Pod Insights The Vergecast The Samsung Galaxy Fold is here and so is the Galaxy S10 About this episode Samsung unveils its new Galaxy foldable phone and the new S10 at their latest event. The Verge’s Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Dan Seifert, and Paul Miller react to the latest Samsung event and debate whether a foldable phone priced at a nearly $2,000 will be a game-changer. They also discuss the new updates to Samsung’s S10 phone, including a headphone jack.
Stories mentioned in the show:
Samsung’s foldable phone is the Galaxy Fold, available April 26th starting at $1,980
Samsung officially announces the Galaxy S10 and S10 Plus, starting at $899
The Samsung Galaxy S10E is small without skimping too much
Hands-on with Samsung’s new Galaxy Watch Active
Samsung’s new Galaxy Watch Active measures blood pressure
Nike says it’s ‘actively working’ to fix its broken smart sneakers
Samsung’s Galaxy S10 5G will temporarily be a Verizon exclusive
Trump wants 6G internet ‘as soon as possible’
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson on Recode Media
Google claims built-in Nest mic was ‘never intended to be a secret’
Apple dug a tunnel beneath the App Store, and the rats are getting through
Apple to combine iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps by 2021, says Bloomberg
You can remap the Bixby button on Samsung’s Galaxy S10 to do whatever you want
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Transcript 16,947 words · 10 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Nilay Patel? On this episode of The Vergecast, I'm going to be honest with you, almost all Samsung, the Galaxy Fold, the S10, the S10 Plus, the S10E, and the Galaxy Buds, your best friends.
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1:26 Nilay Patel? Hello everyone, who are The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media Podcast System, a system that will make you healthier and happier.
1:32 Speaker 03 It's a system of an up. It's like cheerful.
1:35 Nilay Patel? Oh God, that was horrible. That was Dieter Bohn. Today will be his last day at The Verge. I'm your friend Neelai. Paul Miller's here. Hello. Dan Seifert's here. Hey, Dan. Hey. So we have Dan on the show because it's Samsung week. It's Samsung week. Dan and Dieter have played with all the new S10 phones. Y'all. We've looked at some watches. We've done some stuff. We're going to get into all of that. I really quick wanted to tell everyone to go listen to our interview with the CEO of Foursquare, Jeff Glick, which went up on Tuesday. If you're all interested in something we talk about a lot, which is how companies track you, why they track you. What the limit should be. Got really deep into that. So go listen to that if you haven't listened to it yet. But let's talk about these phones. And so we had an argument before we began the show. It wasn't like a heated argument, but an argument nonetheless of do we begin with a Galaxy Fold or the S10?
2:18 Speaker 04 Right. And Paul made a strong case that we should begin with the Fold. And Neelai tried to make the case that we should begin with the S10. And after the argument, you know, everybody made their points and Neelai folded.
2:33 Nilay Patel? Here's what swayed me. Tweeted this morning. I will say it again on the show. I think we all, we're all too jaded. Fundamentally, the reaction to the Galaxy Fold was entirely too jaded. So the Fold is the Fold. It has a little screen on the front with huge bezels. And then you unfold it to a big screen.
2:51 Speaker 04 I believe Dieter coined the term mega bezels in our live blog.
2:54 Nilay Patel? It's mega bezels on the front. You unfold it to a big screen, which is a tablet, which is what 7.3 inches. It's like huge. It costs $1,980 in its base configuration.
3:03 Speaker 04 To start.
3:03 Nilay Patel? To start. You can spec it up to more than that. It'll come out in April. Like four people are gonna buy this thing. So everyone was like, I don't want this. Android apps are tough. These mega bezels are stupid. It's $2,000. Who cares? You just look at the GIF on our site of the thing unfolding and you're like, there wasn't even CGI to fake that like 10 years ago. Right? Like you couldn't, you couldn't even fake it. It's like, it's a, it's a computer that unfolds.
3:28 Speaker 04 It's crazy.
3:29 Nilay Patel? Like, we should all just be happy with that. For one, one brief minute of 2019, we should all take a break and watch the thing unfold. And pretend we live in the future. And then, you know, next week we'll have.
3:39 Speaker 04 Watch things unfold.
3:40 Nilay Patel? Next week we'll have Casey on the show and he'll tell us why Facebook is gonna kill us and it's gonna be fun. But like this moment, you know, the, it unfolds. It's so cool.
3:49 Speaker 04 I'm, I'm watching the GIF right now and it's just like, I can watch it over and over again, even with the mega bezels. Like, like you look at the outside and you're super turned off by the thing. You're like, what is this? And then they do the trick and it's like, whoa.
4:01 Nilay Patel? All right. So Dieter, you were there at the event.
4:03 Speaker 03 I was there.
4:04 Nilay Patel? This is the one thing from this event that did not leak.
4:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, except for the name, but whatever. The vibe was cool. So it was at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, which is a space that Apple has held events in. So I was very curious to see how Samsung handled the space. I think they handled it pretty well. They had seating all the way up to the very front of the stage. I was literally three feet from their like light up stage where like that floor of the stage was a screen, which is wild. Samsung does pre-briefs and so we got to look at the phone ahead of time. A bunch of other people did, but it still had a hands-on area. So we rushed in there. They didn't have the fold there. But it was like a pretty decent vibe. It, you know, it doesn't reach like Apple levels of hype and craziness. I don't know. It felt like it was well put together. You know, the wifi failed like it always does, but
4:52 Speaker 03 I, I, I think Samsung put on a relatively good show as a Samsung keynote. It wasn't weird. It wasn't Samsung weird. It was pretty dead ahead. I think they strategically chose not to address certain things. But overall, I thought it was, you know, a nice atmosphere, a nice place, nice, you know, nice. It was nice. That's, that's the bottom line. It was nice. But yeah, they led with the fold. And I will say that in the actual auditorium, there were two moments when the entire audience like had the exact same reaction. The first moment was when they announced the price of the Galaxy Fold of $1,980. I'm just going to recreate it for you here.
5:35 Speaker 03 Whoa, yeah, watermelon, watermelon, water.
5:40 Nilay Patel? Watermelon?
5:40 Speaker 03 Eh? Eh? Yeah. Watermelon is the thing that you say when you're an actor on stage and you're supposed to act like you're mumbling to somebody. You're trying to create noise. Yeah. So everyone was taken aback and then they kind of got it and then they wanted to talk to somebody about it. And then they realized that $1,980 is a super strange price point. Why wasn't it $1,999? Why not just 2,000?
6:01 Nilay Patel? You know, it's a joke. What's the joke? What happened in 1980?
6:06 Speaker 03 Oh, kind. I was born.
6:07 Nilay Patel? I was gonna say.
6:08 Speaker 03 First of all.
6:09 Nilay Patel? I was waiting for him to say that, but yeah.
6:12 Nilay Patel? That was good. Very fond of it. Ronald Reagan was elected president.
6:16 Speaker 03 The other thing that I couldn't, I didn't realize in the moments during the keynote, but I knew, but there was something in the back of my mind that was bugging me. Tom Warren nailed it. They did the exact same like cadence and song as Microsoft's Surface Studio reveal. They did pure imagination, the Willy Wonka song. It's strange.
6:35 Nilay Patel? Samsung staging, you should go watch it if you haven't seen it. I would be shocked if no one, if anyone listening to this hadn't seen it, but you know, they had that big crazy stage, the wraparound where the floor and the, the background were one.
6:47 Speaker 03 They're basically standing on a giant screen.
6:50 Nilay Patel? Which is awesome. And it just, it occurs to me that, you know, Apple's vibe is like very friendly. Like you don't need to know about these specs. Just everything's great. Like we're just all here in the Steve Jobs theater. It's like being at home. Samsung's vibe is like, we're a giant technology corporation with the most advanced technology and we can put one of these in every part of your house in life. Welcome to the Samsung lifestyle experience. One will be provided. It's like.
7:14 Speaker 03 Powered by Bixby.
7:15 Nilay Patel? Right. They're just, they're, they're, it's so much more aggressive in a way that I respect because every, you know, Google wants to be really friendly. Apple wants to be really friendly. Samsung is like, get on the Samsung bus and go to your Samsung job. Use your Samsung phone. Here's a Samsung laptop.
7:30 Speaker 03 Here's the Samsung theme song that we're going to play on loop the entire time.
7:34 Nilay Patel? Yeah. You will be protected by the Samsung missile defense system like the whole time. And like, it's great. It's just, it's good to be a little bit different than everybody.
7:42 Speaker 03 I can explain that vibe. Google and Apple and even to some extent, Amazon's ecosystems are super real, right? You can go live in Apple world. Apple has to be nice and friendly because like you probably live in Apple world or Google world or whatever already. And if they are like chest thumpy about, look at you, you can live in our world, people will get creeped out. Samsung world, Galaxy world, it's real, but it's like, does anybody really aspire to like have all Samsung stuff, right? And so they need to like, they need to really tout the fact that they have this all encompassing ecosystem because if they don't, people just wouldn't notice, right? Like how many people are like hype for Samsung health and the way they are for Apple health or, you know, even like Fitbit's system, right?
8:27 Speaker 03 It's there. It's like, but.
8:29 Speaker 04 It's just there, right? It's the same thing with name a Samsung software product or name a Samsung ecosystem product.
8:35 Nilay Patel? What you don't love using Samsung Mobility Connect Telecommunication Services with your Galaxy Buds and Tab S5E, which is a
8:42 Speaker 04 I'm just saying, man.
8:43 Nilay Patel? Real sentence they said yesterday. All right, let's talk about the actual Galaxy Fold. So it is hilariously $1,980 to start. It's going to hit AT&T and T-Mobile in the US. It will come with the Galaxy Buds for free.
8:57 Speaker 04 Good deal.
8:57 Nilay Patel? It is arriving.
8:58 Speaker 04 Because there is no headphone jack.
8:59 Nilay Patel? There is no headphone jack. It's real kicking the pants.
9:03 Speaker 05 Can I ask one quick question? Is 1980 before or after a carrier subsidy? Is that a real number?
9:10 Nilay Patel? It's the real number.
9:11 Speaker 04 Yeah. They will, they will split that 1980 up into 36 payments.
9:18 Nilay Patel? It's coming April 26th. 7.3 inch Infinity Flex display. That is like a weird kind of four, four by two, four, three.
9:28 Speaker 04 Yep.
9:28 Nilay Patel? Aspect ratio.
9:29 Speaker 04 With a giant notch in the upper right-hand corner. That is way bigger than I expected it to be.
