The Vergecast - Apple's new iPhone SE, OnePlus 8 Pro review, and Verizon buys BlueJeans

Episode Date: April 17, 2020

Stories discussed this week: The Interface Live on Zoom: the hidden history of Instagram, with Bloomberg reporter Sarah Frier In a self-isolated world, developers are learning to make games from home How GM and Ford switched out pickup trucks for breathing machines The search for COVID-19 treatments shows how messy science can be How Medium became the best and worst place for coronavirus news Unemployment checks are being held up by a coding language almost nobody knows How you’ll use Apple and Google’s coronavirus tracking tool Apple’s second-gen iPhone SE is here: all the news and details Even ‘small’ phones are big now The iPhone SE 2’s camera setup is going to lean on Apple’s software The new Moto G Stylus and G Power are surprisingly adept cameraphones Samsung’s Galaxy S10 Lite will launch in the US on April 17th for $650 Google’s midrange Pixel 4A could launch soon, and there may not be an XL version Apple is tweaking how MacBooks charge to extend battery lifespan Apple’s new Magic Keyboard for the iPad Pro goes up for preorder, ships next week Apple’s over-ear headphones reportedly have swappable ear pads and headbands Here are five things with four wheels that cost less than the Mac Pro’s $700 wheel kit Go read this analysis of what the iPad Pro’s LIDAR sensor is capable of OnePlus 8 Pro review: big league OnePlus 8 review: familiar formula OnePlus announces the Bullets Wireless Z headphones The $579 RedMagic 5G is the first phone with a 144Hz display Verizon is buying BlueJeans, one of Zoom’s videoconferencing rivals Google is reportedly building its own processor for Pixels and Chromebooks Foxconn’s buildings in Wisconsin are still empty, one year later Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on Vergecast, Apple introduced the new iPhone SE. We talk about that. Talk a little bit about that new magic keyboard for the iPad Pro. We get into the 1 Plus 8 review. And we talk a little bit about what's going on with Apple and Google's coronavirus tracing system. It's coming up on the Vergecast now. 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. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it

on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins,

seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. 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 Virchcast, the flagship podcast, teeny tiny phones. Little one.

Well, they're getting bigger every day. I'm your friend, Eli. I'm here. Dieter Bone is here. Also your friend. Paul Miller is here. Hello. I would like to report that.

My application last week to be friends with people has been approved by the authorities, and I'm now also people's friends. Very well done. I'm happy for your friends. Thank you. We need community in times like this. That's right. Real quick, I want to call out a thing that we're doing.

We're trying something new. As you may remember, Casey was doing some interface live events before the current times, where you would meet in person and interview somebody. It's great. We're trying to do one virtually. We're doing interface live. on Zoom. Casey's guest will be Bloomberg reporter Sarah Fryer.

She's author of the new book, No Filter, The Inside Story of Instagram, which I am told is very, very good. So you don't have to be where Casey is to watch this interview this time. You just join him on Zoom virtually. That's happening on Tuesday, April 21st, from 5.30, 6.30 p.m. Pacific time,

8.30, 9.30, Eastern. There's only space in the webinar for 500 people. This is a virtual scarcity. It's a concept that we're investigating. But anyway, sign up. You can just go to the verge.com slash interface. Check it out. We're very excited to try this stuff.

We might do some other things like it in the future. This is our first one. We're excited. Check it out. Interface Live with Casey and author of No Filter, Sarah Fryer. That's happening on Tuesday, April 21st. Also, before we start, people give me some feedback that they do appreciate a little bit of virus news updates before we move on to things that aren't the virus. I'm going to keep doing that.

So first, unsurprisingly, you will note that it's Friday. The show comes out on Friday. Five weeks ago on a Friday, the president of the United States promised a website to be built, I believe, by 17,000 Google engineers. 17,000. It was 1,700? 10 million Google engineers. Everyone at Google was going to make a website that allowed anyone to schedule a test

at a drive-through testing center in the parking lot of one of our nation's major retailers, and then get results on that same website. Deeter, does that website exist? No. There is a website. There's multiple websites made by Google and Google's sister companies, but none of them, except for the one from Google's sister company, will definitely get you to a test. And even the one from Google sister company, you've got to be in the Bay Area. Yeah. So there's a Sundarapitra interview in Time magazine today, and they asked him about it. And he, I would say one of of the most skillful deflections of all time. He was like, we were all, we were working on things. And so we continued to work on them. So it goes. So that's website five weeks. Some other

stories just want to call it from the site. Like I said, the second order effects of the virus are really interesting what's happening to culture and society. So Megan Furkmanesh has a really interesting story about how game developers are learning to make games at home. And it's how everyone's working from home. Check that out. Sean O'Kane. I actually asked for this story because I was personally curious. Sean dug into ventilator tech, how they work, where the state of the art is, the different kinds of ventilator designs that exist. Can I just point out ventilator tech way more complicated than you might have guessed?

Super complicated, very hard to use, right? And so there's a big push to somehow make them smarter and easier to use so you can deploy them more widely. Sean dug into all of that. Also into how car companies like GM and Ford are well suited to spin up massive production of ventilators. and a little bit on sort of Tesla's approach, which is more like modifying other kinds of, they're all basically pumps, right? So Tesla's modifying some other kinds of breathing apparatae to

work as ventilators. So really great story. Like, again, it's one that I asked for because I was so curious on the technology of ventilators. So Sean did that. Nicole Wetzman, who was just on the emergency podcast, you probably heard from her. She wrote a great story kind of broadly showing how messy sciences and how we're all kind of like living through a worldwide scientific race to better understand and treat the virus. And like understanding that science is messy is really important. It's it's one of those like big stepbacks. I really enjoyed it. It kind of puts everything in a perspective. So that's really interesting. Read that. And then Zoe Schiffer wrote a really great piece about medium. As you know, we pay a lot of attention to how social platforms

do content moderation. Medium has not had to do it really at the scale of Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, but there's so much blogging about the virus happening on Medium that they had to roll out some very specific rules and they're sort of enforcing them inconsistently, causing themselves some problems. Medium, one of the things in this piece I think is really interesting is Medium's design makes everything on Medium look the same. Whether it's, we have friends who work at 1-0, which is Medium's tech publication, that stuff is great. They're that's a journalistically rigorous organization. Something that 1-0 publishes on Medium looks almost exactly the same as something a stranger

publishes on Medium. And that flattening of design actually leads to some consequences that Medium is having to grapple with. That piece is really interesting. I put it up yesterday to check that out. And then this one is sort of my favorite. It's like right in the verge strike zone. McKenna Kelly dug deep into unemployment systems around the country.

I think there's over a dozen states which she found where their unemployment, the back-end unemployment databases are written in COBOL, which is like 60-ish years old. Paul, before the show last week, Paul was, we were talking about the syntax of COBOL. It's a very hard language to write in. It's very good at math. It has fixed point math in it, so it can actually do a bunch of these calculations very accurately, very quickly in a way that modern languages kind of aren't able to do. But the systems are old.

they're not well documented. The people who made them are maybe not around anymore. And this flood to get COBEL programmers to help update these systems, let them deal with demand, let them surging demand of unemployment claims. It's actually a big deal. And you just look at the sort of like stats on searches for COBEL, the rates for COBEL developers. They're all just skyrocketing. There's definitely a lot of developers I follow on Twitter that are like, I should learn

COBEL. Ha, ha, ha, ha, unless. And then they've got like a hello world cobal program. But, you know, it's like there's learning the language, which I think there's thousands or maybe millions of developers that could probably get up to speed on a new language in like a month or two. But they're learning, like doing the archaeology on a really old system without breaking it, right?

Yeah. Yeah. That's really tough. And all the sort of modern software engineering practices that you would do to make something scale fast. COBOL programs are all running on mainframes. You can't just make them scale. Right.

