Samsung Unpacked, Google Pixel 4a review, and Apple's new 27-inch iMac

Nilay, Dieter, Becca, Chris, and Dan discuss the products announced at Samsung's virtual event this week, as well as the Google Pixel 4a review, a new 27-inch iMac, and Greg Joswiak replacing Phil Schiller as head of Apple marketing. Stories discussed this week: Apple and Google’s COVID-19 tracking system will make its full US debut in new Virginia app We can’t skip steps on the road to a COVID-19 vaccine Twitter blocked Trump campaign account from tweeting over COVID-19 misinformation Facebook removes Trump post for falsely claiming children are ‘almost immune’ to COVID-19 One tweet tried to identify a cop — then five people were charged with felony harassment President Trump withdraws FCC renomination after 5G controversy Donald Trump trying to control the FCC is a ‘disaster,’ says Sen. Ron Wyden President Trump says he will ban TikTok in the US today How the Trump administration could ‘ban’ TikTok Apple is not interested in buying TikTok Instagram launches Reels, its attempt to keep you off TikTok Google announced Pixel 5, Pixel 4a 5G, and Pixel 4a all at once Pixel 4a review Galaxy Note 20 first look The Galaxy Z Fold 2 is Samsung’s big promise that it can fix its foldable future Samsung Galaxy Buds Live review The best part of the Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 Plus is its screen Sony WH-1000XM4 review Greg Joswiak replaces Phil Schiller as head of Apple marketing The new 27-inch iMac’s webcam isn’t just better; it’s smarter Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates 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, tons of phone news. Becca, Chris, Dan join Dieter and I to talk about the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event, the Note 20, the Note 20 Ultra, Pixel 4A, the Galaxy Bud Live, which should have been called the Galaxy. It's so much. There's so much going on this Vergecast. It's coming up now.

• 0:17Speaker 01

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• 0:41Speaker 02

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.

• 1:15Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Mystic Bronze. Hazy Mystic Bronze. That was my favorite part of the Samsung event. Like, my favorite and least favorite part at once is like Samsung introduced a color and like talked about it too much. I'm your friend Eli. I'm here. Hi. Dieter Bohn is here. Hi, also friendly. Is that your friend? It's always so threatening from Dieter. We're doing something different today. Usually on the Vergecast, what we do is we bring in one reporter to talk about one thing for, you know, a period of time, and then that person leaves and we bring in another reporter. Today, we've decided to bring on three reporters the whole time and just have chaos. So Chris Walsh is here. Hi, Chris. Hello. How's it going? Becca Fasachi is here, making her Vergecast debut. Let it rip.

• 2:01Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna, this is gonna be amazing. Dan Seifert is here.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 2:05Nilay Patel?

  So this is an audio show, but Dan, can you tell us about the shirt that you're wearing right now? Please, Dan. Explain yourself.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  I'd rather not, but.

• 2:14Speaker 04

  So I'm wearing a shirt that says it's a dark shirt and in big white block letters across the chest. It says Bixby.

• 2:22Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 2:23Speaker 04

  What you can't see in our little video chat is that below it, it says specialty coffee roasters. So there's actually a coffee company called Bixby Coffee Roasters and I signed up for their coffee like a year ago and part of the promotion was they send you a free T-shirt.

• 2:41Nilay Patel?

  Do they have a mascot? Is it a dog with shoes?

• 2:43Speaker 04

  They have a mascot and it is a dog. I have never seen its feet though. So I do not know if it is wearing shoes. I would assume it is.

• 2:50Nilay Patel?

  Look, we don't do a lot of like integrated sponsorships, but if they put some shoes on this dog, like let's Bixby Coffee Roasters, come on.

• 2:59Speaker 04

  It's good coffee.

• 3:00Nilay Patel?

  So our, our merch store is down right now. Like we, you can't buy a verge T-shirt right now because we're switching vendors and all that stuff, but we're bringing it back up. And so I went to a meeting yesterday with Will, our creative director and all these other people, talking about what T-shirts are going to pack, put back in the store. Then at the end of it, TC, our executive editor was like, where's the emails T-shirt? And there was like this moment of silence and then everyone looked at me on the zoom and I was like, we need to have the emails T-shirt.

• 3:26Nilay Patel?

  So the emails T-shirt is coming back. I demand it. It's the only shirt that will outlast the, I think the entire, the entire project of the verge. Okay. That's our cast for today. As always, I want to start with updates on a virus, the movement for racial justice in this company, the two biggest stories in the world. They will outlast any of the phones we talk about today. I assure you 21 weeks. So I even have to say it. It's been 21 weeks since the president presented to the nation a flow chart about testing. Google and its 5 million engineers have not yet built such a website. The testing situation is bad. It needs to get better. 21 weeks since we saw the flow chart. However, Apple and Google this week, you know, their COVID-19 contact tracing tool has been implemented

• 4:09Nilay Patel?

  in both iOS and Android. Virginia is the first state to release an app that uses those APIs. Alabama has an app in beta. So we're seeing the fruits of that labor come to America. It's coming out. Other countries around the world. Eventually, both companies are going to make that functionality exposed in the primary user experience. They're going to build it into the operating system, but right now you need an app from your state. That's important because your state has to validate that you got a positive test and then notify everybody else. Apple and Google don't have themselves testing capabilities. So the first steps towards phone-based contact tracing are coming out in America, in Virginia. Again, beta test in Alabama. If you live in Virginia, just download the app.

• 4:54Nilay Patel?

  I'm not going to tell you that you should make a try. I'm just telling you what to do. Just download it. Everybody should like, if your state has the app, you should download the app. Nicole Wetman wrote a piece this week about skipping steps on the road to a vaccine. You should read that. It's a very cogent analysis of how fast we're going towards a vaccine and the necessary steps to make sure it's safe and that people take it. It's very important. And then because COVID just keeps intersecting with tech all of the time, Twitter and Facebook both took action against President Trump this week over basically, Trump basically tweeted or posted that children, I think he said they were immune to COVID-19, which is absolutely not true, just not true. Children actually died from COVID-19 already.

• 5:35Nilay Patel?

  Facebook removed the post. Twitter blocked the Trump campaign, not the President, not real Donald Trump, but the Trump campaign account from tweeting until it removed this misinformation. I think we're seeing very clearly Twitter is just taking a harder line and Facebook is falling behind. I'd point out, because it's the thing I always point out, that just a tiny bit of competition here has made Facebook behave itself. The second thing that we are constantly tracking, which is also just now running fully into the election that's coming up, is the movement for racial justice. Addie Robertson had a story that published just minutes before we started recording. This one is wild. During a protest in Nutley, New Jersey, the cops were being friendly with counter protesters. So a Black Lives Matter protester took a photo of a cop, tweeted it out and said, can anybody identify this cop?

• 6:19Nilay Patel?

  The cops charged that person with a felony and then also charged four people who retweeted that tweet with a felony of cyber harassment. Absolutely wild case. The ACLU is involved. It's going to have repercussions. If retweeting something rises to the level of felony harassment, the entire internet will change, at least in Nutley, New Jersey. So we're keeping an eye on that. Read that story. It is completely built out. Addie and Russell did a great job reporting that one down to the ground. Seeing the election and the stakes of the election, Snapchat is planning in-app photo awareness tools to Make sure people know how to vote. The president himself is obviously publishing a lot of misinformation about mail-in voting. He's pushing that very hard. So I think the platforms are going to start pushing back on that.

• 7:03Nilay Patel?

  We're seeing that with Snapchat. And then we interviewed Ron Wyden on the Vergecast on Tuesday. Addy and I talked to the senator for a while. There's a thing that's happening. It's not getting enough press, I don't think. We've paid attention to it. We obviously asked the senator about it. But Mike O'Reilly is a commissioner of the FCC. He is a very conservative, I would say, on balance. I have not agreed with Mike O'Reilly on most things. But obviously, Trump had the executive order asking the FCC to enforce 230, to talk about conservative bias. O'Reilly gave a speech in which he said, I have First Amendment concerns about this. I don't want to regulate social media platforms. The last thing we want is to impose the fairness doctrine on the internet.

• 7:45Nilay Patel?

  Within days, his renomination to a second term in the FCC was withdrawn. So it was obvious retaliation. The Wall Street Journal opinion page was like, that's a little cancel culture-y. The Wall Street Journal opinion page is obviously very conservative. And then we asked Senator Wyden about it. And Wyden was very clear that Trump's attempts to influence the FCC in this way are inappropriate. And he made a direct link to the president wanting to publish misinformation about mail-in voting and using pressure on the social media platforms to allow him to do that. So all of these things just seem connected to me. We're paying a lot of attention to them. I don't want to, I don't want to indicate, because we're going to talk a lot about phones, that we're not paying attention to them.

• 8:27Nilay Patel?

  But as I say every week, our audience tells us they need a break. So we're going to talk about some phones. But it's on the site. I want you to pay attention to it. It's, it's top of mind for all of us. Okay, let's talk about some tech news. There are phones this week. The reason we have the whole cast assembled is because there was the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked event. Lots of Samsung news, Pixel news this week. But also, I just want to run through this timeline. Absolute chaos in the TikTok world. The president basically said, I will ban TikTok on August 1st. He said, I'll ban it tomorrow.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  How many, how many weeks has it been since the president said a thing about TikTok?

• 9:04Nilay Patel?

  It's been one week since the president said he would ban TikTok tomorrow. That escalated into Microsoft being involved somehow. Microsoft put out a statement saying, we've heard from the president. We've, Sachin Nadella has talked to the president directly. We are in conversations to buy parts of TikTok. We will complete those by September 15th or not.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  And the US Treasury is going to get its cut.

• 9:27Nilay Patel?

  It's very complicated. We, no one knew what that meant when Microsoft published it. The president followed up by saying, either TikTok's going to get sold by September 15th, or it's going to go out of business. And then he said this thing about the Treasury getting its cut, which was, someone's got to pay the Treasury. If not for me, this deal wouldn't be happening, so we have to get paid. He likened it to key money, which is an illegal landlord extortion scheme in New York City. The man was a New York City landlord, so I feel like maybe he's just applying some former knowledge to the present. We don't know what's going to go on with Microsoft and TikTok. Now it appears that what Microsoft is being pressured to do is buy all of TikTok, not just the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but the whole operation.

• 10:12Nilay Patel?

  No one knows how you could even buy part of a social network. Russell Brandham wrote a great piece about that this week. Buying a social network with an algorithm that is built in China and segregating it by geography seems very challenging. I'm sure Microsoft can pull it off. They're a big company.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  I'm sure it would go just as well as a Nokia acquisition.

