The Vergecast - Echo Look, RED announces a phone, and new iPhone rumors

Episode Date: July 7, 2017

The week of Independence Day, Nilay, Paul, and Dieter get together in a classic format of The Vergecast to bring you the top tech news that hit the site this week. To name a few, we’ve got a review of the Echo Look, a new Android phone announced, and some breaking news in the middle of the show. There’s a lot more in between that, so listen to it all and you’ll get it all. 04:48 - Amazon’s Echo Look does more for Amazon than it does for your style 25:17 - RED is making a $1,200 smartphone with a “holographic display” 32:07 - New report claims iPhone 8 won’t feature fingerprint sensor in display 41:08 - Ashley’s segment “Spotted” 42:16 - Qualcomm is trying to ban iPhones from being sold in the US 51:24 - Paul’s weekly segment “TOOTHPASTE PODS” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Theverge.com. I'm going to tell you a couple things, just to start. One, it's just the three of us again. So I'm here. I'm Neil I Patel. Dieter's in San Francisco. I am. Luckily in San Francisco, I've had a week and a half of just the worst travel.

And Paul is here in New York. Hey. The other thing I'm going to tell you is that Paul has next to a box, an empty box. They're building out more of the studio here. and we have discovered something called the d-l-85K IR receiver kit so there's just I can't get rid of these IR blasters. Is it dinky link? It's called the dinky link. T-M.

Dinky-link. I think they should call like the IR Blaster? The IR like trade consortium. They're building it. The IR trade consortium. They're so sad. They're like we got to keep it going. Shouldn't we save this for Paul's weekly feature that has the same name every week that we never first?

Oh, no, no, I got that cover. He's got a cover. Okay. The third thing, I will tell the audience, is that this was the week that we celebrated our nation's birth, the 4th of July. And as such. 240 years? Yeah. Still going strong.

Doing great. Doing just fine. We're going to make it through. Not to be that guy, but it's 241. See? I don't know. I thought somebody said 240. And also not to be that guy, but it's, do you set the nation's?

birth at the Declaration of Independence or at the signing of the Constitution? That's a big spread. I think of it as the, I think of the Declaration of Independence as our primary founding document because it lays out the principles upon which we were founded. And then we tried a couple things. Yeah, we iterated. We pivoted. We're like, it's early days.

And they spit out the Constitution. They had up to 12 messaging apps. The Declaration of Independence. was our minimum viable product. Thirdly, my third not to be that guy, and then we can move on, is, can I just say that using the phrase birth and nation in a sentence together is a very fraught thing. Because if you screw that up, you end up saying the very wrong thing. Yeah, it's true. But I didn't.

So that's great. But because of that fact, there's no news this week. So if you are listening to the Vergecast to be a roundup of tech news, we're going to get through it all in the next. next 10 seconds and then just chit-chat for a while. It's going to be great. Yeah. I got feelings about, I don't know, stuff. Feelings about stuff. The Vergecast on this, the first week of July. No, there's stuff. There's a little bit of stuff. First and most importantly, there's no Overwatch hero. Yeah. Doomfist. How do you guys feel about Doomfist? It's a great name. Here's my question. Really good name. Doomfist is out right now playable on the public test realms, right? Yeah.

But it won't be available like on consoles and in like the regular ranked matches. You know, you can test Doomfist, but it's not like a real true playable character. So which day should we take off as a company? Should it be the public test room day or the wide release day? So in this metaphor, the wide release day is the Constitution. No, no, no, no, no. It's not a metaphor. I'm just thinking, you know, we're a progressive 21st century media company.

Yeah. And I really want to play doom-pits right now. And I love you guys. I love coming to work and doing my job. But boy, I could be punching people right now. On Fridays in New York, we typically, we ditch the office and go work in a bar. You can do that tomorrow. We have to bring the 21-inch acer predator laptop to the bar.

Okay. By the way, can I point out the dinky link is labeled for use with all types of cable and sideliboxys works with LED, LCD, and plasm TVs, and then also CFL lighting, which I don't understand at all. Anyway, that's a fact. Why would it only one kind of... What? It would interfere with IRR.

All right. I don't know. This is a real weird hang. I was going to talk about Zelda for the next 45 minutes. No, there's news. There's actually news. All right. Zelda's, if you haven't read Nick Stats article about this.

the trials of the sword. I highly recommend it. He nailed the feeling of it. It's a great piece. Zelda DLC, that's news. All right. Yeah. Everything is news.

No, there's actually news. There's a bunch of voice assistant news, which we're going to string together into a bundle of news. We're going to craft a narrative. Yeah. Lauren Good reviewed the Amazon Echo look, which is the weird camera. She was here. She had it here in the office when she was here last week.

It is a startlingly weird device. I think her read on is a, I mean, her headline actually was, it does more for Amazon than it does for you. You should read her review, watch the video, it's all great. But here's what I want to say about that thing. It is stunningly strange to me that they would put out something that is so weird and creepy without promising you what actual value it would deliver. Right? So we encounter tons of these products all the time. where literally Google will be like,

it's early days, but just try it out. And like, as people use it, we'll figure out what it should do. I don't think you can do that with a camera that's supposed to go in your bedroom. And watch you dress.

That part to me seems really weird. I will make one small counterpoint to that argument. Yeah. Which is, she's right that it tells Amazon more than it gives Amazon more value than you get. I think that the like comparison of outfits feature, her take on that also seems very accurate. It seems very random and not very helpful.