9:34 Nilay Patel? Yeah, and so hilariously, they, uh, they use Google Maps to show this thing off. And it looks, I thought they were showing off a Chrome page at first. Because I thought it was a browser tab. And it's not, it's just a gigantic weird notch at the top right of that screen. That's where the cameras and stuff are. On the front, it's got a 4.6 inch display that's used for phone mode that has the mega bezels around it. It is weird to be in a place where we're like a small 4.6 inch display. But that's just where we are in the industry.
10:07 Speaker 04 It's a strange screen.
10:08 Nilay Patel? Uh, 12 gigs of RAM. It's 512 gigs of storage. It's got a Qualcomm processor. It's, it's
10:14 Speaker 04 Six cameras, three on the back, two on the inside, one on the front.
10:18 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
10:18 Speaker 04 Yeah.
10:19 Nilay Patel? It also unfolds. So that's the thing that it does.
10:21 Speaker 04 What's fascinating to me is they put like two on the inside. So they expect you to be taking selfies with the fold open.
10:28 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
10:28 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah. I mean, I would.
10:30 Nilay Patel? Absolutely.
10:30 Speaker 05 Can we dive in to this hinge?
10:33 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
10:34 Speaker 05 Because the, the, the obvious thing with folding screens, and correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I know, there is no true creased. Screen fold, you always have like a, there needs to be some, well, there's no such thing as as an infinitely perfect fold even with paper, but you always have to have, there's some radius, right, to the actual fold part. So Samsung is hiding that radius in, in a hinge in a sense.
11:02 Speaker 03 No, no, no, you can see it. And gadget, like they zap router, one of the promo videos, and there is one angle where you can see there is a small gap when the thing is closed next to the hinge. I was kind of hoping the screen would sort of, when it closed, it would be perfectly flat, it would like balloon out inside the hinge in some way, but it's not, it's just, there's a tiny little curve. There's a tiny little gap when it's closed.
11:24 Speaker 04 But it's, it's nothing like the Royale or whatever that was we saw at CES, or like, I think of like the Microsoft Surface Book hinge, that's this big like book hinge. It's, it's nothing of that sort.
11:35 Speaker 03 Somebody found the actual thickness when it's closed, and it's slightly thicker than like an Nintendo Switch when it's closed.
11:44 Nilay Patel? It's not terrible.
11:46 Speaker 03 It's not terrible, and it unfolds.
11:48 Nilay Patel? Right. So, and so, I mean, it like, kind of the specs don't matter, right? Like, you're not really gonna buy this thing. You don't really care if it has a 12 megapixel camera and a 16 megapixel ultra wide and a 10 megapixel selfie, like, right, like, we're not, when we review this thing, are we gonna spend, you know, like when we review the iPhone, like Dan and I spend a day looking at extremely close crops of iPhone photos and arguing about like, that is not, you're not gonna do that with it. I hope we're not gonna do that.
12:19 Speaker 04 No, I mean, like, really, it's, we'll talk about the S10 in a little bit, but it's basically the S10 technology stack with this crazy stuff.
12:25 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but I'm saying the point of this is not how good the cameras are, the point of it is not even how long the battery lasts. The point is that it unfolds.
12:33 Speaker 03 Yes. I mean, I, I tweeted this and then I deleted it because I had a typo, but, you know, in the, and then, Neil, you were. Eli, you were born in 1980, so you remember this because you're old.
12:44 Nilay Patel? Someone's gonna steal my social security number in like 20 minutes. Hank, can we stop saying what year I was born?
12:48 Speaker 03 The Gordon Gekko phone, like it was a status symbol and people used it. Sure, they did business with it. People thought it was cool, whatever. But like you bought that thing to say that you had that thing, to pull that thing out and be the person who owns that thing. That is the Galaxy Fold's primary purpose, so that the people who buy it can be the kind of people who buy things like that.
13:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah, and also to prove that Samsung got there first, like
13:17 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
13:17 Nilay Patel? In the real way.
13:18 Speaker 05 I think it is the most astonishingly status symbol-y status symbol that we've had in this industry. I can't even think since, since the Razr.
13:29 Speaker 04 I don't know if I agree with that because like Samsung sells $2,000 Android flip phones in China that run like old ass technology, like busted specs and like bad software. And they sell for $2,021 because they are pure status symbols.
13:46 Nilay Patel? So what you're saying is people want folding phones?
13:48 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, these are like flip phones, but like
13:51 Speaker 05 I'm saying this has all the status symbol-y parts of being a status symbol, like being very expensive and flashy while also being like a true technological feat at the same time.
14:04 Speaker 04 Yeah, I think the expensive part of this is a strategic move to discourage people from not buying S10s. Like if it was priced at like $1,400, say, yes, that's extremely expensive. It's on the high end of smartphones, but you can buy an S10 for $1,400 if you get enough storage. So like this is priced so high that if you were considering buying an S10, you're not likely to wait for this because it's just going to be so high out of your budget anyways.
14:28 Nilay Patel? But I don't think they're even gonna make that many. Paul, I think that the status symbol-y part of this is like, I enjoy a spectacle, you know? Every now and again, I like Slack Dan, like a eBay listing for an Escalade. It's a thing that happens. I can't imagine just like calmly sitting at dinner and being like, hang on, I gotta like check a tweet and like unfolding this phone. Like, that's a moment and people, some people want to buy that moment. And that's great. But to your point, Paul, like the Razr was a status symbol. The original iPhone was a status symbol. The iPhone four had a status symbol.
15:02 Speaker 04 And the story with all of those is that they got past their status symbol level and became the ultimate mainstream things. The Razr became ultimately mainstream in a matter of a couple of years. The iPhone, obviously, became very mainstream very quickly. So does this mean that the folding phone, this is, it's a status symbol this year? How many years until everyone's got a folding phone?
15:21 Nilay Patel? Four.
15:22 Speaker 04 Yeah?
15:22 Nilay Patel? That's like, I mean.
15:23 Speaker 05 You think four?
15:24 Nilay Patel? Four.
15:24 Speaker 05 All right. How long until it's the best phone, right? It's already a very interesting prospect as a tablet that can kind of be a phone, but it might be a long time till it's the best phone, right?
15:36 Nilay Patel? Yeah, also somebody tweeted this at me today, which is like, I was tweeting like, this thing is magic. Like, we should all just take a minute and just like do this and then we can go back to complaining about Android on tablets, which we, I assure you, we will do.
15:49 Speaker 04 Oh, boy. Standing by.
15:50 Nilay Patel? It's coming for us. But someone was like, we get hype about all kinds of things that aren't real, like VR or holographic displays or Google Glass. And my counter argument to that is that the utility of those things is still like unknown, right? Like, I don't, VR's pretty cool. The AR stuff is neat, like, great, but the utility of it is still kind of unknown. Like, we have to build apps for that. Google Glass was always dumb. It just always was from the beginning. It just, it was. It was exciting, but it was ultimately like dumb. The utility of this is very obvious. It makes a big thing small, right? Like, you don't have to sell that to anyone. You're like, you have a big thing and you can make it small, right?
16:34 Nilay Patel? And if you can get that to a mainstream price, you can put the top end specs in it, suddenly you're like, are you the sort of person who wants a small phone? But have you thought about having a small phone that turns into a big phone? And everyone's like, oh, that's great. I love this. So I, I think that alone is going to drive like demand to it. Like, there's a very simple thing of the big thing gets small. People are going to be into that. And I think that's why the camera, the selfie cameras on the front when it's unfolded. And a lot of people are gonna use it as a big thing and then put it away. Like, it's like if books didn't fold. Like, no one's like, why does that book fold? I wish I had a scroll. Like, you're like, no, this is great. It folds up.
17:08 Speaker 05 I have an exciting proposal for, for both the technology and the media business. What about bring back the 4:3 aspect ratio? Now, hear me out. Step one, IMAX movies are tall. They're not super wide, they're tall. Step two, folding phones, it's easier to have a 4:3 aspect ratio.
17:38 Speaker 05 I thought I had three things, but basically, bring back 4:3.
17:42 Nilay Patel? When it's unfolded, it's 4.2 by 3. I was reading that spec and it was, it was, my brain was breaking because there were so many dots and numbers. But it's 4.2 by 3, so it's pretty close.
17:52 Speaker 05 Imagine watching a Tarantino movie on this.
17:55 Speaker 04 It would be mostly back, black bars.
17:57 Nilay Patel? No, but then you fold it up and you turn it sideways. You're good to go.
18:01 Speaker 04 You have the timing.
18:02 Nilay Patel? The way Quentin, look, I don't want to name check Quentin too many times, but I think Quentin would be fine with this. Cue. So I, look, I, we're gonna get it and we're gonna play with it.
18:12 Speaker 04 And we're gonna find all the apps that don't work on it.
18:14 Nilay Patel? Yeah, so we, so Dieter, this is your moment. But like, I just, before we do all of that, can we, like, the fact that they're gonna make this piece of hardware and it will be, I, my guess is it will be medium good.
18:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, the hardware, like, like, the thing is, like, Samsung can innovate on the hardware, which they're showing very well. And the hardware will probably be fine. It's obviously going to have lots of software struggles.
18:37 Nilay Patel? Right, so I'm saying, let's all just take a moment to appreciate the hardware. Take a beat, pull over in your car, be like, folding phones exist. One is shipping on AT&T and T-Mobile on April 26th. For the absurd price of 1,900. Just pull over and think about it.
18:51 Speaker 04 Two months away, it's two months away.
18:53 Nilay Patel? You live in that world.
18:54 Speaker 04 Yeah.
18:54 Nilay Patel? You can walk into your local T-Mobile store and be like, Give me this folding phone and they'll be like, we would like $1,980.
19:02 Speaker 04 The irony of going to a T-Mobile store and being like, I only want to pay $45 a month for my service, but I'm gonna buy the $2,000 phone.
19:11 Nilay Patel? That's perfect. But you live in that world. Let's just, that's, that's great. Okay. You also live in a world where Android tablet software has to run on this thing, which is ultimately why it'll be medium good. Dieter, what did you think of the three apps at once? The sort of unfoldy, was it janky?
19:27 Speaker 03 I think it's gonna be a little bit janky. Now that said, this thing does have 12 gigs of RAM. So that's probably enough to run three apps at once decently. And Samsung already, like, if you have a S9 Plus or you get an S10 or an S10 Plus, like, you can long press on the icon and multitasking to, like, do the split screen or do, like, a little popover thing. You could, like, take any app in a Samsung phone right now and just make a little app window that floats around on your screen like a chat head. Just, you can just do it. It's wild. So they know how to have multiple apps running or active or on the screen at once. Think about the elegance of, even though it's awkward, like, on an iPad, you can, like, slide over from the side and have, like, an app scooch in
20:08 Speaker 03 and then scooch out. Or on Windows or on an iPad, you can split screen and then adjust the width between that stuff. And having used some of those, those features on, like, Android on Chrome OS, Android, Android is not ready for that. The apps expect to be one size when they open on the phone, the end. So I think that's why Apple, or not Apple, why Samsung went with this panel system, because it solves the problem of Android apps expect to not be resized by and large. And so they expect to just be how they show up. I actually think it's one of the reasons that the slide over thing works the way it does. Maybe that'll get better over time, but I don't know.
