The Vergecast - Apple announces AirPods Max / Qualcomm president Cristiano Amon interview

Episode Date: December 11, 2020

Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Chris Welch discuss Apple's announcement of their AirPods Max noise-canceling headphones and give their first impressions. Second half of the show, Nilay and Dieter talk with Qualcomm president Cristiano Amon about Qualcomm's new flagship processor the Snapdragon 888, the potential of 5G, and what he thinks about Apple's new M1 processor. COVID-19 vaccine starts working within two weeks after first shot Apple and Google’s COVID contact tracing tech is finally coming to their home state of California COVID-19 vaccine monitoring program may be at risk of false reports With guns drawn, police raid home and seize computers of COVID-19 data whistleblower Florida’s justification for raiding COVID data whistleblower Rebekah Jones is looking a little shaky The pandemic turned the volume down on ocean noise pollution Uber asks governors to give drivers early access to COVID-19 vaccines Apple announces $549 AirPods Max noise-canceling headphones, coming December 15th AirPods Max first look Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Chris Welch joins us, talk about Apple's new AirPods Max, and then Deiderot interview, Qualcomm president, Christiano Amund. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog.

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And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports. And mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of first-class headphone purchasers. That's a category, I think. I'm your friend, Eli.

Deerbone is here. I'm your second H-1 chip. You don't know why you need me, but I'm there. Chris Welch is here. And I'm your spatial audio experience. So this is, we're doing two episodes this week. On this episode, Deeter and I are going to talk about Apple's new $550 AirPods max.

I have them. I did a first look. They're in a box. They're on the way to Chris now for a full review. So we're going to talk about that a little bit. And then Deeter and I interviewed Qualcomm president, Christiano Amon. We're going to run that in the back half. We have a second episode this week.

There is a lot of news. We have a second episode. the United States Federal Trade Commission and 48 state attorneys general separately, both filed lawsuits against Facebook to break Facebook up. So I gathered Addie Robertson, Russell Brandham, and our friend

Casey Newton. We have an entire episode about what's going on on Facebook. That's also in your feed right now. We just realized it was too much to jam it all together in one place. So this episode, we're going to talk about the AirPods. We're going to interview the president of Qualcomm. There's another episode we're talking about Facebook. As always, though,

I want to start with COVID. the most important story in the world. Quite a lot of COVID news this week. It's all on the site. You can go check it out. There's a bunch of vaccine development occurring. The FDA is meeting right now in committee to approve the first vaccine. It's being administered in the UK now.

We've learned that it starts working within two weeks after the first shot. You do need two shots, though. Marybeth Greggs, our science center has an entire newsletter called Antivirus, which is very focused on vaccine development, distribution logistics. All of that. Go subscribe to it. It's the verge.com antivirus. We've also learned a lot about the Apple, Google COVID contact tracing system that's in their phones. It's less effective than we would hope, especially because it hasn't been rolled out in very many places.

It is just now coming out in California, which Deeter, if I'm not mistaken, is where Apple and Google are headquartered. Yeah, I think so. I mean, Apple has a spaceship and maybe they can move it around, but they tend to leave it in Cooperino. It does fly away from time and time. It is out in New York. You know, I haven't gotten any alerts. But we're looking into how well that system is working. Obviously, as we go into the period of time where the vaccine is more widely available,

the need for these programs is up in the air, but they're still important. There's also a lot of Nicole Westman's going to have a piece soon on just how well they're working. And one of the reasons they haven't worked so well is because the investment into contact tracing itself has not been so high. So all of that's happening and check that out on the site. And lastly, I keep talking about sort of second order effects of the pandemic. we have a great story. The volume of noise pollution in the ocean, like the sound of the ocean,

has gone down since the pandemic because travel has been restricted. So second order effects still come in fast and furious as the pandemic continues to surge. As always, that is the most important story in the world. I don't want to ignore it. You can go to the verge.com slash science.

If you want to, for all of our coverage there, if you want to keep up on vaccines, really encourage you to read Marebeth's newsletter, antivirus at the virtual.com, antivirus. Okay. So there's some headphones. Chris, do you want to tell us what is going on with these headphones? Yeah.

So I forget what day of the week. It was that these were announced already. It doesn't matter. Seemingly out of nowhere one morning, Apple announced the long-rumored AirPods Macs. We had thought they were going to be called the AirPods Studio for a long time. But they went with Macs for whatever reason. Just to poke at me. Yeah.

So we got the name. Then we got the price, which is largely, dominated this entire thing so far about who these headphones were for. And yeah, it's, it's there is. So they're $549, which is far more than their main competitors from Sony and Bose. And so it seems like Apple is pretty confident that they've got something people will want on their hands. So let's put that price in the context. Because, you know, I put out the first look today. And it's true, those are the headphones we always think about. I think we recommend the Sony. It can never get the model name right. I got it wrong in the post even.

It is the WH,000x, M4. Some letters rolls off the tongue. Oh, so if you think of it as a thousand X, that way you, I always get the M and the X in the wrong order. So now I'll get it right. I just call them the WMX4s, which is related to nothing. I don't know. It's just word, like alphabet soup to me. The WH.

1000X. X. M4. XM4. Okay. Sony makes these headphones. They're very good. We recommend them all of the time.

They're always on sale, right? And I think you can get them for $280.80. They list for $350. So the most years should pay for them is $350. You can often get them for $300. And right now you can get them for even cheaper. Bose is like the industry leader. Like they created the noise canceling headphone category.

The Quiet Comfort 2s were dominant for years and years and years. They've now come out with their own poorly named product. The noise canceling headphones 700. Yeah. Which rolls right off the tongue. But the important thing about those is they finally came back and started competing directly with Sony. For a while, Sony seemed to be running away with it. And we were like, Bose, you're going to update your headphones or what?

And then they did. And they're good. But I'm just imagining, like, Greg Joswiak in the naming meeting with the team. And they put up the names of the competitors. And they're like, whatever, AirPods smash. It doesn't even matter. Like, what are we competing against? Like, pure nonsense.

