The Vergecast - Amazon HQ2, Google Night Sight, and Facebook

Episode Date: November 16, 2018

Dieter Bohn, Casey Newton, and Paul Miller bring you the latest this week with Amazon's announcement of the location of its new headquarters, a report on Facebook's leaders, a Google Pixel 3 Night Sight review,and a whole bunch more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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All right, now on to The Vergecast. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Fox Media podcast situation. I am not, Eli Patel, if you can't tell, but I'm trying to channel his enthusiasm, his joie de vivre. His Savois-Faire. I felt it. His panache. You are hearing the voices of Casey Newton, who's here with me in San Francisco. What's up?

And Paul Miller, who is in a stranger room somewhere in the world. Hello. Hello. We have a, I don't know, a strange show today. One, we're missing Neely, but that's fine. We don't really need him. But we've just got a bunch of sort of things that maybe we can connect at the end. I think there's a couple of things we could easily connect to each other.

And then there's a bunch of stuff that we just can't. Yeah. But I think the biggest news of the week, the thing, well, maybe the second biggest news of the week. Up until, I don't know, Tuesday, the biggest news of the week was Amazon finally announced, I think maybe a better word might be admitted. Admitted. Copt to what their plans were for HQ2. And there's going to be two of them.

One's going to be in Long Island City and one's going to be in Virginia. HQ1. HQ21 and HQ22. HQ2. There's also HQ23. H2 sort of. H not a Q3 in Nashville. That's right.

And the most fascinating thing about this whole deal was just how quickly sentiment turned on them. Like it was like a fun thing that they were doing and like cities were offering to change their name to Amazon and Bezos City and Bezos Town and whatever. And then we knew the announcement was coming and then the rumors were coming out, Wall Street Journal had some really good reporting that they were going to split it into two. And then it got announced and everyone went, thanks. I hate it. It was so crazy when you look at all of the stunts that cities went through and how excited people were at the prospect of landing in Amazon headquarters. And then when it actually happens, as best as I can tell, there were like four people in America who were willing to say they were excited about it. They were the two senators from Virginia.

There was the mayor of New York and there was the governor of New York. Even the two senators from New York went a full day without saying anything. And when one of them finally did, Kristen Gillibrand, she said, we shouldn't be giving away all this money. you know, while the subway's broken and families are starving. Yeah. And then everybody, the floodgates opened after that. And like, Alexei Ocasio-Cortez is like, yeah, no thanks. Yeah.

So this isn't like an urban policy podcast. But the number one thing I was worried about. But it can be. It can be. So there's like, there's housing issues in New York. Not they're like on a different, I don't know, valence of what we've got here in San Francisco. There's also like transit issues.

but apparently the, I assume that like the subways in New York City are horrific and bad and that this would just put even more strain in them and it would be terrible. But apparently they chose a location that's close enough to enough lines where it might actually be okay, depending on where all these Amazonians decide to live. But during the press conference where Bill de Blasier, the mayor of New York City, just completely obliviously was excited about this thing when like there was a growing storm of anger about it, People asked him about transit. He's just like, you know, we're going to do some more ferries, I guess, because they just can't decide who's in charge of the subways in New York.

It seems like such a nightmare. I very much understand why New Yorkers are nervous about this. And, you know, I have to say it is strange for me. You know, in a past life, I wrote about local government, a state and local government. Yeah. And economic development is religious. there. It's the only thing that city mayors ever talk about is bringing more economic development to their town. And so I imagine it must be so jarring for them to watch this high

profile example of two regions that were successful in luring huge economic development to their cities and just watching the populace crap all over it. But at the same time, I get it because if you've lived in one of these big cities like we do in San Francisco or folks who live in New York, you've seen that the presence of massive economic development often does not have any real benefits in your life. And actually, it can have some major drawbacks, the biggest of which, of course, is the cost of your rent. Having a bunch of rich people in town means you have to pay more for your apartment, and that can induce existential panic in people for very good reason. Paul, would you want an Amazon headquarters in your hometown? How about Foxcon?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Definitely want a Foxcon. I think, you know, it's funny, this is coming on the heels of, you know, we talked about Foxcon like a couple episodes ago. And as you might be aware, Scott Walker is now not going to be the governor of Wisconsin anymore. Yeah. Which is kind of ironic. Like that was not a popular move for him. But this is one of those things where I don't really understand American politics just because I get it that there are things that everybody disagree or a lot of people disagrees on. There's like 50, 50 things and there's 60, 40 things.

and there's 60-40 things. But this is like a, like, sweetheart deals for big companies. It's got to be like a 90-10 thing. Like, most people are really against this, right? Yeah, I mean. So how do it keep happening? Well, you know, I've been writing about some of the fallout in my newsletter, which you can find at theverge.com slash interface.

Ding. Keeping count of the interface plugs in this episode, by the way. And what I have been so surprised by is, you know, it's not just sort of the usual. liberal progressive hand ringers that are coming out against this. In fact, yesterday, the National Review, conservative site, posted an editorial piece in which they agreed with the socialist congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And then the Wall Street Journal did the same thing today, pointing to the same remarks by Ocasio-Cortez, saying, look, we don't normally agree with this person, but she's right. Like this kind of handout is really beyond the pale.

So Amazon managed the extremely rare feat of uniting the National Review, the Wall Street Journal op-ed pages and the New York Times op-ed pages in a 24-hour period. It's crazy. Well, and, you know, Wall Street Journal, National Review, that's mainstream conservatism, you know. But, you know, you got libertarians out there, you know, even matter. So you got the whole fringe and most of the middle. all against this. Perfect unity. Yeah.

But like they're going to get the kickbacks. And like every day since this got announced, like, oh, people are trying to like analyze just how much money is going to Amazon. It always seems like just tick up a little bit in every article. Yeah, well, I mean, the initial reporting was it was $1.5 billion. And then I saw a story today that said, well, if you really add it all up, it's $3 billion. You know, the New York Times op-ed I read said that there are aspects of this deal which will have to be negotiated and that they have kind of a memorand.

of understanding, but this thing may very well be ratcheted back. And frankly, I think it would be in Amazon's great interest to make some sort of massive infrastructure investments in these cities where it is investing to sort of rebuild that goodwill. Because, and you know, I don't want to make too much of this because this is extremely anecdotal. And this is, you know, among some of the, you know, the newsiest of the news junkies I know. One day you saw a rat in the subway and you were scandalized and you want Jeff Bezos to fix it. No, I'm not, I'm not that person. But You know, people are canceling their prime subscriptions because they're no longer comfortable being Amazon customers. Yeah.

And I haven't yet read a big piece about this. Of course, it's very unlikely that this is having any material impact on Amazon or will for a long time. But you're starting to get this phenomenon where, you know, some of those early Amazon adopters that probably would have been really excited to support, you know, online merchandise coming to their house via mail, you know, 18 years ago, are now starting to wonder about some of those negative externalities and negative consequences of Amazon in the world. And so, you know, I actually think that Amazon is typically very insensitive to public criticism. They have at best an indifferent relationship toward the press. Yeah.