• 10:30Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I kind of want them to buy TikTok. Then there was, was this Wednesday, Dieter? Like, we woke up on Wednesday, we were like, getting ready to deal with the iMac that came out.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:41Nilay Patel?

  And then Axios published, Apple is interested in buying TikTok. We asked Apple, they're like, no, no.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  No.

• 10:51Nilay Patel?

  So then they denied buying Tik, that they were even interested, or that they ever would. And then like 20 minutes later, they were like, a new iMac is here. And then 20 minutes after that, Phil Schiller announced that he was moving on to be an Apple fellow, which definitely sounds like the next level of Scientology. I'm just going to be honest about that. So just a confusing array of events with Apple. And then Instagram launched Reels, its competitor to TikTok, which is flatly a clone of TikTok. I don't care what they say about it. It looks and feels exactly like TikTok without anything interesting going on. Have you all used Reels?

• 11:22Speaker 05

  No.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  I have not. I think I've, I don't know if I've actually opened TikTok since Reels launched, or I excuse me, opened Instagram since Reels launched.

• 11:31Nilay Patel?

  So I, it took me a while to get it. The first Instagram reel that I saw, Becca's on her phone right now looking at it.

• 11:36Speaker 05

  I, I need to look. I haven't even seen it.

• 11:38Nilay Patel?

  I think this says everything. The first Instagram reel that was served to me was Jessica Alba doing a TikTok meme.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  I got that too.

• 11:45Nilay Patel?

  I think that's the one they programmed for everyone.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:48Speaker 05

  Okay, I haven't started. It's like, create, get started. Should we see what I get fed first?

• 11:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's gonna be Jessica Alba doing a TikTok meme.

• 11:55Speaker 05

  Oh my gosh, this is so cute. No, I got a mommy bear playing no games.

• 12:00Speaker 03

  That's what I got.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  You and me, Becca, were the same person to the algorithm. Incredible.

• 12:06Speaker 05

  Wow. Who would have thought?

• 12:09Nilay Patel?

  I heard from a lot of people who got the Jessica Alba doing the TikTok dance. I think that was like, they have like three or four. What'd you get? Yeah, yeah. Chris Welsh has Jessica Alba doing the TikTok dance. I think they paid Jessica Alba a lot of money to launch Instagram reels.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:22Nilay Patel?

  But it's funny because the thing that she made was a TikTok meme. Like, very obviously, they were like, this is TikTok. Here's a more famous person doing a thing that you like from TikTok.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  So I have two things to point out here. One, I noticed how quickly you moved to wanting us to talk about reels, to prevent me from saying that you explaining the TikTok of that story has me reeling.

• 12:45Nilay Patel?

  No, Jesus Christ, Eater.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  Come on.

• 12:50Speaker 03

  Two, I have reels, but I can't use the audio because at some point in the past, I accidentally clicked the button that says, "Make my account a business account," and then I was like, this is dumb, and I undid it. And I just, they don't let business accounts do audio in reels. So I just like, don't get to play around with it.

• 13:09Nilay Patel?

  I feel so bad for you, famous influencer on Instagram.

• 13:13Speaker 03

  I clicked the button, but sorry.

• 13:15Nilay Patel?

  I was on CNBC and they asked me this question, which I think says everything about this whole drama. Which was, well, now that Instagram has reels, it's fine to kick out TikTok, right? Because Facebook and I was like, I don't, we just had a whole antitrust hearing. Like, Facebook is not great. Like, they shouldn't just be able to clone every company. And I think that dynamic is real. I also think that it's not as good. Like, the interview show on Tuesday is Taylor Lorenz from the New York Times. So that's coming up on Tuesday. And like, the thing I want to ask her when I talk to her tomorrow is Instagram is like a social product? Like, it's about who you follow? And TikTok, I don't even have a TikTok account. I just have the app on my phone.

• 13:55Nilay Patel?

  And it just like magically figured out that what I really want to see is like extremely expensive Bluetooth grilling equipment. That's what I want from TikTok. And that's what it shows me. It's great. It's that and like people doing dumb things with cars. I'm sure everyone else's TikToks are great. Instagram does not know that about me, right? Like TikTok figured that out. It's an interest-based social network, not a social, like, social graph network. I don't think Instagram can figure it out. I don't think they will be able to get there nearly fast enough. Because all of TikTok's energy has been on that recommendation engine. Like, it is effectively just a massively good recommendation engine. And it has infinite content to show you. So we'll see. Like I said, like I said, I'm talking to Taylor tomorrow about all of this. You'll hear that on Tuesday.

• 14:39Nilay Patel?

  I don't want to burn too much time on it because I think she will know what she's talking about. But that is the timeline, six days since the president promised he would ban TikTok. But he did set a deadline, so I'm not going to start counting until the deadline comes. Yeah, I got one reporting trick and it's counting. All right, phones. Now we're going to talk a lot about phones. Dieter? Would you like to talk about phones that exist or phones that don't exist? Don't exist. We just had Sundar on the show, like, what was it, two months ago? And we're like, what's up with pixels? And he is like, we got to make them good.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. Did he make him good? I mean, he made, they made, he made one, one good. Uh, so the Pixel 4A has been announced and released. Uh, I reviewed it. A bunch of us here on this, actually, the podcast have used one. But because the Pixel 4A is late, and we can talk about why, uh, it is really close to when we're assuming the Pixel 5 is gonna come out. So Google's like, you know what? Yeah, we're making a Pixel 5. It'll be out here this fall. Also, there's gonna be a Pixel 4A 5G, because you know, that's what you want. So they just announced all three phones at once. Just bam. But you reviewed the 4A. We have not seen photos of the 5.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  We have seen various and confusing leaks all summer. And Chris, you might actually have a better handle around this so far. But a bunch of the early leaks were like, this must be the Pixel 5A. And it's like, well, no, there's actually the, it's probably the Pixel 4A 5G now. And then there's more, you get more internal documents of even more pixels and a foldable pixel, like later on down the line. Like, it's a fiasco in Pixel rumor land.

• 16:14Speaker 06

  Uh, yeah, it's super confusing. I mean, they had that leak, I think it was last month, where there was a phone that looked just like the 4A, but they said it was the 5, and people weren't sure. But then it seems like they might get rid of their Face ID clone, which I really actually liked on the Pixel 4, like, to just walk away from that for the thumb reader. But, I mean, yeah, no one's really quite sure what it's gonna look like. Even the 4A 5G might have new specs or a bigger screen, or who knows what this, who knows what the story is. I mean, it's a Pixel, so there's, there's just always confusion about what's gonna happen.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  Is it gonna look like a brightly colored plastic rectangle? It's just my guess.

• 16:47Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 16:49Speaker 04

  The 4A is a decidedly not brightly colored plastic rectangle?

• 16:54Speaker 03

  All right, Dieter, tell us about the 4A. You reviewed it. So, uh, the, the big, big new innovation in the Pixel 4A is they dropped 50 bucks off the price. So it's down to $350, which is pretty big. It's a pretty big deal. Uh, it's 100 bucks less than the storage equivalent iPhone SE to get one, an iPhone SE with 128 gigs. Um, and they just like...

• 17:16Speaker 03

  Got everything as good as you could probably get it on a $350 phone. Like, I wish it had a faster processor, but we live in a world of Android where Qualcomm, if you want to get a good Qualcomm processor, you gotta spend way too much money. So they got like an okay one that's got a pretty solid screen. It's OLED, it's got a hole punch, it's got the Pixel camera. Becca actually pointed this out to me when we were talking to them. She asked if it had, what was the sensor, Becca? 363.

• 17:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  Same sensor as the Pixel 4 and the Pixel 3A and the Pixel 3. They've been using literally like the exact same camera stack for like two years now. So it's great, it makes, takes great photos, but they haven't pushed it much.

• 17:54Nilay Patel?

  I would love it if you could select your software tuning on the Pixel.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 18:00Nilay Patel?

  Right? If you could buy a Pixel 4 and be like, just make this shit look like the Pixel 2, that would make me very happy. Cause I thought the Pixel 2 looked, it was the most contrasty and the most dramatic, and they have veered towards looking more like the iPhone over time. But I wish I could just be like, go back to that look. I love that look the best. Cause if they're using the same hardware, they should give you the choices in the software, right? But everyone is just looking at me like I'm dumb.

• 18:28Speaker 03

  I mean, it's like, it's like saying you should just get your choice of, I don't know, clutch on your Mustang, like it gets tied to the hardware. The thing, well, okay, that's true.

• 18:37Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  No, I meant like, not just like manual versus automatic, just like go and put your 97 clutch in a 2015.

• 18:47Nilay Patel?

  I mean, you don't want to do that, but you can definitely retune an engine. Anyway, keep going. Pixel 4, we're not gonna talk about Mustangs.

• 18:53Speaker 03

  Fingerprint sensor on the back. It works great. It's got a headphone jack, cause you know, apparently low-end phones are the only phones that get headphone jacks anymore.

• 19:00Nilay Patel?

  I'm into it. Becca, are you holding one right now? You're holding one.

• 19:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm holding one right now. And what I'll have to say about this is that I love this thing. Like, it gave me everything I like about phones in 2020, like a big screen and it's slim and the battery's decent, but it kept the things that I also love about previous phones, that I love a fingerprint sensor, like a one on the back, and I love a headphone jack, and I love the Pixel camera. And it's $350, which is a pretty good price in 2020 for a brand new phone.

• 19:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. There's this, there's this meme out there, I think like it's a Gruber meme, but like there's this idea out there that like Google is bored with Android and the Pixel is a reflection of its boredom. Does this phone feel like they're bored with it?

• 19:48Speaker 03

  No.

• 19:49Speaker 05

  I'm bored with Android.

• 19:51Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 19:52Nilay Patel?

  Becca, hot debut on the Vergecast.

• 19:55Speaker 03

  The one new feature is an accessibility feature for software where it'll do real time captioning of phone calls, but it doesn't record them and it doesn't put them on the internet. So don't have your conspiracy theories thrown at me. Breitbart, they wrote it up terribly. Anyway, so that's like the one thing. But that's coming to other pixels. It's just like, Google is so committed to keeping the Pixel software like really clean and basic relative to the madness that happens on every other Android phone, that it can feel a little bit boring. And their decision to be really like understated with their design. I think it's like they've gone, they've maybe gone a little bit too far. It's been like, no, no, this is, this is the Android phone that isn't flashy.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  It's just like a phone. And after a while, like that message gets through that like, oh no, you just made a phone. Okay. Like they want it to be utilitarian to the point where it's like become a little bit boring.