But there are people who get genuine real value out of logging their outfit every day. And they can look back and see what they wore. They can have just a log, just a series of photos put in an organized single place where they can have a nice picture of what they wore that day and what they want to wear the next day. there is a genuine value there. Whether taking, you know, a picture with your iPhone in a mirror and then putting that in an album doesn't already solve that problem for you is a whole other question. Why is this $200? Yeah.

Deeter and I were talking to this. Because that's a great use case, but $200. With your echo show review. So much of the value of the echo line is that it asks nothing of you. It sits there and then you talk to it and does something for you. I think it's different when you put a $200 camera in your bedroom. Like, it's just, that thing is asking something of you. It is asking you to trust Amazon every second of the day.

And I just, like, if you're not going to, I get what you're saying you're doing about the pictures, but you have to deliver, like, a stunning amount of constant user value. I feel like half of the people I know have stickers over their laptop cameras. It's a thing. Mark Zuckerberg has a sticker over his laptop camera. Right. Why don't we put stickers over our phone cameras? We should sell a Verge sticker to put up here. That's not a bad idea.

I'm thinking about getting an echo show for my bathroom. Really? Because I want a better set of speakers so I can actually hear the news while I'm taking a shower. And having an echo in the bathroom is genuinely useful because you can like ask it what, you know, is on your calendar and blah, blah, blah, blah. And the idea of having the better speakers and a screen that will just like cycle through what's on my calendar for the day seems really useful. The idea that I wouldn't, yeah, the echo show. I definitely would put some tape over the camera if it were in my bathroom. Yeah.

So the Echo Show has great speakers. Like, I listened to it a lot over the weekend. And to me, that HomePod, unless it is like transcendent every time you turn it on, just selling it on audio quality alone is not a great. Boy, it's got music facts. It's got music facts. I mean, like, I just read this long Reddit thread about how it's, doing DSP processing and what it's doing in the four-inch woofer and the only speakers

can match or these like $80,000 BOS on 90s. And I mean, I love that stuff. And I will read it all day and believe it whether or not I truly, deeply understand what it means. But the simple fact of the matter is most people can't tell. You just can't tell. Is it loud? Most people think louder things sound better.

Most people think brighter TVs look better. And so the echo show gets real loud. and it has a screen. And that screen is kind of useful. I watched a bunch of YouTube videos on that screen over the weekend. Yeah. It's also kind of not useful.

It really wants to display ads. They don't go full ad on the Echo Show, but they go like half ad. What's an ad example? Hey, this movie's out. Yeah. Just stuff like that. There are headlines.

But they're all headlines about products. They're quote-unquote headlines. They're headlines about money you might spend. That's how I feel about modern media. Yeah. The stupid fake. news. Sorry.

There are fake news headlines about movies that don't exist. I don't know what that's what I'm saying. Go see Avengers 7. Out today. Just stay, Alexa, buy tickets. So there's a new voice assistant thingy in China, the T-Mall Jeannie from Alibaba. So Google's blocked in China. Yeah.

Google assistant. Well, they're not blocked so much as they, I mean, they're blocked. but they also pulled out. Right. They got out of China. Both things. And it's been a long running, every time anybody asks Google,

like there's a general Q&A session with Google, the first question is always, so you're going to make it back into China or what? And there were rumors that maybe the store would get in there, and maybe it did in like a limited way, the play store, but it's still, I don't know, it's still a mess. Yeah.

That's why they're focused on India so hard. I feel like good for them, though. Yeah, they're making a stand. Yeah. I mean, I just don't think you can put any Rando assistant in a speaker and call it a product. And I think that there's so much of that going on. And then I look at what Amazon is doing. And the show is a better idea about what the next phase of these things should be.

And then I, you know, like, what's the, there's one with Cortana now. It's like a Harmon Cardin one. Yeah. I don't think that thing, you can't match that up. It's the same problem is the iPhone and the app store. You can't just make another phone with another operating system and be like, this is just as good as the operating system everybody else uses. And I think that first mover advantage for Amazon is just going to be incredible. But what I don't understand is how they can make the show, which is great, and then make the look, which is totally confused.

Like, it doesn't do much for you. It doesn't even look modern. Yeah. It looks like early 2000s webcams. Yeah. It's just a big old lozange. Yeah, it's a very, I don't know. But it's better that Amazon is putting out like 50 form factors.

Lawrence saw a teardown of the look, and it has extra cameras in it that they don't tell you about. Like, they know it's creepy, so they've got the one camera. But there's another camera behind the black thing that's the depth sensing camera. Oh, my God. Wow. And I think it also has like an infrared sensor, which is, you know, which also sends out information. I would like the echo look if it was like If it was an extension of like their mechanical Turk program

It's like 400 strangers judge you No no no no no no no sounds like high school In opposite directions like Amazon like was just up front about it It's like look we need to learn about clothes We're really into them we want to know more For free we will give you this thing If you take seven photos of outfits every week you know, you get to keep it and eventually we'll give you some advice back.

Maybe sometimes we'll show you other, I don't know, just like, just like embrace the crowd sourcing of big data thing. This is exciting to me. Here's what I want out of a me. It's very futuristic. Don't hide it from me. You know how when you, maybe you don't have this, but I've got, there's a little mirror by our front door and you leave the house and you're like, oh, look in the mirror real quick and see if you look like. a dufus, if your hair looks funny or whatever. But I forget to do it because sometimes when I'm rushing out the door,

and then I'll get on the train and, oh, look, my fly is down. That's awkward. And then you're standing on the train and it's really crowded and you've got to, like, zip your fly up without anybody noticing that you're zipping your fly up. It's awful. I want an echo look that sits by the front door that sees me coming and then, like, snaps a quick picture and then immediately does a bunch of information processing. And then shoots me a text message that says,

your hair looks really dumb right now. What are you doing? Get back in the apartment and fix it. There's brownie on your forehead. Paul? Yeah. How'd you get brownie there, man. Well, that's stage two of the AIs to figure out positive effect.