You can't just, like, move it all to an AWS server and then, like, ramp up scale. I think mainframe emulators running COBEL are going to be going to be a hot thing this year. So someone told me that AWS Lambda actually supports COBEL now. And they can do these, like, automated ports. But you can't, you can't risk it. Right. Like, that's actually the problem. The problem is the willingness to risk actual downtime.

time to actually break it, right? It's very low. Someone, and if you are this person, please tweet it me again because I cannot for life and you find it. Someone tweeted me that one approach people are talking about is to actually build a modern front end that can cope with demand and then have it feed the data into the COBEL back end at a fixed rate. Right. So you build sort of the front end on AWS and can deal with a surging demand and then it sort of rate limits with the COBEL server. Is that how the IRS website's working right now? The IRS, we actually, Addie wrote about it yesterday. This is,

it's like a masterpiece of bad error messages. It is unbelievable. What is the air message? Payment status not available. Payment status not available. So if you were, if you qualified for the $1,200 payment that was supposed to go out to everybody, the IRS started processing those.

You know, you get a direct deposit, it's way faster than getting the physical check in the mail. And so people are checking. Some people have gotten them. We've heard from some people have gotten these direct deposits. A lot of people are just getting this catch all error message, which is just

Schrodinger's payment status. It's like, what does this mean? There's a link to an FAQ. If you go halfway down the FAQ, it gives you like five reasons that have nothing to do with each other for why you might have this message. And then Adi pointed out that

also it says other reasons available on IRS.gov, but there's no link. Even though it's the same website that you're on, it's like, go somewhere else on this website. So it's just like a bad design decision. Like, we know that error messages should be verbose and helpful, and our nation's government did not get that memo in 1995 when Microsoft sent it to everyone. So there's just a lot of that going on. And a lot of – Reed McKenna's – like, Addie's piece is really interesting because of the design story about the error message.

McKenna's piece is – she did a lot of reporting. She talked to a lot of state governments that are dealing with cobal issues, trying to scale up demand. And the governor of New Jersey is on television asking for cobal programmers. Like that's where we are right now. One thing that was really cool about this, people started reaching out to McKenna asking how they can help. How they might, they're like retired cobal programmers or they're willing to learn. So we're going to do a story next week, just some resources for if you have the time

and ability, the experience, we're going to help. We're going to do a story that helps you direct that so that you might help. We're figuring out the best ways people can help. So we're working on that pretty hard. Okay. And then the last big virus thing that we should talk about, we did the emergency podcast with Casey Addy and Nicole about the Apple Google contact tracing system. We have since learned more. Casey's uncovering this really closely. We've all been paying attention to it. But we've learned a little bit more about how this system will work. The two things to me that really stood out. One, Deeter, I think Google said they're actually going to distribute the update via Google Play, which is critically important. Yeah, so I actually got some follow-up from them on this. So they are distributing via Google Play instead of just a straight-up Android update, which is, thank God, because it's a straight-up Android update,

he just never know if you'll ever get that ever, and you've got to wait for all sorts of carrier stuff. So that'll just go out. It will support everything from Android 6.0, marshmallow, and up. So it goes back pretty far, which is great. I think it probably goes back further than like when Bluetooth LE started hitting Android Jones. But the important thing to know, is distributing via Google Play is great, but not all Android phones run Google Play.

And there's like two big ones to think about or worry about in that category. One is every single phone's owned China. Whether or not China really wants an anonymous system for people is an open question, perhaps. But two, the other category of phones that it can't hit are Huawei phones sold outside of China. So what's going to happen there? Well, Android is open source for the most part, but not everything through Google Play is. But they do have this thing that they call Project Mainline, which lets them distribute Android updates via the Google Play infrastructure. And for Chinese companies, what they do is they just open source those updates.

And then if the Chinese companies also happen to want to, you know, just do the same thing with their infrastructure, it's relatively easy for them to do. And it seems like that's what the plan is going to be for this system as well. I mean, this is like the ultimate Android fragmentation story. I would love if this is open source. Like, obviously, like, when Google and Apple actually distribute software to phones, it's a binary. So, you know, we can't audit it like coming from them. But just, you know, a lot of, for me, all of the gold standard in cryptography and like cryptocurrency type stuff, all of that is open source because you want so. many eyes on it looking for the potential flaws like oh actually you thought you had an anonymous

system but an attacker with this set of information could actually identify people uh-oh you know so i maybe spoke a little bit inaccurately there i don't know that this this specific system is going to be open source in fact i kind of suspect the answer is that it won't be when i asked specifically about that i was told that google is going to offer code uh audits to, you know, to other organizations that want to create a similar system or, you know, use the seems like mainline sort of thing. So that doesn't mean, that may mean that like it won't be so Google might just help them create something that would be API compatible. Yeah. And also here's the thing. Whatever Google wants to do in order to support Huawei,

it just like, it can't do it directly. Google's not allowed to provide software to Huawei full stop. So they have to make a system that they believe in their hearts Huawei could use if it wanted to. Or they just don't. Right? I mean, like, it's the other choice, right? You'd look at the market share Huawei phones outside of China and shruggy, right? On balance, the danger of someone gaming the system and issuing a false positive is very dangerous, right? So I think the instincts here are to keep it relatively locked down. I think they're tempering that by knowing that they need a lot of big name security researchers, big name, consultants and experts to beat up on this thing. And I think they're, I think they're being open with the spec, they're being open with stuff.

But I think the actual code, the ideas of how it will interact with the server, I think they're going to be pretty tight with because if you issue that false positive, this is what Casey was saying, like the real danger here is the false positive rate. You make a bunch of people stay home that don't need to or you scare a bunch of people and you haven't told them in person, people are going to stop using the system. The other thing that I think was more confusing to me. me, I think this was always their plan, and I think they needed to clarify it because it was confusing to me and I think a bunch of other people. They initially said, we're going to put out

an API that apps can use, and then later we'll build it into the OS. And I think that just does, it never quite made any sense to me. Like it sounded like first ever would have to download an app and then they would later the system would get it. What they have since clarified, which makes far more sense. I think they just didn't say it this way, but they have since clarified, they're building Apple and Google are collaborating on the exchange of Bluetooth keys. So the format of those keys. They're building that level of key detection and transmission into the operating system from the jump.

It's like the thing that is happening is the operating systems are getting the underlying Bluetooth key exchange system built. And then an API is being created for apps to use that system. Then later, when they say built into the operating system, they're going to build a user interface into the operating system for that Bluetooth system. So I think that's like was not made abundantly clear from the beginning. Like they're actually building the architecture into the US from the first day because you have to light up the radios. It's just other apps will be able to turn it on, control it. Later, it will get pushed via the user, which makes sense, right?

The hard part is the part that you want out is the exchange. of Bluetooth keys anonymously and then sending to a server, the user interface can come later. We know that they've said that they're going to use, they're going to allow approved entities per government to release these apps. Obviously, Apple has a pretty good hold, not perfect, but pretty good hold on who can release an app on iOS. How is Google going to lock that down? Well, Google can control the Google Play store. Google also can scan for apps and remote totally take them off of your phone if they want to. And they do that for malware regularly,

even if they were installed via the Google Play Store. If you have Google Play services and you don't actively try and stop it, your phone is getting scanned all the time for known malware. It's not maybe not as good as like a full-on virus malware protection, whatever, but it's pretty solid. And so in theory, if they wanted to, they could just like, if somebody starts distributing something that's malfeasant, they could just yank it.

Yeah. And I think that level of control, is like here it is like almost everything else of the virus it's like let's rethink all of our assumptions like how much do you want google to control the apps on your phone how much do you want apple to zero but when you say in order to to let people like go back to normal that's always that's always how they take your freedoms in order for you to be more free you got to give up some of your freedoms i i i don't know i creeps me out like i don't want them to control my phone i don't want them delete things off of my phone.

