How a TikTok ban could actually work

Today on the flagship podcast of quantum dots: 02:33 - Makena Kelly explains the various attempts from the US government to ban TikTok, and how that could actually work. TikTok ban: all the news on attempts to ban the video platform Inside the US government’s fight to ban TikTok 25:06 - Allison Johnson explains the state of the Android phone market, and where it’s headed next this year. The best Android phone to buy in 2023 51:28 - Chris Welch explains why this may be the best time to buy an OLED TV. This is the best time in a decade to splurge on a premium OLED TV Making sense of new TV features in 2022 Vote for us in the People’s Voice Webby Awards for Best Technology Podcast: http://bit.ly/3moCTDs Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. 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.

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Quantum Dots. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I'm sitting here at my desk trying desperately to figure out the exact color temperature that my ring light should be. Liam, our producer, keeps telling me that I look weirdly tan and sort of gross on our video podcasts, so I'm sitting here trying to figure out how to balance the big glass doors on my left, the bricks behind me and outside, and the dark basement everywhere else. Basically, I just slide the thing until I look weird and orange, and then I slide it back until I look weird and blue. Somewhere in the middle, there is a right answer, I think, but I have kind of lost hope that I'm ever going to find it. Okay, sorry, I have to stop this and focus. We have a great show coming up for you today. We're going to talk

• 0:47David Pierce?

  about the TikTok ban, which I don't think is going to happen, but if it does, we're going to talk about how it might work. Then, we're going to talk about the state of Android phones and how it happened that really only two companies make phones worth buying anymore. And finally, we're going to dig into OLED TVs and why these gorgeous but flawed and very expensive screens are becoming a much better buy. All that is coming in just a sec, but first, I think I'm going to buy another ring light, because that'll fix it, right? More ring lights I can't figure out is better than fewer ring lights I can't figure out? I don't know. Here goes nothing. This is The Vergecast. We'll be right back.

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• 2:30David Pierce?

  Welcome back. We've talked a bunch on this show about the various attempts by the US government to ban TikTok. And after a hearing a couple of weeks ago with TikTok CEO Xiao Zhi Chu, it's starting to look more and more likely that some kind of ban might actually happen. Or at the very least, that the government might try really, really hard to make it happen. But it won't be easy to do. The most current thing happening right now is a bill in Montana that would explicitly ban TikTok and would fine any entity like an app store that makes it available to users. That would be a big deal for lots of obvious reasons. That bill has been passed, but hasn't been signed by the governor, at least as we're recording this. But things could change fast.

• 3:13David Pierce?

  And if that bill does become law and goes into effect in 2024, it will test in a big way whether a TikTok ban is actually legal and even possible. The Verge's Makena Kelly has been tracking this ban for a while and was at that hearing the other week and has been looking into what might happen next. So she's here to explain.

• 3:34David Pierce?

  Hi, McKenna.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 3:36David Pierce?

  You survived the TikTok rallies, the great TikTok rallies of 2023.

• 3:40Speaker 03

  Right. And I'm back and alive and there is more TikTok stuff happening.

• 3:45David Pierce?

  I was thinking about what I wanted to do here because I feel like we've talked a lot on this show, including with you, about whether a TikTok ban is a good idea. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think fairly succinctly, neither of us think it's going to solve the problem it purports to solve. Is that fair to say?

• 4:00Speaker 03

  That's definitely fair. There's a lot of problems lawmakers say they have with TikTok, few of which either have evidence to justify them or would be resolved by a ban.

• 4:12David Pierce?

  Okay, good. So let's just leave that there for now. I want to talk about like what it looks like to actually ban TikTok. And I think that if we're going to do this, we have to start several years ago when Trump tried to do this.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  Right. That was the first time that there actually was a ban happening. There was a lot of discussion before then about TikTok being a national security risk, asking other governmental bureaucracies to evaluate it. But it was Trump in 2020, right? When he signed that executive order banning TikTok and of course, like WeChat and other Chinese affiliated services like that. That was like the first ban we ever had.

• 4:47David Pierce?

  Okay, that obviously didn't work. We still have TikTok. I just used TikTok before we got on this call. Like it still exists, can confirm. Why didn't it work? Like what is between Donald Trump saying TikTok is banned and actual TikTok ban? Why? What happened? What fell apart there?

• 5:02Speaker 03

  Right. So it was an executive order. It was the president saying through some regulations with the executive branch that he is flat out going to ban TikTok. These powers have not been executed in this way before for something so flat out, a direct ban on a specific company. So as soon as he signed that executive order, basically instantaneously, and I think we can just say that this will happen with any attempt to ban it, there was a series of legal challenges. TikTok sued the Trump administration. At one point, three influencers sued the Trump administration. And then there was also a third lawsuit, I believe, from a TikTok employee saying that this was unjustified

• 5:43Speaker 03

  and had no legal grounding. And then, of course, through the next couple of weeks and months, I think it was only about three or four months, several US judges said that Trump had overstepped his power in the executive branch and was unable to do this.

• 5:56David Pierce?

  Okay. And if I remember right, one of the justifications back then was essentially, there's no evidence for this. You're saying a bunch of things about Chinese involvement and the Chinese Communist Party, all of which could be big problems and there could be real risks here, but you've provided us with essentially no evidence or justification for why you're doing this. Is that, am I remembering that correctly?

• 6:17Speaker 03

  Correct. And that's kind of what's been happening throughout these past couple of years. I also want to remind listeners in 2020, what was going on then? That was a presidential election. Trump was running against Joe Biden. And at that time, of course, Republicans, their campaign arms, their campaign branches are trying to find something to get Joe Biden on, or something that would snag Democrats on if Democrats were able to, you know, take over the White House again, and in which they did. So now you've seen this over the past couple of years and over the, you know, the beginning, and now we're getting to the end of Biden's first term, this pressure from Republicans, even Democrats now, trying to get the administration to be tougher on China. And at this point, it seems like TikTok, since it's such a well-known app, people use it. It's become

• 7:00Speaker 03

  kind of this poster child for more than just, you know, a sour app that's got lawmakers pissed off about the how to pass out challenge, national security, things like this. But just like the US is beef with China, rising as like a global superpower.

• 7:14David Pierce?

  That context, I think, helps make sense to me of things like the Restrict Act. And we've had this run recently of people trying to pass legislation that sort of makes what Trump tried to do a couple of years ago, possible to do now, right? Like, is that, are we just trying to sort of retcon that ability back to the president to ban an app if he feels like it?

• 7:35Speaker 03

  Right. So, look, so Trump tried to do this thing. He tried to ban the app. The court said no. Next step there is legislative branch to be like, how do we, as Congress, as elected officials of the people, write a law that would allow a president to do this, or allow the creation of some kind of process to essentially do that? And so we had the Restrict Act come out in March. People are really upset about it, justifiably, I think, in many ways. And that creates a process. Now, it wouldn't be the president doing this, but it would be the Commerce Department. Essentially taking about 180 days, whatever it is in the bill, to create this process of analyzing foreign-owned technologies, figuring out whether or not they pose a threat, and then being able to roll out some kind of restrictions,

• 8:20Speaker 03

  punishments, whatever for these, then I guess, you know, investigated, evidential-based moves to either ban or divest or things like that to better protect American data.

• 8:32David Pierce?

  Okay, so it's the kind of thing that it was just like, two years ago, there was nothing specifically allowing this, so it was very hard to pull it off. And now the goal is like, let's actually lay out the terms by which this is allowed, and then we can do it.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 8:44David Pierce?

  Okay, real quick pause on the Restrict Act, just because this has come up a bunch, and I'm curious to get your thoughts. The sort of two takes on the Restrict Act that I've read are, this is great, we need it, ban TikTok. And all the way on the other side, this is a massive overreach. This essentially lets the president like snoop on your browser history and do whatever they want to anything. It's a total invasion of privacy, and it'll destroy the internet as we know it. Where on that spectrum do you fall? And do you feel like this bill actually lives?

