Samsung's Galaxy Fold phones are breaking

The Samsung Galaxy Fold is here — and it’s already breaking. The Verge’s Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Paul Miller talk first impressions of Samsung’s new phone. Later, they discuss the end of the feud and lawsuits between Apple and Qualcomm and more. 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, Dieter, something happened to his Galaxy Fold. We're going to talk about it. And Apple settled with Qualcomm. There's a little bit of PS5. This on The Vergecast.

• 0:10Speaker 01

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• 1:26Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Verge ecosystem. You know, people just send me emails. I get cold pitches from PR people now that are like, hey, man, been listening to the flagship. It's good. We really put that out in the world. Anyway, I'm Neelai, your friend. Dieter Bohn is in the studio with me. In New York City. He's in New York. And what an adventure you have had in this city, my friend. Paul Miller is here. Hello. All right. You know, there's like all this stuff to pull. Just listen to last week's episode, the top of it. Get all the links, get all the plugs. Like, there's, there's, there's something happening in this world. Yeah. And it's the Galaxy Fold being broken. So let me just set it up and then I'm gonna, Dieter, take it away.

• 2:11Nilay Patel?

  Because this has been his emotional experience. So Samsung Galaxy Fold, as you know, if you've been listening to The Vergecast, we are all very excited about folding phones because they're neat. Yeah, that's it. There's no, there's no practical excitement here.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  We actually had to make a big, long, like, argument, especially on Twitter and like elsewhere, to get people to stop for just a minute and think about how they're neat before they jump right into like, but what will go wrong?

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Just like, sit with the neatness for a minute.

• 2:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's neat. It's a, they're cool. It's like a little piece of the future, folding screens, you got a, do you want a taco? We made a whole chart of all the names you could give them.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:49Nilay Patel?

  We had fun folding screens. And then Dieter got one.

• 2:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:54Nilay Patel?

  The Samsung Galaxy Fold, which, a reminder, costs $1,980.

• 2:57Speaker 03

  Yep, did a, did a hands-on.

• 2:59Nilay Patel?

  Did a hands-on.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Played around with it.

• 3:01Nilay Patel?

  Uh, we were like in a hotel in New York.

• 3:03Speaker 03

  Yep, hotel in New York, found myself, uh, more impressed than I expected to be, intrigued. I thought the hinge felt sturdy. Everything was like, better than I thought it would be.

• 3:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  Maybe not $1,980 better, but like, better than I expected.

• 3:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:16Nilay Patel?

  Then what happened?

• 3:17Speaker 03

  Then, nothing.

• 3:19Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no. No raging controversy.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Uh, okay, so here's the timeline. Uh, hands-on Monday, um, got a review unit, uh, very excited. No embargo at all, so we can just do whatever we want, but I decided not to like, spend my day tweeting about it. I was gonna spend my day using it and letting it get photos and working with whatever.

• 3:38Nilay Patel?

  Cramping debris in the hinge with a toothpick.

• 3:41Speaker 03

  Tuesday night, uh, like, I don't know, 7 o'clock or something, uh, I look at it and there's like a bump on the crease towards the bottom of the phone, like a little bump, and I'm like, what is this? And I like, it feels like there's something hard underneath it. I think it's hard. Is it, do I really wanna push on it super hard to see if it feels like it's hard or if it's soft? I don't, I don't know. So I immediately like war-text everybody at Samsung, just like, yo, something is weird here.

• 4:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Um, finally, uh, like, get somebody on the phone. We do a duo video chat, which is very exciting, because I don't get to duo chat many people, because everybody has iPhones and they don't use it. Um, show the crease. I'm like, okay, well, we're gonna get it replaced tomorrow. I'm gonna want a statement on this. Come in Wednesday morning, I write a whole article. I'm like, I'm gonna write a whole article. I got it done at like, you know, midnight, Tuesday night, and then I just sat on it, because I'm gonna wait for Samsung to give me a statement.

• 4:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  It's a responsible thing to do. I have no idea what caused this thing.

• 4:40Nilay Patel?

  Can I add just one addendum?

• 4:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:43Nilay Patel?

  In classic Dieter fashion.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 4:45Nilay Patel?

  There was a lot of you blaming yourself.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 4:48Nilay Patel?

  That occurred in my direction.

• 4:49Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 4:50Nilay Patel?

  So I'm getting texts. Dieter's like, I, we must have done something.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:53Nilay Patel?

  An entire theory was created.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:56Nilay Patel?

  What? Dieter yelled at me at one point because I was like.

• 4:59Speaker 04

  It's just a lump in the crease, right?

• 5:02Speaker 03

  A lump in the crease.

• 5:03Speaker 04

  That's all that's happened so far. And you're already doubting your life.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  What could have happened? Cause I didn't have the phone the entire time. Other people had it. And like it, you know, could it have like gotten some piece of like mounting clay I've gotten in it? Could like sand gotten in it? Could, did someone drop it? And I didn't know. Like a whole, like we just started knocking down these theories left and right. Like there's no way, there's no way, there's no way. And like, I don't know. It's part of the hinge break. Uh, it's my current theory is that part of the hinge broke at some point.

• 5:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But we don't know.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  But we don't know.

• 5:33Nilay Patel?

  So at one point I say to Dieter, we don't know. We don't have to take the blame because we don't know.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 5:38Nilay Patel?

  We will happily take the blame once we do. And, and Dieter got mad at me because he, he so believed that he had broken the phone.

• 5:45Nilay Patel?

  Anyway.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  We're waiting for a statement. The next morning comes, uh, I opened up the phone. It sat overnight. I did nothing. I, uh, you know, I was very careful not to push too hard on the bump, all the stuff. Uh, I'm not gonna pop it like a zit.

• 5:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:57Speaker 03

  Which is.

• 5:58Nilay Patel?

  Gross.

• 5:59Speaker 03

  Gross.

• 6:00Nilay Patel?

  But would have played huge on Instagram.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  It was like one of those, it's like, like deep in the skin and like, you know what I mean? You know, it's coming, but it's gonna, it's gonna take like a week to show up. Yeah.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Coming to the office like, I need better photos. We should probably shoot a video just in case. Uh, even though I don't want to put it until we have the review, blah, blah, blah, blah. Open the phone up to show people the bump and, uh, there are, uh, the lines that you get when there's a crack in the screen. Just like there's a hor, there's a horizontal line and then a vertical line grows and like, yep, the screen is now officially broken. So I war text Samsung again. They're like on their way to deliver me a replacement. Uh, they deliver the replacement. Um, I have taken a bunch of photos.

• 6:44Nilay Patel?

  There's a second bump though.

• 6:46Speaker 03

  There's another bump that has appeared underneath the first bump in the same way that if you have.

• 6:50Nilay Patel?

  No, gross. We have, can we stop doing this?

• 6:54Nilay Patel?

  Stop it.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  Screen is broken, second bump, very bad. I no longer have the phone. I believe it's being, it has been sent to Korea for diagnosis.

• 7:04Nilay Patel?

  Driven straight to the airport.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  I offered to cut it up with an exact knife to look at it. I was told not to do that and I chose to abide by that. You do sign like an agreement that you won't try and like intentionally destroy these phones when you get a review unit. So, anyway, so then I, you know, I'm sitting on the story, we rewrote the story and then I see on Twitter, Steve Kovacs' phone was busted and I'm like, ah!

• 7:27Nilay Patel?

  He works for CNBC.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  He works for CNBC. His review unit was busted. I was like, okay, well, I'm gonna publish. I told Sam, I can't wait for the statement anymore. It's been hours. Publish the story and then like the internet has already begun to explode because other journalists have had their phones like ruined. Mark Gurman at Bloomberg and Marques Brownlee.

• 7:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  And also Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal has a slight problem with hers, although it hasn't exploded into a full blown disaster for her yet.

• 7:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:58Speaker 04

  Can you rewind just a little bit in the emotional journey?

• 8:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:01Speaker 04

  The moment that you found out that you weren't the only one?

• 8:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:05Speaker 04

  How did that feel?

• 8:06Speaker 03

  It was very exciting. I had actually been planning on like, if I didn't hear an answer, just like quietly texting a bunch of reviewers and finding out if I was the only one. But then Twitter took care of that problem for me.

• 8:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the backfire of the no embargo is when your $2,000 folding phone breaks, everyone can just say it at once in real time.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. People were accusing us of like being in cahoots. There are a bunch of people on Twitter like, oh, you must have, there must, like Samsung must have known it was broken and so they made you all sign an embargo that you wouldn't write about it until the exact same time. Because if you were on Twitter at around like, what was like 2 o'clock Eastern yesterday? And you just happened to follow a bunch of tech journalists, like within five minutes, it went from nobody was talking about the fold to it was the only thing that existed in the world.