I want to have, and so I would hope that they could build some sort of system that is not reliant on everybody in the system entirely perfectly behaved, because if everybody has to be entirely perfectly behaved to interact with the system, then you have to control all the actions of every actor in this system. Well, if they can certify and limit who's allowed to upload a positive result to, the server, then, like, that's another layer of protection here. So they, if they can stop it there, then they don't need to, like, reach into your phone and shake it, Paul. They could just, like, not let the dirty app upload the data and it should be fine. But, like, this is still, or what,

a month away from, like, the first phase of this thing getting released if they managed to hit their deadline. So they're still just like open questions. And not open questions, like, how dare they? Just like, people got to figure this shit out. And the other thing I'll say that's like most important is even if they get this a thousand percent right, they nail every single technical aspect of it. Bluetooth contact tracing, this entire system will only be one piece of a larger set of solutions that are going to require cooperation and solidarity amongst mass populations across state and like country lines. Like if people are waiting for this thing and they think that Google and Apple's framework for key anonymous. just Bluetooth keys is going to, like, solve our isolation problem?

No, it's not. No. And in, and in, in, in, in, in this point, a dozen times on the emergency podcast, she just kept saying, like, all this depends on massively scaled up testing. Yes. And I do want to say, because I'm sound I'm pretty complaining right now, I do really appreciate how seriously Google and Apple seem to be taking privacy and security with this. I just think that ultimately you get the best privacy and security, not through.

obscurity. Ten out of ten, I would agree with you normally. Right. Like, yep, that's, that's, I believe that. I'm idealistically believe in that. I think this moment is one of those, Nicole said this on the emergency podcast, public health has a different bar of privacy ethics, right? Like, if you were to do this manually, you would send people to everyone's house, knock on the door and be like, do you have a fever? Like, that's just a different way of thinking about how we collect information. And I think these conversations are just running into each other with this system. We got a month. It's opt-in, you know, the worst-case scenario is that, like, the system gets compromised

and a bunch of location data leaks out. And you end up with this surveillance, and you're still trying to solve the test and trace problems. So, yeah, Paul, I'm like, rethink my assumptions is like one of those. I've had to do it more because of the current situation than I've had to in a long time. It's like, in many ways, I think it's healthy. but this system, I think, is going to really shine a light on some of those core assumptions of how we build computers and who we want to protect us from bad actors with our specific devices in our hand. Because people are going to be interested in attacking the system when it rolls out.

Because, of course, they are. What have we learned about computers? Okay, that's all of our stuff. There's a little iPhone to talk about. Let's take a break. We'll come back. Let's talk about the iPhone. I see.

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All right, Deeter. Yes. So is it the iPhone SE 2020? Is it the iPhone? Do they call it Addison special? Oh, shouldn't it be the, oh my God. Apple refers to it as the, maybe they don't use the because Apple hates articles, but it's second generation iPhone SE. They must use the for second generation. It's the second generation.

However, is any, is ever going to be writing the second generation iPhone SE? No, they're not. So I'm sure Apple is just hoping we'll just call it the iPhone SE. No, Apple, Apple hates the idea that if they haven't given it a number, that the number exists. Yeah. Like the previous iPhone SC no longer exists, right? There was a, there was a guy named Eric. Now there's a new Eric.

We're never going to talk about old Eric again. There's only this Eric. Well, the MacBook and MacBook Pro version of that is you typically do. the years in parentheses. But Apple will like admit. It's weird, right? They will admit that they put out a MacBook in 2016 and then another MacBook in late 28 or whatever.

With this, they're just like iPhone SC. Can we call it the iPhone SE touch bar? All right. So it's an iPhone SE. Whatever this thing is. I'm going to call it the iPhone SE 2020. That's what I've said a lot in my head. I can tell you what this thing is if you're familiar with iPhones in three bullet points.

Okay. iPhone 8 body, iPhone 10R hardware for the camera, iPhone 11 processor, which parentheses helps improve the camera. Okay, because of the neural engine. So the things that are new, I don't, like, finding the matrix of what the iPhone 8 could do with the camera and what the iPhone 10R could do and what this one could do, I like actually have to look it up a little bit. But they are doing depth and portrait on both. the single lens on the back and the single lens on the front on the selfie camera. It's like monocular depth something, something, whatever. So they are doing a little bit more computational stuff.

And that enables it to do a few more photo modes or whatever. So in theory, this should take better photos than say like an iPhone 10R. We are assuming it's the same like sensor camera setup as the iPhone 10R. We don't have that dead to rights. But that seems to be. I will say this. And Gadget has it confirmed. from Apple that is at least not the same sensor as the 11.

Okay. Great. Well, that's a big deal. Yeah. Well, you can get to it, but like the 11 sensor was a dramatic improvement from the 10S and 10R. Yeah, that's true. So there's a bunch of stuff to talk about beyond the camera. We need to talk about the size because it is not tiny like the original iPhone

I see. It is the iPhone 6 size. It is the exact same design as the iPhone 6 into the iPhone 6, into the 7, into the 8. We've had this design since 2014. This design, by the way, was a big freaking deal back then because it was big. This phone, which everyone's like, oh, they made it, they made, like, keeping the small one was the big phone. And that is, it was a huge watershed moment for Apple. Just to be clear, because it's not the 8 plus.

No, it's not going to be a plus version of the SE. The 8 plus is still going to be sold in certain markets. It's like, there's like inventory out there. The reason I'm harping on the size thing, like, you know, people, you gripe about design or whatever. But basically every Android phone now has found a way to decrease the size of the bezels on the top and the bottom. And you get a much bigger phone in a smaller body. And it's not like a, it's not a stupid thing. It's like actually matters to have that extra screen space or to have the smaller phone. And Apple could have, had they wanted to, put in the work to redesign this, you know,

basic phone body that they've had since 2014 to somehow make the bezel smaller. They could have moved the home button. God knows they wouldn't want to do that. They could have gone ahead and, you know, I don't know, some other method. They could have put an in-screen fingerprint sensor. They would never do that. They could have, you know, like everyone else is doing it. They could have changed.

I mean, it appears to be the same display. It appears to be the same display. It's got true tone. You know, we asked about this. There was a call with press and, you know, Apple will never. confirm, oh, this is the exact same part. But it's like, you ask, hey, is this the exact same part? And they're like, this is an amazing display that 500 million people have loved. Can I spin a tale that's just wildly optimistic? This is a part spin phone. Apple looked at what

it's got. How do we make a $400 phone? Here are the components. Oh, dang, it's really good, because we got this fast processor and we just have plenty of it. $400, wildly successful. then Apple makes a phone with no bezels the exact same size as this. Keeps the metal unibody because it's just beautiful. And I actually really like. I was picking up my iPhone 7 recently. And it's just it's light compared to my pixel. And it's smaller and feels good in the hand.

You know, it is a great design. I do still miss like the iPhone 5. I prefer the iPhone 5 to the iPhone 4. I would buy an iPhone 5 SE and a heartbeat. But you could see if Apple was so successful, then they could come back at this with like, the price is the part's been aspect, right? Right.

They've been making this phone for so long that all of the tooling in the factory to make this basic phone is like paid for 10 times over. Right? When they make a new phone, they have to do new tooling. They have to build a new factory line. they have to block like many many things have to happen that they have to pay for and then they just

keep making it and then the two like that's not that's paid for and they can lower the price and keep the margin right that's the basic model here which is why they keep their phones around for so long right they just drop the price here over here i also think there's a lot of antenna stuff here like i would love an iphone five or an iphone four in the iPhone four is my favorite right i would love that i do not think they can cram the necessary lTE antennas into that body They could barely cram the necessary 3G antennas outside that body if you will remember the iPhone 4. I think that antenna work is we often overlook it. But I think here they had an LTE antenna design for this body that they could just use.

When I worked for a wireless adjacent company, I got tipped off from like a rumor of a rumor that the reason phones had to be big is because the antennas have to be big. And I dug into antenna technology and I cannot confirm it. I love it as a theory, but I really don't understand antenna's enough to really know why. But it really since LTE, we've had big phones. Well, at first, because they needed big batteries. There's a reason the iPhone 11 and then the 10R are the size they are, right? They're the big cheap phones. As much as we go on about their people want small phones and certainly we have lots

of people on our staff who are like, why can't I just get an iPhone that I can use with one hand? We hear it all over the place. 50% of the population in the world is women. They often say they want small funds. Like, it's a thing that we hear. And then people's revealed preferences in the store are like, I'd like the big cheap one, please. Right? Like, I think everybody in the world should have an OLED TV.

