The Vergecast - Google Pixel 5a review / Facebook's metaverse for work / Apple, Epic, and Google emails

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Alex Cranz, Allison Johnson, and Dan Seifert discuss reviews for the Google Pixel 5a, Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3 and Z Fold 3, and the T-Mobile data breach that exposed personal info of more than 47 million people. Second half of the show, the crew discuss Facebook's new metaverse conference software, the emails from the Apple vs Epic trial, and Intel's new PC gaming GPUs. Further reading: COVID-19 booster shots will be offered to Americans in September, Biden administration says Immunocompromised people should get a third COVID-19 vaccine dose, CDC committee says Go read this deep dive on why US public health data systems couldn’t handle COVID-19 Google Pixel 5a review: boring, but better than ever  Google Pixel 5A comes with a bigger battery and screen, smaller price tag The Google Pixel 6 won’t ship with a charger Galaxy Watch 4 review: welcome to Samsung’s garden  Samsung's Galaxy Z Flip 3 is the first folding phone for normal people There’s still a place for the Note in Samsung’s Galaxy Samsung confirms it’s removing ads from its stock apps later this year How the latest and greatest Samsung and Apple earbuds lock you into their world T-Mobile data breach exposed the personal info of more than 47 million people Microsoft is making it harder to switch default browsers in Windows 11 Apple’s been playing it too MagSafe Apple’s attempt at podcast subscriptions is off to a messy start  FTC says Facebook has been a monopoly ‘since at least 2011’ in amended antitrust complaint Inside Facebook’s metaverse for work Google’s ‘Project Hug’ paid out huge sums to keep game devs in the Play Store, Epic filing claims Google gave phone makers extra money to ditch third-party app stores Google secretly had a giant gaming vision that includes bringing games to Mac Sweetheart deals and plastic knives: all the best emails from the Apple vs. Epic trial Steve Jobs email confirms Apple was working on an ‘iPhone nano’  Intel enters the PC gaming GPU battle with Arc Intel shows off its answer to Nvidia’s DLSS, coming to Arc GPUs in 2022 Intel previews its Alder Lake chip, promises hybrid CPUs for desktops and laptops Water shortages loom over future semiconductor fabs in Arizona  Why Intel and TSMC are building water-dependent chip factories in one of the driest U.S. states GM and AT&T are teaming up to bring 5G to Chevy, Cadillac, and GMC cars by 2024 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Allison Johnson, Dan Seaford, and Alex Cranz joined the show. We talk about our Samsung Z Flip and Z Fold three reviews, Allison's Pixel 5A review. Whatever is going on with Apple, Epic, and Google, lots came out on that front this week. And Facebook's Metaverse for Work. That's coming up on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog.

That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud, with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports.

And mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to Bert Chast, the flagship podcast of Platform Walkin. Ooh. Every time you listen to our show gets harder to live. listen to a different show. That's everyone they compound. We only work with certain brands of headphones. I'm Neelai. I'm your friend. Dieter Bon is here. I'm your default H-T-TPS handler. That's so much more accurate than you know. I don't know what that means. Alex Kranz is here. I am your credit card processor. Wow, you got some strict rules. Yeah, real strict.

Charging those rates. Dan Sefer is here. Hi. Good, Dan. I don't have a quip. I wasn't ready. Nobody told me to bring a quip. beginning this show the same every week. I've only done this like a decade. Nobody told me. Allison Johnson is here. Hey, Allison. Hello. I don't have a quip either. You don't need one. Dan has much higher.

He's been around for a longer time. All right. There's a lot to talk about. Allison, you reviewed the new Pixel 5A. We reviewed the Galaxy Watch 4, the Z flip, the Z fold. There's a lot of Z stuff. We have a pay-in to the Galaxy Note that we need to discuss. Then there's a tremendous amount of lawsuit news, basically. We got unredacted complaints in Google versus Epic. Lots to talk about

there. There's Apple versus Epic news that just never stops happening. A lot to talk about this week in the Vergecast. I do, however, as always, want to start with COVID. We are in a very strange time in our COVID experience, our shared COVID experience that we've been going through for over a year, far too long now. We are in the midst of the Delta variant spike across the world. We are hearing more about breakthrough cases. Two senators say actually, tested positive for COVID. They're both vaccinated.

Breakthrough cases. What I will remind you, breakthrough cases are vanishingly rare among the vaccinated. And you are much safer if you get vaccinated. So we have a story about the sort of certainty, the mathematical certainty that there will be breakthrough cases as more people get vaccinated, combined with Delta. I just remind and beg every week on the show,

please get vaccinated. It does make things better. the vaccines are extraordinarily effective. But as you hear that news, we have some stories on how to contextualize it, how to understand it. On the same note, Biden administration announced, we started talking on this bit last week. We all saw it coming. Biden administration announced booster shots will be available to Americans, starting in September, started with the elderly. The CDC said immunocompromise people should get a third shot if you were part of the two-dose vaccine. And then we have a deep dive. We keep talking about COVID as part as a

a systems problem, a data problem, a technology problem on why our public health data systems have not, even after all this time, been up to the task of helping us understand the data on COVID. So we're still in it. We get your shot. Eventually, we'll come out of it. It's just hold, hold tight. Here's what I'm looking forward to. We're going to have a birthday party in October.

Lots of cool guests announced people are coming. We're going to check vaccine statuses. I want to have that party. It's only going to happen. I want to have a 10th birthday party for the verge in New York with lots of people. lots and lots of people. It's only going to happen if vaccine rates go up, cases go down. Like, we're doing it. We're charging ahead. Love it. But everyone's got to help me out. I've been looking for that party for 10 years. Yeah. Come on. Don't mess up with the party guys. Get vexed. Please.

Don't mess up my party. Priorities. I have a priority. I want to party. Get vaxed. But also it's safe and good. Do it. Yeah, but also the other things. Also the other stuff. Yeah, yeah. Look, you got to meet Americans where they are. All this high-minded stuff about public safety and health and dude. No, no, no. Do you want to rage? Get the shot. Exactly.

That's all I was thinking. All right. Let's talk about phones. A lot of phones this week. Deeter, you want to drive this one? I think that the most interesting phone, but also, like, weirdly not, but it's not, it's a dichotomy. It's a tale of opposites is the Pixel 5A. So, Allison, you reviewed it.

Am I weird to think that this is at the exact same time fascinating and boring? That's how I would put it, really. It's a real short list of updates, so on the face of it, it doesn't sound like much. So comparing to a pixel 4A5G, you get a little bit bigger screen. It's a 6.34-inch panel now. You get a pretty sizable battery boost, which has been like not the strongest, point for pixel phones in the past. And then you get IP 67 waterproofing.