20:43 Speaker 04 I'm looking at the picture that we have in our article of the three app apps. And I don't think this screen's big enough to really make this make sense. Like, you look at the WhatsApp screen, it's tiny. You look at the browser, it's like, you're not using that browser. So like, what is even the point?
20:58 Nilay Patel? Wait, look at the size of YouTube video. Yeah, that's great. It's amazing.
21:04 Speaker 03 Think of the original sort of criticism of Android tablets. The apps are bad on big screens, but if you get a small Android tablet, like a Nexus 7, say, everybody's favorite Android tablet of all time, and if it's not, you're wrong, it's great, right? Because it's just like a big phone. And now we all just have big phones, so why would you buy Nexus 7, et cetera, et cetera? But this is only 7.3 inches, which is like not that big. And so even though Android apps don't play well at like full-on tablet big screen sizes, I think at 7.3, you're gonna be like, meh, sure, this is fine.
21:37 Speaker 04 Yeah, if you if you stretch it out to the whole thing. Like, I'm just saying, like, in this three-panel, three-apps multitasking world that they showed off, I can't imagine that working very well.
21:49 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I mean, this is like a weird set of apps. Like, just like, kind of flatly. Who is ever watching a YouTube video at this tiny size while looking at, literally, there's more screen real estate in this screenshot devoted to the next three videos you might want to watch than the video you're watching? Then they've got three conversations in WhatsApp.
22:10 Speaker 04 Well, so like, the ultimate move for this, at least on Samsung phones, where they have the split screen and, like Dieter mentioned, the floating apps or whatever, is you park your YouTube video at the top, and then you tweet about it in Twitter below it, using like 2/3 of the screen for Twitter. Or like, you were watching a livestream of a football game or soccer game or whatever, and you tweet about it. Like, you can multitask like that.
22:31 Nilay Patel? All of this just brings me back to this, like, very core thing we talk about all the time with the iPad. And we just don't talk about it with Android tablets a lot because they're Android tablets. Which is a fact. But like, you need a windowing system to like actually make this thing sort of work. Like, you can't lock these things into these boxes because no one really wants to work this way.
22:56 Speaker 03 But it's possible that there is like a two-window system here, right? That you've got a big one on the left and a skinny one on the right.
23:03 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
23:03 Speaker 03 Which is how the iPad started, right? So like, I am not that mad about this thing yet, until I actually try it and... See how it is to like, open these things and how do you actually manage these different windows and whatnot? So, and like, I don't know, man, it seems a little bit hypocritical to be like, oh my God, there's too many apps on the screen. I'm so confused when like, in, you know, 1980, when you were born, Eli, you could get a windowing system on like a 480 by 320 display. And like, we wanted that and it worked, right?
23:31 Nilay Patel? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I think that's actually the solution to these constrained displays is overlapping apps, which is what windowing systems like.
23:40 Speaker 05 Are you kidding me? Have you heard of a, of tiling window managers?
23:44 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I use one. Like, I have a tile manager on my app, on my Mac. It's just, I don't, like, I often overlap windows in this space.
23:53 Speaker 05 I find it so liberating. Once you have a system that keeps your windows from ever touching or overlapping, you feel more productive and smarter.
24:04 Nilay Patel? Paul, were you that kid who like, didn't let your green beans touch your mashed potatoes?
24:12 Speaker 05 You don't want the juices, it changes the flavor.
24:15 Speaker 03 I mean, that's, that's definitely how my kids eat, so like.
24:17 Nilay Patel? And that's what this is. That's what Android and tablets is.
24:19 Speaker 03 And that's exactly what this is.
24:21 Nilay Patel? It's the special plate you get for the kids that keeps all the foods in little compartments.
24:25 Speaker 05 I've never been a big phone person, so I don't really understand the mindset, but I'm guessing most people aren't getting the note because you can have two apps at once on it. They just want a big screen, right?
24:35 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
24:36 Speaker 05 People are doing phone things on large screens.
24:38 Nilay Patel? I think lots of people do picture and picture video notes, right? It's like, one of the best things you can do with a screen that size. So, yeah, sure. Like, that's a great thing you can do on an iPad. It is bizarre that you cannot do it on the larger iPhones. I wish you could. Ultimately, though, the thing folds. Like, I just want to bring us back to that. I think, right, the utility that fundamentally to me is big thing made smaller, so that's cool. But this, the sort of like, what happens when you unfold it? I don't know if this is connected to any Android tablet ecosystem stuff. Right? Like, Google built some facility for these displays, but they didn't connect that to the tablet version of Android, as far as I know.
25:17 Speaker 03 There's no such thing as a tablet version of Android. It doesn't exist.
25:22 Speaker 03 No, I
25:23 Speaker 04 That's a real
25:25 Speaker 03 It's just, it's just Android. They have been trying to build out the, the, you know, ecosystem for people to resize apps so that apps can exist at any arbitrary, you know, height and width. And like that is what, and then it'll, they'll be on Chrome OS. But, uh, you know, the only companies making Android tablets worth a damn are Samsung and Huawei, right?
25:44 Speaker 04 Yeah.
25:44 Speaker 03 And that, that's fine. But, uh, I'm less worried about like the core OS level stuff of Android than I am about app support. And Samsung's going to play around with different ideas for windowing systems on this, uh, bigger screen. But ultimately I don't think they're going to matter that much because at least as of right now, it folds out to 7.3 inches, which is like the size you want for like a one app, maybe two. But you're not going to use this thing like you would an iPad Pro. You're not going to open up a ton of apps at once. At most you'll like do a picture and picture, have a second like slide app over on the side.
26:17 Speaker 04 Yeah.
26:18 Speaker 05 You, you know, an app, a, a, a layout I would really like on, on a screen like this is, is along that right side. Instead of trying to squeeze two apps in, squeeze kind of like a dock, like just a row of icons. So you can quickly switch between apps and you can like drag and drop things just like to that bar and then use that to switch to the next app.
26:38 Speaker 03 I wonder if this thing supports slide over.
26:40 Nilay Patel? Oh, I was gonna say, I wonder if it supports Dex. Like how wild would it be if you, you plug a dock into this and it just turns into like a full on desktop computer and then you've got a second display?
26:48 Speaker 04 Paul, Samsung has a thing on its phones called Apps Edge or Edge Screen where you like swipe in from the side and it brings this like tab of shortcuts. That's kind of like a launcher. Um, I could see them like adopting that kind of idea, like you were just describing onto this for pretty easily.
27:02 Speaker 05 It could just stay up?
27:03 Speaker 04 Uh, well, you can't on the phone because it takes up like a third of the screen, but I could see them allowing you to keep it open.
27:08 Nilay Patel? I cannot wait to play with this thing. How much like, how much Samsung crazy is in the software? Like, we kind of don't know.
27:15 Speaker 03 Yeah.
27:16 Nilay Patel? Is it all the crazy? Like, could they not fit in all the crazy? Cause just like the, the, making the fold work was enough? I can't, I, I'm very excited. I'm going to buy one.
27:26 Speaker 05 Can I, can I say two things that are kind of related?
27:29 Nilay Patel? My kid's not going to college. Yes.
27:31 Speaker 05 I remember the third reason for 43. If you look at most TVs on a wall in a living room, there's more room above the TV than there is to the left and right. That's just one thing. And then the other thing is, you know, the next phone, the next milestone that we now can look forward to is the phone that folds twice.
27:51 Nilay Patel? Yeah. What?
27:53 Speaker 05 Something that can double it. See, this, this phone doubles its screen size when it opens.
27:58 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
27:58 Speaker 05 But a phone that folds twice will quadruple its screen size.
28:02 Nilay Patel? Right.
28:03 Speaker 04 So you, so you basically open it to like a small tablet and then you open it again to a big tablet? Is that your thought?
28:08 Speaker 05 Your phone is the size of a razor when fully folded. And you fold it out and it's, it's a razor size. Yeah, for making phone calls.
28:17 Nilay Patel? The razor phone, you mean, not like a man's face razor?
28:20 Speaker 05 Sorry, yes, the razor phone. And then you fold it one more time and you can watch Quentin Tarantino movie.
28:27 Nilay Patel? My God. All right, we're going to take a break from that, from that hopeful vision of the future. And we're going to talk about the SN.
28:38 Nilay Patel? Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge. And Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web and how CloudFlare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.
28:59 Speaker 06 We polled all that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you, if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online.
29:24 Nilay Patel? This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts.
29:37 Speaker 02 This series is presented by EY. If you're looking to hire, you need Indeed. With Indeed sponsored jobs, you can spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.
30:26 Nilay Patel? Okay, we're back. Let's talk about some, we talked about some future phones. Dan, talk about the now phone.
30:30 Speaker 04 The now phone, literally now because
30:32 Nilay Patel? It's right here.
30:33 Speaker 04 We've got one here, you can preorder it now. It's gonna be in stores in like a week and a half or whenever you listen to this, a week later or whatever. And it is not like one S10, there are four of them.
30:46 Nilay Patel? All right, walk us through it, buddy.
30:48 Speaker 04 So you've got the S10, the S10 Plus. Those are like the successors to last year's S9, S9 Plus. Then you've got the S10e, which is perhaps maybe the most interesting of the new line, which is a small phone priced against like the iPhone XR. And then coming even later, after the fold, after the fold? Anyways, you, there's a 5G S10 that's coming to Verizon first and then hitting other carriers. And that is not like a 5G version of the S10 Plus. It's like its own separate model with an even bigger screen and other features. But the ones that are like important right now, S10, S10 Plus, S10e.
31:24 Nilay Patel? And this, Dieter, you made an entire video about One UI, which is this new gesture thing that's happening at the bottom?
31:31 Speaker 03 Uh, that's an option. It's not necessarily the default.
31:34 Speaker 04 I turned the option on, on the phone Neela's using to confuse him greatly.
31:38 Nilay Patel? It is so confusing.
31:40 Speaker 04 No, it's not.
31:42 Nilay Patel? It is because the one thing that you want to do the most, swipe up from the bottom to go home, is also depending on the timing of your swipes, the thing that activates Samsung Pay or the Google Assistant.
31:55 Speaker 04 Yes.