People go to the store. They're like, how much gray LCD can I get for 350 bucks? Right? And that is the thing that sells the most. And like, so it goes. but I think can it be smaller is directly tied to how much technology

you need to fit in it, how big is the battery and where do the antennas go? And is there a market for that actually smaller thing? And I've been pretty effusive about the idea of this phone since they announced it

because it has the A-13 bionic processor. The same processor is in the iPhone 11 Pro. And they actually did this with the original iPhone I see. I completely kind of whifted. In my head, when I knew that this was rumored, I expected them to like throw an A12 in there. I mean, hell, there's an A12 in the iPad Pro, right?

A12 Z or whatever the hell it is. So when it came out that they're using the same processor, it just like, it hit me like a lightning bolt. Like you can spend 400 bucks on this thing and have a phone that is going to work for another four to five years and probably work pretty well. Like I've got the OG iPhone I see. I still use it from time to time. I'd like turn it on for, you know, once this announcement, like reset it up again.

And like, it's great. It's fine. Totally fine. I mean, it's tiny, but it's fine. And the thing that occurs to me is it's not that it's $300, $400. It's that it's $400 that you can spend if you want to once every five years. If you buy a $400 Android phone, you're buying another $400 Android phone a year or two. You just are.

And so like that's, that's an incredible value that Apple doesn't get enough credit for. And also, just like, what does the iPhone 11 go for? It's $700, I think. Yeah. Yeah. So like $300 difference. Like you really see where like the costs are. It's the tooling. It's the screen. It's the camera. I mean, there it is. Right. And like battery size, I guess. For all, for most people, they'll be able to do the exact same stuff they could do with an iPhone 11 on this phone for 300 bucks less. And there are many, many cheap Android phones. Like, I'm not a super fanboy here. And they can unlock it while wearing a mask.

That's very true. Also, like, the combo platter of Apple stuff. This is your headphone jackpoint. But like, you can get an iPhone SE a cheap. cheap Apple Watch and some AirPods, and you still haven't bought an iPhone 11 Pro. Like, you still got some money left over, and you have basically the same experience minus like face unlock, right? That's a pretty compelling Apple ecosystem story, even if I think the cheap phone should definitely have a headphone check, because forcing people to spend money on your proprietary Bluetooth headphones, you know how that sits with me. The pandemic hasn't made me rethink that assumption.

I can't tell you that right now. the camera part is the one that's right if it was the same sensor i'd like this is the no brainer right we're going to have to review it and see the iPhone if it's the same sensor as the 10r um or the 10s we'll see what the software does but that sensor itself was insanely noisy right like i did not think that camera was good regardless of the smart htr whatever like they've changed some of that tuning they've made the pictures look different the thing that got me they had to do so so much noise reduction to get those pictures to not look noisy that they just blew out details all over the place. Like that was the thing I remembered from the 10S review. Like what is the real

problem here? It's smart HDR is really, really aggressive and everything looks a little fake. Okay, they fix that generation of generation. I think the 11 is great. The details are gone. Like they couldn't fix it. They switched the sensor and the 11. They got a lot of that detail back. we'll see if like, you know, the sensor, the processor, the image processing stack, those are all a unit. They're all combined. We'll see how that goes. But that sensor itself, and I remember talking to the halide folks, they're like, the sensor is very noisy. It was, it was not a secret that the iPhone 10R sensor or the 10S sensor was super noisy.

So we'll see. We got to review it. It's like photos of inside will be what we use it to review. You can't do our usual tricks, but that's it's, I have one big question mark. I've got a bicycle. So I can, I can go to take pictures of your bike inside of your apartment. It's hard to get closer than six feet to me when I'm on a bicycle. I want to see this review, just photos of your bike in different surprising locations.

Done. You can make that happen. There's a bike in my one plus review. You can see it. Was it in a surprising location? Yes. It was in a surreal parallel universe of color filter. We'll get to that later.

Okay. Yeah, that's the question. Everything's great. I agree with theater. Like, incredible value. Incredible lifetime value because, you know, the chip is new. So they'll probably support it forever. But man.

But if you're, if the camera turns out to be meh, like that's, it's like, that's a hard thing to live with for four years. And the other thing, you know, like just, it's the 5G transition is upon us. I don't know if you know if it's a race. We're racing. Racing a 5G. Okay. If you buy the cheap LTE, you phone.

and you're expecting to hold on to it over the course the next five years depending on how carries matters your networks, your LTE performance might degrade, right? So like we'll see that certainly happened with what they euphemistically called 4G

in LTE. Like I see the 4G indicator on my iPhone now. I'm like, oh, my network's going to suck. So like that's a, just in this moment, you got to maybe consider that. Depending on how long you're going to keep it. My naive thought of the rollout is that they're going to put a 5G antenna somewhere, probably where they already have rights, so next to their 4G antenna.

And they're going to have to run more bandwidth. So wouldn't the 4, like, want the LTE just benefit from that? It just depends on when they decide to switch some of their spectrum over. So like, who knows? It's just, this only matters if you're intending to buy the phone for $400 and then keep it for five years, right? Like five years from now, what will be the state of the mythical dish network, LT, or 5G network? What will be the state of the T, I don't know. Well, you'd still have a pretty good iPod touch.

And that's really all you need, because we're all just inside using the Wi-Fi. That's right. Do you know, there's some other, this MacBook battery thing seems really interesting to me. What is going on here? Yeah, so this was sort of like out of the blue, Apple's like, hey, we're going to have some news. And so here's what it is. for Thunderbolt 3 and higher MacBook Pro MacBooks. So this is like MacBook Air since 2018 and MacBook Pro since I think 2016.

They're doing a thing where they want to extend the lifespan of the battery, how many years a battery lasts before it really starts degrading. And one of the things that actually is bad for batteries, it turns out, is just like leaving them charged all the way to 100% all the time, just like that hard on the chemicals. And so you might know that your phone, sometimes won't charge all the way to 100% overnight until like an hour before you wake up. Like this is the smart charging thing that a bunch of phones do now.

So what Apple is doing is they're using like local temperature data and like your charging history on the Mac. They don't send it up to the server unless you let them to be like, oh, you know what? If we, this person never unplugs their MacBook like ever. They're just like sitting on a desk and maybe they'll like unplug it and walk over to the couch and plug it in again. So we're just not going to charge this all the way. Like, nope.

And so what will happen is the percentage meter in your menu bar will say 100%. But that 100% doesn't mean that your battery is at 100% of its possible charge anymore. I don't like this. This is how they take your freedoms. What it means now is it's 100% of what Apple thinks is the appropriate charge for your battery to take in order to maximize its possible lifespan, which is amazing. You can turn it off, by the way. Do we have any vibe on what that is? Is that 80?

Is that 90? We don't know. Apple did not provide that detail. I don't know how many people are likely to have this thing turned on for them. It's unclear if it's going to be like everybody or just this tiny subset of people. It sounds like it's not going to be most people, but it depends on how often you unplug, I guess. And I don't know what they will be, like 95%. 90%? What is what is a percent anyway when the batteries started degrading?

Right? Like it's it's it's a it's just a a feeling. It's a it's an urge. It's a hunch. It's not really a number. I remember a couple years ago, Ashley Carmen like did like this big like investigation talking to battery experts about whether you should leave your phone plugged in or not. Like should you try and I think the kind of the consensus was yeah, it might be best to like not keep it pegged at 100% but that's so hard to do. So like don't worry. I don't know. But obviously I've just always, I'm glad that you paid attention to Ashley's video, Paul.

I did. I did. I feel like that was the takeaway. It was don't worry so much, but no one can stop worrying. Yeah. And that was, I just absorbed this worry. And so like when I see my computer plugged in, I'm like, ah, that's not good. And then like, I unplug it and I run it straight to zero.