But Bose is obviously there. They're a dominant brand as well. Those both live around $3 to $350. But, Chris, there is a class of headphones that is far more expensive. Yeah, you've got like your super audio file, high-end, open-back headphones that I don't have around the house very often. I mean, I'm more of a casual toss something in my bag headphone type person, so I don't really want to be tossing $700 or $1,000 set of headphones into my bag. But if you're one of those people who just like tends to lean back at home and listen to your hi-fi DAC and to your flak library of music, then there's that upper tier of headphones that I think Apple is trying to say these might sound as good as?

That's what I'm getting at is like, are we in the right context for the price? Right. I think that we are, but I do want to acknowledge there is a tier of like $800 headphones in the world. So the reason I don't want to just put the AirPods Macs in that higher tier is I think of that higher tier like Chris said as audio file. I think it is a tier where you want to think about the quality of your audio through the entire chain. and if one of the pieces in that chain is whatever codec happens to play over Bluetooth

that you don't have 100% control over, you might not want that to be your audiophile headphone. Also, and we actually need to get into this pretty deeply, Apple's doing a lot of stuff to the music in the headphones algorithmically to try and improve the sound

beyond just like, you know, spatial audio, you can turn your head and blah, blah, blah, blah. If you are an audiophile, my hunch is that you want to know exactly what's happening to the sound and potentially have control over it. So I am very reticent to say that this thing should be thought of as, you know, like the cinema display or the XDR fancy, whatever we're calling it now, is meant to, like, they can compete with $30,000 reference monitors.

It's like, can you? I don't know. But it is in an interesting middle zone. I don't know if we should give these headphones the benefit of the doubt of being in that middle zone between true pro and like high-end premium consumer. in the same way that we ended up meaning to do for the pro display XDR. Right, yeah, fundamentally, these are still like just wireless headphones that top out at 256-kilobit AAC. So, like, there's no lossless kind of file that you can play over with these.

Whereas Sony has L-DQ, which is almost CD quality. So if you've got like Amazon HD or if you've got title lossless, you can technically play music that's almost CD quality on your wireless headphones, which is kind of cool. these don't really have any kind of answer to that. It's just the bar is so low. They also just like C-D's came out in like 1986. They don't have a headphone jack. Right. So this is another $550 for the headphones.

Honestly, when I was writing the first look last night, I forgot, I, Nealai Patel, forgot to mention the lack of an audio in on these headphones. And Dider was like, who are you? And I'm just going to say it was very late. But I haven't been in a plane in a long time. So I haven't thought about it. But if you travel in an airplane, all of the high-end, headphones have an audio in port, an analog audio in. So you can plug into the back of the seat back

and plug into your headphones. The Sonys are, I think, superior because it's a 3.5 millimeter standard one, so a regular cable. Bose has gone with a 2.5 millimeter jack just to make it harder. So like, in the grand scheme of things, Apple is offering a $35.5 to lightning plug. and I'm just going to say, is that also different than Bose's weird 2.5 millimeter plug that you're also definitely going to lose. So, like, maybe in the scheme of things is not so bad, but it is $35. It's not in the box. So your total investment, if you're somebody who flies a lot and wants to use your excellent noise canceling headphones on a plane, you're $5.85, which I will note is $15 less than an iPhone 11, which is crazy. Like, that is just a very expensive product that does the same thing is much cheaper products.

Instead of buying the $35 thing, the air flies, and there's another brand. And there's also a bunch of knockoffs that you can get that are just Bluetooth, like, bridges that you can plug in. They're around the same price. So if you want, you could plug one of those into the seat back. I've done that. If you want, you get more Bluetooth in your life. Would you like this cable or would you like some Bluetooth nonsense? That's a real tough one.

Yeah, so there's the cable. But some of these iPhones actually support USBC audio, but Apple has not supported that with this. So you can't plug in like the lightning cable to your USBC port on your computer and play audio. It's not going to work. So the only way to play wired audio is to get that 3.5 millimeter jack as far as I understand it. Do we know if the dongle works, 3.5 to lightning don't get for the iPhone? I don't think so because I tried that with the Beats Pro, which is kind of the same situation. That's when this cable first came out was for the Beets Solo Pro.

and I used two dongles on each side of an ox cable to see if that would work, and it did not do anything. So I think you really need just the straightforward cable from one to the other to make it work. Incredible. I know we're all over the place, but before we get too far into, like, what are the features and qualities of these AirPods Macs? You just mentioned beats? I don't know.

Just like, can we just take a moment to just feel sad for the beats team? I don't know. Yeah. I don't think that Apple cares about beats. I'm just going to say that loud. We had, you know, our opportunity to, you know, I have them. And so one of the questions I asked was, what about beats? And, like, the answer was more or less, beats is a company.

Right. I don't think there's any relationship between this product and what the beats team is doing. I think the beats team, the headphone team, they bought that company to launch Apple music as a streaming service. And they get, you know, a couple of months of saying Dr. Dre worked at Apple, which I think everyone was very happy about. and the headphone company was always the thing on the side and I think it just remains on the side. I think Beats itself is trying to carve out their own niche now that they see all this happening.

They just did the Beets Flex, $50 earbuds that use USBC. So I think that says plenty on its own right that they're trying to kind of appeal more to the Android customer again more so than they were for a long time. Yeah. So I do have them. They are going to Chris for the full review. I have not spent nearly enough time listening to them

and especially listening them in comparison to the other headphones. that compete with it. So we've got to do the full review. I will say they sound very nice. Big, pleasing, wide sound stage. Very crisp. No distortion when you turn the volume up all the way.

Like the things you would expect from a $550 pair of headphones. I can't tell you that they like blew my mind the way that the first time I ever listened to high-end headphones, my mind was blown. They sound good. And then we have to test them and like really put them to test. What I will say is the design. is really strange. And like, it's strange in a way that sometimes Apple can just transcend the strangeness of its design and it becomes the new design.

Like, I think AirPods themselves are a perfect example of this. Like, they look silly and then they didn't. These are like, they're made of aluminum. They don't fold in any way. The headband has mesh over it. It's just like a unique design. The aluminum looks really, to me, not high end. And the way, the best we can think about this is Apple traditional.

reserves colors for its mid-range products. Just think about the iPhones right now. All the bright colors are in the mid-range of the line, like the consumer part of the line. And as you get higher in the line, everything gets a lot dimmer and blacker and more aluminum. Same thing with the iPad error. Yep. Bright colors want this thing is really expensive, but it comes in all those colors because they made it out of Anody's aluminum. And the silver one I have, and I'm dying to see the other colors.