• 8:49Nilay Patel?

  Well, so importantly, and I think this is the key point for me.

• 8:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:53Nilay Patel?

  These phones broke, I don't actually know what happened in China, but these phones broke in at least three different ways.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  I count two.

• 9:01Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  What are your three?

• 9:03Nilay Patel?

  So there's yours.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  Okay, I count, I count definitely two, possibly three.

• 9:07Nilay Patel?

  Right. And I, you know, I told you not to take the blame for it, but it's your fault.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  Great.

• 9:14Nilay Patel?

  You created some sort of psychokinetic disturbance and raised a bump. Look, man, I grew up, I grew up a Lutheran, it's original sin.

• 9:24Nilay Patel?

  So you had the bump, the bulge. The bulge. Uh, so that's one way it broke. The bulge. Yep. Uh, at CNBC, Steve Kavak, his, just the screen, it's just flickered out. So like the one side of the screen doesn't work. It looks like pretty bad. It looks, yeah. Yeah. Uh, and then I think Marquez and Mark Gurman. Yep. They did a thing which, I mean, it's a user error, but it's totally understandable. Uh, I almost, I, I, I will tell you that I almost did the exact same thing. So everybody knows me, but I'm assuming people who listen to the Verchass have purchased a new phone recently in their lives. You buy a new phone, it's got a plastic cover on the screen. First thing you do is you peel that off. Yep.

• 10:06Nilay Patel?

  It's just the normal thing that you do. Some models of the fold, apparently like the T-Mobile version, has a little sticker that's like, this plastic film on the screen should not be removed. Yep. The one you got did not have that sticker. That's correct. I got a unlocked European version. Um. Well, everyone knows Europeans, just they don't, they don't take any plastic films off their phones. Samsung never told me that it was like a, a sample or a prototype or anything. They, they're now calling them sample units, which I find, um, little, little retcon-y. Yeah. But whatever. Anyway, so, uh, Mark Gurman and Marquez Brownlee went to peel off what is called a screen protector. Uh, it's like a, it's like a protective polymer film.

• 10:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like, it doesn't imply that removing it will destroy the phone, which is the thing that happened. It's like human skin is an organ protector.

• 10:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, man, we are deep in the dermatology game today. My sister's a dermatologist, she's gonna be horrified. Your skin is your largest organ. My, anyway, she tells me this all the time. I hope you're all hydrated.

• 11:14Nilay Patel?

  But yeah, so this thing that looks like either the like the shipping film that you get on a phone, or is called a screen protector is actually not.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:23Nilay Patel?

  It appears to be a key part of the screen.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  So.

• 11:26Nilay Patel?

  That when you remove it, the screen breaks.

• 11:29Speaker 03

  One of the things that you probably don't think about when you're thinking about a phone like this is the the screen, you know, it's flexible, and so it has a different like physical structure to it than you're used to. When you get a phone these days, it's a beautiful seamless glossy slab, and the glass melts perfectly into the metal rail and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The Galaxy Fold is not that thing.

• 11:48Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  It has a plastic rail that runs around the edge of the device that's sort of like holds the screen down underneath it. So it's not it's not a bezel. It like the screen is there's a plastic rail over the screen, and the best metaphor I've been able to come up with is like, it's like the the metal thing that holds a piece of carpet down before you get to the tile or the hardwood.

• 12:07Nilay Patel?

  Mm hmm.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  The technical term is a carpet threshold, by the way, I had to look this up. And so there's that. And then within that, there is the extra layer of plastic that doesn't there does like a tiny little gap there. So it looks like a screen protector within that thing. And so it it looks like a screen protector. But there's like, there's extra layers of like, how does this screen work than we're used to? And I have a theory. I don't know if it's true, but my theory is like this thing could they could have shipped this thing without that. But because, you know, it's a delicate piece of OLED film stuff. They wanted a little bit more protection for it, because if you ding this extra layer, it's they could theoretically like, you know, squirt some Goo Gone on it, take it off without damaging the screen and place it, or maybe there'd be like a service option

• 12:52Speaker 03

  or something. I don't know.

• 12:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:54Speaker 03

  But you'd rather you'd rather get a little ding or a nick in a like a protective layer of film on top of the screen than, you know, the quote unquote, screen itself.

• 13:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:02Speaker 03

  Is my theory. I don't know.

• 13:06Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's a, it's a good theory.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:08Nilay Patel?

  Again, I think it's rooted in, in you blaming yourself.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Well, they should, they should, there should have been, like, the box should have had a little, like, like, uh, like pop-up book diorama that when you open it, it's like, don't touch this thing.

• 13:22Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think they made a huge mistake in calling it a screen protector or making it look like a screen protector or not telling you, like, it is clearly an integral part of the screen.

• 13:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  And so it's just, it, it, another layer that's glued on there was special flexible adhesive, but like, it, it looks like a screen protector. It's part of the screen, even though it's technically, like, just another thing glued on top of it. They should have, they should have had it run underneath the carpet threshold.

• 13:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:46Speaker 03

  The bezel.

• 13:47Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, I, I, I take your point. Like, if you scratch it, maybe you want to replace it. Maybe, I don't know. Every T-Mobile store is gonna have a special little oven.

• 13:55Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's how you peel it off. But it's like, very clear that peeling it off damages the screen.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:58Nilay Patel?

  Cause there's at least two reports from excellent tech reviewers.

• 14:01Speaker 03

  The third report from Joanna was she, she tweeted a picture of like, the corner of her screen where she had started to lift it off. It started peeling off. Did she do it?

• 14:08Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no, she said it started peeling off.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 14:11Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so, so I mean, depending on how you look at it, there's like, between two and three different ways you think it broke. And so, yours broke spontaneously. Steve Kovacs at CNBC broke spontaneously. These other ones are pretty, I would say, pretty excusable user errors in the sense that.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  Oh, completely.

• 14:29Nilay Patel?

  This thing looks like a thing that you can remove on every other phone in the world, and they were not instructed such. And then Joanna's, which is peeling.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:36Nilay Patel?

  That's a lot for a $2,000 phone that's supposed to be a showcase of a new technology.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  It's a lot for any phone. Like, some, some of the feedback I got is quit saying that this is unacceptable on a $2,000 phone. Cause it's unacceptable on any phone.

• 14:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but if it was like 20 bucks, you'd be like, yeah, this, this thing's a piece of crap.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 14:52Nilay Patel?

  Um, but this is like a, this is their, their flagship thing for the year, is the fold. They, they need to show it off.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:59Nilay Patel?

  And they blew it. Like, the first question we had is, are they, it's supposed to ship next week. Are they gonna ship it?

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 15:06Nilay Patel?

  That's.

• 15:07Speaker 03

  They finally gave us a statement saying, we're still planning on shipping it. After there are other statements which we should get into.

• 15:12Speaker 04

  I mean, it seems like we will know very quickly if the model they ship is of exact same quality and information design as the first one, as the review unit, because in one or two days, like a million people will break this.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  A T-Mobile executive tweeted the box and was like, no, look, like, here's the retail model on ours says, don't remove this.

• 15:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, John Ledgers running around the warehouse, slipping stickers on all the boxes. But that doesn't account for how yours broke.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  Nope, does not.

• 15:45Nilay Patel?

  And it certainly doesn't account for how it appears Steve's broke, or how it appears Joanna broke, which is they spontaneously, like, broke.

• 15:53Speaker 04

  And this is, this is like one or two days.

• 15:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:57Speaker 04

  Which it almost, it's almost a best case scenario for something that fails. Like, you know, Apple, the problem with Apple keyboards is that it will, it will be three months in, and all of a sudden, you don't have a spacebar anymore. Here, you quickly realize the, the error of your ways.

• 16:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the error of your spending $2,000.

• 16:18Speaker 04

  Well, it's just, I mean, we will know within one or two days if Samsung is, the shipping model is the exact same quality control as, as Dieter's.

• 16:30Nilay Patel?

  Is he's quote unquote, there is a lot of retconning going on here. First of all, calling them sample units is like hilarious, because it's shipping in a week. So if you're still like, putting out sample units.

• 16:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:40Nilay Patel?

  You could just, you could just wait one more week and put out real ones. That's a choice you can make. Then, there's the, the retconning of calling it a screen protector, or whatever, when it's clearly a part of the phone, right? Like, those are two things where I think Samsung played some word games to get around what actually is happening here, which is fair. I mean, they're a big company, they got PR people, that's what they're paid to do. The thing that-

• 17:05Speaker 03

  I think it just didn't occur to them that people would try and peel that thing off, because they've been living with it for however long they've been living with it. And it just, they're like, oh, wait.

• 17:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, everyone in the world tries to peel this off.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it just, like, but they've been, like, people inside Samsung have had this thing for, you know, they say they've been working on it eight years, so they've been messing around with this basic idea for, I don't know, minimum of six months, if not longer, right?