• 9:12Speaker 03

  Right, so there has been so much said about this bill. And again, I don't want to diminish people's concerns because we've been through the Patriot Act. We've been through a lot of these oversteps of the government's power. When it comes to the Restrict Act, we've spoken to Mark Warner specifically. His intention was not to, this is what he says, right? This is what he tells us. His intention was not to allow the government to snoop into your DMs, was not to fine you $20 million, or what it is for downloading a VPN. That's not the intention. But of course, when you get down to legislative text, the words need to be very precise. Otherwise, you could get into a world where maybe a new administration decides that, oh yeah, we want to use this to justify some kind of program,

• 9:57Speaker 03

  to justify something, you know, at the scale of NSA, citizen spying, things like that. I think that's extremely justified. And so right now, I don't think the intention of the bill is to do that. But when we talk to experts, people who are civil liberties experts, people who are digital privacy experts, there needs to be a process here. This is the first introduction of the bill. If it goes anywhere, it's likely to be rewritten. There's going, it's going to be amended. Things are going to change. We're in this phase of the Restrict Act right now, where I think everyone kind of needs to pump the brakes about being scared, even though it is justified, and realize that the legislative process is going to play out. You know, people are going to introduce amendments. You're going to have civil liberties, think tanks, writing letters, trying to cooperate with lawmakers to make a better bill

• 10:42Speaker 03

  or to just stop it outright.

• 10:44David Pierce?

  Okay, let's assume that either the Restrict Act or something that looks kind of like it gets passed at some point in the rest of the near future, which I would argue is pretty likely, right? Like, the momentum behind something like this seems fairly undeniable at the moment.

• 10:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think we're at a moment. And so the past couple of weeks, after the TikTok hearing, Congress went away for their spring break, which is a funny thing to say, but Congress goes on spring break. And so they came back to Capitol Hill today. And there's a handful of things that are happening in Congress that really need to be reckoned with. I think we're going to see a return of discussion on TikTok, but then we're also having the debt ceiling. What if America defaults? That's really scary. And that's probably the top priority for congressional lawmakers right now to solve that out. You know, I think over the next couple of weeks, we'll see a lot of things start to shake out, what Congress is really thinking at, if they're wanting to ban it outright, if we want to see something like the Restrict Act. The thing is, is that they are kind of running out of time. I hate to say that.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  You feel like our legislative officials would be a bit more agile with a whole year to get a lot of stuff done. But there's a lot of things and a lot of infighting and a lot of partisan issues going on. So I don't imagine something like TikTok happening too fast at the federal level. But of course, even with issues that we've talked about in the past, at this, you know, on this podcast, we've seen a lot of momentum around data privacy. Well, where did that law go? We've seen a lot of momentum around antitrust. Where did that go? Where did it go, though? It went to the states, who can move a bit more agilely than the federal, you know, lawmakers that we have.

• 12:16David Pierce?

  Right. That's a good segue into the next thing I wanted to talk about. So like if we if we get to a point where this becomes a thing that the government can do and get away with it, I still cannot wrap my head around what it looks like to do. And maybe the easiest place to start is with this bill in Montana that seems like it's winding its way through actually being signed by the governor and maybe being law. Because at some point, you have to decide, how do we ban it? Because it's like, these always make me think of like, did you ever watch The Office?

• 12:44Speaker 03

  Not really.

• 12:45David Pierce?

  You didn't watch the, okay. So anyway, so this is a totally pointless diversion. But there's a moment in The Office where Michael Scott, the main character, is like having money problems. And somebody says, what you have to do is declare bankruptcy. So he walks out into the into the office and he just yells, I declare bankruptcy. And then somebody has to come up to him and be like, you know, that's not anything, right? That's what these bans make me think of. It's just somebody's gonna come out and be like, I ban TikTok. And everybody's like, what, what does that mean? So like, if you're Montana and you want to ban TikTok, what do you do? What does that actually mean in practice?

• 13:16Speaker 03

  So essentially, that's exactly how it's going to play out. You're going to have the governor, if he decides to sign this bill, it would be him with a pen in his hand saying, I declare TikTok banned, like you said.

• 13:26David Pierce?

  Amazing.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  But then there would be that person who comes outside, right? Who taps him on the shoulder and says, hey, that's not how we do this. And what would happen is I do imagine, and we've seen this with other bills, California had a section 230 bill, things like this, you have legal challenges. Maybe TikTok would sue the state of Montana over this bill. Maybe it would be influencers again. That's very hard to predict. Maybe the ACLU even would put together some kind of lawsuit. And so that would be up to a judge. A judge could decide initially when these cases are brought up, if they want to have an injunction, basically saying that we're gonna not ban the app, the app's going to be allowed. Like we saw during Trump, there was injunctions allowing the app to stay live while we sort this out in the courts.

• 14:07Speaker 03

  Now, if a judge decides he doesn't want an injunction and TikTok just gets banned, that would be in the state of Montana. And I have a very hard time trying to understand how one state goes about doing this. We've seen this in Texas, where Texas banned TikTok on government devices. That's fairly easy to do because you're able to, you know, go to the net Network settings on like government Wi-Fi networks and ban a specific app. It's like banning Minecraft on your student's iPad. It's pretty easy to do. Is Montana going to work with telecom providers in some way to ban that at the, you know, the pipes level? That's something that I haven't heard people talk about. And especially, you know, we talk about this on a government wide scale. I guess you can understand maybe there being more of a strategy in that way.

• 14:52Speaker 03

  But on such a small scale level, especially without government control, you know, with privatized internet communications, it's very difficult to see how that would happen.

• 15:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, it seems like there's one version of it that you basically like compel the app stores to do it, which solves part of your problem, but then the web version still exists. And it's very hard to compel those app stores to do those things. You could sort of do it, like you're saying, at the network level with the different ISPs, but that's also pretty easy to get around. You could do it with, I don't know, different like router providers. It just, it seems so complicated to me to figure out like where in the stack do you try to cut off TikTok? And if you do, I mean, it's like every young person on planet Earth knows how to use a VPN right now. Like, I just can't get past this idea that there basically is no such thing as banning TikTok. And I don't know how anyone is going to do it.

• 15:47David Pierce?

  I'm eager to see if it's possible to do, but I kind of don't think it is.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  Something that I have been thinking a lot about is app credentialing, location-based credentialing, and whether TikTok could be forced through some sort of ban to say like, if we see that someone is using this app in a certain zip code, in a certain area, maybe they just don't allow use there. That could be something, but it's not something I could imagine TikTok just doing without like suing the state or without suing the government, you know, for some type of ban legislation or something.

• 16:19David Pierce?

  Right. Is there any precedent for something like this? Like, have we ever seen even on a smaller scale, something like this happen?

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I wouldn't say a ban, but when you talk to Mark Warner, who of course introduced the Restrict Act, he likes to point out Kaspersky, you know, your safety software in Russia and things the government did there. I think another good one is something that we're actually going to hear about a lot this week is Huawei and ZTE, Chinese telecom providers, which are a lot easier. That's something where it's hardware.

• 16:48David Pierce?

  Right.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  You know, if a telecom company bought Huawei, they can say, oh, we can just take that out and not use it anymore if it's banned. That is a physical object, right? That is a lot easier to take control of than this, you know, app, this service that goes over the internet than something that's just like a pole or equipment.

• 17:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, ironically, it seems like the best solution to that would be to build something a lot like China's Great Firewall, which, again, like irony in the truest sense of the word, that that is a thing that's going to get bandied around as something to do. But it feels like if you really want to do it, you're going to end up having to build something that comprehensive, right?

• 17:26Speaker 03

  I imagine so, and that gets to the heart of this, which a lot of people bring up, is is this even something in accordance with American values? If something we're going to talk about is, you know, being opposed to censorship, something that is like hot on the mind of Republicans right now with big tech companies, like, do we even want to do this? Is this something that, you know, is patriotic? Or, you know, even American in the way, in the sense that we've grown up viewing the country operating?

• 17:53David Pierce?

  So one last question on the Montana thing. It just made me think of the way we used to talk about right to repair stuff, which was that there was this belief in the right to repair community that if one state would make really intense right to repair rules, everybody else would have to follow along, because if you're Apple, you don't want to make one iPhone for Massachusetts and another iPhone for the rest of the country. So the idea was as long as we can sort of make that first domino fall, everybody else will just play along, we'll get what we want, even without a broader law. Do you think something like that works in this case too? That like if Montana does successfully pass and defend a law like this, that it could have bigger ramifications outside of Montana? Or is this just going to be one small fight in many other much larger fights to come?

