Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 888 processor for 2021 Android phones / Warner Bros. will release new 2021 movies simultaneously on HBO Max / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai will step down on January 20th

Verge reporter Julia Alexander joins Nilay and Dieter to discuss WarnerMedia's decision to release all of its new 2021 movies simultaneously on HBO Max. News editor Chaim Gartenberg explains Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 888 processor for upcoming Android phones in 2021. Stories from this week: Facebook will remove COVID-19 vaccine misinformation The people saving our lives should get vaccinated first, experts say Moderna to ask FDA for COVID-19 vaccine authorization Wonder Woman 1984 will be released on HBO Max the same day it’s in theaters for no extra cost Warner Bros. will release all of its new 2021 movies simultaneously on HBO Max Discovery, home of Shark Week, HGTV, and Food Network, enters the streaming wars with Discovery Plus FCC Chairman Ajit Pai will step down on January 20th Trump’s bias hawk FCC nominee is one step closer to confirmation Trump calls for last-minute 230 repeal as part of defense spending bill Comcast to impose home internet data cap of 1.2TB in more than a dozen US states next year Comcast to raise internet and TV prices nationwide next year Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 888 processor will power the Android flagships of 2021 Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 888 promises faster speeds, better cameras, and more powerful AI Samsung begins wider rollout of Android 11 and One UI 3.0 to latest phones Verizon’s Galaxy S20 models are the first to get Android 11 and One UI 3.0 Samsung rumored to discontinue Galaxy Note line, add stylus support to 2021 Galaxy S and Z Fold Leaked Galaxy Buds Pro image reveals new rounded design 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, Julia Alexander joins us to talk about HBO Max and Warner Brothers releasing all of its 2021 movies simultaneously streaming and in theaters, a bunch of other streaming news. Heim Gartenberg joins us to talk about Qualcomm's new chips. And of course, we talk a little bit about what's up at the FCC. That's coming up on The Vergecast.

• 0:17Speaker 01

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

• 1:02Speaker 01

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

• 1:51Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of extremely slow tech news weeks. That's what, see? Yeah, I'm lowering expectations. That's my plan. I'm your friend, Neelai. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  I'm your, the person that's lived across the hall from you for like, four years, but you've never said hi. So now it's awkward. And so you just see each other in the hall and pretend like you know each other, but you don't.

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  Julia Alexander is here.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:15Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Gartenberg is here. Also, hi. Can I? Okay, so here's my story about the person in the hallway, Dieter. Are you ready? Okay, yeah, yeah. So we, until recently, we lived in an apartment building in Williamsburg. This is a real thing. It's a real apartment building, you can go look at it. And our next door neighbor, I noticed when we first moved in, was a very tall and handsome Australian man. And he had like a big, beautiful family and lots of tall, beautiful Australian people were always going in and out of his apartment. And then eventually I realized like, the New York Knicks are often in the hallway of this apartment building. And it turns out that he was international celebrity mega preacher Carl Lentz, who is now in the news, like the gossip about my old neighbor. Uh huh.

• 2:59Nilay Patel?

  I'm not going to go into why there's gossip, but he's like a celebrity who's having a celebrity crisis. And everyone just keeps texting it to me. And I'm like, no, he was just the guy in the hallway. Like, he was just a person. Anyway, that's my story. Like I said, a slow, a slowish tech news week, we're cruising towards the holidays. I feel like everyone is just really ready for 2020 to be over. With the exception of our, our nation's president, he's trying to prolong it as, as long as he can. Cause it's over for him. You see what I'm saying? All right, got to start where we always start, which is the pandemic, still the biggest story in the world. This is the worst week of the pandemic, United States, 13 million cases, 264,000 deaths as of us recording this right now.

• 3:43Nilay Patel?

  I know I, I've been joking for weeks about Trump saying thousands of Google engineers are, are working on a website. It is, I think, obvious to everyone that he's not going to do anything about the pandemic at this time, which is a tragedy. Hopefully the incoming Biden administration picks up that work a lot faster. News on the vaccine front, Mary Beth Griggs, our science editor and the science team have a newsletter called antivirus. We're, we're very much tracking vaccine information. The Pfizer vaccine, mRNA vaccine approved in the UK, pressure on the FDA to approve it here. We'll see how that goes. Moderna, which is the other vaccine, asking FDA for emergency with authorization. Mary Beth is tracking. Subscribe to the newsletter if you want to keep up on the latest of that.

• 4:28Nilay Patel?

  In addition to, you know, the vaccine is very much a logistics problem. We've made them, we've tested them, we're going to roll them out. How we roll them out, they're complicated to distribute. They need to be kept very cold. And who gets them first is a challenge. It's a logistics challenge. Nicole Wetsmann wrote an article for us about how frontline healthcare workers should get vaccines first, according to experts, and how that conversation is going. So check that out. And then lastly, sort of the second order effects of the pandemic. We often talk about Facebook moderation. There's going to be a lot of vaccine disinformation. Facebook is already saying it's going to remove COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. So I think we're going to see another round of conversation just about how our social networks

• 5:14Nilay Patel?

  are reinforcing the truth and taming that misinformation as the vaccine rolls out. And the information economy kind of goes sideways around it, which sadly, I think we all expect. Okay. Again, check out antivirus, thevirgile.com/antivirus. That's Mary Beth's newsletter about vaccine treatment developments. It's great. She's doing a great job. Okay. HBO Max. Huge news in the world of streaming today. And then some other stuff happening today. But today Warner Brothers announced that every movie it's releasing in 2021 will be day and date released on HBO Max and theaters in the United States.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, for a period of one month.

• 5:53Nilay Patel?

  Walk me through this news exactly, because there are lots of caveats around it.

• 5:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a whole lot happening. So basically what happened, Warner Brothers came out and said, we have this slate of movies TBD. They could change depending on the pandemic. And we plan to release them in the United States, both on HBO Max and in theaters the day they come out. They will be available on HBO Max for a period of one month, and then they will go back into theaters. So you basically get a month to watch it, which they are also doing, I believe with Wonder Woman. 1984 is the same kind of thing where they didn't tell us the time. They just kind of told us. It's not going to be on HBO Max after a month. And now, based on this news, it seems pretty likely that Wonder Woman 1984 will also go back into theaters.

• 6:35Nilay Patel?

  So when it's on HBO Max, it's not in theaters?

• 6:38Speaker 03

  No, simultaneously both. So the, the, the conversation about this that we, the reporting that really needs to happen is the deal that I imagine AMC Regal made with Warner Brothers, which is like, we're cool with you taking these big movies that would normally drive people to movie theaters and putting them on your service. We want some aspect of that, whatever you're doing over there, we want to figure out that business to make, uh, to make that more clear. When Universal and AMC made a deal for a shorter theatrical window, AMC basically was like, we're getting some form of that revenue back, even though it's not in our theaters. Um, so these be, these behind the door deals that are happening are, are going to come to light and we'll, we'll start to understand a little bit more about how the process is going to work. But for now, what people need to know, like if

• 7:22Speaker 03

  you're sitting there and you're like, I just want to watch Wonder Woman, I want to watch Dune, how do I do it? You can either go to theaters in the United States, the day it comes out, if you want to, and if they're open, please don't if the cases are closing. Um, but you, or you can sit at home, sign up for HBO Max, which they're currently offering a discounted deal on, um, and watch it from the comfort of your own home.

• 7:43Nilay Patel?

  And then it, after the 30 day window, they'll still be in theaters.

• 7:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the internationally, uh, it looks like it's only in theaters because obviously HBO Max is not available internationally.

• 7:54Nilay Patel?

  And that is obviously also reflective of the fact that other countries have done a better job with managing the virus than we have.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  Right. I mean, Heim and I talk about this, um, daily. I just DM daily about Tenet for Nolan. And the idea that what led to this, in my opinion, was two things happened. Uh, one, Tenet worked out pretty well internationally for, um, Warner Brothers in a way that it did not domestically. Part of that is because, uh, up until the recent resurgence in cases, other countries were better at handling it. They're still better at handling it than our country. And so they realized we can release things internationally and people will go to theaters and it's a little bit easier to do it there. And domestically, where their number one concern is the growth of HBO Max, which is increasingly difficult with a high price point and not that much new content, um, outside of whatever HBO kind of has ready to go.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  This is a good way of bringing people into the service and hopefully keeping them there. And then the second thing that led to it, in my opinion, was Mulan on Disney Plus. They kind of, them and Universal, but trolls kind of really kickstarted like, we can just do this, the theaters will work with us on it regardless. And we need to start releasing these movies and making money again.

