Mobile World Congress 2018, Galaxy S9, and Vivo Apex concept phone

The Vergecast trio is back and so is gadget news. Mobile World Congress was this week, and so much happened in the world of The Verge. Nilay, Dieter, and Paul have everything you need to know. A few other things sprinkled in are the next Light Phone 2, Google Clips review, and a little bit of camera talk — so listen to it all, and you’ll get it all. 03:07 - Samsung’s Galaxy S9 packs an upgraded camera in a familiar body 17:22 - Vivo’s Apex concept phone 19:15 - The Clone Wars: iPhone X copycats battle for notch supremacy 25:59 - Android Go is here to fix super cheap phones 32:44 - Nokia’s banana phone from The Matrix is back 36:59 - The Light Phone 2 adds messaging and more to the ultra-minimalist cellphone 38:40 - Huawei’s new laptop has a mechanical pop-up webcam in the keyboard 44:29 - Amazon has acquired Ring to bolster its home security products 48:54 - Paul’s weekly segment “Bounce shot’ 52:07 - Sony’s new A7 III is a $2,000 full-frame mirrorless camera that should terrify Canon and Nikon 52:40 - Google Clips review If you enjoyed this podcast and want to hear more audio from The Verge, well you’re in luck. There’s a new show Why’d You Push That Button, hosted by Kaitlyn Tiffany and Ashley Carman, which you can subscribe to right now! Season 2 starts March 6th. 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 episode of Vergecast, real quick, and then we'll like start again. Brought to you by RoboForm, uh, which is an ad you might remember from, uh, last week and the week before that. RoboForm is a password manager. They don't want you to reuse the same passwords over and over again, or let passwords out save your login information. It's all very dangerous. It's harder to remember different passwords for your site because you gotta get a strong password with like letters and characters. So just use RoboForm. We're not doing great with this ad today, and I apologize to you, but please just save it by going to roboform.com and use promo code VERGE. And they will know that somehow we, we got through this.

• 0:36Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of, of really, I would say, our, our nation's internet situation.

• 0:45Speaker 01

  And preppers.

• 0:46Nilay Patel?

  And preppers. I've got 50 tabs of generators open on my computer.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  How many of them are spinning up the, the CPU on your computer?

• 0:54Nilay Patel?

  HomeDepot.com makes the GPU on my computer go. I've got a Twitter series going.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, Address Book Sync is my favorite.

• 1:01Nilay Patel?

  Address Book Sync spun up my GPU yesterday.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  I use iSync, by the way.

• 1:06Nilay Patel?

  Oh, iSync, remember that was what used to sync a, like a Palm Pilot?

• 1:09Speaker 02

  And a Nokia, you could sync a Nokia. I had an Ericsson phone that I synced with iSync, it was great. Speaking of Ericsson.

• 1:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you wanna just get into MWC?

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Mobile World Congress is this week.

• 1:19Nilay Patel?

  The Ericsson's favorite show. Are you a, are you a European continental cell provider? Ericsson has news for you at Mobile World Congress.

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Have you got heard about this moon internet thing?

• 1:30Nilay Patel?

  What's that?

• 1:31Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:33Nilay Patel?

  Cool story, Paul. This week is a Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Paul's gonna do some research.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Somebody sent me this article on Twitter in Icelandic that I like Google translated. It's like, we're gonna put moon, internet on the moon so that lorries could drive around on the moon.

• 1:53Nilay Patel?

  All right, well, I would like to just.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  What I would?

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Ericsson tweaked its logo for Mobile World Congress this week.

• 1:59Nilay Patel?

  We're doing so badly.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Do you know what the nickname for Ericsson's logo is?

• 2:04Nilay Patel?

  What's that? Three sausages.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  That's the nickname.

• 2:08Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I see. I get it.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  The Three Sausages logo.

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  Alright.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  But that wasn't the biggest news of the show, unfortunately.

• 2:15Nilay Patel?

  I would like to just apologize to the listener for this shambolic opening to the Vergecast.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Alright, we'll get there. We're here.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  Look up shambolic, by the way. It's a great word.

• 2:24Nilay Patel?

  The, we are, we are in fact, the flagship podcast of this company. And potentially your company as well. I don't know if the listener's company has podcasts.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Look Neil, you want to talk about phones or not?

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  Mobile World Congress is this week. We had a bunch of people in Barcelona.

• 2:42Nilay Patel?

  Vlad, Sam, just like all the Europeans are out there, just playing with phones. If you don't know what Mobile World Congress is, imagine CES without the self-awareness. It's like a much more earnest, sort of, world music situation. About phones.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  With better food.

• 2:59Nilay Patel?

  With much better food because it's in Spain and not Vegas. But the big news of this week, tons of news out of Mobile World Congress, but the, the, the big news, obviously the Galaxy S9, which is a Galaxy S8.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Almost precisely that.

• 3:15Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what else to say. It's a Galaxy S8, it's got a Snapdragon 845 instead of an 835.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  I think, I think it was Vlad that wrote something like this is, that's a, it's a compliment to say it's like the S8 because the S8 is so good. Do you guys agree with that?

• 3:30Nilay Patel?

  That's a real, like Vlad take.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  I know, I, I, the S8 was so good, except for, you know, the fingerprint placement and the dog with shoes, Bixby.

• 3:39Nilay Patel?

  So here are the changes as far as I understand them. Upgrade a processor.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  845.

• 3:44Nilay Patel?

  845 instead of 835. They fixed the fingerprint sensor, so it's below the camera, center mounted, where it should be instead of off the side like the S8. And then there's a variable aperture on the cameras, and the big one has two cameras, a wide angle and a telephone.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:57Nilay Patel?

  The variable aperture is obviously very interesting.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Right, because the iPhone, I believe the iPhone 10 has a, a, a lower aperture on its wide angle. But the fact that, it's cool. The aperture thing is really cool. I think everybody was kind of freaking out about it and now I realize that like, it's been a week since I've known about this and I'm kind of bored of it already.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:19Nilay Patel?

  Well, I've seen a lot of tests. There's been a lot of test shots floating around.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  DXO Mark is all excited because DXO Mark gets hot and bothered about literally everything these days.

• 4:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  I will say, I bought a mirrorless camera because I could put like prime lenses on it and to have just the the best, lowest f-stop possible.

• 4:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  And, uh, and it's not just about shallow depth of field. When you let more light into your camera, you can turn down the ISO and you can get like more saturated pictures. I just, the colors are better and

• 4:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Hopefully that is the case with this phone camera because it's still, it's still a phone camera. It's not magical, but.

• 4:58Nilay Patel?

  My, my read of what Samson is trying to do, so that the, it's a mechanical aperture. It only switches between f 2.4, which is pretty normal and opens up a little bit wider to f 1.5.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 5:11Nilay Patel?

  Right? Um, my read on it is that it is there for low light performance. So it's darker outside. You open it up to f 1.5 where you're inside in the bar, opens up, let more light in. You know what Paul's saying, you get higher quality, low light. I do, I've seen some test shots where there is ever so slightly more depth of field, but not, it's not what you might think.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  You mean shallow or depth?

• 5:34Speaker 02

  To me, the big question is, like, I, I imagine that, um, somebody who is, uh, well-versed in the interplay of ISO and f-stops and whatever else is going to be able to do pretty amazing things with this camera. But the real test is, what does it do out of the box by default when you just pull your phone out of your pocket, hit the shutter button? Is it going to improve that situation?

• 5:59Nilay Patel?

  So, well, I have a similar story to Paul. So it was, uh, our baby shower over the weekend. We got home.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 6:05Nilay Patel?

