The Vergecast - Galaxy S20 Ultra's camera issues and Bob Iger steps down as Disney CEO

Episode Date: February 28, 2020

Stories discussed this week: Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra review: shutter bug Samsung pledges to improve Galaxy S20 camera after reviewers see issues Bob Iger steps down as Disney CEO, replaced by Bob Chapek Meet Bob Chapek, Disney’s new CEO and the Tim Cook to Iger’s Steve Jobs Disney’s new corporate synergy nightmare is personified in Simpsons promo New Juul patent application hints at AI-powered vape to help users quit nicotine Apple’s new Mac Pro and Pro Display technology overviews show off just how ‘pro’ they are Sony did a phone with a headphone jack! LG’s new V60 ThinQ 5G shows steady evolution for a company in need of big change Amazon’s Eero routers get updated with Apple’s HomeKit support Samsung Galaxy Buds Plus review: better sound, even better stamina Huawei announces the Mate XS foldable with a more durable display and faster processor Xbox Series X official specs: AMD CPU, 12 teraflop GPU, SSD, and more Microsoft’s Xbox Series X will be able to resume games even after a reboot Microsoft confirms Xbox Series X will support "four generations of gaming" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Verthast, we go deep on the Galaxy S20 Ultra and what's going on since camera. Julia Alexander joins us to talk about the big changes at the top of Disney and do a little grab bag of news from MWC. It's a fun one. It's a Verthast coming up now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes.

in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporting. for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast. The flagship podcast of Megapixels. That me my super event. It's a megapixel. If there were such a thing as non-abending podcasts, we would be in. Well, we've all gathered together in New York.

We've notabind ourselves. I'm your friend, Nila. Dieter Bone is in New York. Not abending it away. Paul Miller is in New York. Hello. We're all here. Is it a centa megapixel?

Is that a word? Is that how you would say? 100 megapixels is a centa mega? A centa mega. A centa mega. Well, it's been a busy week, but I would say our week has been dominated. Deeter's life has been dominated by the Galaxy S20 Ultra. Here's a thing that I will say to you.

It would be nice to review a flagship premiere, amazing, new, expensive. Samsung phone without it turning into a dramatic fiasco. I disagree. As the person who's like, I got to get through an hour of conversation about a phone review every week. I

like the dramatic fiascos. We need content. Yeah. That's what I'm in it for. All right. Let me just try to set some stage. Deidre Bohn works at the verge. Yes. You review a lot of phones. I do. I would say lately,

a trend is big companies messing with how phones are reviewed. Okay, yeah, a little bit. Right. So like, I don't know, like Walt Mossberg. Walt East Worry of the Verge. He had a long and distinguished career at the Wall Street Journal. For most of that time, a product would come out. They would like, someone would announce it.

Yeah. Then they would give one to reviewers. Yep. Some time would pass. Yep. An embargo would lift. Yes. Walt would have negotiated an embargo

like eight hours before hours driving us crazy when you're young pups. So Walt's review'd go out and then ours would go out the next day. But that's usually what happens. Fair, that is the standard format for all products in that.

So you announce it, you make a big thing, you bring in a bunch of reporters and reviewers, you brief them, you give the reviewers review units, they go out in the world, they use the product, you have a bunch of phone calls about what they're seeing, what they're not seeing, they write a review, all the reviews drop on an embargo day. Yep. I'm sure anybody listening to this has been aware of like 50 reviews getting dropped all at the same time.

Yeah. This year has not featured that pattern to a large extent. Yeah. And in this discussion, you might be tempted to think that we're just demanding that things go back to the good old days when, you know, we knew what the rules are. I want the Walton Bar. Yeah. This isn't that. This is just like companies are trying to figure out what they want, like how they want the phone reviews to work in a world that is increasingly. got like influences at Instagram, YouTubers that may or may not follow journalistic standards.

Everybody that we like follow and talk about tends to, they've got, you know, just other ways that their phones get out in the world. And so they're trying to figure out how to contend with that. So sometimes there's like special like, after the main announcement event, there's like a special influencer event

where they can like show up and have like a day with the thing in a room or whatever. And other times what's happening more and more is they'll just release the thing either to reviewers on the day it starts selling or they'll give the thing to reviewers and be like, yeah, just start writing, no embargo, whatever you want. And then we all have to sort of like a showdown.

Like we all look at each other in the virtual saloon that is Twitter. And we're like, when are you going to draw? Yeah. And we like decide how long, like but it's nice because then you get to you get to like choose how long you are going to spend reviewing a thing

instead of trying to hit the embargo that, you know, everybody's going to hit. But it also means that there's this weird, like, how quickly should a review get written? How much time should you spend with it? And why did they choose to do it this way? You have this, like, thing in the back of your mind. When a movie gets released with no reviews, you know it's bad, right? The movie studio wants to, like, have a chance for, like, the first three days to go to get ticket sales before word or mouth. It's like, oh, wait, no, this is bad, right? I don't know whether that rule applies to phones or not. I actually really don't. Yeah, I think the broad thing you're saying is true. The media landscape has dramatically changed for everything.

Yep. When you're launching a product, you want maximum exposure. In the old days of like two years ago, reviewers are the ones who are going to write about your product. There was not an ecosystem of other people following a variety of other rules of how they were going to... You were a key landmark on the path to more exposure. Yeah. Yeah. But also like there wasn't like, I don't know, medium. Yeah, now there's just like a lot of people who, like, you can see a phone too and they'll just like produce some content around it. Yeah. Fine. Like you can, I don't know, you can go find a famous actor and be like, here's a phone. We post five Instagram photos of you being happy with it and they'll do it.

So we can clarify a little bit of the stakes here. Can you clarify the tradeoff between like I have a phone for 24 hours? What can I say definitively about it versus I have a week? Like, you know, what is that tradeoff? Oh, I mean, with the week, you are more likely to discover bugs. You have a much better sense of battery life. You have a much better sense of, like, performance over time. You settle in with the thing.

There's things that you might not notice in the first day. Like, is the button actually convenient or not? Is the, you know, whatever, weird new way that it unlocks or that the way the home screen works? Or like, is this new setting to do this thing actually useful or not? That you'll try it for the first day. But you're like, yeah, it's like trying a new food. I maintain that you should, before you project a food and say I hate that food, you should eat it three times. The first time it's like, octopus, I mean, I guess.

The second time is like, okay, I tried it once, I got through it, but I'll try it again. Let's see if I actually maybe it was wrong the first time. I got to have, and then the third time was like, you know, I really hate that thing, but just maybe it, maybe it was made poorly the first couple times. I've been doing this with raw tomatoes for 39 years. This is how I approach pop music. I almost dislike every single new pop song I hear. Yeah. And then a few of them, I hear them a second time at Starbucks.

That's how they get you. And then the third time. Okay, we're completely awesome. It's on my must-listen Spotify. Paul, you were like the first person ever played Taylor Shoeff to me. I don't know if I believe this. Okay. We should talk about the phone.

We should talk about the phone. All of this was like a big setup. Yeah. A 2020 theme is. big companies monkeying with the standard review procedure. Right. That has really determined a lot of how reviews get made in the world for a very long time. A lot of monkeying.

The first wave, which was a disaster, I hope everybody learned their lesson, was just to not give review units out, and then Dieter could discover that the folding phones are broken. So we tried that approach. With the S-20, they just gave you the phone, no embargo. Yeah. Which is better or worse. So the embargo, the reason for the embargo is it creates a sense of fairness. Yeah.

Right. You hand out a phone of the embargo. Someone's going to publish it the first day. Yeah. And that one might not be any good. And you don't get to the person who's going to wait a week and do all the rigorous testing. Is it a disadvantage? Whatever.

Well, so the way it happens now is a lot of people will publish like rolling reviews or like constantly updating reviews. And I think that's totally fine. I tend to not like doing that because my first day impression, once I'm a I've said it, and if I want to backtrack on it, or I have something else different to say about it. I just, I don't know. I'm slow. I like to, like, form a complete thought instead of tell you half a thought. That's what Twitter is for, with typos.

I'll tell you half thoughts on Twitter. All day long, for free. Well, Twitter makes money. Yeah. That's the real. That's the real rabbit. Okay. All that's say, you got the phone, no embargo.

It took you a while. Your review is out. Yes. Dramatic fiasco. So the, I went on this whole tangent about not a binning and how the camera works before, so I don't want to do that again. But the core of this phone is it's 5G. It's got a huge screen with a high refresh rate,

and it has an all-new camera system that is a radical departure in many ways from the way that smartphone cameras have worked before. And it has a big-ass battery. Huge high-refresh rate screen, knocked it out of the park. Samsung wins again by making the best display on a smartphone. Yeah.

They just did. It's great. I love it. The huge battery solves whatever problems might come from any number of things. 5G draining your your download, your battery because it's downloaded too fast? No problem.

Got a huge 5,000-million-a-battery. Which, that was something... Set the higher fresh rate screen? No problem. Whatever you do, the papers over mini-problems because it's just a big-ass battery. Love it. Great. Huge win. 5G, you know, it's 5G. It exists.

