The Vergecast - Galaxy Note 10 Plus review, Apple fall lineup rumors, and green bubble Giphys

Episode Date: August 23, 2019

This week on The Vergecast...Dieter's got a review for the Galaxy Note 10, Samsung has some blue bubble bashing GIFs, and there are a whole bunch of Apple device rumors.Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus review: should you spend for the stylus?Samsung made a sad Giphy page filled with comeback GIFs to send people who diss green bubblesApple’s Pro iPhones, new iPads, and 16-inch MacBook Pro detailed in Bloomberg reportApple’s noise-canceling AirPods and cheaper HomePod expected in 2020iOS 13 beta hints at an Apple iPhone 11 event on September 10th …New ceramic and titanium Apple Watch models spotted in watchOS 6 …Apple TV Plus will reportedly cost $9.99 per month and launch in …Apple reportedly ups TV spending by $5 billion to compete with Amazon and NetflixApple warns you may permanently discolor your Apple Card if it’s stored in leatherYou should opt out of the Apple Card's arbitration clause — here's how …Intel introduces eight new 10th Gen Comet Lake processorsDell’s latest XPS 13 and Inspiron laptops feature Intel’s Comet Lake 10th Gen CPUsBose tries to beat Sonos to the punch with a do-everything portable speakerSonos’ first portable Bluetooth speaker leaks in more detailApple’s noise-canceling AirPods and cheaper HomePod expected next yearThis label means your laptop has nine hours of real battery life ...Verizon just announced a partnership with Boingo to solve its biggest 5G problem Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I don't think that should be their timeline, but I thought I would try it out. Hi, I'm Neely. I'm your friend. Dieter is in New York with me again. Again, why? How? Well, we're going to find out why.

Paul remains in Washington State. Hello. How's it going? It's good. Like both a lot going on. and then medium. Going, yeah, August. August is going on.

Yeah, but you're in New York. I am. Because you reviewed a big phone. A huge phone. The Samsung Galaxy Note 10 plus. Plus what? Plus, just plus. Plus means big.

So a big phone both in stature. Yep. And, you know, import in the history. It's one of the flagships, the classic flagships of our time. It's always led the. way of the biggest and the most powerful and the most stylist phone. Yeah. And only one of those three things is unique to the note anymore.

So this was like, I was watching your view of the phone. Yeah. You, like, struggled with it because the, this has been sort of the muscle car of the flagship phone world for the longest time. Yeah. I mean, it's like the phone that, like, if any phone was going to have like a, like a serial port, you know, like it would be this one. But they actually took the headphone jacket.

The headphone check out. So it's kind of like not that anymore. A lot of funds have caught up to its specs. Yeah, so like the big one this year has been the one plus seven pro, and I know a lot of people are almost getting tired of hearing about it, but it is that good for, I think it's like $750.50. And its big thing is it has a pop-up selfie camera and a screen refresh rate of 90 hertz. But in addition to that, it also curves and it also just looks really, really good.

So the note doesn't beat that in terms of refresh rate, but it does beat it in, I think, overall screen quality. But there are other phones that have the same processor. Like the note doesn't differentiate itself on processor anymore. All of the late-year phones, like the note and the pixel are going to suffer from this for a while until Qualcomm changes its cadence. There are other big screen phones. There are other just nice, well-made phones, chief among them, if you want a big phone that's well-made and just nice to hold and use.

there is the Samsung Galaxy S10 plus, which is 5% not as nice as the note, 5% smaller, doesn't have a stylus, and costs anywhere from, you know, $2 to $350 less depending on the discount that you find. How is it 5% not as nice? There's just like really subtle things about the bezels. There's some aesthetic choices. Like do you prefer the curved corners or the notes sort of like hard 90 degree corners? and I personally prefer the iPhone copying camera placement just down the row in a pill that the note does rather than the block.

Yeah. It's mostly like subtle aesthetic things, but you can kind of feel it. I mean, I much prefer having the front camera cut out in the center than on the side. Yeah, and the front camera cut out, this is not a thing I made a big deal about in the review, either on YouTube or on Theverge.com.

It's smaller. It's like, I think they said it's 20. 25% smaller or something. So it did mean that they changed the F stop on it. Whatever. It's still, I think it's still fine. But because it's smaller, it's even less intrusive.

So on other phones with notches or cutouts, I'm more likely to, like, expand the video, see the cut out and go, and then bring it back down again. On this one, I'm much more likely to expand it full screen. And even though there's a little dot over on the left-hand side, I don't care. Yeah, the screen is larger. The screen is huge.

It's 6.8 inches. So ratio-wise, you have. win even if the dot wasn't. What's the aspect ratio of the screen? Squareish. Squareish. It's more square than your average rectangle. So at 6.8, it's actually bigger than a narrower phone would feel at 6.8.

Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huh. Yeah. And it's about the same size. The note 10 plus is the note. They should have called it the note 10 and called the little one the note mini, because the note 10 plus is about the same size as the note 9.

but the screen is like half an inch bigger because they got rid of the rest of the bezels. Sorry to the iPhone 10S and presumably the iPhone something something pro, whatever they're going to call it this year, but this screen looks more like the future than any notch cutout ever will. Yeah, because it goes more edge to edge

even than the iPhone does and the cutout for the camera is so small. When you're on a phone call, if you're like on, you know, you pull the phone away from your head, can actually see the tiny little dot underneath the screen glowing that's looking, you know, to do the proximity sensor to turn the screen on and off for phone calls. Really?

It's pretty cool. Yeah. So, like, all of these cutouts have, there's, like, certain things that can be fit underneath an OLED screen. And some of them put it under there, and some of them haven't. And Apple hasn't. And eventually, they could start packing more stuff underneath the screen if they wanted to. So, I mean, that was going to be my question.

The iPhone, the reason for the notch that we are consistently told is it's not just a camera, right? There's like the infrared beam thing. There's a bunch of stuff. There's the proximity sensor. There's the other camera, the flood illuminator. Yep. All the stuff that makes face ID go. I mean, it's just like physics, you know?

Like you'll never get anything behind an LCD because an LCD is like there's the panel there. But OLEDs are theoretically transparent if you want them to be because they're to handle the colors themselves. But there are prototypes of people getting like pretty low resolution. The cameras behind there. enough light gets in that they can build an image out of it. But something like a proximity sensor, you know, just like a little tiny little infrared beam or, you know, a little laser or something,

that's pretty easy to, like, shine through and get data out of if you're shining it through a screen. A proximity sensor that, like, illuminates, you know, your face or that needs to gather a ton of information is probably way harder. But if you're just trying to get, like, a one point of information, am I up to an ear or not? You could totally put that behind the screen.

And then obviously the fingerprint sensors behind the screen. Figure sensors behind the screen. It is about the same size as the S-10. They haven't changed it. They did position it higher on the phone, so it's a little bit easier to hit. It's still about the same speed, which is like half a tick slower than you want it to be. But still, for me, it's fine. So I didn't really make a big hash of it because it's there.

It works pretty well. I wish it was slightly better. I wish it was as big as on the One Plus 7 Pro. But one of the things I went through with reviewing this phone is there's a whole pile of things. It's really nice. It's really fast. The fingerprint sensor is here. Dex exists.

Like, there's a whole series of things to say about the phone that you would say about any other phone. But to my mind, none of them should affect your purchase decision. Like, you should not buy this phone for Dex, but you should not buy this phone because Dex is like, me. You should probably not buy this phone because it has a big-ass screen because you can get other phones that have big-ass screens that are $100,300, $300,000, $300 less. You know, I'll judge all the things. I'll say, yes, it's beautiful. This has great screen. It's fast.

Battery life is good. All that stuff. But it turns out that none of that stuff should actually drive your purchasing decision because it's all available in other phones in some way, shape, or form. The only thing that's not anymore is the stylus. Yeah. Yeah. That was a stylus.

It's good. It's fine. Yeah. It's a stylus. Someone said on that graph that's like 80% of Verdcast's Deidier saying it's fine. Yeah. Yeah. No, like, look, Samsung made OCR.

usable and actually functional on Samsung Notes. I wish that, you know, you could pick another Note app to be the screenoff thing. They've already got that deal with Microsoft. It seems likely that they wouldn't be that hard to have it connect up to OneNote, but whatever. But the fact that you can search your scribbles and that it's easy to, like, export text or convert it to text inside notes means that you just feel a little bit more confident using the ScreenOff memo because you know that you're going to be able to get to that note later. and everything else that the stylist does, the wand stuff,

and even the like the AR doodle stuff is, they're fun, they're gimmicks, and then you'll use them twice, you'll impress a nerdy friend and you'll be done. Can you give me a practical example of the, like, OCR, like start to finish, like really actually being an effective part of your notes workflow and not feeling like something that you have to shoehorn in?