• 20:49Nilay Patel?

  I feel like Google has been so long burned by Sergey Brin coming to the Google Glass event on a hang glider. That's like, that's a real thing that happened. They launched Google Glass and like one of the co-founders landed on stage on a hang glider and it's like, Glass is the future. And that was their last big attempt to be splashy. And it completely backfired, like in every possible way. I don't even think he was wearing shoes. Like, it was just like.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  He probably had roller blades on, right?

• 21:17Nilay Patel?

  It was bad. But they do not, Google as a company is not flashy. And I think to compete with Apple, you have to have some amount of flashiness in your ethos. And they won't make a flashy phone. They won't do a Samsung style flashy. And we'll talk about whether or not Unpacked was successful as a virtual flashy event. But their emphasis right now is on cheap phones, which it might be where a lot of volume is, but it's not where a lot of like mind share is. And so like, Becca, I agree with you. Like, I'm just like in my house. The only thing I really use my phone for is scrolling through Twitter on the couch and then taking photos. I probably do not need to spend more than $350 on a Pixel 4A for that. But it's also like, I'm not spending money on anything else.

• 22:03Nilay Patel?

  Just like in this house all the time. Like, what if I wanted to buy a nicer phone? And Google just does not have an option for me. And I think that's like a weird place for them to be all of the time, to not have the range of things. Do you think the Pixel 5 is gonna be like flashier?

• 22:18Speaker 04

  No.

• 22:19Nilay Patel?

  Becca's emphatically shaking her head. No?

• 22:22Speaker 05

  I don't know. Has a Pixel ever really blown anyone's mind here? I mean?

• 22:26Speaker 04

  Well, I disagree.

• 22:27Nilay Patel?

  The Pixel 2's camera.

• 22:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, okay, camera. True, true.

• 22:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, but the Pixel 2 camera, and you know, it's, the Pixel 4A is kind of interesting. Google's blaming pandemic-related supply chain issues, but the fact that it's only available in one size and it's only available in one color is like a first for the Pixel line. You know, the Pixel, the original Pixel 1 came in that just blue color, was this like Best Buy blue? That was flashy, you know, and then you had like, you had the Pixel 2 had this panda color scheme. That was pretty cool. Couldn't get that anywhere else.

• 22:59Nilay Patel?

  No one could ever buy the cool ones.

• 23:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, but like they existed though, in theory.

• 23:05Speaker 04

  Oh, no, you know when you could buy them? You could buy them when they were on Woo in like 18 months as refurbished models for half the price. That's when you could buy them.

• 23:12Nilay Patel?

  I would just say the fact that you could, no one could ever buy the one that everybody wanted is like the worst part of this whole story.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  I mean, but the reality is no one bought any of them anyways, right? Like that is the story of Pixels in life.

• 23:23Nilay Patel?

  Right, cuz you'd go to be like, I wanna buy the cool panda one, and you couldn't. You're like, well, screw it.

• 23:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, and like, we're all saying that the Pixel 4A is a great phone for, you know, the price is excellent. It does everything you need it to do. The reality is, how many people are gonna buy it? It's not gonna be pushed by any carriers. It's gonna have the same issues unless it has a huge marketing thing from Google, which has never happened before. So like.

• 23:44Speaker 05

  No, there's something I love about it's not flashiness, though. Like, this is the first phone that I have held, and maybe it's because it's a little bit cheaper, where I'm not like afraid to use it. Like, when I get a new Note or something, I'm like, this is like precious cargo. This is like something really great. And I kinda like treat it a little differently, but with this, I'm, I feel like I can go out and take a lot of photos with it and kinda like, you know, hold it over the edge of the ferry and take a photo. And I don't know, maybe that's cuz of its price, but.

• 24:12Speaker 05

  Risky.

• 24:14Speaker 03

  Living on the edge. So we should talk about the price and the marketing for a second. I am sure that they originally planned on selling this for $399. And then the iPhone SE came out with the A13, whatever, Bionic, the fastest processor that's ever been put in a phone, got put in the iPhone SE.

• 24:31Nilay Patel?

  At $399.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, for $399. And everyone was like, whoa. And then the pandemic, and then like just flagging Pixel sales. And then last but not least, and perhaps most importantly in this whole story, the Pixel 4A is not 5G. And I don't care. I don't think that you should care because what are the like? If you're stuck at home, if you're lucky enough to be able to stay home, you've probably got Wi-Fi. If you're going out in the world, 5G isn't that much faster for most regions. And so having to pay the extra money for 5G is not necessarily worth it. If you get a, if the phone you want happens to have it, great. If it doesn't, I wouldn't sweat it this year. But you know, who is sweating 5G is all the US carriers.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  And so if your phone doesn't have 5G, then the US carriers don't care. And so there is going to be no co-marketing for the Pixel 4A. Google basically told me that. And so one of the reasons I think that they had to pre-announce the Pixel 4A 5G and the Pixel 5 is because they just know if they hadn't, they put the 4A out and it would have just disappeared because no carriers are going to be advertising it at all. Only Google is and how much, you know, how much is Google going to spend on it? Who knows? And so it would have just looked like a flop. Even if it was selling relatively well, it would, it would just disappear from the conversation, you know, two weeks after it was released.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  So they had to drop the price down to make it sell better. And they had to say, these other phones are coming. And so don't freak out when like Verizon isn't telling you to buy it in two weeks. Plus like, you know, the note was coming up like later that week. And so what else you got to do?

• 26:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I feel like the, um, you know, I'm very skeptical of the T-Mobile Sprint merger. But one of the things that would happen if it works and goes through and that network expands to the size that T-Mobile wants it to. It's like, I think Google can just start doing its own advertising for Fi because it runs on that, it'll run on that combined big network. It might have the coverage, although we'll see. But if Google can just start running its own ads that are like, buy this phone online. We run our own network. It doesn't have this overhead. You can pause it like my Fi service right now is paused for, I just pushed one button. It paused for three months because I'm not, I'm not going anywhere. Like we have all these other features. We're Google and we, they can sell like a more integrated

• 26:56Nilay Patel?

  service phone package. That would be wild if that's like a result of the T-Mobile Sprint merger. Cause I think that is something they can actually market as a differentiator versus go to your, Dan is looking at me so skeptically.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  This might be the most optimistic read I've ever heard on the T-Mobile and Sprint merger.

• 27:13Nilay Patel?

  I'm trying.

• 27:15Speaker 04

  I mean, like, like, I think we all agree that Google is not bored with Android. Is it bored with Fi? That might be a real thing. And like, is Fi gonna hit the Google graveyard? I would not be terribly surprised if that happened at some point in the future.

• 27:28Nilay Patel?

  I'm trying to have an optimistic viewpoint on, on, on everything. On that note, we're taking a break. We're gonna come back. We'll talk about the note because it actually came out. We'll be right back.

• 27:43Speaker 07

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• 28:43Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Becca.

• 28:45Speaker 05

  What's up, Eli?

• 28:46Nilay Patel?

  You have seen, as far as I know, you're the only person I know on this call who has held a Note 20 and a Note 20 Ultra.

• 28:54Speaker 05

  Someone is holding one currently.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, they did send me the review, but I've turned it on and installed stuff and then not touched it because it's installing stuff. So Becca is in fact the only person on this call who's like done more than like unbox it.

• 29:05Nilay Patel?

  You have like a weird setup to get an in-person look at the phones, right?

• 29:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, very strange. I walked up to a door in like lower Chelsea in Manhattan, and this woman greeted me with a thermometer and some hand sanitizer. I stood there, my temperature checked out, I was okay. And then I got brought up into a freight elevator into a big, empty room where we are all very separated, well beyond six feet, all wearing masks. And I sat at a very pink desk, and I just told I had an hour to check it out, take as many photos and videos as I could, and then scram.

• 29:47Nilay Patel?

  What'd you think?

• 29:47Speaker 05

  It's a note, we can say that. It's got a stylus, it has good specs, it feels heavy, it feels good in your hand. I need two hands to do absolutely anything on it, but that's pretty standard for me. And I'm not a big phone person. I mean, you heard me talking about how much I love the size of the ForeA. So for someone who is, I think that this is, there's no surprises. It's a note, but it's good, yeah. I think for me, the biggest thing is that the stylus feels so nice to write on this note with. Like, it really felt like I was writing notes. And Dieter and I were trying to talk about like what that was, and he has it in front of him, maybe he can write some more and we can try to figure this out, because I didn't have time in my time there. But it's

• 30:29Speaker 05

  not just any stylus. It really belongs with this phone. And it has, you know, gyroscope in it, it's still got, you know, you can click it to take photos and zoom in on the camera and all of that. But it's good, but it is just an update.

• 30:43Nilay Patel?

  So there's two of them, right?

• 30:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 30:45Speaker 06

  It has not been received well, let's just put it that way.

• 30:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it just seems like a huge miss, like a $1,000 plastic phone. But you've held it. Does the plastic feel horrible? Or does it feel like plastic?

• 30:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, it feels fine. It's very slippery, it's matte instead of like this crazy mirrored glass.

• 31:03Nilay Patel?

  It's Mystic Bronze, I believe it's called.

• 31:05Speaker 05

  Oh, yes, I'm sorry. Oh, the Mystic Bronze, yeah.

• 31:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, for me, I was looking at these two phones. They look like they almost don't belong in the same line together. Like the Note 20 versus the Note 20 Ultra. So you have the Note 20 and it's got a rounded screen and a flat screen at that. Its edges on the rails are actually a little bit more rounded than on the Note Ultra. They just don't feel like the same phone at all. It doesn't feel like a mini version and a big version. It feels like the Note 20 and then the Ultra, the Plus.

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, which one do you have?

• 31:39Speaker 03

  They have sent the Ultra out as review units. I think specifically because they want people to know that they want the best one in people's hands. We'll review the regular Note 20 when we are able to get it, of course. The thing Becca mentioned about the screen. Yeah, Samsung said that there was some kind of different finish on it to make it feel a little bit more paper-like. I never really believe that when people say things like that. But there does seem to be a little bit better friction. I'll be very curious to see if that friction still exists in six months or if it's just like some coating or something. And then the other thing about this Note, and Becca, you said this and like you said it in the video and I wrote it in the hands-on based on your impressions in the article.

• 32:22Speaker 03

  But the camera bump on this thing is serious as hell. It is 90 degrees squared off Mesa. It's huge.