So maybe they look different, particularly maybe the space gray or the darker gray ones look different. This one, I was like, is that plastic? Like, when I first took it out of the box, I thought it was plastic, even though I'd read that it was aluminum. I was like, is this plastic? It has that feel of like painted plastic, which I don't think it's just very odd to me. And then the next thing, and Chris, I'm dying when you get them tomorrow, I'm dying to see if you agree. The next thing is like, there's just a lot of slots. I don't know how else to describe it. There's just a lot of cutouts in this shell. And the way that my Sony, 15 billion don't have any slots.

Like the Sony's are like not as nice. They're like floppy or they're, you know, they're made more, they're more obviously plastic. But they're like, there's only one, two microphone holes in each side of the thing and like the audio jack. This one is like. Yeah, there are nine microphones. There's nine microphones. So there's just slots all over the place for the microphones.

There's two microphones inside. There's sensors inside. So there's more, there's two little holes inside the cups. The slots are, are. asymmetrical. So on the left one, there's a short one on the top and a long one. And on the bottom, like, they're just, it's all, there's buttons and knobs. It's like, there's so much stuff going on that you look at it. You're like, this, there's a long gray antenna line cutting through the bottom of the left side. It's just, I've just never seen an Apple product

where like, they didn't try to hide all this stuff. Right. Like the iPhone, like iPhone antenna lines. We've come to accept them. The iPhone has however many cameras and mics and speakers all over it, but they're like integrated into the thing. And here it's like slots. What you're looking at is slots. Lots of slots and cutouts, but they're also heavy, too.

That seems to be one of the main things people are saying about these is that... They're heavy. They're made of metal. Right. The ear cups come out magnetically. They're very comfortable. So I think I have a gigantic head. It's just a real thing. I think all, like, like, I just got a lot of surface area to spread.

No, I just think I have a lot of surface area to spread the weight out over, and I've never noticed it. I don't know. I'm assuming there's like a head-sized charted apple where they're like weight per size. What I have noticed with my Sony is and with the Bose before then, they get hot, right? Because, you know, their padding is just like not breathable. This is made of memory foam. It seems much more breathable. Again, I didn't wear the way I would normally do this.

I would go on a five-hour plane right at San Francisco, and I'd wear the headphones. and I would tell you exactly what I think of them because that is the ultimate stress environment for these things. I sat on my couch and listened to some tunes. I was like, this is great. So again, Chris has a lot of work to do, especially in comparison to the other headphones. I will say that memory foam,

and I put it in the first look, I'm wondering, Chris, by the time if they get to you, if it's gone, I pulled these things out of the box and my room filled with like new car smell. Like, it's called off gassing. People have tweeted at me. It's like, it is a product of memory foam. but like these things they they put them out right at the end right at the end of the year they just

hit the deadline it seems very obvious that these things not manufactured and slid into a box and then sent over and like for i don't know it's i don't usually comment on how a new phone smells i'm not like the iPhone smells of rosemary i'm like it's just a but like these the memory um a byproduct of that and people have told me AirPods pro have a slight smell too so i just look out for it i'm curious if it lasts through another shipping adventure, Chris. Sure. I do want to talk about spatial audio.

You brought that up. Seems strange to me. It supports Atmos if you have an iPhone. Or iPad. Yeah, but if you have a device that moves. Spatial audio requires motion sensing in the device itself. Do you know what device does not have a motion sensor in the iOS ecosystem? The Apple TV.

Yeah. So I don't think that you can listen to Atmos audio with your spent $500,000 Apple headphones if you're watching a movie on your Apple TV. I don't know. Got it. That seems completely upside down to me. But you'll get it on your plane when you're watching it on your iPhone 12th mini. Yeah, it is pretty cool.

I mean, I've watched a few things here and there with my AirPods Pro. And I imagine it's more intense and much better on the AirPods max than it is on those since they're actually over your ears and they fully cover everything. And they've just got much bigger drivers. And so I think it's going to be better there. But it's kind of like a neat trick that like Sony and Bose can't really match. Sony has 3D audio for some music, but it's not nearly the same thing. Whereas here you can open up, I think there are a few apps that support it.

I think HBO Max does for sure. And so you can just watch movies and it sounds like a surround sound. Not quite as good as like a super high-fi. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A 7.1 system. But like for headphones and earbuds, it's pretty amazing.

And I've really enjoyed it on the AirPods Pro, the buds. The names now are very confusing. So we have to be very careful. I call them the AirPods Pro Max. nice we eat and the, who, I poke that dragon. One more thing I want to know about is the digital crown.

If you asked me, is that a good way to control headphones, I would think that it would kind of suck because it'd be like this little knob you've got to reach up and twist and push and like I would much rather have really big, I don't know, gross is the word I think of gross movement, large movement controls.

Like a big dial like on the surface things or a giant touch pad that I could just like, without having to be fiddly, just sweat. up for the volume or swipe ahead or just slap my hand on it to, you know, do the, you know, listen to the person on the plane or whatever. So is that little digital crown thing fiddly or is it fine? It's fine. So it's a lot bigger than the one on the Apple Watch. Right.

Okay. So you expect that they would just reuse the parts. I don't know why I expected Apple to be like 1980s GM and just like parts spin. No, it's a different digital guy. So it's bigger. there's a button next to it. The button is the noise cancellation mode, so you get in transparency or noise cancellation.

Okay. And then the crown, if you push it, it's play pause, and if you hold it down to Siri. And then you rotate it. Here's the thing that caught up to me that I just wasn't expecting. It is you move your finger forward

to turn the volume up, which means you are turning the wheel counterclockwise. Oh, I can't. I don't even, I will lose my mind if I try and like visual space and visualize what's going on here. But yeah, like you, we think volume up is clockwise.

But on your right, just put your finger up to your right ear. Yeah, yeah. Oh, no. This is the worst. It's the worst. Thankfully, there's a setting to change that I've seen in some hands-on videos, so you can change it to the other way for the crown. It's very much the volume control equivalent of natural scrolling.