  I have a new Nikon DSLR. Like, I didn't want to only take cellphone photos of my child. So bought a new D7500. Took it to the baby shower. It's got SnapBridge. So it just like automatically sends two megapixel photos to my phone. And we ran around with, um, a 35mm fixed lens on it. It was great. Took a bunch of photos. Uh, my sister is like looking through my phone after the party because she was like checking out. And she liked the photos from the DSLR so much better. than the many more photos that had been taken on phones.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 6:39Nilay Patel?

  That she's basically just gonna buy a DSLR now.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:42Nilay Patel?

  Not like.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  Were you shooting auto?

• 6:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, uh, we just put it in that no flash auto setting and like, we did a thing where like, we just handed the camera off. And various people were excited to like, fire some photos with it. So it was just being passed around the party.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:54Nilay Patel?

  Um, and it was like fun to use and like, you know, people like screwing with it. It was more special, quote unquote, than a cellphone. Um, I think you're right, Dieter, that the real test is what happens in auto. I also think that it's, Samsung's processing is so aggressive. Vlad also wrote about this. He tested it out a little bit. Uh, I think his headline was, this is just great marketing.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 7:16Nilay Patel?

  It will probably do better in the light, but Samsung's processing is so aggressive. That you're, you're, you basically run into it. It determines the way the photos look much more than the mechanical nature of the camera.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  Why can't there be a toggle? Is that so hard? Is it, is that, is it such, such an optimized part of the phone that, that's basically hardwired? Why can't you just like, eh?

• 7:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's a lot of it. It's, it's pretty hardwired into the, the, the processing chip. Um, although it is ironic that you are asking Samsung to give you yet more checkboxes.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  They have never not done that.

• 7:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, you can put, and people have hacked like the Pixel camera app on the Samsung phones. Like, you can do other stuff. It's, but it's not like built into the.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:02Nilay Patel?

  I, but I think that's really interesting because we have, we're just at a point now where the camera hardware is starting to get more. The, the question has always been, do you need, do you, can you fight the laws of physics, right? To, to make things look like a DSLR, you basically need space. You need room for light to bounce around. Mirrorless cameras are doing a great job with that stuff. DSLRs are still DSLRs. Phone cameras have tiny sensors. They have tiny amounts of distance, obviously, between the lens and the sensor. It's just the way things.

• 8:35Nilay Patel?

  So what we've been doing is applying tons and tons of software to recreate the effects of physics in like larger spaces with cameras.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 8:45Nilay Patel?

  Google's done a good job, Apple's portrait mode, right? Google has portrait, like, we've been applying software to this problem. This is, I think, the first time, maybe not totally the first time, but Samsung's now applying literally like hardware engineering to the problem. Like, they're doing a mechanical thing and their software is sort of gating how much you can get out of the mechanical thing. And I think that balance is super interesting. Just Google's just like, here's some off the shelf camera parts, but our software will do all the work for you.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  So here's the thing that is, I'm starting to wonder, with the Snapdragon 845, somebody, and I forget who, and I'm very sorry, popped off on Twitter and called all tech journalists terrible, horrible people in the can for Qualcomm, and that the only thing anybody should ever write about with any Android phone is how much crappier Qualcomm processors on Android are compared to the A-whatever-number bionic thing that you can get on an iPhone. That the iPhone processors are so far ahead in terms of benchmarking and speed and everything else, that it's, that if that isn't the very first thing you mention when you talk about a new Android phone, that you're screwing it up.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  And I, you know, I am the person who does not like to say that specs don't matter, but likes to put specs in context. And so there's a whole lot of that going on, but I don't know, like, how much does it matter that, however good the Snapdragon 845 is, it's not gonna be so much wildly better than the 835 is gonna blow our mind, and it's certainly not gonna catch up to the processor in the iPhone X. It might not even catch up to the processor in the iPhone 7 or 8. It'll probably catch up to that, but whatever. How, I don't know, I guess I'm asking Paul to respond to this. Like, what, do you care? Do you care? This is like, it's got a better processor in the context of Android phones, and the fact that that doesn't match the processor on iPhones is like, whatever? Or is it like, is it the first thing we should be mentioning every time?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  I think that most of the performance gains that we are seeing recently are all about

• 10:52Speaker 01

  Hardware that is specifically optimized to run like single algorithms. Like for instance, or, or, or small sets of algorithms. So you have these machine machine machine learning.

• 11:06Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Machine learning.

• 11:10Nilay Patel?

  Wow, Paul.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  I'm just gonna go home. I'm done.

• 11:16Nilay Patel?

  Did you guys hear about that Moon Internet?

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Moon Internet. Let's talk about the Moon Internet. So you, you, you know, Pixel has, the Pixel two has a very specific chip for optimizing

• 11:29Speaker 01

  camera processing stuff. You know, Apple has a lot of very specific hardware. You know, even like Google right now, like in the cloud, they're like, they have their TPU two, like their tensor processing units that are specifically optimized to run specific algorithms. I think that's where the most of the speed ups are, are happening. And you know, like Intel is always doing this, like has like, you know, specific video decoding or encoding support on their, on their chip. So I don't know a lot about the eight forty five or how specifically compares to Apple's

• 12:08Speaker 01

  new stuff, but I think you're, you're gonna get the most speed by having a marriage of specific algorithms and specific chip design for those algorithms. And the general horsepower, the idea that you have a very generic CPU that does most of your work, I think is, is going away. The GPU does all the drawing and a lot of the processing now. And I don't know what CPUs are good for. Just, just breaking on, on bizarre character combinations.

• 12:42Nilay Patel?

  And I'm not even using my CPU to render Home Depot dot com right now. Apparently.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Melting down.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  Is there anything else even to say about the S9? Like, they're gonna say, they're gonna announce more advancements for Bixby later this year. Great, thanks for that, can't wait. I don't know. And some of them are like, "Oh, it's boring." But like, I don't know, Samsung makes a good phone.

• 13:02Nilay Patel?

  I think the real question for Samsung is, they are, if they want to be the flagship... Well, here, I'll start over. It has a headphone jack.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Hmm. True.

• 13:13Nilay Patel?

  It's tru- it does. I was really expecting them to take off the headphone jack and put out like, Bixby headphones or whatever.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:20Nilay Patel?

  The Samsung, like, the S9 is now the most flexible phone on the market, right? It can do the most things. You can, it has the most connections, it has the most crazy software on it, it supports the most standards, you can plug it into the deck stock and turn it into a weird laptop thing. The deck stock now is horizontal, so you can like, use it as a, use the phone as a mouse. So you just have like a Bluetooth keyboard and you like, use the phone as a trackpad.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  Oh, that's neat.

• 13:50Nilay Patel?

  Right? It, it is just the most computer phone.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  Since it's launching with Oreo, it has to support trouble, and so it may theoretically be better than most of the, you know, previous couple generations of Android phones at getting custom ROMs if you still do that. I don't think that's anywhere near as popular as it used to be, but that's like, potentially another reason it's more flexible.

• 14:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just interesting to me that it is, the S9 is by far the most computer-like phone. Of, you know, and we talk about this all the time, right? Mostly in the context of tablets and Pixel Books and what have you, but this is, this thing is now the most flexible platform for doing stuff of all of the major phones. Everything else is closing off. And I, I don't just mean it has a headphone jack. The headphone jack to me is just symbolic of the fact that it's easier to connect to weird things with Samsung, the Samsung phone, than every other phone. That's one example, but, I always think of the fact that Dieter was at my house and he just like, my LG TV has some weird Miracast implementation, and Dieter was like, "Boop", and his phone showed up. I was like, "How'd you do that?" And he just looked at me and goes, "It's Samsung phone."