• 17:26Nilay Patel?

  So, let's talk about how yours specifically broke, because that's one you had.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:30Nilay Patel?

  So your theory, again, the one

• 17:32Speaker 03

  I have

• 17:32Nilay Patel?

  Dieter got mad at me for saying he shouldn't just accept is the truth because we don't know.

• 17:37Speaker 03

  We do not.

• 17:37Nilay Patel?

  Uh, is that, so when we, when we review phones and you look at all the cool shots of us reviewing phones.

• 17:42Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 17:42Nilay Patel?

  Phones are like floating in midair.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 17:44Nilay Patel?

  Uh, turns out we are not able to just levitate a phone. That's like a

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Although we have done high speed shots and then like reverse them where we like just drop the phone on a pillow. And so it looks like it's like flying slowly through the air.

• 17:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  But it, but that's not

• 17:56Nilay Patel?

  Some real TV magic happening with the video.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  By the way, I don't know if this, the podcast is going up before or after the review, which I'm planning on publishing on Friday.

• 18:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:03Speaker 03

  Uh,

• 18:04Nilay Patel?

  It'll go up after.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  Uh, it'll go up after. Make sure you watch the review because the cool TV effect shot that we've done is real practical effects. And is within the top five or like top three, or maybe the best, like effect we've ever done with a camera.

• 18:20Nilay Patel?

  Is very cool.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  It is unbelievable.

• 18:21Nilay Patel?

  It's very cool. Anyway, to make this magic, you go watch the video, pull over in your car, watch the video.

• 18:28Nilay Patel?

  Come back. The, the way you make these things happen is you gotta hold up the phones. It's like virtually every phone, we use a little bit of mounting clay, which is just like Play-Doh. And we stick it on the back of the phone, we stick it something and the phone magically is levitating in midair.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:42Nilay Patel?

  Hmm. So Dieter just like is convinced.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  Initially.

• 18:47Nilay Patel?

  Initially, that, uh, somehow

• 18:50Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:50Nilay Patel?

  The clay is, uh, sticking through the screen.

• 18:52Speaker 03

  So could it, there's like, there's, when you bend the fold.

• 18:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:57Speaker 03

  There's like a tiny little gap on the front between the, the screen and like the gap in there. And then there's also a tiny little gap on the back of the phone, on the hinge, where like the two book covers like come together. But like, we don't think it got in on the front. So like, could it have somehow like gotten in those tiny gaps in the back? And then like literally worked its way through the gears. I included a gif of Charlie Chaplin going through the gears of Modern Times. And then to get under the screen.

• 19:26Nilay Patel?

  Let me just tell you what it's like to get a series of texts like this at 11:45 PM.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  I mean,

• 19:33Speaker 03

  I was very

• 19:33Nilay Patel?

  So, okay, let's just assume this is true.

• 19:36Speaker 03

  I was very troubled. I was rattled. It was

• 19:38Nilay Patel?

  Assume this is true.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  It was the rattle of the bulge.

• 19:42Nilay Patel?

  Assume this is true. This is a horrible outcome.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:46Nilay Patel?

  Because it means that if you have this thing in your pocket and there's dust or lint, or you went to the beach.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 19:52Nilay Patel?

  Anything smaller than a lump of clay can work its way into the phone and destroy the screen.

• 19:59Speaker 03

  Not good.

• 19:59Nilay Patel?

  I don't think, I honestly don't think this, especially after you see all these.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. I don't think that's it either. If it was, it's still terrible.

• 20:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  But I don't think that was it.

• 20:06Nilay Patel?

  What I'm just saying, anything smaller than a lump of clay can work its way into this engine and destroy the screen is a bad outcome.

• 20:11Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 20:11Nilay Patel?

  We don't think that's what happened.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:13Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, now you think the hinge itself, well, just like spontaneously.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  I mean, I did, like, I did, you know, press on the bulge and it did feel like not soft. It didn't feel like clay.

• 20:23Nilay Patel?

  Clay notably soft.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then a second one appeared. So like some dust, like dust, some debris.

• 20:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Ant colony.

• 20:32Speaker 03

  But debris is one of those words that like starts to look weird the third time you write it out, you know? Cause I didn't want to say sand. I didn't want to say dust. I didn't want to say grit. I didn't want to.

• 20:41Nilay Patel?

  Something.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  Something, something.

• 20:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  And like the generic word for a little thing is debris. Anyway, something's in there. So maybe like someone opened or I opened the thing too hard. Or maybe there was just a failure in the thing and like one of those tiny, you know, millions of cogs that they have in there, like just got a little crack. And then that piece worked its way up Charlie Chaplin style under the screen. No idea.

• 21:03Nilay Patel?

  That's bad too.

• 21:04Speaker 03

  It's also bad.

• 21:05Nilay Patel?

  Uh, opening it too fast will destroy the phone.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  I know we haven't dissected it yet again, because of that agreement.

• 21:11Speaker 03

  We may never get to know because.

• 21:13Nilay Patel?

  There's no chance we will ever know what this was.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:15Nilay Patel?

  Which means I can torment Dieter by saying it was his fault forever.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  But, uh, do we know what is under that crease to begin with?

• 21:25Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 21:26Speaker 04

  But.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  I, I, Samsung has posted like, you know, some like cool, like Microsoft style, look at all the gears stuff. And I haven't gone through and looked at every second of footage that they've posted, but I don't think we know what precisely is sitting directly under the screen. If you were like, just rip the screen off. I don't know.

• 21:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  This is gonna be a great iFix it, really.

• 21:46Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Right? Well, Jerry rig everything like they didn't give him one. He's like. He's actually sad. He's like, "Oh, man. The one time I don't get the phone, it breaks on its own. I don't have to do anything."

• 21:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay, so the phone is broken. We've established the phone is broken.

• 22:05Speaker 03

  And the world blew up.

• 22:06Nilay Patel?

  And now you have a new one.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  Yep. Well, no, Samsung gave a statement. We should read some of the statement.

• 22:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  So, "A limited number of early Galaxy Fold samples were provided to media for review."

• 22:16Nilay Patel?

  Fine.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  "Received a few reports regarding the main display. We will thoroughly inspect these units in person to determine the cause of the matter."

• 22:24Nilay Patel?

  I love that.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:25Nilay Patel?

  They're not gonna have robots inspect them.

• 22:27Speaker 03

  I have a slightly different statement, apparently given to a Korean outlet in Korea, and I don't trust Google Translate enough to actually, like, translate it, but they're looking into it.

• 22:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  And then they get into the separate thing about the main display features a top protective layer, not a screen protective, a top protective layer, which is part of the display structure. Notably, removing the protective layer or adding adhesives to the main display may cause damage. I don't think Samsung wants people to, like, go buy a screen protector and put it on this thing.

• 22:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  Especially those, like, fancy screen protectors where you gotta, like, take a blow dryer to it and heat it up and all that stuff. I think if you put anything on this display, it's, you're gonna be putting pressure on a bend that is, like, right at the limit of what it's able to do. Even though they can bend it and unbend it, you know, 200,000 times.

• 23:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:17Speaker 03

  I think that even though we have to sign these agreements saying we're not gonna intentionally damage, you know, review units, I think it is, like, time for us to make an official Verge policy that when we receive any device, we're gonna put it in a bag of Doritos and shake it. We're gonna take, pour Doritos on keyboards. We're gonna put it in, yeah.

• 23:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, look, Max is gonna be at Play-Doh age soon. And we'll just see if we can work some clay into your phone. That's just what we do. Okay, so separately from all of this, you also got to review the phone.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:49Nilay Patel?

  What do you think?

• 23:51Nilay Patel?

  Besides the fact that it's broken.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  It is.

• 23:54Nilay Patel?

  It's like very hard to separate the fact that all of them broke within a day.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:59Nilay Patel?

  From the thing, but you were kind of high on the thing.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  I'm actually reviewing this phone. Uh, like, of course, we're talking about the breakage, but I'm gonna, the bulk of my review is going to be reviewing it as if it didn't have this catastrophic critical problem that should prevent you from buying it. As if it didn't. And in that world, before I knew this thing was gonna break, this was my conclusion. This is, the, I've, actually, let's take it back. This is my conclusion. Enter Mr. And before I knew it was gonna break, this was my conclusion. I have never used a phone, especially a premium phone, with this many problems that I've loved this much.

• 24:37Nilay Patel?

  There's the one problem. And then we added one more problem to that list.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  Yeah. Can you clarify that statement? Are you saying that the pre didn't have a lot of problems, or that you love it more than the pre?

• 24:50Speaker 03

  Ooh. Okay. Maybe, maybe I should say it's been a long time. It's been a long time.