And like, ta-da, that's it. But it's when you kind of step back and you look at all the pieces together and it's really impressive. And it's cheaper this year. It's 450. And I think the 4A5G came out at 500. So that's like what sounds boring on the face of it. But to me, what's interesting is you look at some.

of $500 phones. And every phone has its gimmick, and it seems like the Pixel 5A's gimmick is, we do everything you care about well. Yeah. Yeah, it's not flashy. It's like, it's kind of hard to market, I think. Right. But yeah, it's just a really good all-arounder, and there's really nothing you can fault

it for. Like, there's, it's not the biggest phone. You know, some people want a really huge screen. There's definitely budget phone. out there that can do that. If you want a fast refresh rate screen, the Samsung A52 5G will do that for you. The TCL20 Pro, which I looked at pretty recently, is like very snazzy looking with a curve display, kind of flagshipy. Pixel 5A is not that. It is very, it is very just kind of standard and bland, but like really good. And the software has always been like,

a really strong suit for it, you're going to get super fast updates, feature drops, a good length of security update support. But that's not exciting. Okay, you say there's nothing to complain about, but this is a Vergecast, so we have to. I think there's two things to complain about. One is like my hobby horse of why doesn't Google try hard to sell these things. So we've got to get to that. But before we get to that, can you explain this.

fusion with the 5G support. Not the fact that Google like just puts up the wrong specs on its spec page on his website, which is hilarious, by the way. They just flat out got like three different specs wrong on their own website for this phone.

Come on, Google. Is there no copy editor at Google? I don't know. No, it's an AI. Oh, yeah. Copy and paste on Android is really hard. Right? You got a long press. It's like pot. The thing pops up.

It's confusing. So anyway, but before we get to complain about Google's insanity, what's the deal with its 5G compatibility? Because it's not perfect, right? Yeah, there's a couple of weird things about it. The first is kind of less of a concern. There's no millimeter wave. Last year's model, there was a separate version of millimeter wave sold through Verizon. It was more expensive.

Chances are you don't have a millimeter wave signal around you. So it's not a big deal. So that's just, they're just not doing that this year. So it's all sub 6K Hertz. But the weird thing is, is the C-Band support. And C-Band is the good stuff that's coming, especially for Verizon and AT&T customers. Would you say that when the C-Ban, the new C-Ban stuff gets here, then we're really in a race? I think the race starts, yeah.

It's actually, this whole past five years has just been like a warm-up race. Oh, yeah. They were just stretching. It's like a NASCAR when they do the lap before the actual start happens. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I think that's what's been happening.

How many NASCAR races have you watched in your life? I have been in person to one NASCAR race. Okay. Actually attended. Camped out there. It was super fun. And I have watched, I don't know, a dozen. Okay.

I'm just checking. Yeah. Way more than I have. Because they don't always do a rolling start, but I guess only in a context of 5G. Right. Okay. I want to keep going with the NASCAR metaphor. I just want to make sure everyone's with me.

I could keep going. I just said, maybe not. The good stuff. The good stuff. So that's when, allegedly, it's going to get really good in the U.S., the 5G. So that starts rolling out in December. So phones now are, it's becoming more and more common to see support for it on them because you can hold on to your phone a couple of years. You're probably going to be able to use it.

So the Pixel 5A supports the right bands for C-Band on the hardware level. It has the FCC certification to use C-Band, but Google is doing a weird thing where they are just not committing to making the software update that it would require to use C-Band. And that makes no sense. Don't the pixel-4s have C-Band support? The Pixel 5, I think, was one of the early songs that they're like, we're bringing Z-Band. Does it just have like a wacky radio and they just, they don't want to deal with making the driver for the modem that it happens to have or something? Like, it makes no sense to me. I mean, they've been using this, this modem and radio for a little while now.

Yeah. Because it's exactly the same as last year's phone. So I don't know if that's much of an excuse. Are they just going to like come around in two months and say for $25 more? Yeah. have C-BAN. C-BAN plus. What did they say when you asked them about it?

I laid out all these points. I was like, okay, so you got the hardware, you got the FCC, you're not committing to the software update. And they're like, yes. So it's like, it's really hard to imagine that they won't update. But it's sort of like, I don't want to second guess them on that. So that's kind of is what it is. Like, all the facts laid out there, it has the right components and approval to use CBAND. So just kind of a weird question work on that right now.

Okay. Whatever. Google. Is this where, like, the Android community can get involved? Can they make C-Band happen? Just some, like, big pixel fans? If enough of them buy it. Well, yeah, if enough of them buy it, also, the networks don't exist yet.

Right. A huge part of the 5G story in America is that all of the networks. are fake. Team Mobile's network is not fake. Even Gena 5sys. The Jenna 5 sis deeply fake. It's just like, yeah, I don't know. Anyhow, the race is great.

The race is doing really well. The last thing is, where could I buy one? Well, Deider. First of all, you need to live in the U.S. or Japan. Okay. Otherwise, you're out of luck. Great. And then it's not being sold through carrier.

this year. It's Google store and their wireless brand. And that's it. That's where you can get it. You can't tell your uncle to go pick one up when his like two year contract is over at Verizon. Yeah, it's kind of, it kind of sucks. I want to be like, this is a phone that a lot of people should buy. And it's sort of hard to track down. Why? So actually, like, the big question is, why didn't they just, like, cut the price on the 4A, 5G or, you know, whatever and not make this phone since they can't get it into carriers anyway? Like, and they've got the six coming, which is the high-end one. Do they have promised to market? Yeah, which they have promised to market.

Yeah, yeah. So there's a little bit of, like, why does this phone exist for Google, which is, like, the perennial question for pixel phones? Yeah. I don't know if we want to get it out there with a new number on it. and that's going to be exciting to a small amount of people. Or, I mean, they did talk a lot about the chip shortage and supply chain constraints, making this harder to distribute. So it's possible they wanted to go bigger on this and just didn't have their resources to do it.

Yeah, so we kind of landed in this weird limbo of it exists, but it's only in these limited channels and, yeah, it's sort of too bad. It's interesting to me that Google isn't putting more of an effort on this model and that all of its kind of hopes and dreams and plans for the pixel line seem to be tied up with the pixel six, considering so far, the pixel models that have sold are the A series. They're the ones that they sell a lot more of than the pixel 4 and the pixel 5 and so on. So you'd think, if you're looking at it from like a business perspective, that maybe we put more of our effort behind the A series and we do the flagship as like an aspirational supercar, whatever.

We don't really expect anyone to buy it. But we market the heck out of the A series and that's the one that people buy. But like they are not doing that at all, at least as far as we can tell. Yeah. Sorry, I'm just hung up on you calling the pixel a supercar. Maybe it will be. I don't know. We're doing a lot of car metaphors today.

and this is killing me. Look, Jeff Gordon drives a supercar, or Jeff Gordon drives a Pixel 6, and then everyone buys Pixel 5As, right? That sold a lot of four Tauruses. Wow. Okay. Just an infinity.

Nealai is staring at me through the Zoom call. The very, very, very last pixel thing. We have to get out this car metaphor. Although cars have battery, I'm not going to try and do it. The audience cared just as much about the fact that Google's not putting a Walwart charger in the Pixel 6 box as they did about this review.