Yeah, we're hanging out, we're talking, and you're like, oh, Dieter, you should totally read this book by Werner Vinge. And I'm like, oh, yeah, Okay, I'll take a note, and I'll write Paul, book, Verner, and then I'll put it away and we'll keep talking. And then a week from now, I'm like, Paul, something, something. And then I can just search for the word Paul. Search what? Search Samsung Notes, using the on-screen keywords.

Search for the word Paul. It will find Paul, and then I will see what the note was, and then I'll be able to go by the book. So you now need to be a user of Samsung Notes to retrieve these sorts of things. Yeah. So that's a bummer because Samsung Notes is, you know, it's a Samsung app. you didn't like, can you get it on your desktop? I doubt it. Like, there's all that stuff.

Dex, dude? Except for Dex. Yeah, there's that. So I was reading your review. Yeah. And we should talk about the stylus a little bit more, but I was reading your review. The description of you trying to use decks is like it was maddening and bad. The PC version wasn't very good.

And then when it did work, it was still bad. I understand. Like in the review, you know, you don't want to like overdo it. Yeah. But in this context, I think you should overdo it. Just unpack the badness of this, because you were really excited. I was really excited. So Dex could run up to five apps on the screen at a time inside.

It's like desktop-type window on the thing. And that, it works pretty well. Like, it's not super fast. Like, it's as fast as you'd expect Android to be. Once you start having it open for a while, like, things start to lag and you can kind of feel it. Wait, let's just explain what Dex is and what's supposed to do when you connect to a computer. Previously, Dex only lets you, like, plug your phone into a monitor, and then you've got a desktop interface. in your monitor, you connect up your own Bluetooth keyboard and mouse,

and then you've got like a little mini computer that's running off your phone. It's the dream, right? Well, no one does that. No one has a monitor that they carry around or whatever. So, Samsung made apps for Mac and Windows that take that experience and put it on your computer on the thing you actually use. So if there's stuff that you want to get off of your phone or do on your phone, you just plug it into your computer and then you've got like this wacky little, you know, other

computer sitting in a window inside your computer that it's actually your phone and you can like copy a link from your computer browser to your Dex browser inside the S10 and then when you open it up it's like it's the same app and so it's there you can use your phone at the same time as Dex is open which is kind of funny so like you could be scrolling Instagram on your phone while you're like using the Samsung internet browser in Dex. Oh my God. Because it can run multiple apps at the same time because it's like it has 12 gigs of RAM. This is a powerful. phone. It is wickedly powerful. But then if you,

it can't run it on both. So if you're like, I want to open Instagram and Dex, it'll pop up a thing saying, we can do this if you want, but we've got to restart the app because, you know, Android. And then it does. You have to resize one window, so we have to like close this app and restart it. And on the experience on Windows, actually, like, that's it. It's a little bit slow. If you try

and drag and drop more than like three files at a time, it just like, no, I'm sorry. So it's just like a Windows EXC, like, go get it off the Samsung site. You're like good to go. Yeah. Yeah. Same thing with the Mac, except it is doing something relatively deep into like the innards of the Mac. Whenever you install a Mac app and it has an uninstall program, in addition to an install program,

you know that it's doing something, right? And on my Mac in particular, the keyboard just never worked with Dex. And I was going to blame Samsung for this, except I don't think I should because I run a bunch of kernel extensions, right? I like, I remap my Capsot key. And so what this tells me is my kernel extensions were overriding Samsung's kernel extensions. This is why I described it as a fiasco,

because it's doing stuff. And then there's also, on both platforms, there are vague and confuting warnings about the Android file transfer app, which is itself a fiasco of software that Google needs to do something about because it's a really bad Java app on both computers. And Samsung needs it to be able to do drag and drop,

but it also needs it to not take over the communication between your phone and the computer, right? So it has to be there. So it has the tools it needs to transfer files, but it also can't be there because it'll keep decks from working. You have to go through this dance. Like, is it installed? Yes.

Is it picking it? Nope. Okay, now it's working. I just feel like what you're describing is you shouldn't try to make one computer run inside of another computer. But when it works, it's super fun. And like, it's convenient. Like, you said this to your,

yourself. Using WhatsApp signal text messages from Android to a computer is a crappy experience because you have to open up a tab in a web browser and scan a QR code and who knows a fiddlestick and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Or you have to go crazy and use some wacky Chrome extensions that read all of your notifications. On Windows, it's a very similar experience. They do have the Your Phone app, which I personally think is not ready for prime time yet, but it's there. And so just like, screw it. I'm going to use my phone on my computer. It's like there's something compelling there. It's just very badly executed. So here's what I don't understand.

Samsung owns the phone. Yep. They've written the app. They have. Why? Like, I mean, they can just, like, rewrite Android sort of at will to make sure it works here. Oh, I don't think that Dex is bad because Android. I think Dex is bad because they're not good at making Windows and Mac apps.

Interesting. Yeah. And then my other question is, it requires a wire. Well, come on. Yes, of course it does. Well, no. I mean, that's not like such a come on. I mean, like, I don't know.

Google just announced a service, lets to play video games over the internet. Yeah. I feel like I want to look at a WhatsApp window on my phone can be accomplished over a Wi-Fi network. Okay, yeah, they would need to build a pretty hefty infrastructure for that, or they would need to come up with... Wait, why do they need to do a VNC window over Wi-Fi?

I mean, that's like what this thing is, right? Basically, yeah, they could, but I suspect that the best technology available to Android to accomplish that goal that you're describing, there's two. There's cast, and there's MiraCast. So I just want you worry, Samsung supports both. Yeah.

I just want you to like complete the thought that you started. And the end of that thought is you have a window on your computer that is a mirror cast display of your phone. And then it also is sending commands over Bluetooth. And I just, there's something about that where it's like, you know what, I have my computer. If I have my computer, the chances that I happen to have a USB cable near me is like pretty high. So just plug it in. Yeah, I feel on all this. I just feel like in Samsung world, like they make laptops.

Yep. They make phones. They make charging docks. It seems to me like they could make a system where you like, you sit down at your Samsung laptop, you put your phone in your cool Samsung wireless charger. Yeah. It knows it's in that charger. It does a thing.

It does a thing. Yeah, yeah. It does like a Wi-Fi direct connection to your computer. And then you've got a little. Yeah. instead of what appears to be like, do you remember parallels? We've built that,

but it's your phone with the wall. It's like, it's definitely one step in the wrong direction. Yeah. But like towards the right goal. I don't know how to describe that exactly. It's just a, it's like they're like,

we want to go over there, so we've chosen to go down. And it's like that. I was going to do a whole rocky picture show, time warp metaphor here, but we're going to let that one go. Dex is the Rocky Horror Picture show. I'm fine with that too.

Not to be too much of a Huawei show, but I was talking about this last week. Chinese agent Paul Miller is on the show today. Well, like, this is the idea with these like weird things in Harmony OS and fuchsia, like this idea that you have files that you want to view from multiple machines, you know. And so ideally, the ideal thing is that your phone and your laptop,

do the minimum amount of work conceivable to keep up a file that is, let's say, a history of WhatsApp chat, keep that file securely but instantly synchronized between your laptop and your phone, and then you have an app on your Mac or Windows PC that can view that file, and then you obviously have WhatsApp on your phone that can view that file as well. That's sort of synchronization of the minimum amount. Obviously, what Samsung is doing is synchronization. synchronizing the maximum amount, which is an entire virtual screen. Display.

Yes. What's funny because I was talking about D.O., it seems like Apple could pull this off. Like you have an iPhone and you, like, sit down and you plug it into like a dock with like a special Apple chip. And then you're like $25,000 Apple calibrated monitor lights up. But then that would have to be a touchscreen. Yeah. Never let you do that. But like it seems very obvious that you could do the thing where you turn an iPad into, or an iPhone into an iPad very easily.

right yeah and as we know the iPad is the future of all computing well as i as i teased in my review video i'm doing a processor episode on this um and like here's i'm not going to give you the whole story but like here's the thing i told you like finish the thought and then once you finish the thought it's bad yeah and that's i think that's the problem with this across every attempt that's that there has been you think of it you're like oh this would be great and then you build it and then it turns out that oh no it's not yeah yeah but like it's so funny because they could optimize it for like the four apps people want, which is basically the messaging app. Yeah.