• 14:57Nilay Patel?

  It supports everything. So I think that's really interesting for Samsung. I think what's also super interesting is they've got to decide how much farther down that road they're going. While their biggest competitors, and I would just basically rank Google and Apple in that list here in the States, obviously in other places they have a wider list of competitors. But here in the States, anyway, Google and Apple are shrinking the surface area of what their phones can do. Right? Like Apple's, Apple, they've got their walled garden, they want you to buy their headphones and their smart speaker and use their mail app, which is just an experience.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  It's interesting, like the Nexus phones are famous for being like just the easy, if you want to put some, if you want, if you want a phone to put Ubuntu Touch on, can't go wrong with a Nexus 5.

• 15:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  You know, like put some weird modded version of Android or something like that. I don't know if the Pixels, Pixels don't have that reputation, I don't think they would.

• 15:55Nilay Patel?

  I think the Pixel is Google's iPhone. And that's fine, I have, you know, have one, it's great, people love it, great camera. But it's, you see those two companies like flexing their ability to integrate vertically, and Samsung's just surface area for days for other things to happen. So like, do you need two browsers on your phone? Do you need two mail clients? Do you need two voice assistants? Samsung's got a, I think they're gonna have to eventually make a decision whether they want to, they want to build a parallel Samsung universe to Google's universe. In order to do that, they have to just kind of remain a little bit more open.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  You know what's funny is, think of how many things we make fun of Samsung for? How many software things specifically that they are, have been bad at for so many years and are famously bad at, and yet they're still so successful.

• 16:47Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I think they're successful because of massive carrier deals. Right? In other parts of the world... You know Huawei and Xiaomi like they're they're getting cut off.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  So actually, you know, it's funny. I was in I was in Cancun for my vacation last week and it was just Motorola phones for days.

• 17:05Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Everybody had a Moto phone. It was wild.

• 17:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Are we just are we just we we're we're are we in a bubble?

• 17:12Nilay Patel?

  I think it's a really weird cellphone market.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:16Nilay Patel?

  This is a strange fact like it I in India like there's hundreds of cellphones get released every day.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:22Nilay Patel?

  Um, you know, it's interesting like Vivo put out their crazy concept.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  I want that Vivo phone for real.

• 17:28Nilay Patel?

  The is it Apex that it's called? Um, so if you don't know what it is, uh, Vivo just put out a concept. Vivo was the company at CES that showed off the fingerprint reader under the screen.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Right. And to be clear, Synaptics makes the part.

• 17:40Nilay Patel?

  But yeah, Vivo put it in their phone.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:42Nilay Patel?

  And then at MWC, they've extended the ability of the fingerprint reader to be basically the bottom.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  It's like a third of the phone. It's like a it's like you know that little white modal that pops up when your AirPods connect to your iPhone? Something that everybody can relate to.

• 18:00Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  That that large of fingerprint sensor is under the screen. So you just put your thumb on the screen where you naturally would put it and you're unlocking the phone.

• 18:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then because it's a full face display, they hid the camera, the selfie camera under the display and it like motors its way out. Which is not a good idea.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  No, it's a super bad idea.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  But it's great.

• 18:23Nilay Patel?

  But it's great.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  It's everything I want and I want it now.

• 18:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I love it the most. Having more moving parts with tiny motors on a phone seems real bad.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  I I'm imagining a strip underneath the rear camera, a vertical strip that's a mirror. And when you hit the selfie button, it like flips out and like becomes a mirror and turns the the rear camera into a selfie camera.

• 18:48Nilay Patel?

  What was the phone that had the flip around rear camera? Do you remember what I'm talking about?

• 18:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:52Speaker 01

  I don't remember.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Oh, man, this is gonna kill me.

• 18:55Nilay Patel?

  It didn't succeed. That's why we don't remember. But that's funny because that was such an interesting phone. And then all of the other like Android vendors at MWC are putting out phones with notches.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  The notch wars.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  Oppo N1. Oppo N1.

• 19:10Nilay Patel?

  Oh, is it N1?

• 19:11Speaker 02

  The one with the uh, with the flippy camera. Yeah.

• 19:14Nilay Patel?

  Oppo abandoned this idea. No, but it's like Notch City at MWC. We uh, we wrote a whole story called The Clone Wars.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:22Nilay Patel?

  Literally, all these phones have notches.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Was it Asus? Who's it saying that the Zen phone has a 26% smaller notch?

• 19:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and they refer to it as the fruit phone, which is terrible.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Oh, they're referring to Apple's phone.

• 19:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of screen to body ratio comments out there.

• 19:41Speaker 01

  Yes, I heard that phrase a lot.

• 19:42Nilay Patel?

  Which is real, real bad. And here's what I don't get about all these phones with a notch. The notch is not great. It's not.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:51Nilay Patel?

  I have learned to ignore it. Most people that tend to have learned to ignore it. Just one of those things that we're all, fine. I would prefer it wasn't there, but you mostly stare at the center of your screen, not the top. That's the end of, fine. You shouldn't copy it. But if you are going to copy it, you should copy the whole phone and not have a giant chin at the bottom of your display. And all of these notch copycats, like, look how small our notch is. And the immediate rebuttal that you can have is, look at how big the bottom of the phone is, which is also visible to you when you look at the screen.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Right, okay, okay. So there's a few things here. We can all agree, there's no reason in the year 2018 to have a chin on your phone, right?

• 20:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:39Nilay Patel?

  A bold pronouncement from Paul met with minor squeaks from Dieter.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  There, I would like to agree, but driving a display without a chin, especially LCD, is very, is basically impossible. Driving an OLED without a tiny little chin is very, very hard. And the only company that's like fully pulled it off, I think, is Apple. Samsung's come pretty close, but they still got a little bit of a chin. But I don't, I don't want to be like, ah, if you, if you don't have a chin, you're, you suck. And what are you doing with your life?

• 21:10Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Your feelings, because it is actually relatively difficult.

• 21:13Nilay Patel?

  Let me just explain why. So Apple's pulled it off because their OLED tech. is crazy and it actually is folded under. So they're using the ability of OLED screens to curve and the connectors are folded under. So screen folds under itself and it connects under the screen. Both the top and bottom. That's why it's so hard to manufacture. Samsung doesn't do that, but has sensibly decided, well, if we have to have a little part on the bottom, we'll just have a similarly sized part on the top.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:44Nilay Patel?

  And that's where we'll put all the cameras.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:46Nilay Patel?

  These morons are saying, we're gonna go notch on the top, chin on the bottom, which makes no sense.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  You're saying you prefer the notch, or wait, wait, you prefer the forehead to the notch?

• 21:59Speaker 02

  If you're gonna have, if you're gonna have a chin, you should also have a forehead.

• 22:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, standard face dynamics.

• 22:08Nilay Patel?

  It's very simple. It's the rules of faces that everybody has understood.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  The rules of face.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Well, but so hang on, so the Essential phone has a chin, a tiny little chin, and it also has a notch, but it doesn't have a big dopey notch. It has a notch that is exactly as big as it needs to be and no bigger. The problem I have with these other notches is they're just there for no, there's like, why not make it bigger? Why not make it smaller? Why, why is the notch this size? It's that size so it looks like an iPhone X and that's it and they know it.

• 22:38Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  But the problem, so not to dwell too hard on, on the Vivo phone, but I hate the look of almost all of these phones coming out. Like, shape wise, like, I, I know a lot of people are excited that like there's new colors and a new finish for the S9 and stuff. None of them are appealing to me. Am I just like out of touch with what looks cool?