Yeah. It's, oh, yep, they're doing the same thing that Samsung has done and that Apple did first and okay, but like everyone, I don't know, is real mad or I don't, it's, it's, I don't know, it was obvious that this was going to happen to me. Yeah. Maybe it still just kind of stings when you feel like you're entitled to that thing. Yeah. You know, you paid for your phone.

You get a charger in the box. And then they tell you, no, you don't get one anymore. but the phone's not cheaper. So I don't know. Maybe we just need to have a collective moment of that every time we find out another manufacturer is taking the charger away. But yeah, kind of inevitable. Will they include the cord?

They better. They have to. I feel like we're another cycle away from them taking the cord away. If they keep the cord, I'm fine. Because I have a little woolwort that has me like, I can do like three or four chords into it. That's what I use. I don't need extra ones. The cords are kind of consumable. Like you use a cord for a couple of years.

They kind of tend to break. They air out. They get gross. You want it to be replaced. The warts last forever. I have stepped on so many in my house that I just like forget I own. Do you have a drawer? No, I had a box. I had to organize mine into big Ziploc bags. So USB A,

USBC. Oh, smart. Well, let me just have a question about the price here. So 450, it's good. It's competitive. it's got all the features. We're expecting a very high-end $1,000 plus pixel 6 to come out. There's a pretty big hole in the middle of Google's lineup, right? Like $4.50 is, you know, just I'm assuming most people are familiar with Apple's lineup,

but Samsung's lineup is the same. Like, at every $50 or $100 price point, there is a phone available for you from Apple or Samsung. Google's like, here's this extremely weird set of compromise. is at $450. And then here's the promise of us actually trying. And Dieter, I think we're just assuming it'll be plus $1,000. I think the pro will be. I think that the regular Pixel 6, I've kind of been there,

but I might be the only one who thinks that it could potentially cost $1,000. They might make the regular Pixel 6 a little bit less expensive. But who knows? Yeah, you had that conversation with Greg Osterloan. He was like, we're going to try now. And then they're like, but not. yet. Right. And like, I don't know, like the, the rolling start metaphor is just in my brain out. Like, yep, you do the rolling start. So you're just like, you're ready to go. And there's

no way that this is a rolling start. Right. This is just like a, they're like, well, we just got to get this thing out of the way so we can put all our attention over here. Yeah. If you look at the most popular iPhone model, it's the iPhone 12, right? Which is 700 bucks. And or 830 or 830, whatever, it's in that mid-range. And then, like, the most popular Samsung models are there A-series, which are anywhere from, Alison, you know that's better than I do, but what, $300 on up to $650. So, like, there is definitely, like, a gap where you could be like, well, why don't they just keep selling the pixel five for $700?

But then you realize that nobody's going to buy a pixel five for $700 in late 2021, are they? So, I don't know. They're kind of in a pickle where they got to get, like, a lineup going to be able to fill those gaps. I think it's a weird gap. And maybe particularly in the U.S. market, too, because I was just writing about One Plus bringing yet another phone not to the U.S. That's sort of in that, that like upper mid-range kind of price bracket where it's like,

has several features that are like really nice upgrades from kind of the 500 mid-range. And they've just said, see, we're not bringing this kind of phone to the U.S. It's either super budget or you're going to buy a flagship. I don't know if that's been decided for us or if we decided that. I have a theory. Increasingly, I believe that the U.S. market is wackadoo compared to the rest of the world. And like Samsung, we're going to get into Samsung and how their sales have just plummeted. And the big beneficiary of it, you might not realize here in the U.S.

because they don't sell here really is Jami. So they have been just skyrocketing. And we just have no idea. One Plus, they sell a few phones here in the U.S., but really they're putting a bunch of their effort in other markets. So there's something about the U.S. that makes companies not want to compete here. It's almost like the competition is hard. It's almost like there's gatekeepers, like maybe carriers or something, are trying to stop it. It's very strange.

It's fascinating. Someone should look into that. No comment. All right. Okay. That's a Pixel 5A coming out somehow. It's a mystery. It's a challenge, really.

It's like finding a Pokemon to get it. And then, Deeter, you reviewed the Fold 3? I reviewed the Fold 3. That review will come out next week, but I know enough to talk about it this week. And we just, we got to get this thing done. So we're going to talk about that one. Dan's also here because he reviewed the flip. And then I also reviewed the watch.

Let's just knock the watch out. Because we talked about it a bunch last week, and I feel like I read the review. it's what we talked about. Everything we said last week was true. It is a Samsung watch for Samsung phones. And one thing I want to make clear is that's fine. It's okay that Samsung made a watch for Samsung phones. It's only frustrating because the platform it's using

is the one that we know is supposed to be the good platform for all Android phones. It's just not, this is not that watch. And so I'm not saying it's inherently bad. because it's a Samsung watch for Samsung phones. There are inherent problems with Samsung ecosystem, aka Bixby. But it's not the thing that people might have been hoping for, and I needed to be really clear about that in discussing it, because I don't want anyone to think that they should buy this thing

for a One Plus phone or a pixel or whatever, because you're just not going to have a good time. But if you've got a Samsung phone, go for it. It's great, assuming that you trust their privacy policy, which... I've got to say I received a lot of slacks from Deeter during the course of his review, where he was like, this is nuts. And then, like, five seconds later, he'd be like, ah, maybe it's fine. And then, like, a couple minutes later, I'd be like, ah, it's nuts.

Because it's impossible to read and understand. Well, it's not only that, but I spent all weekend just pressing Samsung, and these poor people were, like, answering my emails over the weekend all weekend. They are end in encrypting their health data. They are not sharing it with third parties. You have to be the one to explicitly do that. They do not. they say have access to your health data unless you explicitly give them permission to look at it.

But none of that information is clear on their privacy policy because their privacy policy was written to protect Samsung, you know, just in case they happen to look at something, right, or happen to be wrong about whatever. And so the big problem with their privacy policy isn't necessarily what Samsung does with the data. It's that Samsung isn't clear enough about what you can do to make sure that it doesn't have access to your data because there are ways, you know, assuming they're telling me the truth, to do that, to use their health platform and have all your data be fully encrypted and inaccessible to Samsung or anybody else.

But Samsung doesn't make it clear how to do that. That's how they get you. Yeah. Somewhere right now, Eric Samsung is like Dieter's heart of speeding. That's the same of the project manager. Okay. I don't know how works at Samsung. Okay.

Let's talk about the flip. Dan. Is it time? It feels like if you are buying a new phone. and you're buying a new Samsung phone and you are willing, wanting to spend a thousand bucks on it. And it's the moon is in its gibbets phase.

It's in its givots face. And maybe you've got a phone you're trading in. You could theoretically buy a flip and not feel like you are making a big mistake. I mean, I don't want to downplay. It is a really big inflection point, but most of that inflection point is because they cut $450 off the price.

price. So now the flip three is a thousand bucks, which is the same price as a Galaxy S-21 plus and an iPhone 12, and we all know that. And then on top of that, the carriers are being super thirsty with trade-in plans. Samsung's being super thirsty with trade-in plans. You can basically hand them an iPhone 3G and they will give you $500 or whatever, and you can walk out with a flip for, you know, a very aggressive price, maybe less than a Pixel 5A. So like, you know, it's like there's a lot of incentive to buy this. But there could be a lot of incentive to buy it, and then maybe you make a bad decision. Like there is an incentive to buy a Surface Duo at half price, but that's still a very bad decision. But the flip three is like kind of like boringly good.