• 24:56Nilay Patel?

  Cause the pre had a lot of problems.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's been a long time.

• 24:59Nilay Patel?

  Is the unfinished operating system being one of them?

• 25:02Speaker 03

  Um, the protective layer, I'm sorry, what do they call it? The, yeah, protective layer, uh, picks up dings like nobody's business. The, the one that I got had like a dimple in it right out of the box, and it's got dings on it that just magically appear. Don't know how. Um, Android on tablets, guess what? Just guess. I bet you have a guess. It's not, it's not, it's not great.

• 25:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:23Speaker 04

  It's good. This year, though, this year.

• 25:25Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna happen this year.

• 25:26Speaker 04

  Wait, did you have, did you have like a moment where you're sitting down and you're using the tiny little screen and like, psh, I wish I had this on a tablet. And then you're like, oh, I do, I could. And you swag it open and the app jumbo sized and like, did you have the moment?

• 25:43Speaker 03

  Um, nah, nah, sort of.

• 25:45Nilay Patel?

  I played with Eaterspoon for five seconds and I had that.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, I had that moment, but I never had the moment where I was like using the tiny screen because the tiny screen is so patently ridiculous from the jump that you never try.

• 25:55Nilay Patel?

  The tiny screen is definitely not big enough to do anything on.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  Uh, I've got lots of highfalutin ideas why I like this thing. Um, when you're sitting in a meeting and there's a bunch of people at the conference table and you pull out your phone and start doing stuff on it, you're the asshole.

• 26:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  Right? You're like, what are you, what are you doing? You pull out the fold, though. You've got a tablet. You might be checking the Google Doc for the meeting notes. You might be like doing something important.

• 26:20Nilay Patel?

  The ideal form factor is the one that makes it look like you're paying attention.

• 26:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:24Speaker 03

  Reading Kindle books on this thing is great.

• 26:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  It is like the exact, it feels like it's the exact size of like a regular old Kindle, but you can also turn it sideways and get two columns of text if you want.

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Move, video's fine. Like the screen is actually like pretty bright and color accuracy is good. It's just, you know, has dings in a crease.

• 26:42Nilay Patel?

  And also breaks.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. We haven't even talked.

• 26:44Nilay Patel?

  The slightest provocation.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  We haven't even talked about the crease.

• 26:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  Multitasking, like the Samsung has this weird like three panel system. It's janky as hell. If you have three app windows open or two app windows open and then you close it and then you open it again, all of your windows just disappear.

• 27:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  They don't know how to save state.

• 27:04Speaker 03

  You know, there's just like jank and weirdness, but when you just like use it as like a basic Android phone, but it's just big. It's like a little too, little tiny tablet. It's about the same screen size as an iPad mini. It's a little bit smaller, but you don't get the iPad mini's bezels. You're like, oh, this is, this is amazing. And it, the other highfalutin idea I have about it, and this is definitely going in the review, is you pull your phone out and you intend to like, look at that notification and then all of a sudden 45 minutes have disappeared because you're on Instagram and you're on this, you're on that. You've got these, like these phones are designed to like fill those downtime moments. They're like these in-between moments when you like just want to look at a thing for a second and then that second turns into an hour.

• 27:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:49Speaker 03

  You can't do that with the fold because the tiny screen is so bad and so tiny and so impossible to type on and so impossible to do anything on that you like will do one thing and get, be done. Like I, I literally, the only things I have on that tiny screen are Google Maps, Spotify and Hold Down and then I can use it on the subway and that's it. When you open it up, you're using it. Like you're doing a thing. You can't like casually, like without really paying that much attention, just happen to accidentally have your phone in your hand for 45 minutes. It's like a thing you have to mean. Right? And so it like, it exists on either side of like what makes phones so like addictive, but it doesn't exist in that middle. And there's lots of problems like, cause like you can't hold it in one hand and like, you know, there's all, it's too thick and it's too heavy.

• 28:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:34Speaker 03

  And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there's something really compelling about a device that forces you to either mean it or not use it at all.

• 28:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Or that just breaks in a day. So you can't use it at all. Like, how do you solve self in addition?

• 28:47Speaker 03

  Wouldn't it be cool if I like, didn't have to, I could like say these things and you could actually think about it and go, mm, the only problem is it's $2,000.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  I have thought about this. Now, this is, this is a classic scenario of a status symbol. Very expensive and very obvious that you have it, right? I always had this theory that the original Beats headphones, the original Beats wireless headphones had horrible battery life.

• 29:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  And they stopped doing any audio once they ran out of battery. So I assumed when I would see someone on the street wearing Beats headphones, there was a 50/50 chance that they're out of battery and they were just wearing Beats headphones to be seen.

• 29:26Speaker 04

  So I could imagine the scenario where somebody's at a coffee shop or at a conference or whatever, and they're standing in the corner. They have to be in the corner so that nobody can see whether or not their screen is broken and they're out there. You know what I mean?

• 29:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:41Speaker 04

  It's gonna happen.

• 29:41Nilay Patel?

  That's how I feel about AirPods now. No, you see the AirPods people and I'm just like, whatever you're listening to, you sense bad. I know it in my heart and you know it in your head. And that's where.

• 29:50Speaker 03

  In your ears.

• 29:52Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I don't think they're dead though. I think people, AirPods have decent battery life. But, alright. The crease. We gotta just wrap up. Can you see it? Do you feel it? Does it bother you?

• 30:01Speaker 03

  You can see it. You can feel it. It should bother you. The screen, yeah, you could feel it.

• 30:05Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  The screen temperature is slightly different on either side of it. Um, oh, there's a, there's another huge problem we gotta get into.

• 30:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no, I know.

• 30:13Speaker 03

  Separate from the crease. Um, when you're looking at it dead on and you're just like using it, you accept it. And like, you don't like see it. It doesn't like viscerally hit you in the face.

• 30:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:23Speaker 03

  So it, it kind, it, it's basically comparable to a notch, but it's like a little bit more severe. Cause like it's a, it's definitely a crease. Um, but it does like become a little bit like, you can blind to it in the same way that, I don't know, like you don't see the spine on a book. I don't know. Like what's a, what's it like? If you had, if you have like a, a dot in the middle of your vision, like literally on your eyeball or like your glasses are scratched. Eventually your brain like sees around it, right? It's kind of like that.

• 30:51Nilay Patel?

  The crease.

• 30:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, the notch is more annoying because none of the video apps have any sort of way to pinch out to like get rid of the notch in the video. And so the only way to not have your video be notched off in the corner is to change the entire phone to notchless setting and then you lose that entire top bar of the screen.

• 31:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:08Nilay Patel?

  Also, the notch is a ridge, like you're talking about the ridge over the whole thing. There's like a little bit of plastic.

• 31:13Speaker 04

  The carp, the carpet protector?

• 31:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the carpet rail. So like there's that ridge and then the notch has a little plastic.

• 31:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:19Nilay Patel?

  It's all very confusing.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 31:21Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, but that's not the thing. I know, I know the thing you're about to talk about.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  So I'm gonna, I'm gonna walk, I'm gonna back into this.

• 31:27Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 31:28Speaker 03

  Uh, when you have a smartphone screen, there has to be a thing that like tells the pixels what to do, right? The controller, whatever, what's it called? The controller.

• 31:35Nilay Patel?

  The controller.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  Sure. Turns out that that controller is usually on the top or the bottom of your screen for a very good reason, because it takes a millisecond longer for it to hit the opposite side of the screen than the, where it's at for the pixels to do what they're supposed to do. So when you scroll, if you look very, very carefully, especially at like, you know, low end phones or certain old headphones or whatever, you can actually see the thing you're scrolling kind of compress or expand depending on where it is on the screen. If you really look, especially if it's like a black square on white, you will see it. Now, the fold, uh, can't have a controller on the top or the bottom of the screen because it folds horizontally. So they put the controller on the right hand side of the screen.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  So when you scroll, the right hand side of the screen is slightly more reactive and faster than the left hand side of the screen because it takes a second, you know, millisecond for the refresh rate to go across the screen. You don't see it, you don't think about it, you don't notice it, and then someone points it out to you and then you're like, do I see it? Do I see it? And then you never unsee it.

• 32:39Nilay Patel?

  I can see it on my XS right now.

• 32:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, are you holding it horizontally?

• 32:42Nilay Patel?

  You sure am.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you can see a little bit of wave, you know, we, we call it like, uh, what's, what's the word we use?

• 32:48Nilay Patel?

  Like rolling shutter?

• 32:49Speaker 03

  Jelly, it's a little bit of jelly, jelly scrolling.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  And, and so like, because it's such a big screen and maybe it's, maybe the refresh rate is not as fast as it ought to be on, you know, this flexible panel or whatever, the jelly scroll is like pretty pronounced.