31:56 Speaker 03 Samsung Pay is down there.
31:58 Nilay Patel? What's gonna happen when you swipe up? Am I gonna pay for coffee? Am I gonna talk to Google? Or am I gonna go to the home screen?
32:05 Speaker 05 Describe this, this timing. Are you, are you flicking up? Are you dragging slowly?
32:11 Speaker 03 Before, before we get there. So Samsung has options. The default is your standard Samsung layout of multitasking, home button, back button. Unlike Google, which is trying to come up with a full swipe system. Samsung defaults to that. You can switch it to a swipe up system where you swipe up from one of those three parts of the screen to activate one of those buttons. However, you know, holding down on the home button or like a slow swipe, if you go to a full swipe system, they still need a way to get to those other features at the bottom of the phone. And this is why Neel is running into this problem. One last point, old, the last couple of generations of Samsung phones had like Samsung's version of Force Touch, which was just on that one spot. You could like press hard and get home. And that is now gone.
32:55 Speaker 03 I assume because they needed to make space for the ultrasonic fingerprint sensor to replace it. So having said all that, the swipes are like, they're there and we can get very angry about them, but it's not on by default. So I, I guess.
33:10 Speaker 04 There's a learning curve. I think once you get used to it, you kind of learn it.
33:13 Nilay Patel? I've now learned to completely be unable to bring up Samsung Pay. When I first picked up this phone, it was all I could do. And now I can't do it to save my soul.
33:20 Speaker 04 I think it only from the home screen is the Samsung.
33:23 Nilay Patel? Anyway, let's talk about the changes to this phone from the S9. So the, the most notable one, well, the two most notable ones, one A and one B. One A is that the top bezel is much smaller.
33:34 Speaker 04 And the bottom bezel is much smaller.
33:35 Nilay Patel? And we got the Infinity O cameras punched out, the hole punch cameras.
33:39 Speaker 04 Hole punch cameras, yep.
33:40 Nilay Patel? Dan has pointed out to me that every one of Samsung's wallpapers fades out to a black gradient in the top right. So it hides it, which I think looks great actually. Like just hide it.
33:50 Speaker 04 Which for, for what it's worth is the exact same thing Apple does with its default iPhone wallpapers.
33:55 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And then when you like do anything, there's just like a black rectangle oval thing there. And then obviously the fingerprint sensor.
34:02 Speaker 04 Yeah. So on the S10 and the S10 plus, there's no rear fingerprint scanner. There's no passive one. It is under the screen, ultrasonic, which I believe.
34:12 Speaker 04 I'm not sure if it's the first on the market, but it's the first ultrasonic fingerprint scanner I've used. Other under-screen ones like on the OnePlus 6T is an optical-based one. So this is a little bit different technology that Samsung says is more secure, faster, harder to spoof, stuff like that. But basically you place your thumb on the lower part of the screen and you kind of find the right spot and it reads it and unlocks the phone.
34:34 Nilay Patel? Is it fast?
34:35 Speaker 03 With a ripple effect on the screen, just like the S3.
34:40 Speaker 04 The Riverstone S3.
34:43 Speaker 03 You know what's funny, Neelai, you listed what you thought were the most important hardware aspects of the S10. And you didn't mention the fact that they like threw another camera on there, which I think is fascinating.
34:56 Speaker 04 He hasn't turned it over yet.
34:57 Speaker 03 No one seems to care.
35:00 Nilay Patel? Well, no, I was just saying the big two design changes from the S9 are the front camera and the fingerprint sensor.
35:07 Speaker 04 Yeah, the stuff you look at all the time. Yeah.
35:09 Nilay Patel? Right. And the fingerprint sensor in particular is like a hilarious narrative of Samsung just finally getting here. Like, where's it gonna go? Should we put it in this drawer, under this rock? How about on the back, right next to the camera?
35:20 Speaker 04 The S10 E does not have this fancy under-screen fingerprint sensor because it's cheaper. So they put it in the power button on the right side of the phone, which is what Sony has done for a few years. And it's like a capacitive thing on the side of the phone.
35:33 Nilay Patel? Anyway, let's talk about, so we can talk about the cameras. So there's two on the front.
35:36 Speaker 04 On the S10 Plus.
35:37 Nilay Patel? On the, so I'm holding the S10 Plus. There's two on the front. The regular S10 has just one.
35:41 Speaker 04 Correct.
35:41 Nilay Patel? This camera is not what I had hoped it would be.
35:44 Speaker 04 Correct.
35:45 Nilay Patel? So the Pixel 3 has like a wide-angle selfie camera, which I would just, for the record, told Dieter on this show would be the most popular thing about the Pixel 3. And he poo-pooed me and I was completely right because everyone loves it. However, Samsung did not copy this great idea and then said this is like a depth camera.
36:02 Speaker 04 Right. So, so the main camera is a 10-megapixel autofocus camera, which I think is Unique in that Samsung is basically the only mainstream manufacturer using autofocus front-facing cameras. Everyone else uses fixed focus. So that's pretty interesting. They've been using them for a couple of years. But then the second camera on the S10 Plus is an 8-megapixel RGB depth sensor, and they are using it for better, what they call "live focus," but basically your portrait mode types of features and stuff like that. They are not using, it's not a, like, a Face ID array, so you can turn on Face Unlock, but it's just using a simple picture of your face as opposed to a 3D scanning array, and you cannot get, like, an ultra-wide field of view. What is interesting, though,
36:46 Speaker 04 is if you, I think he's, Neil is playing with a camera app right now, there is a button to go a little bit wider than normal, but I think they're just cropping and uncropping.
36:55 Speaker 03 Yeah.
36:56 Nilay Patel? I think that's what they're doing.
36:57 Speaker 03 Yep, that's what they're doing. It's hilarious.
36:59 Nilay Patel? That's wild. This camera, Sam Byford wrote this story for us about how every company copies the iPhone camera app, and it is probably the most influential software design in the world.
37:09 Speaker 04 Yes.
37:10 Nilay Patel? Yeah, that's true.
37:13 Speaker 04 You should see a Huawei camera app.
37:15 Nilay Patel? Okay, so that's the front cameras.
37:17 Speaker 04 That's the front camera.
37:17 Nilay Patel? What's going on in the back?
37:18 Speaker 04 So on the S10 and the S10 Plus, they have now three cameras on the back, which is basically your standard, which is a wide angle. You've got the telephoto camera that was on the S9 Plus last year, and then the new camera is ultra-wide, so it goes even wider than normal. So you kind of have, it's kind of neat because it's like you've got three different perspectives or field of views in your phone, tapped, touch of a button away.
37:44 Nilay Patel? Yo, I love this wide-angle camera.
37:46 Speaker 04 And it's extremely-
37:47 Speaker 03 The wide-angle camera's great, yeah.
37:48 Speaker 04 Like, if I, I don't know the exact specs of it, but if I had to guess what the equivalent of that on a, like, a large camera would be, I think it's, like, 10 millimeters. It's really wide.
37:56 Nilay Patel? It's also extremely distorted.
37:58 Speaker 04 Yes, which is why when you are very close to your subject, it will distort. Interesting about that camera is it's not an autofocus camera, it's fixed focus, but at those extreme wide angles, that doesn't really matter that much.
38:07 Nilay Patel? So do we think these take better, I mean, that's a lot of lenses.
38:10 Speaker 04 So it's a lot of lenses, so it's three different lenses and three different sensors. The only real new lens and new sensor is that ultra wide camera. Based on what I've been able to gather so far, the wide camera or the main camera and the telephoto camera are basically the same ones as were on the S9 last year. So F1.5 switching, F2.4 aperture on the main camera, still has a mechanical aperture switch thing. F2.4 aperture on the telephoto, same size sensor, same dual pixel autofocus on them. But they're not like stepping forward with the sensor technology. Like we're seeing lots of phones this year with these 48 megapixel sensors that capture 12 megapixel images and they compress them down and get a whole bunch of data out of them.
38:55 Speaker 04 Samsung's not doing that. So we really need to do a lot of like more work and testing with this to say whether they're any better or worse. But on paper, it's not really pushing the envelope.
39:06 Speaker 03 I will say that I'm just zooming in on some of these wide angle shots and they don't hold up great. They look really cool.
39:11 Speaker 04 Yes.
39:12 Speaker 03 They don't withstand.
39:13 Speaker 04 Yeah, so the wide angle camera is a 16 megapixel sensor. So that's a new one and it's like an F2.2 lens or something like that.
39:20 Speaker 03 I don't know what I just did, but now it wants me to use Bixby Vision.
39:23 Speaker 04 Yep, sounds about right.
39:25 Speaker 03 I just like used the phone for a while and I was like, Bixby's here.
39:30 Speaker 04 The dog comes out in his little bow tie.
39:32 Speaker 03 Looks like you're taking a photo. So we should talk about that too. There is a Bixby button.
39:37 Speaker 04 There is a Bixby button. It launches Bixby, it does Bixby things.
39:41 Speaker 03 But, but on the units that I looked at, at the hands on area, there was a setting inside the Bixby feed. It's not like in the main settings, it's in the Bixby feed settings. You go to that, you tap the hamburger menu, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you can find a place to customize the behavior of the Bixby button. And there's three things you can do with a button. You can press it once, you can press it twice, or you can long press it. Long pressing will always launch Bixby voice for you to ask a question of Bixby. And then you can.
40:11 Speaker 04 Why Bixby?
40:13 Speaker 03 Just, just cuz. And then one of those single or double presses will always launch the Bixby feed. You can't do that, but then you can customize the other one. So you can set the single press to launch an app or to launch a Bixby routine. So you could, you can in some ways. Customize it. Now, Dan is saying on his unit, it doesn't have that option.
40:32 Speaker 04 It does not. And that was like, well, the first things I did after pulling it out of the box was to, to see if we could change that.
40:39 Speaker 03 You definitely looked in the right place, right?
40:40 Speaker 04 I was, yeah, I was looking in the right place. What it lets me do is say, launch Bixby with one press, or launch Bixby with two presses, but it does not let me choose a different app. I've reached out to Samsung for clarification on this. They are currently working on it. So I don't know if it's a software update that might be pushed to this review unit. It is ahead of launch right now. We're about a week and a half away from launch, so it's possible that could be adjusted. It's possible that the ones they demoed had software that might not make it to the retail one. So we'll find out. We'll definitely clarify and let you know for sure.
41:10 Speaker 03 Yeah. Samsung, by the way, notorious for having 5,000 builds of its software customized for every carrier, for every region, for every random, like, different chip that they use. Who knows?
41:23 Speaker 04 Yes.
41:23 Speaker 03 It's always a delightful grabby, but you know what's gonna be there? Bixby.