• 18:38Speaker 03

  So we've seen this a handful of times and I'm not going to say this has happened, you know, with an app like TikTok before, but when we look at a lot of like clean air regulation, car regulation, when you look at even like biometric facial recognition, that was in Illinois. Illinois passed that bill. A lot of companies have been sued, you know, for violating that law in the state of Illinois. So this has happened before on different scales and levels. So if Montana does, and this is really, you know, I'm really going out on a limb to say if Montana does approve this bill, if it survives a legal challenge, I imagine that it's going to be like a pain in the butt for TikTok going forward more than anything.

• 19:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:19Speaker 03

  I think people are still going to use it. In other states, I think it's going to be really, really hard for this to apply elsewhere. Also, like Montana is not a very densely populated state. I think like losing all users in Montana really won't hurt TikTok that much.

• 19:34David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 19:35Speaker 03

  But if you're enforcing it in a state like California or a state that's like larger, New York, Texas, something like that, I could imagine that having a bit more weight than Montana, unfortunately. To all the listeners out in Montana, I'm sorry. I'm from Nebraska. It probably wouldn't happen there either.

• 19:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, that's fair. And it does seem like part of it, like you're talking about with the Illinois lawsuits, is that just ongoing threat of there are going to be people in Montana who keep using TikTok even if TikTok gets banned in Montana. And I suspect that what the state of Montana is hoping is that that happens and Montana then has just an endless run of litigation against TikTok that it can use for all of the money in the world and hopefully just like scare TikTok far, far away in order to not have to pick that particular fight. Like it's weird that Montana believes it has that much power, but it does seem like underneath it, that's part of it, right? It's like there are going to be people who get around it and we want to have an angle through which we can cause trouble for TikTok.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  True. It also sets the precedent. So if Montana itself could have, you know, passed this bill, that's telling other, assumably, I'm going to assume these are red states, that they would be able to pass similar legislation. It would give the green light to them. Cause now all of a sudden there's precedent in the courts saying that, well, Montana did it. They got away with it. Now other red states or blue states, if it gets to that level, uh, could have, you know, could approve some kind of similar ban and have the justification for it to take place.

• 20:59David Pierce?

  And I would say, just to like, make the TikTok users feel a little better, two things seem to me to be true, and I'm curious if you agree with both of them, and then we should take a break. The first is that all those hurdles you just described, the passing the law, the legal fights, the actual implementation of it, if those are even possible to get through, which I don't think they are, they're going to take a really long time. So I would say it's overwhelmingly unlikely that this is going to happen. And if it does, it's not going to happen for a long time. Do you agree with that? Am I too optimistic on the TikTok front there?

• 21:30Speaker 03

  That's fair, and I think that there is a lot of momentum now, even building in Congress, in the civil rights communities, and just like organizers, period, saying that we don't want this to happen. And there is going to be a fight. I think for a long time, no one wanted to be on TikTok's side here at all, vouching for them. And we're definitely getting to a point, at least over the last couple of months, where people have become a lot louder and a lot more outspoken about what a ban would mean, whether that's for free speech, whether that is government oversight, government having too much power. I think that we would definitely see a bigger opposition campaign movement to a ban like this.

• 22:11David Pierce?

  Okay, all right. Well, then I suspect we're going to have many chances to talk about this.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  It's going to be a long year.

• 22:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, it really is. We're going to talk about TikTok so much this year. But at least we get to talk about Twitter less. So it's like, it's kind of a victory. I don't know. Anyway, McKenna, thank you. We need to take a break. And then we're going to come back and talk about all the best Android phones on which you can watch TikTok. Thank you, McKenna. We'll be right back. Bye.

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• 23:32Speaker 04

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• 24:10David Pierce?

  Welcome back. It's mid-April. It's about to be fun season. We're going to hear about the new version of Android at Google I/O in a couple of weeks, and then the new version of iOS a few weeks later at WWDC. Samsung's going to launch some stuff. Google's going to launch some stuff. IFA's coming. Lots of other companies are going to tell us about their new smartphones. So it felt like a good time to bring in The Verge's Allison Johnson to talk about the state of the Android market in particular, and where all of this goes next. Allison, hello. Thank you for being here.

• 24:39Speaker 05

  Hello. Thank you for having me.

• 24:41David Pierce?

  Okay, so I want to start by telling you about a thing I just did on the internet.

• 24:45Speaker 05

  Uh oh.

• 24:45David Pierce?

  Which is a weird thing to say. I probably shouldn't have said it like that, but here we go. So you just wrote, or you updated our guide to the best Android phone for 2023. And the state of the Android phones is basically like there's sort of two companies that exist and really not that much else. And so I was like, okay, has it always been this way? So I went back 10 years and just Googled best Android phone 2013. And I landed on an Android Authority page. It's a good article. And just going through the list, it recommends an HTC phone, a Google phone, a Samsung phone, a Sony phone, an LG phone, and a Seuss phone, which is a wild take even then, but we'll, we'll give them that. A Motorola phone, another Sony phone.

• 25:27David Pierce?

  So the point is there was this like big teeming ecosystem of Android phones out there. And then I go through yours and it's just like Samsung and Google, Samsung and Google. And then like on the side, if you don't want one of those, OnePlus. So my question is like, what happened? Like, is the, how did it end up that essentially, like for all intents and purposes, the only Android manufacturer that exists is Samsung? And then there's like some other ones on the side, but it's just Samsung's world and we live in it now. How did we get to this point?

• 25:52Speaker 05

  Well, I think the big disclaimer on that is that is 100% the case in the US.

• 25:59David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 25:59Speaker 05

  If you live somewhere else in Europe and Asia, you have a lot of other choices that we don't get for certain reasons. I think some of it's down to the stranglehold that carriers have over our wireless industry here. But yeah, it is, it's, I don't want to say bleak, but when you're going through, and they're really good phones. I mean, we have great phones from Google and Samsung to choose from. And I don't feel like if you get one of those flagships, I don't feel like there's huge things you're missing out on. But yeah, it's not as like vibrant and you don't have kind of as many like weirdo options

• 26:42Speaker 05

  or companies trying like strange little things and like LG kind of before they fell out, you know, the things they were doing with like the wing and

• 26:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it just became a, like a numbers game and they just didn't sell enough of those weirdo phones. And Samsung kind of consolidated its lead and made it hard for some of those other companies to compete here, at least. That's my read on it.

• 27:11David Pierce?

  No, I think that's fair. And I think, I think you're right. We're lucky to some extent that these phones are very good. Right? Like you, you kind of land on the best Android phone for most people is the Samsung Galaxy S23 Plus, which is an excellent phone in almost every respect. And the ways in which it sucked, we're going to talk about in a minute. But I do think it's true that there was a weirdness to all those old phones that we used to get. Motorola was trying with like the modular stuff and they had swappable things in different colors. And LG with the wing was like, what if your screen swiveled? And everybody was like, no, thanks. But like, I'm glad that existed.

• 27:42Speaker 05

  Right.

• 27:43David Pierce?

  And it does feel like, especially in the US, we have just landed on this is what a phone looks like and roughly how it works. And you actually kind of are not allowed to change that anymore. And that just sort of makes me sad.

• 27:56Speaker 05

  I know. I mean, the like, the one thing to add to that is foldables and like, that'll definitely be a theme in the upcoming year. We'll hopefully see, you know, some competition for Samsung in, again, in this country where Samsung rules. But yeah, at the end of the day, Galaxy Z Fold is a, is a phone that goes like default. It's not, you know, it is, the screen doesn't like swivel. Yeah, there's nothing you can like magnetically attach to it like a transformer. Yeah, I don't know. It's, it's like good and bad.

• 28:29David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's fair. Okay. So let's talk about the phones that do exist. And you did a thing right at the top of your guide, which is very good, where you basically laid out four things that you're looking for in a really good phone. And I feel like this, we can sort of imply that you should assume that like, performance is good and the battery doesn't die in five minutes. Right?