• 32:34Speaker 05

  It is huge. I had this whole tangent in the video that I ended up cutting out where I just talk about how big this thing is. Like if you put it flat on a table, it will wobble. It's massive.

• 32:46Nilay Patel?

  And that has what, three cameras, a depth sensor, the usual stack that we've been seeing?

• 32:51Speaker 03

  No. Well, it's not a depth sensor. It's not a depth camera. It's a laser autofocus.

• 32:56Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  And that's important because it has the same 108-megapixel sensor that the S20 Ultra had that had slow focus because they weren't using, you know, the proper phase of tech, whatever. And so I'm going to get that wrong. I definitely got that wrong. But they were using the slower focus. And so it meant that like they had to put up with firmware updates. And it was a whole fiasco with the original review because they didn't have the new software update. So that's all quote unquote fixed, but it's still slower to focus. So they put a laser in the Note because a laser is way faster.

• 33:30Nilay Patel?

  Lasers are quite speedy, I've been told. Yeah. But that made it a Mesa. Does it get hot? Well, I just like the, well, I guess we, we, no one's used it long enough. I've just always sort of been told the, the, the reason you make that whole stack bigger in that shape is for heat dissipation. Right? And like notes are big, they have big batteries, fast processors, huge screens. You add in another thing that gets hot. That's like, it feels like a phone that gets hot. But well, I guess we'll find out. That's why you reviewed. We will find out.

• 33:57Speaker 05

  Time will tell.

• 33:58Speaker 06

  It's a big bump, but like you gotta figure like, that phone starts at $1,300, right? It's like the number of people who like buy it and like carry it around just by itself without a case has gotta be pretty small. So.

• 34:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, that, that was my thought with it too, is once you put a case on this, it's gonna hide that, that bump a little bit. But I wouldn't be surprised if you put a slim case on there, if that bump still sticks out. Like, I don't know.

• 34:19Nilay Patel?

  Becca, do you get to take any sample shots of this camera?

• 34:22Speaker 05

  Okay, so not, not really at all. And I obviously couldn't take any, anything with me when I left. I tried to zoom in with that like 50x zoom on the Note 20 Ultra. And I was too close to absolutely anything for it to even focus on it. But I'm very excited to get out into the world because I have been using my telephoto lens on my S10 a lot more recently. So we'll see if that holds up.

• 34:45Nilay Patel?

  Social distancing has finally kicked in. You're like, I'll just stand back a little bit.

• 34:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, this was always the question with the S20, right? The camera wasn't as good as we thought it was gonna be, even though Samsung have thrown all this hardware in it. This camera feels a lot like the same thing. Do you think they've improved the software? Like, I guess we're just gonna have to see.

• 35:08Speaker 05

  We're gonna have to see. I personally have never really liked the, like the colors that Samsung leans into. I always felt like it was like way too punchy. They're trying really hard to add a lot of contrast and bring the saturation way up. So we'll have to see. I definitely want to put that all to the test.

• 35:26Nilay Patel?

  I'm telling you, the entire game here is software modes that just look like old famous phones.

• 35:32Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 35:33Nilay Patel?

  If you can put like the Instax filter on Instagram and be like, now it looks like that. Eli, this is a business model. This is an app.

• 35:40Speaker 04

  This is a business model for an app, just like you have, you know, Fujifilm simulations and Kodak simulations and you got all these filters for these various films, but you want one to emulate smartphones from three years ago.

• 35:53Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be great. We actually, Mark Lavoie left Google, the guy who made the Pixel camera, and now he's at Adobe.

• 36:00Speaker 04

  He's building you the app right now. He's doing it.

• 36:02Nilay Patel?

  I gotta do it first, but crappy, and then Adobe can buy my company. This is the way. Why doesn't my brain work like this? Okay, so that's it. Anything else we need to pick up on the note? I gotta say, it feels like the note landed with just a thud. Like as Chris was saying, the $1,000 plastic note with a 60-hertz screen. Yeah, the 60-hertz screen is what kills me. Like, that's terrible.

• 36:24Speaker 04

  That product just feels like a carrier concession. Like, carriers wanted something at $1,000 or less with 5G and all that stuff. Like, if you look at last year's Note 10 lineup, you had the Note 10 and the Note 10 Plus, they were basically equally premium, right? And the Note 10, I think, was 950 bucks, and the Note 10 Plus was like 1150 or something like that. But they both had, like, full glass bodies, they had the same spec screens, except resolution was a little different that you couldn't tell. Same camera, stuff like that. This year, there's like a way bigger, as like Becca alluded to, way bigger difference, way bigger golf. You got different design, different screens, different build quality, like different cameras even. We really talked about that, but this camera on the Note 10 is not the same as the Note 20 Ultra, or excuse me, on the Note 20 is not the same

• 37:06Speaker 04

  as the Note 20 Ultra. It just really feels like Verizon and T-Mobile were like, we want a note that's under the $1,000 mark, that has 5G, make it happen. And Samsung was like, okay, and like, did it. And like, but Samsung wants you to look at the Note 20 Ultra, which is why we have a Note 20 Ultra review in it, and so on and so forth.

• 37:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, these are two different phones. This is why Samsung gets the carrier co-marketing deals, right?

• 37:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:32Nilay Patel?

  The carriers are like, here are some hoops, and Samsung is like, we have jumped through them.

• 37:36Speaker 04

  How high can

• 37:38Nilay Patel?

  Are there more hoops? We'd love to see more hoops, please. Just market Bixby in your weird TV ads. But it's also like, do we, do we need any more evidence? The carriers don't really know what they're doing. Right? Like, they demanded a phone that no one wants.

• 37:52Speaker 04

  The carriers have very different incentives than a phone maker or than you or I. Like they're like Verizon's incentive is to sell its 5G network and get more people on its 5G network. The fastest way you can do that is by offering more 5G phones at more price points, whether they're the Pixel 4A, 5G XL, whatever it's going to be called for $500, or the Note 20 for $1,000, or the OnePlus 8 for $800, whatever it is. Like, they can get 5G across the line. They can make their 5G network look better and get more people on it, yada, yada. It's like a completely different goal for them than Samsung or Apple or Google or whatever.

• 38:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just think it's impossible to talk about. I mean, I don't think we should, I could rant about the three major carriers and I'd say it's, as everyone has heard me do for a full hour. It's impossible to understand Samsung without understanding that relationship. But at the same time, like Samsung is a big company and they're launching these phones globally. And you can't just give them the out.

• 38:50Speaker 04

  I'm gonna say, we wrote about this book a few months ago. There's a book called Samsung Rising that talks all about Samsung's like efforts into becoming the company that is now. And there's a huge section about its early work with carriers and what it was willing to do. And it's super enlightening. There's an article on the site written by Sam Byford, who interviewed the author. But I also suggest go read the book.

• 39:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. More things happened at Unpacked. One of the more confusing virtual events that we've been attending.

• 39:19Nilay Patel?

  There's a new Z Fold 2. Dan, I'm gonna, for whatever reason, I've chosen you as the person I will ask about the folding phone. It's your punishment for making us talk about carriers.

• 39:28Speaker 04

  Nah, I deserve it. Roast me.

• 39:31Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but this one actually feels like, you know, Samsung's doing the Samsung thing. They put out the Z Fold. It was a legendary mess.

• 39:40Speaker 04

  So actually it was the Galaxy Fold.

• 39:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:42Speaker 04

  Get your names right. It's a Galaxy Fold. Then it was the Z Flip.

• 39:46Nilay Patel?

  I got it. And now it's a Z Fold 2.

• 39:48Speaker 04

  No, no. Then the Z Flip 5G.

• 39:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. Which got announced early.

• 39:52Speaker 04

  And now it's, it's the Galaxy Z Fold 5, Z Fold 2 5G.

• 39:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So, but what is it the sequel to? Hold up, hold up. What is it the sequel to?

• 40:02Speaker 04

  Technically the Galaxy Fold.

• 40:03Nilay Patel?

  Got it. So I was right. It's what I'm taking away from this.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  Here's, here's Samsung. There is the A line, which is their low end phones. There's the S line, which is their mainstream phones. There is the N line, which are the Note phones. And there is the Z line, which are their folding phones. There once was a J line, I believe, but I don't know if that's around anymore. Uh, just like, imagine there's some ways and, and some of them are nice and some of them take you to bad neighborhoods. I don't know.

• 40:35Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 40:36Speaker 04

  Some of them are broken half the time.

• 40:37Nilay Patel?

  I'm letting all of this go. We're putting all of this behind us. There is a sequel to the Galaxy Fold. All I was saying was Samsung did the Samsung thing. They put out the first generation product, which had many, many flaws. One of the flaws was, uh, it immediately broke. Then they recalled that phone. They re-released it. It broke less frequently. And now they've, it seems like they fixed same basic design. But there's a bigger screen on the front cover. So it looks more like a normal phone. It seems like they've re-engineered the cover.

• 41:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I feel like with the second revision of the first one, they were addressing the durability concerns, which were obviously the major problem, right? It's why you couldn't buy the phone initially. So like, they kind of feel like they got those in a decent place. And so now. With the Z Fold 2 5G, they are addressing the the the feature complaints. And so like one of the feature complaints, the first one was that the outside screen was like tiny and he wasn't really usable. So they made that basically as big as a screen on like an S20 now. So it's like a full size outside screen. So you could realistically use that as your phone. They made, they got rid of like the giant camera array when you open it up now. So it's just the little

• 41:56Speaker 04

  hole punch dot that we're seeing on all the modern phones. And they upgraded the other cameras so that they are competitive or commensurate with the S20 line. So they're not like a generation behind. So all of those things that were like feature level complaints, not the like fundamental, this thing will break in my hands complaints. But like, it seems like they're addressing that with the the new model. Is it gonna break? I like, I don't know, I feel like there's, there's plenty of anecdotal evidence now of people who have bought the original Galaxy Fold and have used it for months on end and not had the issues that we initially saw last year. So maybe it's slightly more durable and everyday use, as long as you don't get it wet and don't poke it and don't put dust in your pocket and yeah.

• 42:40Nilay Patel?

  Becca, did you get to see this at the hands on?

• 42:43Speaker 05

  No, I didn't get to see this. And I am very eager to hold it in my hand because I just don't believe that the bezels on the front are gonna be like that small. I don't think they're gonna be as small as the S line.

• 42:52Nilay Patel?