But that's killing them here because they were totally unprepared for this negative backlash. And unless they make some sort of real accommodations to New York and Virginia, it's only going to get worse for them. Okay. So we're going to talk about Facebook lately. later. But Facebook, another huge ongoing scandal. And now after this New York Times story, Google just had, what, like 20% of its workforce, walk out the door and conduct a work stoppage if you, I don't know, that's not quite

the phrase that you would like us to use. But like it was a unionesque move almost. Amazon is facing this backlash about what even a couple of years ago would have been a totally anodyne. Oh, they got a lot of money. Grumble, grumble, grumble. Oh, we move on. We're happy about jobs.

I mean, who's next? What's going to happen to Apple? Right? Yeah. They're next. I mean, Microsoft is like, no, there's some defense contractor stuff with Microsoft. And actually with Google, too. I would like to see 20,000 Apple employees walk out over the headphone jack issue and say,

damn it. Yes. You know, when a critical mass of them forgets their dongles at home, I want them to just storm into Cafe Max and stand on the tables and demand change. What do we want? Headphone Jacks. When do we want it? Okay, take those four companies, right?

The other day I exported my data from Facebook, I'm still just kind of like trying to look around, trying to remember what will break if I cancel my Facebook account, but I'm going to cancel it. Not because I'm super mad at them or anything. I just like, I don't really want the liability anymore. I just want to get Facebook out of my headspace. Yeah.

So I could cancel Facebook at any time. Google would be a little harder. I'd have to move my email off of Gmail. Google Docs would really suck. Amazon, I would hate to lose the usage of Amazon. It is so convenient and nice. And then Apple, you know, makes the computer I use. That would be pretty tough, too.

But it feels different just because, like, I can be mad at Amazon or mad at, politicians or something like that. But that's not going to make me stop using them because they're just so dang useful. Yeah. Like with Facebook, it's like, I should quit this. But man, I really want to check out what my great aunt, Tilda. Tilda, it's Tilda name of a person?

Well, you would have to tell us who your great aunt is, Teter. I don't even know. Like, the things that you kind of just want to do on Facebook are the things that you actually don't feel good about doing a lot of the time. Now, there's some stuff like Facebook Messenger people. There's some people that that's a, they definitely want to do those things. Disclosure, my wife works for Facebook and the Oculus Division. I'll have to say that again later.

Google quitting is like, I really want to quit Google, but I also just want to search for this thing, but there's alternatives, right? So there's no alternative to Facebook, really. There are some alternatives to Google, whether you think they're any good or not is like one thing. With Amazon, the alternative is like,

I got to go use like a random, I have to use Google shopping, which nobody wants to do ever. Like the alternative is so much worse. You buy things from Walmart? Yeah. I mean, have you been to Walmart's website recently? Maybe they fixed it.

I mean, they bought jet.com. Yeah. Look, the truth is for all these things, there are alternatives. They are less convenient. And I think it's actually more of the social pressures that keep you on, like sometimes directly in the case of Facebook.

But, you know, if you go to search for something, and your friends see that you're on duck, duck go. Like, they're going to laugh at you maybe in that moment, right? What kind of friends do you have? I have the worst friends, which I've been, which I'm going to talk about later in this. No, I won't. No, but I just think what.

I use duct, duck go all day long for every search and then like one in 30 searches I have to copy and paste and go to Google because I don't get a good result. Interesting. You know what I want? I want there to be a service. And this could never exist because I would never trust. them enough. But if there was a service where I could once a year pay them a hundred bucks and be like, all right, I'm going to come into your office and I'm going to give you my passwords

and then you're going to nuke all of my data off of all of these services, but I'm still going to keep my account. But instead of me figuring out how to do it, you're just going to wipe me clean. So I'm starting my internet profile starts from close to zero. And then I will, you know, change my passwords. If there was some way to do that, just, just make it easier. We're just like, hey, you know what? Find out what accounts I have on the internet. Just like, I would maybe trust one password with something like this,

but I would love to have a service that just makes it really easy to just be like, I don't want to delete these accounts, but I don't want them to like know anything about me over time. And so just nuke all my profiles, new call the information that's there and I'm going to start fresh. Well, and Facebook supposedly is going to introduce this kind of reset button. Like, this has been one of the commitments they have made this year. Yeah. And, you know, then they should.

You know, there's a lot of great writing out there about data as toxic waste. If I wanted to read a newsletter about, you know, interesting stories about those that come out, comes out every afternoon and aggregates just the best one. I wish that such a thing exists. Someone should do that. And if you have heard about any such thing, please DM me. I would like to know about it. No, there's been really great writing about the idea of data as toxic waste, right? where sort of it is this byproduct that is created by this result of this process that is important to all of us.

And it kind of gets stored underground and you don't think about it. But it can come back to haunt you. And it can kind of, you know, leak into the digital groundwater. Like this metaphor can go on a bit. But we should think of better ways to dispose of our data so that it has less chance of coming back to haunt us. Speaking of bringing this back to Amazon, did you guys know Amazon has its own? social network. What's it called?

Like Amazon, I don't even know. Amazon has this thing. Somewhere on the left of Amazon, if you click on something and then you click on another thing, you get this stream of like kind of like tweets. And it's basically people like, I just got this. My son loves it. And here's a picture of my son using this product. Seriously, it's a real thing.

The other thing I wanted to say about Amazon is, and back to the key issue of HQ2, Seems like one of their big excuses for this is the pipeline of talented tech employees. Yeah, they just couldn't get enough workers in one place. Well, this means like that remote work is truly dead as a con, like, remote work is not the true future of the world. Like, like we've finally decided that that's just really not going to work out for us, for big companies at least. I think for big companies, that's totally fair.

I know there's been like waves of remote work and then backlashes against remote work. And it kind of goes back and forth. But this seems like a real thing where it's like, nope, the only way to get good employees is to be in one of five cities in the U.S. Yeah, at least in the U.S. Yeah, that seems about right. Sorry. I don't know, Tuscaloosa. Why am I picking on Tuscaloosa?

Well, I was tweeting about Tuscaloosa the other day because there was this extremely hot take. It was published by TechCrunch saying Amazon did exactly the right thing in its HQ2 search. And it sort of defended them across every dimension. But my favorite part of the defense was, you know, this decision could be a real wake-up call for other cities about what, you know, the fact that they need to change to make themselves more attractive. You know, I'm just thinking, yeah, like, I bet the mayor of Tuscaloosa is thinking, you know what? Maybe it's time to just rebuild as New York City. You know, why don't, yeah, if we want to win economic development, let's lure 8 million people here. Let's, you know, completely transform the city into a global metropolis.

And then maybe we'll have a chance of winning HQ2 business. Anyway, just made me laugh. All right, here's what's going to happen. We're going to toss to an ad. And then we're going to come back and we're going to hear a very, very special episode of this week in Elon. I'm very excited for this one. And then we're going to stop talking about Doom in tech. We're going to talk about something nice.