• 9:05Nilay Patel?

  So Shelley Taylor, who's the CEO of Alma Drafthouse, the smaller movie theater chain, was just on Decoder this week. And one of the things she said was, it can't just be one movie at a time. The studios have to get their act together and put out a slate of movies such that people want to go to theaters and there's a bunch of stuff to watch. How do you think that affects, this move affects the idea that the studios will come together and actually come back to slates and managing their weekends against each other?

• 9:32Speaker 03

  My, my favorite thing to do is look at data charts, genuinely. I just sit at home and I look at charts that people send me. And a thing that is really hard to like picture, but is true is like the top, you know, 10, 15 movies every year, and not even really, the top 10 movies make up 50 to 60% of the US box office. So that means like if Disney comes out and they're like, we have an Avengers, no one releases it. They're just like, cool, like you guys do, and that's what people are going to go watch. On average in 2019, people saw less than four movies in the theater. And you can probably guess which ones they were. It would have been Avengers, it would have been Joker. So there's a certain type of movie that we know does really well in theaters. And those movies that will continuously, that's where Universal is not ever going to pull Fast and Furious 9.

• 10:17Speaker 03

  Marvel is never going to pull entirely an Avengers movie. Warner Brothers is never going to pull a Superman movie. But for the time being, there's a perfect opportunity for them under the, I use the word geez, but under this moment of what's happening in the world, to kind of test this theory that they expected to play out in five to 10 years in the next 12 months. Which is this beautiful moment of acceleration. And it's, will people stay at home and spend money? And can we bring in revenue additionally this way? And can we use all the pipes available to us? And will the theaters work with us on it? And now we're going to see that start to play out. They're going to simultaneously release for years to come their biggest movies in theaters and on HBO Max. And it's just going to get to a point of which one you prefer.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  But I think we need to have this conversation is that streaming is built on this idea that you have to have a consistent outpouring of big things to bring people in in order for them to keep subscribing. And an easy way to do that is moving a bunch of your theatrical titles to your streaming service either as simultaneous releases or as exclusives. And I think we're going to hear, this is the beginning of it. We will start, we will hear way more about this exact line of thinking next Thursday, when Disney has its big streaming Investor Day. And it's kind of like, we're going to probably do the same thing.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  So can we go back to this this 30 day window? It's like a reverse window to me. So it's hitting simultaneously theaters and the streaming service, and then it'll leave the streaming service, but stay in theaters. And the way I normally think of a movie window is it hits theaters for a while, and then it goes away, and then you wait a while, and then it shows up on streaming or for rental. So why would the theaters want it after 30 days? It seems like the people that are hyped for it that really want to go see it in a theater are going to try and do it in the first 30 days. Is the thinking that there's just not going to be that many movies, so we might as well have them after 30 days just so we can have something because eventually people will come back and they'll want to see the thing in a theater. So we might, they might as well let it be exclusive to

• 12:15Speaker 02

  us. Is there a second window where it comes back to the streaming service after that? I'm just trying to figure out, what does AMC get out of having Wonder Woman 30 days after we've all watched it at home on HBO Max?

• 12:28Speaker 03

  Right. Well, AMC, which Jeff sold like 20 million worth of its stocks, is looking to survive. And the thing about this deal specifically that like we really need to hammer home is that it's a simultaneous release. So if you are in a place, I can't think of it off the top of my head, but in the United States where theaters open, and you want to go to a theater to watch Dune, or Mortal Kombat, or whatever's coming out, you can go do that. And AMC is glad to have you. At the same time, the story that I think is going to come out is they are getting some form of a deal out of this. I don't know what it is. It could be that Warner Brothers comes in and they accept 50% revenue as opposed to 65% revenue on whatever it is, and AMC can make it back that way. But I remember-

• 13:10Speaker 03

  AMC's CEO, Adam Aaron, who has the greatest earnings calls every three months because he'll just go in and like, quote Winston Churchill and he's like, it's a battle. We have to, we have to win if we're going into it. He was basically like, we want to work with the studios. We get it. Like, we understand you guys need to get stuff out. We want to be alive in six months so we can figure that out. I'm sure they have a deal. It would be much different if Warner Brothers came out and said, all of our movies in 2021 are going to be exclusively on HBO Max and AMC is not going to get anything. There would have been uproar, but the fact that AMC hasn't really come out and been like, this is terrible. The fact that they kind of stressed in their blog post, you know, from Jason Kilgar, who's the CEO of Warner Media and Sarnoff, who's the head of Warner Brothers, were like,

• 13:52Speaker 03

  we're working with the theaters. There's, there's deals in place for sure. That makes sense for both of those parties.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  I fully believe that there are definitely deals because the last, what was the movie where studios like, we might put it on the streaming service and all the theaters are like, how dare you?

• 14:07Speaker 03

  Trolls World Tour.

• 14:08Nilay Patel?

  Trolls World Tour.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Trolls World Tour completely blew up the world. It's like, and now it's fine. I still don't get the 30 day window. I still don't get.

• 14:17Nilay Patel?

  Wait, Dieter, I don't think it's fine. I, I think the virus has gotten worse. I, I think that.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  No.

• 14:23Nilay Patel?

  What I would think of is the, the Trolls World Tour moment, which historians will long note, is they were going to pull it and the argument was just delay it because things will go back to normal and you won't destroy our businesses by flipping the switch and going to streaming. And that just didn't happen. I think Tenet is the example of Warner Brothers and Christopher Nolan really wanted that movie out. There was a dip. They said, here's our shot. Christopher Nolan was like, I shot it in IMAX. That's the thing I do. I'm Christopher Nolan. I, I do IMAX. You got to see it on the screen. He put it out and no one in the United States went, right? And I think that proved to everyone, we, we got to move. I think that, and now it's worse. And I think if you're Warner Brothers and you're saying, am I going to bet on?

• 15:08Nilay Patel?

  Vaccines, am I going to bet on treatments? Am I going to bet right today as we sit here? It's worse than ever and every day is worse.

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Well, there's um, the other story or aspect to this, which I know Neil I will appreciate because it's AT&T focused is like this is a company with $160 billion of debt that are trying to convince shaky shareholders that spending $175 billion on two major entertainment or media properties, one of which is going to be completely derailed by the end of 2021, 2022, which is pay TV at a time when everything about their business screams flee. They're now trying to prove that no Warner Media is a thing that's going to happen and we're going to make sure this works. And so what they're going to try to do extremely hard is accelerate that growth of HBO Max. They're going to to a point where it's like, no, see, it's working out. We figured it out. They have not. They are still figuring that aspect,

• 16:00Speaker 03

  but more than any other company, I think AT&T is like, we need to make sure that we have to prove that this bet works like that. This is the thing that we were right from the very beginning. But and John Stanky, who's the CEO of AT&T has been hinting about this for months. He, in the last earnings call, I think his quote was like, we're not optimistic about theaters. We can, we think it's really shaky still and we are going to evaluate the holiday season, the closer that we get to it. And as soon as we know, you'll know. And it's clearly that they knew that with rising cases, they were not going to, they had a better chance of forming a way to increase subscribers and generate recurring revenue, which is the fun word in Silicon Valley and entertainment these days and then betting on big theatrical things that would bring people to theaters.

• 16:41Nilay Patel?