• 23:03Nilay Patel?

  No, I think we're, we're.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Why can't we get like at least Essential, well, even Essential's doing, I mean, good for them, give people choice. Choice is great. But please come, give me a matte black monolith phone.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  We've always. Essential made a matte black monolith version. They just released it.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Oh, I saw, I only saw the color. They've got a matte black?

• 23:26Speaker 02

  There's a matte black version as well.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  All right, well, see, Essential gets it.

• 23:29Nilay Patel?

  They get you.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Vivo gets it. All these Apple cloners.

• 23:34Nilay Patel?

  This is shaping up to be one of the ugliest years for phones on record.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's an awful one.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:39Nilay Patel?

  It's not, it's not gonna be a fun year of phone reviews. It's gonna be a lot of, there's a notch at the top. They didn't care enough as Apple.

• 23:49Nilay Patel?

  They, they, they blew it. All of the iPhone reviews were dominated by like discussion of the notch, whether or not it bothers you. And the answer is like, it kinda doesn't, because at least it's, you know, it's Apple. They like, there's a great Medium post about how the curve of the notch into the curve of the, the edge of the screen is like one continuous curve, so it never tangents to vertical.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:14Nilay Patel?

  Like, right, it's like, deep Apple stuff, where like, Johnny Ive is like, "Don't worry about improving the software, boys. Make sure it never tangents to vertical." Right? Like, that's software design. That was just a hobby I picked up, right? The, the clones are not nearly as well crafted. And I, I don't know, I just, I'm not, did you see the Bloomberg story? Mark Gurman and Sam Kean had a story in Bloomberg about how when Apple came out with the iPhone X, the expectation was that OLED sales would skyrocket because everybody would rush to copy OLED screens. It didn't happen. So Samsung has an oversupply of OLED screens. Uh, it's coming out today. Great story. Classic, great Gurman reporting. Um, what's interesting, so they're all using LCD screens, and they're cutting the notch,

• 24:59Nilay Patel?

  but they're not, because they're using a different technology, they're just getting the look without, they're not making, they're actually making the trade-off that Apple made. Apple made a trade-off to get a full-face screen.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:12Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, it's just like.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Well, and Apple was also putting like an IR blaster in there.

• 25:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's no like crazy face recognition tech packed into this notch. It's just the same as ever. We've talked about this too much. Here's what I really wanna say.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Have we talked about the notch enough?

• 25:29Nilay Patel?

  Notch nearly. Alright, um, sorry, Paul.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Just, just, let's, let's, let's notch it down a minute and move on.

• 25:37Nilay Patel?

  I don't want this to stop.

• 25:41Nilay Patel?

  It's not enough. Alright.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Um, you know, what I, what I saw, when I saw this Asus phone, you know what I said? That's not your design.

• 25:50Nilay Patel?

  Alright, we're done. That's the end of the Vergecast, everyone. Forever.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  No flagship, no longer.

• 25:56Nilay Patel?

  We're done. We have run this thing into ground. Uh, no, I'm gonna say one last thing. Well, we should talk about Android Go.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 26:03Nilay Patel?

  So.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  I'm sorry. Android Oreo parentheses, Go Edition parentheses.

• 26:09Nilay Patel?

  Kill me. So, Google put out Android One, like, what, two years ago? And said, this is our version of Android for cheap phones.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:18Nilay Patel?

  And then something happened.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  It's actually more complicated than that. Do you really want me to break your spirit?

• 26:22Nilay Patel?

  Yes, and therefore, that's why we do the show, Dieter. Not for your notch bugs.

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Android One was a specific version of Android wherein Google did basically all of the work and then handed it to a bunch of, like, super low-end manufacturers. And think of it almost like the chassis system back in Windows Phone 7. They, they basically, they did the whole thing other than, like, here, design the case. They specified the chipset, they specified the software, you weren't allowed to put extra crap on it, and it was a bare minimum thing. And they worked, they had MediaTek processors and the whole thing just sort of didn't do anything. And then they're like, okay, well, Android One is more of a feeling than it is, uh, like, we'll just make the thing for you. It's more of a vibe. Um, and guess how well that worked?

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Not at all. And so now, they have, what they've done is they went to all of their little app makers that make all their apps, all the Google apps, and slapped them on the wrist and said, find a way to make your app smaller. And then they took a bunch of stuff in Oreo and they stripped it down so it would work with less RAM.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Can I ask?

• 27:28Speaker 02

  And they're calling it Android Oreo Go Edition instead of Android Go because they want to confuse us. Uh, and they also want you to understand that it is a full Android Oreo phone. It can do all this stuff. But the big question is always, why don't you just make all Android phones work well with, with less RAM? Uh, and that's because a regular Android Oreo phone how, takes advantage of the RAM to do more graphical stuff, I think, is like the really short answer. There's a much longer answer, but that's the short answer. It's also like app launch time and stuff. Anyway.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Can I ask a question of clarification? When you said it didn't work. Do you mean it didn't sell or it was a bad phone? We, for Android one phones?

• 28:06Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Both things.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  I mean, both of those things.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  So, because there are a lot of low end Android, there are a lot of hundred dollar Android phones in the world getting sold.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  Right. But there's a lot, there's a few. Well, maybe there's a lot, but we always see these low end attempts happen at Mobile World Congress. Like Nokia back in the day started it like 15 years ago. Nokia is like, oh yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna start selling to developing markets and look at, look at the phone we made for developing markets. And then, you know, five years ago was Firefox was making Firefox phones and they were designed for low end markets.

• 28:37Speaker 01

  I think that was like a fifty dollar phone.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so like the, the, getting a phone that's somewhere between fifty and a hundred dollars has been a unicorn, a white whale. Pick your, pick your hundred dollar metaphor and nobody's pulled it off. But I, the question is, is Android go, which is what we're calling it, sorry. Does it have a better shot at doing that than the other myriad attempts at making fifty to a hundred dollar smartphones we've seen before?

• 29:02Nilay Patel?

  You know, my read on this, because I made fun of Nokia to no end when they were like, our strategy is these developing markets. Because people aren't confused, right? Like, it doesn't matter how wealthy your country is, like, you still want a good phone. And I, you know, I, all of these companies are successful in China, India, wherever, are making phones for those markets directly. They're in the mix, they're hyper, the Indian market's hyper competitive, the Chinese market's hyper competitive. They're, they're competing with, they're trying to like add features. They're.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  They're skinning the hell out of it.

• 29:39Nilay Patel?

  They're skinning the hell out of it, that, you know, they're, they're way ahead on like dual SIM support.

• 29:45Nilay Patel?

  And these, these phones that are like a regular phone that we dumbed down, they don't stand a chance except for price. And I don't think people are confused by price. I think that's why Apple continues to sell like, you know, three year old phones. Because people in those countries would rather have an older iPhone that was the top of the line once upon a time than some sort of like other cheap thing. And every time I see one of these attempts, it's, they just seem kind of like baseline confused about the fact that people would rather have the nice thing. They don't want the dumb, like, it doesn't really, I don't think anyone is that deeply confused about what is the nice thing or what is the cheaper thing.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  One thing that's interesting about Android Go is it seems very practical. It's very designed to help you make decisions about not filling up your storage and not using too much of your data. And so for people that are constrained on storage, or I think much more common, people who are constrained on how much data they can use in a month, it's nice to have an operating system being a little more proactive about helping you make those decisions. So, that's interesting.

• 30:52Nilay Patel?

  Here's, this just can't, I don't know, there are some early benchmarks, the S9, it scored worse than the S8.