  I just like Samsung's obviously committed to this style of folding phone. Like it right, they're iterating on it. They're gonna make another one and another one. I think the real question is, the first time around, they they didn't get it right, right? In like very clear ways. Is this now the prototype from which like they got it right? And they're gonna make it better and better and cheaper and thinner? Or do they still have like fundamental reengineering

• 43:19Speaker 04

  It took them like five generations to get the note into like a really great place.

• 43:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  It might be a while. Maybe they move a little faster now. Maybe they've learned a few things and they're able to do it in three or four generations. I think this one is still going to be really expensive, like all the, all the signs are pointing to it being close to 2,000 bucks again. It's going to be really limited in terms of like, how many you'll be able to buy, where you'll see it, though they are said that it will be on all three carriers as opposed to just AT&T like the first one. So it still feels very in the experiment stage to me. It's just in a next step of that experiment stage.

• 43:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I will say that everyone being at home is like the best possible situation for this phone to come out. Like you can't, you can't get in too much trouble with it.

• 44:05Speaker 04

  Sure. But like at home is like the last place that I need a folding phone because I've got bigger screens all around me.

• 44:13Nilay Patel?

  Or is it the first place you need a folding phone? I'm not sure what the rest of that argument is, but that's how I'm choosing to engage.

• 44:20Speaker 03

  So actually one thing, at the end, there was a scripted interview with TM Rowe. And he, they like, why not a stylus? And he's like, you know, stay tuned, which they're, they're going to make another one with a stylus that's coming next year.

• 44:34Nilay Patel?

  So this is my, my constant, like we criticize Samsung a lot. Dan is literally wearing a Bixby t-shirt. I mean, like, we criticize Samsung a lot. The thing that you can always compliment Samsung on is they're willing to have their boldest ideas in public, in fail in public, and just keep going, just step by step by step by step relentlessly until they're like, see, we told you so. And you're like, well, the first, the first note didn't even fit in a regular human being's hand.

• 45:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:02Nilay Patel?

  And they're like, see, everyone likes a big screen now. You're like, that was a refrigerator. But like, they just keep going. And like, I, I, I'm always eager to see, like, it's rare that we see a Samsung failure not result in them learning something in a way that Apple like will never even tell you that their mistakes happened. Like, Apple never admits that they tried something and it didn't work and they made a change because of it.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  Can you apply that insight to the unpacked livestream itself, Neelai?

• 45:29Nilay Patel?

  No, I cannot. Samsung needs to stop having these events. I'm just gonna be straight up about it.

• 45:35Speaker 05

  I was thoroughly entertained, though, I must admit. I was, I was doing the supercut and I was like, this is incredible, but not, I don't, I don't think it was the response of the incredible that they wanted.

• 45:46Nilay Patel?

  No, you, because you're doing the super, like, that frame of mind of, I hope something interesting happens so I can put it in a supercut. Like, I hope there's, I hope there's like a car crash that I can like stick in the supercut.

• 45:56Speaker 05

  I, I must admit, when I'm, when I'm editing a supercut, I'm always looking for the moments that make me giggle so that I can like pull them out and put it in the end card. And this end card was getting long.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  We call those the, the Michael Bay moments of supercuts, yes.

• 46:10Nilay Patel?

  I keep making fun of Mystic Bronze and at one point Samsung was like, this color is gender fluid.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:17Nilay Patel?

  Which is like, did you just look up a vocabulary word and not, and not understand what it means? Like, that's not what that means at all. And also, like, all you're trying to say is both men and women will like this color. And the best way to say that is to just not say it.

• 46:34Speaker 05

  Just don't say it.

• 46:35Nilay Patel?

  To 0% say it.

• 46:36Speaker 03

  Samsung does get credit, though. That is, that is the most diverse group of presenters I've seen in a tech keynote that I can, in, in, in memory, like, maybe ever.

• 46:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 46:45Nilay Patel?

  That's good.

• 46:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 46:46Nilay Patel?

  Um, I mean, look, they've been trying, like, we dinged them ages ago. Remember when they had the Broadway show?

• 46:51Speaker 03

  Who could ever forget? Radio City.

• 46:53Speaker 04

  And Neela, you and I were sitting there, the audience just trapped in that horror show.

• 46:57Nilay Patel?

  Like, what is happening? So they've gotten steadily better since then. We'll give them that credit, but they're still, these unpacked events, they don't tell a story. They're totally disjointed. And most importantly, everything leaks. Like, everything from this thing leaked down to the, the, the videos they showed during the event, right? And then they released their own PR before the event even started. So like, not only had it all leaked, they had officially told everybody what was going on. And then they, this thing was basically a sequence of promo videos, because that's what virtual events are. And it just, they, I think they have lost the plot of events.

• 47:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:32Nilay Patel?

  Like, they don't know why they're doing them, but they know they should. And there's like, a predatory cabal of ad agencies who are ready to affirm that instinct. And be like, we'd like some of your money. And you can just see that dynamic happening.

• 47:47Speaker 03

  Like, spam calls have gotten really bad lately, and maybe like Samsung is just like the company that answers them and like, provides their information.

• 47:56Speaker 03

  It's like, oh man, like every time I watch one of these, I'm like, some ad agency got super rich today.

• 48:03Speaker 05

  What did you think of the giant AR, larger than life products? That was probably my favorite part, to be honest.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  I mean, they had to do something, right? If you're not, right? You can't give people the big screens or the Oculus thing that they usually do. Why not make it seem like your, your headphones are dwarfing a human being? I'm just glad they didn't know. All right, speaking of headphones, we gotta move on. We've spent too long on, on critiquing their show. Welch, the first line of your review of the Samsung Galaxy Buds Live is they should have called them the Galaxy Beans.

• 48:34Speaker 06

  They should have. I mean, how many chances do you get in tech to just own the fun name of the thing? We always complain about how these headphones have weird, bizarre names no one remembers. And there was some meeting at some point where someone said, hey, guys, I think it'd be fun to call these things the Galaxy Beans, because that's what they look like. And then someone else came along and said, Galaxy Buds Live, you see? Because the open design makes you feel like you're at a concert. And someone else said, that's the one, not the Beans, Galaxy Buds Live.

• 49:00Speaker 03

  That's the predatory cabal of ad agencies.

• 49:03Speaker 06

  I'll never understand that choice. I think they would have sold better if they were just called the Beans and had they leaned into it.

• 49:08Speaker 03

  I mean, literally the product page on launch day, they left one of a Beans reference in on samsung.com. Wait, it was, they were actually going to be called the Galaxy Beans?

• 49:17Speaker 06

  I didn't even see that.

• 49:18Speaker 03

  And they changed it? Yes. If you went to the Galaxy Buds Live page on samsung.com, right when the keynote ended, and you typed Command F and typed the word Beans, you found a reference to Beans. They called them the Beans.

• 49:34Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, I have a question for you.

• 49:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:37Nilay Patel?

  So you're confirming that directly after the keynote ended, you went to the Samsung Galaxy Buds Live page, hit Command F and typed in Beans?

• 49:45Speaker 03

  I have been, I have been so hard on the Call Them Beans bandwagon, the Bean bandwagon, the chuck wagon, that everybody on Twitter knows that I'm Team Bean. And so someone who went to that page tweeted it at me, and that is why I went to confirm.

• 50:02Speaker 06

  It is too late now. They're the Galaxy Buds Live indeed, but it turns out they're actually pretty good. They sound good. They fit in your ears better than I expected. I mean, I'm someone whose ears don't like AirPods at all, like hard kind of earbuds don't fit me super well, but these just kind of slide right in. Sit in the contra of your ear, I believe that's the.

• 50:20Nilay Patel?

  Oh, wow.

• 50:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, yes.

• 50:22Nilay Patel?

  This phase in tech is making us learn way too much vocabulary.

• 50:27Speaker 06

  So, but they sit pretty well. They sound great. The bass is tight. They don't sound better or worse than the Galaxy Buds Plus, I would say, because these are open, so they sound different. And they let in much more outside noise. The noise cancellation, like I say in the review, is barely a factor at all. Like, it'll cut off the slight, the smallest slice of like, really low pitched things like hums or like your air conditioner or your refrigerator, but like voices and like outside noise all just comes through like nothing. So, don't buy them for that reason. But if you want the style, if the look appeals to you, they sound good. The battery life is really good.

• 51:04Nilay Patel?

  Chris, tell me about this lead image, which is the headphones in beans. Just walk me through the whole thing. Ideation, refinement, execution, everything.

• 51:17Speaker 06

  Well, I figured if they weren't gonna do the name justice, I would, I would take it upon myself. And so I stopped at my corner deli at like 10 o'clock on Tuesday night and bought a bag of beans and came back home and tossed them in a plastic container and put my flash on my camera and made the lead image you see in the review.

• 51:38Nilay Patel?

  I gotta say, it does not look like deli beans in a plastic container under a flash.

• 51:43Speaker 04

  They look like much classier than bodega beans, for sure.

• 51:48Nilay Patel?

  It's weird. Do you think they changed the name to Live because the noise cancellation isn't any good?

• 51:53Speaker 03

  Well, that's was, was the intent, the design intent from the start to make it this sort of half weird noise cancellation that feels open? Or did they want it to be open because they know that AirPods Pro are vented and they want it to be vented and then they couldn't figure out how to do, do noise cancellation on top of it? Like, that's the question, right?

• 52:11Speaker 06

  I think the whole time they wanted to call it open type NC is what they call it.

• 52:14Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 52:15Speaker 06

  So it has its own name. So I think that's what they were going for, but I wish they were a bit more effective at just cutting out like even a bit more of like trains or like airplanes like these will not work on a plane. Let me just forget about it. So for that, you're going to want the other headphones that we're going to talk about in a minute, but all in all, I think they're pretty good earbuds.

• 52:31Nilay Patel?

  How's the, how's like the pairing, multiple device support? Like right now with my AirPods, I switch between my phone, my iPad and my laptop more than ever, I think. There's like other people in this house, right? So I need the headphones more at home than I did before. And like I have just realized like, okay, I'm like locked into Apple W1 world. I hate it, but it, it works really well. So I'll deal, you know, like it's real, that part is really good. How is that kind of like pairing dynamic with these?

• 52:58Speaker 06

  I might have used them with a Samsung phone. And so obviously it's going to be a pretty ideal there. You just open the case and it is very, very close to the AirPods experience where it just kind of comes up and says, these will be paired to your account and then you're good to go. But I haven't, I mean, I did have some issues with the dropouts and that sort of thing here and there, but by and large, I mean, they're pretty on par with Galaxy Buds. Plus if you want more noise isolation, I would go for the Buds Plus, uh, since they have those silicone ear tips and.