And then right back to Doom. So here we go. Yes. Maurice Hilliman developed vaccines for some of the world's most devastating diseases. He's been called one of the true giants of science, medicine, and public health in the 20th century. Yet he's not a household name. That changes today. Dr. Hilliman was on the first.

forefront of discovering, developing, and inventing many vaccines that have helped save and improve lives worldwide. Dr. Hilliman's impact on public health is undeniable, and his passionate commitment continues to inspire scientists in medical research laboratories to this day. You've always known his inventions. Now you know who's behind them. Merck has been working to discover and develop vaccines for more than a century. Dr. Hilliman, was just one of the many Merck scientists throughout our history who've been dedicated to inventing for life. See why we invent today at Merck.com slash inventing for life. Hi, I'm Sean O'Kane. This is this week in Elon, and I'm coming to you from the roof of

Tesla's Gigafactory this week. It's been a pretty quiet week in Elon, which is good because we're out here in Nevada taking a look at what's going on at the Gigafactory League. You know, Tesla's gotten away from some of the biggest problems with Model 3 production, and the Gigafactory is really what Tesla's future is all about. It is the machine that makes the machines. It's all of the products Tesla cells come through this place and will, as it builds new gigafactories around the world. So we've been taking a look inside the Gigafactory to just check up on what's been going

on, see how Tesla is thinking about the future, and it's been really interesting. We're going to have a lot more on this coming to the site pretty soon. But the thing that has really kind of struck me the most since we got out here the other day is that Reno is kind of turning into a Tesla town. It's not like San Francisco or Fremont area where their factory is, where there are Tesla's all over the road, but you see Tesla popping up in all these different corners of life here, whether that's being at the gas station

and watching a factory worker come in off of his shift with his Tesla hat on or going into a restaurant and having people at the restaurant recognize whether or not you're a Tesla employee. It's really kind of fascinating, at least to me, because I have kind of a mild obsession with company towns. I think one of the most famous ones was built around Ford's River Rouge plant, which is a factory that Tesla and Elon Musk has really tried to model itself around. Way back in the early 1900s, the goal around the River Rouge, beyond just making cars, was to provide basically an entire life for employees, whether that meant helping families of the workers with education

or providing them with options for housing. Now, don't get me wrong, there were definitely downsides to this. I mean, Henry Ford was kind of a total racist, and there were a lot of problems on how he kept his workers in line, and some, frankly, kind of dystopian stuff when you think about how much control there might have been over the lives of some of those employees. You know, the kind of stuff that we think about

when we think about the future of technology companies these days. It's stuff that's all been sort of tread before. And, you know, I'm not saying that that's what's going on out here in the desert. We're far from that in the Gigafactory. There's definitely other business out here. There's casinos. There's all this other stuff going on. But when you're standing at the Gigafactory and you're surrounded by just nothing but mountains

and wild horses, and you're thinking about how Tesla, Tesla is actually considering building housing for some of its employees because there's such a big housing crisis here in Reno that stuff like that really starts to enter into your brain. You start to wonder whether or not Tesla is going to go down similar roads. Is it going to try and build a life for its employees here? Or is it going to stay sort of at an arm's length with the Reno people and let the city operate on its own compared to the Gigafactory?

Another more modern example of this kind of company town idea is actually Palm, you know, the juice. The company that runs Palm is owned by this major farming family in California. And they've done some similar things where they provide housing for their workers and have them live essentially on site at the fields where they pick all of the stuff that the company sells. They provide education for a lot of the workers and their children. They make them eat healthy meals, which is kind of nice, but also, again, a little dystopian. But people who have looked really closely at what POM has done with its workers

kind of think that maybe they're doing it the right way. And I think what I'm getting at here is that there's sort of two paths to this. I've only been here for a few days, so I can't really say whether Tesla's ever going to wind up like either of these companies. But it's something to consider as Tesla thinks about building gigafactories all around the world. Elon Musk wants about a dozen scattered across all these different countries. and you start to think about when you're employing thousands of workers and really pulling resources from a city around the Gigafactory,

how does that change the fabric of that city, and what does it do for the people who work for the company? Anyway, those are my meandering thoughts from the top of the Gigafactory. We're going to have a lot more concrete stuff, like I said, coming to the site pretty soon. So we hope you enjoy what we've been able to gather out here in Nevada. And in the meantime, we will be off next week for Thanksgiving. So have a happy holiday, and we will see you on the other side when your esteemed steward, Liz Lapato, will be back from vacation.

All right, we're back. I would say the thing that warmed the hearts of everybody at the verge this week was night sight. The feature on the pixel three that lets you take pictures in the dark. And, I mean, I've been using it. And we went out and shot a video in San Francisco because, you know, Vlad wrote it up and has all the details of how it works, and we can get into that. But Viren and I out here, we went out in San Francisco,

and, like, we couldn't find a dark enough spot to properly test it in the city, number one, because we've got all this smoke from the campfire in the city. So there was, like, haze that was, like, spreading out over the city under the streetlights. But we finally found a dark bar, and we're like, oh, let's go to this dark bar. And we convinced a bartender to, like, not turn the lights on outside in this canopy area.

And we sat in the dark and the cold and took pictures. of drinks. Someone kept asking me if I was drinking a Negroni. Yes, I was because I wanted a red drink. And we just sat there

and like kind of drunk and got mad because it was so good. We were like, we were just angry. Like I was just sitting there and Viren just spits out and we ended up using this line

a couple of times. He's just like, this is just filthy. You mean it? No, it looks really. It's like, no, that's what I mean. It's so good.

It's filthy. I'm so glad we're talking about this because Lord knows it has been a dark year for tech, and there's not a lot to get excited about. And, you know, I think about what it was like to write about tech when I started at The Verge in 2013, and it just felt like it was miracle after miracle, after miracle,

on your phone. Of course, you know, looking back, there were probably some huge stories that I missed. You know, but, man, I saw this, is it night mode or night vision? Night site. Night site. Okay, terrible branding,

but it is a Google product. So night's site. I saw these photos and honestly my jaw dropped. I thought they were so fantastic and I really can't say enough good things about them. It is an incredibly impressive example of tech. It's tech that helps people with a real problem, which is that most of us are terrible low-light photographers, right? And it's something that you can have right now that can help you, you know, capture important moments in your life to save forever and, you know, and pass them on to, you know, your children and your grandchildren.

So I just think this is so awesome. My question is, because I saw some tweets sort of floating around about this yesterday, does Apple have the same technology or how close are they to putting it on my iPhone? Does anybody know? I don't know how close they are. So here's what the technology is. Does Apple have this technology is actually like, I'm going to go with kind of no. So they have this other gimmick.

other feature called super res zoom. And the way it works is it uses the motion of your hand to collect extra data in extra frames and use that when it does its HDR thing of smashing a bunch of images together, right? It uses a slight movement, slight variation. So this uses the same technology, but it uses it to capture more data and information to make something, you know, work better in low light. I mean, there's some other stuff too.

It does, it can extend the exposure time, but the difference here, like if Apple were to do this, it would probably just extend the exposure time. But when you do something with night sight, you get something with significantly less noise because it's able to pull out extra information. So even in like a relatively well lit but still dark scene, you can toggle this mode on. And when you take the photo, it'll look basically the same as a regular photo that you just take with the main camera mode, except when you look in the dark spots, there's just way less noise. And it's not just like a smoothing effect that you would get. It actually does legitimately have less noise because they've collected more information

and figured out that there shouldn't be noise there. That's super cool. So that doesn't quite answer your question. Apple could do this if they tried. Yeah. Like they have an image processing chip. They have the hardware and they have most of the software to do this. So I got the like the early camera.

updated to the new camera. That's one thing. I really was super stoked on having an Android phone that I could just put on a different camera app that could be, I could set as my default camera app if I wanted to do. What a miraculous event. And so I was taking night shite. Night shite. I was taking nightshite.