• 31:02Speaker 01

  No.

• 31:03Nilay Patel?

  But that's with an Exynos 9810 chip.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:07Nilay Patel?

  Onentech tested the Exynos 9810 version, and their headline is, "Galaxy S9 Exynos 9810 Hands-On Awkward First Results."

• 31:19Nilay Patel?

  But of course, here we're getting the Snapdragon version, so, I don't know. All right, I'm gonna read an ad.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:25Nilay Patel?

  Then when I come back, we're gonna talk about the surprising resurgence of Nokia reissues, and then I'm just gonna rant about Ring and Amazon.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:34Nilay Patel?

  God, okay. Dieter is already bored by it, but I'm ranting.

• 31:39Nilay Patel?

  This is an ad for mattresses, begins now.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  I'm ready.

• 31:42Nilay Patel?

  "Are you struggling to get some shut eye? If yes, you're in luck, because we have a great tip for how you can zonk up more easily, and that is to buy a new mattress from Mattress Firm." Mattress Firm is-

• 31:50Speaker 01

  Not a law firm.

• 31:51Nilay Patel?

  Not a law firm, it's a mattress firm. They're America's Neighborhood Mattress Store, that their budgets stretch farther when you're looking for a solution to improve your sleep. They're more than mattress experts, they have a whole package that helps you transform a mattress into a bed, from adjustable bases and sheets, to headboards and bedroom decor that have you covered literally and figuratively. So just please, my God, go to mattressfirm.com/podcast to see what the deals are. I am begging you to go to this URL and check out these deals.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 32:15Nilay Patel?

  Just on my hands and knees.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  It's true, I can see it.

• 32:21Nilay Patel?

  "There's even 120-night sleep trial that ensure perfection, and 120-night low-price guarantee so you know the paid price." Again, please, go to mattressfirm.com/podcast to learn how your sleeping could be monumentally improved. Please, mattressfirm.com/podcast if you're still awake. Again, this line in the ad is very confusing, because it implies that some people are asleep at this point in time.

• 32:44Nilay Patel?

  You want to talk about this Nokia situation? Yes. Why are they doing this? Because they're thirsty.

• 32:52Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so Nokia, last year, mobile world congress, reissued the 30 through 10, which is like the classic feature phone. Yeah.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  I still have a problem just even referring to the corporate shenanigans that create these phones as quote unquote Nokia. Like, I know I shouldn't. I know everybody understands that it's HMD and they bought the brand and blah blah blah, and so it's Nokia, but like fundamentally, like, uh, I just hate it. Anyway, continue.

• 33:21Nilay Patel?

  Right. The, the shell company. Right. Owned by HMD Global, that we refer to as Nokia, that some people are going to tweet at me to say, has some ex Nokia employees working at it. Also true. But Nokia also continues to exist as a co- right? Very confusing. Yep. Making cameras or something. They're doing something. But the, the HMD Global variant of Nokia. Uh huh. Is now making phones again. And the first thing they did to get attention was they reissued the 30 through 10 last year, which made a somewhat amount of sense. Right? It was like the same feature phone. They updated the screen and OS and like stuff, but it looked the same.

• 34:05Nilay Patel?

  Head snake. And it was a feature phone. Great. That thing, who cares? But got a lot of press. People were excited. People loved that phone. Now, this year, they've reissued a not the same phone. Which is what is very confusing. So if you remember the 8110 from The Matrix.

• 34:26Nilay Patel?

  Remember The Matrix? Yeah. It had like, like an ejecting, it had like a mechanical action. This is a thing. So in The Matrix, you know Nokia, Nokia, Neo gets a phone call. He picks up a Nokia phone. Right. The, the computer says, ring, ring Neo. The phone rings. Pulls it out. He pushes the button. It pops open. So exciting.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  A real, wow.

• 34:45Nilay Patel?

  I got a literal.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  And he looks at it and he, he goes, whoa.

• 34:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay. The real 8110 did not have that mechanism. No. Yes, it's just pull it open.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Because life, real life sucks.

• 34:59Nilay Patel?

  Uh, there was another Nokia phone that did have a spring, but it looked totally different.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Right. And then for the sequels, they like went with Moto, I think?

• 35:08Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah.

• 35:11Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna talk about the sequels. Those are illegal. Okay, that phone looked like something.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:18Nilay Patel?

  So that now HMD Nokia is out at this year's MWC and they're like, we reissued the classic 8110. It looks totally different.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:28Nilay Patel?

  Which makes sense because that 8110 had a little tiny screen. I just don't know, like, great, it has the slider, pops open, does the thing. But it's, it's not, it's like if some famous band got back together and like, we're reissuing one of our famous albums and they just rerecorded it all, but they were all like Pocas instead. It's just, it's a different thing. But anyway, it's app. People are excited about it.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  It seems like a nice thing. There's gonna be like some really crappy Java apps or whatever on it. I don't know if they'll actually be Java, but they may as well be.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Well, it's gonna have Google Assistant and Twitter.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  I'm very excited about that.

• 36:01Nilay Patel?

  This is the worst phone in history.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  The way I think about this is, okay, you're Disney and you've been trying to buy Spider-Man for years. Finally get Spider-Man, wrest it away from the cold, dead fingers of Sony. Of course, you're gonna make a new Spider-Man movie. Obviously, that Spider-Man movie is not going to be a frame-by-frame recreation of all the best Spider-Man movies. It's gonna be a new Spider-Man movie, but it is a Spider-Man movie technically, just like the other ones that Sony made.

• 36:32Nilay Patel?

  It's like a reboot.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  It's a reboot, right? All your favorite characters.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  I think all Nokia is trying to do is they're putting out these things, they're getting people excited about them, and then they're gonna try to sell you a mid-range Android phone.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Oh, they're, they're playing the long call?

• 36:48Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, it's like Nokia is back. And then you're like, I don't want a feature phone, but I am in the market for a mid-range Android phone with a bad camera, no software support.

• 36:56Speaker 01

  Much more interesting feature phone.

• 36:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  The Light Phone 2.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:02Nilay Patel?

  Tell us what the Light Phone 2 is.

• 37:03Speaker 02

  It's gonna come out in 2035.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  The original Light Phone was, was, it was as dumb as a phone could be and it just had like LED lights would light up a keypad and you could type in numbers. And that was basically all it had. I think it had an address book. Didn't even matter. Cool, great look. Um, now with almost the exact same aesthetic, they're putting an e-ink screen in this thing. And it's, it's an e-ink touchscreen, so you can do like messaging with this. They're thinking about like, maybe you could call an Uber with this phone. It'll have like 4G. I think the, the, the, the best image is this, this image of the, the light phone is on its side and there's a touchscreen keyboard and, and hey friend has been typed. And it's like,

• 37:48Speaker 01

  man, I want to be there. I want that phone. I want that e-ink. I want e-ink phones. That's been very important to me for a long time. Hopefully there's like a cool software SDK so I can do my own stuff with this.

• 38:02Nilay Patel?

  So the first light phone.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:06Nilay Patel?

  They were like, it's just a phone, no features.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  No features.

• 38:09Nilay Patel?

  People were into it. The light phone too, they're like, we've gone ahead and added some features.

• 38:18Nilay Patel?

  They're on a very definite trajectory.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  The light phone has gone to the, the dark side where they, the features are.

• 38:23Nilay Patel?

  iPhone 3 is like, it runs Android now.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  It runs like Android 5.

• 38:31Nilay Patel?

  I kind of don't, like if your promise is no features, you kind of, you kind of locked yourself off from putting out a new phone.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  I think this is great.