• 28:46Speaker 05

  Right.

• 28:46David Pierce?

  But beyond sort of basic phone stuff, the four things you landed on were longevity, a great screen, quality cameras, and wireless charging. My immediate question on reading the four of those is that wireless charging seems like by far the least important of those. And I would not have necessarily even put it on the list. So why did you put it on the list? Why does it belong on the four?

• 29:05Speaker 05

  I think it's when you look at kind of the top phones available, they've all kind of agreed on a set of specs that they're gonna have. You're gonna get a 120 Hz refresh rate screen. You're gonna get an IP68 rating. What separates like a phone you would really like from maybe the phone that's not right for you is like a kind of narrowing list of things.

• 29:31David Pierce?

  Interesting.

• 29:31Speaker 05

  Personally, I don't use wireless charging. So it's for me, it's not a deal breaker at all. But it's one thing I hear about when it's not on a phone and the wireless charging fans come out and say, no, this is bad. But yeah, it is one of those things. It's like you are starting to be able to just expect it from a flagship phone. So when it's not there, it's just sort of worth noting.

• 29:58David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's totally fair. And I think that's actually one way to think about how things have changed over 10 years ago. Like in 2013, it was very possible to buy a bad smartphone. Like a lot of smartphones sucked so much in 2013. They were slow, they had bad software, the cameras were awful. The like, we were still doing that thing where it had the like, really the scroll lag as you would move around on Android. Like it was bad times. And it does seem like now it's true that if you buy sort of any of the like reputable Android smartphones in 2023, they're pretty much all like different degrees of at least very good, right? That's a good thing. That's progress.

• 30:37Speaker 05

  Right. And even down to like $500, what you can get for a phone on $500 is kind of silly. I just reviewed the Samsung A54. It has a great screen, like really good build quality, has some waterproof resistance. If I set it next to the S23 Plus and I like go across the room and look at it, I can't tell the difference and it costs $500 less. So just like across the board, you can get a pretty good phone. Like you have to try pretty hard to get a bad phone, I think.

• 31:09David Pierce?

  Somewhere somebody is holding their LG Wing being like, no, I don't, I don't have to try that hard.

• 31:14Speaker 05

  It's right here.

• 31:16David Pierce?

  Longevity was the other one that jumped out to me because I think for me, the thing for years has been, I feel like phones were becoming increasingly just like vehicles for cameras. And it was like, if you wanted to know the difference between phones, most of what you had to talk about in terms of like regular people use cases was the camera. But to some extent, I feel like that has almost flipped now where like all the cameras are pretty good, right? They have funky stuff, they take fake pictures of the moon, like it's fine. The cameras are good on, again, almost all of these phones. And so it was interesting to me that you put longevity at the top of that list. And now, because now we're getting back to really interesting stuff where like you want to keep your phone for longer, which makes sense because they're better and they're really expensive. And so questions about like, how long is this physical object going to hold up are way

• 32:01David Pierce?

  more important than I think they were even a few years ago when people were still upgrading their phones more often. And that's one place where it seems like all phones are very much not created equal, right?

• 32:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I think this is kind of like a bright spot in the past few years is Samsung has really come out with a really strong support policy where basically all their flagship and even the mid-range phones will get four OS updates, like version updates, and then five years of security patches. And it like slows way down, you know, by the fifth year, you're not getting a security patch every month. But that is really good if you just want to hold on your phone, you don't want to keep buying a new phone every two or three years and it'll, it'll remain like relatively safe and it'll keep working. So like they sort of came out with that and that has pushed.

• 32:55Speaker 05

  OnePlus came up with a, I think, matches that policy. Could be wrong, but Google extended theirs to, they promised five years of security updates and only three OS version upgrades, which is weird because they make the OS, but.

• 33:12David Pierce?

  You would think that would be easier for them.

• 33:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 33:16David Pierce?

  Give it three years and Google will have like changed its mind about smartphones 30 or 40 more times. So you never know.

• 33:21Speaker 05

  Three years is a long time in a Google products life, but it's kind of good news all around. Like you are getting new, you know, OS version upgrades for longer. You're getting security updates for longer. It's like a win.

• 33:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, I mean, that's good. And what about on the hardware side? I think waterproofing kind of became a thing everybody talked about. And then did we like hit a point where it was pretty good? So everybody stopped talking about it? Because it doesn't feel like that's kind of first on the list anymore. Nobody's really like dunking their phones in the water to test them anymore. Is that because they're good? Or did we just stop caring?

• 33:54Speaker 05

  I think it's because they're good. Like IP68, which is total dust resistance and some ability to like throw your phone in a pool of fresh water and it'll be okay. You know, you can drop it in a puddle or the toilet, like whatever.

• 34:10David Pierce?

  We've all done it, Allison. Don't feel bad. These things happen to everybody.

• 34:13Speaker 05

  I have lost a phone that way. Okay, thank you. RIP my iPhone SE.

• 34:19David Pierce?

  So you shouldn't buy small phones, people. Let that be a warning. They will fall.

• 34:23Speaker 05

  I didn't even know it was in my pocket. That's a thing. Anyway, small phones are good. So that's sort of the baseline. And I don't think there's like, aside from going to like military standards of like, you can shoot it with lasers or like water jets. There's not much more like practical use in like anything that's more robust than that. So there's it's sort of a baseline in the flagship class and there are a few outliers. And they're still pretty dust resistant, water resistant, but they're just not quite up to that level, which is worth knowing if you're spending $700 or $900 on a phone.

• 35:03David Pierce?

  So it seems like the big debate that you had to make in making a guide like this is Samsung versus Google, especially between the Google Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro and the Samsung Galaxy S23 and S23 Plus. How do you think about just like philosophically the differences between those things? Because I've always had a very hard time explaining it. It's like, do you want Samsung has specific pros and cons and so does Google and it's sort of hard to know which one you like? How do you think about the differences there?

• 35:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's hard. And I especially with that kind of top recommendation, which I gave to the S23 Plus, I went back and forth a lot between the seven Pro, the Pixel 7, S23. And I just sort of come down to like, what is the, what is the crowd pleaser here? Like, what is going to meet the needs and not just needs, like what, what people really want from a phone for the most people. And I think the S23 Plus has a very big, very nice screen, which is people want a big screen. So that kind of rules out the smaller phone.

• 36:07David Pierce?

  Even though we've acknowledged on this show that 6.1 inches is the correct screen size for a smartphone.

• 36:12Speaker 05

  It is correct. So maybe I'll write a guide to like phones that are the actual right size and which ones are the best.

• 36:20David Pierce?

  There's the best phone and then there's the right phone.

• 36:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:23David Pierce?

  They are different things.

• 36:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:24David Pierce?

  And I understand. I get you.

• 36:26Speaker 05

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 36:27David Pierce?

  Okay. So big screen, help tip it. What else kind of tipped you in Samsung's favor?

• 36:31Speaker 05

  I keep coming back to the word crowd pleaser. It's, it's sort of easy to just pick up and feel really familiar with. It's predictable, reliable that I think the cameras are, I mean, you're, if you're going up against a Pixel camera, like it's got to be really good.

• 36:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 36:48Speaker 05

  Pixel 7 Pro will give you, you've got a telephoto lens. So there's an advantage there if you're inclined towards telephoto photography. But the S23 Plus portrait mode is so good. And I think it beats the pants off of the Pixel portrait mode. And that's just, that's what I want. I want to be able to pick up my phone, put it in portrait mode, take a picture of my toddler and move on with my life. Pixel 7 Pro has a ton of cool features that are sort of, you're sort of like a beta tester as you own your phone, which I think is some people want. Like, I, I think that's fun for some people. And you don't have to go in with that attitude, but there is a little bit more of kind of

• 37:31Speaker 05

  like, you know, it's going to change, it's going to evolve as you own it, it's going Do different things. And, and I think someone who's excited about that, that is the phone for you. But when you have to give a blanket recommendation to just anyone on the internet who's gonna come to theverge.com and try and find out what phone to buy, just the S23 Plus one.