Like we were talking about how like the 5A is kind of boring. The flip three is similar, which is silly to say about a phone that folds in half, but there's like no big gotchas with it. The price is kind of normal. The screen is really good. The processor's really fast. I had no problems with battery life. It lasted four to five hours of screen time every day. It went to bed.

I had like 25% battery. So it lasted me all day long. The cameras are fine. They're not class leading. If you really care that much about cameras, you're not buying a flip anyways. But it's like you can now have a phone that folds in half and fits in your pocket. And the one big lingering question is, is that screen going to break in six months?

And I can't answer that for you yet. Samsung is more confident than ever that it won't. And you can get it wet now, which is also kind of a nice thing that you couldn't do before. But like where a year ago, if you were buying a flip or a fold or any of the folding phones, you were kind of walking into this being like, okay, I'm taking a flyer on this. It may break. It probably will break. A lot of people's broke.

I'm getting like last generation hardware. I'm getting last generation cameras. I'm paying through the teeth for it. I'm not getting many discounts. I am buying this because I want to be the first person to have this phone. And now, just a year later, it's like, oh, you know, a lot of people could buy these this fall, and then a lot of people have flips. And, like, that pace of acceleration of iteration just seems way faster than I think anybody anticipated

for these folding phones. And so that was kind of like my takeaway. It was like, it just felt normal. Like, it's like, oh, I could live with this. Like, this is normal. There's no other than really complain about. if you like the idea of something that has a big screen that fits in your pocket because you can fold it in half, this is now a viable option for you. I mean, that just sounds cool.

I'm sorry, that just sounds like cool as hell. Like, I know we're all like shrugging, but like it's a phone and it folds in half. Exactly. Yeah. And you can get it wet, which is like a pretty remarkable accomplishment. Like I don't want to downplay that. And I don't want to downplay the fact that they put this whole package together at a price that. that most people would feel fine paying for a phone. Because at this point, we've established

people pay $800 to $1,000 for phones all the time, right? Like that hasn't stopped sales of the iPhone, hasn't stopped sales of anything, really. And so they brought it to this price point where it's just like, this isn't a novelty. This is normal. And that's like a kind of a pretty major inflection point for this kind of technology. Now, it could be in six months when all them break, or if all of them break that, it's like, okay, that was a mistake. We're not there yet. And like, not that many people should be buying them or whatever. But like, at this stage, it's pretty, pretty wild to see. And that they iterated this quickly. And I think this is what Samsung's really good at is that just relentless in iteration on their idea. We saw them do it with

the curved screens years ago. And we saw them do it with like the note for years. And now we're seeing them do it at a faster pace with the folding phones. And I think there's, to Deeter's point earlier, about how their lunch is getting eaten all over the world by its show me. There's, there's more incentive for them to accelerate this path, path of iteration. But like, I wouldn't feel too scared buying this myself, like if I were buying a phone. Like, I can totally understand why other people might, and they want to take a beat, and it's probably smart to take a beat with any sort of new technology. But this is getting to the point where it doesn't feel like new technology anymore. It feels like normal technology.

But that's because you will buy a new phone in six months. Yeah. Well, that's, yeah. There's like zero percent chance that you're going to have a phone for a year. I'm still the early adopter, right? And so like, but like even, even last year buying one, I would buy it if I bought it. I didn't buy one last year, a flip at least. You'd go in knowing that you're making compromises on it. And now you would go in buying it and really getting everything that you would get from a comparable $1,000 flagship smartphone. That doesn't fold in half. Do you think they rushed into it? Right. We went through the marketing cycle where

Motorola was like, it's a new razor. All the influencers come to a party. And like Samsung was on the Today show and like the products are not ready. Yeah. For that. Absolutely. Not even close. And now we're like the product's ready. And everyone's like, oh, another folding phone. And we just like, yeah. They totally like, you know, shot themselves in the foot a little bit. But like if you look at like the razor and those first like to that point like the razor was $1,400 had kind of a lousy screen had a mid-range processor definitely had lousy cameras you were buying this specifically because it folded in half and looked like the old razor if you bought it nobody really bought that phone but like if you were buying it that's why you were buying it and like you you were like I'm

going to compromise on all these other features but now it's like okay I'm buying this because I like that a fold in half and also I don't have to compromise on the screen and I don't have to compromise on the fact that it's water resistant. And I don't have to compromise on the processor and the performance and the battery life and all that fun stuff. And now it's just like I can buy a folding phone that is my normal phone. And like that's a huge point to reach. But this perception, and we think we've seen this in reaction to from the audience and everything, is that like, but I don't know. We saw a lot of them break. So like there's just like huge reticence from from the general public. Well, that's why I think the 99 price point.

point is I don't want to give Samsung too much credit. I mean, more than anybody, I'm like, once these phones are cheap, then that's like the main thing. They got to bring the price down. So they did it. But because they're also water sealed, the only people that could feasibly repair one of these things is Samsung, right? And so you maybe should think about pricing in the Samsung extended warranty full protection program, whatever the heck they're calling it, into the cost of this phone. I think that would be, I know that extended warranties are a thing and they're off and a rip-off and whatever, but I think it might be prudent in this case if you think you're going to hang out of this phone for a while to pay that extra money and price that

into the cost of this phone. Yeah, and if you pre-order it, like I said, Samsung is super thirsty to get everyone to buy these. They'll, Samsung will give you a year of that service for free. And then if you break the screen, I think it's a $250 deductible and they will repair that screen three times. So if you do it, if you damage the screen, they'll do that. If you don't have that coverage, Samsung gave me some pricing on repairs. A flip three costs $369 to repair the inside screen if you're out of warranty and you don't have their Samsung care or whatever, which is not that much different than the cost to fix an iPhone 12 screen, if I remember correctly, and less than it costs to fix the back of an iPhone 12, which is always hilarious. So it is

expensive to fix, and you're right, that Samsung's the only one that can fix it. You are more than likely going to be shipping your phone somewhere and crossing your fingers and hope that it comes back in a few days and whatnot. But it might be, you know, if you are that concerned about it, a lot of people buy extended, you know, protection plans. AppleCare is very popular on their phones anyways, but it might be extra prudent to do so. This is like, we mentioned that it's water resistant a bunch. It is not dust resistant at all. So in the review, I wrote, take it to the pool, don't take it to the beach. Like, you're going to want to be careful in that respect. Last question, and then I want to talk about the fold. Tell me about this cover screen. Is it good? Is it

all of my dreams? Is it... I think the cover screen is probably where they still have the most room for improvement. So not all of my dreams. It's not. It's not. Do your dreams involve replying to text with Bixby? I got weird dreams, man. Yeah, I mean, the cover screen's bigger.