  So I want to ask you about that because you mentioned John Stanky, you mentioned Jason Kilar. These are the new guys, right? They brought in Kilar and he, his job, he was the ex-head of Hulu. His job as the head of Warner Media is to basically blow it up, right? He, I think his, the phrase he used was, we were a wholesaler in that they sold, they made content and they sold it to TV networks and theater chains and they got the money that way. And now they're a retailer. They're selling it direct to consumers and he's shifting the whole company around that. So if you're betting on HBO Max, you've got this slate of movies that is in whatever state of completion. Yeah, this is your time to say everyone should sign up for HBO Max and hopefully you don't quit because next month we have another good movie you're going to watch.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have three kind of predictions for AT&T Warner Media in the next kind of year, two years, three years. Um, one, they divest of half Warner Media easily. Uh, I think they just, it doesn't make a lot of sense for them to be keeping on to as many things as they're holding on to. And we're already seeing it. They're selling Crunchy, reportedly selling Crunchyroll, um, for, I think, two billion is the reported number, one billion. Like, they're finding ways to get rid of stuff that doesn't bring them anything in. They will start releasing binge mode or binge model stuff for HBO shows, which will drive people insane, but it will drive people to HBO Max and get them off linear when they know pay TV is just going away. Smart move. They're already kind of doing it, uh, and it will just increase. Uh, and three, yeah, they will move a number of their kind of

• 18:09Speaker 03

  big titles to HBO Max and have this simultaneous thing because they need to keep that subscription thing going. I mean, the irony, right? It's like, everyone knows this. It's like, it's, it's almost, you know, boring. It's like, new titles are, lead to addition content, comfort content and libraries is what keeps retention. Uh, so they have the library. They have the best library out of any streaming service. It's phenomenal. They don't have the new titles. They have the higher price point. So the way to get out of that is to do what I think Disney's gonna do too at Disney Plus is like, every month you have a big-ish movie that you're gonna bring to the streaming service and you're gonna find ways to keep people being okay with that $15 a month spending, especially when Netflix

• 18:48Speaker 03

  inevitably hits $15 and people realize their content is fine, but it's not great. Uh, and that will be a fun moment to really see play out. But I think you're gonna, there'll be some big Warner Media changes with content and ownership. I think because they just have to, that debt load is just insane.

• 19:05Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, Julia, you've had all the keywords, so it's time for the Julia Block of disclosures.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 19:10Nilay Patel?

  Comcast owns Universal. Comcast NBC Universal Division is a minority investor in Vox Media, our parent company. Two, we are producing a Netflix show. You mentioned Netflix. Three, I don't think there's, AT&T hates me. I don't think there's a third one. Is it, is there more? There's usually more.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Well, we don't have to, we don't have to mention Quibi anymore. Yeah. Cause they're now officially shut down.

• 19:32Nilay Patel?

  Rest in peace. So that there's, the block is a little smaller. So one thing I want to just call out, to me, this was the biggest news of all. Wonder Woman 1984 is coming out on Christmas Day, day and date with theaters. And the day that was announced, I was actually disappointed. I was very excited for the movie. I'm very excited to know everything about that Blue Monday remix in the trailer for Wonder Woman 1984. If anyone has a deep dive of where that came from, please let me know. We'll pay a premium to publish it. Just give me a call. But right now, HVMX is only in 1080p and doesn't support very many surround formats. And then Patty Jenkins, the director of Wonder Woman 1984 tweeted, "It will be the first movie

• 20:14Nilay Patel?

  in 4K HDR Dolby Vision Dolby Atmos." Have they said anything about these, which is great. I'm very proud of her. I'm sure that she was like, what the hell? Like, you're making me put this on people's 32 inch TVs. Like, I, I want the good stuff too. So I'm glad they did it. It's been a long time coming. It's been, to me, the most irritating thing about HVMX. Besides, well, they just redid the interface a little bit. So it's a little bit better now, but they were behind technically. Have they said anything about these new movies next year? You, I would expect they all come out in the highest quality possible.

• 20:44Speaker 03

  This is gonna be the biggest debate between you and I for the rest of time. Do you think HVMX is not great? And it's like my number one streaming service. It's like, anyways, uh, yeah, they'll all be in 4K.

• 20:55Nilay Patel?

  HVMX right now, I'll tell you, we watch it, we, we were watching The Undoing, you know, and we were watching The Flight Attendant. Good, good shows. You're correct. Their content is good. You start the show and it puts up the skip intro button and the button doesn't work.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. The glitchy stuff they have to, I know. It's

• 21:11Nilay Patel?

  Technically, it's broken. They lie to you. I watched the intro to The Flight Attendant five times.

• 21:17Speaker 03

  We have a great intro. We have, I think, I don't know when it's coming out, but I have an, a kind of end of year rankings of the streaming services. And literally the con, every single con pilot's like, the UI design could be better. And our like, great games editor, Andrew Webster was like, we just call it Julia hates UI.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  But yeah, so to your point, everything will be in 4K HDR and to your point about kind of the tech side of things, the biggest thing that's going to come out of this in the next week would be my bet, maybe two weeks, is that HBO Max will be on Roku. Like Roku has had the upper hand for so long where they've been like, oh, we don't need it. No one's signing up for it. I had a source at Roku once tell me that Disney gets the deals Disney gets because they're Disney and it's very hard to be Disney if you're not. So Roku's had the upper hand. It is now extremely hard for them to say, no, we don't want HBO Max when every single big movie of 2021 from that studio is going to be on HBO Max. So this is them betting on

• 22:20Speaker 03

  that as well. It's them saying us being on Roku is just as important as us being in theaters. Like, that's the decision they're making with this move.

• 22:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that certainly is whenever we've had stories, the feedback we've gotten from people is it doesn't matter because it's on Roku. And so obviously the leverage has changed and hopefully by Christmas Day, they've solved this problem because they're going to want Wonder Woman to hit everybody.

• 22:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I got a Google TV, the new one, I think, the new Google TV. It's great. Got a kid that was pink, but it works. Everything's on it. It's beautiful. That's my type contribution.

• 22:53Nilay Patel?

  Well, so I was gonna, you and I have been DMing. You just redid your living room.

• 22:59Speaker 04

  I just redid my whole living room.

• 23:00Nilay Patel?

  And so what'd you get?

• 23:03Speaker 04

  So I have the Vizio OLED and a Sonos Arc, which are quite lovely. They go together really nicely. Sonos hasn't gotten here yet, but I'm confident it will work well because E-ARC is nice.

• 23:16Nilay Patel?

  How many E-ARC ports have you got there?

• 23:18Speaker 04

  I have just the one, but I only need one. You only need one.

• 23:21Nilay Patel?

  What about your HDMI 2.1 port? Is it the same thing as the E-ARC?

• 23:25Speaker 04

  No, no, separate E-ARC, two HDMI 2.1 and one regular. So I have just enough for a Sonos, two next gen consoles, and then some sort of streaming box, which I haven't decided on yet.

• 23:36Nilay Patel?

  I will tell you this, we said we were going to do an HDMI episode after the election as a joke, and Andrew Marino, our producer, has been putting together what he is referring to as the HDMI holiday spectacular.

• 23:49Speaker 04

  I'm so excited.

• 23:50Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. We're looking for someone from the HDMI Foundation to talk to us. If you know that person, who I imagine is just fascinating, please send them our way. But hi, so the reason I'm asking you this, big upgrading your living room, right? High quality picture, high quality sound. When these movies hit theaters, are you gonna say, man, my living room is better? Or are you gonna say, I really want that theater experience?

• 24:13Speaker 04

  I'm staying in my living room because I'm not risking. Look, I, I love Wonder Woman. I love, you know, Dune. I'm really excited for The Matrix for, you can ask my fiance. I have been bothering her with In the Heights trailers for months, but I am not risking my life to go and see any of these. I don't love any of these movies to the point where like it is worth risking the life and my life and life for once. Also, it's a pretty good TV.

• 24:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:41Speaker 04

  And it's, I live in New York City. For, for one $15 movie ticket, I can pay for a month of HBO. Everyone in my house and all of my friends can come over and we can, well, not yet, but one day hopefully everyone can come over and watch it. Like, that's a pretty good experience. The popcorn's cheaper. It's like, yeah, I'm not gonna get like a theater full of people like bursting into applause during like an Avengers thing when the cool thing happens. But like for the money for like 99% of movies, like I'm really confident that that TV is gonna, gonna do the job. And like, the big question for me is like, how does Warner Brothers put this genie back into the bottle? Like, once you get used to spending $15 a month and getting all these movies and you

• 25:25Speaker 04

  get to watch it from your couch and you're not spending, you know, $100 to take everyone out to go and see, you know, Wonder Woman in theater this holiday. It's like, how do you, how do you get that back?