You can find it. Yeah, Paul just ran a speed test on the phone. He got 13 down, but I think that's on LTE. Yeah, you got to go out to the street corner and stand in one particular spot and then like literally like make a praying motion to hold the phone up to the tower. 5G will change everything. We'll all just be more mindful.

But T-Mobile 5G in New York is mid-band and so you can get better speed sort of everywhere, but it's not radically better. Anyway, I said this. What, you haven't done any robot surgery with your cat? Don't buy it because it's a 5G phone. You're just going to get it. It's got this new Snap 865 processor that doesn't seem to me to radically change experience. Presumably it does and that it like allows them.

to do a bunch of stuff that like they couldn't otherwise do like that refresh rate screen or whatever. But the big, big bet, the differentiating thing, especially on the S20 Ultra, is the 108 megapixel camera. And it has two problems, one of which everyone has experienced, which is that it has a hard time autofocusing. It hunts for focus. And you really see it in video. You'll see it in photos, but photos is actually, it took me a minute to discover it.

It took me more than a day to discover it, actually. because I just assumed that, you know, I'm not that great of a photographer, which makes me a great phone camera reviewer in some ways because, like, if they can make me take good photos, then, like, that's a good sign. But I was getting a lot of out of focus photos, and I was just like, I must just be bad at this. But no, it's actually bad at autofocus. Wow, that is one of the most deeder things that ever heard.

I'm going to take this on myself. Yeah. Always blame yourself. But then the second thing, and this is a little bit hard. to convey, even when I post photos on the website, it's because everybody has a different aesthetic thing. And I could put up like an entire gallery. And I might do that later.

But with faces in particular, the assumptions that you can make about what the phone will do go completely out the window. So you learn a phone's camera will light things in a certain way, will color things in a certain way. You get a sense of what it's going to do so that you can trust it. And then as soon as it sees a face, it's like, yeah, just kidding. We're going to change everything. This is the really jarring illustration in your review where you're taking a picture of a guy. He's looking at you.

He looks kind of orange and a little fuzzy. And then when he looks at 45 degrees, the picture is way darker. It's right sharper. It's completely different. Yeah. And beauty mode is a thing. Skin lightning is a thing. It's a thing that often has like, like, rate.

undertones that are problematic. We actually very specifically took lots of photos of lots of different people, lots of different skin tones, and do not think that Samsung is Doing anything inappropriate in that regard to skin tone But it is making these like lighting and like white balance choices that are just Impossible to predict when you see a face It might go green. It might go yellow. Who knows? It wants to get rid of shadows and so it like it just brings up mid tones and shadows way too much And then the worst one for me is the softening. It runs a softening filter on faces to get rid of like a little bit of blemishes. And I am okay in principle with the camera doing all of those things, including and especially the softening.

But there should be a button that tells you that it's happening and you should be able to turn it off. And there just isn't that for the main camera. It's just on. But you can use like a pro mode. You can turn on pro mode. But then like you're like you're going to have to go into pro mode every time. And promo makes you turn on like you have to set all the other settings. Well, the settings are all like basically on auto and pro mode.

So like you could theoretically go to promo, take the photo, and it's like functionally equivalent to just leaving it an auto basically, sort of maybe. I don't know. Like that's the problem, right? But no one's going to do that. Everyone's going to hit the shutter button. Yeah. And the defaults matter the most on these cameras. Yeah.

Like we could review every camera with like a variety of pro camera apps. Yeah. And it doesn't count. Like it's not the real thing. So to be clear, everybody does this with face. Yes, this is correct. So if Apple, when it sees a face, the iPhone, Apple literally calls it re-lighting the face. They will re-expose the face.

They do all their fancy computational photography, all the AI. They're like, we know this scene. We know what it should look like. We will, what is a photo. We've seen a face or two. Yeah. It's the whole what is a photo conversation. Like they're sort of generating an image that's closer to what they think it should look like.

Like, Google does this. Everybody's kind of re-metering and re-exposing, especially with HDR. Samsung is doing it extremely aggressively. Yes. To the point where turning your head 45 degrees produces just a dramatically different photo, which I don't really know what's going on here. It's hard to tell. But it seems like Samsung's person detection AI only sees a person when you're looking dead at the camera.

And if you just turn away, they're like, where'd the person got? No. Like a toddler? It's like a blanket. Like it's a totally different metering mode if you just turn your head. That seems extremely problematic. Like it's just confused about what it's looking at. And then it is so, so dramatic when it does see that face and meter that you end up with like just, it's just a weird looking photo.

Yeah, it's just too much. And I didn't believe, I mean, the. Did it believe me? D. D. Part one is, first, the fiasco is localized to the DMs between me and Dieter. Yeah. I'm just like, is that happening?

It's like many, many more slacks have arrived. Yeah. Dieter's like, I took 45 more photos. They're in this lightroom album. I was on a plane. I was like, you can't look at this when you're on a plane because GoGo crushes photos. Don't make any judgments there. At the airport, like, locally downloading files.

I'm like looking at photos of Deeter on a plane. The people sitting next to me in the plane are like, well, he's looking at that guy a lot. But it's just obviously there. Yeah. And then there's the second part, which I don't think is quite the metering stuff. It's like Samsung's look is still Samsung's look. And they've toned it down a little bit. Yeah.

But the combo platter of the unpredictable metering and the focus in Samsung's look is not good. Right. And it not being good when it's like, to me, it's the most important feature of this phone. To other people, it might be the 5G or the size. But to me, it's that. Otherwise, just get an S20 plus, right? Or an S20, which we will review. But, like, Google throws imaging algorithms at a stock sensor.

Yeah. And what they get out of it is rock-solid consistency. Yes. Right? Like, a pixel photo looks like a pixel photo. I think often produces winners. Like, in just a comparison, I often prefer the pixel photo. Apple has gotten really good this year.

they're sort of less consistent. I don't know. Deep Fusion ever actually did anything. Yeah. It seems like maybe they never actually shipped it. Like I don't even know. Like there's no way to tell. There's not even a setting that lets you know if it's not.

But like iPhone photos look very good on balance. They've got it better. Like they're up there. Yeah. Right. Samsung is like inconsistent and weird looking is not a competitive zone to be in. They have, they do take photos that are up there much of the time. but it's the inconsistency that's the problem.

And the big swing of we're going to go with 108 megapixel camera, and I think it's 48 on the telephoto or something, it's 40 on the selfie and all the binning and all the other stuff, and you could take 108 megapixel photo if it remosayex, like all that extra stuff, I don't know how actually worth it it was. Maybe you get the telephoto, because that's like the other reason to get the ultra,

you get that periscope lens with the telephoto. And I think at like up to 30X, which is very impressive. It produces good enough photos. And at 10x, no, 8X technically, because that's how far the pixel goes, so that's where I tested it. It wins, hands down, every time. Yeah. Like, if you're taking something that is 8x away and you're zooming in that far, the only thing that will do better on a, is not a phone. Like a camera.

Like, get a zoom lens on a real camera. I did it on the Sony, RX100 Mark 7, which has got a little 200, you know, zoom lens on it. But yeah, like that is an unmitigated, unmitigated. win. But the question is, what do you blame on like the new technology, right? Is the autofocus function of the way that they're choosing to do like phase detect or whatever on the 108 megapixel sensor? I think the answer might be yes, but maybe they can fix it because that's the next part, which is they finally promised a software update to me like like 12 hours for the review went up. Wait, can I can I talk about that part? I mean, you're going to have a much more,

I'm just going to let you have emotions. I'm going to try to step us through the canology. Okay. So there's no embargo. This is where we all came back. All that, the five minutes of inside baseball we did before this began. Yeah. There's no embargo. Right.

So Ray Wong and Evan Rogers, Evan Rogers, an expert person, did a really in-depth review of the camera for input. Yep. They found the autofocus issue. Yep. Evan, he was tweeting, he thinks the color is a little weird. Yeah. Okay. But they published before everybody else.

They were the first ones at the gate. Yep. And to their credit, they caught the autofocus issue. They caught the auto focus issue, yeah. Sasha Segan, a PC mag, goes up the, I think the next day. I think it must have been the next day, maybe day after. Within the window. Yeah.

Great phone, shouldn't spend this much money until they fix the autofocus issue. Yep. I would say at this point, Samsung is, like, freaking out. By this time, I had already been on the phone with Samsung for like a half an hour, being like, hear all the problems. And Dieter has not yet looked at the autofocus issue. Well, I have, but at this point, I was, when input went up, I was, like, having doubts. And I actually at some point tweeted, like, I have doubts.

It may have been after their thing went up. But I still wasn't 100% sure if it was like, I was dumb or, like, I hadn't learned the habits of this camera. Because every camera's different. Deeter's criticism is at this point, it's a lot of slacks about the faces and the colors and inconsistency. So he's been on the phone with Samsung about that stuff. Yes. Input and PC mag are like, autofocus is bad.