• 33:03Nilay Patel?

  When you scroll, the whole display goes like, diagonal.

• 33:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:07Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's wild.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you don't see it at first, but once you see it, you like, see it. And if you, if you shoot it with a high-speed camera, the kind that like causes that, those like black bands to go across the screen, those black bands are actually the screen refreshing.

• 33:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:18Speaker 03

  And you can see it like stepping down across those black bands, like you see literally the refresh happening.

• 33:26Nilay Patel?

  This is a lot of compromises in this phone.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  This is, yeah, this is way too many compromises in this phone.

• 33:32Speaker 04

  But it sounds like you like it conceptually. My, my biggest worry, let, let's say they got all the technical kinks out and it just works wonderfully, right? My biggest concern is that this seems too big to put in my pocket.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  It is too big to put in your pocket.

• 33:46Speaker 04

  So, it doesn't feel like a phone that you bought.

• 33:49Speaker 03

  I have never had a phone with this many problems that I liked this much. Like, this many problems should make you just want to throw this thing away, but you don't want to because it's, it's like a beautiful little iPad mini that you can stick in your pocket, except it runs Android.

• 34:03Speaker 04

  So you just said you don't put it in your pocket?

• 34:05Speaker 03

  Well, you can like, put it kind of in your back pocket. You can put it in your pocket.

• 34:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you need cargo shorts. That's actually the, the biggest compromise of all, is that it comes with a pair of cargo shorts that can't be removed, and that destroys the phone.

• 34:18Speaker 03

  I mean, bring back holsters.

• 34:20Nilay Patel?

  No, no, we gotta wrap this up. Dieter's like getting cargo shorts and a holster to use his broken folding phone.

• 34:31Nilay Patel?

  Where we should, so, there's many more folding phones coming out. We've seen like three of them. Motorola is gonna do some like weird vertical razor thing. They all use the same core underlying technology, these plastic folding OLED screens.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 34:47Nilay Patel?

  I think the question is whether they're all gonna have the same problems.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  Or similar problems.

• 34:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:52Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's really what we're learning, like, maybe this is a Samsung problem, and they just forgot to engineer a hinge to block out items smaller than a lump of clay, and they didn't do the screen, like, maybe, maybe these are all Samsung execution problems. And when Huawei puts out the, the Mate. 10, whatever it is.

• 35:12Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 35:13Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's not gonna happen, even though that screen's on the outside and that seems like dense city. Maybe Motorola is like, or maybe this is like inherent to these plastic OLED screens. And I, I think we just don't know, but that's the thing we're about to discover.

• 35:27Nilay Patel?

  Samsung also put out a phone that literally exploded. Like, it's hard to, to know where the blame lies right now.

• 35:33Speaker 04

  The, the exploding phone came in a landscape of primarily non-exploiting phones. What is so disconcerting about this is that this is our first experience with a folding phone. And I, and I want, I want it to work out. I don't, but I don't want anybody to feel burned by it. Like, I want that person to spend $2,000 on the phone because they're, because they're gonna look really cool. Right?

• 35:56Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 35:56Speaker 04

  And get marginal utility out of it, but not be mad when it breaks. And so I want everybody to be happy so that five years from now, when I buy the super thin, affordable, great folding phone, you know, it's all been, it's all been worked out.

• 36:14Nilay Patel?

  Well, I will say the narrative of this phone is, is all but set.

• 36:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:18Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's not a mainstream product. You're not gonna put it out and then have everybody. Remember the iPad came out, we, everyone made jokes about the name and then like 20 minutes later, millions of people have iPads and the joke's away because like the, the culture had just taken the thing away.

• 36:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:30Nilay Patel?

  Hmm. Like, that's not gonna happen to this thing. Like, 10 people are gonna buy this product. And all anybody else is gonna know is that the screen broke within a day of like all the reviewers having it.

• 36:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 36:39Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna take them some generations to, to get to the place where, right? But the first thing anyone is gonna do with a folding phone now is throw clay at it until it breaks.

• 36:50Speaker 04

  Right. But you don't get, you don't get more generations if this is a completely losing proposition.

• 36:56Nilay Patel?

  Uh, we got another generation of the Note. They, they brought that back from explosions. Yeah, they didn't really mention it. They're like, not to worry. This time we've tested for explosions.

• 37:08Speaker 04

  I think the risk of re- releasing another Note was mitigated by the fact that there had been other Notes that didn't explode.

• 37:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:15Nilay Patel?

  I don't think that this, this bumpy rollout is gonna make, stop them from iterating and refining folding.

• 37:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:22Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Like, everyone seems committed to it. So we'll see. But we'll see. All right, we gotta take a break. Then we gotta talk about Apple and Qualcomm, because that is just surprises for days. We'll be right back.

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• 38:41Speaker 03

  Okay, we're talking about Apple and Qualcomm, and they settled their lawsuit. I'm teeing you up, Neelai. You just want to jump into it.

• 38:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm so, like, raring to go.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  We were expecting, you remember the Samsung Apple trial? We got discovery, which meant that executives had to go on stand and speak on the record, and internal documents from the companies got released in court records, and we found out all this exciting dirt about the birth of Android and how pissed off Steve Jobs was and Eric Schmidt, and like, all this really juicy, exciting stuff. And this lawsuit between Apple and Qualcomm, we've talked about it before, it's been a while, but it boils down to Qualcomm has a million patents, and they want phone makers to pay them a percentage of the cost of their device, not just a flat rate for licensing their patents and getting their chips. And Apple thinks that that is highway robbery, and they're very pissed off about it. That's like the core of it.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  And they have been escalating their rhetoric to a high level of vitriol. And Apple had started putting Intel chips in its, Intel modems in its phones. And so we were like, these people did not look like they were willing to negotiate or settle.

• 39:50Nilay Patel?

  They hate each other.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  And it went to trial, and we're like, here we go! Yee-haw!

• 39:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, documents.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:57Nilay Patel?

  Tim Cook on the stand.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:58Nilay Patel?

  We're like, ready for it. And then after the first day... Uh, they announced they settled and then like 45 minutes later, Intel announced that it was no longer making 5G modem.

• 40:09Nilay Patel?

  We're done with that. So that's like a wild ride. I will say the first day of this trial, the opening arguments were legitimately just like comedy level. Because you know, patent licensing, modem chips. They're complicated.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:25Nilay Patel?

  So Apple's lawyers tried to do this like earthy. You know, like, folks, let me explain to you what's going on here, right? To the jury, because they think the jury's dumb.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  Did they have a hip analogy?

• 40:35Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no. Let me just read this to you. This is like a Kentucky Fried Chicken that refuses to sell a bucket of chicken to customers. First, you have to go to a different counter, KFL Kentucky Fried Licensing. And you have to go pay the eating license fee before they'll sell you any chicken. That's what they went with.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  I've already lost. I've already lost.

• 40:55Nilay Patel?

  That's what they went with Kentucky Fried Chicken. All of the things that you can buy.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  I want to know when they were preparing this, this opening argument, how many other fast food restaurants they went through before they landed on KFC? As it being the thing they think would work.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  Like, you need a bucket of patents? And so you need a bucket of chicken?

• 41:16Nilay Patel?

  No, that would have been better. No, they just went with KFC because Qualcomm's entire model is they get you to pay twice.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 41:28Nilay Patel?

  Right? And Apple hates paying twice. So if you want to buy at any other scenario, so I'm going to do it too. Oh, God.

• 41:36Speaker 03

  Here we go. If you go to Hardee's.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  What's the burger at Hardee's called?

• 41:43Nilay Patel?

  This so much. No, but think about your actual phone.

• 41:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:46Nilay Patel?

  You purchase a phone, your phone is full of parts.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 41:50Nilay Patel?

  Those parts are encumbered by thousands of patents. You don't have to buy a patent license to buy your phone and use it.

• 41:56Speaker 03

  Right.

• 41:56Nilay Patel?

  Right? So like, I bought a phone, Dieter bought, Dieter received a Galaxy Fold.

• 42:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 42:01Nilay Patel?

  Samsung, he broke it very quickly. On purpose, with great intention.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  It broke.

• 42:09Nilay Patel?

  Samsung's not making Dieter pay a patent license fee to get the fold. I don't have to pay a patent license fee to use my laptop, right? To buy, to get a Qualcomm modem. The Foxconn, Pegatron, those companies are required to also take a license to Qualcomm's patents. So you pay a patent licensing fee and that's the only way Qualcomm will get you to buy the chip. There's like a million different ways that you can, that Qualcomm would spin this as like being totally reasonable. Apple thinks this is the worst. Foxconn thought this is the worst.

• 42:39Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:41Nilay Patel?

  I feel like that is not so hard to explain. Because I just explained it.