• 25:35Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if Warner Brothers wants the genie back in the bottle.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  I don't think they do either. And also, Hime, I will get on Zoom with you and yell during exciting scenes if you'd like, because I'm also trying to replicate. And I've run out of favor with like our Verge colleagues, Bijan and Mike.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  We should start a service where we watch the movies.

• 25:54Nilay Patel?

  It's Julia Plus. That's what we're gonna call it. It's $15 a month and Julia just yells at you on Zoom.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  No, we'll do, we'll do a riff track. We'll do a podcast for every movie where all it is is complete silence, except during the good parts when we cheer. And then you can play the podcast while you watch the movie and it'll be perfect.

• 26:11Speaker 04

  I'm sold.

• 26:12Speaker 03

  Verge colleague, uh, Meghan Froch will no longer watch Marvel movies with me because she's like, you quote them and you yell and then you cry.

• 26:20Nilay Patel?

  I gotta say, I'm fully with Meghan on this one.

• 26:25Nilay Patel?

  It seems like the correct, uh, correct evaluation. Julia, so Heim brings up an interesting point. So before you would go to a theater, when the movie came out, all of you would pay $15 and then you would buy your own popcorn and soda. The movie would leave the theater, it would get syndicated, the studio would sell it to like four different TV channels. They would sell it to HBO. Then they would put it on iTunes and you would buy it. Then they would put it on Netflix would maybe buy it. Then they would finally, at the end of its road, sell it to TNT for pennies. And TNT would run ads again. And there was just a million opportunities to generate money from these movies as a movie, not as merchandising or theme parks or anything. You put it on a streaming service, you pay 15 bucks a month, it's just there.

• 27:09Nilay Patel?

  And those other, all those other little bites at the apple seem to go away. How do these economics even work out?

• 27:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, that's the question. There's like the two-fold question that I haven't seen anyone really answer. Uh, and it's a question, it's like arguably one of the most important questions, uh, which the two part of that is piracy, right? One, piracy is going to make a comeback because people can't afford to be paying for the stuff. And two, not piracy related, but password sharing related is like, I have, you know, four or five people on HBO Max, it's like families and friends. One person's paying $15 and it's an issue. So it's an issue that I would imagine, you know, in my. Small, non-executive brains, like you could be making a lot more money off this if you stop password sharing, but they, you know, they kind of seem to take their note from Netflix,

• 27:57Speaker 03

  where Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos have been like, eh, people are watching, it's helped with word of mouth, like, we're doing okay. But not everyone is Netflix, very few people are Netflix. Actually, no one is Netflix. And so that's an issue that they're going to run into. But the thing about what you're talking about is something Heim and I also talk about quite often, which is, for example, you cannot stream Harry Potter anywhere right now, which is an insane thing, because when two streaming services launched this year, they prided themselves on carrying Harry Potter, and now they're nowhere. To watch Harry Potter, you have to have NBC, but like TV, it's not on Peacock, it's not HBO Max, and that's because of windowing. So they're still making those deals. Warner Media is still licensing out its stuff and then just

• 28:40Speaker 03

  bringing it back and hoping people will sign up for it again when Harry Potter's back on its service. And on the other end of it, you have what Viacom CBS does, which is if you open up Netflix, oh, I meant to tweet this, if you open up Netflix, it is the top two rows of the most popular content are Viacom CBS shows. They're MTV shows, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, BET. It's like the most popular shows on Netflix. And Viacom knows that, so they can charge quite a bit if they wanted to, like, you want to carry our stuff? Cool, it's a non-exclusive deal, so we're still going to have it on CBS All-Access, which is about to become Paramount Plus. But we're going to give this to you, and we're going to make a bunch of money that way. So the thing that they're going to do is just start selling to

• 29:23Speaker 03

  other streamers. You know, Disney needs stuff for Hulu, Netflix needs a ton of stuff, HBO Max, Warner Media's also purchasing things from Viacom. So they're all still licensing their content, it's just going to different streamers at different times.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  So this is going to be like a giant, like, media streaming ecosystem, or a boros, where they're just selling each other the same movies over and over and over again? And that's how they make money? So I think it already was, but now it's harder to watch TV.

• 29:50Nilay Patel?

  That's what I'm getting out of this, right? Like, it already was that thing.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  The thing, the most interesting thing to me, I had an exec tell me this one. So they were like, windowing is suddenly something that if I go out for dinner, people ask me about. And it used to be a thing where nobody outside of the entertainment and media industry cared about windowing. It was like, okay, I watched this movie and then it's on DVD and then it ends up on HBO. And like that, I am aware of it because I can see it, but you didn't really notice if it left HBO. You were kind of like, oh, it's gone. Now I guess I'll buy a DVD. Now, because everyone is so, there's lists that go out every single month from a dozen publications that are like, here's what's coming to HBO Max, here's what's coming to Netflix, here's what's leaving. People are so much more invested in what they're paying every single month for. And they want to know exactly what's on it. And I think to an extent, well, that was, well, that was applicable with TV.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  There were so many channels in the cable bundle that you were just like, oh, I'll find something to watch, which is what Netflix does really well. Like there's like, there's always something on Netflix. You can just find it. But it's becoming much harder for them to just silently get rid of Harry Potter or whatever, or the Batman movies, because people are like, hey, I signed up for this thing because you promoted that you have this. Now you no longer have it and I want to know what's going on. And so it's very fun to hear like my non-media friends talk about windowing. Because it's like, this is a boring thing. It's a very licensing deal.

• 31:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, this is also like, when I say it's getting harder to watch TV, that to me is the evidence that it's getting harder, right? Because to figure out how to watch something, you have to figure out where it is. And then if you have even the slightest bit of curiosity of why things appear and disappear and go away, you will discover that windowing exists. And it turns out, most people have a lot of curiosity about why Harry Potter is no longer available, right? Like, people want to know why the things they were watching suddenly disappeared. And so I just look at this and I look at the fact that I have YouTube TV and it just got more expensive. And then they're in a fight with Sinclair, so the tennis channel went away. And like, I'm just getting all these carriage dispute-like emails. We talked about the fight between HBO Max and Roku.

• 31:56Nilay Patel?

  It feels like all we've done is move the entire mess of old TV onto newer devices with slightly different business models.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  For a minute, one glorious minute, it seemed really easy to watch a bunch of stuff because it was all on Netflix and now it is radically harder.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, like my most anticipated email every week is Nielsen sends out their top 10 ratings for the streamings for they have every streamer in the US and they break it down by minutes and everyone was really excited when Disney Plus made it on finally with the Mandalorian. But it's usually just Netflix and there was a period of time where you just open Netflix and it had everything. And what it's kind of proven is that in that time, Friends has never appeared on that list, even though it's on HBO Max. And that was like, well, we have Friends. It's the most popular show on Netflix, therefore it will do well here. And it's like, we're going to run into the exact same scenario when The Office leaves Netflix the end of the month and it's finally on Peacock. And it's like, no one, I shouldn't say no one. I would imagine very few people are rushing to sign up for Peacock or figuring out what Peacock

• 32:59Speaker 03

  is to watch The Office. They'll either buy the DVD set or like on iTunes will download it or they will pirate it. Because why were they going to sign up for this other thing that they don't want that maybe isn't on the aggregator that they're using like a Roku or an Amazon? It becomes so much more complicated that you end up just saying like, I'll just find something similar on Netflix. And this is the argument against a new streaming service that was announced called Discovery Plus, where Discovery, which is a huge, huge cable kind of collection of networks, it really is, it's very popular. They were like, we're going to launch a streaming service because we are very popular. And the biggest argument against it is like, but I can find a version 98 Day Fiance on Netflix. Like, there is a

• 33:42Speaker 03

  version of it that someone is making. And so eventually you just get to the point where it's like, does your brand really matter enough to get people to sign up? Or will you just find filler content?