Like you really want that on your laptop, make that work. And then a handful of social networking apps that are somewhat more limited. Well, that's Microsoft's move, right? Yeah. Pretty much. Let's take the core functionality and make it work on Windows. So that's really interesting about this phone is it's the first sort of like Samsung plus Microsoft flagship Samsung phone.

Yep. That means there are three email clients on it. Which is a delight. Did you get a sense when you were reviewing the phone, talking to Samsung or anybody, that this is, the Microsoft stuff will eventually replace the Samsung stuff? No. I mean, because why? It's Samsung. Yeah.

We'll just glue more stuff onto it. Yeah. It could. It could. Like, Microsoft could sell a Microsoft edition of this, and they could get rid of Samsung stuff and put their stuff on it. But I get no sense that they're ever going to get, like, so in bed with each other that that will be the way Microsoft. takes on Google by like hijacking Android on Samsung.

But that would be the game to play. Like that's the thing that makes really interesting to me. Like they can't, there's no way Microsoft is going to get what it wants out of Apple in terms of integrating the phone with Windows, right?

There's not going to get it because Apple has its own computers to sell. Fine, that makes rational sense. They hate Google. Like there's a very natural tie up there, but they hate each other. Yeah. So that's not going to happen.

Yeah, but if Samsung's in the middle. But Samsung's in the middle. Samsung wants to distance itself a little bit. Yeah. And in its own destiny. They literally make Windows pieces. I guess they also make crowbooks. They're Samsung.

They make refrigerators and nuclear reactors. Samsung makes the only Android tablets the worth a damn that you can buy in the U.S. Yeah. Yeah. But it seems like if Microsoft wants to be in mobile, the place to go is the number one seller of Android phones, at least the United States. Yeah. And, like, get real close to them and say, let us do a bunch of this stuff. want to.

Like, you just go ahead and stop making a web browser. Have you heard of edge, right? They could just do that with Samsung. Yeah, they could. But you don't think that's ever going to happen. I don't think so. I think Samsung feels like it needs to provide a, if not equivalent, like parallel ecosystem to what, like, Apple users can get.

And I think it's thinking about Samsung selling phones in the U.S. market actually is a little bit tunnel vision-y. I think that especially stuff like Samsung health and, like, even some of other, like, you know, weird Samsung Cloud Service. service stuff. I think that they do actually have some kind of user base for that internationally or especially in Korea, and they're not just going to drop that. Also, frankly, like, there's too much money and stuff like Samsung having its own web browser. Like, you open up Samsung internet and you go to like a page that sells some stuff and there's a pop-up that's like, hey,

you want to, you want us to help you out here? You want a little help? Like Bigspey's like waving a credit card. Try the Bigsby card. Oh my God. What if Samsung launches a credit card? I'm sure they already have. They have like an insurance division. Yeah. They're Samsung. Yeah. Oh, man. Of course they have a financial services division. But instead of a titanium, it'll be made out of, well, not magnesium. It'll be. It's just another metal. Just a close, but no cigar. It turns out they made it out of lead and didn't realize it. Whatever the back of this note, I do not want to ever spend $1,000 on a phone, hopefully for my whole life. But I... Paul, you don't have to on the note. It's $1,100. But I want the back of the note.

I want a phone. In a changing industry, Samsung technology enables financial professionals to serve customers anywhere, reimagines a bank branch for a mobile world and safeguards every solution with defense-grade mobile security. Like, it's Samsung. Yeah. They already thought about, like, what if we weren't bank? They can't help themselves. I'm just saying, make a credit card.

They make ATM machines. Make a credit card that looks like the back of the note. and I will go into so much debt. Oh, yeah, that's true. The back of the note does look pretty, of the aura glow color, which is one that they are giving out to everybody. It also comes in black and white and blue, which are boring.

I think I got cut, but I originally was going to, I kept on referring to it as hollow taco instead of aura glow, because hollow taco is the name of a really sparkly nail polish from a YouTube influencer, nail influencer, that has, just, it's in my life. Yeah, I get it. And she's got this whole line of her own nail polish called Holo Taco. That's pretty good.

And I just have been calling it Holo Taco and getting corrected for like a week and a half. That's really funny. You should send one to her. You should do a, that's the next YouTube video. Oh, yeah. You're going to do this high-minded thing about phones starting the computer. No, no, no, no. Straight on.

Collab with a nail influencer. Get it done. I'll do it. Yeah. If I'm going to sign one thing on the show, it's that. So real quick, finish the, finish the style slot. It's the reason to get the phone. Is it worth it now?

If you are not a stylus stand, then absolutely not. But if you love the stylus, if you are already into the idea of writing with a stylus and pointing at stuff and interacting with the phone with the stylus, it's worth it if you got like a note 7 or earlier, right? Yeah, as usual, right? No, wait, the note seven was the fire note. Well, so it's definitely worth you having that seven. It's time to out there.

It's one of those, yeah. I will say the thing that surprised me the most was Samsung's built in a video editor. You would not expect Samsung to make a good video editor. And they totally did. If you're a YouTuber, this is not going to be the thing you do. And it does have the cringy background music that you can add to it automatically and whatever. But for like, I want to string these four clips together. I want to edit these clips and I want to put just like a dissolve between them and then put it on the internet.

It's great. And manipulating all of that stuff with a stylus is way better than doing it with your fan. fingers. Yeah. So. All right. I'm getting a note 10. It's going to happen.

Yeah. It's going to be great. You should think about getting the smaller one. Yeah, you love the smaller one. I love the smaller one. It has less RAM and the screen is only 1080. It's just like, imagine a Galaxy S-10, but just a little bit wider. So it's small.

What a confusing product. Yeah, I know. But it's $950. And I think... It's a lot of money. I know. Like, if you have $950, you also have $1,100. That's fair.

I think that, um, Yeah, that's fair. Right. Like, if you're already like, I'm going to spend $950 on this flagship phone, like, you're a short of person who's like, I'm going to wait another 20 minutes to make that buck 50. Do you think there are people that really want a stylus and do not want a gigantic phone? They just want a pretty big phone. Maybe.

That's the question. But they, I am actually, like, close to being in that camp. I just don't want a stylus that badly. I definitely bought a note 10 pre-ordered one. And there was like, this is dumb. I have a Galaxy S-10 that I like and I canceled my pre-order. What's the size difference between the little note and the S-10 plus? It's smaller.

It's smaller. It's probably about the same width or a little bit wider. I haven't looked at them side by side personally, even though we should have because we had them all sitting on a table and I'm an idiot. But it's not as tall. You know what the S-N-plus has? An extra camera. I don't know what. A headphone jack.

A headphone jack. This is true. Same. There's a literal silo. There's a hole, a tube down the center of this phone. But there's not a tube for your headphones. That's true. What's the Bixby situation?

It's there? I didn't see it in the review. You did not. I mentioned in the video. It's like there. There's a single power button. There's not a Bixby button. You can map it to...

You can map double press to camera. You can map single press to Bixby or not. You can't map anything to Google Assistant. And you can put yourself in the situation where it's sort of like the iPhone where all the buttons do stuff other than turn the phone off. So you can map long press to Bixby

and double press to camera and then you want to turn the phone off or you don't know how. And it has to like pop up instructions telling you how to turn the phone off. Oh, my God. Well, I mean, that's what happens when you put too much work into a single button. And I don't think Samsung handled it super well, but at least there's a couple of configuration options.

Yeah. And I don't think Apple handles it super well either, to be honest. But Apple never wants you to, like, turn off your phone. Well, neither is Samsung. Fair. Yeah. But Android. Well.

But sometimes you've got to restart that thing. It's just a fact. If you know, if you ship a phone or the operating system and you're like, Yep, in our hearts, we know that every so often you should restart this operating system. We should make it easier to restart. So Android used to not have a reset button on the power button. Like it pops up the menu and you see power off reset something, something. They're like, no, we're not doing it.

And then they did it for two years. And then finally they brought it back and like, yeah, we know. People want, that's sorry. I don't know. I have a bunch of Android devices in my life. I reset them every so often. They work really well. Then after a while, I'm like, got to reset this.

I guess it's time to reset my television. It's like a thought that I've had. I have an Android TV. Yeah. It's super Android. Yeah. That's what it is. Okay, so I want to talk about another thing Samson do this week.

I don't. Well, so I think it signals something important. Okay. Which is we have now arrived at like a cultural recognition that I message has creates a chasm in society. Yeah. especially the society of the United States. If you're in Europe or whatever, like you're using some third-party available in every platform messaging app. This isn't your problem.