And like, I. my MacBook Pro like 2015 has been really one of the best computer one of the best technology items of my life battery wise. It tells me I need to service it, but I still get like four or five hours of battery life. It's wonderful. But I run it to zero and then I recharge it to 100. I know that's bad for it. So I just feel like everything I do is bad for my battery. So I find this comforting even if Apple does want to lie to me.

I think what's really like right now this laptop that I'm using, It's plugged in all the time. I just leave it in this room in an effort to have like different spaces of where I work and where I like, because I'm just here all the time. You know what I mean? So I'm trying to leave the laptop here. So it makes sense. Don't charge us all the way.

In a world where like, uh, remember planes? I used to go on planes all the time. They were great. I mean, I didn't love them, but now they seem wonderful. But like the night before I go on a plane, I want to tell this thing like actually charge it all the way. And like that's, it's just that little bit of customization. I want to make sure.

It would be better if they were like, if 100 was, if it was more like a video game, where 100 is like where they thought it should be, but you'd be like, I need 120, right? And you go, bo bo bo, bo, bo, like, that's what I'm looking for. The old whimsical Apple would have done that. They would have been like, do you want to go to 105? Which, which Apple, which era are you referring to? There was like a whimsical era of Apple where they'd be like. Like the Dalmatian Spot, IMac?

Yes, that era of Apple, or, which. They're like, this time back is called flower power. Would have been like 105. It's hilarious. So, guys. We'll see. When does it roll out? It's in the developer seed right now.

And it'll be an upcoming version of everyone's favorite operating system, MacOS Catalina. Catalina. The operating system that hates being there. It just doesn't like it. It's like why it literally is like, what, am I doing this again today? it's a perfect operating system for quarantine. It's just like, it's just at angst with itself at all times. Speaking of MacBooks and planes,

the thing that I'm most excited for to try on a plane is the magic keyboard for the iPad Pro, which they just shoved up the release date. Yeah, it's coming out early. It should be out as you listen. If you listen to this on time, it should be out next week, which is much sooner.

Although I think it got back ordered pretty quickly. Instantly. What size you want. I almost bought this thing 500 times. And the first time I was bought it was showing me a two to four day ship week. And by the end of the time I was trying to buy it, it was three to four weeks. Yeah. And that was just in the span of like a couple hours.

I'm very excited to review this thing. We haven't touched it. We've talked about it a lot. Obviously, I have feelings about iPads and whether or not they, our computers or not. Yeah, I mean, we'll see. I think that Apple hasn't told us what they weigh, which has me a little bit worried. But we'll see. Now that I can't have it tomorrow.

You want it? I'm extremely annoyed that I didn't buy it. But it's so expensive. Yeah, it's 300 or 350, which is like basically an iPhone. It's an iPhone. It costs as much as an iPhone. Can I make a request for who's reviewing this? Who knows?

Okay. Well, for whoever reviews this at the birth. All right. Welcome to the tension between me and D. Look up, look up measurements for airplane seat, spacing, tray table height, and reconstructed. airplane scenario in your apartment. Will you be paid extra for this work?

Absolutely. Well, it's up to Deli. Oh, no. Paul, Paul, think about it. The screen floats, right? Like, it comes up like a laptop and then it like kicks out a little bit and then

the screen floats. So when the back of the airplane seat comes down, it has a little bit of room to push down. And if it comes down really hard, maybe it will pop the iPad out of the case and break the case instead of breaking your iPad. Think about it. Okay. So enlist a, a child or a significant other to suddenly lean back the fortune and see what happens.

There's a couple of rumors. There's a rumor that those over-your headphones, which aren't beats branded because Apple hates, I don't know, whatever, they're going to be over-your-headphones. And the rumor is from Mark Herman that you're going to be able to swap out the, like, ear pads and the headbands because it'll be like magnetic. So you can, like, customize it. Okay. Sure.

Like Fortnite. Yeah. You got to wonder when Eddie Q went to Jimmy Iveen, Dr. Dre, and Trent Resner, the people who owned beats, and they're like, he's like, I want to buy your streaming service. And we have a billion dollar headphone company. Was he like, yeah, we're going to treat them like second class citizens the entire time? Yeah, probably. I mean, of course. Like for a while, like they didn't have like lightning connectors.

Yeah. They're like, we won't give you these. But like, so these headphones, like they're going to be expensive, right? Of course. Yeah, yeah. So I don't understand because in addition to these headphones, which would probably be expensive, you can now buy the Mac Pro $700 wheel kit. How does Apple decide when it's going to gouge you when it's not? Like, where's like, you know, like AirPods's not that expensive.

Like that they seem like fairly priced, right? Wheels like the posts are like $300. Wait, this pricing is out of control. So what Deeter is referencing is previously to get wheels on a Mac. Pro, you had to buy them with the Mac Pro. They were like 400 bucks, 500 bucks. I forget. Yeah, it was a BTO option, yeah.

But you couldn't buy them separately. Now, you can buy them separately. My strong belief is that Apple is selling these just because people want to buy them. Oh, my God. I don't have any insight into this. I just know there are some people who are like, yeah, I'll buy some wheels. I want those wheels. The wheels alone cost $700.

So if you don't buy them with your Mac Pro, you just have to eat. in like an additional $300 for the wheels, which is amazing. I'm going to buy the wheels and I'm going to buy the stand for the Pro Display XDR. But I'm just going to put them on my desk. But I just and, but then if you bought, if you bought the Mac Pro with the wheels and you regret it and you're like, I wish it wasn't rolling everywhere because the wheels don't lock and you want just the standard feet. You can now buy those.

And that's like another 300 bucks, right? Yeah. I don't think anyone is buying the feet. Like some people are just going to buy the, I promise you, someone's going to just stunt buy the wheels. And Apple have made their money. If you just buy four aluminum sticks, like you have made a mistake. Like just go to Home Depot and just buy like a rod of aluminum and just cut it.

And then you have it. Okay. Imagine this. It's called The Path to Mac Pro. And you buy the Mac Pro piece by piece, right? You buy the wheels, you buy the case, buy a mother port. You buy a graphics card, and you've invented computers. You invented the Apple One, and you make a wooden case for it.

Yeah, the feet are $2.99, and the wheels are $6.99. We have a post on the site. Taylor, Liles, wrote it. She pointed out that you can just buy four wheels and tires for your car for $294. That's cheaper than the Mac, bro. That's great. I love it. I hope some people, I hope people all over America decide they just want some wheels. Maybe they were like, you know, people are at home. They're like picking up new hobbies. They're building like cars for their kids. We should put some nice wheels on the market.

I mean, I own a fidget cube, you know, just like something to do. Just like, you know, roll a little knob around and push the little buttons on the fidget cube. Okay. But here, but here's the list of prices. Whole ass iPhone with an A13 processor. $400. Yeah. Wheels, $700. Four aluminum posts, $300. It's a very, I got keyboard, $300. It's very, it is a very confusing list of prices. Once they get those Mac Pro factories really revved up and they've paid for the supply chain,

you could get wheels for, for two, wheels SE for $2.99. They're going to have to sell those wheels for like 35 years. That's great. I'm sure all of this pricing makes sense in some universe. You are certainly not supposed to compare an iPhone SC to wheels, but they just keep handing it to us. All right. And then lastly, the HALID folks, they put out a new app called ESPR. Oh, this looks fascinating.

Yeah, yeah. So the iPad Pro, the new one has that LiDAR sensor on it. They did this great write-up of what it's good for. You should go read it. It's really interesting. But they put out an experimental app called ESPR that, like, does scans of objects. They're like,

it can't really do anything smaller than furniture, but it can like, this app can like scan a piece of furniture, can move it around, that's neat. And then it can like scan the entire room and then glue the room back on the room and then do effects.

So it looks like you're walking through a cartoon. Like, it's just a neat proof of concept demo of what this LiDAR sensor can do. I still don't know what it's for, but it's super cool. Like, no one has this iPad.