• 42:46Speaker 04

  It's a lot easier to explain than the KFC analogy.

• 42:51Nilay Patel?

  And what we went to instead, and I'm just gonna read this again. It's like a Kentucky Fried Chicken that refuses to sell a bucket of chicken. First you have to go to KFL, Kentucky Fried Licensing. Which is, it doesn't exist. You have to, you're asking this jury to invent another counter in a KF, anyway. So that happened. Like, so one theory is that-

• 43:18Speaker 04

  Wait, one second, one second. What you're really doing is you're going to KFC, you're buying a bucket of chicken. But to be allowed to buy a bucket of chicken, you also have to buy a license-

• 43:28Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 43:28Speaker 04

  To the recipe to the chicken.

• 43:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:30Speaker 04

  Although you are not allowed to use that license, that recipe, to make your own chicken.

• 43:37Nilay Patel?

  Potentially.

• 43:38Speaker 03

  You have to, you have to, I mean, we, how-

• 43:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm not sure how this particular KFC operates.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  Brought seven herbs and spices into this metaphor.

• 43:46Speaker 04

  I've changed my mind.

• 43:47Speaker 03

  The license is clearly for the seven herbs and spices. But isn't Qualcomm's argument that they also have, like, they also control, like, if you make a bucket, that they also make the buk, I don't know, never mind. Because they're, like, their, their patents aren't just for the thing inside their chip. It's for like a whole host of other things.

• 44:05Nilay Patel?

  I feel like I'm just, I'm getting older by the second. I'm dying.

• 44:09Speaker 04

  What about, what about the mashed potatoes?

• 44:12Nilay Patel?

  It's all bad.

• 44:14Speaker 04

  What about the bowl that has like all of the foods all at the same time?

• 44:17Speaker 03

  Meanwhile, Intel can't even figure out how to make coleslaw.

• 44:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:21Speaker 03

  And so-

• 44:23Nilay Patel?

  It's bad. So again, tells like, what is this? Is this chicken? Like, we don't know. We've never been able to identify a chicken.

• 44:30Speaker 04

  Okay, okay. Kentucky Fried Pigeon. On a serious note, is the fact that nobody can make the chips that Qualcomm makes because Qualcomm has the patents?

• 44:41Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so this is like a deeply complicated secondary layer.

• 44:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:46Nilay Patel?

  The 5G is a standard, right? So a bunch of, you invent the stuff, you give the, so the way you like, in a classical sort of economic sense, the way you create incentives to buy into the standard is, or to develop against a standard is, Qualcomm does a bunch of forward investing, they do all the R and D work to invent the technologies for 5G. They go to the standards group, whoever else, Huawei's there, Ericsson's there, so on and so forth. They say, okay, here's a bunch of technology we've invented, we're going to put our patents into the standard pool, and anybody can make stuff that uses or interacts with the standard, and we will promise that we will license this out for fair, reasonable, non-discriminatory rates.

• 45:30Nilay Patel?

  FRAND. You might remember FRAND from the Apple and Samsung trial.

• 45:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 45:34Nilay Patel?

  Right? Where so, where Apple had all their patents and trade dress and trademarks and blah, blah, blah, on iPhone stuff, and Samsung had a billion patents on Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and FRAND stuff. And Apple, literally, Tim Cook said to me at a code conference, when I said, why is this trial still going? He said, we just want to make the FRAND system better. And like, the code conference audience laughed at him, because who gives a shit? Like, that is the most ridiculous, like, nobility.

• 46:07Nilay Patel?

  It was just, it was a waste. At the end of the day, Samsung paid some money, they took it all the way to Supreme Court, they took it all the way down, and you know what? Everybody's still making phones. Samsung, their phones do break after a day, just put it out there.

• 46:19Speaker 04

  One of their phones.

• 46:21Nilay Patel?

  It's one of their phones. The other phone exploded.

• 46:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh for two.

• 46:27Speaker 03

  It's like, this is basically libel.

• 46:29Nilay Patel?

  It's like, it's not.

• 46:31Speaker 03

  It's true.

• 46:32Nilay Patel?

  Two flagship phones.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  Stop libeling Samsung. They've, they've put out like 20 flagship phones.

• 46:37Nilay Patel?

  Oh, fine. Anyhow, the point of this is that trial was obviously a waste, right? Like, we, they did all this stuff and at the end of the day, someone paid some money, whatever. No FRAN issues were truly resolved. In this case, Qualcomm's big set of patents, some of them are, uh, FRAN. Some of them have to be licensed out as part of the standard. Fair, reasonable, non discriminatory. Some of them don't. But Qualcomm just makes you sign a blanket license when you want their modems. So that's what Apple's objecting to is like, this is extortionate. This isn't fair, reasonable, non discriminatory, blah, blah, blah. Intel, though, has access to the standard. Huawei has access to the standard. Samsung makes a bunch of stuff, has access to the standard. So you could.

• 47:22Speaker 03

  As long as they pay Qualcomm.

• 47:24Nilay Patel?

  No, as long as they, as long as they pay into the, the standard pool.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:28Nilay Patel?

  License the full set of 5G patents.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  Can.

• 47:32Nilay Patel?

  And take them back out.

• 47:32Speaker 03

  Can we actually, like, I think that the way I see this, um, and I think actually the way, I'm going to zoom out from the legal argument, just for half a second. Is from like the like legal, how should the FRAN system work perspective, from like the moral perspective, like, I think Apple probably has a little bit of high ground here. But it seems obvious that from a leverage perspective, from a power perspective, uh, Qualcomm had Apple over a barrel.

• 47:59Nilay Patel?

  So I think what happened here, what, so with LTE, um, they were able to go to the Intel chips. Right? And Qualcomm spent a bunch of money and they owned a bunch of LTE patents. And if you look around the industry, there's Qualcomm modems everywhere, right? And great. Apple went to Intel, said, make us these LTE modems. It took them a couple of generations. This last set of phones exclusively Intel modems. People generally think they are not as good as Qualcomm modems. In the grand scheme of whether you're using iOS or Android, that's not enough to sway a purchase. But the Qualcomm modems generally perform faster in LTE. It's just a thing that the industry kind of knows. Then you get to 5G and Intel just doesn't get it right. They just don't have it.

• 48:43Nilay Patel?

  Like Qualcomm first demonstrated their like millimeter wave 5G modem like a year and a half ago. Like super wonky trade so stuff, right? Like here's a booth. It's a white box. There's a chip. There's like a LED display that says like 200 down.

• 48:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:00Nilay Patel?

  Like no one like this is stuff where I we see it at CS. We see it at MWC. It's not even worth writing about. Qualcomm demonstrates modem. I assure you four people care, right? So this stuff is happening in the background. Intel is not demonstrating those modems. They don't have it. In the meantime, it is very clear that Apple is like hiring modem engineers in San Diego, which is where Qualcomm is located. So from a leverage perspective, it's it seems very obvious that Intel just is not going to get it. They're not going to get there. Apple's going to make their own modem in the end. But they can't do it in time for them to put out a 5G iPhone in 2020 or 2021 or however long it's going to take. So I think they eventually they just realized they had to cave.

• 49:43Nilay Patel?

  My question, and I think people saw this coming a long way away. Qualcomm was ahead in terms of the technology, in terms of shipping the chips. There are 5G phones, right? Like in the world right now, they're a little bit silly in the sense that the most available one is a moto mod for the back of a Motorola Z3. You could use it like one square foot of Chicago.

• 50:07Speaker 04

  LG just delayed its 5G phone and there's a really good quote. We're going to concentrate on the completeness.

• 50:15Nilay Patel?

  So there.

• 50:16Speaker 04

  It's really zen, actually.

• 50:18Nilay Patel?

  We're very early in the ramp, but if you want to ship the phone when the networks are ready, when the technology is ready, when you can put it in a small package, you you need the chips now. You need to start the development now and Intel has nothing.

• 50:33Nilay Patel?

  Intel's stock went up when they announced that they were done making five cheap modems. Because they were just dumping money into this thing.

• 50:39Speaker 04

  How, is this like, Intel's like, fourth mobile failure?

• 50:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:44Speaker 04

  How many times have they tried?

• 50:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and for a minute, you know, like, having the iPhone modem business is

• 50:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:51Nilay Patel?

  not a bad thing.

• 50:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:52Nilay Patel?

  They just literally couldn't get it right.

• 50:54Speaker 04

  So, okay.

• 50:56Nilay Patel?

  Intel, but here's my question.

• 50:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:58Nilay Patel?

  Apple knew this yesterday, Apple knew this a month ago, Apple knew this a year ago. What happened that they got to the KFC argument? And they're like, alright, we're out, we're settled. Like, they had to know Intel was gonna, like, pull out of the business.