41:27 Speaker 04 Yes. So on the, uh, the S10 and the S10 Plus, we talked about them a bunch. Inside, you got your Snapdragon 855, like, specs out the max or whatever. You can get a 1 terabyte S10 Plus that's $1,600. You can also get an S10 Plus with a ceramic back, which is kinda crazy. The one thing that's remarkable, I've been showing this around the office today, everyone says it's smaller than they expect, and it does feel pretty small for what is arguably a big phone. Like, there's no getting around. This is a big phone, big screen. It feels smaller than you would expect. But if you really want a small phone, that's like the S10E, which is kind of an interesting story.
42:00 Speaker 03 So, okay, S10E, um, I guess we'll just compare it to what you miss from the S10. So you don't get the ultrasonic fingerprint sensor. Um, you only have the single selfie camera on the front, and you have the, is it the regular and the tele on the back, or regular and the wide? I can't remember. You get two lenses on the back.
42:18 Speaker 04 It's the regular and the ultra wide. It's, it does not have the telephoto.
42:21 Speaker 03 I actually think that's better. I would rather have that. The screen is flat instead of curved, so it has slightly bigger bezels. But I don't know, man, they're pretty small. If you're really complaining about the bezels on it, whatever. It's $750. It still has a headphone jack, still has USB C, still has wireless charging, still has the same processor, still has... The cheapest model has a little bit less RAM, but whatever. The slightly more storage one has the same amount of RAM. And that's kind of it. It's a 5.8 inch screen, so it's a little bit smaller. It's like comparable in size to the iPhone X, but it feels a little bit narrower in my hand. And I think it actually is like half a millimeter, millimeter thinner, whatever, or less narrow, less wide. I don't know. Like, I think it's pretty solid.
43:04 Speaker 03 The question is, is does it feel small enough compared to the S10 that people will be like, oh yeah, I want the small one to justify it? And it's only 150 bucks less than the S10. And if you're the kind of person that goes on a payment plan, that 150 bucks like becomes a couple of bucks a month. And so, blah. So I have no idea if this thing is gonna, you know, live or die, succeed or fail, or what. Now Samsung phones get discounted pretty aggressively, pretty quickly. So it's possible that this thing will get more discounted than the S10 does. And so it will end up being like the cheap phone option and be more successful at being the cheap phone option than the iPhone XR was.
43:44 Speaker 04 If that does happen, like, it's... It would be really compelling because you're getting like cutting-edge 2019 tech inside of it.
43:51 Speaker 03 Yeah.
43:51 Speaker 04 In terms of processor, LTE, sport, stuff like that. The other confusing part of all of this is the S10e we mentioned has a 5.8 inch screen and it's smallest. Last year's S9 had a 5.8 inch screen. But the S9 is bigger than the S10e because the S9 has more bezels. So the S9 is like the size of the S10, which has a 6.1 inch screen. So like, it gets kind of confusing. You really eventually should just go...
44:17 Speaker 03 Yeah, well, actually, hey, but if you do that, it won't help because if you hold the S10E and the S10, you're like, man, these are really close in size. I could barely tell the difference. I guess I should just get the bigger one. And then you set down the S10E and then you pick up the S10 Plus and you hold them next to you, you're like, man, these two are really close in size. I really can't tell the difference that much. I'm just gonna, I should just get the bigger one. If you put all three of them together, you can see the size difference, but when you try to compare them one to one, you're like, ah, like, it is almost like insane that they have three phones that almost like, they're not identical sizes. They're obviously different sizes, but they're so close to each other that it's hard to know which one to get.
44:59 Nilay Patel? That's not so insane. That's like the Samsung story. Do you remember we used to have a chart of Samsung screen sizes? And it was everything from like 1.2 to like 12.7. Like literally every little incremental screen size was available. So if it does get discounted. So in America, obviously, the, I would say the big competitor here is not only the sort of $500 crop of phones, but the iPhone XR. To Dan's point, if you get a XR, you get the Apple's best processor, but you don't get their best wireless performance. You don't, you only get one camera. You do get Face ID in the front, so you can do emojis. That's great. That's whatever it cares.
45:35 Speaker 04 Yeah, what you're getting with the XR is the battery life. It's like the biggest value.
45:39 Nilay Patel? Well, you get the battery, but you don't get their best screen. Like the cut downs from the XS to the XR are noticeable. Are noticeable. I think we all agree the XR is the best phone for most people because like the, if you want that other stuff, you can just go buy the XS. But in like Samsung world, the cut downs are not nearly as severe, right? You still get the screen.
45:58 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's still, it's a, it's a little bit lower res, but at the smaller size, it's like negligible difference to your eyes.
46:04 Nilay Patel? You get their, the new modem.
46:06 Speaker 04 Super AMOLED, whatever it's called.
46:07 Nilay Patel? You get the same processor.
46:09 Speaker 04 Yeah.
46:09 Nilay Patel? You do get two cameras in the back.
46:11 Speaker 04 Yep.
46:11 Nilay Patel? Like, that's, and if it gets discounted at 500, now Apple's like really looking at some competition.
46:17 Speaker 03 Well, so it's Apple, but also the other competition to keep in mind for the S10e is OnePlus. Because it makes killer phones at a price point that's, you know, lower than that. They might be creeping up this year, who knows? But like, they make five, $600 phones that are really good, but then the downfall is always like, eh, the camera. So if the S10e's camera maintains or does better than what like OnePlus and those other, you know, 500-ish phones do, then it's golden. But if those phones step up their camera game, then this thing is gonna get squeezed because you're gonna have people saying, eh, screw it, I'll get the really nice one. Or eh, screw it, I'll save, if I'm gonna save 150 bucks, I might as well save 150 more because the camera's almost as good anyway.
46:58 Speaker 04 And get like a bigger screen and stuff like that, yeah.
47:00 Speaker 03 Yeah, so it's like, it's in a weird spot. So I think Samsung did the right thing by touting it as the small screen phone. Because I do think that is its best selling point.
47:09 Nilay Patel? And to Samsung's credit, they're very good at sort of harnessing, like, looking at like meme-based consumer demand. Like, I don't really know how else to put it. Like, we hear about small phones a lot, we write about small phones, we tweets about small phone go viral. And then you like, look at the raw data and people are...
47:26 Speaker 04 Nobody buys small phones.
47:27 Nilay Patel? And nobody buys them.
47:28 Speaker 04 I, you know, I think it's a convenient marketing line for them, to be honest with you. I really think that the S10e exists so that they can have a phone at $750 and then push the price of the S10 and the S10 Plus up. Because the S10 starts at $899, the S10 Plus starts at $999. Like I said, you can spec it up to $1,600.
47:46 Speaker 03 The Galaxy Fold is at $1,980.
47:48 Speaker 04 The Fold is $1,980. I mean, like, it gives them more headroom for their, for their higher pricing. And to, like, for what it's worth, the S10e is 750, it looks like a deal. It's still starting at more expensive than the S9 started just a year ago. So like, it, it, it, it exists to allow them to raise their prices above the board and then, or across the board. And, you know, compete with Apple on pricing in terms of the...
48:12 Speaker 03 Can I just say how bonkers it is that we're talking about a 5-inch, 5.8-inch screen as a small phone? Putting that out there. Not that small.
48:20 Nilay Patel? Oh, I want to talk about the headphone jack real quick.
48:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, so all of them have headphone jacks.
48:23 Nilay Patel? All of them. And this is kind of what I mean about like meme-based demand, right? So that like-
48:28 Speaker 04 It's almost like, it's almost like these are the anti iPhones, right? So they don't have a notch, they've got a hole punch cut out. They have a headphone jack, they have a smaller screen on the $750 model instead of a bigger screen like the XR. It's almost like all of the things that people get really mad about Apple, about the iPhone at Apple, Samsung's like, "Well, you're mad about it over there, but if you come over here, we have those things you're mad about losing." So it feels very much like an anti iPhone.
48:59 Nilay Patel? Which is what you want. There's competition in the market.
49:02 Speaker 04 Yeah.
49:03 Nilay Patel? I just, it's there. I'm very happy and excited about it. I think they will actually move units because it's there. But the fold doesn't have one, and they were very clear that the fold is like the future.
49:16 Speaker 04 Right.
49:16 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Is this the last one with headphone jack? What do we think?
49:19 Speaker 04 Good question. I mean, like, I wouldn't have been surprised if they dropped it this year. Like, I'm actually more surprised that it has it than it doesn't have it. Like, I don't know, we'll see. Like, you know, they're gonna do another flagship phone in the fall with the next Note or whatever.
49:32 Nilay Patel? I will say the fact that this phone and this design with this set of features, with this amount of stuff in it, it, this thinness-
49:40 Speaker 04 Yeah.
49:41 Nilay Patel? Is just like a slap in the face for every Apple person who's like, "They could never fit it in there."
49:46 Speaker 04 Right.
49:47 Nilay Patel? Yeah. It's waterproof, it's got a tiny bottom bezel. Actually, the bottom bezel is smaller than the iPhone's bottom bezel.
49:54 Speaker 04 Yeah. And like, everyone loves to talk about how the iPhone has no chin because they fold the
49:59 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
49:59 Speaker 04 the AMOLED panel or whatever. Like, I mean, Samsung didn't talk about how it did this display, but it did it.
50:06 Nilay Patel? Yeah, and it's, I mean, it's just like every excuse Apple has ever given outside of, "We needed to spend a couple hundred bucks on AirPods." It's like non-existence with a phone. I just want to put, I just want to put it out there in the world.
50:19 Speaker 03 It's also funny that they included the headphone jack because they're pushing the Galaxy Buds so hard. You get free on preorder, that's 30 bucks cheaper than the AirPods. You can charge the Galaxy Buds from the phone. I know, I know that there's a rumor the next iPhone will have like, you know, reverse wireless charging or whatever, but that feature alone is killer. I like, I don't know why I'm so excited about the fact that the phone can charge other things, but I love it specifically for the idea of traveling to a hotel room, having just one charger for your laptop, for your phone, and you don't even need to bring one for your earbuds because you can just set them on top of your phone. It's the best.
50:56 Nilay Patel? Turn on the charging mode real quick. Let's try something.
50:58 Speaker 04 Oh boy.
51:00 Nilay Patel? We're gonna try to put my Apple Watch.
51:01 Speaker 04 So I'm gonna tell him this isn't gonna work.
51:03 Nilay Patel? It's definitely not gonna work.
51:04 Speaker 04 Let him try.
51:04 Nilay Patel? It's either not gonna work or it's gonna start a fire. Like those are the two choices.
51:08 Speaker 03 It might not work with an Apple Watch. It should work with an iPhone.