I think at this point it is safe to say like, okay, now we're like, Dieter's re-reporting the review. Like, he's back on the phone. Yeah. And then Samsung last night was like, we're always improving our cameras. We're always improving our cameras.

So when I called them Monday, I think it was, and I was like 20 minutes, like, here's what I'm seeing, blah, blah, blah. They're like, yep, okay, that's interesting, good feedback. And I was like, okay, anything else, guys? Okay. And so the statement that they would, that they were planning

a future update, not necessarily a pre-store release update, just someday in the future, they will update the software to do unspecified things came in just before the review. So I have to make a choice. Like, one, do I, like, wait for this thing someday in the future? Or do I, like, I just go. Like, this is what I experienced on the phone. Maybe there'll be an update in the future. Go.

And, like, I chose to do that in part because, as Neely said, I've reviewed a lot of phones. Neelai, you've reviewed a lot of phones. Paul, one phone. Yeah. What happens when a company says, we'll fix the camera with the software update? It never happens. Never, ever, ever. I'm sorry.

Maybe you can tell me there is one time when one Nokia phone. One Plus did manage to slightly improve some pretty serious issues a couple years ago. No, the only delta is like if the, if when you push the shutter button, the phone lights on fire and you fix that. It's like that. The camera doesn't work and generates corrupt issues. Yeah. Or corrupt files. Okay, you can fix that in software.

The video recording, we forgot to turn on 4K60. Yeah. Whoops. Okay, software update fixes a bug. Yep. Never does it actually change the quality of the camera. That is one of the reasons I publish. The one thing to say is like these seem, the face filter stuff seems like an eminently fixable problem.

Just like turn a knob down. Right? Whether or not they can fix the auto focus is an open question. And this gets more complicated. And I'm just going to say a thing. And some people are going to get mad, but let me finish the sentence. Samsung is not Apple. And what that means, let me finish, is that Apple is a monolith.

They are, they are like centralized control, everything. And like the messaging is on point. And everyone is in locks up and everyone knows what's happening and what to say. and Samsung is just like there's like there's a bunch of divisions there's a bunch of people that aren't talking to other people. So like there's apparently a software update in Korea that may or may not be newer than the firmware I have that may or may not address the autofocus issue. It's unclear. I had a journalist from France say that he was told like on Friday that a software update was coming, which is very confusing because I talked to them on Monday for like a half an hour saying what's going on. So all of that's fine.

But just a lot of people sort of tweet or will talk definitively that like they know a thing about Samsung. But Samsung is not one thing. It's it's so many things. Can we just say Samsung is not knowable? Yeah. Samsung is fundamentally not knowable. Yeah. There are many things to many people.

The people who work at Samsung often do not know what Samsung is doing. And I, that's just, they're just a big sprawling like multinational corporation that doesn't talk to itself very well. Which in some times is like. Which is funny because they make phones. Yeah, but there's a benefit to that sometimes because they're willing to try stuff and do stuff. But every now and then, it's not a benefit because it's like what's going on with this $1,400 phone. So that's the simple answer. Yeah.

Which is it's a huge company. And it is also true that the phone, like a Samsung Galaxy S20, is not a single product. Correct. It is a different product and every carrier in every market. Like Verizon gets its own like skew with its own weird apps. Sprint gets its own customization. They're just like, they make multiple, multiple versions. Yeah, the logistics that Samsung has to go through to get one of these phones out the door on about the same day across the world is truly mind-boggling.

And I think it is probably like more of an accomplishment than what Apple does with the iPhone in some ways. Is there any indication yet if the ultra is the only one with. No, we don't know. I have yet to see any reviews of the regular Galaxy S-20 or S-20 plus. Yeah. So again, the simple explanation for the differing software update things that we've heard, which is in Korea, there's an update that people have been told about that's supposed to be coming. In France, French journalists have just straight up and told an update that fixes a bunch of camera issues are coming. And then in the United States, so we don't know what's going on.

Yeah. You could just blame it as a sprawling global corporation with multiple arms, a huge logistics challenge. They solve credibly. Or it is a multinational disinformation conspiracy aimed at Dieterbaum. Or you could be biased. Oh, come on. If you think about it. If you are hype for this phone, I don't want you to think that I do not like this phone.

I love this phone. I'm concerned about the camera. And if they issue a software update that fixes the camera, I will be the happiest person. I will be very excited because I think that other than that, this thing is like, Very, very impressive. So if you are excited for this phone, don't be like, ugh. Just wait and see if they do something. Don't wait too long because, you know, camera software update stuff and don't pan out.

But never buy any product on the basis of a promise software update. Exactly. The software update will never come and it will never do what you think it will. Yep. And it is just true. The thing that I keep thinking about, though, is like the thing that I make on a regular basis that requires the most logistics is a YouTube video. We have incredible directors and producers, and they're very good at editing. And they put so much more work into making a thing that I do, like, punch in words.

And when we're making this thing, there's no takebacks. Like, you can maybe do a content replace every now and then. But, like, you publish the thing and you can't, like, edit it. To YouTube. It's YouTube. Yeah. So you, like, you want to make sure there aren't any problems. You watch it.

You watch it down. You look for whatever you can. And when something goes up on YouTube that is like, it's not the highest quality or like I said a thing and I kind of flubbed the line or whatever, I definitely know before you've seen it. Like I've seen it. I'm like, well, it's too much. I can't fix it. Like we'd have to reshoot too many things. It's going out.

It's going out the door. I have to assume that inside Samsung, they knew. Oh, they'd have fun knew. Right? They'd have fun knew. Okay. I've always wondered when there's an obvious failure. Well, let's take an even simpler example.

There's the photo relighting. There's the skin smoothing, which has all kinds of cultural implications. Okay, that stuff is very subjective, even if I think it's subjective about it. But like, whatever, you're looking at it. You're like, we think a lot of people are going to like the way this photo looks. Then there's the Zoom. We haven't even talked about this. Like they printed in giant letters on the back of the.

phone 100x space zoom. Yeah. And then you zoom it to 100x. You're like, well, that looks horrible. So, like everyone in the world can just be like, huh, I wonder what 100 X is. And you do it. You don't need some fancy photography skill or like professional eyes. You're just like this photo sucks.

Yeah, except every time I showed it to somebody, they always went, whoa. They get to, they get to have people go, whoa. Sure. That's what it's for. The 30x is the one that's actually useful. The 10x is great. again, like better than the competition. The 30X is like usable.

The 100X is so that they can have people go, whoa. I think they could have done that at 30X. So do I. But it's cool, though, because it's showing you the maximum amount of information that this sensor can possibly obtain. And it's not like every single pixel is good. Once you get up there, they're doing lots and lots of sensor cropping. So the way that the pixel gets the Zoom photos,

they take a bunch of photos. and they use your handshake to gather more data and what is a photo, et cetera, et cetera. Samsung is taking lots of photos. I like that we've done that conversation so much. We're just like, you know, what is a photo? The essential philosophical dilemma of our time, as you are well aware. Samsung is also doing multiple photos, but what they're really doing is this curious mix of, like, zooming and then sensor cropping. That's why they picked a high megapixel sensor.

It's slightly bigger. They can do the bidding or whatever. But when you start zooming in, they can just crop down and still have a ton of megapixels. there's a ton of megapixels to work with. But it's just like a photo of a truck. That is a horrible photo. Sure, but. I mean, this is one of the worst photos I've ever taken.

It's like bright outside. The truck is very far away. Yeah, it's like, okay, it's like if I am an international spy, you know. I don't know where this is going. And I put a microphone that, like, works via like an aerosol spray. And I could just spray it on an object and now I've got a much. and I can listen remotely, right? Uh-huh.

Like, I'm not mad that it's not like Dolby quality audio. I'm proud of my achievement. You know what I mean? Yeah, sure. Like, I understand that this is not comparable to a good photo of you being close to a truck. Yep. But right now, my phone can't get that close. Yep.

So outside my hotel room, there's a dog park here in New York, and I saw a dog frolicking, and I was like, oh, this is a great opportunity. to see if like what Zoom does with like a thing that's moving around. So I like zoomed way in the dog, try to get the shot, you know, shaky, whatever. And I couldn't get a shot of just the dog.

I like, as soon as I took the shot, like the owner walked into frame that I hadn't really, because they were like across the park and they went to go get their dog. And then like, like completely unintentionally, I had just taken like this like really creepy spy photo.

I deleted it immediately. He's like, oh, I don't, I don't want that. Here's what I'm saying. This is going to make full. So you're saying it, it's producing unusable product.

I think that if anybody thinks that they're going to get something. that they're going to want to treasure forever out of the 100x zoom, therefore, like themselves. No, I just took a photo at 30X zoom. Yeah. Which looks fine. And then you can just, like, crop that photo.

Yeah. And that's what the 100x is. And it looks better than if you try to take the photo at 100x. Okay. That's 100x. That's 30x. That's 30x, and I just zoomed in, and that's better. That's obviously better.