• 38:40Nilay Patel?

  All right. Do you want to talk about the MacBook real quick?

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Are you talking about thumb, uh, the knuckle cam?

• 38:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. By the way, everybody, I, I think, I still think the knuckle cam is, so if you're not aware, it's a, it's a new laptop from Huawei. It has a, just a beautiful three by two nearly bezelless screen. And in order to get that nearly bezelless screen, which is also like, doesn't have much of a chin, they had to put the webcam somewhere. So they put it in a pop-up button, like one of the, in the middle of the function bar row. And so it's like, it's down there. And I, I still think that looks hilarious and I said so on Twitter. And basically everybody on the planet, including Marco Arment, who has been on a tear, ripping into like MacBooks for the past year. It's like, no, this is great. Nobody uses the webcam anyway. Uh, I'm the only one who uses webcams because I'd lived that video conference lifestyle. Uh, but nobody else does. And you don't, you don't have to put tape over because it's hiding anyway.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  Uh, and you'd rather, they'd rather have the nice screen. And so people are actually like really excited for it.

• 39:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think that is a ridiculous place for webcam. I- Just the way we work, we are, we're on a video conference data right now. Although we're using a real camera.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're using external cameras.

• 39:49Nilay Patel?

  But we're constantly.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  I'm using one of those Logitech's that sits on top of the computer.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  I do think there is an aspect where you, it's like, no matter what, I always look terrible on my laptop webcam. It's always a bad angle.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  So you want to lean into it.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  So, well, for one, I can say, hey, sorry, guys, I got this new Huawei laptop. You don't want to see this angle. I'm not going to turn my camera on for this video conference. Or it's, you're in a situation where it's so casual, it doesn't matter that you look ugly.

• 40:21Nilay Patel?

  You know, you could do is you could make the lid just a tiny bit thicker and have it pop out of the lid.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  VIVO style?

• 40:27Nilay Patel?

  No, it's just like, yeah, just do that. Like, I get that we want the lids of these laptops to be real thin, but.

• 40:36Nilay Patel?

  Just like, there's a million design solutions that aren't pointed up your nose. I do, just like the, the VIVO thing, I love the idea of a pop-up cam, camera. Love it. Can't get enough of it. People are really into this.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  I do think there's something that people, it, it does look, it looks stunning to see a, a laptop with no bezel around the screen. But can I tell you something that it is never helped anyone ever be more productive? The only thing that matters for me with a laptop is how lightweight it is. Because, you know, like, if, if, as long as it's like around the size of a 15-inch laptop or smaller, it's going to fit into my bag. Then after that, all that matters is how lightweight it is. It doesn't matter how thin it is, and it doesn't matter how small the bezels are. As impressive as it looks, what is actually useful for a laptop is light, light weightness, is what I'm saying.

• 41:34Nilay Patel?

  My measure of how efficient a laptop is, is how often the GPU turns on when rendering various websites. No, I think you're right. I get it. I'm just, basically the theme of this show, this episode of the Roadcast is, you made it so thin, now you're making other stupider choices.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:52Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, we're not quite. We haven't, we've optimized too far in one direction and now other things that we'd like these products to do are getting like literally shoved into corners or compromising other parts of the display. Yeah.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  What if, what if everybody just stops? Like, we've been yelling at Apple, "Stop making the phones thinner, just give us more battery life for five years." But they don't, they don't want to do that because apparently nobody will buy that. Uh, and now we're making everything else stupid and thin and, and maybe just, maybe just stop. Just let there be a, let there be a forehead on it. It's okay.

• 42:26Nilay Patel?

  And that's why you should buy a Galaxy S9. I don't know. It doesn't seem like where we'd end up on this show. The world's slowest phone. Breaking news. 8:45, garbage. No, it's the X9s. Uh, I'm not gonna buy a Galaxy.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  I want to hear about, I want to hear about Ring. Explain to me why I should, uh, care at all that Amazon bought a smart doorbell company. Cause sure, Amazon likes, wants, wants me to let delivery people in their house and nobody's buying whatever doorbell they work with, so they bought another one.

• 42:57Nilay Patel?

  Alright, let me, let me read.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  Why is that interesting?

• 42:59Nilay Patel?

  Let me read the next ad. I know I promised I'd do that, but whatever. Just get through this with me and then we'll do Ring and then Paul do his thing and then we'll wrap it up. This ad is for SimpliSafe, which is a security company, right? They've been around for many years. SimpliSafe is a security company that's been around for many years. They've transformed into the fastest growing home security company in the nation. Now they protect over too many people and they just released a, a brand new home security system, the all new SimpliSafe, which has been completely rebuilt and redesigned. They've added new safeguards, protect against power outages, down wifi, cut landlines, bats and hammers and everything in between. Again, the spectrum between bats and hammers, wide, I think. Bats carrying hammers is what I'm afraid of. All new SimpliSafe was redesigned to be practically invisible.

• 43:42Nilay Patel?

  Powerful sensors so small you'll hardly notice them and you, but you know who will notice them? Intruders, because presumably they will be sensed and then an army of bats with hammers will come out after them. I don't, I, please don't verify anything that I say in this ad. Anyway, SimpliSafe spent years building a system, they added so much, but you still get the same fair and honest price. 24/7 protection for only $15 a month and there's no contract. It's smaller, faster and stronger than anything they've built before, but supply is very limited. So visit simplisafe.com/verge now to order. That is simply safe, S-I-M-P-L-I-S-A-F-E dot com slash verge to protect your home and family today. I implore you. Visit this website, protect your home from bats with SimpliSafe.

• 44:29Nilay Patel?

  So Ring, Amazon's second biggest acquisition ever. There's Whole Foods, and then there's Ring. Just below Ring is Twitch.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  Amazon's most important acquisition ever.

• 44:45Nilay Patel?

  Sure. Amazon buys a lot of things, right? Like, Amazon bought a robot company to help them make their distribution centers go in the beginning of Amazon. Amazon bought Zappos. They bought lots of things. But just Twitch was almost a billion dollars, Ring was a billion dollars. And then up there is Whole Foods, which they spent much more money on. Ring makes doorbells. They make doorbells and security cameras.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 45:08Nilay Patel?

  I have a smart doorbell. It is the least used smart product in my home.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 45:15Nilay Patel?

  Because by definition-

• 45:16Speaker 02

  Isn't it outside your home technically?

• 45:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's, well, it's mounted to the home.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  Okay, it's mounted to the home. Is this all about home deliveries? But do you think Ring has a magic, like-

• 45:27Nilay Patel?

  Do you know what they don't have?

• 45:28Speaker 02

  Product in their pipeline that is worth a billion dollars? Like, there's some other thing that they're making and nobody's seen it yet, but Bezos saw it and was like, oh, I gotta, I gotta buy that.

• 45:37Nilay Patel?

  So if it's maybe, if it's about home deliveries, the thing they need to do is open the door. What they don't have is a smart lock.

• 45:46Nilay Patel?

  So maybe they, maybe they got one of those?

• 45:47Speaker 02

  Maybe Ring's into that.

• 45:48Nilay Patel?

  Right? Amazon's got the CloudCam, and that connects to some stuff?

• 45:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, Amazon does have cameras, don't they?

• 45:53Nilay Patel?

  Right, and they just bought another camera company called Blink. I have Blink cameras, they're great. Blink makes a doorbell. It's just very confusing.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  A billion dollars.

• 46:05Nilay Patel?

  A billion dollars, this company. They're, they're, they make the most popular doorbell. They have $400 million a year in doorbell sales. Who knew?