I provided an alibi for your situation. Amazon's vast cloud resources have examined you. Oh, Amazon alibi? one of three plausible backstories for your current condition. I would take that. I just think it's creepy man. Speaking, by the way, of assistance, Washington says Samsung making a smart speaker with Bixby,

which was all but inevitable, but Bixby delayed in the United States because they don't have enough data, which seems very, I don't know, all these other assistants weren't delayed because of a lack of data. I kind of don't understand what is, truly going on with Bixby. And I... I think Samsung doesn't either.

Well, their whole line with it on the phone is it's not meant to replace Google Assistant. It's meant to do all these other things on a phone. But if you make a speaker with it, now you're head-to-head with the assistant. Yeah, there's no... You don't... Unless they really believe that there's, like, a deep, smart things market for it, and that the Bixby speaker will be better at smart things than anybody else. Also, Samsung...

music services MIA so when they launch their smart assistant it's gonna I imagine it'll talk to Spotify but they've

partnered with Google music for Bixby and so it'll be a Google music speaker I'm not really clear I don't understand why I would want a Bixby speaker

as opposed to an Alexa speaker or a Google Home or a series speaker or whatever else I'm also not looking forward to the platform wars

in smart speakers. Like that's just, Platform Wars with phones was super fun with laptops and, you know, PCs, PC versus Mac, iOS versus Android versus Blackberry versus WebOS versus Migo or whatever.

Like, that was fun. That was a blast. There was, you know, there was some competition to get apps. If you, I don't know,

you, you could like, you buy a new one every two or three years and then you could like comparison shop to different platforms. you could comparison chop different form factors and blah, blah, blah, blah. But with home speakers, it's just the idea that there's going to be a platform battle between Siri and Cortana and Alexa and Google and Bixby just sounds exhausting. What's the...

Am I just old? What's the angry... Because the thing I remember from that saga with all these different mobile platforms is like, look how much we paid to get angry birds on our app store. Like that funded Instagram for like a hot minute, right? No, Instagram was never on Windows phone. That was a thing. It never made it to Windows.

That's so sad. I think Microsoft couldn't pay enough. Yes, it did. It did eventually. But it came when it was too late. So what's the angry birds of smart home assistants? Is it Spotify? I mean, if Sonos is smart, it's Sonos.

Instagram on Windows phone is still on beta. Edit it out, guys. I'm sorry, that's the saddest thing in the world. And it only has a 3.6 rating. Anyway, that's really sad. There's also, sorry, I just watched Get Out finally. And the Microsoft product placement in that movie is hilarious. Like, I don't know, watching this movie,

suspend your disbelief whenever you watch any movie. And I'm like, okay, I'm in it. I'm in this narrative world. I fully believe the creepy things that are happening here, except you have a Windows phone. I know you don't. It really does. You super don't have a Windows phone.

It's the least realistic thing happening right now. No, I get what you're saying about smart speaker platform. There was a big winner in phones. Like an overwhelmingly, at least in terms of developer support, right? Like iOS ran away with it. And then there was like a huge platform in Android. And it seems like Alexa is going to run away with it. and Google's going to make the cheaper one that more people buy.

Like, it feels like the same thing to me. Well, I feel like Google is trying to change the terms of the debate by trying to make, you know, stuff feel like the web where you could just ask it for anything and it'll go out onto the internet and figure it out. Alexa's actually moving in that direction a little bit. It's now pretty smart where if you ask it to do something and it can't, if it knows about a skill that actually could do that thing,

it'll recommend that skill to you. But the idea that these things are going to fight using, the field of battle for a home assistant, for a speaker, is very, very different than it was on phones. On phones, it was who has the coolest hardware, who has the fastest processor, who has the biggest app store, who has the best camera. But on home speakers, is it just raw number of skills? Is it sound quality? all of the things that are people are going to use to try and pick between these are really fuzzy and they're all other than sound quality well with sound quality it's actually worse because like it'll sound different in the store and in your house and it's very subjective to describe it blah blah blah

blah if it's number of things the assistant can do everyone's just going to throw big numbers at you and you're going to not have any way to compare them i have no idea as a consumer walking into a store what you're going to do to look at these five speakers or 10 speakers, whatever you can pick from, and make a coherent decision. You're going to pick the one with a screen that's $100 cheaper than the home pod. Yeah, well, there you go. I mean, right? The show is 229 and it has a screen, and it's pretty loud.

And like, unless you are so deep into Apple World, and it's not even that integrated into Apple World, like a thing you can't do with it is to play a movie on your Apple TV. Probably the next Apple TV will let it do that. But it's like, I don't know, man, Airplay 2. It's going to change your life. We know so much about how it's going to work. What is it?

Someone tell me. Do you know what Airplay 2 is? Please send me an email because no one seems to know. Call 1-800 nelai.com. That'd be great. That's a great phone number. But I made up. It's not real.