I think Dieter has a review unit. I think Sam Byford aren't team bought one. So you two are going to have a lot of fun at this app, I think. But what's interesting is that when you look at the map that the lasers draw for the light are, that anything smaller than a chair, it kind of really can't get. Yeah, is that the scale that we want our AR to be working at? Because you would think they'd want a little bit more there. And especially on the iPad Pro, like it's not hurting for battery.

they could have gone a little bit harder on that, but they didn't apparently. Anyway, this app looks amazing. I'm looking to try it. Yeah, I'm not sure what the relationship between fine-grained LiDAR sensing and battery life is. Are you suggesting that it needs more lasers? More lasers cost more money?

I don't know. Or charge more, I don't know. Here's what I want to see from someone. Someone by the fully-kitted-out iPad Pro, running about $3,000. and then attach the four wheels to it. Just do it. Be like, this is the most intense I've had that Apple sells.

And then mail it to the YouTube channel Braille, Braille skateboarding, and they'll skate it. They'll skate anything. There you go. See? I bet you money that I have a cow print gateway tower in my parents' attic. I'm going to buy the wheels and attach it to that 1995 gateway. See, look at this.

It's been like 20 minutes. I've already sold like five sets of wheels. Come on. This is easiest money Tim Cook ever made. All right. We've got to take a break. And we've got to talk about this one plus eight. We're right back.

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Claude. ad.ai slash vergecast. Paul Miller. Hello. In these troubled times, consistency of the following segment is a light. It's called, more hurts than you can handle old man.

It's funny. This segment every week, just like attacks Americans. No, it's an attack on myself. It's a self-criticism. I see. Also, why isn't the segment called Hertz so good? that's fine. That's fine. Maybe one of these weeks don't do that, okay? For you. That's a treat.

So this Red Magic 5G, $579 phone, first phone with an 144 hertz display. Also, it has 240 hertz display. Also, it has 240 hertz touch sampling. This is a phone for gamers, people. And so the 240 Hertz touch sampling is not impressive because that's like standard for 8020 hertz refresh rate display. In fact, normally, I'm pretty sure that the touch sampling is usually double the refresh rate. So they maybe just cranked up the refra. I don't know that it's like a fact across all phones, but most of the ones that I've noticed, I've seen, I do that.

Okay. Okay, that's good to know. Also, liquid cooling, of course. also full-on turbo fan inside and there's a vent on the side of the phone I think we've seen one of these gaming phones of the fan inside

this is the obvious evolution like if you're really if you're a real gamer and your phone isn't worrying like like with a like just a subtle fan wine I doubt you're that serious every time we talk about

one of these gaming phones I beg our listeners if you are a hardcore gamer that needs a hardcore Android phone for your hardcore Android gaming, to please tell me who you are so that I know you exist because I don't believe that you do. So if you are that person, please just tweet me at Future Paul and tell me about your life. But you need a proffer, you need a proof. I don't, I want a, I want a video of you gaming on an Android phone. Okay, here's, here's what I want in your, um, online.

multi-player shooting game of choice. So whether it be Fortnite or PubG or whatever, you need to get a winner-winner-winner chicken dinner on camera on your phone to show that you're a true gamer. And then, I don't know, I feel like you should win sort of prize. You really set yourself up to give out some prizes, fall. Eli will buy you. Apple, macro wheels.

There's a part of me that wants to agree to this. but I'm not at this time I'm going to agree with this. All right, Dieter. Speaking of hardcore phones. Yeah, One Plus Pro 8, Pro 8 plus. There's the 1 plus 8 pro and the 1 plus 8. Yes.

And they both were released. They both exist in the world. I reviewed the 1 plus 8 pro. John Porter reviewed the 1 plus 8. According to the YouTube comments, he is more handsome than I am. Ooh. That is fine.

I agree with that assessment. And look, so the OnePlus 8, what's fascinating about this phone is it's getting distributed on Verizon. There's a special edition that works with Verizon's ultra-wideband 5G millimeter wave stuff. But it's first time like the One Plus has been on Verizon, which means that they are on T-Mobile and Verizon. And they're also just making a phone that's like really good. So I think they're coming for Samsung. Now the One Plus 8 Pro, which is what I reviewed, is not being sold on carriers. it's being sold on Amazon and Oneplus.com.

And it's just a great phone. Yeah. It's just really good. The knock, of course, because, you know, it's always the knock is like the camera is like B plus, you know. B plus relative to the current level of flagship cameras. Yeah, to the current level of flight. Because, again, the one plus eight pro costs $900. And so historically, one plus phones, you're like, it's a one plus phone.

So like they cut a couple of corners and then you get to save $300. Hooray. And that's kind of the one plus eight. The corners aren't really cut that much. You lose wireless charging and the camera quality dips is like the main stuff, I would say. The screen is like not quite as fast. It's a 90 instead of 120, I think, for the refresh rate. But at $900 for the one plus eight pro, like you don't get to cut any corners anymore.

You don't get to say, oh, well, you know, you're saving some money, so it's fine. So there's nothing to hide behind when you're trying to stack up against, you know, like a flagship Samsung Galaxy S20. and for the most part I think that it holds its own So this is the first time they're on carriers I think Well the 1 plus 7 Pro

a couple of 1 plus 7s were on T-Mobile They like started as like a pretty tentative like To In the Water experiment Then it got a little bit more serious But now it's like quite serious Because they're on Verizon and T-Mow So it's Dan Seapert Who constantly reminds us

Never pay full price for Samsung phone Correct All right Samsung phones come out they come out at ridiculous prices, and then within, you know, three to six months, the prices are much lower. Dude, like three to six weeks, like, they're dropping, like, super fast. Samsung's supposedly cutting production.

Samsung will give you trade in value for older Samsung phones up to, like, $4,500 for phones that are, like, you could go buy an eBay for, like, $250 right now. Wow. Someone's doing a work-from-home arbitrage scheme. Yeah. Right. So like, Samsung prices collapse very fast. I mean, every carrier at some point is like, buy one, we'll give you another one for free.

Like they just, they're handing out Samsung phones. The question I have is, will this price fall as fast? Because if they hold steady at 900 and then you can get a Galaxy S, what are they at, 35, you can get a new Galaxy phone for way less, but it's still a flagship. like that's a huge problem for Oneplus. It is. I have no idea. I think that there's choices have held relatively steady, but they also haven't been at this level before

where they're like head-to-head taking on the S-20 on every level of feature and every spec. So it could be. And like, look, you can get like the Galaxy S20, the regular size one, is smaller than this phone. I don't think they're directly competitive. The S-20 plus is. And it, you know, it's going to get a discontory.

counted at the same price as the 1 plus A pro if it hasn't already. It's gotta be. And so that's like a tough heads-up decision, in my opinion, between those two phones. Yeah. To me, it always just breaks on the camera for me. Yeah. But I was, I've not been in love with the S-20

camera either. Yeah. No, the S-20 Ultra camera is a massive disappointment. The S-20 camera is like good, but it's not like a, it's not a huge, the huge win that Samsung hoped it would be. Both, especially the ultra, we're supposed to be test of Samsung sensors. So the

1 plus 8 Pro is using, I forget the exact numbers, I'm like 689, no, whatever the newest Sony sensor is, it's bigger physically in area, it's 48 megapixels. With like slightly better processing software, I think that this could be amazing. Someone is going to end up hacking like the G-CAM, Google Photo Camera app onto this thing and I'll be very interested to see what that looks like. They're getting pretty good detail, but they are

like One Plus's processing is a little bit weird. It's like hard to put your finger on. It'll paint faces too much in like dim lighting. I think the detail is actually pretty good. The macro performance is incredible. But just sometimes they just kind of overdo it a little bit, especially with like colors. So but you know, in the same way that like you get a Samsung phone and you're like, oh, huh, I guess that's what you do, isn't it? Okay.