• 51:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 51:16Nilay Patel?

  Presumably, Intel told them, like, this isn't going great.

• 51:20Speaker 04

  Like, some people are wondering, like, what, what, what, what happened first? Did this settlement happen and then Intel's like, you know what, phew, we're out? Or did Intel, like, tell Apple, hey, actually, this isn't gonna work, you should probably figure something out? And then they settled, and then Intel announced.

• 51:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this, this sort of like, this chain reaction of events. There's the first day of the trial, they settled, just like, they put out the press release, the press release is super terse.

• 51:42Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:42Nilay Patel?

  Um, Qualcomm, obviously, like, I don't know how to, you can't read into it too much, because they won't say the number, but Apple signed a six-year agreement to use Qualcomm chips with a two-year option to renew. They signed a, a license agreement. So Qualcomm got what it wanted, they're selling chips and they got the license. And an unspecified one-time fee from Apple to Qualcomm. Which presumably is all of the licensing fees they hadn't been paying already.

• 52:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:07Nilay Patel?

  Right, so like, Qualcomm won. The Apple press release is, has a longer laudatory passage about Qualcomm in it than about Apple. So you have the end of every press release, it's like, Apple is the world's best company and you shouldn't only buy it, like, it's there. There's like two paragraphs of how Qualcomm invented everything at the end of this press release.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  The finest purveyor of patent-encumbered modem technology.

• 52:27Nilay Patel?

  So they, they obviously like won, running away. So what happened that Apple decided, we're gonna get through opening arguments of this trial, and that's when we'll stop? And I, maybe that will always be a mystery, but...

• 52:39Speaker 04

  I have seen lawyer shows on CBS. Maybe they read the jury.

• 52:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's like what everyone's saying. And it's like, well, then you should have tried harder than this KFC situation. Like, you like, you thought you were gonna win this trial at opening argument. And you're like, here's what it's like. It's like buying chicken. Who hasn't bought some chicken? Like, imagine you're Tim Cook, one of the richest company in the world. And you're like, I just want some chicken. Like, why did you think that would have been a good argument? And like, did you read the jury enough? Right? And Qualcomm's opening arguments were basically a sob story. Like, they took all this money away from us. Now our engineers are sleeping in the streets.

• 53:23Nilay Patel?

  You know, we're just, we're just out here inventing the future. Big old bully Apple showed up. Like, maybe that. But if you're in a game where you're trying to get leverage, and you think, based on your opening arguments, that you've lost enough leverage and you settle right then, maybe your argument was never that good.

• 53:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:41Nilay Patel?

  And so like, that's, to me, is gonna be the mystery forever. Is why did we get all the way here? The one, the one comparison I have, which is one of my favorite Verge moments of all time, is Uber and Waymo went to trial over self-driving tech. Remember this?

• 53:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. Like the dumpster diver?

• 54:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he like took his laptop, he downloaded all the files. Waymo, which is on by Google, sued Uber. It was like a whole, I mean, this is like trade secret theft. It was like a whole thing. It was chaos.

• 54:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:13Nilay Patel?

  And everyone thought Google would win running away. And Sarah Jeong was at the trial covering for us. And she wrote, I think for day three or four, she wrote the headline like, "Waymo's case is pretty weak." And like, there was like dead silence from like the Google PR people and the Google lawyers. And we're like, we probably pissed everybody off. And like, 20 minutes later, announcement that they had settled. And I was like, we just made them settle. Like, we just called them out and they settled. Like, we're very proud of that moment. There wasn't any of that moment here. Right? Like, there wasn't any of that moment where like, it was just like, very obvious that one side was gonna, had a weak case. I don't know, like to me, it's remarkable. It does cement Qualcomm's hold on this industry.

• 54:56Nilay Patel?

  And even if you think Apple's gonna do the thing it's probably gonna do, which is make its own modems, they're not gonna license those modems out to anyone else.

• 55:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:05Nilay Patel?

  Right, so everyone else is still enthralled. It would have been a good thing for Intel to figure this out and become a component supplier to the industry because then you get competition.

• 55:14Speaker 03

  No, Neelai, we're always talking about. You're only allowed to have one big company in each industry.

• 55:18Nilay Patel?

  There can only be six companies. And now Qualcomm can be half of them.

• 55:22Speaker 04

  Well, it sounds like the hot thing to do in this industry is to design the spec and then be ahead on the tech for the spec. So Apple should design 6G with its brand new poached employees.

• 55:39Nilay Patel?

  Well, sure, I mean, it's hired an awful lot of employees. A lot of those ex-Intel employees are apparently going to Apple. Presumably, Apple thinks we're just gonna like work harder because they'll be in a spaceship. They're like, this building's a circle, you should be able to figure it out now. But that's sort of the rumor is that they're all going over to the Apple side. Intel is just like generally struggling at an engineering level, so.

• 56:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:01Nilay Patel?

  Right, so like, who knows, maybe it's all gonna work out. But yeah, the game Qualcomm has played to perfection is forward investing in the spec, owning the huge swath of patents in the standard, and then leveraging that against the industry. And so like, their version of this, the happy version is, well, we invent all this stuff. Like, we spent the money upfront and now we want it on the backend. And everyone else is kind of like, well, shit. Like, that was basically Apple's response to them.

• 56:34Speaker 04

  It's really frustrating. It's one thing, a typical patent in a non-standardized industry, it's like, well, we don't need to make technology that's compatible with your patented technology so we can go our own way, you know? But in this this scenario where there's a standard and the standard is encumbered by patents. Like I it's it's it's kind of it's probably way different, but I know there's been a long term work to get the browsers. Uh, video playback not be

• 57:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:04Speaker 04

  Completely just drenched in patents and same with like image decode, you know, like it's it's um. Because it really limits, I don't know, it's frustrating. Patents are garbage is my opinion.

• 57:16Nilay Patel?

  Hmm.

• 57:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, I just don't, I don't see how how any consumers are are benefiting. It's not like 5G want to be worked on. And invested in if there weren't these patents.

• 57:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, this is a huge argument around friend in general. Like, is this work? Is this how you want it to work? And sort of the arguments are, well, it works everywhere else. Right? Like, we are not having this argument about wifi, which is also patent encumbered. We are not having this argument about Bluetooth, which is also patent encumbered. Like, there are. The the, this is so wonky, but like the the friend methodology operates well. Around the world and you just never see it. You never think about it. Right? When Apple wants stuff, like friend is like thrown into question. Like, Apple wants to sue Samsung, like, all of the sudden, Tim Cook is like, we need to reset how friend works.

• 58:12Nilay Patel?

  Apple is mad at Qualcomm, like, we're having this, like, patent discussion. Is Qualcomm's model extremely aggressive? Sure is, but like, how do you incentivize a bunch of companies to contribute their technology to a standard? If they're not the ones who are going to get paid on the consumer end? Like, that's a very, like, that is as complicated of an economic question as I think there is.

• 58:33Nilay Patel?

  Would Qualcomm just do it because they think if they invent good enough stuff for the standard, their chips will be better? Well, that is true. Because Intel couldn't make that. But like in a world where Samsung can just lift all that tech and make something equally as good, like you probably want to get a return on that investment. So like, I don't know, like it's, it's as complicated as anything. And there are places where there isn't a patent ecosystem like that, and there are lots and lots of places where there are. And it, it just seems to be like Apple sits in the center of it all the time. And they cast themselves as like the, the victims of an unfair system when they are also the richest company in the world.

• 59:11Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 59:12Nilay Patel?

  And so like, we'll see, I, I just, the thing that kills me is it would have been better for everybody until it sorted this out. Cause then you would have had two competitive eco, like chips that were being sold as commodities instead of the Apple world and, and then the Qualcomm world, which is where we seem to be going. All right, that's enough patent talk for today. Mr. Miller.

• 59:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 59:32Nilay Patel?

  Every week you do a segment.

• 59:35Speaker 04

  Always. It's called Keyboard in the Front Club honorary inductee edition. So, uh, as you all know, I am the president and CEO of the Keyboard in the Front Club.

• 59:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:50Speaker 04

  Uh, mostly inspired by the amazing Asus Zephyrus laptop, which has a keyboard in the front, right?

• 59:57Nilay Patel?

  Touchpad in the back.

• 59:59Speaker 04

  Touchpad to the side.

• 1:00:01Nilay Patel?

  Touchpad to the side, okay.

• 1:00:02Speaker 04

  Hot, hot laptop a, above the keyboard.

• 1:00:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:08Speaker 04

  Does this make sense? You don't have to lay your hands and wrists across hot laptop to touch a keyboard.

• 1:00:15Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:00:15Speaker 04

  Keyboard in the front club, especially for hot gaming laptops. Well, the new Acer Predator Helio 700 has a, a, a twist on this where the, the key, it's so hard to explain. The whole top of, of the laptop where the keyboard and trackpad are, right? It slides forward.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  Revealing fans and and innards of the laptop.