• 46:13Speaker 02

  $400 million?

• 46:15Nilay Patel?

  That's the, that's the number I read.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  Well, then maybe it's just a good business.

• 46:19Nilay Patel?

  Yes, maybe.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  But Amazon's MO is they look at other things that are popular and selling well, and then they go to China and say, hey, this thing is selling well, make a crappy version of that, and then we'll sell it for a quarter of the price, and then everybody will stop buying that other thing, and they'll buy our thing, and we'll be good. Right? And that works with the Fire TV, that's like Android tablets, it's like all the Amazon basic stuff. Like, why didn't they just do that?

• 46:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just confusing. And what I, what I particularly don't understand is Amazon already has this program called Amazon Key, which basically integrates with all the things in the cloud cam. And you like buy their suite of things and then, you know, the delivery person shows up and they get to open the door and commit.

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Maybe Ring was just too much of a threat.

• 47:05Nilay Patel?

  Maybe?

• 47:07Speaker 02

  Does, does, does Amazon seem like the kind of company that would be afraid of Ring?

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Well, maybe they, they couldn't get an edge in this market. I don't know. I'm just making

• 47:16Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 47:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's confusing.

• 47:19Speaker 02

  Take it back, Neela, you're right. I'm also confused. Thank you.

• 47:21Nilay Patel?

  And, and, but by definition, and this is the other thing about smart doorbells, by definition, you, the consumer, never use the product. Just everybody, you're in a car, you're driving right now, just close your eyes.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:36Nilay Patel?

  Both of them, close your eyes.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Open them, open them quickly, quickly open your eyes.

• 47:42Nilay Patel?

  Left, go left! Uh, just, you know, just do that thing, just, eh, close your mind's eye. Wait, no, do the, do that, whatever. Focus.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Focus on the road, okay? I want you to get to where you're going. This would be the worst Vergecast ever, possibly already is the worst Vergecast ever, but it was-

• 48:00Nilay Patel?

  It's not a great one.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  If we interfered with your commute in any way, I would feel horrible.

• 48:05Nilay Patel?

  Alright, well, if you're not driving, close your eyes. The people who are driving, pull over to the side of the road and close your eyes. And just, just, when was the last time you rang your own doorbell? This is a piece of hardware that by definition you will never use. Like, I have a smart doorbell. I never use it.

• 48:26Speaker 01

  Well, I live in an apartment, but my roommate's always locking himself out.

• 48:30Nilay Patel?

  So he's gonna ring the doorbell and beep it, but then you're there with your phone, and if you have access to your lock, you're just gonna open the door.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:38Nilay Patel?

  It's just very confusing. That's it. That's all I got.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:43Nilay Patel?

  But maybe the whole thing is-

• 48:46Speaker 01

  I pulled, I pulled my car over to the side of the road for that.

• 48:51Nilay Patel?

  No, just when did you ring it? Whatever. Fine. All right. Paul, every week.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 48:57Nilay Patel?

  You do a thing. By the way, we talked to our podcast advertising team. Paul's segment is now opening for sponsors.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you want to sponsor my weekly segment that is always named the same thing.

• 49:09Nilay Patel?

  It can be named whatever you want it to be named.

• 49:12Speaker 01

  But it has to be the same as it already is named.

• 49:15Nilay Patel?

  Papa John's dropped out of that NFL deal.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  All right.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Hit me up, Mr. Papa John. Okay. This one, like all of them, is called Bounce Shot. And I just want to say that as a child growing up, I always loved.

• 49:38Nilay Patel?

  Paul, I'm gonna actually, I'm gonna give you a couple bucks. If you could just go ahead and call this Bounce Shot sponsored by Neil I Patel.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  I'm easily bought.

• 49:49Nilay Patel?

  I know this is an audio show, but I just want everybody to understand that Neil I literally handed Paul a couple of bucks just then.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Today's, today's episode of, or today's segment of Bounce Shot brought to you by Neil I Patel. All your best. Do you want to know how to drive better? Listen to what Neil I tells you to do. Okay. Bounce Shot, Canon made a flash that automatically figures out the best direction to point. So if you've ever seen like a highly skilled photographer at work, a lot of times they'll have a flash that they'll be like holding in their hand. And they'll be aiming it at the ceiling typically or other things and they'll like bounce the light and it's fascinating to me. And it's obviously, there's a lot of knowledge in it that I do not possess in any way.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  But we all know, thanks to Apple's advertisements, that lighting is very important for photos.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  And bouncing lighting is really cool. And now Canon has a flash that literally automatically, like a robot. It turns the flash on a digital SLR into a robot and, and, and bounces it. And I just think it's really cool and I'm glad that they did it.

• 51:01Nilay Patel?

  So is it fire first and then read the room and then move around?

• 51:04Speaker 01

  It's very complicated. It, when you double tap the shutter button on your camera, the flash points out at the subject, calculates the distance, then points itself at the ceiling and does the same. Right after that, the flash reorients itself one last time into what it thinks is the best direction to achieve the perfect bounce light for your subject. There's also like a dumber mode where it just tries to keep like at one, pointing in one direction at all times.

• 51:35Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty cool. So 35 minutes later, it motors itself.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  And it's like $400.

• 51:41Nilay Patel?

  I'm in.

• 51:42Speaker 01

  I just, I just like this idea of pulling robotics into making things better in the world. This one's probably terrible. Who knows?

• 51:50Nilay Patel?

  We'll get one. We'll try it out. I'm into it. Good segment, Paul. I think I got my money's worth.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you. Um, also the, the, I'm pretty stoked on this new, this new Sony camera. This isn't part of the segment. You didn't pay for this.

• 52:05Nilay Patel?

  By the way, Paul appears to be keeping the money.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. The A7 III.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  The, the new, it's like $2,000, full frame.

• 52:16Nilay Patel?

  Sean O'Kane read a whole thing about how Sony is being more responsive to its customers than Nikon and Canon.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  I saw, I saw a theory that Sony is so far ahead of Canon and Nikon that they're just holding features back. Just to like, they'll just like, as soon as Canon or Nikon ever look like they're waking from their slumber, Sony will like, ah.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  But they're, they're, they are, they do feel very far ahead.

• 52:41Nilay Patel?

  All right, last thing.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  At least for video.

• 52:43Nilay Patel?

  We should talk about Google Clips. Dieter, you wrote a whole thing about it at I O when it came out. Um, this is Google's, Google's little AI camera that like you put in a room with your kids. It recognizes them, takes a bunch of photos. Dan Seifert reviewed it.

• 52:59Speaker 02

  He'd like to review it as he, uh,

• 53:02Nilay Patel?

  eviscerated it.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  lit it on fire in print and video.

• 53:05Nilay Patel?

  So I noticed an interesting thing about this, um, this review cycle for this product. Um, Dieter, and you know, a bunch of other people reviewed it. We did about, everybody had the same basic idea, which is like, this is a neat idea. Execution flawed. A lot of the other reviews I read, they spent their time talking about how the core idea here is very good and futuristic. And as we generally do, we talked about the execution. I, there's something in the middle there. And Dieter, I, I assigned myself a story that I failed to publish. I just sent 500 garbage words to Dieter and said, I did this. Uh, and I have not yet received a response, my friend.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  No, I did. I replied right away.

• 53:46Nilay Patel?

  Hmm.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Was it LOL?

• 53:49Nilay Patel?

  Dieter deleted my post.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  I told you it was bad.

• 53:54Nilay Patel?