Yeah. It's just like they, it's that they printed it on the back of the phone. They did. They printed 100x space soon. They're inviting you to try this feature. They're very proud of it. And it's like, it's not there. And I think that's the one where when you're like they had to know, they definitely knew when they decided to print it on the back of the phone.

Yeah. Like some engineer at Samsung was like, I don't think we should do this. Well, it's something that struck me with your review you were talking about, like this, in some ways, is a Gen 1 device. Yeah, I think so. And that makes a lot of sense with this camera where like, because a lot of what makes a flagship phone so good. is that a flagship phone has everything that the last model got right and then also some more. Right. But when you completely replace a part and you have kind of a new image processing pipeline,

you don't necessarily get to build on your prior successes. Yeah. Theoretically, there is more upside to Samsung's like theory of how a camera, smartphone camera could work here than there is on Google trying to apply ever better, you know, software to, you know, bargain bin sensor. Yeah. Like,

if they can start, continue to do interesting things with, like, combining and uncombinding, you know, sub pixels and their 108 megapixels, and they can, like, up their software game a little bit and,

you know, just roll down the line. theoretically, like, this could be, like, this could be a step change. That's what they wanted to argue.

They just, they didn't finish it. Yeah. And maybe they never will because Samsung, But there's more potential upside here. They just haven't achieved it. And then, of course, Google and Apple aren't going to, like, stop. They're going to keep making stuff.

But that's, like, on two fronts. They're fighting this war on two fronts. One, it is clear to me right now. And I do think this is debatable, but it feels clear to me that on the computational photography, smart HDR side of the world, Google and Apple are firmly in the lead. Yes. They are doing more with processing off relatively stockish sensors than Samsung is able to do with their stockish sensors. Samsung is throwing a bunch of hardware at this problem.

Bigger sensor, not a binning, a periscope zoom lens. Lots of hardware being thrown at this problem. They still do not have the software chops to pull it off. Even if they're trying to do something totally different. Right. They're trying to process that sensor into something that's better. Yeah, the software problem they're solving is now different. And they have to solve the same problem that Apple and Google are solving.

And they also now have to solve this other problem that they've sort of created for themselves. But again, if they can do one or both, I think that this sensor is interesting. I think that they actually do have more upside. But they have to get the software right. I just took 100X zoom. This is trash. I mean, that's it. It's like, it's really cool.

And you get the shutter button and you're like, why did I do that? That's just a creep shot of a person in a building. I just see a ghost. I don't know what you guys are looking at. So I would say that here's the flag there. There are lots of, well, not lots, but there are several 108 megapixel sensor cameras in the world. Yes. None of them have been good.

Right. So if that is indeed a different class of problem, how do we? we make this sensor good? Well, Samsung is doing a slightly different sensor. A slightly different methodology to the way the sensor works and those other cameras. I think that this is better than those from what we've heard. I haven't actually used the other 100 megapixel cameras, so I don't know this for sure. But it's a harder problem to solve than getting a 12 megapixel photo good, I think.

Yeah, and I just think that's like the two problems are right next to each other. Yeah. One, how do we get a great photo out of the big hardware sensor? Two, how do we do all the fancy HDR computational photography stuff, which is now a look? Yeah. Right? Like, we're going to take multiple frames and composite them into one sort of evenly lit frame. What is a photo?

What is a photo? It's just a look that people expect. Yeah. So now you've got to do both, and you're not good. And like, no one has solved the big megapixel sensor problem well, and you're already behind. and that's just a lot of problems for Samsung to solve. The cool thing is that they can, not that they can solve it. Were they to solve it, then they've solved it.

You know what I mean? Like they could just put up. Yeah, it's true. They don't need to shut up. If this rusty old Mustang in the front yard just had an engine and some wheels, it would be faster than your working car. If they release a software update that solves his autofocus problem and solves the sort of the randomization of image style problem,

then this might be a really good camera. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's sort of the baseline of, is it bright outside? Are you taking a great photo? I got good photos for it's bright outside out of the Motorola Razor. So let's not make that in the bar. Yeah, I like the idea that you're on team optimism.

If they ship a software update that is unlike any camera software update in history, this will be the best camera ever made. Right. Yeah, sure, I'll buy it. I'm with you. 100X Zuma. I love it again. Another thing about the sensor is it is in fact physically larger than most phone camera sensors have been to date.

It is like physically larger. They're just cramming more megapixels in it. Like the intuition of all existing cameras is that that's basically the larger the sensor, like the better off you are. The larger the sensor at a constant megapixel count. You want those big, those big pixels, the deep wells. Because they're just trying to get more light. Yeah, but they've been them together. They're not a bit.

But if you think about it, yes, you want more light per pixel, yes. But the summation of all the light that you get is almost directly a function of the area of the size of the sensor. Well, so there's walls between pixels. Oh, God. We did this last time. Can we not talk about non-abinning at this time? It's great. It's a cool tech.

I hope it works. Dramatic fiasco with a global disinformation campaign aimed only at Dieterberg. So I want to talk about one thing that you did like, camera-wise. Okay. You love the selfie camera. Oh, the selfie camera is amazing. It does, it's 40 megapixels. It defaults to 10, so it's quadributing.

It's also non-emitting. It's quadribending because it's 4 to 1 instead of 9 to 1. It has beauty filters. But if you turn them off, it just takes, you can see all your wrinkles and, you know, imperfections on your skin if you want. Samsung has improved over its own portrait mode stuff. I don't quite say dramatically, but noticeably. But it still has that sort of like blocky texture. You know what I mean?

But it's way better than it was before. It's definitely, especially in the selfie camera, better than what the pixel can do. The classic test is you like you turn your head so your glasses are sticking out a little bit. And like can the portrait mode realize that that's part of your face and shouldn't be blurred? Pixel still lifts that a lot of the time and this thing got it. I really, really like the selfie camera. way more than I expected to. That's great.

Yeah. I mean, I'm all in on gigantic megapixel selfie cameras. Like, if Apple wants to, like, really knock it out apart, they'd be like, the front camera is the same as the back camera, and they never want to upgrade their iPhones. They won't do that because they have to manage their bezels. I should say some people do not like the fingerprint sensor as much as I do. I think it's good enough. I'm happy with it. And I love just having the whole screen, like not having a notch.

It's just, or a big bezel at the top. It's just, it does just feel. differently every day when you look at it to like just have that huge screen with no interruption on it except for a tiny hole for the camera. Yeah. And I the 120 hertz is very nice. The 120 hertz is incredibly nice. Okay. So what happens next? We wait for the software update and we'll see what happens with it and we review the S20 and S20 plus which have a high megapixel cameras, um, but not a not a hundred and eight and they don't have the periscope lens. But we'll see if anything is different there, especially with

auto focus. I think that's going to be the big one to check. And then, yeah, man, that's, you know, they sell these things, and they're selling the S-10s for a deep discount, and I think that the S-10 is still a very good phone, and you know what the S-10 does? Auto-focus? Works with a headphone jack.

Also, like, I didn't know, $1,400. It's a lot. There's a lot of money for a phone. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, it's got $1,600 for the $5, $12, 16 gigs of RAM. But, like, You can pin apps to RAM, right? Which is like, then they just, your browser just won't close in the background.

I think that's pretty cool. Which is pretty cool. You know, Daring Fireball, John Gruber wrote a post that was like, let's be real about how much phones cost. And he's like, it's okay to spend that much money on a phone if you know how to get the use out of it. That's why, like, this isn't a tragedy quite. But like, if they can fix the camera, like, that could be a potential use out of it. But there are other people who will be like, yes, I will get $1,400 of use out of this huge screen, the storage. the expandable storage, the amount of RAM that this has, you know, whatever.

Like all the stuff that you can do with the phone. Decks. Yeah. Stabilized video if the auto focus works. Stabilized video if the auto focus works. It is, it's not like a huge, massive improvement over the S-10, but it's a slight improvement. It, like, stabilizes over like another axis, basically. Like, I think it does a roll now or pitch or something. It's better.

But it's not, it's not, I don't think it's quite up to what the iPhone can do, especially with, like, the iPhone's really good at, um, um, adjusting color and light balance as you move in and out of shadow. And I don't think that Samsung's quite there yet. You can shoot 8K though. I guess, yeah. I mean, I guess you just listed a bunch of things that could be considered a reason. But like, for me, I need a real specific reason in my head of why this phone I'm going to spend more than I spent on my last phone.

Now, I understand like, oh, every year I spend $1,000 on the phone, it's a lot to spend, but I use my phone a lot, you know? But like, this year I'm going to spend $1,400. on a phone. Like, what changed? What got so, what new capability does this phone provide me? Yeah, it's 5G and 100X Zoom. Just don't try it. And a huge, beautiful screen and tons of RAM and tons of storage.

Huge beautiful screen, tons of RAM and tons of storage is like not. Yeah, okay. You can get that from a lot of places now, right? You can get that from One Plus pretty cheaply. Yeah. It's a 5G radio to use on one street corner in a praying position. Or just do you sit on? T-Mobile and eventually it'll get certified for AT&T 5G and that that's better.