That's when you go poop after 8 p.m. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's taking night shot pictures. in Hawaii. And they are so miraculous. It's just, it is really incredible that you can take a picture of something very, very dark, and you can see it now in the camera.

My only problem is there's some middle point between taking a picture in the normal mode and taking a picture with night shot where there's something in the frame that's lit. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, you mentioned you had a hard time finding a place dark enough. Like, I don't live in the woods Like usually where I am There are some things that are lit up

But there's other things that are dark I feel like they could do even more magical things to make a photo That's somewhere in between a regular photo And a night shot photo You know what I mean? Night site. They're in a weird spot

This is a separate camera mode If this were just a thing that happened automatically by default I would probably hate it Because they do look unnatural It's the sort of thing you want to try When you can't get the shot otherwise. But they're going to have to really decide what they want to do in terms of building

this technology into the main camera function because they're going to have to make some artistic choices about what kind of pictures people want to get out of their cameras. The one thing that is definitely to come to the main camera mode, I think, is this new histogram feature. They are using machine learning algorithm to do white balance in this nightside mode. And they think that eventually they're going to be able to use that on the main camera mode instead of just in this special night site mode. Some people are saying that histogram is going to be the hottest new social network.

Yeah, I think so. Actually, I want to talk a couple more things about Pixel. So they've been issuing like a bug fix or a fix for a weird problem like once a week since the thing came out. So like buzzing speaker, apps closing in the background because they're on a memory. Apparently there's a camera bug that I have run into

but like Matt Hohner over at Busfut has run into it where if you open up the camera on a third party app, then the main camera doesn't work until you reset. text messages have apparently been disappearing. My very favorite bug with the pixel, by far, is people would just get a random second notch appearing on the side of their screen,

which is just amazing. Which is weird. This is like not quite, this isn't like, like Pixel 2XL has a terrible screen, levels of quality control problems, but there are a bunch of like weird software bugs that I wouldn't have expected coming out of this thing from Google.

And I, it's not enough for me to like completely panic or completely freak out about it yet but it is enough for me to go huh maybe it makes sense to wait on buying these kinds of phones in the future are these pie problems or pixel problems i think they're pixel problems okay yeah but paul you have you have fully switched from iOS to android have you turned off iMessage yet yeah or is it still on on your computer god how do you live know what to do. I'm in an existential crisis with I message because I still, random people pop up at my I message. I like reply to them on my Mac. Yeah. And if I turn it off, they're not going to know how to get a hold of me. So yeah, like, so I have a few very close friends who have learned how to actually text me. Yeah. But I don't want to stay on SMS. I mean, I got, I, I have to pick a message. I really want everybody to get on Keybase. I feel like,

that's the secure messaging platform that I prefer, but it's like, go ahead. Please prove your identity so you can get a PGP key so you can message me on eBay. So that's a problem. I will say I do not like the battery life on this phone. Have you got the three or the three XL? I have the three. Okay. And it just doesn't feel like a new phone battery.

It feels like a one-year. in battery to me. And so I'm really worried that I'm going to hate it. Obviously, it's plenty right now. I can't watch YouTube and play three simultaneously on my phone all day long. And, you know,

maybe that's a ridiculous thing to ask for, but I just feel like it's not, it's not as good as it could be. And I also feel like, and maybe, you know, I haven't been using Android, so I don't know if this is usual, but I get like visual glitches. Not like it's broken, but the transition.

is glitchy, if that makes sense. Like switching orientation sometimes. Yeah. Switching between apps. And so I do have this feeling that overall Android just does feel like a less polished experience than I'm used to in iOS. There are some things that are less polished. I do really like the phone.

I really like picture and picture. Yeah. The thing that I really, the least polished thing, the thing that drives it crazy, that apparently they finally admitted they're going to fix is the share sheet. So when you want to hit the share button on Android, it pulls up this special sheet with a whole bunch of apps on it, and it has this neat feature where you can share directly to people. But apparently it's like a pole model.

And so it like when you hit the share button, Android goes, hey, are there any apps out there that I can share to? And then all the apps go, yeah, I can. And then it waits for all the apps to raise their hand. And then it gives you the share sheet. Apparently, I don't know. I'm probably getting this wrong. Someone's going to tweet at me.

And that's fine. Please do. But hopefully they fix that. Because if you want to share a link real quick, having to like sit there and wait and having the menu jump around is like the most annoying thing for me. I haven't had that bad of battery life.

I'm surprised that you are. Maybe you're just playing too many threes. You should switch to hold down. I mean, honestly. Holddown. Hold down. Hold down is the best game that I have played this year.

I play a sickening amount of hold down. Okay. It's like a brick breaker. I will say threes hasn't been updated for a long time so it doesn't have the artificial home, button at the bottom. And so you have to carefully swipe from the bottom because you don't want to mess up your

three's game. Oh, yeah. Okay, so I'll check out hold down. Oh, I had one other thing about, oh, Android question. Yeah. Sometimes I feel like that I have a lot of notifications, right? And I don't get around to them for a bit. Yeah.

Then I start clearing them. Yeah. And then like 15 to 30 seconds after I cleared a bunch, I start getting new notifications. Is that a feature or a really lame bug? That's a really lame bug. That's not a feature. That's super weird. Okay.

All right. Sorry. All right. Good to know. All right. So the biggest. Join me. Yeah.

Keybase. No, I'm not. Just use Signal, man. That's what everybody's doing. It's easier. I don't know. Signal and WhatsApp drive me crazy because they're, they only work on one device at a time.

And plus like the web version. which is annoying. Speaking of annoying, actually, one last thing. I wrote this rantee post about Google Maps and how it is getting bloated. I emailed both Verizon and AT&T this week and asked them when they're going to support the universal profile, which is the version of RCS,

which apparently everybody's going to call chat, although they probably are backing off on that because carrier garbage. Anyway, they won't commit to it. It's almost the end of the year. There's like a, there's a, using RCS for business messaging, like, thing happening in New Jersey, probably as we record this today, where a whole bunch of carrier people and Google are like, here's how you can get customers with RCS. And, like, no one is actually supporting the interoperable thing that is supposed to save messaging on Android. And, you know, it's mid-November.

Figure it out. Launch the thing. Otherwise, you know what's going to happen? If this stuff doesn't launch by the end of the year, you know what? You know what I'm going to be forced to do? I'm going to be forced to demand that Google actually support Allo. And I don't want to be that person. I don't.

I don't. I want RCS to fail because it's not encrypted. I hope they never get it right. Okay. That's fair. I have to say, like as a fairly just devoted iOS person to a point where I just do it in an unquestioning way. Like I can't even pretend like it's this, you know, rigorous choice that I've made after hours of debate.