• 37:55David Pierce?

  Okay, that's fair. I will say my only quibble with that is that I think you undersell the extent to which Samsung's software is really annoying.

• 38:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:06David Pierce?

  The thing for me is just, I continue to have a hard time explaining why there are so many app stores and where all these notifications are coming from and why are there ads here? And it's just, it's gotten better over the years. It's absolutely true. And but you, you point this out in your piece too, that for the cost of these phones, it just feels like unpolished in a way that I think is, is borderline unacceptable, but at the very least, really frustrating to me. And it's just, there, there are these little things that the phone doesn't make sense in a way that you just want it to make sense. And there are some things about stock Android, like you were saying, that are kind of a mess. And Google does some weird stuff with the Pixel too.

• 38:47David Pierce?

  But Samsung software has just always been 25% too much for me. And, and maybe that's just me. I don't know.

• 38:56Speaker 05

  I think too much is a good way to describe it. I pulled down the notification, like the control settings on a Samsung phone. I'm like, dear God, why are there 200 things here? Yeah, it just balloons. Like, I give you that. It is not my favorite. I knock on Samsung's software like in every piece of writing I do about Samsung.

• 39:19David Pierce?

  And the thing is always like, oh, it's a lot of settings you can change. And it's like, sure, but there's 600 places to change those settings. None of the menu titles make any sense. Like, God help you if you want to change those settings, but it is technically possible. Sure.

• 39:32Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I will say, when you go into the settings and you're looking for something and you go to the logical place it should be, they're very good about giving you a little pop up. It's like, were you looking for the side key settings? I'm like, well, yes, I was.

• 39:47David Pierce?

  It's like, my friends, maybe you should have put it here. If you knew I was gonna come here looking for it, maybe you should have put it here. It's just a thought.

• 39:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a roundabout way of getting things done.

• 39:58David Pierce?

  So the only company on your list that isn't Samsung or Google is OnePlus. And I feel like OnePlus, a few years ago, was trying to be very different, right? They were doing the cheaper, but still just as good thing. They had some wacky ideas about how phones should work. Now it feels like it's just kind of a down the middle Samsung competitor. Is that fair? Am I, am I not giving OnePlus enough credit?

• 40:20Speaker 05

  Well, they've sort of done this roundabout thing where they, they went like a little too far into like, this is a real flagship. It costs as much as a Samsung phone. It does 80% of what a Samsung phone does. And then that didn't work. So they kind of came back around to like, okay, well, we, we like just cut a couple of things and it's much cheaper. And you get the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor, which is really good. And it's not a Samsung phone.

• 40:53David Pierce?

  Which is something.

• 40:54Speaker 05

  It is a good deal. It's, I think, again, for a very specific kind of person. If you've heard of the brand OnePlus, then that's a signal that maybe you're, you're in that group. It's really good performance and software that's a little less cluttered and unpleasant.

• 41:15David Pierce?

  Yeah, it just, it felt very telling to me that the category you put it under is best alternative to Google and Samsung, which is not nothing. Like there are people who don't want either of those companies products. But the fact that that is kind of the most compelling thing about it says a lot. Were there other challenger brands who even like deserve honorable mentions in this guide?

• 41:36Speaker 05

  I do actually have Asus on here.

• 41:38David Pierce?

  Oh, you do? That's right, the small phone.

• 41:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, the small guy, which is just me trolling everybody. So I guess it's like, yeah, you, you really kind of have to dig to get to in this category, I think. And the Zenfone 9 is a lovely small phone with a great processor. But it is, again, one of those things that like, you have to be in the market for a small Android phone to get. There. But yeah, I think in the budget category, there's at least a few, a couple more like there's Motorola. They just really have not brought anything to the US in the premium space that has been worth anyone's time, really.

• 42:20Speaker 05

  So yeah, that's where, that's where we are. We're down to Samsung and Google and then the, the alternative entree.

• 42:27David Pierce?

  Yeah. On the price front, the, the kind of heuristic I got from people a few years ago was the top of the market is interesting. The very bottom of the market is interesting and in between, there's kind of nothing because for most people who are willing to spend $600 on a phone, they're probably willing to spend $800 on a much better phone. Is that still kind of the case? Is there anything interesting happening in that middle $500 range anymore?

• 42:52Speaker 05

  Well, it's the same story, kind of. It's like very much dominated by Samsung and Google.

• 42:58David Pierce?

  There you go. Yeah.

• 42:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. In the US with the asterisk on that, but they've kind of like played this game of chicken. I feel like over the past couple of years where like the six, you know, the Pixel 6A is like slightly better in this way. And then the A54 is slightly better in this way. So that's, I wouldn't say it's like interesting, but I think has, has turned into like, you have a really good option at $500. And the other thing is like trying to figure out how much a frigging phone costs in this country. It's, it's just a game that will drive you insane. It's like, you know, there's the MSRP, but then there's like, some companies will instantly like knock that down $150. You're like, what was the point of having a price tag on your phone?

• 43:44Speaker 05

  And then there's the carriers and there's the deals, you know, a lot of people in this country get their phone through the carrier and they don't pay for the phone. I did the deal with Verizon the last time around, but you know, you, you pay through being on your phone plan for the next three years.

• 44:01David Pierce?

  And yeah, T-Mobile is forever. Like if you find a battery on the street, bring it to us and we'll give you a Samsung phone for free.

• 44:09Speaker 05

  And it's just mail it, mail it in. Yeah.

• 44:12David Pierce?

  If you've ever seen a smartphone, we will give you a Galaxy phone for free. And it's like, yeah, right. Is that free? No, because you just pay for it by being a T-Mobile subscriber. But it makes it really hard to sort out how much am I actually paying for this phone? Which I guess is deliberate, and if it ends in everybody having nice phones that they like, so be it. But I think you're right, and I wonder if that's part of the difference in other countries where it is just much more obvious when you walk into a store and there are phones with price tags, and you make your decision really differently than you do by just like getting whatever's on promotion at your carrier store.

• 44:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it probably makes things more interesting. Just trying to decide what is a mid-range phone? You go look at what phones cost right now. The Pixel 7 is like $450 or something.

• 44:57David Pierce?

  Right.

• 44:58Speaker 05

  Like, is it a flagship phone? Is it a mid-range phone? Who can tell? So it's hard to compare apples to apples, like, in that way, I think.

• 45:07David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that's very fair. So, okay, so looking ahead, we're about to hit sort of the beginning of smartphone season again. We're going to get new Android. We're going to get potentially a Pixel Fold, maybe, possibly, at Google I/O. There's some smoke around that, but who knows? New Samsung phones, probably in the fall. Lots of stuff coming, like, what is this going to be the year of in smartphone world? Is this the year foldables become a real thing? Like, what's coming?

• 45:32Speaker 05

  I think it is. I'm excited. I hope so. I think it's the either year of foldables, and maybe that'll mean you see more than like one person out in the world with a flip phone or a fold. Yeah, I think when and if Google goes in, that'll be, you know, I don't think we're gonna, like, know a lot of people who go out and buy it, but they're gonna know about it. And that's gonna make it a little more mainstream. And then I think that opens a door for competition, which would be lovely. The Z Fold 4 and the Z Flip 4 from Samsung are, they're very good phones, but Samsung's just doing like victory laps with that.

• 46:14Speaker 05

  They're like, the last generation was like barely different from the one before that. And it's sort of like, come on, we could eat, this is cool. Like, put a bigger screen on the front, make it do other stuff, like throw stylus in there. And they kind of have been like, meh, no.

• 46:30David Pierce?

  Right. Meanwhile, every, every other company has been like, look at this neat prototype that we made. And you're like, when are you going to make that into a thing that someone can buy? And they're like, who knows?

• 46:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm still waiting for the phone that like unfolds like a scroll.

• 46:43David Pierce?

  Ooh, I like that. Like that LG thing we saw a million years ago, the rollable screen. Listen, all I know is I used to see a Z Flip 4. I was commuting more often and would see a Z Flip 4 on the train like three times a week. And I was like, wow, this phone must be really popular. And then I was just on the same commuting schedule as someone and it was the same woman every single time. But she would get on the train, sit down, she would prop it up and she would watch something on the top half of the screen while she just like did her thing. And I was like, you get it. This is the future.