Like, your brain just either accepts it or it doesn't. And that just for a day, just like, or not a day, however many hours I had just through me. because I was like, because you think a volume control should be clockwise for up. But it makes just as much sense for forward to be up. I would love, if you work at Apple and you know what happened in the meeting where they decided the default would be counterclockwise. There was no meeting.

They didn't plan it. They didn't think about it. This is the company that when you're in landscape mode on an iPad, you press the left button for volume like up and then like you turn it and then the meter goes in a different direction. Like they just happened. Anyway, it was fine. I actually, I appreciate, like, my Sony headphones, you know, it's all the touch controls.

I just never use them. I'm like, this is a mess. I don't like it. The bows have buttons. There's a reason people like that surface, that big wheel on the surface. It's tactile. It makes sense. You're not going to accidentally touch it.

So I was skeptical. I do think this sort of natural scrolling element of which direction it turns. Like, because you can change it, it means that you're going to pick up your friends headphones. It's going to be backwards. It's literally, it felt to me literally like natural scrolling. What about the case? The case is one of the most deeply strange things Apple has ever made. And I put it on the list of deeply strange things with like the mouse that charges upside down. You know, I was like, they definitely think this is a good idea. They definitely think it's just fine. And it's not. It just isn't. It isn't any of those things. The MagSafe duo charger is like,

so it's one piece of material. Is it leather? No. Oh. It's, maybe it is, but it feels like final to me. Okay.

So it's obviously like one piece of material they cut out and then they like origamied it into a case. I do think it's cool that it looks like a purse when you put it in there, the handle of the headphones. Like the hand, it's a very rigid band. That's clever. I think it's like fun.

I do we should fold it down just a little bit smaller the way you can like tuck a headphone in. on other headphones, so it might be more likely to fit in a bag pocket? Yes, what you're saying is, I wish it was useful. Here's your, right? It's ugly and not useful. Well, I keep saying it's origamied because it has to attach to itself, right, to stay in that shape because it's one piece. And so you can just see all of the, like, glue seams, like on the inside where, like, the pieces are glued together.

The middle comes through the back, and that's folded over on the back and glued in place. And it's just like, you know, $550. Like, you got to, where's my cool, hard case? Yeah, I think the backlash to this has been pretty widespread. So I think, like, within a few weeks, you're going to see Apple start to sell, like, third-party cases from its friends at the Apple store. They'll probably cost $100. And one of the challenges here is the case contains some magnets that when you put it in the case, it actually puts a thing immediately into low-power mode, which if you don't have the magnet. Because there's no power button.

There's no power button on these headpoints. And it takes them a while to shift into low-power mode on their own. You can't just manually turn it off? No. I don't believe you. Not that I found. Again, Chris, got a lot of pressure on Chris. Chris has to discover all the things that I discover.

But my... Let's try every scenario. He's going to have to hold down all the buttons and different combinations. If you cover, if you use all ten of your fingers to cover up all the slots, then I shut down. I don't know. It's a weird product. I will say, after all of this, I don't know I'm just sounding about liking. It did sound good.

Yeah. And that thing that Deter, you're talking about, Apple calls computational audio. we just have to test it and see, especially against the other ones, but when Apple talks about computational photography, what they're talking about is overcoming the limits of a tiny sensor and a tiny lens at capture to get more data and to make a more realistic image.

That's the reason that we do computational photography. When they talk about computational audio, they're just like, we're going to process the shit out of your signal to make it sound like what? And I think the big question, is what are they trying to make it sound like? We had some of those answers with the home pod. Right?

They're processing the hell out of the home pod sound. And the home pod sounded nice. Some people don't. But like it didn't work to sell the home pod. Right. That emphasis on audio quality didn't work to sell the home pod. I think these sound really good. They were fun to listen to.

I wasn't displeased with the sound. But I think it bears some investigation over what all of those microphones are doing inside there to tailor the sound as you move around, how the noise cancelling effects. and all that stuff, where I will just say this, AirPods, the regular AirPods, don't sound good. Right? So, like, Apple's history of making good-sounding headphones, their most popular products, sound extremely medium.

And so we'll just see if they've overcome that. Like I said, no pressure, Chris. I'm counting on you to get it right. Yeah, it seems like people are buying these, despite the price shock. The current shipping estimate is 12 to 14 weeks. Wow. They've got a backlog.

It is. You think they rushed them out for the holidays, but then they only made like 10. It's possible, yeah. We'll see. But yeah, it's fun to, like, it's a new product. We'll see how much they push everybody. It's not that there wasn't already fierce competition here, but Apple usually enters these markets and really, really ratchets them up.

But Chris, we'll do the review. We'll have you back to talk about the AirPods Max when you get a chance to put them head to head with all the other ones. Looking forward to it. All right. We're going to take a quick break. We're going to come back. Dieter and I interviewed Qualcomm president, Christiano Amon.

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In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Grammarly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. Christiana-Mahn, you are the president of Qualcomm. Welcome to the Vergecast. Very happy to be here.

Really a pleasure talking to you all. We're having you on because you just had your tech summit, not in Hawaii as usual, but virtually online. And you announced a new flagship processor, the Snapdragon 888. We covered it at a high level last week, but we wanted you to come on and actually tell us about it at a much deeper level. So what's the story with this new processor? Well, it is the latest, I think, premium platform for Qualcomm.

It's interesting so many ways, especially because we are in the 5G transition. And as we go to a new transition on technology, we have seen new use cases. And really it changes the mobile experience. We're going to see a lot of things happening. And it is one of those opportunities that we have to redefine the premium smartphone experience. And that's how we talk about the Snapdragon 888. It redefines premium. It is also the first instance that we, in the premium tier,

we integrated the modem and a premium modem into a single chip. And it is really delivering the next evolution, really, of 5G connectivity, with a lot of advancements in graphics, in camera, and machine learning, and many other features. And as I want to go deeper, I want to just start focusing just on the connectivity alone. It breaks new records and speeds with taking 5G connectivity to 7.5 gigabit per second. But there's something we talk about at, the new X60 modem, which is going to become extremely important, especially in markets like North America, but not only here across the world, as it will allow the existing spectrum holdings of the carriers that have accumulated spectrum

for years across 3G and 4G to more than an icon deliver real 5G performance as they started to aggregated those spectres into wider channels with the speeds in capacity of 5G. So a lot of good things coming and are happy to go even deeper. I see you're wearing a 5G is real shirt there. Is that? That's great. It looks, it's black. We have our email shirt.