If you're in the United States, there are green bubbles and blue bubbles. Yep. I would say that any conversation we have about green bubbles and blue bubbles, Ashley and Caitlin have had a better one on why did you push that button already? Yes. I just want to make that clear. They've done this in far more depth. but Samsung this week

put out like gifts where the green bubbles violently attack the blue bubbles so that when you get shamed in your cross-platform text about being a green bubble you can be like

but my green bubble is a snake that has devoured you like you should go look at them it's hard to describe these bubbles one of them there's a blue bubble and it looks like panicked or nervous and then a green bubble erupts

from its back like a like that I don't know what else to say about what is happening. And like, why would you send that to someone? But they did it. Because we're just now definitely at a point where it's a problem for companies that they know that teenagers shame each other for having green bubbles. I don't think that's cool for teenagers to do. I want to be really clear about that.

But there's like a million reasons that it happens. And Samsung is aware of them. And they're trying to, like, give you some cultural admonition to fight back. I'm probably reading too much into this and possibly also. becoming part of the problem by saying this, but a lot of these gifts imply that the green bubble is more powerful because it can take over, right? But from a technical point of view, the green bubble has a strict subset of the functionality of the blue bubble. So it is, it is a lie. No, no, I can, I can, I can, I can, I can, I can, I can, I can, I can, I can, I can, I can,

oh God. I don't want to, but I'm gonna. Okay, so you are correct, right, by saying the, the green Subtle signifies SMS. No read receipt. And SMS is not a subset of I message, right? It's a parallel. It's a subset of the functionality, but yes. A subset of the functionality. So it sends text.

Yeah. That's the subset. Text can go across a platform. But SMS still, I believe, does not run over IP, right? It's still like SMS. It's still packed in the extra characters of the cell signal. Technically, there are some characters. that do on sly run SMS as an IP service and don't tell you.

I know it's because like Verizon texts sometimes just work on a plane. Oh. And it's like, what? It's like, oh, because you're lying too. Yeah, but there is always a fallback to the wacky extra space in the carrier signal thing. Anyway, let me finish the sod. So you're correct. Functionally, it's a little subset.

But the message they're sending is, oh, you're a bunch of I-message people. You included me. now all your shit's green. Right? So their fallback is an expression of power. Right? You've devolved to the lesser protocol. And now you live with me, the green monster.

You're taking a criticism that is, I don't want you to be part of my group text because you'll turn it green. And it's like, make me a part of your group text and I will turn it to green. You're owning it. Yeah. Yeah.

It's like, it's like, it's, I brought you down to my level. Yeah. It's like, you know how like a common criticism is like, that's a low. common denominator solution. It's like, yo, I'm the lowest common denominator. Like, it's such a weird move. But it's weird.

It's funny, and it's like a little sad. Yeah. And it's perfect for what it, like, they can't solve the problem with a technical solution. I know, you're going to talk about RCS, and they can't do it. They've tried. Like Google can't fix it Samson, what's Samson do? Big Speed chat?

They can't do it so they're resorting to being like, you know, we're just going to make this cool. We're going to try to make this problem seem cool for you. I want to give where the blue texts are whizzing past the NSA and the NSA is like, I can't read them. And then the green text, like look at me. Oh, the green text.

The last one of these is like the one they deleted in review is the one that's like, I'm a cop. They're like, the agency's like, cut that one. Don't put that one on the Givie page. I just love that their choice is to mark it out of it because they can't fix it. Deter, do you want to make some noises about RCS at this time? No, I mean, like, RCS messages still show up as blue bubble. They don't exist on the iPhone.

iPhone doesn't even support it. So you still, you can't. RCS to an iPhone full stop. Samsung does support RCS in Samsung messages. It has done a reasonably good job of interoperating with everybody that wants to do their own custom version of RCS AT&T. But they also have done a good job of supporting the Universal Profile. So Samsung is a very good RCS citizen. They have just quietly done the right thing, but they have not pushed hard to make everybody else do the right thing.

And I wish they would have. Well, Samsung, they're a good RCS citizen in the same way they're a good citizen. of every other protocol. Yeah, they just, there's literally they're all infanted. They're a good mirror cast citizen. That's good.

I think RCS needs a color. I think they should be like black texts or something. Like really. Oh, yeah, that's RCS is the goth messaging protocol. I like it. I'm not saying I don't like it.

I'm saying that we should, it would be amazing if we all started competing by bubble color. That's the way to do it. Like I said, Ashley and Caitlin have, have, actually, I think you were on an episode of this show by the green bluebubles. They asked me to explain RCS and I did my level best. It was a lot.

It was a good episode. So go to this and I want to dive into it. But Green Bubbles versus Blue Bubbles, I'm telling you, has gone from basically a joke we make on this show and a thing that people know to an extremely mainstream conversation. Yep. And the thing that kills me, and I hear this a lot, I see it a lot. it's like if your friends are going to make fun of you for having green bubbles you should get better friends that's like not a choice most teenagers can make yeah right like it's a it's a real phenomenon it's a real thing they're experiencing and it's hit the mainstream in a new way uh ben bajarne who's a great analyst

that we talked all the time he's like i've seen it like my teenager in the high school like it's a real thing like i think one of his kids he was tweeting like one of his kids friends was an android person and he nerded out by the Android with Ben because he's like, tech analyst. And the next time he saw him, he had an iPhone, he was like, this was just getting too much for me, so I switched. Yeah, the thing was, like, once they see that a group text has turned green and been eaten by the Samsung GIF or whatever,

they're like, oh, screw this. And they make a new group without the green person to prevent it from happening again. It's just like, I don't think the answer is individually all of you should make new friends. Yeah, it's like teenagers have it hard. But I was in high school, I was happy that. I got to stop eating lunch in the bathroom alone. Right? Like, I got a friend, and it was great.

And, like, if that friend had shamed me for being a green bubble, you know what I would have done? Got in a blue bubble. Yeah. And on some level, it's like, some, I don't know, some products are cool and some products aren't, right? On another level, it's like the coolness of this product in high school will determine all of your technology purchasing decisions for the rest of your life because you're locked into an ecosystem. Also, you have their credit card. Also, everything has a slight discount because you have their credit card. also they are your television provider

and use provider. Like, maybe we should take that a little bit more seriously. Anyway, speaking of names, that's not a segue. But, Dieter, you have a little name script today. Oh, no. They pre-reached a whole bunch of people. You're the one on the show. Yeah.

Oh, so we know the name of Android Q. Yeah. Q stands for 10. That's what it stands for, apparently. So Google's argument is that It turns out that Android is sold around the world, not just in America. There are more people using Android in Brazil than in America. There are way more people using Android in India than in America.

So picking the name of an operating system using basically an English name of a dessert. Seems super weird. They could have chosen another nationality. In fact, I think they were going to for Q. But then they're like, or we could just use numbers because everyone uses the same numbers. Everyone just uses Roman numerals. Is this a retcon? If there is a dessert with a Q name,

They've just kept going. So here, internally, the engineers are still going to use the dessert code names. Oh, my God. They're just not going to tell anybody. And there is, in fact, an internal dessert code name for Q. Do you know what it is? Yeah. What is it?

Kinzei, whatever the Brazilian dessert is, yeah, which fits, right? It's like Brazilian. There's something. Google's actually put a big focus on Brazil and Android there. And so there is also, I am told, a codename already for R, aka Android 11, but they just won't tell us. And so if you would like to continue playing the Guess the Dessert Guessing Game, you are welcome to. Interesting.

Hymgaardenberg has many feelings about this guessing game. But the problem is you will never get hard confirmation officially from Google. You'll only get soft confirmation of finding it in code or an engineer telling you. But like everyone will find out. Maybe. Maybe not. We didn't find out about Q until like they finally confirmed it to me like on the sly. And they didn't actually confirm it. They're like, you know, like in the code, it's like you see QC.

and there's only so many desserts that have the sea next to it and Brazil's a big thing. It's like, oh, so it's this one. Right? So alongside this rename, they also redid the Android wordmark to make it way more boring. It's better because it's more legible on different-sized screens, and they've also now decided that the green robot head

will always be next to it from now on because they never actually tied those two things together. So now when they like the official way to show Android is to show the robot head either above or next to the word Android. Okay. And that's where the character comes from. The character comes from the Android head, not from, you know, there's not a closed vertical line on the D and Android just to make it look like futreary. Now they just have a regular looking word that says Android. And then next to it they have a wacky little robot head instead of having a wacky word and no robot head.