• 47:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 47:15David Pierce?

  Fancy kickstands. This is, this is it. This is all I need.

• 47:18Speaker 05

  It's kind of great. I was sitting in a coffee shop next to someone doing the same thing like a few months ago. And I restrained myself and I didn't ask them a bunch of questions like, hey, why'd you buy that phone?

• 47:32David Pierce?

  I really do hope this is the year because I think, I think you're right that we've probably gone as far as Samsung will go without someone pushing them. And so I'm hopeful whether it's the Pixel Fold or something else, that there is a real kind of push and pull in this, in this space for a while. And I hope people keep making flip phones.

• 47:49Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 47:50David Pierce?

  Dear smartphone manufacturers, I don't care about your foldable phones nearly as much as I care about your flip phones. Bring flip phones back. Vote Pierce 2024. That's my, that's my platform.

• 48:01Speaker 05

  Co-signed. They're so fun. I think that, okay, I'm gonna write another buying guide for phones that are fun.

• 48:08David Pierce?

  I like that idea.

• 48:09Speaker 05

  Yeah. Z Flip 4 is the leader right now.

• 48:13David Pierce?

  Phones that are maybe a bad idea, but you'll have a delightful time with anyway, by Alyssa Johnson is like, that's a thing that should exist. I'm into it.

• 48:19Speaker 05

  It's coming up.

• 48:20David Pierce?

  All right, we should take a break. But Alyssa, thank you. Appreciate it. Fun as always.

• 48:24Speaker 05

  Thank you. It's been delightful.

• 48:26David Pierce?

  Okay, next up, we're going to get deep into the weeds on the latest in TV technology. Fair warning, this segment is going to make you want to spend too much money on a new television. We'll be right back.

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• 49:52David Pierce?

  Welcome back. Time for TV Talk. We don't talk enough about TVs on this show, I don't think. And in part, that's because TVs have been, I don't know, kind of stale for a while. There are a lot of good TVs out there, but it's been a while since we had a big sort of foundational change in the tech that makes your TV work. But The Verge's Chris Welch just wrote a story about how that's about to change. He says that OLED TVs, which have long been promised as the next big thing, but have mostly just been the next really expensive thing that most regular humans will never buy, are starting to go mainstream. And they're starting to get really, really good, too. So I figured we'd get Chris in here to tell us all about OLED and see if it's time for you and me and everybody to upgrade our big screens. Hi, Chris.

• 50:35Speaker 07

  Hello. Good to be back.

• 50:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, good to have you. It's been a while. I was just thinking about that.

• 50:40Speaker 07

  We haven't tested some headphones and earbuds in torture tests lately.

• 50:43David Pierce?

  I know. I mean, it's about to be earbud time. So for all the listeners who hate that segment, I'm so sorry, but it's gonna come back.

• 50:51Speaker 07

  This here right now is TV season. New TV season is upon us.

• 50:54David Pierce?

  This is very exciting for me because reading this very good piece that you just wrote about OLED TVs made me realize I am like staggeringly far behind. I'm the guy who like goes to Best Buy Memorial Day Weekend and just buys the cheapest TV I can find. And this is the life that I lead. But you sort of start this story with the premise that we're in like a magical moment for TVs that like you kind of can't buy a bad TV anymore to some extent. Are we in a truly magical moment for televisions? What's going on here?

• 51:24Speaker 07

  I think we are. I mean, part of that is that these companies that sell cheap TVs like TCL and Roku and Hyacinth just sell all of your data, you know, your personal data to, that's how they managed to make such affordable, nice, uh, smart TVs. But yeah, like I bought a new TV a few months ago. It's the Hyacinth U8H. I got it for like $800, $900. And it's like the brightest TV like on the market, basically, one of them. So like for that, at that price, like there are downsides to it. Like you can nitpick some like very small picture quality stuff, but like for gaming and movies, 800 bucks in and out, you know, it's got Google TV. It's got all the features, AirPlay, uh, most of what you'd want. And I'm not really someone who really cares about my like TV viewing habits being sold.

• 52:05Speaker 07

  I don't know. Not sure where that cutoff comes from. Like my personal data is like, you know, I want to keep that private, like TV viewing, like what I'm watching. Who cares?

• 52:12David Pierce?

  That's interesting. And is it, is it really that simple? Cause as I was preparing for this, that was one of the things that occurred to me is like, maybe what changed is all the TV makers figured out they don't have to make any money on the TVs anymore because they can just sell you crappy software and then sell the data from you using that crappy software. And this is just the TV business now. Like, is this just the TV business now?

• 52:33Speaker 07

  I think so. I mean, it's, that's, and also like all the panels have gotten better, you know, it's been many, many years since the first smart TVs. You really can't buy a dumb TV anymore, uh, from anybody.

• 52:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 52:43Speaker 07

  That's the point that we reached. But yeah, I mean, uh, you've got the many LED TVs like this one, the Hyacinth that I like quite a bit. And, uh, those are pretty cheap and you get big picture performance from those. Uh, but the new ones I covered from LG and Samsung are their new high tier flagship outlets.

• 52:57David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah. So let's talk about those. Cause that's, that was the thing that you. You most recently wrote about that these are on the list of amazing TV technology we've been promised. OLEDs have been around about as long as anything I can think of.

• 53:11Speaker 07

  Mm hmm.

• 53:11David Pierce?

  And it seems like they're finally, they're not to the, you know, walk into Best Buy and grab one off the shelf for a few hundred bucks territory. But they're down to like reasonable people can afford them territory. Is that, is that fair? Is that kind of where we've gotten?

• 53:28Speaker 07

  Uh, yeah, for sure. I mean, there were some big sales on the LG C2 that we covered over the last few months on Verge deals. And so, yeah, I mean, you can get one of those for like $1,100, I think. So yeah, that's totally reasonable for a lot of people, not everybody.

• 53:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:39Speaker 07

  Obviously, some people don't want to spend more than like $400, $500 on a TV. But yeah, OLEDs, I mean, we all know the benefits. You've got those perfect black levels, great contrast. You can watch them from anywhere in the room and they look great. And so now the brightness is the new war that we're into between LG and Samsung.

• 53:56David Pierce?

  Yeah. Walk me through that a little bit because the, again, this is where I get very dumb about televisions, that the only thing I've known about televisions is not to worry about the brightness. Because you, you walk into the store and they're all cranked up as bright as they go, as contrasty as they go. And so the picture you see has nothing to do with the actual reality of watching that television.

• 54:14Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 54:15David Pierce?

  But now you're saying the brightness fight that especially Samsung and LG are having is really important. Like, why should I care about brightness in my television?

• 54:24Speaker 07

  For years, like the counterbalance to OLED has been that they're not great for bright sunny rooms. So if you have like a really bright living room, you might want to go for some kind of like LCD TV from Samsung or Hi-Sense or TCL. That can just get brighter at all times, be it for SDR or HDR.

• 54:38David Pierce?

  And that's just because it's lighting the whole panel all at once, all the time, right? Instead of just kind of individually lighting pixels?

• 54:44Speaker 07

  That too. And also just OLED just couldn't get that break.

• 54:46David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 54:47Speaker 07

  For its peak brightness was always like fairly low compared to like the best like mini LED. Like those have like backlighting systems that like turn off pixels or parts of the screen as you don't need them. But yeah, for a few years, it's been, there's been like a fairly clear cut win for mini LED on the overall brightness front. That kind of changed last year with the LG C2 and Samsung's QD OLEDs of both, which both use two different types of OLED panels. So like LG has their usual panels that have white, red, green and blue sub pixels. And then Samsung came out with the QD OLED, which stands for quantum dot. And those are pure RGB panels. And so that benefit is you can like go higher on brightness while maintaining like full color luminance. And like keep colors looking like nice and vivid, even at like full peak brightness.

• 55:31Speaker 07

  Whereas LG, not quite as good. I mean, these are things you wouldn't really notice unless you were side by side in like a viewing test room. So like, it's not a huge difference, but the overall brightness from both companies got quite higher last year. And this year it's gone up even more. So they're hitting like 1500 nits, you know,

• 55:48David Pierce?