You have your 5G shirt. It's perfect. So I know you're enabling sub-6 carrier aggregation. Could you just talk, what do you think the state of 5G is here specifically in the U.S.? I'm not sure if you're aware, but Neil I and I are, neither one of us, have had great 5G experiences so far based on where we happen to live. And I'm just wondering, how long is the road going to be to 5G feeling like the default that LTE does today? I think that 2020 was really the year

the 5G gets to scale. The device system already switch. It's interesting. The market contracted due to the pandemic. Before the pandemic, we talk about 175 to 125 million 5G devices in 2020, and we're going to finish the year and we're on the higher end of that guide.

So 5G definitely got scale and switch. the device side. 2021 is the year of coverage. And what you're going to see in 21 is as we bring the ability now to reuse the existing spectrum holdings, existing base stations that have been built, as you can add, an additional 5G equipment with care aggregation, as you add the C band in the United States, and you have more sites of millimeter wave that takes time, you're going to see very broad coverage in performance, not just the icon.

And that's going to be 21. That's my question. And I wanted to finish the answer, but the icon is, the icon's on my phone here in the middle of the woods. And what I am getting is relabeled 4G DSS. And it's slow. Right. And I'm just wondering, yep, you're going to get the coverage. But haven't we all, like, missed our opportunity to make the icon switch mean something real?

Well, I can't, I can talk about. how, you know, some of the other companies, a few about the article, but I'll give you a very precise, you know, answer on this. So here's, here's one simple way to think about it. If you look at the, you know, the channels, how wide a channel was in frequency. When we were, you know, in the 3G area, we talked about channels that were like 1.25 megahertz wide or maybe five megahertz wide as we go from two G to four G we had channels maybe the channels became some stay of five then it went to 10 or 20 megahertz wide and you started to aggregate them together so you get 40 you get 60

well in 5G the channels are start of 100 200 megahertz wide or even 800 megahertz wide so without adding more spectrum There's no way to get the performance of 5G. You need more spectrum. So what happened is the first, what is good about DSS is the DSS allow an operator to deploy a brand new 5G equipment in that frequency. You get a new icon because you're getting now a 5G signal. And you can, in that frequency, which is a very narrow channel, right?

You're getting the 5G technology, but the channel is still narrow. Now, what if as you convert all of your existing 3G and 4G channels to 5G, and you aggregate them together, then I can get 100 or 200 megahertz wide, then in addition of the channel, you're going to see the speed. That's why when I talk about Snapchat 888, you know, we talk about the X60 modem doing DSS plus carrier aggregation. That's the big deal because then for the existing spectrum that is already deployed and cover everything, you can actually find a way to upgrade and get the performance. And then on top of that, you add the new spectrum, like the C-band, and then you keep deploying millimeter wave stations that look like excess point. Milliman wave comes with a massive amount of spectrum, almost unlimited capacity, but you have to deploy new sites. The good news is the sites from Millimid Wave.

They're not expensive. They look like Wi-Fi access points. That's the good news. The bad news is you need to get new sites and new site permits. And then you have to negotiate that municipality by municipality to get the approval, to get a site and then deploy it. But it takes time, but we're going to get there. And that's why maybe I'm going back to answer in the simple way of question,

To anyone, we're projecting there's going to be the year that we get broad coverage of 5G in the United States, as well in other countries as well. I'm curious, you are the dominant chipmaker for Android phones worldwide and especially here in the U.S. And so I imagine you have a lot of sway or your opinion carries a lot of weight when all the carriers and Google and Samsung and you get in a room and be like, all are we going to figure out what this 5G thing looks like. I'm curious what you think about the inclusion of millimeter wave on phone specifically, because to me it seems like we're in a little bit of a cart before the horse situation with millimeter wave on phones. I can see really interesting use cases for it in other technologies, but for a phone, I would much rather see a huge emphasis on this DSS and carry aggregation

because that, to me, is like that solves a more urgent problem. So can I present maybe a... different viewpoint. But I promise, you know, make the rationale compelling. I promise that. Okay. For what we have today, and to go back to the way you frame the question, it is true. I think we're very proud. It's not true that we're a dominant player, but it's true. We aspire to be, you know, the best one, but yeah, very competitive, very competitive market out there. And I'm sure our legal team will be very proud of my answer. I'm proud of you.

It's great. But let's go how you frame the question. It is true that we have an important role of the ecosystem. When we set ourselves to let's accelerate 5G by one year, and from that idea, we had contacted, you know, the companies are part of pioneering that idea. And all of a sudden, you saw us make an announcement with 40 plus companies in MWC, and we changed the timeline of the industry. and it's been an incredible journey and was still there.

And as we think about this technology, the technology has to not only bring new opportunities, but solve problems for existing industry. So we look at how we're going to design this technology, and say, okay, what are the things that we needed to bring to the mobile industry? So one, it's the society today, it's connected. Everybody has a smartphone and everybody wants, speed, unlimited data, right, and reliability.

So 5G, that starts with that. And it is about unlimited data and capacity. Think about when people, before the pandemic, people still go to sports events and concerts and like try to upload something on Instagram or was congested. You need to make that go away. You're going to be connected with the cloud. So 5G comes to solve that so that in a way,

everything you do today is better. You already consume video in your smartphone, you stream video in your smartphone. But the reality is sometimes you buffer, sometimes you don't play at a highest possible resolution. But if it's music, you're there, right? Music, no matter where you are, it's fine. Well, 5G with a higher speed performance, it's going to make video at a higher resolution, 4K video, 95% of the time you're going to get a higher resolution. And, you're going to get a higher resolution. you're going to do that in the other direction. When we announced Snapchat 888, and I go back to about redefining premium, we put 120 frames per second out of focus camera.