• 1:00:44Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 1:00:45Speaker 04

  Um, it slides forward and the touch, the touchpad like tilts down because now it's off the shelf of the laptop, right?

• 1:00:54Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:00:55Speaker 04

  So you're bringing the keyboard towards the front, but it's not technically in the front because the trackpad, while I'm guessing not even functional anymore, is still technically still attached and in front of the keyboard.

• 1:01:09Nilay Patel?

  It's like in, it's like in the winter when you've got like a giant sheet of ice on your roof and it like starts to slide off in one big piece, but doesn't quite completely fall off. And so like, so it's hanging off the eve.

• 1:01:20Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:01:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:21Speaker 04

  It's a very good illustration. And so basically the, it becomes a nice like tapered wrist rest. So you can use your keyboard, which is now basically in the front of the laptop. Uh, because obviously if you're going to play a video game, you're going to plug in a mouse. Uh, and so, yeah, so we have an honorary inductee in the keyboard in the, uh, front club and I'm very excited. Welcome.

• 1:01:44Nilay Patel?

  I like it. I can't wait for you to have just like 50 gaming laptops.

• 1:01:49Nilay Patel?

  That's what, that's what your home should look like. This is my wall of gaming laptops. All right. Let's have a PS5 for five minutes. Wired had a big piece.

• 1:01:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:01:58Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I will say that, um, I don't put anything past Sony. Like Sony can say anything that's insane and I'll believe it. So at one point they were talking about how it would have better audio and there was a typo in the Wired piece.

• 1:02:11Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:02:12Nilay Patel?

  He, the, the Sony person was saying like, you know, we're going to have this better audio. It's going to be much more immersive. It's kind of sounded like they were going to add Atmos to the PS5 because PS4 doesn't have it. But he was like, but it's, it's only going to be headphones and visual surround sound. And I read it and I was like, visual surround? Well, what does that mean? And like I, I, like the rube I am, I just assume Sony's got something nuts.

• 1:02:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:35Nilay Patel?

  Cause you, of course Sony is like, the future is visual.

• 1:02:39Speaker 04

  No, no, no. You were just hoping that it was DJ speakers. You were just hoping it was light up speakers. That's all you want.

• 1:02:44Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no, it was a typo. They meant virtual surrounds.

• 1:02:48Speaker 04

  Reading this piece, it sounded like like two middle schoolers.

• 1:02:54Nilay Patel?

  Like imagining a game console.

• 1:02:56Speaker 04

  And it's like, what do you think the PS5 is gonna be like? And like, well, let me tell you, it's gonna be so good. It's gonna have, it's got AK. Well, what about the audio? Oh, man, the audio is gonna be so good. It's gonna be 3D audio, you know?

• 1:03:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was a lot. But they're they're doing, uh, next, they're doing ray tracing.

• 1:03:14Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:03:14Nilay Patel?

  So far has not been anywhere except super high. Like, I think we saw the first big ray tracing announcing, announcement in CS. And then like the heart of this piece, and Paul, I'm interested to retake it because the whole world is moving to cloud stuff.

• 1:03:28Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and they're like, it's gonna have an SSD.

• 1:03:30Speaker 04

  Bum, bum, bum. Oh, the SSD is huge. It's amazing. Okay. It, uh, at some point in this piece, they say, it's, it's kind of vaguely worded, like, this SSD is about 20 times faster than a regular SSD?

• 1:03:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:47Speaker 04

  Okay. Uh, or it could be faster than the fastest. I don't know. My guess is that it's, it's a, um, like M dot two, like an MVME. It's not a SATA SSD.

• 1:04:00Nilay Patel?

  Right, right.

• 1:04:01Speaker 04

  This is the impression I'm getting. So it's not just a, a good SSD that you get in your desktop. It's, it's very fast and that's very exciting. But yeah, the,

• 1:04:11Speaker 04

  I mean, it, it seems obvious, uh, it's kind of RAM, like,

• 1:04:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:17Speaker 04

  When you have a hundred gigabyte game, you're not gonna put it all on RAM, so you need a secondary slow RAM. That's what storage on a video game console is. The problem is, is you have these hundred gigabyte games. And the, the, the thing they don't mention is what capacity this SSD will be. And very fast SSDs are very expensive. So are you gonna have 128 gigabyte SSD?

• 1:04:44Nilay Patel?

  That can only hold one game?

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  What if it's 128GB SSD and like, most of it is designed for just pre-caching what they think you're gonna need from the cloud. So it's like, half-stream, half-streaming.

• 1:04:56Nilay Patel?

  Maybe.

• 1:04:57Speaker 03

  I dunno, that's crazy.

• 1:04:58Nilay Patel?

  They say they wanna have physical media too, so.

• 1:05:00Speaker 03

  Here's, here's the future I envision. People that live out of the country where they can't get good broadband because our broadband policy, all comes back to broadband policy, is garbage and they have to have something fast and local. We'll get PS5s. And everybody else who can get good broadband in the cool hip cities are gonna get um, Microsoft or Google Stadia. Because then, instead of having like, a cool PS5 under their thing, they'll have an amazing, more powerful machine in the cloud.

• 1:05:33Nilay Patel?

  I, I don't think this Stadia machine is gonna be that much powerful than this PS5.

• 1:05:39Speaker 03

  Hmm, okay.

• 1:05:41Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I mean, obviously, it's the cloud, they could upgrade Stadia as soon as the PS5 launches. Also, they haven't launched Stadia yet, so who knows? But, I, I'm not, are you that bullish on Stadia? I'm, I'm not.

• 1:05:53Speaker 03

  No, but Microsoft is like, you know, gonna be taking another swing. And I'm, I'm talking like, three years down the road.

• 1:05:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:59Speaker 03

  Right? Like, we're not gonna, we're not gonna bring 500 or, you know, gig speeds to all of America in the next five years. It's just not gonna happen.

• 1:06:06Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:06:06Speaker 03

  But, it is gonna happen and I do think that we're gonna have a high enough speeds and, interesting enough, like, cloud gaming technologies where the latency will hit an acceptable level for all but the most hardcore gamers. Uh, I, like, that, that, in five years, that is a reasonable thing to expect. And so all of a sudden, we live in this, like, five-year-in-the-future world where, like, the only reason to buy a Playstation is because you, you live in a place that can't get broadband.

• 1:06:31Nilay Patel?

  Or they have better games than the Xbox, which has historically been the reason to buy a Playstation. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, I just, it was, it's an interesting time for this piece to come out. That was like, there's, you know, there's the, the tech narrative, like, what are they saying? Is it cool? 8K ray tracing, visual surround sound. It's still wrong, visual surround sound, that'd be true. But like, here's all these specs, it's gonna have this SSD situation. And then there's like, kind of like, the media narrative, which is like, why now? Like, why? Why put this out now? Like, what are you, what are you trying to prep people for? And it seems like the response is... I don't know, Microsoft's just put an Xbox One S that is literally the same Xbox One S without an optical drive.

• 1:07:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:07:12Nilay Patel?

  And Google announced Stadia and like, well, we gotta have something. Let's just, let's just put some letters out there and see what people think.

• 1:07:18Speaker 04

  Well, they are prepping people for not having any exciting Sony news at E3.

• 1:07:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's probably true. I know, it's interesting. I, I just, I'm asking the Rich Cast audience, if you can come up with an idea for what visual surround sound is, please let me know. Because it was a really exciting like hour where I thought it was real and then they corrected the type.

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  All right. We don't have time, but I just want to say I'm very happy that Google and Amazon have stopped having the stupidest fight in technology and are allowing YouTube on Fire TV and Amazon Prime Video to support Chromecast.

• 1:07:49Nilay Patel?

  It was very dumb.

• 1:07:50Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:07:50Nilay Patel?

  That's it.

• 1:07:51Speaker 03

  It was, it was just very dumb.

• 1:07:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. That's it. The Rich Cast this week. Like I said, there was, there's, there's, there's two folds. There's a Galaxy fold and there's Apple folding and those are the two stories.

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:08:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I did it.

• 1:08:03Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:08:04Nilay Patel?

  I made it funny, Dieter.

• 1:08:05Speaker 04

  All right.

• 1:08:09Nilay Patel?

  We're out of here. We'll see you next week. Tuesday's interview episode, Friday's chat show. You can tweet at us, I'm at Reckless, Dieter's at Backlon. Paul's, future Paul, we want to hear from you. Just do all the stuff. Sign up to all our podcasts, watch all our videos, just go to our website as many times as you can in a single day. We love you forever. Rock and roll.

• 1:08:26Speaker 03

  Snip, snip. Paul.

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

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