They had to do that. The last one was kind of a joke. So they made the cover screen bigger. You can customize the look of it with different animations and stuff, which is fun. You can put widgets on there to see your calendar and weather. And if you're playing music, you can control it with the music, and you can read notifications now. But there's no, like, quick reply messages. Like, if you want to reply to a message, there's nothing like that say, like, okay, or I'm on my way or any of those canned message type of things. You have to either use Bixby voice

command, which I think we all know is probably not going to work, or B, open the thing. So the cover screen still is there as like a stopgap before you open the thing. You can't really use it without opening. And that's one of my critiques against this design. is that it is less convenient to use than a standard slab smartphone that you can just pull out of your pocket, one hand to unlock, and reply to a message or make a phone call or whatever we want to do. Like you have to stop, you have to more than likely use two hands to open the thing. You can kind of nudge it open with your thumb, but it's hard,

and it'll probably fall out of your hand if you do that. And you also kind of feel like you're going to be like scratching the screen with your thumb when you do it. So you're using two hands to open it, unlock it, all that fun stuff. So it is a different use case than what, we're used to and what we're commonly familiar with. But if you want to have a big screen and you want to have a phone fit in your pocket, you will, you know, learn to use a folding phone, I guess. I mean, like, that's kind of the tradeoff that you're making. Yeah, I just think

calibrating that cover screen is so interesting, right? Like, part of the appeal of this whole thing for me is that you close it and then you're done. And the internet can't hurt you anymore. Right? Like, I'm just, goodbye all these people. I would want the cover screen twice as But then now you're just like, now I have a little phone. Yeah. So I have a little phone for little phone stuff. That like leads me directly into the fold. Yeah.

But like that's kind of what I would want because then I can, okay, I can reply to a message without having to open the phone without having to really stop what I'm doing or whatever. I can, you know, get more context or information about whatever it is. I'm seeing maybe I can read the whole notification instead of only getting half of it without opening the phone. But aren't you wearing a smart watch? I'm wearing a smart watch. Is everyone?

Like there's a real. dance here between what's happening on your wrist, what's happening on the little screen, and actually opening the phone. The other rub with that is they designed the interface of the cover screen to basically mimic what you can do on a smart watch. It looks like a smart watch's interface if you have a Samsung smart watch. They should have just gone all the way. No screen.

No screen. They should have just made the cover screen of the watch. They should have just taken the watch screen, the circle, and the whole thing. That'd be cool. Separate processor. A phone that runs two operating system. I'm dead serious. They should have just done that. It's all Android. It's not all Android. It's like wearotizing or whatever it's called. That's what I want, a phone that runs to operating systems. Absolutely, yes. The other area they could still improve is the cameras. They kind of just went status quo with the cameras. They're the same as last year. They're not bad, but like you can get better cameras very easily from a pixel or Samsung's own phones or an iPhone. All right. Well, speaking of cover screens, the fold is a little Android phone that opens into an Android tablet.

It's hard to, like, escape that now, especially that they've fixed some of the tablet stuff. Yeah, so, I mean, everything Dan said about the flip basically applies to the fold. The resistance, the durability is the... Actually, maybe now's the time sort of sense of it. The spec updates here, it's a fast refresh rate on the outer screen.

The cameras are pretty meh. You can use a stylus on the inside screen, but it's very wobbly on a table. and it also, I don't know, it's not the note. With the note, part of the appeals, you can whip the stylus out and take a quick note and put the stylus back and you're done. With this, you have to open it up

and then get the stylus out of wherever you're keeping that stylus and then start writing on the screen. But really, like, Samsung has been iterating on this idea of this form factor with a little screen on the outside, bigger screen on the inside, it's got a crease, it's got a little bit of a gap when it's closed. For three and a half generations now, maybe four.

And I don't think it gets much better without some huge technological breakthrough. That's like, that's how I'll just warn you, Virchcastlesters out, so I'm going to end my review. Like, I think this is as good as this idea gets, right? They could improve the cameras. They could make the stylus work on the outside. They could do some other stuff. But fundamentally, it doesn't get much better than this for this idea. And so if you like the idea of having a big tablet or a mini tablet in your pocket and your

willing to pay $1,800 or more for it, and you're willing to have a thing that's pretty thick when it's closed, the only thing that should hold you back besides those two things, which are very real, is, you know, do you trust it to, you know, hold up for six to eight months? Because the screen feels great. Everything about it is like good. The multitasking is good. It works essentially in the same way that the iPad 15 multitasking works, where you can tap a lozenges and have a button pop up. But if you'd prefer to drag windows around, You can. You can have three-up in any orientation that you want. You can have pop-up windows. You can drag stuff around. It feels very, very fluid because it's using the Snapdragon 888.

You can have a dock on the side of the phone if you want. There's a million options, but they're not completely overwhelming. And Samsung enabled this, like, labs feature that basically makes Android apps that haven't been coded properly to work in windowing systems. It forces them to do it. and it works. Like, Instagram is great. I can have it be the full width of the phone. I can multitask with it,

and it, like, works at different aspect ratios when you drag the sliders around to change the size of your tile windows. The multitasking here is very good, and there's the other line for my review, I'll just tell you. I feel just as weird and uncomfortable saying multitasking on an Android tablet as good

as you do hearing me say it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't believe you. I've already seen the video. I was like, none of this is happening. I mean, I mean, Deeter green screened it's, it's very strange.

Dieter, how do you take photos with it? Like, do you open it? Do you close it? Are you like the dill hole with an iPad at the concert? Yes, but that is great because you can do selfies with it. So, okay, there are three ways to take a selfie, okay? I mean, you can take regular photos at the clothes or with it open, and having it open is awesome. Don't, don't be shamed into not taking trouble photos. Don't be shamed.

You can take a selfie with the good cameras on the back. You like start the selfie mode with the clothes, and then you, like, open it up and then you're taking selfie with good cameras. There's a 10 megapixel selfie camera on the outside for just taking regular selfies. And then my friends, there is a selfie camera on the inside, on the big screen. It is four megapixels, which is terrible, but I don't care about that. Like, you just use it for video calls. If you want to take a good picture, use the good cameras. But it's a under-screen selfie camera. Samsung thought that was a good idea. Samsung was wrong. It's terrible. It has. It has. It has.

it looks like a screen door. It looks like the opposite of pixel density. It looks like a zit. Because it has that screen door effect, it's got the moir effect. So it draws your eye. I think I complained about this last week. It just draws your eye. Yeah.

It's just like a magnet. It's just as bad a week later as it was when I first looked at it. It doesn't go away, and it's a huge mistake. And you can't just kill it so it's a pinhole all the time. Nope. Big mistake. It's like if they made a setting to turn it off, I would be a little bit more. like eager to tell people that this is the one it's it's just two experimental

feature to have put on this thing it's just dumb yeah I'm shocked within minutes right someone's gonna write an Android utility that just yeah for sure someone someone will figure that Android utility out yeah I mean there's an Android utility to Dixby the thing you know you can Dixby any Samsung phone now it's not too hard if you've got a Windows computer it actually like handles the rooting for you so that it just works really really cleanly and there isn't a place to put the stylus that's the thing that like it's weird right like I feel like I should be able to close it the stylish and just go

right in the gap. Oh the gap is. Or like in the hinge. Yes. Well there is a case that has a silo for it on the hinge on the back. No. Which I haven't seen yet. But yeah.