  Oh, wow.

• 55:48Speaker 07

  2000 nits. Those numbers don't mean much to anybody, but it's just very bright, very, very bright.

• 55:53David Pierce?

  It's bright enough. Yeah, that's, that's past the threshold of like, you probably don't need to worry about it in just about any space.

• 55:59Speaker 07

  Right, yeah, and like more of the screens now have like these coatings that kind of like just fend off the reflections. So you can put them in like a bright spot and they're not going to be just a hellscape of like reflections of your bedroom or living room. You know, which can, which did happen with my previous LG C10 that I had. That would be annoying, but yeah, both Samsung and LG now have that figured out as well. Plus all the usual benefits, those black levels, they all do really good at gaming. These are the best TVs for gaming that you can buy, but of course they come at a price. Like for the 65 inch G3 TV names, boy, I'll tell you. Uh, 65 inch LG G3 and the Samsung S95C both cost $3,300. So that is a far cry from like your typical TCL or something like that.

• 56:42Speaker 07

  You get what you're paid for if you want the absolute, absolute best. But if you've been holding off for like a big TV upgrade, if you've got an old, you know, some old LG OLED that's six or seven years old. And you've, you know, you just want maybe nicer HDR, you want to be dazzled. Then this is kind of the year to kind of just go out there and splurge, I think, and you'll be pretty happy.

• 57:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, you just made me realize though, I, I've never been in like a fancy TV testing room and you have. And I know you just went to LG to see all their cool new stuff, I think in LA, is that right?

• 57:10Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 57:10David Pierce?

  What are these rooms like? What, what, is it just, you just like walk into a like sensory deprivation chamber and there's a TV in there? Like what, what are these places like?

• 57:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, they all do their own thing. Sony does this all the time where you just come into a room and their TV side by side. It's always their, it's that company's brand new TV versus last year's best. So by that, it's like, it's like by that nature alone, it's an unfair comparison.

• 57:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 57:32Speaker 07

  But they all show the same footage and they like point to like some very small thing on the screen and say, look how we do this better. You know, this color is more accurate than our TV. And so they all just do the same old song and dance, but they all look nice at the end of the day, like, you know, all TVs, if you spend over a certain price point, you're going to be pretty happy. And so it's like a very nitpicky home theater nerd type stuff that you would choose one over the other for.

• 57:53David Pierce?

  That's fair. So while we're, while we're doing TV nerd stuff, I think every once in a while, we should sort of update our like, here are the words and acronyms you should look for when you're buying a television.

• 58:02Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 58:03David Pierce?

  So let's, let's do that a little bit because especially I think as we talk about OLED a lot and we talk about QLED and we talk about micro LED and we talk about just regular LED and now there's QDOLED and just like the landscape is enormous. But if I'm just like a regular person who wants to buy a new TV this year, is there one of those you think most people should want and be happy with? Should everyone who can upgrade for the OLED because it's worth it? Like what's, what's your sense?

• 58:29Speaker 07

  Yeah. As long as you go for an OLED or a mini LED TV, QLED is kind of like a misnomer. It's kind of just the same old LCD TVs that might have like mini LED backlighting. But they just call that because they want to like just focus on the quantum dot and like the wider color gamut. But like by and large, they're pretty similar to the, the best mini LED TVs.

• 58:47David Pierce?

  That's my favorite thing about the TV companies, by the way, is when they all just come up with different names for the exact same thing, just to make it impossible to know how to do anything or comparison shop. It's really delightful.

• 58:57Speaker 07

  Right. And that was so blatant. People were like, oh, we like, people seem to like these OLED TVs. So let's just call them QLED and just confuse people actively in hopes of more sales. So it's a, it's a fun market to shop in. But as long as you're looking for OLED, yeah, just that mini LED or the features I would encourage people to look for. We've got a thing on the site, I think maybe after last CES, that's basically like a glossary of like TV terms and stuff that I'd encourage people to check out because it can get kind of, kind of overwhelming, all the new terms and stuff that come out every year. But go for OLED, go for mini LED. As far as brands go, Samsung, LG, Hyacinth, TCL, Sony, you know, all the brands you'd expect.

• 59:35David Pierce?

  In the OLED space, why are Samsung and LG the only two sort of relevant players? If I'm remembering right, it was basically just LG for a long time, right? And then Samsung kind of showed up recently. Like where is the rest of the market here?

• 59:48Speaker 07

  They'll just buy panels from LG, honestly, if they make OLEDs at all, which most TV makers don't. So for a long time, yeah, it was just LG display dominating the whole, the whole scene. And then finally, last year, Samsung came along and said, we think we can do this better. And their TVs did review slightly better. Samsung uses their panels, obviously, and also Sony uses the Samsung QD OLED panels for their high-end TVs. And they did get some pretty good reviews. They also, there was a test from Ardings, like a torture test, where they kind of like test them for burn-in. And there were signs that these new TVs, these new panels, do show burn-in quicker. But also, like, these are tests that like, no normal person would ever do. Like, you're not going to watch CNN for like, 60 hours, and like, ruin your new television.

• 1:00:31David Pierce?

  God help you. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:33Speaker 07

  So as long as you use them normally, you change the content you're watching, be that games, or movies, or Netflix, you're going to be fine. So it's not something to worry about.

• 1:00:40David Pierce?

  So was the problem on these tests that like, the CNN logo in the bottom right was like, burning into the TV?

• 1:00:45Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:00:46David Pierce?

  That's really funny. That's like, if you do that on your TV, like, you have different things you should think about in your life, I think.

• 1:00:51Speaker 07

  Yeah. So when I buy a TV, like, I actually try to avoid news networks for a while. You don't have to, but just, that's an old habit that I've not really gotten out of. But yeah, don't worry. Just buy your TV and use it like a normal person, and you won't have to worry about burn-in, no matter which kind of OLED you buy. But yeah, so there is more competition now, which is great to see, finally. It's kind of this two-way horse race between LG and Samsung. So hopefully that'll bring prices down over time, because right now, they are quite high. So maybe like, come the fall, we should see some deals on, on these TVs as the holidays and, and that, that whole season approaches. And maybe they'll fall below $3,000, because yeah, that's a lot to spend on a TV, no matter how much of a home theater nerd that you count yourself to be.

• 1:01:29David Pierce?

  And the prices have been super high for a long time, right? So I guess, is it, is it already a sign of the competition that these prices are starting to come down, even after just a year or so of both companies being in this?

• 1:01:38Speaker 07

  I think so. I mean, there are only so many models to go around. So it's not like there's a huge selection of competition to choose between. But even just like, two or three models is enough to kind of, you know, have that one-upsmanship between Samsung and LG to just get the price down. But right now, they're the same price. So they're kind of just doing that to stay on the same level. But yeah, there have been some good reviews. If you check out my favorite TV review orders, since I don't do them too often, there's Caleb Benison over at Digital Trends, who does great work. And also Vincent Teo of HDTV Tests. And if you want to check out new TV reviews from them, we're gonna have some over the next few months as well. But if you want like the nitty gritty, those are good resources to check out. And they both seem to love both of these new TVs.

• 1:02:18David Pierce?

  Is there an appreciable difference between the two of them? Like if these are the two sort of main players from the main players, is there anything that sort of sets them apart from each other in meaningful ways?

• 1:02:27Speaker 07

  Samsung still does not support Dolby Vision after all these years, which is

• 1:02:31David Pierce?

  Well, that's dumb.

• 1:02:31Speaker 07

  Kind of a cause for a headache from some people. They've got their HDR 10 plus standard, which has made its way to more movies and more services. But Dolby Vision is kind of a big deal.

• 1:02:41David Pierce?

  Somewhere Neel I just started shaking his fist. He doesn't even know why. He's just mad because Dolby doesn't exist.

• 1:02:46Speaker 07

  Yeah. So if you want to light up all the lights, like Neel I always says, you're gonna want to go for the LG, I think. And also, they've just been around longer. Their software, I prefer a bit. I mean, neither company does great TV software. You've got the Tizen OS on Samsung, and then I think it's WebOS 23 version this year.