We're going to make everyone a broadcaster. That's our goal, right? But there are other things that are going to come, and you cannot get those other things without millimeter wave. I'll give an example. One of the still-thinking consumer, One of the things that users look at their phone in its communication is they also use it for entertainment. And as you have millimeter wave bandwidth and low latency and speed, you can play mainstream gamings on a mobile device.

So we're going to make every smartphone a kind of a Nintendo switch type device when you think about it. And for a developer, you're going to have to develop a mainstream game. it goes into the cloud, and it doesn't matter. So almost in the way that we had said, maybe the next console is the last console, right? So millimeter wave is required to change the gaming industry. Millimetre wave is also required for a completely different experience when you think about interaction of other people and collaboration.

One question I have about 5G in general in Qualcomm's role in deploying it. And that's why I was laughing when you said, we're not dominant. Qualcomm developed a lot of the standards, right? I mean, you have a massive patent portfolio around the 5G modem. You have a massive amount of research and development. There's a reasoning of all the patents because he invented a lot of things. But as you think about your modem business, the 5G business, do you see competition for 5G modems emerging? Do you have a great direct competitor for 5G equipment?

Yes, look, we always had a company. We always had a competition. And today, the nature of the competition changes, right? You have, for example, I have competitors in China, which are kind of more focused towards the China domestic market, more focused towards the mid and the low tier. We have been more focus on the technology innovation, the high in the prement tier.

We have customers that have their own modem, and we have been successful in that relationship, and it has been a very balanced relationship, as the markets that require the latest, technology, you know, our modems are the preferred platform. And I feel that we always going to have competitors in the space is a very competitive landscape, but we'll separate Qualcomm from all the other companies. And I say that sometimes. People have a hard time defining what we are. We are a semiconductor company, a licensing company. We're really a technology and a system engineering

any type company. We create, you know, we create standards. We're not, we're not like an implementer of standards. And I think as that ability to continue driving the modem roadmap, which it changes every time as you bring new technology, is what it allows us to be highly differentiated on ahead of everybody else. And the proof, you know, there is not a single modem technology all the way back to 3G that we're not the first. And I think that's, that's, that's kind of track record we have. So you mentioned China, but just to bring it to United States where we are, I can't think of a phone we've gotten to review that doesn't have a Qualcomm modem in it. Who is your big competitor in the United States? I think my reaction to that is this speaks a lot

about the quality of the U.S. consumers and how much they care about technology. It's us. We're great. When I go to the Verizon store, I'm like, I need a Qualcomm modem. Yes. And as far as I know, so does every other citizen in America. By the way, Qualcomm stands for quality community. Oh, my God. That's it. All right, moving on. We let you do the thing on millimeter wave.

We're not letting you do what the company says. I'll give you an answer to that. We have the same exact competitors that we have. Sometimes it's a modem for one of our customers like Samsung. Sometimes they're phones, they're built with companies like media tech. and we had competitors, which was also Huawei High Silicon, right? But I think the key answer to your question, the result of what you said, is the United States carriers, they actually care about the quality of the service that is offering the network.

Also, they take full responsibility to know you have a problem on your phone, are going to call the carrier. So therefore, they take all those things to very rigor a test, and Kaukanahas comes on top. And I think that's the result. So let's switch from 5G to the 8A itself, which is a processor. It is very powerful. You've got new cores in it. You've got a new GPU in it. One of the questions we were asking last week on the Vergecast, you know, Apple tells us a story very loudly about how their chip team works with their OS team and they can realize all of these performance games.

And their ship is very fast. Their phones are very fast. Their computers are not very fast. same kind of question. I can't think of a high-end premium phone, Android phone that we've reviewed that doesn't have a Qualcomm chip in it in the past 10 years, Deeter?

It's been a while. It's been a while, right? Like the Snapdragon is dominant. Is there a conversation with Google about optimizing Android or the chip to realize the kind of performance advantage that Apple tells us that it's getting? I think that is my,

that's among one of my favorite questions of this conversation. I will say the answer to the question is absolutely there is, not only with Google, also with Microsoft as we enter the PC space. The way we look at this is we're very, or at least we aspire to, we aspire to be very good of what we do, and we're very focused. Like that's one of core premium mobile smartphones, the core competence of the company. And there are the companies also very good at what they do.

And we create a model that we can work together and develop great. solutions and that's what you see in some of the devices to get built with Snapdragon. But I also want to point it out to something. When you do those comparisons, and I'll give you like a hint, if I may, when you do those comparisons, we design platforms for the consumer. We don't design platforms for benchmarks. We design for the consumer. So if you get, for example, some of the Qualcomm metrics, let's just pick one example, or adreno GPU, right? What you can see when you put side by side

all the other platforms is you're going to play a game and hopefully you're going to play like a more sophisticated game that's going to make use of the GPU. And what are you going to see is you're going to play that game for 20, 30 minutes and you're going to see that there's a lot of

platforms that advertise certain benchmarks. They can't sustain it. But Qualcomm will have like a flat curve performance over the 20 minute. We're not going to power throttle. We're not going to bring it up. When we think about the capabilities we advertise, we also designed for the user.

And you're going to see that across the Snapdragon processor. That's one of the things that differentiate us versus some of the competing platforms. And we do get the benefit of kind of working with our partners where there's an

OEM or Google or Microsoft for the PC, really thinking about what would the user experience at the end? But let me push you in that. You said you work with Google to optimize for Android, and you work with Microsoft to optimize for Windows. I'm not an expert. My understanding is that Windows and Android work very differently.

That is correct. Just by lay understanding of operating systems, how can you optimize for both? It seems like you're once again being pulled in two different directions. That's a very good question. I'll say we optimize for more than two. For example, in the automotive space, for the dashboard, for the car dashboard, we run Q&X. And we also run...

BlackBerryLivs. Yes. We also run Linux. But the key, I think the key to answer your question, for example, when I think about our graphics, right? When we do our graphics and we do adreno GPU, we have our adreno drivers. And we work with Microsoft and with Google, so our adreno drivers is part of the Android, solution as part of the Microsoft solution to run on that. So think about the teams kind of work together. There's a very clear demarcation line on what we can do and we'll build the system together.