• 33:52Speaker 02

  The thing here that's interesting is the result of everybody launching their own streaming service means that power is going to start going back to the aggregators, Google TV and Apple TV and Roku. Everybody is going to eventually feel like they need to be participate in search. That used to be thing, we're not going to be in your search, but now everyone's in the search. And now it's going to be, well, are you going to participate in their home screen? And increasingly, the companies that make the smart TVs are going to have the power to pick winners and losers on these streaming services. If Google TV and Discovery get in a fight, I'm never going to see, you know, Alton Brown on Food Network, something, something on the home screen there. They're just going to show me some other cooking show and I'm like, ah, fine, there it is. Or I'll just watch it on YouTube or whatever.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, when they announced Discovery Plus, they were like, the press release was like, we're on connected TVs. And it very specifically did not mention names. And then finally, on an investor call after they were like, we're in conversations with Roku and Peacock, which is what Warner Media said, it was what NBC Universal said. And it was just like, they have the power. They're like, we are in, you know, 70 million homes or whatever. We are the ones that are going to control what you're doing. And there's only two streamers that Roku and, and, uh, um, Amazon really are like, we need, and you know, Apple and all them, like, we really need you. And it's Netflix, because Netflix is the equivalent of, uh, TV Guide at this point. You just have it. It works. You, you like it. Um, and Disney. And I think what you're going to start seeing with Disney next year, when they have a new Star Wars and Marvel thing every week,

• 35:16Speaker 03

  and it's the thing that everyone is talking about. It's like, well, that's what you need to generate. You, uh, everyone has their big franchises, but you got to find a way to get it to a point where it's like, oh, if I'm Roku and I'm, uh, or Amazon, I need to have you on, because if I don't, people will go to Google or Apple and buy those TV devices so that they can watch Hawkeye, uh, or whatever is coming out.

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  You know, I just, we spend so much time talking about app stores and computers and who's in control. And then you just like, look at the TV industry and it's like, who are the, this is the most gatekeeper ecosystem that has ever existed. Dieter always talks about like, the backroom deals keeping you away from your computer, or forcing you to use, and like, everything in Hollywood is a backroom deal. Has anyone just made like, an open TV device?

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Plex.

• 36:05Nilay Patel?

  That you can ship an app to and it, Plex? No, you can't like, run an app on Plex.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 36:10Nilay Patel?

  Like, the Nvidia Shield is still an Android TV or a Google, whatever platform they're calling it now. The Nvidia Shield is still like, an Android TV device with the Google App Store. And like, Peacock is not going to let people sideload weird code onto it, right? Like, even the most open devices that we can think of are still fully ensconced in ecosystems that are totally controlled by executives making deals, not consumers running code. And I, I wonder if this, this is going to break in any way.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  What needs to happen is all that, all that gatekeep stuff needs to be, like, boxed in and kept in one space. So you have an open platform, and then you have like, a, like a card, like a cable card that you plug in. And that's where all the lockdown stuff goes. And then you're free to do whatever you want on your actual box.

• 36:58Nilay Patel?

  That's how I think this could work. The saddest situation, but like even this discovery thing, I think Peter Kafka had, he had a tweet about it that just, you know, like this is the week that Salesforce bought Slack, right? And he was like, Netflix used to be Discovery's biggest customer. All those shows were the biggest hits on Netflix. Netflix realized they could just make their own shark documentaries. And now Discovery is like out in the cold with its own also ran streaming service. Like that is a remark, like in a computer, we would say this third party accessory for your Mac was really good. And Apple just built it in the US and like that company is dead now.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  I mean, like related to my, uh, our distaste with every single UI, every single streaming service ever. Uh, the thing that a lot of these entertainment companies do because they're entertainment companies is they go, well, Netflix clearly liked our content. People like our content. They will therefore sign up to watch our content. And I think these companies are deeply, and I speak about myself here as a consumer, deeply downplaying how lazy I am. Like I like, it is like, I don't want to sign up for that. I'm so lazy that the Google TV came with apps installed and I was like, I don't know if I want to put my password in and go through all that.

• 38:07Nilay Patel?

  Yes, I do that all the time.

• 38:09Speaker 03

  Like, I was like, I don't know. It's fine. I have Hulu. It's good. But it's, it's that thing where Discovery, after Discovery kind of took a bunch of their shows off Netflix, yeah, people were still seeking it out. And there was Netflix has never made anything that got to that level of like Food Network or HGTV. And they do have their stars, but it's funny because what Discovery was promoting its service on is like, we have these stars, people will come watch these stars. And it's like Twitch and YouTube went through that same issue. They were like, we'll go watch this person. It's like, no, if they're on YouTube and someone leaves, they'll just find someone else sometime. Like they're just like, I'm here. This is where I want to be. It's what I know. I'm not going to go anywhere else to try to find something when there's so much more content that I can just dive into. Um, and there are rare exceptions. I really rare exceptions. Disney is again, probably the biggest

• 38:54Speaker 03

  because it's like, you can't find a Star Wars thing somewhere else. It's only on Disney. Uh, but Discovery is like, yeah, if your big things are 90 Day Fiance and Jada goes to like Italy or whatever, it's like, yeah, I, I can find that on Netflix and they're doing it at a speed that is like astronomically faster than anyone else.

• 39:14Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, I'm very excited for Wonder Woman on Christmas Day to watch in my house.

• 39:18Speaker 03

  You gotta watch Soul in your house.

• 39:19Nilay Patel?

  It's the thing we've always wanted, wanted to have happen. It's happening. What is Soul?

• 39:24Speaker 03

  Soul is the new Pixar movie. It comes out on Christmas Day. You have a child.

• 39:30Nilay Patel?

  I don't, that baby does not need any more characters to latch on to. We got the Paw Patrol. We're good. Is Soul gonna be appropriate for a small child? Isn't the setup that like the guy dies like bang?

• 39:39Speaker 04

  It's a Pixar movie. It's gonna be cute. It's gonna make you sad. It's gonna have like adorable brightly colored characters.

• 39:46Nilay Patel?

  Also, I'm a little worried Max is a sociopath. Like she loves The Lion King, but every time Mufasa dies, she throws her stuffed lion over the couch and starts like cracking up.

• 39:54Speaker 03

  I mean, Scar, Scar throwing Mufasa off and going along with the king is, I cheer every time.

• 40:00Nilay Patel?

  We have to take a break. We're gonna take a break. That's what's happening. Here are some ads.

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• 41:10Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Actually, this all ties together. One of the things that is really interesting about HBO Max is that it's part of AT&T. Julie and I interviewed Tony Goncalves, who is an executive as part of the HBO Max launch, and he told us that HBO Max is exempt from AT&T's data caps, which is a big deal, right? I mean, that is just part of the net neutrality conversation writ large. But if you have an AT&T phone and you go to stream Wonder Woman, or you go to stream any of these other movies that are coming out on HBO Max, it will not hit your data cap. If you have Verizon phone, you open HBO Max, try streaming one of these movies, it obviously

• 41:50Nilay Patel?

  will hit your data cap. Now, there's an out, which is that Netflix can go pay AT&T for sponsored data and it won't hit your data cap. I suspect Netflix will not do that. And also, HBO Max is owned by AT&T, so they're just paying themselves, which is my favorite kind of accounting. But it's a big deal, right? I mean, this is, here's the moment where the pipes and the content are coming together. AT&T is a service provider, it's cutting its content service a favorable deal. The simplest way to express it is HBO Max does not hit your data cap, Netflix does. So there's a cost difference now for AT&T customers in streaming each service. That is all in the context of net neutrality. And what we now know is that FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is stepping down on January 20th, which

• 42:32Nilay Patel?

  is inauguration day. We expect Biden will propose a new chairperson of the FCC. But the moves that are happening right now are that Trump is proposing a replacement for Pai. His name is Nathan Simmington. He is the person who wrote the petition to overturn 230 at Trump's behest. So Pai, who was, for all of his many faults, was very focused on internet access, right? That's what RFCC under the Trump administration has mostly done, is deregulate ISPs, because the thinking is with fewer regulations, they will build more and better networks. I obviously have my disagreements with that, but the focus

• 43:13Nilay Patel?

  on how should we build networks and how do we incentivize the construction of networks, that's where the FCC has been. Simmington comes in as Pi's replacement. The focus of the FCC and McKenna Kelly, our great policy reporter, wrote a profile of Brendan Carr, the other Republican FCC Commissioner. Their focus is on regulating social media and speech on social media. So you've got Carr, who's already talking about it a lot. You should read McKenna's profile of him. It is very indicative of a lot of the thinking around, a lot of the conservative thinking about how to regulate the internet. And then Simmington, who literally wrote the petition to say, the FCC should regulate Twitter and Facebook. It seems like he's going to get confirmed as Pi's replacement. So that's a huge shift.