• 53:24Speaker 04

  Chris, these don't have true multi-point support, right? Like I can't have them on my tablet and my phone at the same time.

• 53:31Speaker 06

  Uh, nope. Just one device at a time. I think, uh, still right now, the only buds at least that have that are the jobbers. So they kind of stand alone as the, as the ones that'll do two devices at once.

• 53:41Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's, we, we have to talk about the, the tablet, Samsung's S7, but you said, you just mentioned the other headphones you reviewed this week, the Sony WH 1000 XM4s.

• 53:51Speaker 06

  WH 1000 XM4s. Yep. That's, that's what we're saying with the names.

• 53:55Nilay Patel?

  Do they change the X and the M around?

• 53:58Speaker 04

  No, the, the MX are the, the Bud style, I think, right? And the XM are the over here.

• 54:02Nilay Patel?

  But they were the MH4, MH3s.

• 54:05Speaker 06

  So the buds are the WF 1000 XM3s and the headphones are the WH.

• 54:10Nilay Patel?

  This is the worst radio ever made.

• 54:12Speaker 04

  They should call them little beans and big beans.

• 54:14Nilay Patel?

  Every now and again, I'm like, man, we, we should have a show on like Sirius XM and I'm like, what will I send them? And it's us just doing Sony model numbers. But there, it's the fourth edition of like the famous Sony.

• 54:25Speaker 06

  Fourth edition. Yeah. These are finally here. It took two years for some reason. I mean, uh, Sony kind of fired off the first three, like, I think there was one every year for a while. And then it kind of took two years to kind of catch their breath and see what Bose did. And Bose came out with a noise cancelling headphones 700, which are great. And so now Sony is back with the 1000XM4s. They look the same, they sound exactly the same. But now they compare with two devices at once and the microphones are no longer garbage. So if you're on Zoom calls or we're talking on the phone, they'll actually do do pretty well now.

• 54:56Nilay Patel?

  It took two years to add multi-point support and slightly not garbage microphones.

• 55:01Speaker 03

  They also added the sensor inside the ear cup so it can detect when it comes off your head to pause music, right?

• 55:06Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  Does that work?

• 55:08Speaker 06

  It does.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  Crap, I'm buying these.

• 55:10Nilay Patel?

  I mean, so I have the I have the twos. I'm still not entirely clear what this. I'm like, I'm literally looking at your review and that collection of numbers and letters is breaking my brain. I have the twos. I love the twos. I could not justify upgrading to the threes for a pretty good jump in noise cancellation in USB 3. I was like, this is fine. I'm like, either on a plane, I'm asleep or listening to something and the noise cancellation was fine. Is there a reason to jump from the twos to the fours?

• 55:41Speaker 06

  I mean, I guess if you want the multi-point, if you want to like, I mean, like you were saying, you're always home now, like and on your phone and your laptop at the same time often. So so it does come in handy for sure. But right now they're kind of buggy. Sony's support for multiple devices, but they said a former.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  Buggy Sony software.

• 55:55Speaker 06

  But a former update will will come out by the time these ship to customers, they claim, and then that'll shore up all that. So it'll work.

• 56:03Speaker 04

  I gotta say, multi-point is like a habit or like a deal breaker for me. Like I've I've never bought any of the other generations because they don't support multi-point and I'm constantly switching between my like phone and my tablet or my my computer or whatever. And so like I I got the Surface Headphones 2 specifically because they do great multi-point and like average everything else.

• 56:24Nilay Patel?

  I did not like the way the Surface Headphones 2 sounded. It's just they just never agreed with me, but multiple devices. Chris, I scrolled to the end of your review to look at agree to continue because Sony's Sony's headphones connect privacy policy has always been terrifying to me.

• 56:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:40Nilay Patel?

  It seems like they've walked it back a little bit. Like, at one point, if you use headphones and Sony is like, we'll just send every song you're listening to to our server so we can track your listening of music. It was like, why?

• 56:53Speaker 04

  That now falls under the opt-in part that I mentioned at the end there. So you can like opt in to like what you do with the app and how you use it and software updates and and things like that. But it's it's the usual privacy policy in terms of service that no one reads and hopefully Sony's not doing something too nefarious, but.

• 57:09Nilay Patel?

  To me, it's the one extreme downside of Sony headphones is I every time I look at that app and every time I look at that privacy policy, I'm like, I don't, I don't love this. All right, let's talk about the, I mean, it's an Android tablet. Dan, I'm going to give you like three minutes to talk about it. I feel like that's enough.

• 57:24Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 57:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But like, people are kind of excited about it.

• 57:27Speaker 04

  Literally, the only thing you need to know about this Tab S7 Plus is that it has a 120 Hz OLED screen that looks incredible. Like, it is, I wrote this in my piece today, perhaps the nicest mobile screen I've ever held in my hands. It feels like I took an OLED TV off the wall and like hulked it down to 12 inches. And I'm staring at like, it is, it is gorgeous. And 120 Hz is like awesome for like interactions, it's super fluid, it's fast and responsive, like it's all great. The sound on the four speakers sound great, like it does everything right in terms of like a content consumption tablet. When it starts to like fall apart is when you try to use it as a productivity tablet.

• 58:10Speaker 04

  So like you and you use the keyboard and you're using Samsung Dex software, which is their desktop emulation type of software environment or whatever. It's kind of buggy, doesn't work great. It's running Android, so a lot of the Android apps kind of look terrible on this big 12.4 inch screen unless you're watching full screen video, which doesn't matter. So. It's it's like really great. It's like the typical Samsung story from five or six years ago. Really killer hardware, awesome specs, really well made, and then software.

• 58:41Nilay Patel?

  It's Android tablet software. I feel like the interest in this is definitely related to people being at home. I think people are buying tablets for their kids. Kids are, we have no idea what's going on with schools. Kids are gonna have to like do e-learning like. Is there a cheaper kind of computer that I can put in front of my kids or use for?

• 58:58Speaker 04

  I wouldn't call this like an ideal kids tablet. I mean, the thing is 850 bucks. The keyboard case is 230 bucks. You're at well over a grand when you pack them together. This is a premium level. This is going head to head with the iPad Pro and like the 12.9 inch iPad Pro with that. So like the top of the tier stuff. And it has a price that's commensurate to it. If you're looking for like a tablet that you just want to kick around and watch some some video on and kill time with at home. You know, a Fire HD 10 will do that for you. An entry level iPad will do that for you. This is probably way more than you. Unless you're a total screen snob and you just want to have that OLED screen, which is like, I get it. I don't blame you. Like this screen is incredible.

• 59:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I don't want to. I don't want to dive into it, but it feels like this product coming up against our Macs. We're about to, we're about to see just like a category wipeout happen here, but we'll get into it.

• 59:52Speaker 03

  Real, real quick. How about the watch? The Galaxy Watch 3? Just super quick.

• 59:55Nilay Patel?

  I totally forgot about this watch.

• 59:57Speaker 04

  I've got one on my wrist. They sent me a review in it already. It is thinner and lighter than the last Galaxy Watch was two years ago. So.

• 1:00:03Nilay Patel?

  That's not saying much.

• 1:00:04Speaker 04

  Not saying much. Uh, this is the 45 millimeter model. It's still pretty big. I've also got a, an active watch, active two. That's in the 40 millimeter model and that's a smaller size and I find that way more comfortable. But if you like big watches. You know, you'll like this too, because it's still a really big watch. Um, I haven't really spent a ton of time playing with it, but that's their like big pitch is that it is smaller. Or it's gonna be thinner and lighter than before. It's also slightly more expensive. They're kind of going upscale with it since they've got the watch active two line that's taking care of the lower price. So it's cost a little bit more. I think this model is like 450 bucks and it goes up from there. So, uh, stay tuned. We'll have a review soon.

• 1:00:45Speaker 04

  I know that the Galaxy Watch was really popular for Samsung, uh, and this one probably will be popular as well. Um, but we'll see.

• 1:00:53Speaker 05

  I love the rotating bezel on those, but I felt like when I was holding this at the hands-on first look experience, that bezel raises pretty high above the screen still. And I just wish that they would get that down.

• 1:01:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like I'm of two minds with that because I totally agree. Like it's got this like dish to it and it's kind of a little weird, especially when you're swiping it. But at the same time, if you're like out and about and you knock it against something that bezel like stops something from smacking your screen and scratching it. So like, I could totally understand why you would want to have that kind of raised lip in the sense of like a Casio G-Shock has all that chunky like rubber around it and it's super rugged. You could smack it with a hammer, wouldn't smack this with a hammer. But like, I get why that bezel is raised. And I will say this, I've been wearing the watch active too for almost a year now. And it has that virtual touch dial around. It's like a touch strip that doesn't rotate, but it moves when you move your finger on it.

• 1:01:48Speaker 04

  And then this is obviously the, the actual rotating ring. This is way better. The rotating ring is way superior. So I'm glad that they kept that around.

• 1:01:57Nilay Patel?

  Physical controls beating virtual controls. I'm into it. All right. We gotta take a break. We gotta talk about Apple a little bit. We'll be right back.

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• 1:03:09Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, you have a new iMac.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:12Nilay Patel?

  I will say this, we were on the call where they told us about the new iMac, and then it was time for questions. And my question was, "So it looks the same?" And they're like, "You're right, we didn't point that out, because it looks exactly the same."

• 1:03:27Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:03:28Nilay Patel?

  One assumes the iMac is going to change its design when they move it to ARM.

• 1:03:33Speaker 03

  Which is happening within two years.

• 1:03:35Nilay Patel?

  We think.

• 1:03:35Speaker 03

  Well, no, Apple said this transition will take two years.

• 1:03:38Nilay Patel?

  Right, so we know, I guess.

• 1:03:40Speaker 03

  Unless those are like really weasely promises, like, that's the thing. So, alright, the TLDR is, they kept the body exactly the same, they didn't take the time to put in Face ID or a fingerprint sensor, they upgraded the processors to 10th gen Intel, they made SSD standard, which was the right move, but you can still get a Fusion Drive if you really want, for cheap storage, and they gave you an option to spend $500 on a nano textured display, and they made the webcam 1080p instead of the terrible webcams that are in every single other Mac.

• 1:04:13Nilay Patel?

  So I looked at your comparison photos of the webcams.

• 1:04:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:17Nilay Patel?

  It really looks like they are just doing some iPhone stuff on that webcam.