I mean, this gets into like are they going to bring the note back? To me the answer is and Allison, you could actually speak to this. Like they should just make the note a cheap phone, right? Just bring it back. People and just, it's fine. Make it, make it the cheap phone to compete with the other cheap stylus phones, right? Yeah, they don't need like 20 flagship souped up, you know, phones that have like variations on the coolest and best specs.

Like, just drop the note out of there. It's fine. I mean, people love gigantic, cheap screens. In doing tech journalism for a decade, there's only one thing I know to be absolutely true. And if you show people a big screen and then you're like, it's cheap, that will always be the most popular one. You can tell them anything. This one will kill your family.

And they're like, is it 80 inches, $300? I'm going to risk it. Right. They're into it. And like Samsung has that opening with the note. I think they, it was their flagship for so long that, you know, the meetings are probably very emotional. Like that one product manager who's like, this is the flagship.

Eric is just sobbing. Because he's like, why are you taking it from me? You're begging at $300? Are you out of your mind? He's like, remember when they used to explode? We didn't do so much. Deider, I have one question for you on the fold. And, you know, the trajectory we've seen from smartphones over the past decade plus

is that they have consolidated all of a bunch of different dare devices into one thing. But most people would agree that, you know, a smartphone is not a tablet. It's not a desktop or laptop computer. Does the fold get us closer to this single device? where now it's like, okay, you don't really need a tablet. You could use decks on this thing. You don't need a computer as well. You just have this one expensive thing that you keep in your pocket.

Or are we still two, three generations away? There are going to be a dozen people that do that, that like plug it into a monitor and use decks and it becomes their sole computer and they're living in the future. I don't think that it's going to be that device, really. The screen is not big enough. You want a big screen for your laptop. right? Right.

But what I will say is the moment when you're like, ah, this phone isn't doing it, I need to go use my laptop, is like pushed way back with this thing because, like, you can do a bunch of tablet stuff with it. Like, I don't know. This is really dumb, but like PDFs are actually usable on this thing in a way that they never are, even on the biggest iPhone, right?

You can actually read a PDF. And I'd have to scroll around and pinch and zoom and blah, bra, bra, bra, blah, blah. It's just like a little page on a nice little tablet. So it's stuff like that. It's all the things that make big screen phones nice. This is that times 1.5. And you can circle things with a pen. And you can circle things with a pen.

That's true. All right. I'm going to buy this phone. Okay. Circling PDFs. That's like all I do. That's what I'm here for. All right, before we go, Allison, you cover the carriers as well as reviewing phones for us.

There's a gigantic T-Mobile data breach that kind of flew under the radar. There's a lot of other news happening this week. Tell us what's going on with T-Mobile. Yeah, it's pretty bad. So what T-Mobile has confirmed is that about 47 million customer accounts were affected. This is a data breach where some hackers got a hold of, you know, stuff you don't want to give away like your social security number, first and last names, drivers, license, ID numbers. Yeah, that kind of thing. So it's all wrapped up in people who've applied for credit through Team Mobile.

So it's current customers postpaid, but also some former customer accounts or some people who applied for credit and just never opened an account with Team Mobile. So that is not great. And they've got a support page set up. If you were affected, you can go there and get some tips on, you know, they want you to reset your pin and your password and then you can get your two-year trial of McAfee, whatnot. But yeah, it sucks. And I think, like, if you are concerned and you think you've been affected by this, like,

freezing your credit is not a terrible idea. That's something they suggest on their site. Team Mobile has a really bad track record with this, doesn't it? Yeah, this is, like, the fourth one. Fourth one. Yeah. The thing that kind of killed me, on their page about it.

It was like, so none of your financial information is out there. They didn't get your, you know, your credit card number, but social security number maybe. It was like, that's too. Yeah, the one you can't change. Yeah. They can just get a whole other card in your name. Right. Yeah.

Just be a different person. Assume a different identity. Yeah. All right. Well, our nation's carriers is always the most trustworthy. actors in the entire tech ecosystem. I love it. We got to take a break.

We got to fold this phone up. Yeah? Thank you, Alex. I loved it. I appreciate your concern. Dan, Allison, thank you so much for being on. Thank you. Thank you.

We're going to take a break. We're going to talk about software locking for a long time when we come back. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO,

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That's upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. that's upw-w-r-k-com upwork.com we're back like i said at the top of the show actually a lot of things happened today right it was like a pretty sleepy week and then today was like a tsunami so part of it is our fault we published a huge piece sean hollisd been working on it for months ever since the apple and epic trial uh was over he has been diligently reading every email that came out of discovery in that trial and sorting them. So he put up a huge piece today that's, I don't know,

I put 107, I think. Over 100. It's like 107 just like revelations from this trial. We're not going to go through all of them. You should read the piece. It's amazing. He's got all the PDFs. Like all the receipts you could ever want.

Like, Sean's got a store. It's called the receipt store. And it's just receipts from Apple versus Epic. And just like a lot. Like Steve Jobs wanted to build an iPhone Nano. He had Johnny I present mockups at a conference. Steve Jobs, a brilliant man, did not learn the lesson about big cheap screens. Took them a long time to learn the lesson about big cheap screens, and now they're all over it.

But that's in there. Apple has, like, extremely tried to lock down its store. They've discussed IMessage and Android many times, and they've always returned to We Want to Keep people here. They do gift cards in promotions. And we have emails proving it. They give gift cards during promotions because they want you to buy more apps and music and stuff from their stores because it makes it harder to switch. You knew this.

I knew this. We all felt it. Now we've got an email that we're like, this is what we're doing. So just like an incredible amount of this going on. You should just read that piece. That's one thing we did. At the same time, I would remind you that Epic is also suing Google. The case has just been burning in the background.

And then today, the judge in that case ordered the complaints to be unredacted. So now we, like, have a clearer picture of what's going on. You just don't even want to say it. All right. I will say it. Part of the unredacted emails includes a program that Epic was complaining about inside Google called Project Hug. Okay. So there is this project.

still not going to say it so epic is like they're going to leave the play store they're going to do fortnight right Android's open they can do their own store Google I cannot believe they called it this pH pH pH pH

Google launches project hug to hug the other game developers yeah to like pay them money and give them free marketing so they won't go into Epic store or any other store Google seems right

like worry they've got we've got in the complaint they're worried that epic and i go arranged a deal with samsung other phone makers get better splits on revenue basically have the their store preloaded with fortnight which they kind of did with with samsung for a minute there so part of this game this is a quote uh a hug it's hug developers close and show love plan a surge plan to throw extra love slash promotion to top developers in games, including other 10 cent portfolio companies, because 10 cent big investor in Epic. Basically, this amounts to do.