So it's that if you would like such a thing. And it's a zoom lens. And it's very pretty. It is very pretty. I think this is the year of the $250 phone for me. Pixifioria, it's coming. Not convinced. All right.

We're going to take a break. It's emotional. Everyone needs a break. And then Julia Alexander, two weeks in a row. Disney News, I strongly suspect it will be even more emotional. for the next segment. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard.

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Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. Julia. Yes. Big news in the world of Bobbs and Covens this week. Big news. The media industry. Big news in my world.

Yeah, huge. So, again, I was on a lot of planes this week. Yeah. So I spent some time on a plane watching Deter emotionally process the Galaxy S-20. And then on my flight back, I spent all that time on a plane watching you emotionally process Disney CEO Bob Iger stepping up? Yeah, he's not stepping down. He even step away.

He just stepped to a more exalted role. He pulled the most baller move in the world. Explain what happened. All right. So Bob Iger, former CEO of Disney, because it's effective immediately, announced that he was taking on a new role. He's the executive chairman of Disney. It's a role he made up. Yeah, it's his role.

He's just like, I would like to do it. Essentially, in his mind, he saw it as the perfect time post Disney Plus, post everything, to go and just work with the creative teams and focus entirely on the creative side of content at Disney. Disney is a content company. So that makes a lot of sense. And he announced that Bob Chapic, Bob Chapic, I spoke to like four Disney people yesterday and asked how to say his last name and got different answers each time. Everyone I talked about it just calls them Bob C. Yeah.

What is important here is that his name is also Bob. Yeah. There's a lot of Bob's and Allens and Kevin's at Disney. Yeah. Just so many of them. There are three Allens on that org chart that I looked at. And really, the face of Marvel is a Bob because it's Robert. So we've got a lot of Bob's in there.

Yeah. Okay. So there's Bob Iger. Yeah. And there's Bobby C. Bobby C. Bobby C's the new guy. He's the CEO of Disney.

Where did he come from? Yeah. So he's been with the company. for close to 30 years. He's kind of a company man. He was been in every department. He was part of home entertainment. He was one of the leading executives on getting the distribution deal between Disney and iTunes because he was like, hey, I think digital's taken off and Apple seems to have a grasp on it. So he set that up. Then he got moved over to consumer products where he went to basically clean house for Iger. It was kind of like paying your dues to get into the mob. And he got in. And he became Iger's loyal. What did he do? He cleaned house. He went in and they were very anti-Iger because this was post, you know, a couple of years, but post the Eisner Eiger, the Michael Eisner, who was the former CEO of Disney.

Bob Eiger taking over. So that's that happening. So he got rid of the Eisner guys. Basically. He goes in. He's like, I'm cleaning house. Then eventually he's moved to parks. He's instrumental in setting up the Shanghai resort, which is a huge resort for Disney.

And then he became CEO. That was the whole thing. He's the guy. He's a guy. I would argue he is not, I would argue many people inside Disney don't think he's the guy. Really? So this is all very, so this is just what happened. This is what happened.

And by the way, when I was Julia, what happened? She didn't say Disney CEO Bob Liger stepped up. No, there's like all this dramatic stuff, this history of the new guy. Yeah. But there's a thing that didn't happen here, which is the Kevin. Yeah, one of the Kevin's. One of the many Kevins. Kevin Meyer, who runs Disney Plus.

Yeah. whoever everyone thought was going to be the CEO Right Is not the CEO Right The other thing that happened Is that everyone was surprised Yeah, because there was a lot of things that were happening

He had, Iger had extended his contract I think he was not even He was about a third I think or into his contract Because he had extended He had just finished his book tour He was supposed to appear at conferences As the CEO of Disney in like a few months Clearly that

He might still attend but he's not going to be CEO So it was just really jarring because it came out of nowhere. It was a random Tuesday. Everyone I spoke to was just like, something is happening. The conspiracy theories that hit my DMs were just amazing.

Everything from he's going to be Bloomberg's VP running candidate to, yeah, he's sick, to everything in between. So there was a lot of confusion over what was happening because it was so sudden. And if we remember the last time there was a Disney executive change, which I do regularly,

it was a lot of. long, long, public, very bad process. I mean, it was just bad. And Michael Eisner was ousted. And it was a year, but they announced. Like, there was a year change, and they were figuring it out. And it would all kind of move over eventually. This was like, I am no longer CEO immediately.

Yeah. And that leads to a lot of confusion and scare in the markets. Julia, you didn't like my tweet. And so I feel like I'm justified in making this joke again. This is why we bring you on here to read our bad tweets at you. So when Bob said he was stepping down, did you need to go get a drink later? Because it was so stressful? I did, actually.

Would you say that Iger augured loggers? Dieter. No, look, Deeter, I love you. You're like a brother to me. I want you to get the hell out. Just go. Just think about what you did. I'm so happy I got to look at you say that.

Because there's a lot of shame when he does it. It was just so good. But there's this other underline. drama, which is it happened very suddenly. Yeah. It's Bob C. who always seemed like he was in the running. Yeah.

But maybe wasn't the favorite. The guy who runs streaming Kevin Meyer was supposedly the favorite. Right. And he didn't get the gig. What happened there? So from my understanding, the thing about Bob C. Is that he is a company man. And to an extent he's an Iger company man.

He's someone who really kind of idolizes Bob Iger. And so he's someone that Iger can mold into what they need to carry out the next 10 years of Disney. Like that's someone who can then basically deploy what Iger has set up and just keep that running. The really great thing about Iger is he said in a call to investors after the news went out that he's basically made Disney in a lot of ways as autonomous machines because the heads that he has set up just are good at what they do. Kevin Feigy runs Marvel beautifully. Kathleen Kennedy and John Favro basically run Lucasfilm pretty well. Yeah, that's a medium great. Yeah, so let's go on there.

Sean Bailey does his job really well. And then you've got Kevin Mayer, who's exceedingly good at what he does. Extremely good. And he runs Disney Plus and Hulu. Yeah, he runs. So his department is direct-to-consumer and international. So he runs hot stuff. He would also now look over hot star in India.

Like, he looks over everything. My assumption, and based on what people told me, is that Bob C gets the job because the board really likes Bob C. They like the idea that he can be the space of Disney. they like that he can basically be a company man. Kevin Mayer, who's extremely good at strategizing, who is probably one of the best strategist Disney has ever had, next to Iger, who came up that way too, can continue doing what they need him to do,

and that's really shaping streaming in the streaming wars era. Like, they need him to focus on that. There are other issues that have come up with mayor that are like people publicly reported, he's very aggressive, he's a bulldog, he's kind of like, that's his whole stance, and that doesn't necessarily jive well, with Disney on the public front.

When you think of Bob Iger, you think of Uncle Bob's, what a lot of industry call them, right? Because he's just charismatic and lovable. And that works for the Disney brand. And Meyer, sorry, is just very good at what he does, but is he the face of Disney? That's the question the board has to look over. And clearly they went with Bobsey.

And a surprise 4 p.m. Tuesday night announcement. Yeah. I mean, the great thing is that this is just in tune with what Disney has done. I mean, 25 years ago, you had arguably the biggest public Disney scandal which was with after their COO

Frank Wells died. Jeffrey Katzenberg was like I'm who's now the head of Quibi is now like I'm going to be your second in command. Michael Eisner promised him this apparently on a walk in like Salt Lake City Michael Eisner goes actually we're not going to do that and then a few months later

Katzenberg is fired and starts Dreamworks right and it's like a public brawl like they're fighting over this but that's how you get Prince of Yeah, that's how you get a Bugs Life and Ants at the same day, like literally the same day. Same thing happens in 2004, 2005, right? It's like, this is like the Disney story in a lot of ways. So do you think Kevin stays?

This is the conversation I had. A former executive. One of the Kevin's. Kevin Meyer. Yeah, a former executive told me he had a great quote and it was like, you know, you think of a bake-off and the second place winner doesn't necessarily stay around to see if they can win again. They go and do something else. At the same time, you know, Kevin's got a really good position at Disney and he'll

still get to work with Iger for the next, you know, up until the end of 2021. So Iger, yeah, he's on for, it's like 22 months until the end of 22, 22 months until the end of 2021. That's his contract. He's executive chairman. Yeah. The CEO reports to him. Yeah.

It's great. It really feels like they just move some titles around. Yeah. I mean, he had a great quote on CNBC. He just went, I didn't want to run the company anymore. And I was like, that's a mood. Like, that's just, it's like, yeah. do this. Yeah, it's like, I'm tired. I don't want to do this anymore. You've extended my

contract so many times already. I mean, obviously for it to happen on a Tuesday afternoon, something happened, right? This is the story. I'm trying to chase. Something has happened for Bob Iger to go, I don't want to do this anymore. Like, I'm going to just take a step back to an extent and focus on creative. At the same time, it's what he likes. I think he generally liked being able to think about content and work with Kevin Feigey over at Marvel and Kevin Mayer on streaming and be able to strategize with them and figure out the next five, ten years. years. I think it said Bob Iger finally.