• 1:03:03David Pierce?

  Wow, alright.

• 1:03:04Speaker 07

  So it's kind of a mess in some ways. Yeah, these new TVs let you like customize the quick settings. You can put all the stuff you want right on the first page. You don't have to scroll through, you know, who knows what. And like that. And like most people just use like an Apple TV or a Chromecast or a Roku and they're gonna be, you know, just like in that world most of the time. Anyway, once they, once they set up the settings the way they like, it's fine. But yeah, I guess the main difference is gonna be the Dolby Vision. So you get that with LG and you don't have it with Samsung. But does that matter to you if you're spending this much money? Maybe it does matter. But by and large, you know, they both look great. They both sound really good. They, they both have really nice speakers. They both do like 120 hertz 4K gaming for your Xbox Series X or your PS5. They've got all the HDMI 2.1 features you want. That's finally settled out now.

• 1:03:46Speaker 07

  So you get everything. You just gotta pay a, pay a whole boatload. And I am someone who is happy to just pay $800 and settle for quite good picture quality.

• 1:03:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, you and me both, my friend. So, but it does seem like we, we had this run where it was like everybody had LCDs and LEDs were like the super expensive thing that slowly came down in price. And then LEDs came down in price. And now OLED is kind of moving along that path, really sort of for the first time. It's gone from like bonkers prices to slightly above regular prices and then it'll come down to regular prices. So it seems like, I don't know, a couple of years from now, if things keep going this way, OLEDs could be sort of a mainstream display technology.

• 1:04:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, even right now, if you don't want to settle for like the like, if you don't have to have the absolute brightest panel, you can buy the LGB three series, I think, like their base level. And that's like super affordable, you know, it's like most things, if you want the absolute best, it's going to cost you, but you can settle for fairly good panels for $900, you know, $800 or a thousand bucks. And so, yeah, I think in like two or three years, it's going to come down even further and we'll see where we are then as far as like micro LED, even more buzzwords and.

• 1:04:53David Pierce?

  That's where I was going with this one because it's, it seems like if you then cast out and say, okay, well, what's the next one that's going to start to go on this road from like, it costs a million dollars and there's only six of them, but they show it at CES every year and it's very cool, which is where micro LED is right now. Is it the next one that you think is going to start to sort of slowly move down the price curve? Is that ever going to happen?

• 1:05:14Speaker 07

  That's what Samsung's been saying for years. Every CES, they like show a new version of the wall or like some new micro LED TV that's still hugely absurdly pricey.

• 1:05:23David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23Speaker 07

  Those are like a hundred thousand dollars for like, you know.

• 1:05:25David Pierce?

  But they look so good.

• 1:05:26Speaker 07

  They do look beautiful. Plus it's like modulars. You can make any size screen you want. You know, you can do a whole wall in your house if you want, if you have God knows how much money to burn. But I think it's going to be many, many years before that actually makes its way into like baseline consumer televisions. So I think for the foreseeable future, if you want really good quality, I think OLED is going to be where you go. And that's not going to change anytime soon.

• 1:05:48David Pierce?

  Okay. It's, yeah, I just, I'm not the type of person to like stand in front of a large screen and be like, I must have it. But there's something about that wall that Samsung shows every year and they're like, would you like this 19 foot television that costs a hundred thousand dollars?

• 1:06:02Speaker 07

  Yes. Yes. You put a gun to my head and say, you have to have this giant sized television under in your, in your house. I would, I would not complain.

• 1:06:09David Pierce?

  Yeah. And there's something about they make it like a bunch of tiles and it's, I'm always like, yes, of course I do want one that's the exact width and height of my wall. Like what a terrific idea this is. How does this not exist? Uh, it's probably for the best that that's a hundred thousand dollars because if it were $3,200 right now, I would be like sitting with one in my cart.

• 1:06:27Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:06:27David Pierce?

  Not even remotely being able to afford it, uh, but having to talk myself out of buying it. And it feels like it's for the best that that's not yet the case.

• 1:06:35Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, a hundred thousand dollars and still no Dolby Vision. That's harsh.

• 1:06:39David Pierce?

  Can't let all the lights, man.

• 1:06:40Speaker 07

  Can't, can't win them all.

• 1:06:41David Pierce?

  Can't let all the lights.

• 1:06:44David Pierce?

  So is there any other tech along those lines? Like, what else should we be looking out for in TVs over the next few months? Like, obviously CES was a good preview of it a few months ago. That stuff is starting to roll out. Like, anything else you're seeing that is cool and exciting in the space?

• 1:06:57Speaker 07

  They're the new first-party TVs from Roku. So they're first self-branded sets. You know, they're following, there are the Fire TV sets from Amazon. And so now they're trying to get in the same game and price them super aggressively. So you're talking $200, $300 for an okay TV that's gonna have Roku. You know, people love Roku City, that screensaver.

• 1:07:16David Pierce?

  It's the only good thing about having a Roku TV.

• 1:07:18Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:07:19David Pierce?

  I hate, I hate my Roku TV. It gets slower every day. It refuses to work at anything ever. It just updates all my apps every day for no reason. It drives me absolutely insane, but I love the screensaver.

• 1:07:31Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31David Pierce?

  It's so good.

• 1:07:33Speaker 07

  And these are super cheap, super affordable. I mean, case in point, where a company is gonna sell your data for ads. And like, that's Roku's whole business now is advertising, basically. So those are gonna be in the market soon. They already are, I think. And so, yeah, that's like the bottom end. If you want something simple, easy, go for a Roku TV. If you want the top, top, top, QD OLED and the LG G3 is gonna be where it's at. And then somewhere in the middle, there are a ton of great options from TCL, Heissons, everybody.

• 1:07:58David Pierce?

  It does seem like that $400 to $700 range is just full of great TVs in a way that it never really was before. Even a few years ago, I feel like I would sort of start at like, okay, let's get like a $400 or $500 TV. And then pretty quickly, it's like, okay, well, the thing I actually want is like somewhere between like $800 and $1,200. Now it's like you can buy a truly kick-ass TV for $500.

• 1:08:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, absolutely. And like, the worst thing you settle for is like, okay, maybe there's only one or two HDMI 2.1 ports that do the best gaming for consoles. But if that's the worst trade-off you have to make, then I think most people aren't gonna mind that. So, yeah, I mean, I bought one. I'm gonna have this for who knows how long. I don't buy TVs very often. I buy phones all the time and new earbuds constantly. But TVs, I can just be more disciplined.

• 1:08:42David Pierce?

  You just go straight from this to the wall. That's the, that's the next move, just by the wall.

• 1:08:46Speaker 07

  I'll wait, I'll wait for micro LED from this point on.

• 1:08:49David Pierce?

  All right, Chris, thank you, as always.

• 1:08:51Speaker 07

  Thank you, sir.

• 1:08:52David Pierce?

  If you do upgrade, let us know what you end up with. I'm very curious.

• 1:08:56Speaker 07

  I shall.

• 1:08:56David Pierce?

  Appreciate it.

• 1:08:57Speaker 07

  Later.

• 1:08:59David Pierce?

  All right, that's it for The Vergecast today. Thank you to Chris, Allison and McKenna for joining the show, and thank you so much for listening. There is, as always, lots more from all of our conversations at theverge.com. We'll put a bunch of links in the show notes, but as always, go to the website. It's good stuff. Oh, and also, vote for us in the People's Choice Webby Awards for the Best Technology Podcast. That link is also in the show notes, and I'm not going to lie to you, I really, really, really want to win. I so appreciate everybody who's voted for us so far, and please keep it coming. The voting actually ends tomorrow, April 20th, so if you have a minute, please get to it. Also, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or a Samsung wall TV you want to sell me, you can always email us at [email protected], or keep calling the hotline. It's 866-VERGE11. We love hearing from you.

• 1:09:43David Pierce?

  Send us all your thoughts and questions and ideas for what we should do on the show. It's one of my favorite things about The Vergecast. This show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James. Brooke Minter is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about electric cars, ChatGPT, social networking, and presumably, a lot more carplay. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 1:10:17Speaker 08

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• 1:11:00Speaker 09

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