I see. There you go. This is fine. It's fine. Yeah, it's fine. It's cute. It's cute in the way that Google things are cute, you know. All right, we're going to take a break. There's a bunch of Apple stuff to talk about.

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All right. Where to start with Apple Incorporated. which is truly living up to the incorporated and it's incorporated with this credit card. Let's start there because it's funny. Apple card is out, everybody can sign up for it. I have just too many feelings about having a Goldman Sachs logo in my wallet.

Yeah. You tweeted about this, I tweet about this. At some point, it's an Apple product. Yeah. We're The Verge. We have to review it in some way. Yeah. It's an Apple product,

but it's not a tech product. The tech part of it is just the only way to use it is in an app inside the iPhone. Yes. And not like on the web where you do the rest of your finances probably. Well, there is a bunch of tech. Sure. Right. There's a,

they, oh, there's like anonymizing tech and stuff like that. Right. There's a bunch of like virtual credit card creation database stuff going on. Goldman Sachs bottle company called Final, which is doing a bunch of this stuff. Yeah. There's like rumors.

A bunch of Final tech is sort of like working on this stuff. But yeah, it's a credit card. At the end of the day, it's a machine for creating debt. Yeah. And I think I've said this before on the show. I tweeted it, but like my dad, since I was five years old, his like, never, ever run a balance in your credit card. It will destroy your life.

Yeah. So is mine, but then I did it. And so, like, it's great that it gives you a bunch of tools from managing a credit card balance. And, like, some people legitimately need to run a credit card man sometimes. That's fine. But you shouldn't have one, like, permanently. And if you do, you should spend all of your time thinking.

about how to not have it anymore. Right. And like, I don't know how to acknowledge that. There's nothing new about that with Apple. It's just a different window into that. I can give a contrast to this. I don't have the Apple card, but I recently got a Bank of America card with some cash back

just because, like, I had finally gotten out of all of my debt. And now I was getting, like, like, dinged for not having floating credit, which is annoying, but I was like, okay, whatever. I'll just have a credit card open just so that they like that, that I'm part of their system. And so I bought some stuff with the card because you get extra points, whatever. And so I bought some stuff with the card. And so I was like, oh, okay, well, I have a Bank of America bank account, which through that

interface is how I even applied for the card, right? Like Bank of America is very aware that I am the same person who has this bank account and it has this credit card. And so, okay, whoo, coming up on paying my card bill, where's the button to pay the bill? There's no button. You have to set up, like, it's like setting up a vendor type of payment. You have to, like, type in all this details about, like, this Bank of America business that you want to send, like, do a money transfer to Bank of America to pay your bill. There's no just pay off the balance.

I was very disappointed. So I have the same bank, ran into the same thing, and I was like, this is stupid. And then I clicked the transfer button, and it's just another account you can transfer funds to, and it functionally is the same thing as paying off your credit card. So I just use the transfer button. This is what the virtual has to know. We're helping you use your bank out. Which is super annoying because all of the banks are trying to get you to use Zelle, which is the bank version of PayPal, basically.

And so when I go to, like, pay my credit card, I, like, have to scroll past. an ad for a crappy bank competitor to PayPal every time. All of this, my point is, banks are bad. That's all I'm trying to say. I'm giving you that. They're a deeply necessary evil in society. That's fine. And I have a credit card, Paul, master of living off the grid.

The only person I know who quit being on the internet for a full year of his life has what, like, you need one, right? It's like function and it's fine to like manage your cash flow with a credit card. the problem is when the debt eats you alive. And like, everyone knows that. And it might be such that Apple helps you manage it better. Just through visibility. Through visibility.

I think credit card companies are motivated to do some of that stuff too. But it is super weird that it's just a credit card. So, like, am I going to review this interface versus my big bank's interface versus mint versus any of the other many financial services startups that exist to help you, like, manage this thing? I'm thinking about it. I'm going to try to get somebody from the points guy, which is many more people than just one guy who want to point out. On the show soon, because I want to talk about the points and reward stuff. I'm not a person who does point schemes.

My sister is, but I don't think I should have my sister on the show. So I want to get somebody from that world to come talk about that aspect of it, because I think that's kind of interesting. Neil, you tweeted this. The thing that's weird about the Apple Card is on the launch where anybody can go get it, They announced it, oh, yeah, by the way, we're also doing a 3% cashback deal with Uber. Yeah. It's like, this is the car, this is the thing where you're like, you're teaming up with Goldman Sachs, like.

Champion of the financial crisis. Yeah, like destroy the economy, Goldman Sachs. And then also Uber doesn't have the best reputation. Yeah. Really high voice when I say that. It's odd. So, Golden Sachs, which is doing better. You know, I've got Marcus, I got a new CEO.

The financial crisis is like 10 years ago. But it was still, I would say, a notable event. my lifetime, seeing is that me and many of my friends graduated from school into the financial crisis, which is not a great time to be like, I need a job. You know, it's just a memory I have. But Matt Taibi very famously described,

he's a writer at Rolling Stone, very famously described Goldman Saches, a giant vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. And now I have this logo in my pocket. Is the logo of the giant squid? They just lead into it.

That's some like green bubble marketing move right there. Just like change it to a squid. Be like, yep, that's us. Listen, Nilai, you don't have to worry about the logo being in your pocket because eventually you're not able to see it because your whole credit card is going to turn blue and brown from your jeans in your wallet. So that's like the, that's actually the newspeg to talk about the Apple card. I just have so many emotions.

Apple put out a support document this week, how to care for your titanium Apple card. You are not supposed to put it near leather or denim. which is, I would say the environment that credit cards most often live because it will permanently stay in the card. But you are supposed to gently clean it with a cloth from time to time. Yeah, but no chemicals.

There's two possibilities. Well, three possibilities. Three possibilities. Apple had no people test the physical card. They just released it straight from the factory. Two, they, those people that did, test the card, all do not wear denim nor have leather wallets. I mean, Apple is like famously the company with jeans. No, it's a stretch, but maybe they selected for us very special.

Or they selected? Are you a khaki guy? Because the other idea is that my theory of how Apple puts its products in a completely 100% sterile room, like an Apple store, but with everything removed from it. And they test their products in a complete and total vacuum. And so, of course, nobody ever put it in a wallet or in jeans because, you know, that's not acceptable in the clean room.

You want to know my theory? What's that? Deep down in his heart, Johnny Ives knows that Apple shouldn't make a credit card. So he, like, sabotaged it. I think that their goal is to make you not have this card, right? The point of the Apple card is absolutely not the physical card. It has the lowest returns.

Yep. Right? So if you use the car to get 1%, if you use the Apple pay, you get two. If you buy Uber, you get three. If you buy stuff from Apple itself, you get three. But they obviously are incentivizing and use the Apple Pay.

And that's what they want. And like, so this card is an accessory. It's like the backup. So you're supposed to, I think, keep it in like a zip-lock baggy in case of emergency. You know, like, let me get my Apple card. Like your spare key for your car. I think Ben Thompson called it

it's almost a parody of an early 2000. Apple product. Right. Like, it's just hilarious. Like, the thing, it's, it's not designed for the environment that it will live in. It's, like, very funny to me. Anyway, that's the Apple card. I'm very sorry that I have so many feelings about it.

I promise I will write something about it eventually because I have it. Apple is one of the most influential tech companies in the world. We should probably evaluate it in some way. If you have ideas on how you want me to evaluate it, please I know. A numeric score, Nilai. Are you saying seven and a half out of two? You should evaluate its privacy. That's worth it.

You should evaluate the complete... So there's this arbitration clause, right? Most credit cards have this, I imagine. It's true. You're not allowed to sue them, but you can opt out of it so that you are allowed to sue them if you want to. But you need to tell them I opt out. And what's wild to me is you can opt out of the Goldman Sachs arbitration clause

by just texting them. Yeah. You don't have to write a letter, you don't have to send an email, you don't have to sign a form on docu-sign. So Chase, very famously, you have to send them a physical letter and there was a deadline.

The deadline's passed. Yeah. So if you did not, like, print out this form letter and mail it to Chase, you are bound by the arbitration clause. Right. With Apple, like, yes,

you like open the support window. It's like a fake iMessage screen. Yeah. Right? And they, like, forward you to Goldman Sachs, and, like, some poor Goldman Sachs person clicks a button in your account. Right.

Okay. That's very nice. That's cool. I'm happy that that exists. Yeah. Review that. Okay. I don't know how to do that.