They spent hundreds of millions dollars on secret deals with 20 developers. That, quote, they had deemed risk of falling to Epic's contagion. Contagion. Wow. For a plan called Project Hug. Yeah. This gets very dramatic very quickly. So here's the thing that stood out to me, I mean, besides the name and whatever,

that it's, that the amount of money that we're talking about here. It was hundreds of millions of dollars that they paid. We've always, we've always said, you know, like Microsoft, when it was trying to get app stores going for Windows, sort of like, just pay the money. And now we have a sense of, like, how much money often gets doled out in these deals, these backroom deals. It's a lot.

The other numbers that jumped out at me was the stuff that Google was apparently worried they lose. So they're like from the Epic Game Store and if, you know, other things start to, you know, contagion spreads. It could be 350 to million to 1.4 billion by 2020. And then if like, you know, the damn breaks and there's a Samsung app store and an Amazon app store and all sorts of other app stores and everybody gets traction, they were worried they could lose anywhere from $1.1 billion to $6 billion, which is just a lot more money than you maybe were thinking of in terms of scale for the Play Store. Yeah. So notably that this is just unredacted complaint. Nothing has

actually happened in this case. They just took blackouts of the complaint because the judge says the complaints read unredacted. Google gave a statement to us, did not deny Project Hugg exists. It's real, everybody. Google's statement, these programs are a sign of healthy, these programs are a sign of healthy competition between operating systems and app stores and benefit developers tremendously. This is true.

It's true. If you just had two stores, if you had Target and Walmart, Target and Walmart compete ferociously to get the best products in their stores that compete on race. This is Google also controls the operating system and they make the deals with the number one vendor of phones in the ecosystem in this country. Like it's true, but it's like also extremely alive by omission, right? Like it's true that programs like this are a sign of competition. They're worried about competition. They're going to spend them.

But if you're Samsung, right, like you're also negotiating to merge your watch operating systems with Google's watch operating. that like the levels, the layers of control across the entire ecosystem are, like, massive for Google, and they've got a war chest of money that they're clearly just spending to provide all this extra promotion in their store. So, like, is it, it's competition? Is it fair competition? Is it meaningful competition? Like, I don't know the answer to those questions. I would just point out. They did not deny that it was called Project Hug. That's really my main takeaway from the story. similarly well and also to your second point the next thing yeah similarly connected to that same kind of point unredacted complaint reveals google had a program called the premier device program

that gave android fund makers a greater share of search revenue than they would ordinarily receive remember they give android away for free they monetize it because people use google apps and services they see google ads they can give kickbacks to the phone makers on top of that So many ways for your Android filmmaker, Google's paying you to use Android. But in exchange for this higher rate of search revenue, they all agreed to ship their phones without any third-party app stores pre-installed. When I say it's like, yes, it's competition. It's like Google's working every angle it can to protect its premium status on your phone.

And this is just one of those, man, it's icky, right? It's just like Dieter, you know I have talked for years about like every time we use one of these modern devices, like we know there's like some sequence of deals in the background. Yeah. That is preventing us from having, like, real choices. And this is, well, here is the deal. But is this also why, like, a lot of that bloatware that carriers used to just shove on

your phone that you hated? Is that why it's gone? I mean, that might be part of it. It's also gone just because we yelled a lot and we started buying phones that didn't have it. Like, we, there is some effect of, like, consumers choosing the things that are good and rejecting the things that are bad. But the layers of sort of these, I call them kickbacks, you know, compare the Premier Device program, you know, giving more search revenue to companies that only include one app store to, we had, was this like two years ago, there were a bunch of carrier deals got revealed in like France and that was related to Google Play Services and like requiring that you, you know, don't make non-Google versions of Amazon. Android, and there was money spun up in that as well.

So this is not Google gives away the operating system, you know, and then Samsung or Jamie or whomever picks it up and then makes a phone and everybody's happy. This is a very complicated set of deals behind all of these phones. And I think what makes this worse for Google, we've obviously spent a lot of time talking about Apple and Epic because that trial happened. But Apple and Epic, like, the fight is very narrowly about the App Store. Apple's control of it. There are arguments for needing to control the App Store.

And, you know, you can just fall down the rabbit hole of whether Apple can have a monopoly over the iPhone, right? Like, that is a very complicated argument to understand. Some people, and like Epic obviously believes it, Apple obviously uses its control in various ways that feel anti-competitive. But at the heart of it, they're like, it's our phone. Deal with it. With Google, they have all of these deals.

It's their operating system that they have given away for free, that they have touted as being open, that they are proud of, you know, the amount of competition, all these other apps are they point to all this stuff. And then there are an endless series of deals and documents where Google is controlling the ecosystem that runs on its open platform in order to benefit itself. And so just it feels like it should be easier for Google because they can just say, well, there's another app store. But what is actually happening is they are using all of their other levers to make sure their app store is the preferred app store and really the only thing that matters on Android. And there's more evidence because the ecosystem is wider and Google has to use the other levers to maintain the control. In some ways, it feels like this whole thing will break worse for Google than it will for Apple. Right. Or we will hear more about how Google does it.

Whereas Apple's emails are like, why would you do that? People would switch from the iPhone. And like, just like rationally, this makes sense. Like, yeah, that's like a normal thing. Google's like, we can't possibly have anyone use a different Wi-Fi stack, which is like a real thing they used to do, or a GPS stack. And then they're like, put the boot down on Motorola. And this is like a lawsuit they've had.

And like, we've gone through this with Google before. And the fact that they have to use the control, the fact that their control is influencing a bunch of partners means that it's very obvious when they exert the control. whereas like Phil Schiller sending Craig Federee an email being like, oh, that's a bad idea. Does not feel like an exertion of control. Right. We'll see.

I think like I said, I think this one's going to be a lot wackier. Last revelation from this also revealed that Google had a gigantic plan to counteract epic by building its own gaming division that would indeed also ship games on the Mac, which is very funny to me. Finally, someone's going to break that one. They're going to figure it out. It's pretty good.

I don't know. They also try to horse trade with Epic to get Fortnite on Stadia. And that people's like, no. That's not a lot. Yeah, like I said, just a lot coming out of these two trials, a lot of emails, a lot of evidence of these companies are, in fact, trying to control your experience on the phone. Yeah. That brings us to Deeter's new segment. Our new weekly segment, I think it has to be weekly.

that we call This Week in Lock-in? Dieter, what's happening this week in lock-in? Well, Tom Warren broke the news wide open of just how Microsoft

is changing Windows to make it even more difficult to change your default browser away from Edge. It's so petty. It's so,

so, so, so, so, normally you just, like, you have a pop-up, you click the one you want, you're done, and then, oh, wait, I want to change it. You, like, go into settings.

You find wherever the, default browser thing is in settings and whatever. But the way that all of these defaults work, they're like handlers, right? So like when you click a link that has HTTP or, you know, dot-da-da-d-whatever, Twitter slash or whatever, that's what tells the operating system, use this app to open that thing. Right. And so what Microsoft has done is, instead of just having default browser for all the stuff you would want your browser to open, they make you go into settings and change each one of those handlers individually. And also, if you don't click remember this setting, the dialog box goes away.