Anyway, Bigsby, go ahead and release a speaker, but no, don't. Don't. He tried. You really gave it a shot. shot there. Samsung fundamentally, they want to take on Google and Siri. They want to do it,

but they know they can't because they know it's not there. So they've got this other angle. Their story for explaining consumers is really bad. It's not out in a real way. It's delayed. And now it's coming to a speaker. Cool.

That sounds like exactly. I want the beautiful Samsung experience that I get on early versions, early iterations of Samsung software talking to me in my house. That's what I want. I want touchwiz from the Galaxy S3, the audio equivalent of that.

That's what the Bixby speaker is going to be. It's going to be the auditory equivalent of touchwiz on the Samsung Galaxy S3. It's going to make a little water droplet noise every time you walk in the room. That's going to be great. If you're like, hey, Bigspeed, it's like, bloop.

That is a version of the future. I do think Amazon's on to something. Eventually, the way we will, will think of these smart home assistants, they'll be impossible to separate them from the cameras. Either the camera will be built into them or they will be connected to cameras throughout your home. But they're going to know what's going to, they're going to know Dieter's flies down and then I've got brownie on my forehead. And they'll like, they'll like ask you if your kid is sick or like, where'd your dog go? Or like, don't forget to do the dishes before somebody's

coming over that's in your calendar. You know, I really see. If these actually are not just a gimmick to set timers and play music, then they're going to have to continue to get a lot smarter about what's going on in your whole home. And I think that's definitely going to involve vision. Oh, there's no good soundboard for them. You switch for touch-wiz soundboard? I found one.

There's, I don't know. Yeah, we hit this survey that a morning or a poll that Morton console did. There are priorities for voice-controlled smart speakers. This is from consumers. Price. Then speaker slash audio quality. Then accuracy of devices voice recognition. Then compatibility with devices you may already own, such as your smartphone.

Then access to a variety of music streaming services. And then ability for a device to integrate with other services or platforms, such as controlling smart light bulbs. So skills is pretty far down the list. Yeah. I mean, I think the killer app for this thing is still just saying play music. To that extent, like the home pod will be fine because you'll say play music. If you have signed up for Apple music, it will play some music at you. It will probably sound amazing.

But if you are most, I mean, if you are most people, you think your white headphones sound great, right? You think you're in pack-in iPhone earbuds sound just fine. Or you're not bothering. Well, you might not think that, but also you just don't care. Yeah, you don't care enough to, like, I feel like if someone came up to you and asked you, like, well, I'm sure they're not that good, but that's good enough for me or I don't care. Right. So why don't you buy the cheaper one that sounds fine? Yeah.

IDK. All right, I'm going to read the Squarespace ad. By the way, to the listener, I told you the show would be like this. I want you to know that. I did not make you promise that we have. It's a chill. Our nation was born this week. We're all taking it.

Coming up next? How many years ago? But first, this ad. Look, this episode was brought to you by the very generous people at Squarespace. Whatever your next big idea might be account on Squarespace to help you create an eye-catching online platform that brings it to life. Whether you need a portfolio to showcase your work, a store to sell your products and services, a blog to share your ideas. Squarespace gives you everything you need to look at an expert right from the start. You can get a unique domain which strengthens your brand and makes it easier for visitors to find you.

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I made my own. Everything's very inexpensive. I made a website in Squarespace the other day. Yeah? Was it wise or brownie in my forehead.com? Just a blank meal? They had like a bad WordPress thing going on, and they're like, can you fix our WordPress? I was like, I don't mess with WordPress.

I don't touch that stuff. Do you use the offer code? Is it a lot? Are we allowed to use the offer code? I don't know. I didn't pay for it. I built it and then like handed it off to them. Oh, but they could use the offer code.

I told them to use the offer. The offer code, by the way, is Verge, V-E-R-G. You get 10% off your first purchase. So go to Squarespace.com, check that out. It's great. Paul, I want you to talk. Was it the Red Phone? Do you want to do your segment early or is it a different thing?

I got another thing. Yeah, another thing. All right, let's talk about this Red Phone. I know you're hype about this Red phone. Yeah. I love. Explain why you're hype about this Red phone. Okay.

Red is a company came on the scene like, I don't know, 2006 or something. They were like, hey, we. we set up a forum on the internet and we will post on the forum to tell you about fantastical cameras that we plan to build but but you know obviously this is going to completely fail and we'll never actually ship anything they eventually shipped cameras and then like they shipped like the well their 8k weapon camera yeah was like what they shot guardians of the galaxy on so to me it's like a real like success story of this like tech upstart against all odds, you know, there's the cannons and the Nikons, but they weren't delivering what people really wanted. I mean, we used to troll for news in the red forums where, like, the founders would post pictures of new cameras. Yeah.

And that's the other thing. Yeah, they have like, they have the right sense of hype and buzz, which is just tantalized with just a little bit of information, keep people guessing, keep people waiting, because you end up waiting a long time for them to actually ship anything. And once they do, they don't ever make enough. Yeah. And, but it, you know, people who have them, you know, are making cool things out of them. And they're, like, beautiful and kind of this really aggressive black and red kind of way.

So they announced a phone, the hydrogen one, which has a 5.7 inch holographic display. That means something. With nanotechnology. It uses nanotechnology. It's got to mean something. So here's my theory. Just before this, Red is not a company that bullshit's about specs. Right?