He's a busy guy. And so he finally found the time to go watch Star Wars Rise of Skywalker. And he's like, nope. Goodbye. Wow. And he's like, well, what do you do? But he's just like, they can't like redo. Bob Iger stepping down his Disney CEO.

Yeah. So he can reboot Rise of Skywalker. That's like, that'd be great. That's the ultimate. Like he's got the board like the masters of the universe, Disney board all in a room. He's like, I'm going to just direct Rise of Skywalker. myself, actually. We're going to pull it. We're going to do it next year. I'm just impressed that J.J. Abrams wasn't named CEO at this point.

They're like, you run the company. Well, so the reason I want to talk to you about that, there's the mechanics of the change. Yeah. There's the drama of the characters. But Disney is the big player in the streaming wars. They, like Iger is saying, like, our strategy is set. We've executed all the pieces. And now it's just about creative.

Also, I would prefer never to think about our parks ever again. Like, that's where he's at, right? He's like, I don't want to run the boring parts. I just want to do the fun stuff. Which, again, is a mood. It's a mood. I'm totally, totally by that. Extremely sympathetic to that idea.

But, like, where does it leave Disney in this moment where there's so much activity in the streaming wars? Right. It's really funny because this happened at a time. Iger kept saying our strategy is deployed, we're going on the Disney Plus front. And while this is happening, like, yes, they have 28 million subscribers. which is not something they'll do in their next quarter. They're not going to get $28 million again, although they are launching internationally, so who knows?

Maybe they are. I was just talking to someone who said that they're working overtime on making sure the UK launch goes really well. So they've got that to worry about. But back home, when we look at the content on Disney Plus, which is what it matters, that's all it matters at the end of the day to consumers. They don't actually have the strategy in place because two of the original series that they came up with for Disney Plus got moved to Hulu.

The third series that's just Who Knows What's Going On With It is Lizzie McGuire A big Disney franchise And now that suddenly is No one knows what's going on with it The showrunner just said it was considered Too Adult for Disney Plus How Lizzie McGuire is too adult for Disney Plus

I would love to know I would love to know So if you take out If you actually take out Marvel and Star Wars To an extent Pixar Disney Plus does not have much They have a proud family remake They have a Mighty Duck series, and they have a Turner and Hooch series.

I mean, I love me some Turner and Hooch. I know, but that's it. Everything else is like Marvel and Star Wars, which makes sense. But from what I have heard is like the content side of Disney Plus is undergoing issues because they don't have an identity. So what Iger, from what I hear from people have said, is like, I'm going to give slots to Kevin Feig and Kathleen Kennedy. You get three a year, you get two a year, do what you want with it. I don't care. slots in the app you mean.

Yeah, so it's like every month or every three months you have something here and we'll bring people in that way. But in terms of strategy, they actually don't have a great strategy in place because they set out to do all these Disney Plus shows, then decided they weren't made for Disney Plus. They were Hulu shows, which is an advantage only Disney has because they have multiple streaming services. And now they're moving that around. Well, multiple-scale streaming services. Right. AT&T has multiple streaming services. But no one thinks that's an advantage.

Yeah, they just all have slightly different names. Facing TV now, which obviously does not compete with DirecTV now. Yeah. Sure. So that's exactly where that. So is your strategy in place? If you don't know what the identity of your core flagship streaming services, I don't think it is. I would argue it's not.

I have argued last night for many hours that it was not with people at Disney. So they have to figure that out. And I do think Iger being able to just focus on that and not have to do investors calls every three months where he's like clearly bored. It's like, I think that works out really. well for him. The question is if mayor leaves in the middle of them launching internationally, in the middle of them going up against Peacock from NBC Universal, HBO Max, et cetera, et cetera, what happens to that streaming unit, which is still undergoing changes, it's still undergoing identity, you know, stuff, who knows? I mean, he thinks it's in place because they have 20 million

subscribers, they're scaling, they have partnerships, they have content from Star Wars and Marvel. That's really what matters. Let's talk about that. Let me push on that all a bit. Do they, Right, like all the good Marvel people are dead, by what you mean, Tony Stark? Whoops, spoiler alert? I was actually going to get mad, and then you said Tony. I was like, I don't know what to feel now. Right, but like the good one's dead. Like Robert Downey Jr. is not coming back.

Whatever. He's on Sony. He's sort of Marble. So there you got. Marvelesque. Marvelesque. Star Wars is over, right? And then 20 years to now, we're going to reboot the Avengers.

And that is going to, I'm assuming, just drive you insane. Probably. Okay. Just guess to guess that when they reboot the Avengers franchise. Yeah, if Spider-Man has taught us anything, we can tolerate a reboot every like five years. Right, but like they're in a moment where they're doing like ancillary content. Right. They're doing Siri, Wanda Vision.

Right. You have to be hardcore in the Avengers verse to care about that. Yeah, I would argue that's true. Okay. Black Panther is great, but like that's not going to do. 11 films over time, right? I don't know how many Avengers movies. It's like 45. There's like four right now. Four Avengers. But you know, though, Black Panther isn't going to spawn the MCU. Sure. The way that sort of Avengers spawn the MCU. Right. Star Wars, the core

narrative is over. There's no new core narrative. It's just bits and pieces inside of it, like the Middleorean. Doesn't that seem like the biggest problem for them? I mean, this is why they're relying and paying a lot of money to people like Kevin Pige, because they're like, you can figure it out. They know that. They know they're at a point where, They've told investors this, right, where they've said, it's 2020 is going to be fine, but it's not going to be 2019, right? We figured it out. They get asked this a lot where it's like, when does the Marvel tiredness, exhaustion kick in? And when do you guys figure this out?

They kind of keep proving that they have, that they can bring people in just based on the Marvel name and the Star Wars name. People tune in to see Mandalorian. There was nothing really there attached to the main Star Wars thing. And then Baby Yoda became a thing. So except for the main thing. And they're launching, well, yeah, but they're launching, the Marvel TV universe on Disney Plus is launching with Falcon and Winter Soldier, which are two big Captain America characters that people know from the series. And I think they'll just kind of continue to lead with that. Where it's like, yeah, Wanda Vision has two characters that you know from the main Avengers.

And they'll tease us out. Then they've got Loki, they've got Hawkeye, like they've got the big guys coming back. Are they going to get, yeah, Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans back? No. They want to pay for it. But at the same time, they've proven, after the Avengers, people are like, what are they going to do now? They turned Ant Man into a success. They turned Guardians of the Galaxy into a success.

It turned into a big success of the theme parks. They can figure it out really well. They just have to be inventive with it, which is where I pitch my idea, which is fast and furious, but pod racing. Have you considered change you named a Bob? Or Kevin. That's a great pitch. Kevin's don't make it, though. There's a Kevin's ceiling that is very clear.

and Tom's. My takeaway is that Disney's future success depends on Hawkeye. Yeah. You can just refer to Hawkeye as one of the big guys. I mean, he is. I mean, Hawkeye was part of the key reason why they succeeded in endgame.

Here's the thing. Here's the thing. Pulls up my Tumblr. Wow. I genuinely feel like people have already bought so far into, I think of one of our news editors, like Haim, who's just bought so far into the idea of Marvel and Star Wars.

It doesn't even have to be anything to do with Skywalker. It doesn't be anything to do with Iron Man. They're just into the idea of what it is. And I think Kevin Feige has proven that they can bring people in just based on the idea that it is Marvel. Is that going to keep people going throughout Disney Plus? I mean, no, it's why they have the Simpsons. Right?

It's like there's a reason that you bring a show like The Simpsons in and you go, if you're done with this, you can watch the show now. But add in Lucasfilm, Marvel, Pixar, especially if you have families, I think they're fine. Let me contrast this with other shooting work competitors. Netflix. Netflix has a massive library. They bought a lot of stuff.

They make a lot of stuff. If you pay for Netflix, it is almost certain that there is something that the algorithm will find for you. Or there's something you have never seen. Or there's something new. Right. Like there's just so much new stuff happening in Netflix all the time, plus they're huge library. Even though stuff is going away. But it's just like vast library of stuff where you're like, just play me something.

it will almost certainly, it will be new to you at least. Disney doesn't have that, right? It's a very finite library, and they're not flooding it with new stuff. Right. At the same rate that Netflix does. No. And they've spoken about that. I mean, that was the biggest question for two years when they announced it and they were leading up to an Iger.

That was the question he got a lot. And he said, we're not going to have the output of Netflix. We're not going to have that for many years, if ever. Like, that's just not going to be where we're at. At the same time, they bought Fox. There is a lot of, I mean, they put Nat Geo on there. They put The Simpsons. There's a lot of stuff they could bring over.