I could deal with that. Like you have to like learn that in a whole deal. different way with one plus phones. But one plus phones, you also have to learn it a whole different way with every phone because they're changing their camera much more rapidly to improve to catch up than Samsung is in some ways. So look at the cameras, like, it's not as consistent in a good way because I do think they're improving year over year. Just got a few quality of life questions. First, how cool is this charger? Oh my God. The charger. So it wireless you charges at 30 watts. The charger, the cable, speaking of quality of life, is like, I think, three feet long, maybe four, and you cannot detach it, either on the Walwart side or the charging dock side.

Can you do like a USBC power delivery extension cable or something? No, no, it's hardwired on both of that. That's so weird. It's not even like a barrel plug. You can unplug. It's hardwired. So if you want to string the wire through like a drawer hole or something like I do and like my drawer, like, you know, you just can't do that. No.

And it has a vent. Like there's a fan. Other wireless charges have fans, so I don't want to dunk on the fan. But there's a vent that holds the phone out from the edge, the side of the dock so that it can pull air along the phone. Yes. A fan means you're a real gamer, Dieter. Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

Amazing. No, I think this is a great phone. I think that if you are in the market for a big Android phone, you probably are going to want to buy this. It's got a ringer switch. The ringer switch is dope. Oh, dude, I would love to have one of those. Curved edges. Like, I have a hard enough time when I'm holding my too large phone, like, accidentally touching the bottom corner of the screen with my, like, the, what's it called when your palm, the part of your palm that connects to your thumb.

Like, I'm always accidentally touching the bottom right of my phone with that. that that is that is a killer on this phone it's like you get used to it but it takes a while it's and the trend on other phones is to get a little bit less like that but uh not here and then one more is that so it's got a camera bump down the middle which a lot of phones are putting off the side so is it can it balance in the center if you lay it down flat on the table is it balanced you know how like when the camera bumps first arrived we were like oh God, this is terrible. I hate this so much. And then we just sort of like got a nerd to it.

And now we accept ridiculous camera bumps. That's where I live with this camera bump. Like, yes, I should have feelings about it. But like, we live in a hell world of camera bumps and they're never going away. So maybe it wallowls on the table. Who cares? Wait, one day, the whole back of the phone could be a camera bump, but then it will finally rest flat again.

See, Paul, I'm trying to, I'm trying to praise this phone and you just, you like, maybe bring out all the nitpicks. But there they are. That's what we do here. We've successfully picked nits. Everybody go buy a one plus eight and then $700 wheels and then do a skateboard thing. It's great. All right.

Some little news things to pick up. This one obviously personally is poignant for me. Verizon, you might remember Verizon. They're a telecom company. They also own AOL for some reason. They're buying Blue Jeans, which one of Zoom's big competitors. Blue Jeans has been around for a long time. Blue Jeans has a.

wild history actually. It didn't start as a self-contained video conferencing product. It was connector software so that if you had some weird enterprise video conferencing solution in your office and some other company has their own weird proprietary video conferencing solution, you would buy blue jeans and it would be the middleware that connected them both. Do you know this? I didn't know this. They've been around for a lot. And now they're just like a full Zoom competitor. They're not obviously as big as Zoom. I would not say the world has had a blue jeans moment the way that we've had a Zoom moment. No, we're all wearing sweatpants right now.

Thank you very much. It's like the wrong name for this moment in history. But Verizon is buying blue jeans, Wall Street Journal Party, a little less than $500 million. Hans Vesberg was on CNBC today. Really, actually, I will disclose that I'm a CNBC contributor, but watching CNBC do those interviews now is wild, right? Because all their anchors are in different places.

Right. And then Hans just like at his house. Yeah. Because everyone's just like, so they cut between the anchors in different locations. to ask some questions. I hadn't watched that happen. It was like, you should just watch it. It's like a very entertaining way to make television.

So I asked much questions. They asked him directly if 5G causes a current virus. And he was like, that's a fake news. He's like, screw this. But he said this thing about buying blue jeans, which just like strikes at my net neutrality heart directly. Let's hear it. He's like, we're already,

Verizon Enterprise already has all these customers. We already sell it as part of the thing. It's already integrated with our systems. We were already working with. and blah blah. We're going to build it into our 5G network. I have no idea what that means. Blue jeans at the edge. That's basically what he said. Here are some buzzwords that we have. What he means is there's only one reason you buy a company. Right. You think you're going to make more money. You don't buy a company because you think you're going to lose money. Well, I mean,

Verizon has bought, they did buy AOL and then bought Yahoo. So it's true. I guess I would immediately take that back. Verizon also launched Go 90. But, Hans is the new guy. Those are the old guys. Hans Vesberg is the new guy who was like, why are we doing this and shut it all down? So one assumes that he's doing telecom stuff to make telecom money. That's been his focus.

It's obvious what they're going to do. They're going to prioritize Blue Jeans traffic on their network. Sure. So that if you're a Verizon enterprise customer, you buy their product and it's like guaranteed to work and has traffic priority. And all of the other solutions, including Zoom, do not have that priority unless you pay up or Zoom pays up. That is literally the net neutrality nightmare,

and that's basically what they said today. What if Comcast decides to retaliate and like, and like limits Blue Gene's performance on its network, would then you be teleconferencing via cutoffs? That's horrible, Dieter. It's very bad. It's very bad. I didn't want to,

my immediate reaction was to just let it slide, but I must. I have to live up to my idea. There's like a, I don't know, perverse part of me that wants like the net neutrality nightmare as like a commercial where it's like blue jeans, like someone's like all blocky and garbled on a Zoom call. And then the smart person on the other end says, hey, why don't we switch this to blue jeans? And then now you're on blue jeans. It's like, oh, it's so clear. What an excellent network and service this is.

Integrated. Wow. Yeah, that's what they're going to do. They're going to change the name of it. They're not going to keep calling it blue jeans. Oh, it's going to be called like Verizon Enterprise Conferenceing. Yeah, they're way too stuff. And they will advertise the net neutrality nightmare.

They're going to say gets priority on Verizon 5G. Integrated with, built into the 5G network is an enterprise-grade video conferencing solution for the future of work. And then they will say something happy about everybody working from home that isn't like your fear of disease. They're going to be like, in a world. of ever like now that work has been recalibrated you need enterprise class conferencing Verizon is there and it's like yeah what you're doing is prioritizing your own product yeah and like the they'll be like it works ideally on 5G phones and by the way when you're on a 5G phone

on a conference call your portrait video is really annoying so make sure you go 90 that's great they bring back to the go 90 tech yeah delight so that's what I will see is there I've been trying to think what does it mean to integrate into 5G? What actually, is there some like fig leaf, some pretend thing they could say is technically necessary for like the packets to work better? I think it has a, I really do think the edge is more than a buzzword in the sense that we've been living in the cloud era where we have very highly centralized data centers

and the carrier C 5G as an opportunity to compete with the cloud by putting little, like medium-sized or small data centers very close to the towers or very close to the actual access points. And so they can become the next cloud by bundling delivery and that sort of hosting. I have literally sat through a Verizon dinner where they like laid that strategy out. Like straight up, that's the Verizon's big strategy is we need to do millimeter wave all the other stuff. We actually need data processing facility near the towers. We'll just overbuild it and sell that, that ability, low latency to do all this other stuff. That's like the

plan. Okay, so maybe Blue Jeans will happen there. But like, okay, well, will Zoom get free access to run in your little, like, distributed data center cluster, like, without paying? Or will Blue jeans come for free? Like, those, I think, are just huge questions of internet government, governance. that it's, I don't know how Zoom competes with that. But there's no market dynamic that lets Zoom or WebEx or whatever compete with that, short of just paying the paying up. So there's like, we'll see. The other one that's on the same note, McKenna and I interviewed Jessica Rosen-Warsall a few weeks ago.

And we were talking about the FCC's Keep America Connected Pledge, where Ajit Pye just like went to all the carriers and made them promise it wouldn't disconnect people for non-payment, all the stuff. Carriers doing it anyway. And their claim, McKenna's writing stuff. Their claim is you have to tell us not to do it. So if you don't pay your bail, but don't tell us, we'll still disconnect you because there's, that pledge is not enforceable because the FCC has given up all of its

enforcement and oversight authority. So like, we're just entering just like very clearly like a Wild West era of internet government. Like, I could not tell you right now if Verizon is throttling Zoom. They have no, there's no requirement for them to say it. I could not tell you if Comcast, which disclosure, investor in Mexico, the whole thing. I couldn't tell you if they're throttling Zoom. And one question is like, well, Zoom works.