They're like... The specs are the only thing that's real. Yeah, that's all they do. So whatever these words mean, they presumably mean something. I had this PDF up. So they basically put out one photo of the phone, which is of kind of the back. You can see a headphone jack, USBC plug. They've got this some interesting, like proprietary-ish accession.

reconnecter that's going to be like high bandwidth. The phone will work. And like heat dissipation fins, it looks like. I mean, they put heat sinks on it because they just love heat sinks. Like, it doesn't matter if something's hot or not. They definitely put heat sinks on everything and they did it in this case. But let's see, where

I have this. Well, holographic nanoparticles are pretty toasty. That's true. That's true. Okay, so here's the thing. I don't know if that's true. They've created their own file format called dot H4V. they call it red hydrogen four view content like the number four view content and here's my theory of what it is right yeah Sean kind of said this in his write-up um so I'm basically stealing it from Sean but if I'm wrong I want to take full blame yeah think of the 3DS right so like 3DS basically works by having pixels at different angles and so when you look at it without you don't need glasses but you can see 3D stuff

Right. So basically halves the resolution of the device to show you 3D images. And then remember the fire phone, right? It had all those cameras on the face of the phone. Yeah. And when you look around, you could kind of like peek around 3D objects. So imagine those combined. Imagine a screen that's 3D, but it's also like tracking your movements.

So it's just real immersive content. Why would you want this in a phone from red with heat sinks? Does it run Android? Yeah, it's an Android phone. Okay. Of course. I mean, it has to. Actually, you know what?

No, yeah, yeah, yeah. It says it. It's a standalone full feature unlocked multi-band smartphone operating on Android OS. Okay. That just happens to add a few additional features that shatter the mold of conventional food. I love this phone. It converts stereo to, quote, multi-dimensional audio, and it will, quote, assault your senses.

I don't. It has a headphone jack. It has a headphone jack. It does have a headphone jack. There's so much bullshit in this. And the phone is 1,195 for the aluminum version, 1595 for the titanium version. We've seen one photo of the back of the phone. We don't really know what all this stuff is.

But you know what you can do right now? What's that? Pre-order this phone. This is a phone literally designed just for Marquez Browns. I know. I know. It's targeted. to him, exactly him.

They're going to make two of them. She bought three. Of course. I love that kid. I'm just saying they're like... They know their audience. They had a bunch of leftover battery packs. And I'm like, what do we just put a screen on him and call him a phone?

And it has a modular connector on the back, which I really wish that I love standard ports, but we really need a standard port for crap you attach to phones. Because it's ridiculous now. The Essential has got hits. there's the MotoZ thing there's this thankfully Project Ara got AX so it's not a fourth standard

there's just too many different ways to microsoft too many connectors Microsoft has those connectors Apple has connectors right on the iPad oh the smart connector yeah yeah but that's not quite the same those are a little different yeah because those are specifically for keyboards

like there's nothing else you can plug into a smart connector on an iPad they're not like a high bandwidth thing yeah I guess I don't know I don't know. You guess you could standardize the connector. I mean, all I want to know is what was the meeting like where they're like, yes, go forth. Like someone pitched this. This didn't come out of like a giant consensus brainstorm.

Someone was standing around and they're like, we should make a fucking phone. I do not know how Red the company operates internally. Yeah. But my external experience is, I imagine, too. Possibly three dudes saying, I wish we had this. It's like, well, can't we build it? And then they'll like tell them, but people say it's impossible. And then they tell themselves, but you know what?

We've done the impossible before. We can do the impossible again. So it's basically the beginning of an action movie shot on red cameras. It's kind of like a self. They were just watching down all the footage that was coming through the servers. They're like, we should, what would, if we had a montage sequence, What would it be about? It would be about building the world's best phone.

All right. There's other phone news. This one is weird rumor territory, and I think it comes down to what Apple is actually planning to do with the iPhone. So there's just reports out in the world that the iPhone 8 will not have a touch ID sensor. I don't believe it. I think it might just be on the back, because there's been a lot of case leaks. Right. thus far with the space for that sensor on the back.

On the back makes way more sense to me. If there's no touch ID sensor, I have just a cajillion questions about how you will do all the stuff that you do with touch ID. Because when you have something like face unlock, it just unlocks without you asking it to do anything. It's also wildly insecure. And touch ID is an action. Like when you log into your bank app or you pay,

with Apple Pay or you unlock your phone, you actually have to actively choose, I am doing this thing now. Even when you're downloading like a free app. Yeah. But it's like an authenticated button. Yeah. Right.

Go ahead. But is this, right. But you don't want your phone to just be authenticated all the time. No. You want to have some of those authentication actions happening. I like the idea. And if there's a face unlock. Yeah, yeah.

I like the idea you had the other day of like a password protecting like certain apps or something, like touch ideifying for like to make a multi-user. Well, so here's where I think this is getting confused. This is my theory. I could be wrong. All of the rumors were they're going to do virtual home button. And they had figured out how to do screen through fingerprint scanning. And there's a bunch of like component makers out like showing the stuff off.

But it seems like slow as hell. The delta between the component makers being ready. and Apple needing to shit this phone is too high. Okay. So they probably weren't able to put the fingerprint sensor on the front through the screen, which I'm assuming what they wanted to do, and they just stuck it on the back. And so... They pulled a Samsung.

Yeah, so somewhere... That is exactly whatever... Samsung did with the Galaxy S8. Yeah, so somewhere in that murky chain of rumors and leaks and whatever, them taking it off the front and putting on the back got turned into it won't have a fingerprint sensor. That sounds completely plausible and probably correct. Right. One of the screen through component vendors was like Apple didn't place the order.