But that stuff is going to Hulu. Well, not necessarily X-Men. X-Men's going to Disney, right? And that's arguably more of a Hulu. I mean, this is the debate. But like... Wait, wait, tell me why X-Men is a Hulu. Is it...

Wait, the movies or the cartoons? The movies. The movies are going to Disney Plus. Yeah, I mean, they are already on Disney Plus. What tile are they going to go under? But Marvel, I guess. It would go under Marvel. I guess that makes sense.

I don't think of the Fox X-Men movies as Marvel properties. Well, this is the issue. This is what I yell. out is like that's why you're here. Yes. By all means. Behind Hulu and Disney Plus doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Like there's no overlap between what is a Disney Plus thing, except that it's under PG-13 and what is a Hulu thing?

But even then they're taking all their Disney Plus stuff made for Disney Plus, moving it to Hulu and then bringing Hulu stuff over to Disney Plus, no way that doesn't make any sense. But to answer your original question, it's like they can bring stuff over from Fox if they want to. They now own a lot of stuff that they can. bring if there's like, oh, people are leaving. There's not enough to watch. Let's bring in a little bit

more titles. We can figure out what works under PG-13. So like Logan is never going to hit Disney Plus. That would be incredible. If there was an accidental way that ended up, that would be phenomenal. It's never going to hit Disney Plus. That's a Hulu thing. Same with Deadpool. It's just not going to be on Disney Plus. But they do know that... Bob C's got some wild ideas. They do know they have this. I mean, this is where HBO Max and Peacock come in, right?

So NBC University... Sorry, Warner Media and NBC Universal, that's their big pitch. It's like, not only are we building, literally building new studios, new networks designed just for streaming. We also have all of HBO, but then we have all these other networks we own and all these other shows we own. Like a house of brands. Yeah, like CV. It worked out real well for CBS Viacom. But you look at Netflix, Netflix is losing all those, right?

That's the thing. Netflix is losing almost everything, which is why they're pushing so much of their originals and why. they're pushing so much, like they're spending a report at least like $17 billion on content this year. That's more than any other studio because they know they have to do that. Disney is going to get by on having a series like the Mandalorian, Falcon Winter Soldier, every three months that people will keep subscribe to. And that will hopefully keep them there. And Kevin Mayer, very smartly said in November, which also why we're bundling Hulu really cheaply

because we know you'll probably get bored. Do you have you tried Hulu? Yeah. Like, that's a smart move on their part. So when you hear Bob Eiger say, I'm going to focus on creative. Yeah. And then there's a sort of problem of the big franchises have reached narrative conclusion. We need new stuff.

We don't kind of know what app all of our content is going to live in. Does that seem like he's just going to start meddling with his studio heads? I think he makes the right calls. I heard a story that, so Kevin Mayer was the guy alongside Eiger who was responsible. He used to lead acquisitions. So he was responsible for all the major acquisitions alongside Iger. From what I heard from a source, Kevin was the guy who kind of pitched Twitter to Disney. He was like, I don't think this is a good idea thing.

They should buy Twitter. We should buy Twitter. And Bob was the one who was like, nah, I don't know about that. I think we should like wait. Yeah. They did. It was a good decision. Yeah.

They were also at one point going to buy vice. Right. Also seems like a good non-call. Right. So there's a lot of these things that happen that Bob, I think, has a lot of, that's why, people credit him as being visionary and for what he does. I think that's where he'll come in. He won't go to Kevin Feig and be like,

how we consider doing this movie based on this random character? But he'll say, okay, I think we can roll it out this way. I think if we make this a Disney Plus thing and we make that a theatrical thing and then we put this on free form, which is like their family channel, we can really work out a way that makes sense for all of our consumers and keeps it going and keeps the interest high. That's what he's always been really good at. And now he's just going to focus on that.

So he's going to focus on over, I think, intertwining all of the different parts of Disney's content that makes sense. You know, the big question now is whoever replaces Bob C's heads of parks, I don't think they've announced anyone yet, they'll have to like work with them on that to like figure out how to intertwine the parks into that way as well. But Iger is mostly focused on the next few years of content. And that is going to be intertwining Disney Plus theatrical and network. I like that freeform didn't get a tile on the Disney Plus. I know for free form. They just didn't make it.

All right. The streaming wars continue to be, first of all, dominated by Bob's and Kevin's. The Bob and Kevin Shuffle continues every day. You wrote a piece, you wrote a little profile of Bob C. Everyone should go read that. What's the next big turn, do you think? The next big thing is what happens with Kevin. And so that is what happens with his division, which is streaming international.

Everyone I talk to who works in those divisions, I keep asking if they've heard from Kevin. Not necessarily that they would, but they're like, nope. had no email saying like, hey, this is our new CEO. He hasn't said anything yet? Nope. Nothing like, hey, here's our new CEO. You know, like, you work at a company. Something happens.

Your manager sends out a thing going, hey, this is our new thing. You know, here's what's happening. I definitely knew about this before it was happening. Yeah. There's 100% the lie you were always telling you were in the company. Yeah, exactly. So no one's heard from him. So, I mean, people are not worried, but they're kind of like, what does this mean for us?

And I think the big question is, if Kevin stays. for the next year, what does that relationship with him and Bob C look like? Because they've rarely worked together, really. And now they're going to have to suddenly work. And by the way, streaming, which Bob Iger calls the future of Disney, is the one area Bob C has no, like, can relationship with. So that's a fun move where Bob Iger, for the two and a half years has gone. Streaming is where the future of Disney is.

We're going to take some theatrical stuff and make it a Disney Plus show. We're doing it this way, Disney Plus movie. And all of a sudden, their new CEO who does it, absolutely no idea what's going on with streaming to an extent. Like, he's just not been involved with it. So that's, like, a fun thing they're going to have to overcome. That's the big thing that Wall Street's going. Like, how are you managing that?

The word I keep using is that Bob Iger will be a buffer. He will be the guy that, like, talks to the Kevin's and is like, no, no, no, you come to me. I'll figure it out. Don't worry. Like, basically, dad roll, right? He's going to be like, don't worry. Like, I'll deal with it. Like, we'll figure it out.

And I think that's what he's going to do for the next 22 months or whatever. If Kevin leaves, it's a whole new game. It's like, well, they have to figure that out pretty quickly because Kevin has been instrumental and everything happens with streaming. All right. Keep your eye on Kevin Meyer. Yeah, it's been my thing. Big Kevin movement coming. All right, Julia, thank you so much. We're just going to, the streaming war is view from the field.

It's just going to become a recurring thing here, I feel. All right. All right. We'll get back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. But time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates

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with a segment that is consistently called. A plurality of puffs. I know what this is. This is wording from Jules' patent application for some sort of AI smoking or vaping cessation thing. I don't really know what's going on here, but it kind of sounds like, let me just read straight from the pattern, because it's just really good. The method includes determining a delivery pattern. for providing a first puff

containing an amount of a first vaporizable material and the second puff containing an amount of a second vaporizable material. So I think the idea is that they're kind of, they're doing a switcheroo on you to trick you into stop smoke.

Stop vaping. The first vaporizable material includes a first substance and the second vaporizable material does not include the first substance. I think that substance is nicotine. Yeah, that's definitely nicotine. The method further includes providing a plurality of puffs from a vaporizer. Okay.

The plurality of puffs based on the delivery pattern and including the first puff and the second puff. The method further includes receiving user feedback associated with the delivery pattern in response to the providing. Is it just like screw it that puff didn't have any nicotine in it? Yeah, I think the thing is like if somehow they can detect that you still really want more puffs. This is not a cessation plot.

This is a get you hope. on more jewel plot because literally the cliche is the pigeon in the room with the button that gives it food and it hits the button the food comes that if it's consistent it like hits a button eats until it's full and then it stops but the food comes randomly it like hits the button until it needs until it explodes because that's how random feedback works on your brain if you're a pigeon or a human with a gambling problem for example so if there's AI that is like giving you like trying like step down your nicotine, but the actual experience of it is just like, you randomly don't know if you're going to get nicotine in your puff or not. What are you going to do? You're going to be the pigeon. You're just going to puff away. This is great. So it's an AI. It's an AI Jewel. Yeah. It's a patent. Okay.

Jewel, they've been promising a smart vape that helps you kick nicotine for like a long time. One of the problems that they have is that Apple just kicked all vaping apps off the app store. by default. Yeah. And Apple also doesn't allow Safari access to Bluetooth devices, obviously. Yeah. So you're saying we're going to live in a world where Android users are nicotine-free. Yeah. I'm saying in a world where the local processing power of the Jewel has to skyrocket

to pull off your plurality of puffs. Like, is Jewel going to make an arm processor is like the next turn of this group? Just to be clear, we live in a world where there already exist like Android phones that have vaporizers built into it. All right. Well, we'll just see how that goes. 2020 AI Vakes. End patents.

That's my argument. But then you would never know. That's right. And I don't need to know. You can keep this sort of literature to themselves. All right. All right. We've gone long with there's a grab bag of stuff.