But, like, when I hear people talking about Android, it's always exactly like this. It's like, you know, Android's great. The camera is so great. It's so customizable. But, yeah, like, texting is basically impossible because there's some carrier standards problem. And also the share sheet doesn't work.

I'm like, all right, well, best of luck with your operating system. I'm just going to keep playing hold down on iOS. These are nitpicks. I play hold down on Android, and I have a higher score on hold on Android than you do on iOS. Dieter is one of the best holddown players in the entire one. world. Shut up. So as you might know from Ding the interface, an excellent newsletter covering the destruction

of democracy by social media, written by one Casey Newton, the New York Times published what there's no other word for it than blockbuster story that described what Facebook was doing over the past couple of years at the highest levels of the company when the, you know, the stuff about Cambridge Analytica and Russian hacks started coming out. And disclosure, again, my wife works for Facebook, so I'm going to probably not be talking a ton during this next bit. But there is no way we cannot talk about this thing. So I don't even know where to start. Yeah.

I mean, I think the first thing to say is if you read, if you use Facebook, I would encourage you to read this story, which I think is called deflect, deny. Delay, deny, deflect. Delay, deny, deflect, the 3Ds. And it traces some of the high-level decision-making inside Facebook over the past two years, basically everything that happened in the months leading up to, and then after the 2016 election. And there are sort of two components to that. One is Facebook understanding how it was misused by Russians,

and later it would find out, you know, many others were doing the same thing to launch these coordinated influence campaigns in the hopes that it could get folks like us to change our votes in the election and sort of just generally so discord. And then it also traces Facebook's response to that. And I have to say, as somebody who's been writing about this stuff closely, it's the latter piece of it that I found the most compelling. And this does get into the kind of nitty gritty of how companies hire public relations firms to manage their public perception, which I think a lot of people might find to be really in the weeds. But I also think that it is at moments like these that you really see what a company is made of. And often the kinds of decisions

that get made around communications can cut against some of your stated values. So, so actually, okay, again, we're fully in the eye of disclosed. This is a weird thing for me to say. But when Google screws up, and they, they screwed up in recent weeks, well, they screwed up massively two years ago by giving Andy Rubin this huge payout to leave, by, there's a lawsuit about equal pay for women, like just gigantic screw ups. And often when you get the like inside story of what's going out at the company, you're like, oh, like, this is perhaps evil, but it seems more likely that you're just so naive and not paying enough attention that you're dumb.

And with Facebook, with this story in particular, I don't know if, like, it's hard to make that case. It seems like this New York Times story is written in such a way where it's like the most obvious explanation is, oh, no, you're trying to be bad. You're not, you're not just like naive or you're not just bumbling. You're just actually bad. And certainly that has been the conclusion on Twitter and among, you know, many of the commentators out there.

And, you know, the job. gist of what the Times reported is that, in the Times has previously reported, that in the wake of all of these calamities, Facebook hired up to three crisis communications firms, which are sort of these highly expensive boutique PR firms that come in in the middle of, you know, a giant catastrophe, and they try to settle things down. They try to help your company make decisions that will get people to stop yelling at you. And one of the companies that Facebook contracted with is called Definers and folks like me have been receiving frequent emails from Definers over the past year as Facebook has kind of deepened its relationship with them. But the Times found some really disturbing things that Definers had done. One of them was to set up this kind of AstroTurf news site called NTK where they would post kind of conservative leaning clickbait that just happened to exonerate Facebook. or cast doubt on Facebook's competitors like Google and Apple.

And they posted dozens of these stories over the past year. Some of them then got picked up by Breitbart and kind of filtered into the more general news ecosystem. It looks like Paul wants to say something. The irony, the irony is so rich. Yes. It's almost too rich. You know, when you buy it into something and it's so sweet, it hurts your teeth. That's how rich the irony is right here.

Yeah. And so for a lot of us yesterday, as we're reading this, we're thinking, oh, gosh, you know, for the past year, how many calls have I been on? How many, you know, rooms have I been in with Facebook executives where they have talked to me about how seriously they're taking the misinformation problem. And then to learn that their crisis communications firm was spreading, if not outright information, misinformation, then certainly the kind of sensationalist clickbait that later today, as we're recording this on Thursday, they've now said that they're going to try to sort of tone down in the newsfeed even more. So it was incredibly damning, and by the end of the evening, Facebook had fired Definers, which I think was sort of the only possible outcome of this story. But then today, on a press call, it sort of took another strange turn, which was that, so I was on a call with Mark Zuckerberg and some of his other top executives,

and he told us that until he read the New York Times story, he was not aware that Facebook contracted with Definers. Is that better or worse? Well, this is the discussion that I want to have. He also said Cheryl Sandberg didn't know about it, which from the Facebook people I've talked to is very strange because Cheryl is very involved in communications generally. And, you know, normally in these cases, CEOs have this ethos of the buck stops with me, right? Like, I might not know every detail at my company, but I know the high-level stuff. And let me tell you. That's certainly the line that Mark Zuckerberg took when he was before Congress.

He's like, look, it's my fault. Even if I didn't know, like, it's my, like, I'm not firing anybody because it comes down to me. He said this to Kara in the podcast. Right. But, you know, you talk to people who've hired crisis communications firms, which I have, this almost always involves the CEO, right? Think about the context for you hiring this people. Your company is in a crisis, right? There are a few situations that your company that are going to demand a CEO's attention more.

and certainly the Russia situation and the misinformation situation has been a top priority for Mark and Cheryl during all of their communications over the past year. So the idea that their communications chief, who until recently was Elliott Shraig, had sort of done this, not told them and never reported back to them about what the company was doing, it really kind of beggars belief, which isn't to say it's untrue, but just that it is incredibly hard to believe. And so then, yes, Deeder, it brings us to the question of, is it better that, which would have been better, that they knew about it and are lying, or that they actually didn't know that this company was out there sort of spreading this kind of viral crap. Yeah. To be honest, Zuckerberg not knowing matches my concept of him. And it does match. Naive doesn't feel like the right word. Yeah.

I hate the, like, Zuckerberg is like a robot trope, but sort of algorithmic. Like, in a sense, it feels like Mark Zuckerberg, I'm really generalizing, I'm very sorry about this, but I feel like as a person, he has a hard time dealing with edge cases. He really wants general principles to work and live by, I'd love to hear if you kind of agree at all with this. And so like the Times piece leads off with a total edge case like of are we going to delete this statement by Trump on Facebook that, you know, it's an edge case that went all the way to the top because they didn't have a clear method for for moderation.