51:10 Speaker 04 It won't work with an Apple Watch because it is a cheat charging and the Apple Watch doesn't use it. But let's put my, you got an iPhone there.
51:16 Nilay Patel? It's charging my iPhone.
51:17 Speaker 04 Now, it charges at 4.5 watts, which is less than like slow wireless charging. Slow wireless charging is 5 watts. So it's, it's not a fast charge. It's really designed for like, you said, accessories like your headphones. And it's funny that you mentioned that like they're pushing these Galaxy Buds. You get them free if you preorder. They're, you know, their latest true wireless headphones. You could charge them with the phone. That would have been the perfect excuse to drop the headphone jack. Like, oh, we dropped the headphone jack, but Apple charges you 160 bucks for AirPods. Here, these are for free and you can charge them with your phone.
51:46 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Alright, so let's talk about the Galaxy Buds.
51:49 Speaker 04 The buddies.
51:50 Nilay Patel? I love that they're called Galaxy Buds. Yeah. Just like, just as a thing. Like, that's a win for Samsung. They have a product called the Galaxy Buds.
51:58 Speaker 04 I'm trying to remember what they used to be called.
52:00 Nilay Patel? Uh, the Galaxy Best.
52:01 Speaker 03 Icon X.
52:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, they had the worst name, the prior generations.
52:04 Nilay Patel? Uh, so now they're Galaxy Buds. They come with a little case, Dan was showing it to me earlier.
52:09 Speaker 04 Yep.
52:09 Nilay Patel? They charge wirelessly on the phone. We don't know if they sound good.
52:13 Speaker 03 They sound okay. I've been wearing them for a day. Vlad's gonna do the full review, but I will tell you that they're a little bit less noise isolating than say the Jabra 65T Elite, Elite 65Ts. They're also slightly more uncomfortable after like three or four hours, which is funny, but they're smaller and they're lighter. And yeah, like they pair fine with an iPhone. They're cheaper.
52:33 Speaker 04 They supposedly have six hours of battery life, which is basically as best as you're gonna get we've seen from these kinds of things.
52:39 Speaker 03 They have identical touch controls on both sides. And because it was okay for Apple to not give you volume control on AirPods, Samsung decided it's okay not to have volume control on the buds. So you can play, pause, next track, last track, and invoke a digital assistant like Siri or Bixby.
52:57 Nilay Patel? And it's just straight Bluetooth?
52:59 Speaker 04 Yes. So what's funny is like, they do the same thing as AirPods. If you put them next to an S10, you open the case. It pops up on the screen. It tells you the charge. If they're not paired, you can click that to charge or to pair, just like you would do with AirPods on an iPhone. Which is kind of fascinating because I don't think I've seen an Android platform rip that off quite so hard before, but it's there. It's a nice feature to have. Like, I'm not mad at it, but it is not original.
53:25 Nilay Patel? How much do they cost?
53:26 Speaker 04 Hundred thirty bucks.
53:27 Nilay Patel? So they're right, they're right in the range.
53:28 Speaker 04 Or free if you preorder an S10 or S10 Plus.
53:31 Nilay Patel? That's not bad.
53:32 Speaker 04 No.
53:32 Nilay Patel? And it's better than when they were giving out like Galaxy Gears or whatever. Your VR is like, do you want, do you want this like kind of Doom smartwatch platform or how about this plastic shell? Like, it's better than that. I'd take that.
53:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, no, I think, I think it's a, it's a good little giveaway.
53:49 Nilay Patel? All right. Speaking of Galaxy Gears.
53:52 Nilay Patel? If I walked, I veered us right into it. Uh, there's a new smartwatch.
53:57 Speaker 04 Yeah. The smartwatch is at the same time disappointing and also maybe kind of interesting.
54:01 Speaker 03 It's it's only 199 bucks, right? It's 200 bucks?
54:04 Speaker 04 Yes, yes.
54:05 Speaker 03 Yeah, so it they got rid of the rotating bezel. They made it, I feel like, just like, maybe a little smaller. It's only a 1.1 inch screen. It's super ridiculously light. But it's it took an operating system on a watch that like felt really cool because you had to like rotate a thing and like the whole OS was like designed to work with something being rotated. And then that rotation got replaced with like a swipe left swipe right mechanic, but you still have to rotate. And so it just feels a lot jankier to use than the last one, even though it's like the exact same thing as the last one. In terms of, you know, the the core UI and stuff, it just feels worse.
54:42 Nilay Patel? Is this thing, are they selling these?
54:44 Speaker 04 They sell them to Samsung device owners. Or or there's oftentimes lots of bundle deals, especially during the holidays. You buy a Samsung phone, you get a free Galaxy.
54:52 Nilay Patel? I'm just like, they added this feature to the the where it can measure your blood pressure. Like, are they converting people who are like, that's a useful feature for me?
55:00 Speaker 04 I mean, you're not selling it to iPhone users. It works with an iPhone, but it's super clumsy. Like, people who own iPhones are either buying Apple Watches. Maybe someone's buying a hybrid watch because they don't want to charge it, or they're not buying a smartwatch. Other Android owners, which really don't matter because Samsung owns the market, but like other Android device owners, if you buy a Samsung smartwatch with it, you have to install half a dozen apps. It's kind of a clumsy UI, clumsy experience. They really work best with Samsung phones. They are designed to be used with Samsung phones, which kind of makes a whole lot of sense. But there I don't think they're like converting people over here. Like, they will sell them as many as they sell of Samsung phones, but not everyone's gonna buy one, right?
55:40 Speaker 03 So I mean, this gets back to the like, can this is why Samsung has to pound the table and say, we have an ecosystem of Galaxy stuff. They they need to convince you that you want to live in that world and that they have got everything you want there. And they're they're, you know, a real big boy ecosystem.
55:55 Speaker 04 What's interesting is that this, at least they didn't announce it one. There's no LTE version of this watch, which is one thing that Samsung has had for the past few years on its generations of smartwatches and seems to actually be popular with a segment of customers who want to have connectivity and can't have a phone on them. So I know a lot of service workers use these kind of watches with LTE connectivity because they can get text messages and calls without like having their phone out on the floor or something like that.
56:20 Nilay Patel? I love my LTE Apple Watch. Yeah, I I I'm doing this thing where like. We go out with the child on the weekends and I don't take my phone.
56:29 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
56:30 Nilay Patel? And then I'm like, this thing should, I wish it had more apps.
56:35 Nilay Patel? But that's good.
56:36 Speaker 04 Yeah. But so like, so what's interesting is that I think carriers are the ones that probably push the most Galaxy watches because they do bundle them. They do sell service on them and stuff like that. This one does not have LTE. Carriers are probably not going to really sell it. So.
56:49 Nilay Patel? That's really interesting.
56:49 Speaker 05 Can you charge the watch on the phone?
56:53 Speaker 04 Yes, yes.
56:54 Speaker 05 Yes. Nice.
56:56 Speaker 04 It is, it uses, this is one of the other new things with this watch is it uses standard Qi charging. So, yes.
57:01 Nilay Patel? And it does sleep tracking. So if the battery life lasts long enough, that's one feature that it's one feature that it has that the Apple Watch can't really do.
57:07 Speaker 04 Natively.
57:08 Speaker 05 I was not aware that we were ready technologically for reverse wireless charging. I guess I just wasn't paying attention. Apparently it's not the newest feature, but.
57:17 Speaker 04 You missed it on the one Huawei phone.
57:20 Speaker 05 Yeah. Well, that's exciting, right? This idea of, of my gadgets, we're all going to die together. We're all going down. We're at 5%. We're not going to last long, but I'm going to be listening to music for every last percentage of that.
57:35 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And I, Dan laid out the, the scenario and indeed we were just talking about it too of you go on the road, you plug in your phone, you flip it over and you charge your earbuds by just sitting on top. That's like, I'm okay with that. I'm into that. I mean,
57:50 Speaker 04 Yeah.
57:50 Nilay Patel? It also implies that instead of ever getting true USB C on all these things, they'll just integrate extremely slow Qi charging, which is like not the correct nightmare that I was anticipating.
58:02 Speaker 04 Well, nobody's doing that yet. Like the nightmare is coming for you, but right now you still get a USB C plug, at least on the Galaxy Buds.
58:10 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I just, I anticipate a world in which, you know, Apple's like, you know what? No, no more ports. Extremely slow wireless charging for all. And then everyone else does it too.
58:22 Speaker 05 You're, you're holding your phone up against a blank wall outlet.
58:26 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Yeah. Everyone's at the airport just sort of like desperately pressing their phone to the wall.
58:34 Nilay Patel? That's the nightmare.
58:36 Speaker 04 Well, like the, if, if, you know, if you've ever been to CES for the past like decade, you know, true wireless power, man, that's coming.
58:44 Nilay Patel? No, no, that's great. That's amazing. All right, let's take a break. Paul's gonna do his regularly occurring segment, which I did not forget. And we're gonna do a little lightning round. It's gonna be great.
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1:00:06 Nilay Patel? Paul Miller.
1:00:08 Speaker 05 Uh huh.
1:00:09 Nilay Patel? Every week, you captivate our audience with this ongoing series of extreme consistency. What's it called?
1:00:16 Speaker 05 It's called Don't Brick the Shoes. And if you remember a few months back, I did a segment about, you know, of Don't Brick the Shoes about a jacket. And it's like, why is he talking about a jacket on Don't Brick the Shoes? I was talking about this, this Levi jacket that was receiving a software update. I was talking about this fanciful idea of what if, haha, what if they brick a piece of clothing with a software update? Well, nice. Nike has bricked a piece of clothing with a software update. They have bricked or some of Nike's Adapt BB smart sneakers. Apparently, some of them were running like an earlier software build or something like that.
1:00:59 Speaker 05 They've been bricked by a software update and I'm just really excited that we live in a world with folding screens and bricked shoes.
1:01:07 Nilay Patel? Wait, I want to be clear. I once got into a lot of trouble for saying that Microsoft had bricked the Surface tablets in an NFL game.
1:01:15 Speaker 05 Oh, right. Yeah.
1:01:16 Nilay Patel? Which was true because they didn't work, but the tablets were fine and the network that Microsoft had built had gone down. And I've received many emails explaining that the Surface product itself was wonderful. Great. But just because of that experience, I want to be clear about what happened here. Nike put out the Adapt BBs. Ashley Carmen went to Nike, saw the shoe, met Tinker Hatfield, did the whole thing. Great video. Go check it out on YouTube. Read her article. The shoes work with an app to automatically lace, right? They're like the Back to the Future shoes. There's an iOS app and an Android app. The iOS app is good.