I'm working on it. Again, if there's something you want to ask me or there's something you're interested in, please let me know. I'm trying to figure it out, but it is challenging for me to think of a thing that creates debt in this way because I literally entered the workforce in the middle of financial crisis. That's just me personally. Maybe you're having a different experience. There's other Apple News. It's much more exciting. There is so much.

So Mark German over at Bloomberg dropped his traditional, here's everything that Apple's going to announce at the fall event and maybe for the next six months story. And it's a bunch of stuff that we had been thinking was going to happen and a couple new things. So it's going to be called the iPhone Pro, triple rear cameras for better light performance, reverse wireless charging.

Face ID will actually work if it's sitting on a table. There'll be a matte version. They're getting rid of 3D touch. a ton. Then there's going to be a new version of the iPad with bigger cameras. That 16-inch MacBook Pro is going to come. The Apple Watch is confirmed, or not confirmed, but we're pretty sure it seems like it's going to be basically the same thing.

It'll just come in a couple of new materials. We might get noise-canceling AirPods. They're finally going to make the home pod they should have made in the first place. Just like a million things. iOS 13 beta hints that it's going to be September 10th. There's a bunch of news, just a ton of it. And this is all, like, it all landed basically today in a way that we feel is more definitive. Like, all of these rumors have been trickling for the most part in.

Now it seems like we've got a pretty decent run a show. We'll see what actually shows up in September. I'm very interested in see the 16-inch macro pro actually shows up. Yeah, so am I. I think a lot of people are anticipating it, a lot of people. Even at the last Apple event, people are, like, whispering about it. I got the sense, especially after the last rev of Mac stuff, that it was probably getting pushed to 2020. me that was like the vibe.

Yeah. I don't know. Well, I mean, obviously the big question is the keyboard. Yep. How long has Apple been 100% confident that they need a 100% new keyboard? Like, because they were trying to make it work for a while there. Yeah. Like when did Apple know?

I mean, not that keyboard. It seems like they should be a solved problem. Apple, of course, is going to want to use all new materials and like some novel new mechanism or something like that. I hope they try to make a better keyboard. Yeah, I mean, I think they've known for a while, and I think they've been doing these weird incremental upgrades of, like, now there's a layer of rubber. Now it's made out of mystery.

The mystery metal is my favorite. Yeah. Now it comes imbued with hopes and dreams. Like, they've been doing that sort of, like, iterative approach. Now it comes with a warranty recall out of the box. So, I mean, I think that it's in parallel track. So, like, I'm very curious that the 16-inch Packer Pro arrives. I think a lot of people will be stoked for it.

German's report kind of front-loaded these rumors with, in an effort to increase revenue, they're putting out more products faster. Yeah. So this is a great way to spike Mac revenue because so many people are waiting for it. Getting that Mac Pro out on time, I think a lot of people are going to buy that thing. So if that's really, you have to buy, that's what they want to do.

But when does any company not want to make more money? So maybe they do want to do that? What's interesting is you're more excited for the Macbook Pro because you have an aging macro pro, and it's a need that you have. I'm actually more interested in the iPhones, in their cameras. There's going to be a triple camera array.

Having just reviewed the note, I reviewed the pixel, I reviewed the pretty good camera on the 1 plus 7. I currently own an iPhone 10R. They're all in the zone of really good smartphone cameras, but I also have an RX100, which is in a completely different zone.

and I would like to see smartphone cameras like level up. It is a miracle that like the Pixel 3 brought us to the level that we're at and everyone has got very close to that. And then Apple has done as well as it has video and like Samsung got very close to that, right? All of that is miraculous. But I don't know, I'm used to the miracle now. And I want the thing that actually makes me go, why do I own this RX100? Yeah. That's what I want.

And so the rumor is that they're going to combine the wide angle with the, regular and do some computational stuff. It's going to be better at low light, which is an area they've been a little bit behind in. And they're even going to do wacky stuff like if a person is cut off because the wide angle will catch it, they can like kind of add them back in a little bit, which is sort of funny.

Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. All I know is I would like to see, I don't know if it's actually going to happen this year, but if Apple's going to actually justify calling these things pro, they need to do something pretty special with that camera, I think.

I don't. No? You just think they're just going to call pro? I think they're just going to call pro. I don't think they even need to. I think they need to just like a MacBook Pro and a MacBook Air, like the 13-inch Pro, the base model and the air, they're so close. Right? Like, we've had this conversation.

What makes that thing pro? It's like a slightly zippier processor and a slightly better display. Yeah. All right. Well, you can do exactly that thing with an iPhone, right? Okay. Right? Maybe it won't even have a slightly zipier processor.

because they tend not to do that. Like the 10R has effectively the same processor as the 10S. Yeah. But it'll have a better display. It has slightly better cameras. This display does HDR with X and it's a brightness and that one. Like these are games Apple is very comfortable playing.

But, okay, so this is like a really common trope that I used to be annoyed at. People like, oh, phones are boring now. I was like, actually, no, they're like still increasing at a pretty steady clip and, like, there's still cool stuff happening. You maybe don't need to buy one every year, but like there's still cool stuff happening. And for the first time with the Note 10 plus, I'm like, 10% better than this is like, would be nice. And the next time I buy a phone, I'll be glad it's there. But it's not going to make me go, holy crap.

Yeah. And I feel like if all the actions are on cameras and they're putting these giant cube square bumps on the backs of phones now, that's all coming. If you're going to do that, you need to justify it more. Because I can get something that is 80% as good as what you can get out on an iPhone 10S out of something. that doesn't have a, you know, insane bump on the back of it. And that's fine. I think Apple's just in the trickle-down stage of these phones. Yeah.

Right? They need to make one at the sort of accessible price point. They're going to make one that's more expensive over time that. Like, I would bet that iPhone 11 has two cameras in the back. Whereas the 10R only has one. Right. Right. So you can just, like, see that process going.

Yeah. The thing about the camera to me, and I agree with you, like, you put this in your note review I think I've stuck this in some reviews lately if you have a phone and you like it and you have a thousand dollars which is like you're doing great and all you want is better photos

like go buy an ARX 100 by the new Panasonic thing like there's a new canon that's like pretty good spend your money there because you will get substantially better photos that let you do all kinds of other things with them every photo I take of my kid with the phone

I'm like, well, I'm glad I have the photo. That's good. It exists. Best cameras are one of you have with you. But I wish I had my real camera. Right. And that to me is like, except for video. Right. Right.

Like the iPhone video functionality is far, it's more convenient. And it's also, I think, the best video any phone takes. So you add more cameras. What I want is like, I want more resolution. I want better low light performance. I want a little bit of like, I don't if anybody sees this as much as I do, I see it, I just can't not see it. There's like a, there's still like a haze over iPhone photos.

Like, because they very specifically, and I don't mean like that old nasty mobile phone haze, they've obviously gotten far away from that. I mean they, because SmartHDR is so aggressive, these photos lack contrast. Oh, sure, yeah, sure. And so like they just seem really flat to me in a way that seems like hazy. And so every, the first thing I do with every iPhone photo is, like, I up the contrast. Yeah.

And I like... This is why so many of us prefer the pixel three, is they like, they get that balance a little bit better. Right, they just seem crisper. And it's like, it's a trick. Like, I'm not saying they might actually be crisper. There's more detail. But like, it's the first thing I see. And I think they just got to process a better photo.

And the noise reduction's out of control. I can complain about phone photos all day and all night. But like, that's what I'm seeing. Like, they're going to add the third lens. I hope they use that third lens, not just to let you zoom out, but to actually increase the detail contrast noise reduction of the existing photos because they've plateaued. Yeah.

And that's like a thing. Yep. No, that's my feeling. Plateau. I want us to start climbing again. And like the angle of that climb, I want it to be sharper and steeper. And then Pixel 4 will have two lenses.

We'll see what happens. Google's always just going to have one less lens, but better processing than Apple. It's just like the curve that they're on. I don't know how to... I feel like this Apple TV Plus news, it's going to cost $10 a month. It's going to launch.

Yeah. The game service. price leaked. It's like six bucks a month or something. I think it was, yeah, five or six, yeah. They've got to be letting that stuff slide out so that when they announce the bundle, it seems really good, right? That's my guess. They're going to announce the phone and the iPhone upgrade.

I mean, I think the dream, a lot of people have said this out loud. I think Lance Euleneoff was tweeting about it. Ben Topson has talked about it. M.G. Siegler has talked about it. Like, the idea is that you pay Apple, I don't know, like $150 a month. And you get, you know, that's your phone payment. You get a new phone every year. that's all their services.