Obviously, I've talked about this a lot on this show that that's obviously a really hard, basically unsolved problem. and I feel like they set themselves up for this sort of failure of moderation when they decided to be moderators of 2.2 billion people. But still, I feel like they don't have a good answer for edge cases. They don't. And to your point, Paul, like Zuckerberg absolutely wants there to be scalable solutions for answering every question because it's kind of the only way that Facebook can survive. If they have to referee every single Facebook post, the company collapses. And so he is always going to be motivated to find these kind of, you know, general systems. You know, today as we're recording, Facebook put out their second report on the enforcement of their community standards,

which is like essentially like four times a year now. Facebook is putting out a report that lists all of the like police activity that they did on the platform, basically, everything that they had to take down. And that is only possible because they have, they've built these AI systems. And so the entire report is about how much of the content that gets taken down is taken down because AI identifies it. So, like, that is the Zuckerberg ethos, is let's offload all of this to the machines. And I do think that in addition to the kind of practical reasons to do that, it also speaks to the deep personal discomfort he has with making these decisions. And by the way, I think that discomfort is really justified, right?

you know, as his karaoke buddy Kanye West once said, no one man should have all that power. So hang on, what's the, what's this, they announced this, independent oversight body, like an independent court? Yeah. The world court, the Hague for Facebook. Like, what is this? Yeah, so this is like super interesting.

So when I got to ask my question of Zuckerberg today, I actually asked about this because all the stuff we're talking about a site. Like this, honestly, it just kind of blows my mind. Okay, so in April on a podcast with Ezra Klein of the, box media podcast situation. Mark said that he wanted there to be some kind of Supreme Court for Facebook. And the idea was, again, like, I might be the king of Facebook, but I don't want to have to decide all the edge cases around, like, you know, Trump's post about banning Muslims from

entering the country. And so today, they formally announced that they're going to do it and basically said that that work is underway. They're hoping to establish this panel by the end of next year. And so my question was a little bit about how it's going to work. You know, when I talk to experts in this field, they'll say a really frustrating thing about Facebook is that if your content gets taken down, traditionally there has been no recourse for appeal. Now you actually can appeal. But if you get rejected, you sort of just got a form letter.

There is no case law about why. And in the American judicial system, if, you know, if you appeal your case, the judges will write down, you know, why your appeal fell short. And this becomes a really important way of ensuring the. there is justice on the platform. So to me, what is just so crazy about this is you have this website that started for, you know, us all ogling at one another's like college photos. And now they have to think about coming up with a global judicial system. So it's really a crazy milestone. I do not like the film, the circle, and I have not read the book. But it's like they pulled an idocracy except the movie's not funny. Like I just like the circle was.

like, okay, I get it. Eye rolling, like, yeah, they're going to take over everything. And, yeah, it's... This will be idiocracy if they decide that the Facebook court, the independent oversight group, is actually a televised court TV show. Like, like, a la Judge Judy.

If they have Judge Judy, and like, and like, every case, you know, they agree to binding arbitration to show up on the TV show. They both get paid, but really they're trying to solve this case. And it's like, it's like, Pepe distributors versus like who would the other side be and it's like

oh uh sure I would watch the hell out of that show yeah like this is the first great pitch for a Facebook watch show that I've heard actually is just just like C-SPAN for the Facebook Supreme Court that is going to be fantastic

so yeah man I don't know it's like this is what I love working about for The Verge is that you just like you find yourself writing about these moments that just feel like these like strange leaps forward 30 years in time and for me Facebook having a Supreme Court is one of those moments where I say it out loud and it sounds crazy.

One last thing on Facebook, we got to move on. Paul, I would like you to react to the news, which Facebook downplayed, of course, that perhaps in part because he was pissed off at Tim Cook, but probably mostly because that's what everybody of the planet uses except in America, Mark Zuckerberg decreed that Facebook executives have to switch to Android.

That doesn't... It didn't surprise me. I don't know. Is that mean of him? Does that sound like a mean thing? Well, look. You know, it sounds, it sounds balmeresque. I, look, I have a great deal of respect for the times of producers who broke the story.

On this particular point, I suspect that their sources misinformed them. I do believe that Zuckerberg told executives to use Android phones, but Facebook has been encouraging employees to use Android phones for years. and the obvious explanation is that the majority of the world uses Android phones, right? So you don't need a personal feud with Tim Cook to explain why you want your executives using those phones. You know, certainly it's, you know,

yet one more reason why I personally would not want to become a Facebook executive. You know, on account of the share sheet and the texting issue. All right. On the Vergecast, we cover the ever-changing landscape of all things tech. And so coming up next,

we're going to hear the segment from Erickson about the shift to 5G. So take a listen to that. And then you're going to hear from Paul. And now the 5G meditation minute. Welcome. Just relax your body. Breathe.

Repeat your mantra and feel the calm wash over you. 5G is here. 5G is here. And it's going to change the way. way we live. This next generation of wireless technology will revolutionize how we send and receive data, and Erickson is one of the companies building the infrastructure we'll need. Push away the bad reception and overcrowded networks. 5G uses multiple antenna to boost capacity, so in large crowds of people, like at a packed concert, you can still connect and share selfies

instantly. Embrace the cloud. With minuscule latency and edge computing, 5G makes even remote files behave as if they were on your device, and you will have so much more to be thankful for. Augmented reality, 8K streaming, AI-assisted services, smart cities, and the ever-growing Internet of things.

Your future is empowered by things. 5G. Lie back. Be present. Focus on real connections. Erickson is bringing 5G to life. Breathe in and breathe out. Repeat your mantra and feel the calm wash over you. 5G is here. Thanks to Erickson for sponsoring the Vergecast and supporting the Vox Media podcast network, which I prefer to refer to as a situation. Now we're back to Paul, who every single week without fail. It's a very serious segment. Nobody ever laughs.

Nobody ever has anything to say about it other than to just listen in quiet repose. You do a segment that's called. Dieter, it's called Why Not Two? So we covered the Android bug that added two not two notches. Yes. And it was hilarious. It was. What have I told you?

Uh-huh. What have I told you that Sharp has made a phone with two notches? On purpose. On purpose. So it's, there's an essential style little, little camera notch at top. And then at the bottom, there's a home button notch. And I think the real, the real nice touch. Next to the notch.

Yeah. Yeah, well, this whole thing has, yeah, it has a slight chin. So you basically, you have the essential notch. Yeah. You have a home button. Yeah. You have a bottom notch, which, to be honest, that's a sharp innovation right there. That is.

Then you have like a Samsung style chin. And then you have the iPhone XR, like border all the way around the screen that made the notches kind of seem dumb in the first place. But I do love that it's only a 5.2-inch phone. are compact. Yeah. So their last compact phone had a little bit of a notch, but it had a big chin with a button. I will say, because I don't have this new, hot new hold down game, that this would be a great phone for me to play threes on all day. Yeah.

Because I do need that home button. You do need to swipe up to get the home button on hold down. That's one of the things that Android does. A lot of things go full screen, and then the home button gets hidden, so you've got to do a little swipe up. But it's less dangerous to swipe up and hold down because it's not a there yeah, there you go. Exactly. That was by worry. Yep.

So Paul, the trick, by the way, for threes is instead of swiping, trying to get the swipe up to get the home button, just do the swipe back on the fingerprint gesture to bring down the notification area. And that will also bring the home button up. And then you don't have to worry about a rogue swipe in threes ruining your game. What? Look at this. Hot Android tips. Yeah.

Amidst all the politics. What a great show. This show is one stop shot. It has everything. We are now entering the weird lightning round section of it. Paul, I got to say, I'm really disappointed that you didn't pick Currig's new cocktail pod machine for your segment. This thing, I mean, go ahead. These are going to be awful, right?