• 1:04:22Speaker 03

  So they are. So this thing has a T2 chip, which is like the iOS chip thing that like controls like the touchbar, and it does the secure enclave, and it like controls the encryption on the SSD, so it's faster. They've just put a little iOS computer inside every Mac now, and it controls a bunch of stuff. And so now it controls the camera, so the camera runs through the T2 chip before the Mac even sees it. And they're using that opportunity to do stuff. So they say what they're doing is exposure control, tone mapping, and face detection. Not face detection to unlock, because, you know, why would anybody want that on a computer, every single Windows computer up? No, it's to like properly light your face, you know, and not have it just give you a general exposure for the entire

• 1:05:06Speaker 03

  room. So it's always exposed to your face. And you can see it, when you move your face around, you can like watch the room get lighter or darker, depending on how light or dark your face is. They insist they're not doing face smoothing, and part of me... He wants to like, challenge that assertion and like, really see if they're doing face smoothing out. Cause everyone who says they're not doing face smoothing on cameras, they, they really, they really are. Maybe not Apple, but a bunch of other people do some face smoothing. But I can, I couldn't see it. But yeah, it's like, it's a pretty good webcam. It's like, they're doing some iOS stuff on it. If this pandemic lasts another year and webcams across the world on every single computer, don't take a massive step up, I'm going to be supremely disappointed.

• 1:05:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but it's like, potentially for Apple, right? Like, maybe on the Windows side, like, the market will get the signal. Oh, people are buying computers for better webcams.

• 1:05:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:55Nilay Patel?

  Apple's like, people continue to buy Macs. Macs remain the most popular Macs ever made. And it's like, you don't, you don't, literally no data is hitting you. Like, they're like, the iMac is a bestselling desktop Mac in our line. And it's like, there's only one.

• 1:06:09Speaker 03

  Well, there's the Mac Mini.

• 1:06:11Nilay Patel?

  I feel like they, they made the concession. I, the relighting stuff, like, Apple's image processing stack is so good. They're just moving it to this computer and putting in a better camera. They have, obviously have a lot of thickness in that chassis to put it in there.

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:26Nilay Patel?

  But the fact that they went all the way to, we're doing intelligent relighting, exposure control. I hope that portends like, when the R Macs come out, we're going to do some crazy iOS stuff to these cameras.

• 1:06:38Speaker 03

  They really should, yeah.

• 1:06:39Nilay Patel?

  If they don't take that shot, like, what is, what is even the point? An iPad app on your Mac, come on.

• 1:06:44Speaker 03

  What do you think is more likely, that you get a, you get a really, really good iPhone level camera in an R Mac, or you get a touchscreen on an R Mac?

• 1:06:51Nilay Patel?

  All right, everybody vote.

• 1:06:52Speaker 04

  I'm gonna go with the better camera.

• 1:06:53Nilay Patel?

  Okay, Dan went with camera.

• 1:06:55Speaker 05

  I'm gonna go camera two.

• 1:06:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm going with the better camera.

• 1:06:57Nilay Patel?

  Welch?

• 1:06:58Speaker 04

  Cause it's like the easy, like, they don't have to change macOS at all for that.

• 1:07:01Nilay Patel?

  Chris? I suppose the camera, yeah. Oh, man, I'm going, it's, wait, Dieter?

• 1:07:09Nilay Patel?

  Look at Big Sur, just look at it.

• 1:07:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm going touchscreen. I bet we get a better touchscreen before they figure out the hardware limitations of squeezing a better camera in a laptop. Yeah.

• 1:07:19Speaker 04

  What's, what's interesting to me, like, I think you just alluded to this a minute ago, Neelai, is that like, they have this image processing stack from the iPhone that they've refined for the past decade plus. And like, they could just port that over to their existing hardware, which is terrible. And, you know, the general consensus is that the lid on your MacBook is too thin to put better hardware in there. But what if they just took the processing and put that on their hardware? Would that bring it up to a level that is above garbage? And then maybe they can figure out a way to put in better hardware if they do a redesign or something like that, where they have more space or whatever. I don't know. It just seems like an easy thing that they could do that they just haven't done.

• 1:07:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, iPhone photo tricks are based on like, multiple exposure stacking, which is way harder to do in video. iPhone video tricks are done in all kinds of other ways. I don't even know if these existing 720p cameras in the MacBook can do it. Yeah. And you get, you kind of get the feeling that Apple was forced to put a 1080p sensor in the iMac, because no one will sell them a 720p sensor anymore. Like, they went to Sony and Sony is like, dude, like, you gotta, you gotta stop asking for this. Like, we all want to move on. But I don't know, we'll see. Like, if the stuff we get from our Macs is the things we take for granted on iOS devices, the camera just has to be on that list. Yeah.

• 1:08:42Speaker 04

  Bring back the eyesight camera, you cowards.

• 1:08:45Nilay Patel?

  That huge tube?

• 1:08:47Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:08:48Nilay Patel?

  That's like, such a sign, we're talking about how thick the wids are. That thing was like, a six inch cylinder, with like, holes in it for airflow.

• 1:08:57Speaker 04

  It was incredible.

• 1:08:58Nilay Patel?

  And it was like, 480p, if that. It might have even been lower than that. Dieter, talk to me about Nano Texture.

• 1:09:03Speaker 03

  So it makes the screen matte, but not really because matte scatters the pixels and makes it a little bit fuzzy and this tries not to. And it keeps glare from hitting your screen, so that there's no glare. It's very effective at that. And I do not know how durable it is. I just don't. I don't know.

• 1:09:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's because there's no like coating or whatever.

• 1:09:26Speaker 03

  There's no coating. So it's bare glass. So the way it works is they they etch the glass at a like nano level. And like the literal definition of nano, like nanometer, like tiny, tiny, tiny. Like, I actually was like, I'll just sort of call it microscopic because that's that seems small. And I'd look up like, no, no, microscopic is actually not the right term. I should go with nano because it's super tiny. But it's glass. And so like at a certain point, like there's physics involved and like glass can only stand up to so much, especially when it's etched in there like little tiny points, right? So they give you a cloth to clean it and they tell you not to clean it with other stuff. And so the concern is that like it will like scratch or degrade. And this was a big concern with the Pro Display as well.

• 1:10:08Speaker 03

  The problem is when you buy a Pro Display, you're spending $5,000, $6,000 or whatever on a thing that you're going to put in your fancy, you know, studio where you edit videos and you are the kind of person that could spend $6,000 on a monitor and use it for work. You probably know not to touch it when your hands are covered in macaroni and cheese. If you're a four-year-old and there's an iMac in the living room, you see a big glowing screen and all big glowing screens are touchscreens because that's the way the world should work. And so you're going to go up and you're going to slap your hand on it.

• 1:10:40Nilay Patel?

  Oh, man. Does a nano texture iMac mean that there's never going to be a touchscreen Mac? Ah, dude.

• 1:10:46Speaker 06

  Don't say that because I want this on the iPad Pro very badly.

• 1:10:49Speaker 04

  Dieter, I want to go back to what you said in Apple's instructions. They hand you a cloth. They give you a cloth and not to clean it with other stuff. That other stuff includes things just like water or like window cleaner. Like you're you can't like spray anything on this this display. And then you probably void your warranty and it just disintegrates or whatever. But like, I love the point that you made in your in your article and like, I didn't even think about that. Like the iMac is like the shared family computer that Apple makes and it sits in living rooms all the time.

• 1:11:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like when in our our dear suite office. Remember that? It was great. Like Becca was editing on an iMac. Right? Like, most of our video editors were editing on consumer, not even iMac Pros. And like, I think there is a world in which a bunch of pros actually end up buying iMacs. And so you can give them this option, and maybe not your unruly children.

• 1:11:45Nilay Patel?

  I mean, my kid would destroy this thing so fast, but, you know, other well-behaved children might not destroy it. But that, to me, is like the confusing part of the line. What were you saying, Becca?

• 1:11:54Speaker 05

  Another thing, though, is that as a video editor, I have a lot of other video editors often around me, and they love to like, touch screens. Like, they'll point to the timeline, but they'll touch my timeline. And I like, don't. Like, I have one coworker, and you know who you are, who always is touching my screen, and they would just ruin this.

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  So I asked Apple about this specifically, and they're like, "Look, we don't want to, we don't want to give you the impression that it's delicate, right? It's not gonna like, it's not gonna fall apart if you touch it, or if you like, happen to accidentally wipe it with a paper towel or something. But over the course of the life of an iMac, which you're going to keep for a very long time, like, eventually, like, a bunch of abrasive things that weren't designed for this bare glass would damage it. Now, where the truth lies of how delicate and fragile this thing is, I don't know. And I don't know because the only other screens that have it are the $6,000 Pro Display XDRs. And like, how many of those are out in the world? Who has the data on whether or not those things are actually durable enough to be put on an iMac? Presumably, Apple does, and they decided it is, but...

• 1:13:05Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they just must know that they have pro customers who want to buy this thing. And the pro customers were like, "We see that Pro Display XDR."

• 1:13:12Speaker 03

  Is it available on the iMac Pro? They did like, a slight update to the iMac Pro, and you can't even get this on the iMac Pro.

• 1:13:18Nilay Patel?

  Interesting, isn't that? Very, very interesting. That is super weird. All of this has made me remember that we actually purchased an iMac Pro and a very fast Windows PC, and our video team was very excited about both of those things. And both of those things are sitting in our office being completely unused right now.

• 1:13:35Speaker 05

  Surprise, I am sitting within five feet of one.

• 1:13:38Speaker 03

  What? Which one do you have?

• 1:13:40Speaker 05

  I have the Mac Pro here.

• 1:13:41Speaker 03

  Oh, my God!

• 1:13:42Speaker 05

  I agreed to do every supercut.

• 1:13:48Speaker 05

  I could have this in my home.

• 1:13:50Nilay Patel?

  Wait, really? That was a trade?

• 1:13:52Speaker 05

  That was the legitimate trade, yes.

• 1:13:54Speaker 03

  Incredible.

• 1:13:55Nilay Patel?

  I had no idea. Do you have the display too?

• 1:13:58Speaker 05

  Oh, I have the display too. And, uh, yeah.

• 1:14:03Speaker 05

  I legitimately had to move a vacation because there was a supercut. So, and then I also had to give Alex a set of keys to my apartment so that she could come do a supercut, just so I could for, just miss one.

• 1:14:15Speaker 03

  Is that why we had a record turnaround time on the Samsung supercut this week?

• 1:14:19Speaker 05

  No, Dan, I'm just getting that good, okay?