That's your blood money for iCloud. Like, it's just all the stuff. And, like, that's a very, that's a very tempting recurring revenue bundle for Apple. I imagine that's what they're going to do. And then if you don't want that, you can get some all-a-card services. Yeah, so right now it's Apple Music is $10.

Apple News Plus is $10. Apple TV Plus is rumored to be $10. Apple Arcade is rumored to be $5. I think it's still a rumor, right? Yeah. Yeah. And then, like, the most reasonable ICloud plan is 200 gigs, and that's $3.

And then the most reasonable upgrade program iPhone that I think is for the good one is the iPhone 10S-256. That's 56 bucks. So you're looking at like 80-90 bucks for like, give me everything Apple makes. Yeah. So if they could bundle that down to like 75 bucks, sure. Yeah. Or they just bundle it for like 90 bucks. You know what I mean?

It's Tim Cook. He's like he's running a bank now. He's like, and a little big on top for me. Like, let's do it. I think they're going to do that. I can't imagine they don't make that play. It's such an obvious move for them. And Cook has spent so much time talking about how people perceive their trade-in phone as financing the next one,

how upgrading process needs to get easier. But he's spent on every earnings call, he's like, I'm convinced consumers see the trade-in value of their phone is financing towards the next phone. He says it every time. I don't agree with him because it implies that people are a little bit dumber than I think they are. Like, I bought this phone for $1,000. I'm going to give it to you, and the price of my next phone will be lower by $400. I don't think anyone's like, I'm financing my new, you know what I mean?

Like, I think they're just like, this phone is worth $400. Yeah. Yeah, they say it that way. Although it does significantly change the calculus for just like my lizard brain. Yeah. So, for example, Samsung offered a big $600 traded value for a Galaxy S-10 to get a Note 10. And I went from like, oh, my God, $950 for this thing to, oh, hey, $350. this thing.

Yeah. Right. And like it made a difference and made it more likely. And I was like, oh, I might want to do this. So I agree with you that I disagree with Tim Cook. But there is a kernel of truth there that it changes the way people think about their purchase in some way. Yeah. Yeah.

So we're looking early September for all this to happen. Oh, yeah. No, the iOS 13 apparently had a reference to September 10th, which is the least surprising day that it can be because it's like the Tuesday or whatever. All right. Let's take a break. We'll come back. There's a little grab bag of stuff I'll talk about. We'll be right back.

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Every week. That's right. The consistency blows me away. I was like away last week and I was like something's missing. That's right. And it was that I didn't have this fixed constant in my life. Yeah. The weekly segment is called Are There No Laws for Hype Beasts?

As you know. And so. Yes, that's what I thought to myself. I don't know. I don't really get the whole high. might be thing, but I know that there is a brand called Supreme, right? Yeah. And just please correct me if I'm wrong.

Supreme puts its brand on things and then they sell those things because they could look kind of cool with Supreme on them and they also kind of make them like sort of limited addition. Is that correct? Yes. This is correct. Okay. So Supreme has put its brand out of like what they're calling a burner phone.

It's a it's a burner. It's a phone that's made by blue. It's got a keypad. It's got like the old timing hang up and call buttons and like a Dpad and a low-res screen in the middle and probably like whatever cheapest camera exists on the planet on the back. But of course, the photo is red with a Supreme logo or you could get in black with a big Supreme logo on the bat. Also, your phone's wallpaper has the Supreme logo centered in the middle. So here's my confusion.

It has Supreme on it, but it also still has the blue logo. And no offense to blue, blue is really cool in that they make very, very cheap phones. But it's not a prestige brand. So what I'm confused about is if the whole concept of Supreme is around a brand and they put their brand next to the brand of blue, I feel like that harms the Supreme brand. Am I incorrect? I think the Supreme brand is so powerful. I was going to say. It just boosts everything around it.

So now Blue is resilient. Blue is like cool, cheap now. No, like Blue might not get any shine off of being next to Supreme, but Supreme definitely cannot be hurt by Blue. Okay. Supreme is the brand where like a fake Supreme started in Europe and then Samsung partnered with the fake Supreme. By accident.

Because they thought Supreme was cool. And then the real Supreme was like, what are you doing? And they defeated Samsung. They're good. I think blue phones are like, they're a phone remarker. I don't know what you would call that.

They like do badge engineering. They're like, here are some phones from the Alibaba catalog. Now they're blue phones. Like, they're just going to be that company. So if you just want to get access to phones to make, quote unquote, make phones, they're the ones.

All right. Well, as long as you're convinced that's legal. Who am I to answer your question? To answer your question this week in the interest of consistency, because I know it's a kind of a call-and-response thing we do. There are no laws. Okay. The answer this week is no.

All right, Paul, you want to, there's new Intel stuff, some new laptops. Walk us through it. So we're all looking forward to this holiday season. Intel is going to have its first 10-nometer laptop chips, ice lake, right? Yeah. I think there's going to be like, four of them total available for purchase is my hunch. There will be a

handful of Ice Lake's. Not four brands, not four kinds of laptops. Literally four of them will make it to Best Buy shelves. It's a limited edition. Kind of like Supreme. Okay, so because... Yeah, Intel's strategy to save

itself is supreme drops of processors. Okay, so whether or not there's completely constrained supply, Ice Lake also doesn't really hit all of the different types of laptops you would want to make. For whatever reason, Intel is also making a new 14 nanometer chip called Comet Lake. Yeah.

So 14 nanometers is the process that we're currently on. So this is another revision of already kind of long the tooth kind of processor. But they're doing some kind of cool stuff. There's also a really helpful chart that they make. because now it's up to you to decide, do you want an Ice Lake machine or a Comet Lake machine, given all things being equal? So here's the table.

Ice Lake. So imagine a table four cells across the top. You've got Ice Lake, Comet Lake, right? Yep. Ice Lake on intelligent performance, bringing AI to the PC at scale. Ice Lake on stunning entertainment, generational leap in.

entertainment. Now, best connectivity, that goes across both. So now let's run down the Comet Lake column on intelligent performance, productivity powerhouse, on sending entertainment, immersive entertainment. Great. All this completely clears it up. Wait, wait, it's immersive versus what now? Generational leap versus immersive, bringing AI to the PC at scale versus productivity powerhouse. As far as I can. All of that's, Just one is fast and one is slow, right? Yeah. At the end of the day, it's like, productivity powerhouse means like it'll do itself.

Here's the wild thing. As far, like, obviously, we don't actually have these in our hands. We don't totally know. But the basic, what the word on the street and from a reading and non-tech, it sounds like basically Ice Lake for GPU, Comet Lake is going to go, Comet Lake is the 14-anometer one. It's going to go up to like a six-core core I-7, which is, is, is, is going to be the most cores ever for that, that, like, wattage of, like, the 15 to 25 watt kind of chip,

the kind of the sweet spot for laptops. Whereas Ice Lake has a newer, like, a GPU generation. And so it's going to be better for AI to the PC at scale. And for gaming and stuff like that. But so that's interesting. Also, as interesting is there, they are, They kind of backported some technology, some like new RAM stuff. So you're going to have faster RAM now in Comet Lake than you've been able to get.

So that's pretty exciting. I read that that backporting process isn't like an easy, simple thing for them to do. So they're still investing significant R&D into 14 nanometer, which is a pretty good sign that they're not just about to switch everything over to 10. And because 14 nanometer, it makes sense that it can get more horsepower in the CPU than the 10 in some ways. because they've been doing it longer, et cetera. I think that it is unlikely that in the way that arm chips, you're like, oh, it's on the smaller nanometer now.

Obviously, that's better. I don't think that applies to Intel, and it won't for quite a while. Because they're doing, like, weird hybrid stuff, right? Yeah. It's just confusing. And so Intel's solution for solving all of this is they've created a new thing. Instead of Ultra Books, they have Athena. They didn't actually want to, like, make this.

a brand name, but we basically demanded that they did. Like, Sean Hollister person was like, this is stupid, you should give it a name, and they did. And it's their guarantee that a laptop will have a certain amount of battery life and like a bare minimum of performance and thickness and so on and so forth. So you should be able to look for

an Athena-ready laptop and know that you're going to get a laptop just going to get, I think it's like 10 hours of battery life or something. And that, in theory, could be the thing that cuts through this needing to know the various versions of the lakes, potential. for the average user.

I don't know if this is true. I don't know that Intel actually believes that this is what they're trying to do, but there is a chance, a sliver of hope that going to buy a laptop won't be a nightmare of looking at spec sheets. You could just say, is it Athena? Cool. I like the shape of

this one. I'm done. I don't think that's likely, but there's a tiny hope. Well, it's really you can't look at spec sheets anymore because of like the a lot of these chips, They're 15 watt and then they have like an up

configuration that the manufacturer can set up to 25 watt. So a laptop given the exact same core I7 processor based on the thermals and configuration that the manufacturer chooses will have different performance from laptop to laptop.