  It's bad. Uh, and nothing, nothing further came in. But, uh, this is another product with a battery and a Bluetooth connection. That you have to care for those things to get the pictures off it. You gotta open the app on your phone, like do all the stuff, doesn't go to cloud or anything. I think if you're going to build a ba, a product, a battery and Bluetooth connection, it has to deliver far more time saved than you have to think, than you spend thinking about its battery and Bluetooth connection. If you gotta charge something, it's gotta save you way more time than you ever spent thinking about charging it.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  So I think time saved is the wrong metric. I think it, this, this was my response to your thing, by the way. Um, it, it needs to provide like some kind of value that is way beyond the amount of effort that you have to put into it. It's not necessarily time, like the point of Clips isn't to be a time saver. It's to get you something that you never would have gotten otherwise. A moment with your child and then also somebody recorded that moment without you having to fuss with a camera.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  The, the, the, the thing that was interesting, looking at this review cycle to me is, Dan did the work of judging clips on its own terms. Google claims it does this thing. Did it do the thing that Google claims it does? No, it did not. Also, the camera quality isn't that good and you'd like it to be, but your phone camera quality is way better. If it had done the thing, then, you know, we, you could argue about the, you know, the quality of the, you know, pictures and how, you know, did they picture like a lens and blah, blah, blah, blah. But it doesn't fundamentally, after a week, do the thing. And so he said, this is the thing it said it should do, didn't do it. Then here's our, here's our score. A bunch of, a bunch of the other stuff sort of said, it would be so great if this thing

• 55:37Speaker 02

  did the thing that it says it does, but it, you know, and so therefore it seems cool. Saying, no, it didn't do the thing.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  So, so that, as far as I understand, the ultimate calculus is how much would you pay to have footage or at least photos of your baby taking its first steps?

• 55:57Speaker 02

  So that's, that's the, that's the wrong way to look at it, in my opinion, because, I mean, okay, it's right insofar as like, would this thing do it? But if you think your kid is like gearing up to take your first step, it's okay to like have someone take out their phone. Like what, it's how much would you pay for a cute photo of your kid playing by themselves? You know, serving tea to a stuffed dinosaur that you would never, they would never have done if the camera were out.

• 56:28Speaker 01

  Well, so what seems like the ideal thing to me, because one, one of the things that Dan pointed out is that, you know, this is supposed to relieve him of the role of being the photographer, but he was moving this around a lot and setting it up in like different places. And so it would be interesting to me, here, you get like a four pack of cameras and you just stick them up in strategic locations throughout your home and they're off. And then when something important happens, you say, you yell, Alexa, turn on the camera in the living room. And then that turns on and, and that captures the footage and, because you knew it was the moment that you wanted to catch, right?

• 57:13Speaker 01

  And Google's trying to sell people something that they've never wanted, which is these weird ambient candids. Like this, this special moment when, when your kid was turning a block contemplatively.

• 57:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. It, it just seems like they, that count. I first started thinking about this with the first Apple Watch, which tried to do way too much. And it's, you've got to spend so much time organizing apps on it and charging it and monkeying with it and getting the notifications right. Like, it just didn't seem worth it. And they've cut it down so much that basically you charge it and it shows you some notifications as fitness tracking. John Gruber and Marco Arment, again, this week, were like, just kill the apps on the Apple Watch. Like, whatever, this is not worth it.

• 57:56Nilay Patel?

  That is right to me. Like, we're starting to understand that if you're gonna demand people care for something, it should deliver a very focused return. AirPods, I think, are another good example. Right? You have to charge them, but not so much. And they're, they don't sound great, but they're super convenient and people like them, so they're getting it back. Clips is just, the calculus is backwards to me. It's promising to save you time, but you have to, like, care for this hardware. And then the thing you get back from it is like, did I want this? Like, this quality isn't great. And in order to actually get all these candid shots, everyone noticed, you actually gotta move the camera around a bunch, so it's pointing at the right thing. I don't know. I'm gonna figure this out. I'm gonna figure out how to write this down. You know, put it on the website.

• 58:42Nilay Patel?

  And then every gadget maker in the world will pin it to their wall, using their printers.

• 58:48Nilay Patel?

  That's, they all have it. All right, is that it? Here's what I will tell you. If you would like to see this experience live,

• 58:57Nilay Patel?

  you've made a horrible mistake. But, next week, uh, we're doing the show live at South by Southwest. Uh, me, Dieter, Casey Newton, Ashley Carmen, all be at the deep end. This is Vox Media's brand situation. It's South by Southwest. I've got some details here that I can read to you.

• 59:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's on Friday, March 9th, I believe, at, uh, doors are at 11. Uh, the show's gonna start at noon. There's a chance that might move around depending on a fancy special guest for another show, but we'll let you know if that happens. But otherwise, plan on being there. The first 100 people to show up, uh, there might be a t-shirt in it for you. Uh, I can't guarantee it'll be a t-shirt in your size, but, uh, we'll, we'll do our best.

• 59:39Nilay Patel?

  There'll definitely be stickers, though. You got fancy.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  There will be stickers.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  The last live Vergecast had napkins.

• 59:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:47Nilay Patel?

  Vergecast.

• 59:47Speaker 02

  I do need to warn you that it is 21 plus, uh, the houses, uh, cause there, uh, is a bar there. And so the, the, them's the rules. Um, what else can I tell you about it? Oh, it, we, there's sponsors for the house, uh, and the sponsors that are, apply to the Vergecast, um, are Great Clips and Tempur-Pedic. Which, if you step back and think about it, Great Clips is about cutting things.

• 1:00:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh, God.

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  Tempur-Pedic is about getting through the night. So you might say that our sponsors are going to help you.

• 1:00:19Nilay Patel?

  Snip, snip.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  Cut through the night.

• 1:00:21Nilay Patel?

  You know, LG put a, they, they teased a G7.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Nilay Patel?

  They missed it. They just missed the opportunity. All right. Uh, also, uh, Ashley and Caitlin will be doing Why'd You Push That Button Live? They've got a great cast. That's happening later in the day. Uh, Kara Swisher is gonna be doing Rico Decode Live. Uh, and Ezra Klein, uh, will be doing something very funny as well. All the deep end, March 9th through 11th at South by Southwest. Please come.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  Ezra Klein's gonna have Melinda Gates.

• 1:00:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I was just teasing it. I want people to Google it.

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:00:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Ezra's talking about Melinda Gates. Doesn't it be neat? Anyway, all night, March 9th through 11th, if you're gonna be at South by, please come, come see us at noon on the 9th. Ashley and Caitlin, they're doing their show on the 9th as well. There's all kinds of stuff. Register for it. There's a website. You can go to it. Foxmedia.com slash South by Southwest. Well, foxmedia.com slash S X S W dash 2018. Get an invitation, come in, open bar, watch us do the Vergecast. You can also listen to other great shows. Our friend Lauren Good does Too Embarrassed to Ask, which is great. Kara Swisher does Rico Decode. Peter Kafka does Rico Media. All that's on iTunes. And then Why'd You Push That Button, coming back right after South by. So that'll be very exciting. And I've been listening to some of their second season, you know, things.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  I'm very excited.

• 1:01:35Nilay Patel?

  Very good. One of my favorite shows. That is it for this week. Shambolic, I would say. I'm so sorry to the people who pulled over.

• 1:01:45Nilay Patel?

  I apologize to you, my friends, but we'll make it up to you. Come visit us up by. I'll buy you a drink from our open bar. He will Venetmo you $2. I can't believe you kept the money. Definitely keeping the money.

• 1:02:01Nilay Patel?

  Alright, that's it. Rock and roll.

• 1:02:04Nilay Patel?

  Promo code?