Then why would you complain? But I don't know if Zoom is working as well as it could, even though I rely on it to do my work because they don't have to tell me and they don't have to tell the OCCC. So just a lot wrapped up. This was supposed to be a news bite. It was not.

I apologize. It was not a news bite. Well, it's got out long enough that I thought I was going to be able to come up with the stonewash pun, but I just couldn't get there. I'm glad that I defeated you. Dieter, Google reportedly building some processors for pixels and Chromebooks, which is very surprising because I thought they wound down that team.

Yeah, well, so they make the tensor processing unit, right, the TPU, where it was like machine learning, customized stuff. I'm very surprised by this too. The question is, are they going to go the media tech route and just build low-end stuff? Are they just building more co-processors? Like they do the, they do the pixel imaging processing chip or whatever. So they make some custom chips, but they've never made like the main, app processor.

And I think making the main app processor is super hard because you have to deal with Qualcomm patents and it's also just hard. If we're not hard, we would have exonose processors

in all our phones in the US, but we don't. Samsung literally makes this processor, develops year after year, uses it in their phones in other parts of the world. They could very easily, if they wanted to,

you would think, sell it here, and they would prefer to but they don't. And so if Samsung, which sells tens and hundreds of millions of phones, can't figure out

how to get around Qualcomm, Google's chances of doing it seems smaller. Yeah. Also, Apple couldn't get around Qualcomm. They ended up paying them. But, I mean, Apple's paying them for the modems.

Google also, don't they still have like a patent war chest that could be at some sort of cool standoff with Qualcomm? Who knows, man? I mean, look, this is the year of the pixel five. And there's no way this chip if it exists is going into the pixel five. Like, it's too soon for that.

I'd be shocked. But this is definitely the year where, like, we get to decide if Google is actually serious about trying to get people to buy pixels or not, right? The four, like, they're trying, but the, didn't quite get there. Either, like, the five is it, or it's like the pixel is just Nexus, but Google happens to make it. Right. And if that's what it is, that's fine.

just say so. And then once you've done that, then go ahead and build your own wacky processor for it and take a flyer on it and just see what happens. And if it bombs, no one's mad because you took a shot on your weird little experimental hardware hobby that you do on the side. That's all fine.

But if they're serious about the pixel is going to compete with the iPhone head on and we're going to sell in big numbers and we're going to make real money off of it, then this reported custom processor is a much bigger risk. I feel like making your own processor is a bet on yourself moment. Like that's like we do want to go big.

And I mean, I feel like Apple moving to making its own processor and controlling as much of that as possible seems like one of the most genius things in the world in hindsight. Given, especially obviously it worked out performance-wise and they're just winning. Like their own processes are faster. than most of their laptops. But it also gives you so much flexibility control.

And like Google's obviously moving in this direction. You mentioned those little chips. Like it's just becoming increasingly obvious that a lot of the way forward for us to get more performance is going to be application-specific hardware. It's hardware that's designed to accelerate very specific applications

on your computer or your phone. And so it makes a lot of sense for Google to get into that if they're very serious about phones. So if this is true, this sounds very serious about phones. And maybe it'll be like they'll put it in like the 6A and not the full on 6 and that's how they're going to handle it. Like there's many options for them. And I want the Qualcomminopoly to get like challenged in a serious way. I really do. But I don't know if I trust Google to be that serious because they have not to date proven that they are that serious.

it's interesting that there isn't an AMD to the Qualcomm Intel right yeah it's I mean there's like media tech there's like Samsung yeah but Samsung isn't here and media tech is in the low end like where is the competitor that pushes Qualcomm forward and maybe it's just Apple and that's the way the mobile market has shaken out and maybe Google's going to come at it I look at this and I'm like yeah they're going to make I think it's more like what Paul said they're going to make some weird custom processor units they're going to they're going to accelerate the things that they care about because like straight ahead Android gaming processing is like that's not the problem they have with the pixel.

Yeah. The problem of the pixel is like marketing, distribution, selling a bunch of them. A little like hardware quality. It doesn't feel quite as like primo as the other Android competition. And with the Fixel 4, I was like, this is their aesthetic. I get it. It like there's a certain like honesty and humility to it. It's just a phone.

Like it can feel like just a phone. But it's not working. Like I think it's fine. I actually like the aesthetic just fine, but it doesn't feel like it's luxurious and fancy and whatever. And very clearly, you need to if you want a cell phone that costs more than, you know, $8,900. That was another good news bite. We really, really got through that one quickly. Okay, I am going to do this one fast.

We did it on Sunday, this past Sunday, one year anniversary of Foxxon promising a statement or correction. We asked them, we went out. We said, do you have a, they didn't reply. So that's where that is. One year, we actually, Matt Jewell, who's a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Oclair, and he rode his bike past the building, took another photo. The building is empty here than it was a year ago, which is like my personal, like, if you remember a year ago, there was like a laptop on a table.

And to be clear, this isn't like social distancing empty. This is like there's literally nothing. It's bare concrete. Okay. Even though, like, there's a person here taking measurements that has been cleared out. We looked up building permits. Most of the places don't have any building permits. The factory, however, is supposed to open in May.

They apparently had an open house, which I saw some photos online, very much like a low-grade CES. They just invited people to, like, look at 8K TVs mounted on a wall instead of a booth. This is a real thing they did at the factory. They, like, set up a little CES and people came and looked at stuff. Have not yet said what they will be building when they opened in May. Don't know. This factory is supposed to open.

And we asked, like, various officials in Wisconsin. Like, do you know what they're open? And they're like, we do not know. It's Foxxon has not yet told us. So the Foxxon-Wisconsin story continues into its next round of mystery. What if it the whole time was just a dream factory and what they're building are dreams? That's clearly what they're building at this point. It seems very obvious.

The dreams of tax subsidies is what they're building. They have claimed, Foxxon claimed that they've hired enough people to qualify for their subsidy payments this year, but they hired them all in a rush in December. like over 70% of the people were hired in a rush in December just to meet the target. So the state is like, are they doing anything? Are these? Because last year they claimed the same thing and the state actually found it was less. So another turn to the Foxxon story. I'm very excited to see what they, what are they going to make in May?

It's like, that's all I want to know. All right. Can I drop a positive note? The Moto G. Stylus and G. Power, Verge reviewed those, a camera faulker. And they sound amazing. for $300, $250. If Apple's $400 phone

is too rich for you, you want Android or One Plus is not what you're looking at. It sounds like they've got way better cameras. You know, they're budget phones. They're not waterproofs, you know, a lot of drawbacks. But I feel like if I was in the market for a phone right now, I think this is what I'd go for.

It just seems like such a good deal. Yeah. I mean, we, I haven't given them a ton of thought. I really do want to look at it more. It's funny. Like the camera quality is like the thing, right? If they can, if they can just get up to like a B, then all of a sudden it's like,

it's a really big deal. It seems like they're getting there. Yeah. All right. That's it. It's a Vergecast. I want to tell you about Casey's Interface Live. Again, Tuesday, April 21st, 530, 630 Pacific, 8, 930,

Eastern. Go sign up for that. There's only 500 slots in the webinar. It should be really good. Sarah Fryer, that book, the Instagram book, No Filter. very good. So interface slide with Casey and Sarah Frye who wrote no filter.

April 21st, go sign up for that. Subscribe to Dieter's newsletter processor. And then we have a new, speaking of good news on that note, T.C. Sotic, our executive editor, has a new newsletter called Home Screen, which is just full of fun stuff because we know people want some fun stuff. Full of fun stuff that's happening on the internet, go subscribe to that. All right. That's it.

That's our chest. Rock and roll. Paul. Promote code.