And I think that's true when you look at some of the performance we could achieve when you take a use case, you get the Snapdragon and you put it on a PC. And you think about a use case of a PC is different in the use case of the phone, different in the car. And I think we're very fortunate to have, you know, the depth of hardware and software teams that can work and kind of virtually, you know, integrate into one end-to-end platform. And it's true when you think about all those things. I'll give you another practical example that should answer your question. When we got into Windows, there's one thing that separate us, for, for example, our competitor in the incumbent player in the PC space. You can say Intel. You're allowed. This is great.

So the incumbent player in a PC space. That's what Intel stands for, actually. It's an acronym. It's quality of communications, I believe. Or maybe that's the dominant player, I would say. So when you look at that, what is different about Qualcomm, for example, our solution much richer on multimedia and richer, for example, in dedicated harder for machine learning. So some of the machine learning applications that you could not do on Windows PCs because it's become CPU.

intensive. You can do now on Qualcomm. So one of the features we're showing on Microsoft, which is on Qualcomm only you can do because you can run this on our NPU of Snapchat. Is when you're talking on a team's meeting, your eyes always look like you're looking at the person. Even if I'm doing something on the side like that, you know, you actually have that connection by doing some machine learning. And that's a great example of doing something very unique when the teams work together and make use of the harder that we have. And they put capabilities onto software, and it becomes a unique solution. So, I mean, I have owned and used both Surface ProX with the processor you code developed

with Microsoft SQ1. I haven't used the SQ2 yet. I've also used the Service Pro 7. And generally speaking, the Surface Pro 7 has worse battery life, but it's faster and has fewer app compatibility problems. And we know with the M1 that Apple sort of got to have its cake and eat its two. So what lessons could Qualcomm and Microsoft take from what Apple did? with the M1?

So one of the great things about the M1, the way we look at it, we're super happy with that announcement, very happy. And kudos to Apple because he validates our belief. It basically validate our beliefs that, you know, the mobile user is defining what they expect out of the PC experience. And when adding Apple to that conversation, you started to see that the, ecosystem is moving. Great example, I believe, was probably this week, if another week before, that Adobe announced a bunch of applications. They're all arm native. And once you make it arm native,

you know, performance increases, right, as you have no app compatibility. So that overall is a very good sign. The ecosystem is going to move. And it showed that Microsoft and Qualcomm were in the right trajectory. It's about battery life, it's about connected, it's about a whole different multimedia experience. And let me just talk about the pandemic in a way to prove that point in addition to the conversation. We just said a M1 and the ecosystem. PCs change dramatically in the requirements how we think about PC. I think PCs are in the process of being redesigned. And we're seeing that activity we have of our customers because of the pandemic. First of all, the CIO now has an opinion about your home computer because that's, it's the process of the enterprise transformation of your home.

The second thing that we see is camera really important. This is what we're doing right now. Hopefully you like what you see. We're using this NEPTerm camera on my Surface X. But the camera becomes really important for the PC use case. then you're going to work, you're going to take a break, entertainment. Whether I want to watch, you know, things, when you want to run, you can run some of the mobile apps. Or on top of this, you have to deal with connectivity and as an extension of the enterprise.

You need to be always connected. All of those things accelerated, even simple things about multimedia audio, you know, and how, you know, I'll see you with a headset and, you know, microphone becomes important. So all of those things are part of this redefinition. think that's a lesson learned for everybody about how we should think about those devices as the use cases are changing really fast. When you talk about over the past 10 years, when the, when executives from the dominant chipmaker come on. We always ask them about Moore's law because that's their thing.

That was their guy, Moore. And they've run into it. But you look at the past 10 years, we've gone from 10 nanometers to 7 to now 5. It doesn't. Do you see that? I mean, obviously, a lot of other work happened and a lot of other improvements happened and there was a market and there was demand and the chips got more sophisticated across a number of axes. But one of the major ones was process transitions that happened on a cadence and had very dramatic impact. Do you see that sequence of process transitions happening across the next 10 years? It continues. I agree with you that there was many vectors of change and some is a process technology. some is design technology, some or kind of new innovation in standards or architecture. And there's no question that a rate of change in performance improvement on mobile SOCs have been probably the highest in the industry. And specific to your question is, I expect that to continue.

Like we were getting to the end of lithography and then EUV came in. We're one of the pioneers with, you know, EUV lights-based chips. What does EUV stand for? It's an enhanced ultraviolet, if I'm not mistaken. I think so. It's basically, it's an evolution of the lights that you use in lithography. As you, you know, at the foundry level, you basically produce and manufacture semi-conductors. And there's, you know,

Next, there's a number of technologies to continue pushing the boundaries from where we are right now, you know, into further shrinkage, going into three nanometers and beyond. So I expect the industry to continue. We are not at a point that we say there's not a room for leading node any further. I think we have always focused our Snapdragon product line on leading transistor technology, both across our two suppliers, TSM and Samsung, and we feel pretty good about that roadmap. We still have ways to go.

And eventually, we shouldn't be talking anymore about just one transistor technology. As some of those smartphones have even more things going into it, you have a multitude of transistor technology. I'm just thinking about now when we look at the whole chip sets that we provide with Snapdragon, including our Afron and, with our mold into antenna strategy.

We have a multitude of components all with different process technology. And I think the industry is still very vibrant and we feel good about it. The other thing that's interesting to me about the 888 is the number of image processors and the capabilities of the image processors. It seems like there's a real, I don't know, lead-follow thing happening where there's a wacky new camera feature that a manufacturer tries. And then everybody else is like, nope, actually that's good. And then eventually Qualcomm makes it sort of available to everybody that wants to be able to do it.

and then the cycle continues. Is that a fair way to think about how camera technology is going to be going for a little while on phones? Because it does feel like we're at a point where we're waiting for another step change. And I'm wondering, do you think that 888 is it or is there going to be something else coming along? It's a good way to think of. I don't disagree with the way you approach this. You know, you're going to have somebody, for example, say some of our customers had an insanely high number of megapixel, right? And those are going to be great things.