And if the manufacturer overshoots it and they try to make it run at a higher power level, and then it hits thermal throttling, then you'll have terrible performance in very specific scenarios. So there's that confusion as well. So I think we're really at the point

where if you need to know your workload and then talk to an expert who can choose the real CPU for you. Basically, do you want... In conclusion, buy an iPad. PCAI at scale. Yeah. What if you want AI 8K and 5G?

Oh, my God. Keep dreaming. Bucko. All right. Last little thing I want to talk about, there's a Sonos event on Monday. Yep. They announced it.

I think you guys talked about it last week. Yeah, we talked about the fact that the FCC announced what they're going to announce it. It happens. That used to happen so often that we had, remember it to Engaggett. We had an FCC bot. Yeah. They're just pinged the FCC every day and emailed us what had happened. Good times.

Then people figure it out. There's a service of a bunch of different websites that just crawl the FTC and give you a better, or the FCC, they crawl the FCC and give you a nicer interface for the FCC's website. Oh. Because it's all public free information in the public domain. What are we doing? Yeah. Let's set up an automated gadget blog. Yeah.

Let's go full Andrew Yang on this thing. I mean, there's a million automated New York Times crossword solver blogs. They just like, they get the dot-puzz file, they parse it, and they just like. Make a million blog posts. Is there a dot-puzz file format? Yeah, that's very exciting. We should have done an hour and ten minutes on dot-puzz. That'll be next week on the Vergecast.

On the interview episode, we're going to get the creator of Doc Puzz. Actually, arrival format, zuzzle. I actually have a really good guess for you on this topic if you want. I really do. Are you saying? He made the onion crossword, the American Family Values. He wrote some really spicy editorials about crossword open sourcing and domain

and property. Is dot Puzz an open source format? Yeah. Are they? I'm asking, is there a commercial variant called Zuzzle? That's the format war I want in my life.

There's like the open web dotpuzz people and then there's like the proprietary Zuzzle people. You understand that this is my dream. Like Zuzzle has like some extra kind of cool functionality. You can do like a like a diagram. word and stuff. Zuzzle has like

Zuzzle's fully encrypted but there's a lock-in problem. Yeah. Okay. There's like a puzzle is like patent encumbered. Anyway, just you guys are so mean. Ben tossing is genuinely cool. I'm sure he is. I just want

him to have an evil rival. We're not making fun of him. We're making fun of RCS.S. Anyhow. I don't how we got here from Bluetooth speakers, but we get. It's the Vergecast, everybody. There's an event on Monday. I'm very excited for this product.

To front run this event, Bose announced a speaker that has everything. Except for, like, Sonos compatibility. Except for Sonos compatibility. But there's a new Bo's speaker. It has Google Assistant, has Airplay 2, has cast, it has Spotify Connect.

I think this is a super interesting upcoming market, where you have the sort of like dockable speaker. Like, this is a thing people want. People have tweeted us about it. Yeah. Like, where can I get this thing that isn't Sonos? I am shocked that Apple, which knows that AirPods are its best seller.

Yeah. And is rumored to be making a cheaper home pod has not made a product like this that lives in, like, the H-1 ecosystem. Yeah. Right, where it's like, it's AirPlay 2 when it's sitting on its stock and you pull it off and instantly ICloud Bluetooth's to your phone. Like, that's the thing they should make. Every Apple person would buy that instead of. to buy and they're like ridiculously overpriced home pod.

Yep. But I think Sonos is going to be in the punch. I'm super excited about that thing. But because it's the Vergecast, I'm just going to say that the biggest problem with all this stuff is you are still in an ecosystem block in because at some point you need to set up the rooms in your house. And once you do that, once you set up the rooms in your house, that is your ecosystem for the rest of your life.

You either do it in Alexa or Google Assistant or HomeKit. And once you do that, that's what you want to use because it's a pain in the ass to do it again. Yeah. Although I did sort of like accidentally switch from Alexa to Google Assistant. Yeah? Yeah. I mean, like literally we bought the Home Hub and it has the photos.

Right. And so I was like, well, I want that thing around. And it's that next to our Alexa where everything else is set up. You think it like sniffed out your network and like figured it out like in the dirty way? I will say that the Google assistant. I think we just slowly started using it more. So I like finally like did the thing where I set up the rooms. Yeah.

And then it was done. Okay. But like I think probably very few people set up both assistants, use them both for a while. and then like phase one out. I mean, that's where I'm at right now. Maximum nerds. I had to rename one of my lights because I used the word kitchen in it,

and so Google refused to believe that it wasn't in the kitchen because it was called the kitchen strip, and I didn't want it in the kitchen room because I wanted it to stand. It was a whole thing. Wouldn't work. And I was like, what if I rename it? And it just worked. Of course.

Smart Home stuff is very complicated and very weird. And I realized bizarrely had two DHCP servers on my network because Verizon insists on running one. And you have to like, get into it to make it stop. So I had two, and I didn't realize it because Verizon doesn't tell you. It's just going to always do it. And so bizarre, like, things would just magically stop working until I realized I had two

secret subnets at my network. Well, so this is why I'm intrigued by Sonos and why I'm actually kind of intrigued and impressed with the Bose is they both know their limits, right? Soos is like, we're going to do the music stuff and there'll be some assistant stuff, but we're just going to ask those folks to handle it. We know how to make a music network. And Bose is like, we know how to make good speakers and we'll support all the protocols and stuff, but we're not going to try and, like, create the Bose digital assistant, right?

The Bose, whatever. So I think the thing about these Bluetooth Wi-Fi speakers, that is really interesting to me, I mean, it's great. It's, like, convenient, right? But once you have a Bluetooth speaker, it's all it can be. You know what I mean? Like, you can take it out, and you're like, I don't know, you've got a Jeep Wrangler, the doors are off, you're at the beach, you're doing Bluetooth stuff.

Like, is that what the kids do now? or TikTokin, whatever it is. But like, you live that out of your house lifestyle. And then you get back in your house, and you've got this like parallel ecosystem of music stuff. Right. And this investment is worthless to you in that environment. I think the idea that that investment will get more value

by connecting the other music solutions is really powerful because you'll just, you'll want to have that investment. You're like, okay, I'm going to take it and go with me. That's at least my expectation. I kind of wish this thing didn't have microphones. Oh, yeah. I don't need it to have microphones when it leaves the house. Yeah.

But we'll see. We'll see. There's a rumored son-us one that doesn't have microphones, but it's like a play-one upgrade. Okay. We'll see. All right. Anyway, I just wanted to end on a hopeful note

after that depressing zuzzle conversation. Pat and Spall. We should just make up fake evil companies all the time. What are we doing? That's what this show should be. We're starting a new podcast, everyone. It's a narrative fiction podcast about, evil proprietary companies.

That's most of science fiction. Anyway, that's the Vergecast. We'll be back next week. We got the interview show on Tuesdays. That's a real thing. By the way, thank you to Senator Bennett. That was a really fun conversation this week. Listen to that if you haven't.

We're trying to get more 2020 candidates. So keep an eye out for that. We have the chat show on Fridays. We'll just keep going and going and going. You can tweet at us. I met reckless. Paul's at Future Paul. Dieter's at Backlon.

I would actually really appreciate your thoughts on how we should evaluate the Apple card. We're going to go talk to somebody at the point sky It's going to happen. We're working on it. But what do you want from us? I'm very curious about that. Danny Deal is back on the YouTube channel with Future of Music, her series about The Future of Music.

That show is one of my favorite things that we do. Danny has access to all kinds of incredible people. She got Charlie XX on this season, which is very exciting. Her first episode is about Eric Pridz's hollow sphere. You just got to see it. It's a giant LED sphere that he performs in. And she got to see him build it, which is awesome. So go check that out.

It's on YouTube channel. You can check out Pivot with Kara and Scott Galloway, which is really a fun show. I actually saw live taping of that this week, which is really entertaining. You can check out Recode Media with Peter Kafka, Recode Decode with Kara. Check out Land of the Giants,

which is Jason Del Rey's show about the rise of Amazon right now. And you should catch up on all of Lodge you push that button, which is wrapped up season three. It's the best season in that show we've ever done. Ashley and Caitlin did a great job. So check that out when you can.

And we'll see you next week. Rock and roll. Paul. Kessney.