Lightning around. MWC was canceled due the coronavirus. The coronavirus, by the way, is literally sweeping the world. We're going to have an interview episode with our health reporter, Nicole Wetzman, and Liz Lapato, our deputy editor who's kind of studying the business impacts of the coronavirus. We're going to get those two together and do a whole interview episode about that. Don't want to minimize it. But MWC is happening virtually because it's not happening in Barcelona. A bunch of announcements.

I'm just going to yell phone names that you do. Are you ready? LGV60 think Q5G Seems fine on paper We'll see if they can get the camera right Also it has the little screencase thing Which man LG just can't get anyone to pay attention

By screencase you mean a second Like the what's like an extended display The duo Yeah It's like the duo but it's just an extra screen for your phone Yeah It's exactly like the duo only They're not Microsoft and so everyone will forget

That it's there in a week So it's a case for the phone that contains another full-sized screen. All right. Where did all the other phones on this go? This just says Sony did a phone with a headphone check. That's because I have that link. Sony made the Experia 1-2, which Xperia 1 is the tallboy.

They also have like an Experio-owned mini, which is a smaller tall-boy. So they updated it. There's another version coming. They're trying again to get it right with the camera because Sony makes the sensors with their cameras on their own phones are always bad. We'll see what they do this time. I think there's some special stuff going out. there, but they added back a headphone jack.

There wasn't one of the last one. They know. Yeah. They know how to get me back. Huawei announces mate excess foldable with a more durable display. The main excess is one where the screen folds are on the outside. Yes. Which, given everything we know seems bad.

Yeah. Well, there's now like, I don't know, four or eight layers of different kinds of plastic now on the outside to make it more durable. That's great. The dimest display in the industry. It's like, imagine if you put a screen protector on your phone and then you forgot and then you put another one on your phone. And then it bent.

There's a Redmi phone. Yeah, the Redmi phone is, it's an 865 and therefore it'll be 5G. And it's just like a bunch of phones that were like, oh my God, they're just, they're coming out. They've got like the same like baseline specs

that the S20 has. We'll see. It'll be fine. Galaxy Buds Plus. Chris Welch reviewed them. They're good. Yeah. Yeah. Good battery life. phone quality actually is good. Yeah.

The only thing they're missing is active noise cancellation, which... There's been a lot of announced wireless buds with active noise cancellation, but the AirPods Pro seem to be it. Yeah, well, there's already... I mean, there's the Echo Buds from Amazon. And then there's the Sonys, which are well-regarded, become in a gigantic case. Yeah.

The one thing these buds don't do is they will let you, you know, pair with multiple devices, but they won't switch seamlessly between them. unless you have a bunch of Samsung phones, in which case it's totally a can. Of course. proprietary Bluetooth. Can I say something about active noise cancellation? Earbuds.

I am living with my sister in New York. She got the AirPods Pro because her regular AirPods died. And I have no idea how to get her, like it's a dice roll whether I need to yell at her to get her attention. Or, you know, wave at her, you know, do something respectful to make her aware that I'm talking to her because these are apparently effective at noise cancellation. It's great. Very good.

And they're really subtle. So you don't know necessarily that she, anyways. Yes, Dieter was sitting next to me in the office all the yesterday and I kept on just yelling at him. It was not respectful. He was like, Dieter. I feel like this is, this could lead to a breakdown of our society. The best part was I wasn't listening to music.

They weren't even on. I heard him the entire time. All right. Do you want to run us for this Xbox series? X stuff? I am so stoked about it. So Microsoft kind of like confirmed some details about

the series X, which is really great in this case where the PlayStation 5, like basically until specifically proven otherwise, you can assume that every feature hardware-wise that you get on the Xbox you're going to get on the PlayStation. So, you know,

I'm sure they will find ways to differentiate. I think Microsoft wants to be the fastest. Sounds like Sony might want to be the cheaper one. Who knows? But like right now, they're both getting the same general batch

of very good AMD stuff. So Microsoft is saying Xbox Series X will have 12 terraflop GPU, which to put that in context is about where the high end is right now of desktop GPUs.

Wow. It's like, it's faster than anything that AMD has right now. Wow. So they're really, they're really pushing it. And then every other little detail that comes out

is just like it sounds like exactly like my like wish list for what I would want in a console. Like the HTML 2.1, which is going to include variable refresh, high frame rate stuff. Microsoft is focusing on low latency throughout the whole chain from the controller all the way to the screen.

HDMI 2.1 has this thing where you can request the game mode from a TV, so the low latency, so you don't have to dive into the settings to try to find the low latency settings. And then another detail that they just shared, because, you know, Sony and Microsoft have been talking about these really quick load times

or zero load screens because they're going to have fast, like, NVME SSDs. This next part is amazing. Major Nelson on his podcast is talking about his experience with this. It's like, yeah, the load times are really great, and I could switch between games and they just start up right away. It's awesome.

But then I had to reboot the console. And after it booted, those save states are still there. And so I can just resume the game right away, like even after a reboot, which is, it's just like, I feel like we really downgraded

how much we're waiting on our consoles between the 360 and the Xbox one era. Because the drives didn't get any faster. Our internet connections didn't get much faster. And the files got way bigger. But I don't know. I feel like they're addressing it now. Yeah, I'm very excited.

Like the instant resume of like the last game you're playing, a PlayStation or a Switch, you know, like, I love that. It actually, like, makes it more likely that I'm going to play the game because I know I don't have to wait for it to start. And to have that work for multiple games, huge. And to have that work across reboots is just, that's just like bragging. Right. And then something that Microsoft is also really into is that they're calling it smart delivery.

So, and one of the first publishers that, like, promised to do this, like obviously Microsoft will do this with their own games. You buy the game and now you own it across any compatible console. So you bought, and so Cyberpunk 277 is announced that it's going to work like this. So if you buy Cyberpunk 277 for the Xbox 1, you now own a copy that will work on your next Xbox. Or if you buy it when you buy it on the next Xbox, but you bring your game over to a friends to play, it will work on, and they only have the Xbox one. don't have the new series X, it'll work on their console. So like there's some kind of a portability.

The scary part about that is that the real game is no longer, you know, it was already ceasing to be the physical object, but it's definitely not the physical object. What happens if you take a photo of the game with a pixel at night and it combines multiple photos together in a composite? What is a photo? Well, that sounds exciting. It sounds like GDCs, Microsoft just pulled out. because of the coronavirus.

Epic pulled out. We don't know if GDC is going to keep going, but that's another one of these. It seemed like it was going to be a moment, and now we're going to bleed out some more information over time. GDC is Game Developer Conference. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know all the, like, how much they were going to announce that.

I'm sure they were going to have a bunch of meetings with developers and show them a bunch of stuff. I think that if I work at a game company and I want to figure out how to handle the cancellation of a conference and like to try and get some attention for my phones that I otherwise would have definitely gotten attention for to conference. I would not do what everyone has done in the wake of MWC. Like I made fun of people not paying attention to LG a minute ago.

If they had been able to launch that thing at MWC, they definitely would have gotten more attention than they're getting now. Yeah. Because it would have had an event. Yeah. It's different for a big company like Microsoft. But these cancellations of these conferences really hurts the mid-tier and like bottom-tier companies

that that's their chance to get some attention in a much easier way than they otherwise will now. Yeah. Okay, last bit. Apple released white papers the Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR. You should read them.

They're very funny. Apple's very proud of itself. He's looking at me and he's seeing me smiling at him because I just need to like start saying words to troll him into a three-hour rant, but I'm not going to do it. No, our review of the Mac Pro and the Pro Display is coming next week.

It's very close. It was just a busy week. There was a dramatic fiasco. It's 20. We didn't want to stack them all up. It's coming on Monday. But just two things I want to point out for these white papers. One, you're not supposed to shine a light at the back of the pro display XDR because it has light sensors in the back in the front.

Yeah. And so if you, like, point a light at the back of it, it screws up the display. I think that note is in the white paper just for our friends who are YouTubers. Like, no hue lights behind your setup anymore, boys. and then for the Mac Pro, and there's just a little tease, Apple is like, hey, as core counts go up on these processors, clock speeds go down. So make sure your applications are multi-threaded appropriately because they might actually get slower depending if you buy the more expensive processor with more cores of the slower clock speed. Should have gone thread Ripper. Just put it out there.

No compromise. Not saying a word about it. There's just a little piece of information I want you to have. You'll see it next week. Our review is happening. The wheels don't have locks and the thing we'll roll off the table. I know. That's the true scandal.

Marquez Brownlee did that video. Did a great macro video. Go watch that. That's very funny. Okay. That's it. That's a Vergecast. Deeter, you have a thing to plug.

It's a newsletter. It's called processor. You can find it at theverge.com slash newsletters. I write it mostly daily. It's about computers. Yeah. If you've enjoyed this show, have you thought about it with an editor and an email. It's very much right there.

You can tweet at us. I'm Reckless Paul's Future Paul Deer's at Backlon. That's it. Rock and roll. Paul. Promocode.