It makes cocktails. It sounds awful, and Ashley tested it out. Ashley said that the margarita tears. She said the margarita tastes like a lime marita, which have you ever had a limerita? Yeah, that's pretty much the worst thing you could say about a margarita. No, it's a it's a malt beverage designed to taste like a margarita. It's like, what were like the bottles and James drinks? Yeah, it's a wine cooler.

Yeah, it's a wine cooler. It's, uh... She did say that the Moscow mule that she tried was, was tasted like a Moscow mule, but I don't know what a Moscow mule is. Do you guys know? It is A Moscow mule is vodka, ginger beer, and lime. Yeah, it's not a hard drink to make. Yeah, but you have to serve it in a copper mug

Otherwise, you'll steal in all likelihood from the bar. Yeah. So sometimes when you order a Moscow mule, you have to give them your driver's license. Really? Yeah, because they have so many stolen copper cups. Wow. And I just want to put this out there. If you run a bar and you require any sort of deposit

when you serve a Moscow mule and a copper mug, I would just like you to tweet at me at Casey Newton and I want to collect those stories and I'm going to write a medium post. Okay. Yeah. Great. So, but yeah, this is,

this is called the Drink Works Home Bar. It's also supposed to eventually make beer, which seems pretty suspect. Yeah. I just, I can't. And it needs CO2. How many cocktails are fizzy? Here is my idea.

I have an idea for stunt journalism. Here's what we're going to do. Yeah. We're going to take the cocktail pods and then we're just going to squeeze them between our hands and see if you can create a cocktail without even needing to involve the curig.

Yeah, we can have a viral hit. That's a really good idea. Just get an Xacta knife, slice it open, pour it over ice to see what happens. Like, why is there a machine for it? Oh, we made fun of this because it was super easy to make fun of, but I get what it's supposed to be. but Essential has released

its first or its second ever module that I know of for the Essential phone. It's just a list of Andy Rubin's mistakes and you can just plug it right into the phone. Well, at the top of the list of mistakes is the headphone doggle. It's a $150 headphone dongle. It's technically the modular adapter

that lets you plug a headphone end without losing your USBC jack and I think it has a high-end DAC in it. But, come on. It doubles the thickness of your phone, basically. All right. I was just going to say, I'm very open to the idea that there could be a cool thing that you plug into your phone that you pay money for. Like, I have no objection to that idea.

I would love there to be a useful thing that extends the functionality of your phone. This one is the single worst of these I've ever seen. Yeah. It's like a $150 headphone, jack. Come on. My least favorite thing about like USBC headphones, lightning headphones, and headphone dongles is I, you know, know, I wear jeans large enough to hold my phone, but not quite large enough that like there's some, you know, there's some tension, especially when you're sitting down on that like that,

where the jack goes into the phone. Do you guys know what I'm talking about? Yeah, I know what you're not about. The headphone jack tension of, I don't know. So I feel like this doesn't really look like it solves it. Maybe maybe a little bit, but what a sad life that we all lead. I don't know. I guess the only other thing,

like we've got reviews up of the Microsoft Surface headphones and the Dolby Dimension headphones, which are both two fascinating headphones that I will not buy because they don't quite, like the Microsoft headphones don't have quite enough audio quality to justify their price. And the Dolby ones are just weird.

Like you're only supposed to wear them at home. They, you can like dial up and down the ambient. You can do that with the surface headphones too. Having used the new Sony, a thousand M3s, like being able to adjust the level of ambient is a really neat idea.

And doing that physically is also a neat idea because digging into the app to adjust that stuff is the worst. But yeah, just like no one has actually, in my opinion, done everything just right on a nice pair over the year noise canceling headphones. Yeah, I, you know, and

I don't know, I would be interested in for me, either whether that is particularly true of the wireless ones, because I now just understand that my next pair of nice headphones will probably be wireless because I just bought a new iPad and it doesn't have a headphone dongle thing. So, you know, I would love it if there was a really great pair

of over-ear headphones that also did the noise canceling. That was also wireless. I mean, there are a bunch that meet all of those needs, but I also want it to charge via USBC. I increasingly want to have an adjustment for the noise canceling, but that's not a must have.

And I wanted to connect multiple devices easily, and that is not possible in my world. I don't know, I'm probably going to switch back to the Bose. We'll see. Oh, hey, you just bought an iPad. Tell us about your iPad. Yeah, so I bought what I refer to as the Monstros,

which is the 12.9 inch iPad, and I tweeted about this, but I absolutely clowned myself. I thought I was going to go into the Apple store as the smartest man in the room because I looked at the prices and I said, you know what,

if I get the 64-gibite 11-inch model with no LTE, yeah, I'm spending $800 for something that I'm going to just be using as a pure consumption device, but that actually feels like a kind of moneyball pick because the thing's going to last me four years, I'm going to use it every single day,

and I'm going to get out at the cheapest possible price. So I walk into the app. store and I look at the 11-inch model and I look at the 12-9-inch model and my freaking lizard brain just starts going, well, you know, Casey, the 12.9-inch models is actually much bigger. And the bigger thing is good and the smaller thing is for a weak and puny person and no, you know, self-respecting gentleman could ever bring this into his home. And so the next thing, you know, I've talked myself into buying the 12.9 inch thing, which like barely fits on my lap. It is an absolutely ungainly absurd piece of hardware that is also incredibly beautiful.

And I've been using it a lot over the past week. And I have to say, the Reddit display is so good. All of the TV I'm looking at looks so much better than it looked on my old iPad. So I'm keeping the thing and I hate myself for it. It was both the right and the wrong choice. And like that is just technology for you sometimes. You didn't get the keyboard cover, though, right? No. So that's the thing is like, you know... You just watch TV on it? Well, I do a little bit more than that.

You know, so whenever a new iPad comes out, the discussion is always like, well, can it replace your laptop? Which for me is this not an interesting question because I have a laptop and I always use my laptop to do laptop things. But I love the iPad when it's just kind of time to like lean back and relax and read or, you know, watch TV, you know, in the morning. I don't sleep with my phone in the room because my phone has like every messaging out. My iPad has a much narrower selection of apps. And so I can sort of bring the iPad into my bedroom. And like, it's just not quite as loud. But, you know, in the morning, I'll pick it up.

I'll see what email came in. I don't respond to any of them. But, you know, I just see what's on fire. I open up Twitter. I see what tweets I've missed. And then, yeah, like, I get home from work and, you know, I'll wind up like watching something on Netflix or something like that. But it is such a beautiful consumption machine. The battery life is incredible.

Like, there's so many cool things about it. And I realize that, you know, I could. I could get all of those features for much less money in another device. And that is that is totally true. But it wouldn't be a big ass screen. It wouldn't be a big ass screen. And also like I'm an iOS person. And I get a lot of value out of things sinking, you know, across.

I love the fact that I can get my eye messages on my tablet. I love the face ID. Like there's just a lot of stuff that I wind up liking. And, you know, let's face it, like a lot of tech is about aesthetics. It's about the kind of stuff that you just like respond to. And I will say I brought the iPad into the office the other day. And it was like, it was as if I brought in a newborn. Everybody wanted to hold it and touch it.