And that got turned into, but really they just moved it to the back. Because I cannot imagine them taking touch ID away. Like Apple Pay is built on touch ID. And the idea of you like holding your phone to the reader and then like craning over to look at it makes zero sense. And that click noise slash vibration when you buy stuff with touch ID. It's so satisfied. I got to get a new phone. I held on the 6S and Empire the 7.

It has just fallen apart. It has like the weird pirate battery in it. It gets real hot all the time. It won't charge above 88%, which I believe is just a sign that I should watch back to the future because I don't want to think about the fact that I have broken battery in my phone. I got to get you. Okay. Let's assume for the sake of argument that they put the fingerprint sensor on the back of the phone. Let's also assume, because I think it's pretty safe, that for the sake of argument that the high-end iPhone, the 10th anniversary iPhone, has a near-bezzalist display on the front. Let's also assume for the sake of argument that they will iterate upon their dual camera system, but it will still, you know, it's not going to be a

massive crazy improvement. What is going to be hardware-wise on the 10th anniversary iPhone, the super fancy one that John Gruber is assuming he's going to cost $1,500, that wasn't already done,

potentially, albeit not as elegant a way, on the Galaxy S8. Yeah. Depth sensing camera for AR kit. Yeah. Right? I think that's it. Isn't that the answer? I think... Why is the A.R. Kist stuff?

I feel like they can't put a, like, a, a, a, a feature like that on a, a hyper premium. I haven't heard all these rumors about a $1,500 phone, but they can't make a hyper premium phone that needs developer support to be really good. Okay, so the going to be, that there's going to be a 7S and a 7S plus, and there'll be iterations on the current, you know, form factor, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But then there'll be a premier super fancy high-end iPhone that will have, have a bezelist display and whatever the new way to authenticate is and presumably depth sensing cameras.

And it's going to cost a ridiculous amount of money and it's not going to come out until next year. And the big question I have is, what can Apple do to this phone to justify a $1,000 plus price that isn't just slight iterations on the stuff before? If they had had an underscreen touch ID, that would be something. amazing. If they, I don't know, there's a million other things I suppose you could do to a phone to make it that. Holy crap.

Wow. Blow your mind. They could make it out of moon rocks or something. Sure. But I feel like it's going to, the whole value proposition of this high-end iPhone is going to ride on the quality of the cameras. Unless they've got some insane thing up their sleeve that I would not think. Or the screen, right?

The new, an OLED screen with Pro Motion. Like there's all kinds of. Yeah, like, I feel like the bezel list makes it, like, interesting and premium. I just, man, that's true. That's going to suck. Stunning analysis from Polkowitz. Like, I always assumed, like, the iPhone 7, which was so, so similar to the iPhone 6S, which was so similar to the iPhone 6. It's like, it's like they've been saving it up to go real different.

A lot of what they... If the iPhone 7s isn't different, and. you got to wait till next year to get an anniversary edition to get something different. Yeah. That's a lot of years of nothing different. The enormous narrative around the seven was we held back because we're going to do something crazy next year. Right, right. And that was seated out. That was not just a bunch of like guessing. That was very obviously put out into the world.

It's definitely hard to do this new different fancy stuff. but at some point we're ready for it. And Samsung's doing some pretty fancy stuff. Well, the question is why I can't, if Samsung can figure it out on their timeline, how is Apple not able to figure it out? I don't know. We'll see. That's what I'm saying.

I think the amount of bad information flooding into the world right now is... Yeah, there was like rumors today about like the iPhone 8. Like, it's like at some point, like we can't take seriously rumors about phones that aren't. out for three years. Yeah. Or you can't take seriously rumors about hardware decisions on a phone that will presumably ship in September or be announced in September. Because they've already started building them because they have to, because they have to make

it like a day in a day. Yeah. Okay. Here's what's going to happen. So as you know, we've been doing a bunch of experiments on Anchor because we need to get more podcasts into our Mata podcasts. So we've been doing tons of segments. You should listen to them there.

Go to Anchor. It's great. but Ashley Carmen did one that's really cool. She called it Spotted. So I'm going to read an ad. We're going to run Ashley's segment. We're going to come back. Wrap this thing up.

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at transferwise.com. There's also an app for Android and iOS. But once again, that's transferwise.com. Transfer, as in, I need to transfer money to another country. Wise is in, I'm going to do it the wise ways. That's transferwise.com. A woman in a blue sleeveless blouse wearing matching blue eye shadow sits next to me on the train.

She has Candy Crush loaded up on her phone. She begins to play. After five minutes or so, her eyes start to close. She nods off. Her phone doesn't have automatic locking, so Candy Crush stays loaded, waiting for someone to find a match. She begins leaning to her left away from me. Eventually, that falling motion wakes her up, and she immediately looks down to see her phone, still in her hand, still running Candy Crush. As if nothing had happened, she makes a few more candy matches.

But then, yet again, she closes her eyes and falls back asleep. This pattern continues for the entirety of the ride, which was at least six stops. I feel like I got a glimpse into her nighttime routine while in a very public place. Also, why no automatic lock girl? Your battery is going to die. We're back and there's breaking news. Qualcomm, everyone's favorite company. Qualcomm. Has sued the International Trade Commission to block importation of the iPhone because they say it was it six deeter, six patents? Yeah, there's six patents that have to do with extending the iPhone's battery life.

and importantly, and this is the key thing with Qualcomm, Qualcomm says that these are not, like, they're not related to a standard. They're like specific Qualcomm technologies that Apple isn't paying for. Well, that makes sense. So, man, I gotta, I gotta do the big Qualcomm piece.