• 1:14:22Nilay Patel?

  Wow. This is incredible breaking news on the PerchCast. I had no idea. That's incredible. Do you wait, our display does not, is the glossy one, right? You don't have the nano texture?

• 1:14:35Speaker 05

  I don't think I have the nano tech one, no.

• 1:14:37Nilay Patel?

  All right, well, don't put macaroni and cheese on that one either.

• 1:14:40Speaker 05

  But what I will say, a bit aside, is that the Mac Pro gets so hot that my air conditioning is running at full speed at all times. And there's a fan on the Mac Pro. I just keep it on it because it just, under my desk, it's just hot.

• 1:14:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:55Speaker 05

  At all times.

• 1:14:55Nilay Patel?

  That's incredible. I had no idea. That's such, that's hilarious. I love it. All right. Uh, we gotta talk about Greg Joswiak and Phil Schiller. There's like, a lot to say and also not a lot to say. So Phil Schiller is a legend in Apple world. He has been there since 1987. He used to be the product manager for PowerBooks. Like, he gave interviews to Engadget when we were in Engadget about the PowerBook.

• 1:15:21Speaker 03

  He famously demoed one of the, like, very first Wi-Fi chips on a laptop by, like, jumping, uh, like, off a giant, like, diving board on stage and landing on a giant, like, mat.

• 1:15:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, dude's been there forever. Depending on who you ask, at what time, he gives himself credit for the, the click wheel on the iPod, or the scroll wheel. If you ask other Apple executives, they will dispute this. But he was in that room, and he has claim to be in this disputed conversation about who invented the iPod. Very few people get to say, someone will argue with me about whether I invented the iPod or not, and my argument is just as good as theirs. He's that guy. So that's incredible. He obviously worked hand in hand with Steve Jobs. He has been in charge of worldwide marketing at Apple for a long time. Marketing at Apple is very different than other companies.

• 1:16:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. Can you explain that? Because like, I think, I think I've been saying it, but I think that people don't really understand what it means that marketing at Apple is a completely different thing.

• 1:16:16Nilay Patel?

  You know, the way I think about it is there's this joke that like, Apple is a software company that makes hardware. And like, they make all their money in hardware, but like, really what they are is a software company. And they want to make software experiences. I think what Apple really is is a product marketing company. And I mean that not in a bad way. I mean that in an absolutely positive way. Apple figures out what people want and what they can give them and what tools they have. And then they make that product exactly. And they don't let other people, like this joke about Samsung just doing whatever the carriers want. Phil Schiller is the guy at Apple like stops it. He's like, this is the product we're making to fit the market, like the classic definition of marketing. We found a market of people who want this thing. And we're going to make that thing and make sure that we communicate about that thing the right way.

• 1:16:57Nilay Patel?

  And a better way maybe to think about it is Schiller is the guy who's introduced the iPhone for the past several years. And he's the guy who geeks out about the camera because he knows the story of the phone is the camera and he's in it and he knows the specs. And he knows exactly how cameras work and like, he cares about the specs and the nerdery of it. But his job is to tell a story out of the specs. So he's just been in part in that world and Apple or marketing is different than almost every other. There's no predatory cabal of ad agencies surrounding Apple because they're doing it all right there. He also, just to be blunt, has had like a super spiky relationship with the press. He is very protective of Apple. He famously is the can't innovate my ass guy when they introduced the old Mac Pro.

• 1:17:39Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:17:39Nilay Patel?

  Which it turned out their innovation was wrongly wrongly directed. You know, he's, he's just like a company man through and through and like, that has led to some great successes and some, some obvious misses.

• 1:17:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's been running the App Store for the past little while. And like, the App Store has been the center of a bunch of controversy lately. And that's not all on him, but like, he's, he's in charge of it.

• 1:18:00Nilay Patel?

  Right. So he, the press release says, what was, it was like ascends. The verb was, was wild. It's like ascends to Apple Fellow, which is this title that Apple uses for like famous people. Like Steve Wozniak has the title of Apple Fellow. It means he has no responsibilities. Alan Kay, Andy Hersfeld, Alan Kay, like famous computer people get this title to just like float around and go to events. Schiller is getting the title and he's still in charge of the App Store and all this product marketing functions are going to Greg Jozua, who we know really well, who we see at every event, who talks to us about every product, who's great. I think he will do a great job. He's very direct. He's very clear with us. And he's also been in a

• 1:18:43Nilay Patel?

  lot of those rooms. But if you just like take a step back from all of this, they're taking the App Store away from like the day to day job of one of the executives. They're making it Schiller's entire job, taking him out of the executive team. And then you look even one step farther than that. Johnny Ive, Angela Aronson, Phil Schiller, like a bunch of Apple people are gone. Like senior famous Apple people are moving on. And there's like an obvious changing of the guard. It kind of feels like this is now Tim Cook's moment. Like he's more in charge of this. And all that sort of like Steve Jobs DNA is like, kind of like, and like, to be fair, he's been there since 1987. I would be bored. How many Porsches does he have? One for every day of the week. But you just see this moment where

• 1:19:28Nilay Patel?

  the all these dudes are moving on. And I think it's a pretty big inflection point for this company with, they're being, they're not being treated like an underdog anymore. They're a big company that's in front of Congress that controls a big chunk of the economy. And that has outsized impact on the entire world. And that's, that's now going to be Tim Cook's version of Apple. And sort of the underdog growing Apple has moved on. So, I don't know. I don't have like, more thoughts than that. There was a lot of them, to be honest. But I don't know. What do you think, Peter?

• 1:19:57Speaker 03

  Well, the inflection point is also coming when the Mac switches to ARM and they're going to start really, truly unifying their ecosystem. We've been seeing a bunch of building blocks, you know, the catalyst on the Mac and iPad getting, you know, a few more features and becoming more like, can it replace your Mac and blah, blah, blah. They've been like, we've been calling it a collision course for years, right? And so like, that's, that's happening under Tim Cook's watch, under his vision. And everyone's like, well, Tim's not the product guy and there's other, everybody else is a product guy. But like, at the next phase of like, Apple products and Apple computers and how they work and how they work with each other is something beyond what the original vision was under Steve Jobs, right? And like, the DNA of the company and the culture of the

• 1:20:42Speaker 03

  company, I still think is like, has that Apple core to it. But the, the things that they make and the philosophy of how they're supposed to connect with each other and connect with the rest of the world is coming out of the most valuable company in the world, depending on what day it is, not the underdog who got big and like, is just realized that it's big now. You know, it's like, it's coming from the behemoth, not from the little guy that is just realizes a behemoth. And that's, that's a big shift.

• 1:21:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The other thing I'll note is Apple, Steve Dowling was another Apple executive who left. I think less well-known to the world, but he was their head of comms. And he was like a powerful head of communications. Like, he ran all the press and all the messaging. He's been gone since September. Apple has not had a head of comms since September. Schiller has been running it. And now I don't know who it is, right? And like, that's just a lot of places where either it's going to be new blood with new ideas, or they're going to promote people from like, within the ranks to, to just deal with, how do we talk about a company that now some people, some powerful people think has too much influence and power across the entire industry? And I, I don't know. Like, I think it's just a, I think

• 1:21:54Nilay Patel?

  Schiller had an incredible run. I think almost any tech executive would take Schiller's run. Like, certainly, for example, if you ran the tiny phone division at a certain search company, you'd be like, hmm, I'd take Phil Schiller's run.

• 1:22:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's going to be very strange this fall to like, not hear him talking about the iPhone's camera or like, the new features or everything else. I guess there's, what better time to do it really than this year when there's not going to be that usual iPhone event? And so Jobs can kind of just come in and do whatever they're going to do for the event and maybe find his own approach to it, but. Yeah, I think Phil's done most of the last several iPhones, so not small shoes to Phil.

• 1:22:29Nilay Patel?

  Not, I mean, not even a little bit. And like Phil will get into it on cameras with you. I mean, he is a nerd. It's, and Jaws is like deeply a nerd too, but there are not many marketing executives who are like, I made a decision that affected the camera while we were developing the product and Phil had claimed that. We'll just, I just, this moment of Apple becoming the bigger company, like I would say this is one of the bigger inflection points. Not even I've leaving. Like Johnny I've left and we're all like, good, right?

• 1:22:59Nilay Patel?

  All right. Like battery life, here we come. How long till the keyboards work? Yeah, Johnny I've left. The laptops got thicker and the keyboard got fixed. You know, like, that was one kind of inflection point. This is how does Apple treat itself as a business? So there's not like executive shuffles of big companies are not usually the kind of news that we talk about. But I think this one is notable. It's worth, you know, saying the dude did an incredible job, but it's also, the future of Apple, I think, looks a lot different as the, as this group of executives cycles out, which is what we're watching do. Okay. We went over, I don't know why I said we went over. We're actually under our average time. Well, we went over the time that we're supposed to hit. I want to call out one story before we wrap it up.

• 1:23:43Nilay Patel?

  James Vincent wrote a story about scientists who, like the committee of scientists that names like human genes in the genome. They got together and they decided to change their naming scheme because Microsoft Excel kept converting the names into dates. And it was easier to change the naming scheme for the human genome than to get Microsoft to change Excel. This is a long and deeply reported story. It has many twists and turns. I just want everyone to read it. Cause there's nothing I love better than human software interaction stories at this scale. So you go check that out. The site is rocking. Casey's actually off this week and next, but the interface is coming back next week. Check out the interface. Dieter is back at Processor. He was actually off, but he's back now. Becca, you got a new show on YouTube. Tell them about it.

• 1:24:28Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. We got this new show called Full Frame, where we talk anything and everything cameras. We're just kind of revving that up, getting really excited about it. I just needed a place where I could like fully nerd out about cameras on our YouTube page. So this is that. The first episode, I built my own camera because, you know, you gotta know the rules to break the rules. And learning the rules killed me. So if you want to watch me struggle, go check out episode one of Full Frame on youtube.com/Liverge.

• 1:24:57Nilay Patel?

  Very cool. We'll be back on Tuesday. Like I said, if all goes well, I'm assuming it will. I love Taylor Lorenz from New York Times. Talk about TikTok. I think that's gonna be a fun episode. You can tweet at us. Chris is at Chris Welch. Becca's at Becca Farsace. Dan is DCCFert. Dieter is back on, and I'm reckless. We'd love to hear from you. Like I said, we'll be back on Tuesday. Talk to you soon. Rock and roll. Wear a mask.

• 1:25:39Speaker 10

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