And they would hold it in the morning and they came back after lunch. It's like, can we hold it again? You know, so there really is something that is super compelling about that particular thing. And like nobody is trying to pick up your candle fire and, you know, see what it's like. That's true. Yeah. Speaking of compelling, would you have some updates on the most exciting story in tech of than Nightshot or NightSight or whatever it's called.

The Galaxy F. Holding phone. Wait, is it really called the Galaxy F? Why did they decide? I mean, F for Fold, but it's like... I thought that was a joke. That's hilarious. Samsung can't stop owning themselves.

We should also talk about their new interface, but anyway, keep going about the Galaxy. Okay, well, we just have... There's a rapport out that it's going to be maybe like $1,700. or something like that, which is great. That's bonkers. And then we have some dimensions. The main inside screen is 7.3 inches with a 420 DPI. Yeah.

This is great. And then the cover display is 4.58 inches with the same DPI. The thing is we still don't know. We don't have the actual design of the device. We've just seen it's like this boxy prototype. that they can do these screens, but we have no idea what the actual thing I look like. What it's actually going to look like. It's going to cost so much money.

Yeah. But that will be like a baby moment, right? You bring that into an office. Everybody, everybody the version is going to want to hold that. Yeah, for sure. Have you looked at some screenshots of this new Samsung One UI that they're doing? So Samsung, it was touchwiz for years. And then they realized everybody hated touchwiz.

So they said, don't call it touchwiz anymore. Call it the Samsung experience. And we said, cool, we're going to keep calling a touchwiz. And so they realize they actually have to give it a name. And they're changing the way that their UI works on Samsung Android phones. And they're calling it one UI. And the whole deal with this new UI is they've realized phones have gotten too big. And so they just shifted everything down to the bottom.

And so now everything is at the bottom. And then there's like giant headers. Like, their notes, their default notes interface that says, like, all notes is like the header of, like, the section of the app you're in before you, like, tap into a note. And it's literally the top third of the screen is just gone. So, like, I get it. You, like, you get the full screen because, like, when you're browsing or something, you can scroll up and it's there. But when you're in, like, an app where you actually need to tap something, they've tried to shift everything down to the bottom half of the screen. and it's like,

do I love this or hate this? Is this good or really bad? Like, just get a small phone or, wait, no, Samsung is genius. I was all set to be like, ha ha, ha, they couldn't figure out how to make a small phone that anybody wants, so they just, like, gave up on using half the screen.

But then I, like, look at some of these photos. I'm like, wait a minute, this, yeah, I do want all my buttons down at the bottom. that that makes Samsung makes sense. It's like smart. There's there's this one image from the announcement that it fills me with hope. So imagine the screen cut into thirds. Yeah.

The top third is the viewing area. So that's where you look at content. Yeah. And then the lower two thirds are the interaction area. So that's how you interact or you choose what you're viewing. Right. This obviously completely relies on execution, but I'm glad somebody's doing it. I hate reaching up to the top of my big phone.

Yeah, but I hate it. It does look silly. Like you're in your text messaging app and you can only see your four most recent messages because the top half of the phone is just the word messages. It looks so dumb. It looks so dumb. I have to imagine they're going to do some sort of. sort of wacky button combo to like let you shift that stuff back up.

I don't know, man. Whatever. Whatever. Samsung, I'm going to give this a shot. I'm not going to make fun of it by default, but whatever. That, I think, is enough Vergecast. Oh, wait. One last thing.

Black Friday's coming up. We've got a bunch of Black Friday coverage. We've got it like, or there's, it's already happening. There's deals posts up from like Microsoft and Google. I think maybe Best Buy and there's a road to come. Target. Some of these deals are actually pretty good. Like 50 bucks off on Google Home Hub is pretty good.

Pixelbook is pretty good. The surface is like cheaper. Casey, you and I are going to have to start a buddy comedy because you went with the 12.9 inch iPad. And I decided to go with the Surface Go with LTE. Which is like a tiny baby tablet. It's a tiny little baby tablet. It's so a little bit in itty-bitty.

So like we're going to go and we're going to recreate that Apple commercial with me and yummy. And I'm excited to hold your newborn tablet like a baby and see if I like that too. Paul, is there anything for Black Friday that you're holding out to get for yourself? Are you going to not participate in the evil capitalist bacchanalia of consumerism? I mean, Black, I don't know if you know this about me. I hate deals.

Oh. I always feel like I'm, deals are like they're tricking you, you know? Like if you see a cheap TV, like a suspiciously cheap TV at Best Buy, it means it's basically like a reject. Yeah. It's a failed television that they're hoping to get rid of. So deals are scams. But I will say that after all of my hating on consoles, I kind of feel like I need to get a PS4 to play Fallout with friends.

Yeah, I think you do. I'm really sad about it because I wish everybody had PCs, but that's very unrealistic of me to expect everybody to buy. Well, you know, Sony just released a silent update to the PS4 that apparently gets rid of fan noise, or it reduces the fan noise on it. So you pick the right time. Also, I love my PS4.

That is such a fun thing. Yeah. Yeah, it's great. This episode of the Vergecast is brought to you by Erickson, who would like you know that 5G is not just a step up from 4G. It is a game-changing advancement.

It is 100 times faster, and the ultra-liable, low-latency network means that it can connect with more than just phones and tablets. It connects everything. Imagine a jam session with band members miles apart in perfect sync. It is happening. Imagine an 8K entertainment system in your self-driving car that rivals your home theater. 5G will have the power to revolutionize existing industry models or even create new ones.

This is just a glimpse of what the future will hold and what it will look like with Erickson and 5G. Find out how 5G will transform the world at Erickson.com slash 5G. That's E-R-I-C-S-S-O-N dot com slash 5-E. Hey, Vergecast listeners. I'm Spencer Hall from SB Nation, and I want to tell you about my new show, It Seemed Smart. It Seemed Smart is a show about people doing things

that, for some reason or another, seems smart at the time. Those things might include doing a little cocaine and driving a bike up a mountain. Or, I don't know, maybe racing 100 miles per hour across the country in the middle of the night with no one's permission.

Or even stealing a bat from an umpour. Pires room in a major league baseball park. Check it out. And if you like it, tell a friend. I'm Spencer Hall. Don't do anything smart. All right. Well, I think that's enough talking about consumers and but you should go check out the holiday gift guide, which Michael Moore put together. We've got a lot of great recommendations in there. There's also holiday gift guides from Eater and Curb, which are also really nice.

So you should check those out. You can follow all of us on the Twitters. I'm at Backlon, Paul's Future Paul. Casey is Casey Newton. and he is Ding, the author of... The Interface, evening newsletter about social networks and democracy, which you can find at the verge.com slash interface.

That's great. You should also rate and review us. It's been a while since I asked for that, but give us some stars. We'd appreciate that. And, of course, there are other podcasts. Recode in particular has some great stuff. There is Recode Decode with Kara Swisher.

There is Recode Media with Peter Kafka. And Kara has that new podcast with Dr. Scott Galloway. Pivot. It's called. It's called. It's very, very good. So you should check those out. Thank you so much for listening.

We'll catch you in the next one. promo code. Paul. Rock and roll.