• 43:56Nilay Patel?

  That also means you right now, at the end of the Trump administration, you'll end up with two Democrats and two Republicans and the potential of a Republican Senate not confirming Biden's nomination as the chairman. So you'd have a deadlocked FCC that can't do anything. I'm just putting this out there. I don't think there's like not any more analysis. It's just the current state of play. But as we think about next year, AT&T saying to its customers, you should stream our service, which has all of these movies, and it won't hit your data cap versus Netflix. That's going to be a real conversation. That neutrality has always been a slow boil and it's just, it's going to be at a simmer next year. Like the temperature turned up one more tick.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  Well, and it's also like the thing you mentioned about how we've been focusing on neutrality and AT&T and who owns the pipes and who's paying who to get access to the pipes. And, you know, zero rating data and all of that is very, very focused on the networks. But this, it's moving to a different burner now. Now it's going to be focused on like social media networks and they'll be more focused on content instead of pipes, which, you know, normally the way we've been thinking about the FCC, we haven't been thinking about it in that way. But, you know, they have fine TV networks for the stuff that they find lewd or vulgar. They, they can jump in in different places where we don't traditionally think of the FCC as jumping in.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  And so if there's a bigger push to like shift its focus over there, that'll be weird and interesting to watch, is one way to put it. But there's also like, we shouldn't forget that they still have the remit over all the stuff that they just deregulated. And like, that doesn't mean AT&T is going to like, they got permission to do some shenanigans. They've done some, they're probably going to do some more.

• 45:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think there's a real question about the future of what the FCC focus is on. If they're deadlocked, if. You know, if Symington gets confirmed, he's going to be the next character that we'd think about at the FCC. What kind of mug does he use? I believe, I believe the FCC is back to regular sized mugs across the board. But the question of whether they spend all of their time focused on Twitter and Facebook instead of making broadband better, faster, cheaper is a big deal. And I would say this, well, you know, one of our biggest stories the past week, Comcast is going to impose data caps of 1.2 terabytes on more than a dozen states over the next couple of months, particularly northeastern states, which are very populous. So a lot more data caps are coming. We've seen Comcast also raising internet TV prices next year.

• 46:24Nilay Patel?

  We've seen other providers, Charter, Spectrum, they've all been raising prices. So at the beginning of the pandemic, right? What do they do? They, they got rid of their data caps, they lowered their prices, they said, you know, if you have financial difficulties, you're going to have to pay. And everyone said, this is great. Why didn't you do this the whole time? Because they were also bragging about how well their networks were holding up. We're coming to a point where they're saying, actually, we're, we're going to, we're going to squeeze everybody a little bit more. And I think, you know, the argument on data caps is very deep, it's very technical, but at the end of the day, it does not cost them any more money to sell you any more service. Right? Like, it's just electrons. Hi, my, my, um, my rudimentary understanding of electrons, and you're the engineer here, is that sending you one extra electron does not cost thousands more dollars than the previous electron.

• 47:08Speaker 04

  That is, that is correct.

• 47:09Nilay Patel?

  Okay, just checking.

• 47:10Speaker 04

  On a, on a deep technical level, yes.

• 47:13Nilay Patel?

  Well, but that's, that's the story, right? The networks, we, they have shown this year that networks are very capable of absorbing the spike in demand. And now they're saying, to be fair, we have to bring the caps back and start charging more money. And I think that combined with some of this content pipe merging stuff that we're seeing, the net neutrality conversation is going to get very loud, the FCC might be deadlocked, and two of the four commissioners might be focused on how mad they are at Twitter for putting labels on things. It's going to, it's going to be a ride. I will say, this doesn't appear to be happening, but we have it on our list. Wednesday night, like midnight, Trump was tweeting like, I'm not going to pass the National Defense Authorization Act that they pass every year unless it includes a repeal of section 230. And we all just, poor McKenna was like, ah, crap.

• 47:59Nilay Patel?

  She had to spend her day chasing it down. You know, Trump didn't win the election, and so his political power is reduced. But that's where at least one part of the Republican Party is at, which is, we should just eliminate 230. It doesn't seem like that's going to happen. There's a bill that's passing through committee. It doesn't have it in there, but I say this every week and I'll say it again. Repealing 230 is also Joe Biden's stated position. So there's just a lot of noise to come in how we think about, like as Dieter said, every part of the network, whether it's the pipes, whether it's the content of the pipes, or whether it's how the services moderate user content. All of that is, the heat's going to be up next year. Okay, that was enough of a speech from me. We're going to take another break and then I want Heim to tell us all about these new Snapdragon processors.

• 48:47Speaker 05

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• 50:09Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. I'm Gartner, Snapdragon 888.

• 50:12Speaker 04

  It is new Snapdragon time, so we're jumping right ahead from 865 to 888. So you get that nice branding synergy.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  By the way, Sherwin Lo pointed out that if you think about it, this is actually the Snapdragon Zero, because 888.

• 50:28Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God, Dieter.

• 50:29Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 50:29Nilay Patel?

  Well, I should say, Sherwin, you did a good job. I think, Dieter, I'm mad at you for telling me about that pun. Because you should, you'd need a pun filter.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 50:38Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Continue.

• 50:40Speaker 04

  So in a lot of ways, this is kind of just a very standard Snapdragon update. You know, faster speeds, better cameras, more powerful AI. There are a couple of interesting, interesting little bits here that kind of make this a little more interesting. So first off, we are finally back to an integrated 5G modem. Now, for the last, like, two years, the 865 and 855, you could get 5G, but you had to have a separate modem in the phone. And then last year's was really weird. The main 865 chip didn't have a modem at all. Like, if you just put an 865 in your phone, it could not connect to any cellular thing. Because Qualcomm wanted to make 5G mandatory, but not enough to put the modem in the phone,

• 51:25Speaker 04

  in the main chip. So every 5G, every Android 5G phone from last year has a separate modem chip in it, which takes up more space and draws more power. So we're finally back to an integrated modem. It's a new modem, it's the X60, it does a couple of things better. It's also 5-nanometer modem, so it should be more power efficient. Some numbers that like Samsung, who's, you know, the one making the chips, says that the 5-nanometer node is 20% better power efficiency. We have to actually see how that works out. Qualcomm is giving similar numbers. But the net result is 5G is now actually really finally integrated, like, into all Android flagships in the good way, where it is not necessarily going to cause as big of a hit to your battery life.

• 52:07Speaker 04

  And combined with the new node, and then the, you know, other improvements in, you know, power efficiency across the CPU and GPU, means that 5G should be even Less of a concern for battery than it already is, even on millimeter wave, hopefully.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  And actually, before we get off the modem, we should point out that one of the features in this modem that they're really excited about is carrier aggregation.

• 52:28Speaker 04

  Carrier aggregation.

• 52:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we should talk about that a little bit because in theory, depending on how it goes and what the networks do, this could be one of the ways that 5G goes from like, why is this slower than LTE? To actually being pretty good, and it's also maybe somewhat related to, will Verizon specifically, but other carriers, figure out a way to deal with not having all of the spectrum they could possibly want to light up all their 5G networks?

• 52:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, so one of the big things here is that Qualcomm is starting to do sub-six gigahertz carrier aggregation, which means that the sub-six gigahertz, those wider bands of 5G that have the slower speeds, are able to connect to more chunks of spectrum at the same time, to have faster data per user. It's a technique that we've actually seen a lot in recent years on the e-things, when, you know, older ones that were only on LTE, so go back generations of iPhones, a couple generations of Samsung phones, this stuff started, was already using this, this was, you know, AT&T's 5G E stuff, all that. A lot of that was built in carrier aggregation. So, we're finally bringing some of those improvements more to 5G, which will be good, but again, this is a thing that's sort of the theme with a lot of Qualcomm stuff.

• 53:40Speaker 04

  Qualcomm is laying the groundwork here, and it's really up to the device manufacturers and the carriers to follow through. For example, the new Snapdragon 888 is in theory capable of download speeds up to 7.5 gigabits per second. You will never see that on any smartphone in 2020. You're just not. But it's nice to think that it might be possible, and also when you raise that ceiling, it does help make speeds better, even if you're not getting the maximum speed. That was true on, you know, 3G, it's true on 4G, 4T LTE, it'll be true on 5G. So, that's part of it. The other thing is, you know, new updated CPU, new updated GPU. One of the interesting things here is that Qualcomm is using, ARM had introduced earlier this year its new Cortex X1 core.