1:01:51 Speaker 05 In that it doesn't break the shoes.
1:01:53 Nilay Patel? It does not. The Android app is very bad.
1:01:58 Speaker 05 In that it does break the shoes.
1:02:00 Nilay Patel? Well, it is unclear.
1:02:03 Speaker 05 It's bricked.
1:02:04 Nilay Patel? So if you've got the iOS app, your shoes are lacing, you're, you know, you're, I don't know what you do. You're jumping.
1:02:13 Nilay Patel? You're jumping. You're just jumping all over the place. Your shoes aren't falling off your feet. You're living your best life. If you have an Android phone, it is probable that your phone will only pair to one of your shoes, leaving the other shoe unlaced. Now, so your jumping will be constrained. Where it is unclear is whether your other shoe, the unlaced shoe, is fully bricked or works manually with the buttons on the shoe. So if the shoe.
1:02:42 Speaker 05 Some reporters, some users report that the buttons don't work for them.
1:02:46 Nilay Patel? Right. So some, so it's really a grab bag. You've got an Android phone. You got your robot shoes. What's going to happen next? Who knows?
1:02:54 Speaker 05 But it is, it is important that I was using the word brick loosely.
1:03:00 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:03:00 Speaker 05 There's, there's brick as in completely unrecoverable. And then there's my, I use brick to mean turning it on and off again doesn't fix it. It, it, it is broken to the point that it needs some serious intervention. And then there's like, obviously, there's something like a crash. I wouldn't call a crash a, a brick.
1:03:21 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I think you're right. I, I think the loose definition of brick is a simple power cycle does not restore you to a, a known good state. That's good.
1:03:30 Speaker 05 I'll go with shoes working.
1:03:31 Nilay Patel? Shoes being laced on your feet. Just to, yes, agree, Paul, that is a problem.
1:03:40 Speaker 03 If you own a pair of these shoes, if you own a pair of these shoes, just put them on and just, you know, open up your app and just like a very simple test is that if the shoe fits, software it.
1:03:50 Nilay Patel? Wow. Well, as I said at the top of the show, this will be Dieter's last episode of the Verge Cast.
1:03:57 Nilay Patel? What a, that segment always delivers. Brick shoes. There's one more little segment of Samsung stuff to talk about and then we're in a lightning round. Samsung also announced the S10 5G.
1:04:09 Speaker 05 Yep.
1:04:10 Nilay Patel? Which is a real phone.
1:04:12 Speaker 05 Yep.
1:04:13 Nilay Patel? They announced it with a bunch of carrier partners.
1:04:15 Speaker 05 Well, it's, it's exclusive to Verizon for a quote, limited period, and then it will be going to the other carriers.
1:04:20 Nilay Patel? But then Sprint.
1:04:21 Speaker 05 Like Fortnite.
1:04:22 Nilay Patel? Yeah. But they put Sprint had a video, T-Mobile was there in a video, Vodafone was there in a video. Notably, AT&T not present because, well, I mean, they're gonna get it.
1:04:34 Speaker 05 Yeah, they are getting the phone. They're just, they didn't want to hang out with Sprint and T-Mobile.
1:04:37 Nilay Patel? But right now, at this moment, Galaxy S7s on the AT&T network are showing a 5G E logo. So I'm not sure how AT&T is gonna walk through that. And I really want, it's like, it's great, they made a 5G phone. No one knows how to talk about 5G, like.
1:04:53 Speaker 05 Well, I can tell you, I, I will talk about it. Don't buy this 5G phone. Like, just do not buy this phone.
1:04:59 Nilay Patel? Well, there's that, but I, what I want to get to in, specifically the way that Samsung thought to demonstrate this phone was like a, a video, like a glossy product video. But it was just like zooming lines through Chicago, like overhead shots of Chicago with lines zooming through the streets and making right angle turns. And they ended it and the presenter was like. That was amazing. And I was like, I didn't, that was just lines. That was zoomy lines, man. So they're gonna launch it. You shouldn't buy it. It's a tech demo. You know, the sort of carrier hype around 5G is at full tilt.
1:05:34 Speaker 03 And I, I think, I think you should wait for 6G.
1:05:37 Nilay Patel? Right. So then Trump, Trump is out there. He doesn't know what to do with Huawei, which he wants to prevent from coming into the country. But rural broadband providers are saying Huawei's equipment is cheaper. So that's going to prevent their like 5G rollout. This is all stuff. So today he tweets, I think we should have 5G and even 6G networks as soon as possible, which probably if you're like, Do you disagree? Yeah, but if you're Verizon, you're like, we didn't even get to this G.
1:06:04 Speaker 03 Oh no, Verizon's probably thrilled about it. They're like, we could just call it 6G.
1:06:09 Nilay Patel? AT&T is like, flip the switch. Get it done.
1:06:12 Speaker 03 Have it tomorrow.
1:06:14 Nilay Patel? And AT&T, by the way, put out a 5G fact sheet about its upcoming 5G network that does not even mention 5GE.
1:06:21 Nilay Patel? But just,
1:06:21 Speaker 03 By the way, uh, just real quick on, on, on the Trump tweeting about this and tweeting weird things about, you know, couldn't tell if it was Huawei so tweet or what, it was very confusing. Heim Gartenberg, intrepid reporter, reached out to the CTIA, the industry association for the cellphone carriers and asked them for comment on Trump's call for a 6G network. And they were just like, I don't know, man. Whatever. Here's a statement. Just sure. It was the best.
1:06:47 Nilay Patel? Okay. So I want to connect two dots for people. So there's all this 5G hype. There's this 5G phone. There's Verizon saying, we're going to be in 30 more cities. There's AT&T just lying. This is what they're doing. And then there's like the reality of what the 5G, what they really think it will do, which they don't say out loud. So Randall Stephenson, who is the CEO of AT&T, was on Recode Media with Peter Kafka. You go listen to it. Great podcast. And Peter, if you know Peter, is kind of like no nonsense. And he was like, tell me what the hell 5G is. And again, this whole conversation. And so here's Randall's answer. Listen to this.
1:07:22 Speaker 08 This no latency, zero latency thing is a really, really big deal. It's the game changer. All of the stuff that's in that smartphone that you're holding right there, the storage, No longer needs to be there. The storage can be back in the network. The compute capacity no longer needs to be there. It can be back in the network.
1:07:40 Nilay Patel? So their vision of 5G is that they will take storage and compute away from the consumer and they will own it at the network level. That's their like long-term vision of 5G. That's what the CEO of AT&T is saying about it today. And I read that and I'm like, I'm filled with like a, like an existential dread about AT&T owning what is computed and stored for me. And I, I don't think anybody's really like put those things together. Like, why all this hype? It's not because of faster speeds. It's because they're, the, the telco networks. And Verizon has said something like this to me as well. So I don't want to just put an AT&T. This is just, we happen to have audio of the dude saying it. That to me is wild, right?
1:08:24 Nilay Patel? And I don't think it's just getting enough attention. So you hear about all this 5G stuff, there's the 5G galaxy, whatever. If the promise is, we actually need way thinner clients because we're going to do compute and storage at zero latency. We should probably be having a, a bigger conversation on privacy and security with our telecom companies. Cause they're not making that promise to us right now. Right. And if that's where they're going, like, you know, he has this whole line in here about how like, we don't need wifi anymore because there'll just be 5G everywhere. It's like, no dude. Like, I do not want you managing my network devices. Like, I'll do that on my own. Like, put a fiber line to my house. Anyway, I just want to bring it up. Cause that to me, it's like 5G, great. They, they made a new phone. No one should buy it.
1:09:07 Nilay Patel? But if that's the promise of these networks, I think we, we all need to start paying more attention to it. Paul, you look very thoughtful right now.
1:09:12 Speaker 05 I, I had not heard this quote. I'm just, I have so many thoughts. First thought, a bounty hunter watching my remote desktop connection.
1:09:24 Speaker 05 While I play like Minesweeper on a Windows 2000 box.
1:09:28 Speaker 03 Um.
1:09:30 Speaker 05 Wait, what bounty? But because carriers just give everything to bounty hunters, as we've recently discovered. Yeah, that's really interesting because I wrote a piece a little while ago about edge computing, which is there, there is a sense, there is a lot more processing and work that needs to be done on the device. Like you want to do certain, like you don't want to send everything over the network if you don't have to. And so platform companies like Microsoft and Google are, are doing a lot more, I would say, towards edge computing and owning more of your platform so that they don't
1:10:11 Speaker 05 have to do everything in the cloud. So, and I also, the first thing I thought of is all the promises of, of light clients back in like the year 2000. Like that was what the internet was going to bring us in the first place was these tiny, thin clients to real computers. And I don't think, other than the enterprise, that really hasn't ever taken off. So I'm very suspicious about this being a thing, but it's kind of exciting if it, if it would pit the carriers against the platform companies. The platform companies want to own more of our life with edge computing and the carriers want to have more reasons for bandwidth to happen and so they can spy on more of our life.
1:10:55 Speaker 03 I don't know, Paul. So let's, let's play, let's play that scenario out. So both, we all have thin clients and our compute and our storage are happening in the cloud because there's zero latency and so there's no reason not to. And now there's a competition between the telecom companies to provide that service to us and Google and Microsoft and Apple. You know what I would like in that world? I would like some sort of.
1:11:19 Nilay Patel? I don't know, law that keeps the carriers from, you know, throttling my access to my preferred service provider for my compute. Like, it should be neutral on the net in some way.
1:11:32 Speaker 05 Yeah, what if it was more of like a policy, not really a law, but just sort of like a reinterpretation of a law.
1:11:39 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:11:39 Speaker 05 By a regulatory body.
1:11:41 Nilay Patel? What if you just had a series of, I don't know, like gentlemen's agreements?
1:11:45 Speaker 05 Well, but to clarify, Dieter, and I do love that you brought this to neutrality. But to clarify, I think of it as possibly a productive tension in the sense that platform companies will want more to be happening on the device, while carriers want less to be happening on the device. I mean, I'm probably making way too blunt of a description.
1:12:06 Nilay Patel? No, I got you. Yeah. Yeah, so there's one example I would use that cuts against you, Paul. You said then clients have never taken off. Well, there are an awful lot of $140 billion Chromebooks out there, right? And they are taking over one particular segment of the market in education. So I think Google actually sits right in that middle zone where they're like, yeah, do everything on the web. Like, we own that. That's actually ours. No one else can make money here. And Apple, you know, I think Apple will continue to put an enormous amount of effort pushing things to happening locally in the device because that's, they want to sell expensive hardware, that's a good way to do it. They've got their whole privacy thing going on. I just, that quote to me was the first time I've like really heard
1:12:49 Nilay Patel? a telecom executive say on the record, we don't think you need compute and storage. Right? We want to do that for you at the network and that will enable the things that 5G does. And they've struggled to articulate, right? Like, it's Samsung doing zoomy lines. It's a lot of nonsense about AR. Like Samsung had a whole segment yesterday about AR. Like, they're like, the Galaxy S10 5G now will scan this room automatically. It's like, what does that have to do with the 5G? Nothing. But they need to like mash these things together so they can come up with a zero latency application. And AR is a good zero latency application. Cars are a good zero latency application, but. No one's like pining to buy a 5G phone.