It's been a long time since we've had a good knockdown ITC fight. Because there was a long time ago, HTC actually lost one of these and, like, temporarily had its imports band. And then it got it figured out. So the international, This is just deja vu for me.

So when you file a patent lawsuit, there's two ways to go. You can choose them both if you want to, but there are two ways to go. I can just sue you, federal court, just do it. You're violating my patents. You go through a lawsuit. You pay me. Or I can go to the International Trade Commission and say, hey, these patents are being infringed in this product that's being imported. I would like you to halt all imports of this product.

so people do them both because the ITC is way faster how does the ITC work like it's not fast like like are the ITC police running around like or it's just like have countries agreed to do this or have

shipping companies? No it's the US International Trade Commission so it's inside the United States it's a federal agency and it's got a bunch of administrative law judges in it and it can shut stuff down and it can halt imports It can do a bunch of other stuff too

But this is like a main function So Qualcomm is only filed for this They just file So what you do So like when Apple was suing all the Android makers It would file a lawsuit Right And then it would file the block imports

In the ITC Because what you Because that's death Right You can wait the lawsuit out for years And years and years and it'll take forever But if you can't import the phones Yeah

You're host So this is like patent holders Do this routine So If you got a lot of money I mean, I've never heard of Qualcomm, but apparently I use them every eight seconds. That's so creepy. Those ads are still up in the subway.

The complexity of the Apple Qualcomm dispute is so high that I have yet. I mean, I've talked to Qualcomm's general counsel. I've talked to Qualcomm people. I've talked to Apple about it. The complexity of what they are fighting about is so, it's just so beyond my ability to synthesize it into something that makes sense. because the core thing that I think is not intuitive to people is that Foxcon sells iPhones to Apple. That's a thing that happens.

Right, right. So Apple doesn't have any licenses from Qualcomm. Foxcon has licenses from Qualcomm. And then there is just an insane shell game of money that happens. So Apple pays Foxcon, Foxcom pays Qualcomm. Qualcomm pays Apple back. This is all true. What does Qualcomm pay Apple for again?

Like literally marketing agreements and like buybacks and like things. Like rebates? Yeah. So they have what was called a master agreement. So they're rebates. So like none of this comes down to Apple makes the phone and they need a license from Qualcomm. Right. That is what I think most people would think.

That is to some degree what Qualcomm thinks. but really what happens is Apple orders the phone Foxcon Foxcon makes phones for everybody so they have this license to Qualcomm and then Apple buys the phones from Foxcon at like a wholesale price but it's weird because Apple also buys all the tooling for Foxcon so like just the

amount of complexity in the transaction stack is so I can't I can't just come right out and be like here's the problem And Qualcomm's version of this is, well, there wouldn't be a problem you just paid us, which is a very simple answer. But, you know, Apple's version is they want to charge us a percentage of the price of every phone at retail, which I think intuitively in most people is also extremely unfair. Because if you buy a phone with 64 gigs of memory versus 128 gigs of memory, Qualcomm shouldn't make more of a patent. royalty on that phone.

So, I don't know. But they are at it. This is existential for both companies in a tremendously important way. And so they're saying they want the government to ban new iPhones. They're talking about phones, like the iPhone 7, iPhone SE, like newly manufactured phones from coming to the country. Cannot import any products that infringe the patent. They have to name the products.

They named the products. But yeah, this is just one more lever to pull for them to get to a settlement. But they are at it. I mean, there's news about this case every week. Because that's the end of this, right? The end of this is very clearly a settlement. It's not,

I mean, I, are they really going to go to court? Are we going to have another big, long court case like we did with Samsung? There's no way that they could do that. I mean, I guess they could.

I mean, there's totally way they could do that. But when you say that it's existential for both companies, I can't understate how true that is. Apple is not going to be able to, to replace Qualcomm tech or parts or patents in its phones. Qualcomm has too much power. Qualcomm, if it didn't get its stuff into the iPhone,

that's got to be some enormous percentage of their business. Right. So actually, Qualcomm's bigger business is not Snapchat. It's radio standard development and licensing. Right. So their patent licensing business is massive. And the reason they have that business is because they invested all the money in LTE. So, like, LTE, for the longest time, LTE was not operable without Qualcomm technology somewhere in your life.

And you can argue about how much you love or hate patents and patent licensing and all this stuff. But they invested the money and they want to see a return on it. And this is, that's the business model they built around it. So now they're racing ahead and they're doing 5G, just like everybody else is doing 5G and that's their business. And on and on and on and on. Apple's putting Intel modems in some of its phones. but you're right. You can't,

you just can't not pay the patent money to Qualcomm. There's just too much of the LTE standard is wrapped up in their technology. So someone has to pay some time. Maybe this isn't the right time for it, but I would love to have like a nice, solid roundtable debate about the benefits of patents. Because I used to be pretty into them.

I'm 100%. I listed like this really long, really great podcast episode about like how drug, drug patents work and stuff. And it's just, I'm just done with them. People can find a way to be profitable without protecting those profits with patents. I'm just,

I'm just done with them. But I want to hear all sides, but I'm, I'm done. You're over it. I'm just done. Love you Qualcomm. Thanks for being in my life all the time.