• 54:24Speaker 04

  Now, the way Qualcomm's chips, the big chips, the flag- ships are typically set up as a 134 setup. So it has one really big main CPU, three also big, but not as big, you know, power cores, and then four efficiency cores. Now, usually, the top four cores are all the same product. It's usually one of the, sorry, one of the Cortex ARM cores. This year, though, they're using, ARM introduced this earlier this year. It's the ARM Cortex X1, which it promises to provide up to 30% better peak performance efficiency than last year's big core. So it's got like an extra juiced core, which should help for performance. And they're also promising a, let me get the exact number, a 35% jump in GPU performance, which Qualcomm says is the biggest jump

• 55:09Speaker 04

  in GPU performance is ever done, so they will be faster. The other two big areas, and this is traditional for Qualcomm, but there's a couple of interesting things here in particular, are cameras and AI. So we'll start with cameras, where the most interesting thing is that the new Spectra 850 ISP is now a triple ISP. So it can, in theory, capture three simultaneous still images or video streams at once. So like what you could do with this, if you have a phone with an ultra wide a wide and a telephoto camera, with one press of the shutter, you could capture a still from all three of those lenses at, you know, those different perspectives, which is kind of cool. You can also capture three simultaneous 4K HDR video streams

• 55:51Speaker 04

  at the same time, which I don't know why you would need to do that.

• 55:55Speaker 02

  Oh, you did, Apple was really high on this idea for iPhones, where you would shoot with all three lenses at the same time, and then you can switch between them as the, you know, in edit, in post. So you just like, you set up the camera, you shoot all three lenses, and then you can like change the scene without having to move the camera, because you've got three lenses shooting the same scene at the same time.

• 56:16Speaker 04

  All right, well, that's, that is a good reason for it.

• 56:20Speaker 04

  I guess.

• 56:23Speaker 04

  Tell you what, if you're using, if you're planning on using a smartphone to capture three simultaneous 4K HDR video streams, please message me on Twitter and send me, send me your edited video and, and how this has improved your workflow. I'm, would love to hear more about this.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  I'm very excited for this. So, but sticking with the camera for just a second, um, actually, we should talk about the GPU a little bit more too. But anyway, um, the, the thing that's interesting when you look at what they do, it's triple ISPs, it's, uh, they've got a, a new like specific night mode thing. They have got, you know, just like a bunch of stuff where you like, just look back at like the flagship camera features of the past couple of years and Qualcomm is saying, everyone's been doing that stuff in their flagship phones. They've done it themselves. We're just building it into the chip now, which is kind of the regular cycle of how Qualcomm goes with Android phones. So the thing that was like night, night sight, night photography was like, oh my God, how'd you figure this out? This is incredible, is now just going to be commodified, commoditized across any Android phone that wants it because it's just built into the chip.

• 57:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, I mean, and the big, the big sort of, the big part of that is it's any Android phone that wants it. Qualcomm sets these up, but manufacturers have to support it. Um, and that's not always the case. Like this phone, the phones with a Snapdragon 888 can, for example, shoot 120 photos at 10 megapixels in one second, but your manufacturer needs to have a lens and resolution and needs to, you know, build it into their phone and their software to offer that as a feature. Uh, you can shoot, you know, 10 bit color in HEIF, but the manufacturers have to decide whether that is a feature they want to offer. But yeah, the fact that they're building it in on a native level is a thing that we've seen. It's a thing with, you know, previous ISP upgrades have allowed, you know, double

• 58:05Speaker 04

  cameras, which soon became, you know, standard or triple cameras. And it's sort of a rising tide lifts all boats that when Qualcomm raises the floor here, it gives manufacturers more room to do more interesting things with the ceiling.

• 58:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. But I mean, the, the big open question here, especially maybe with the GPU is,

• 58:24Speaker 02

  Apple's chips, right? And this is really, really a big deal for like, computers now. Because Qualcomm, they've worked with Microsoft, the SQ1, the SQ2. They've got the 8CX. You know, they're going to keep working on that. When you compare Android phones to iPhones, and therefore Qualcomm chips to the A14 line of chips, A15, whatever, Bionics. You're like, yeah, okay, it seems like it's faster, but it doesn't matter because like, it has different RAM properties on the iPhone than on Android. And the way that Android OS works, there's a whole lot of extra cruft in there. And so that's the reason the animations are slow. Like, you can't be that mad at the chip, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like, I think that we're pretty, it's getting really clear that, I don't know if I'm saying Qualcomm is bad at making chips, but it's more that making a chip that needs

• 59:07Speaker 02

  to work for like, the entire Android ecosystem and needs to be a platform is, in fact, like the cliche that Apple gets to control the whole vertical stack and therefore they can like, make something that's faster and better for their specific purpose. I think it's like, becoming clearer. And so, there's a bunch of numbers on this 888, and I'm really curious to see what it does. I'm really curious to see what it does for battery life, in particular, with these 5 nanometer processors, with the faster graphics and all that stuff. But, the like, the Apples to Androids comparison, I think is going to get a little bit sharper because people are going to be able to do it not just on phones, but also now on ARM laptops.

• 59:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, look, in terms of raw power, with you know, the clock speeds and the percentage GPU improvement, I mean, we'll have to wait to get the device and people will benchmark them and all that. But like, in terms of raw power, like, this GPU might be better on paper than the ones in Apple's stuff, but Apple does have that intrinsic advantage. I mean, it's a thing that, like you said, was very clear. Like, Apple's instruction set for macOS is designed specifically to run on, you know, the M1. And that's an advantage that Apple just has intrinsically that it can do because it is doing all those things, which Qualcomm-

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  But can I, can I ask a really dumb question about that? I, I've heard that argument, and I was just on that talk show with John Gruber, and we talked about that a little bit as well. Snapdragon chips run on cellphones that run Android. There isn't another operating system-

• 1:00:36Nilay Patel?

  There's barely even another use case.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  Well, they run on Windows, too.

• 1:00:41Nilay Patel?

  Well, sure, but like the tiny, the tiniest sliver over there of Windows. Like, the biggest market is smartphones running Android, which is effectively run by one single company. I understand it's open source, so yeah, put that caveat in there. Is there some reason that the Android team hasn't called Qualcomm and said, just make your chips better at running our code? Like, it, it, because on paper, in the abstract, this makes sense, right? Qualcomm is making a general-purpose processor that needs to do a bunch of things. Android is just one client operating system that runs on their, on their chips. And so you can't optimize it as tightly as Apple. I think you, everyone says that and it makes totally intuitive sense and off we go.

• 1:01:25Nilay Patel?

  But here in reality, there, much to Dieter's chagrin, there isn't a competitor smartphone operating system from a plucky upstart with great ideas about the web. There is not another category of devices that really run Snapdragon chips. It's just the thing. What is preventing them from coming to that level of optimization and alignment?

• 1:01:44Speaker 02

  I'm sure they do talk, like there, there's no question that things-

• 1:01:47Nilay Patel?

  There's not even another smartphone chip vendor. There's MediaTek.

• 1:01:50Speaker 04

  Well, you have Samsung.

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  Real vendor, there's Exynos. They will not be using Exynos in the US, I do not think, for their next flight.

• 1:01:58Nilay Patel?

  There's Huawei as well, but like, here in the United States, there's but one vendor. Yeah. Anyway, keep going.

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  No, so I think they do talk, but like Android needs to work on those other chips as well. And it's just, it's a difference between, well, maybe not in the pandemic times. It's a difference between having to walk down the hall to be like, hey, I have an idea. Let's do this thing and like, can you put this extra little instruction set in your chip? And setting up a meeting with 10 people and then having a negotiation over a video conference and then driving down to the campus or flying over there to like, talk about it a little bit further. Da, da, da, da, da. Like, being the same company just makes it a little bit more efficient, I think.