1:13:31 Nilay Patel? And then you kind of like connect that to how badly the carriers want to sell it to you. And you're like, there's got to be something else here. Right? You can't just be churned to sell more phones. And this is the first time I've heard a telecom executive say it out loud.
1:13:43 Speaker 04 It's their fight to not be a dumb pipe. Like, they tried to be media companies for a long time. Some of them are still media companies because they don't want to be such a dumb pipe. So now the next move is to, okay, we're just going to take it all. And you're just going to have this little tiny little thing.
1:13:56 Nilay Patel? Right. And there's a, there's a little, there's a little bit of a business case here. Like, my understanding is that the millimeter wave technology for 5G is like actually very compute intensive. So you need to build some data centers and compute centers like near the network. And so you will necessarily have this excess capacity. So, okay, now we've got excess compute and storage next to the network and all these places. We can just sell it and, you know, we'll, we'll keep that. But the idea that you won't need any of it, I think, is, I would like to press them on that more because it, to me, it's just openly scary, right? Like, they are not great at protecting our data right now. So why would I give them more and give them my compute?
1:14:35 Speaker 04 I would, I would go so far as to say they are actively bad at protecting our data right now.
1:14:41 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So I'll say, I just, it was interesting. All right. Lightning round.
1:14:45 Speaker 03 I don't want to actually lightning round this stuff. Let's just, there's just like a handful of topics that we like, want to get cleared out and then we, we can wrap up here. So, Neil, what's the first thing you want to talk about?
1:14:53 Nilay Patel? Google claims the built-in Nest mic was never intended to be a secret.
1:14:57 Speaker 03 You dumb mother. If you put a mic in the thing, you're owned by Google, you say so. You stupid idiots.
1:15:10 Nilay Patel? Just to be clear, this is not the Nest thermostat, which is the thing most people have, or even the Nest Protect, which is slightly, it's the Nest alarm system.
1:15:18 Speaker 04 Nest guard.
1:15:19 Nilay Patel? The guard, the keypad thing, right?
1:15:20 Speaker 04 Which I tested and reviewed last year and had a microphone in my house all the time.
1:15:24 Speaker 03 Yeah. If they had just said, there's a microphone in it, maybe someday it'll like listen for a glass breaking. This whole thing would have gone away. If they had just said, there's a microphone in it, it's not turned on, whatever, just say so.
1:15:36 Nilay Patel? Their excuse was, it should have been on the spec sheet, but it wasn't, which is incredible. And then after that, I want to call it two stories from Nick Stat that build on a ton of work that other people have been doing, including and most especially, I think, TechCrunch, about Apple's enterprise developer program. Nick has a great headline here. Apple dug a tunnel beneath the App Store and the rats are getting through. This is, you know, there's the big story about Facebook using this enterprise certificate program to install this research program that was expiring and Google did it too. And everyone's mad and we shut down Facebook for a day because Apple pulled this, all this bad. Turns out like there are entire secondary iPhone app stores that rely on the certificate program. They're super well-known and they're full of like pirated games and weird stuff.
1:16:21 Nilay Patel? And Nick was like, here's, here's one, like here it is. And I tweeted it and all these people are like, oh yeah, you didn't know about that one? I've been using it for like four years. So.
1:16:31 Speaker 04 I mean, what's fascinating about this interest, this story is that it kind of like the original story, when, when TechCrunch broke it was like, everyone was kind of mad at Facebook for good reason. Like Facebook was like doing this kind of shady stuff and using data from teenagers and stuff like that. And the reason Facebook was able to do that though is because Apple's house is kind of a mess when it comes to these things. And this story basically shows how bad it is. And like, Apple talks a big game about its walled garden, protects its users, makes sure that, you know, the, the app stores, you know, censored and clean and all this other stuff. But, you know, there's this backdoor that.
1:17:08 Speaker 05 It's almost like when people buy computers, they want to be able to run software.
1:17:15 Speaker 04 That they didn't have to pay for.
1:17:16 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:17:17 Speaker 04 I mean, like these, these things exist solely for pirated.
1:17:21 Speaker 05 That is, that is not entirely true. Yes, a lot of it, a good amount of it, but there is an aspect to this where I just, Apple can't, uh, it's just very frustrating to me that, and I quit iOS for this very reason. So I don't have to worry about it anymore. But iOS should be able to run software that you, you should be able to push a button in your system preferences that you, just like you do on your Mac that says, yes, I do trust this developer. I want to run this arbitrary code on this $1,000 computer that I own.
1:17:55 Speaker 04 You could do that on Android.
1:17:57 Speaker 05 Yes. That's exactly what I'm saying.
1:17:59 Speaker 04 Paul, had you known about these, these stores though, you wouldn't have had to leave iOS.
1:18:03 Speaker 05 I really, I literally did not know about these stores.
1:18:06 Nilay Patel? What I do. I'm not saying that we're telling the people about them in a positive way. I'm just saying now you you have some light awareness of it.
1:18:13 Speaker 05 Android has a real healthy culture around this with F Droid. It is a store full of open source programs and I can go and check them out. Android also has a massive app piracy problem. Oh, I'm sure.
1:18:25 Speaker 03 Right, but so the the point here is that I don't know if it's as massive as Android, but it exists on the iPhone. And so the question is, if Apple were more open about allowing untrusted sources to install software, one, would it be like critically damaging to the security of the platform? Maybe, maybe not. Two, would there be more light or would there be more light on these piracy sites? And would they get taken down from like some other means? Right? The answer is probably no.
1:18:59 Nilay Patel? They can pull their certificates right now. There's an element of this where it's like Apple wants to protect its like perfect house. So it exists in sort of an uneasy truce with the people it doesn't want. You know, like, for whatever reason, I'm just thinking about demolition man like they just they just want Dennis Leary in the basement and like they're fine to let him be down there. I mean, this is like how cops work like they they they acknowledge some criminal activity as long as there's like some regulation of that activity and they keep they can keep it at bay. But if Apple just opens it up, like, you see what I'm saying?
1:19:33 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:19:34 Nilay Patel? Am I just making a number of veiled references to the wire right now? Because that's kind of what it feels like. Lastly, Dieter, actually, I want your take on this. Apple to combine iPhone, iPad and Mac apps by 2021, says Bloomberg.
1:19:45 Speaker 03 And also, there's like an ARM MacBook is like sort of possibly coming in 2020 is part of this.
1:19:54 Speaker 03 You know what? Fine. Like, the the Mac ecosystem is not doing super hot right now, the Mac app ecosystem. The quality of the Mars Japan apps that we've seen so far are not super hot either. It makes sense to want sort of universal binaries. We got that across iPhone and iPad, you know, like you used to have to ship two different versions, you know, two different things. Things and then you can just ship one thing. It's fine. It makes sense. At some point, they gotta do it like at some point, the the Mac needs the Mac OS needs to like do the next thing it's gonna do. Um, and this makes perfect sense to me. I know a lot of people are having lots of feelings about it and I I respect and value those feelings. But I also think that if not this, then what?
1:20:39 Speaker 03 And I have not, I've yet to hear a really clear elaboration to that answer. If the Mac is going to continue continue to be a mass market consumer thing. Um, they need to continue to develop ways to make good software for it. And um, this is, you know, probably the best shot. Now, it's easy to make fun of all this because we can make fun of Universal Windows apps or Metro apps or whatever the hell they're called now. You, there's, there's lots of examples of this like big fat binary thing that have not gone well. And so it's quite possible it could not go well here. But I also think that you look at the, you look at the five year timeline of what needs to happen to Mac software. And you look at the possibilities that are there.
1:21:21 Speaker 03 And I think just keep on keeping on is not a good option.
1:21:25 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I just. It makes me sad that the iOS market is so big that it's overshadowing to a large extent how big the Mac market is.
1:21:37 Speaker 03 Right.
1:21:38 Nilay Patel? So they can't get attention and support for their big market. It's a big market like I think Walt, we talked, we were talking about Walt. I'm sure all delete, Walt would be like, the Mac alone is a Fortune 100 company. Like, what are you doing? Like, why do you keep blowing it? But it's because iOS is so big. It just makes me sad. That's all I'm saying. Just makes me sad. All right. I didn't mean to end on a down note.
1:22:00 Speaker 03 I just want LTE on a Mac.
1:22:02 Nilay Patel? That's never gonna happen.
1:22:03 Speaker 03 Update to earlier discussion in, uh, in the podcast. Uh, Big Speakey customization will be available, uh, through a future software update, but we don't know when. There's a blog post about it on, um, on samsung.com.
1:22:16 Nilay Patel? I love that they had to go all the way to blog post.
1:22:18 Speaker 03 Yep.
1:22:19 Nilay Patel? That's how much people want to customize Big Speakey. See, we ended on a high note. There's a folding phone and you can customize the Big Speakey. That's the Vergecast, everybody. We won again. Victory is ours. Thank you, friends. Uh, listen to our show, binge, listen to Why'd You Push That Button? Binge, listen to Better Worlds, which is excellent. Check that out on wherever you find your podcasts. You can listen to Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. You can listen to Function with Neil Dash. It's all available for you. Go to [email protected] . You'll figure it out. It's gonna be great. You can talk to Dan Seifert. He's at D C Seifert. Paul's future Paul. Dieter's back on. I'm reckless. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll.
1:22:55 Speaker 05 Paul.
1:22:56 Nilay Patel? Bloop, bloop.
1:23:15 Nilay Patel? Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web and how Cloudflare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.
1:23:36 Speaker 06 We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online.
1:24:01 Nilay Patel? This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY.
1:24:17 Speaker 09 Support for the show comes from Pipe Drive. Sales teams spend up to 50% of their time on admin work rather than selling, building relationships, and closing deals. Pipe Drive gives them that time back. It's the intelligent AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams. Pipe Drive just launched meeting intelligence built right into the CRM. Before your meeting, it pulls deal history and past conversations into one brief. During the call, it records and takes notes. After, it auto-drafts the CRM updates ready for you to review and approve. Head to pipedrive.com/vox to get started and get an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14-day trial. No credit card or payment needed.
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