But this is just, it's just annoying. Like, I'm sure Apple and Qualcomm, I mean, they're just being aggressive businesses that are trying to, you know, make the most money. they can and they both think they're right and they you know but this is just an annoying thing

to have a fight over yeah I could talk about that for a long time but I don't think we should do that now stay tuned for 70 small three-minute installments on anchor about patents all I will say is they are a huge incentive to invent something first that is on balance a good incentive to provide to people who make things right are Are they being abused like crazy? Probably. But I think the incentive is important. Because otherwise, do you read about the woman who claimed she invented the fidget spinner?

It's like a whole thing. She didn't actually invent a fidget spinner. She invented another thing that spins. Which does not look like a fidget spinner at all. But there's all this coverage of her. And she's like, I didn't have enough money to pay for my patent renewal. So now I get nothing. But then you're like, if that thing isn't a fidget spin.

Right. I think that's the problem is when you dig into a lot of these patents. Yeah. They're a little broad. They're a little vague. There's been, since Apple and Android and all that went down, there has been a substantial amount of reform in the system. Yeah.

So, like, it's not quite as bad as, it's not great. It's just not as terrible it was when literally every day I was writing a patent case. But round table. That's what Vergecast listeners want. I'm ready for it. Name the day. I'll be there. I'll figure it out.

You've got a segment. Every week. Every week. Same name. Same time. Rarely forgotten. Toothpaste pods. We had tortilla pods.

We had bags with some juice in them and you'd squeeze them. But now we got toothpaste pods. There's this full mouth tooth brush called Amma Brush. I don't know how you say it. AMA brush. It's, it brushes all of your teeth. all at the same time. And it looks like a sports mouth guard

but with like silicone bristles on it. Put it in your mouth. Then you magnetically attach this handle to the front so it looks like you're wearing like a huge pacifier. And then it vibrates the mouth guard to brush your teeth in 10 seconds. They claim they can save you 100 days of your life. If you brush your teeth like this,

And then, but the key, in my opinion, is that they have a somewhat proprietary toothpaste pod that's refillable, or it's not refillable. You have to buy your toothpaste pods from them because the toothpaste needs to be slightly more liquid to be able to be injected into this mouthpiece automatically. And then you spit. How much does it cost? That's like 100 bucks. 120 bucks. There's an optional wireless charging pad. So the setup is, you know, you have a mouth guard, your wife has a mouth card,

and then you can use the one handle for both of them, right? Okay. And you just set them on the wireless charging pad and pick them up. So you just like hold it up to your mouth? You put it in your mouth. The mouth card. The mouth card is... What's the handle for?

You attach it to the front, right? Okay. The handle's the thing... Like, imagine biting an apple. That's where you put it. Like, you put the mouth guard. right where you'd bite an apple. And that attaches magnetically to the mouth guard, then injects toothpaste into the mouth

card, then it vibrates the mouth card for 10 seconds to brush all of your teeth simultaneously. Yeah. And then you're done. Then you spit. It's still not really following the... So you just bite the mat, you like... And you... It brushes all your teeth at once.

Okay. You know when you brush your teeth and you put like, spend 10 seconds on each tooth, This thing just spends 10 seconds on all of them. Have you ever had an apple? Yeah. All right? Imagine first you have a slice of an apple, right? Yeah, yeah.

Put that literally in your mouth and bite down on it, right? Like your mouth is full of a slice of apple. Now you take a small apple and put it to your lips, and that's magnetically attached to the apple. It's already in your face. This apple thing is not helping. Here's what I want you both to ask yourselves. has neelai successfully trolled us to explaining this thing three times because the answer is definitely yes now what other fruits is it like uh i've done the apple thing with oranges like you take an orange slice that's still it's still it's got the skin on

you know it's like that it's like that watermelon no too big watermelow's too big What do you have a big mouth? It's tiny watermelon big mouth. I just love this video because every time I'm trying to explain this, I'm visualizing this Kickstarter video. And the two models that like model this thing, it looks like they're in pain when they put it in their mouth. It's like, ah.

Hey, look, the future is not pretty. Exactly. That's what I tell everybody. You're going to brush all your teeth at once. You're going to look like you're in pain while you do it. Okay. I think that's the show. Look, there was not a lot of news this week.

We apologize. I hope you all enjoyed yourselves. We certainly do. did. We always do. But next week is a new week. Things are going to start happening again. One very important plug is that next week, Lauren Goods, new video series next level starts. It is awesome. So you're going to see it here. We're going to have it on the verge cast next week. It's going to be a whole thing. There's ads on the site. We're doing ads for our own thing. Oh. Be crazy. We're buying our own ads.

See? Told you. What? Media. It's all. What? What? What does that mean? But it's awesome. We've been working on it hard. She did an incredible job. So look for that next week.

It's called Next Level. It's going to be huge. Lauren also has a great podcast that you can listen to. Too embarrassed to ask. Karras Swisher has Recode decode. Peter Kafka has Recode Media. They're all wonderful. You can go listen to that stuff.

Go to Anchor, listen to all the experiments. Let us know which ones you like. Let us know if you have ideas for new things we should try. I'm promising you we will be really. at new podcast soon. There's also Verge extras. A bunch of stuff is going on Verge extras on that feed. So listen, watch, enjoy.

Also go out on Instagram, because Instagram's great. Instagram is the only good thing on the internet right now, my opinion. Oh, yeah, go to iTunes.com slash verge. Leave us a note, leave us a review. You can tweet it Paul. Paul's at Future Paul. You can tweet at Dieter. Deeter's at Backlon.

I'm at Reckless. That was it. That was our nation's first podcast. That's not what it was. Goodbye. Rock and roll. King George have made a terrible mistake.

Take us back.