And, you know, they can get over time. But you may not do this, you know, across every single phone. But I feel at this time with the 888, it was time to do a significant upgrading camera. And overall, not only photo, but video, we believe that 5G is going to do to video what 4G did to music. You know, it's everyone will be a broadcaster. everyone will be, you know, able to, you know, record and send it to the cloud. You cannot do in a phone a lot of very high-sized image files if you don't have good bandwidth. Because bandwidth becomes almost a necessity now for you to be able to store things on the cloud.

How is that not true now, though? I mean, like, TikTok exists and Instagram exists and Facebook Live exists. Periscope. Like, what will be meaningfully different in a 5G ecosystem? for services like that. How fast you can upload a very large file and the ability to start broadcasting yourself and straight to their cloud. 5G bandwidth.

We just carry that in an instance. But I guess in terms of the step change, right, it'll be faster. When you say what 4G did to music, I'm just like curious, like it's already happening. Is it just going to happen faster or do you think there will be another second order effect because of faster. No, I understand exactly your question. With music, the transition is, I will say, probably complete unless if you have CDs today, it's because you're vintage.

And eventually, they're going to be more vinyl than CD just because of the vintage aspects. People don't buy CDs anymore. Would you agree with that, right? Yeah. What I think with 5G will do, because there's music in 3G. There's music phones in 3G. I remember the LG, you know, Verizon music phone, that silver one that a lot of people had. But with 4G, it was just pervasive.

5G will do that. 5G will basically significantly change how we're going to consume video. It's going to be as easy to stream video in high definition, 4K video, high definition, the full frame rate with 5G because of the bandwidth. The next thing that it does, it allow cameras to go. So exponentially higher in the file size that you're going to generate by higher resolution as video and code, for example, you can capture 4K HDR video and you can instantly broadcast yourself to a cloud service and your social friends can watch it in real time.

And for that, you need bandwidth that you didn't have otherwise in 4G to do that. Or at least you could do it at a lower resolution and it's probably not as pervasive. as you can do with 5G. The next answer to the question is, what is the next, and I think that's kind of the second part of the question, what are the next thing coming to camera? And we're just at the beginning, I think we talk about that during the Tech Summit, of adding more machine learning to camera, because then you have the ability to do a lot of artificial intelligence with real speed, post-processing or image, or even going all the way to the cloud and come back in real time to be able to, you know, get access to information to cloud, make decisions,

and overlay those in how you process image. So all the things we're going to see coming. So I don't know if I'm answering your question. Yeah, I mean, I think I'm curious, you're describing a lot of things that would be great. The reality is that AT&T's network streams everything in 480P today, right? Like, I'm curious how much the availability of the bandwidth or the availability of the capability will actually translate into real change given the fact that you're not in I'm confident that if you were in charge we will just do all the things but there's a carrier there's an operating system vendor there's

instagram won't make an iPad app like there's just all these bizarre little roadblocks along the way that I'm wondering if the presence of more bandwidth will finally knock down I you know I hear you and look there are many more examples and they're examples and they're examples and many other industries, even beyond mobile, of taking a while for the benefits of technology to be adopted by the ecosystem. So I think the first answer is I'm always optimistic about those things. And when we're thinking Qualcomm,

when are we going to design something like 5G, we need to think about 10 years ahead. But the second part of your answer is the speed that when the developer ecosystem moves, it's incredibly fast. You just needed to get that initial momentum. I'll flip the conversation a bit, and I think you're going to agree with me. We have invested with the same, you know, Snapdragon technology.

We had invested early in things like augmented reality and virtual reality. Very, very early. We're talking about this for years. And now if you look at Oculus Quest, it is started to reach an inflection point. The scale is really picking up. And you've started to get into a meaningful conversation. It's not like a handful of people using it. And you can see, as more and more people users, the speed of the development and the applications

and people thinking enterprise applications, consumer applications, that's my comment, for example, about video and gaming. The video applications, the video sharing, the social networks use of people, you know, sharing their experiences will get modified and will get better. as the broadband becomes widely available. The problem you have, it's a chicken and the egg, right? If you only have, for example, high-speed 5G, getting multiple gigabits per second in low-latence,

just in Manhattan, it's going to take a while for a developer to be interested in developing this for the globe. But as I said, as we get coverage of being deployed globally in 21, those things will start to change. Awesome. Well, Christiana, thank you so much for joining us. This is an amazing conversation. I'm excited for my 5G to finally become real.

Very good. Well, it's my pleasure. I love talking to you guys. Thank you for the opportunity and happy to participate anytime. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates

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Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. All right. Thank you to Christiano Amman for joining us. He answered the questions, Deider. Nerdy stuff. Yeah. That's why we did it on the verge account. Thanks again to Chris Welch for joining us to talk about the AirPods Max.

Like I said, that review is coming. We'll have him back when that's done. And like I said, if you want a deep dive on the government's case to break up Facebook, check out the other episode of Virtstass this week that's in your feed right now. Russell, Addie and Casey talked all about that. On Tuesday, on Decoder, this is a fun one. I was very excited to do this episode. I interviewed Melissa Grady, who is the chief marketing officer of Cadillac,

and we actually really didn't talk about cards at all. I had her explain how advertising works to me across the internet and TV and all the other places. Because she has a big budget. She's the one who spends the money to buy ads. So I spent an hour with her just talking about how that works. Super fun. She's great.

Check that out on Tuesday. It's just a big component of the online economy. I mean, I definitely asked for an escalate like five times. Like, let's be honest. I really just want to ask for an escalid. She didn't give you one. That's coming on Tuesday. We'll be back next week with one more chat show.

Then we're at HDMI Holiday Spectacular. We're thinking about it. Yeah. It's coming. We got some ideas. I've got some really bad ideas. We're going to see what happens. My ideas have mostly been just yelling at Andrew to put sleigh bells in it.

So we've got to really buckle down. But we're going to do it. It's coming. Yeah. All I know is I'm definitely going to trim a tree with HGy my cables. It's going to be great. Oh, my God. We've got to get you the light up H-9 cables.

Okay. You can tweet at us. Chris Welch is at Chris Welch. Dieter's at Backlund. I'm at Reckless. We love hearing from you. We'll see you next week. Rock and wrong.

Wear a mask.