• 1:02:33Speaker 04

  Part of it is also Qualcomm isn't the one designing this stuff. It's ARM. So Google is, it's a game of telephone, right? Qualcomm is taking the cores that ARM is making and building its chip around those. And then Google is building its thing on top of, on top of Qualcomm. And there's a manufacturer intermediary. Like it's, it's not as straightforward as, you know, Google just calls up Qualcomm and is like, make our stuff work better. It's Google calls up Qualcomm, Qualcomm calls up ARM. ARM is like, we make cores for a lot of things. Like it's just the raw, the raw parts. So I think it's a little, a little more involved than, than just a simple, a simple fix there.

• 1:03:09Nilay Patel?

  I said it was a dumb question. I said it from the start. I just, I, I think it's important to like, bring it to reality from time to time and say, actually the, the sort of abstract explanation, in reality, it doesn't quite line up that way. And I, I wonder, and you know, it was Qualcomm's, they had their big summit this week. That's where the 888 was announced. And they just basically, and they have to do this, but they, they evinced not even a whiff of anxiety about the M1, right? The context of them announcing a new chip is everyone just went insane over the M1 and the new Macs. We're saying it's an inflection point for computers writ large. Apple's way ahead on this curve.

• 1:03:52Nilay Patel?

  Intel's in the corner crying and Qualcomm's like, well, what else are you going to do? And I feel like that's just an important series of questions for them to answer. Can they, can they meet that performance? Or are they just going to let Apple run away with it? And they'll be, sure, the dominant provider, there are more Android phones in the world than anything else. But I'm sure Microsoft is like, hey, we can't let every Windows laptop in the world be slower at every price point compared to the Apple computer. Like that, that can't be the outcome Microsoft wants. And I think that's an important problem for Intel.

• 1:04:24Speaker 04

  And it is a growing problem for Qualcomm.

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's funny. So the the phone versus laptop thing is interesting because fundamentally, however fast the 888 is, we're just assuming it won't be faster necessarily than iPhone. But it's always like, the story has been the same. Like, if you look at the raw power in the chip, it is kind of irrelevant to the operation of a phone because it's Android and iOS. And they're like, they work different, and they feel different, and blah, blah, blah, blah. With laptops, it feels like you can make a more one-to-one comparison. But that story isn't quite right, because there is Exynos, and people do compare Qualcomm phones, Exynos phones directly. There are Huawei chips. In theory, Google's Whitechapel chip might come out this year on a Pixel, and they might just do the thing. Instead of having a little chip off to the side that does something small, they actually produce

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  the main chip themselves, then we'll have another thing to directly compare against Qualcomm. So it feels like Qualcomm has been in this place where they're the dominant maker of chips for phones, especially in the US. And there's like, nothing to directly compare them against for people's actual experience of what matters from a chip on a device. Like, they just, no one is directly comparing them to stuff on a mass scale. And so the question is, with M1 being directly compared to whatever ARM, Windows laptops there are, if in fact Google does a Whitechapel chip, I don't think Samsung's going to make a big push in Exynos this year. But there is a chance that, for the first time in a while, there is going to be, pardon the pun, apples-to-apples comparison for Qualcomm

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  Snapdragon chips. Because we haven't really had that for a while, that like, at a scale that mattered, anyway.

• 1:06:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, that's also part of it. They just haven't had to compete. Like, you know, LG and Samsung are still buying Qualcomm chips. There's, there's no other game in town to go to. So then they don't really need to bow to anyone and, you know, make, make it work better on their end. It's, we're going to make what we, we're going to make what we make, and then, you know, work with what you have, or go somewhere else. And it turns out, there's not a lot of other places to go.

• 1:06:25Nilay Patel?

  As always, the theme of our show comes back to competition. It's like the top of our show was Julia being like, the competition in TV services is nuts and it's bad. And the bottom of our show is there's very little competition in chips and it's bad. If you are an economist that can work out the ideal amount of competition, please let us know. It's always, oh, by the way, thank you to, I was gonna say we're way over time and that reminded me to say, uh, thank you to everyone who's been tweeting us Spotify charts. Dieter and I have just been smiling at each other with the, the number of people who've listened to like 6,500 hours of The Vergecast over the past year. Uh, so that's been great. That leads me to say we're way over time.

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  Ah, I got so much stuff to say about Samsung next week.

• 1:07:01Nilay Patel?

  No, I want to do, uh, you had a good point, which is Samsung released a lot of good phones this year and they kind of got washed, washed out. So.

• 1:07:08Speaker 02

  Remember the Galaxy S20, the last event before the pandemic? And how all year the Galaxy S20 and like all the variants of it have just been quietly great 5G phones. And all of the 5G hype since then has been like for the other phones and Samsung's just like, yep, still, still here, still good. They just put out one UI 3.0, Android 11 for it. Took them three months, which isn't great, but it's better. Um, there's a rumor that they're gonna drop the Note line. I have many emotions about that, but we're over time. But stay tuned for more emotions about that, um, at some point in the near future. I just think Samsung is like quietly making pretty good stuff. Not quietly, but they're making pretty good stuff and like not in the conversation I would, in a way that would have expected them to, because it's no longer Apple versus Samsung. Oh, my God. The new Galaxy Buds are coming, apparently. They're rumored and they're gonna have noise

• 1:07:53Speaker 02

  cancellation. They're gonna be shaped like lozenges instead of beans, I guess.

• 1:07:57Nilay Patel?

  I'm not gonna acknowledge this product until they call them the Galaxy Beans.

• 1:07:59Speaker 02

  Well, they're not, they're not bean shaped anymore, but.

• 1:08:02Speaker 04

  These are bud shaped, so, so they can be buds again.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  They have had the best all-round earbuds that aren't AirPods for two years running, basically, with the Galaxy Buds. The Buds Plus are great. They're still my go-to headphones. They're gonna put an active noise cancellation in them. They're gonna be good. They've got the Beans, which are an interesting new kind of product. Um, they just like, they've got a line of three to four different, like wireless earbuds that are like really solid. And I don't, no one, they're not a cultural thing anymore. So Samsung is making its best phones ever, but their cultural relevance has sort of disappeared, or it's, it's at least gone down. I think that's really fascinating.

• 1:08:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Maybe it's because they can't do the events. They gotta bring back next year. They gotta bring back the Broadway plays.

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  Hmm. They gotta, they gotta, they gotta bring back the splashy Super Bowl commercials.

• 1:08:52Nilay Patel?

  You know, I know we're doing like end of year roundups and they're mostly, they're largely entertainment focused. We should do an end of year ranking everyone's weird pandemic infomercials.

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 1:09:02Nilay Patel?

  Because there are a lot of weird pandemic infomercials.

• 1:09:05Speaker 03

  Dieter, that was like the most heartfelt pitch in the world. I just keep picturing you as the Love Actually dude with the like signs. He's just like, "Says on at least so many things."

• 1:09:14Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they tried, they tried.

• 1:09:17Speaker 02

  The Z Fold 2 is really good. It's just, it's too expensive. It's wildly expensive.

• 1:09:23Nilay Patel?

  Also, no one's going anywhere.

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:25Nilay Patel?

  Like, if you buy the flashy flippy phone.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:27Nilay Patel?

  And you're just like, "Can I get on a Zoom call with you? I gotta show you my cellphone." Like, maybe you and I, that's like, you and I are locked in on that.

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:36Nilay Patel?

  Not as, not as good of a sales for other people. I will, I will promote something. We are working very hard on getting the president of Qualcomm to do a Vergecast interview with me and Dieter. Time, I'm gonna need to take copious notes from a conversation with you before we do that. Hopefully that's coming next week. We're just trying to work out some timing. So I'm excited about that. You can tweet at us. Heim is C. Gartenberg. Julia is Loudmouth Julia. Dieter's Backlon. I'm at Reckless. We've put out a number of Twitter calls to action on the show, I believe. Everything from economists to struggling filmmakers recording three streams of video at once. Just tweet at us. We love hearing from you. Again, thank you, everybody who tweeted us. Decoder is out on Tuesday. This week, we've got an interview with Substack CEO Chris Best. I'm very excited about this episode. It was

• 1:10:20Nilay Patel?

  very interesting to talk to him. That is, we're not running Decoder in the Vergecast feed anymore, so if you're interested, go subscribe to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. And we'll be back next Friday with the Chat Show. That's it. Rock and roll.

• 1:10:31Speaker 02

  Wear a mask.

• 1:10:50Speaker 07

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