It reverts to edge, and then you have to like wander through the operating system to find it again. Yeah. And just to be clear, even if you do all of this, that doesn't mean that edge goes away, because when you do stuff with the like, you know, Windows search or clicking links in like Windows widgets or whatever, those are hard-coded to Edge. and so Edge still appears unless you come up with some, you know, hacky workarounds, which do exist. I feel like Microsoft should have learned from like the last time they had a big browser that they wanted to be the best and everybody used.

You'd think they would like maybe not be so agro. I guess this is less, this is definitely less agro. But like... I think Microsoft is like looking at the iPhone and being like, well, they do it. Yeah. I mean, like the whole lesson here was Microsoft got slapped for. browser bundling in the 90s and then everyone was like who everybody everybody relax and then i will say this flies in the face of nadella coming on decoder and saying we're the open platform for open

competition we have a distribution advantage for edge but if you want any anything to be a first class citizen of windows that is what we're doing that is the culture of the company like yeah that dude said that to me and then i'm like looking at the screenshot i'm like okay uh what happened to that idea this happened afterwards you know who else is mad about this is the the head of Chrome publicly tweeting Hiroshi Lockheimer saying this from the company that claims to be the most open with quote the most choice unquote. I hope this is just a developer preview thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because he definitely knows a guy at Microsoft who runs Windows. Yeah. Right. Panos Penae runs Windows. Like do you remember when they made the service duo and they both

like follow each other on Twitter and like did a bunch of hard eyes emojis. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe they've lost each other's phone numbers. Yeah. Well, every good breakup requires you to tweet at your ex about how she doesn't live up to her values. Get messy. Let's see it. There's like, okay, we pointed out just how locked in

Samsung's and Apple's earbuds are to their respective ecosystems. Just go look at the chart. It's very sad. We pointed out that nobody's making good Macsafe things because Apple just doesn't make it easy to do MFI proper MagSafe things. So in order to get a 15-watt MagSafe charger, you need apart from Apple. Right. And I will tell you, like, Apple has learned this lesson before.

Apple's executives don't turn over. Right. Right. It's all the same dudes who, like, learned the lesson from Airplay, now failing to apply what they learned to MagSafe. So if you will remember the first versions of Airplay, there were no airplay speakers. They just didn't

exist. Thomas Ricker wrote about this in like 2012 for us. He would like wander the halls of CES and be like, do these speakers support Airplay? And then people look sad at him. And eventually, someone told him that the reason nothing supported Airplay was to make

airplay work. You needed to buy a single supplier piece of hardware that was blessed by Apple. It was so expensive and it didn't work and it wasn't small, so nobody used it. Years later, Apple's like, crap, our TV strategy has failed. Airplay 2 will now be everywhere. They re-engineered Airplay to support video on all the TVs that wants it and to make it easier for basically anything to have it. Now, everything has Airplay 2. When we publish a story about a device that doesn't have Airplay 2, everyone's like, this thing is DOA. Yeah. I want Airplay 2 to, I wouldn't even consider it.

And it's like, well, have you taken a step back, Eddie? Just thought about what happened here. He might be too busy with podcasts. I don't know if it's Eddie. I'm just doing e-names today. Didn't the same thing happen with the lightning cable? Because the original lightning cable, didn't it need like a very specific Apple-approved part? And so all the other ones would like melt and were terrible and people were complaining about it.

And then Apple... Even Apple's own lightning cables melt and are terrible. No, but it definitely, it had a controller in the cable. It was definitely a thing. Yeah. And then eventually they're like, oh, we can't keep doing this because everybody keeps yelling when they buy the much cheaper cable and it breaks and they're mad at us. And we should stop that.

Like, Apple knows they don't have to do this. You know how when there's a big tech event, we have like a plan, we have like a template? And, you know, we customize it and blah, blah, but like, we're like, okay, there's another tech event. They're going to announce some stuff. Let's get ready. And we know how this is going to go. We know the order that it's likely to be announced. we know like how the event will go

there'll be a live blog we know we'll need to do like you know this that the other thing wait we plan these things I just show up you just show up we do all the work Alex actually does the work now just Dieter and I

in a huddle I don't do it work I'm here to be charming yeah but we know like what the week looks like right the event the announcements the like analysis

the like devices show up a week later you review the things and blah blah blah we've got like a two week game plan that we just know how it's going to go yeah do you think Apple has like a three year game plan for each one of these technologies

that they just know how it's going to go. We're going to release a thing. It's only going to work with our stuff. We say it'll work with other stuff, but it really won't. And then we'll work with a couple of partners just so that we can say that it does. And so Logitech and Belkwin will make a thing. And then six months later, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then two years later, we'll redo it again so it's actually open this time. They just have a playbook. But what's the gain from that? They get two years of exclusivity. Where the gain is, everybody buys Apple accessories, which are enormously high margin when they buy the new phones. Okay.

The gain is people, and this is like you weigh it. You decide how important you think this is. But Apple's like, we can't guarantee safety. If we just like open this thing up and let people charge it the full of 15 watts, they'll buy bad chargers and their phones will explode. I've heard this from them and a full of all times. I don't know. But maybe we'll believe that maybe don't.

But that's the thing that they say. And then I think the final gain is they want to control the, ecosystem. What they want is the line out the door of accessory manufacturers waiting to pay the money and then a huge vibrant ecosystem of people going through their toll booth. And what actually happens is people tweet crazy shit from Alibaba at me and say, this ecosystem is fine. And I'm like, I hope your family is safe. And then like somewhere down the line, Apple like gives in and like, they will bless more products with a cheaper rate or something. And the entire made-for-i-phone ecosystem is full of people who are terrified.

They will not talk. Heim Gartenberg has been trying to report out the story of how MFI really works for 10 years. Right? He's been talking to accessibility. The filmmakers. They talk to him off the record. But like, we can't get that story out of his brain and onto the verge.com. Because everyone's like, no, no, no, I'm afraid my entire business will tank if Apple

things I'm violating the NDA and they yank the like the business will disappear. So like the amount of control that Apple exerts those ecosystem is like out of control. That said, it is at the end of the day, Chi charging and magnets. There are lots of devices that work with it. The one that's the funniest to me is like Belkin makes a stand. Yep. That does 7.5 watt mag chi charging with magnets because you can't lock out magnets. It's like a line that at times like this is the most open standard in the world.

Anyone can build a magnet. But if you don't have the software, if you don't have the little hardware chip, the iPhone software will lock you out of 15 watts. So they have a different one that's 15 watt MagSafe. Right. Two products from the same company that look identical with one has more expensive. Here's a different part in it. That is ridiculous.

Yep. And then I don't know how much we want to get into this because you don't want to hear me complain about RSS much, but actually had an incredible story about what a mess Apple's podcast subscription platform has been. Everyone has to upload their podcasts to Apple separately and deal with their fields and they're really complicated and everybody never really screws it up. And like podcasts are disappearing. People are losing like 30% of their listenership just from like technical error. That's real businesses.

Just, whoops. Oh, well. My favorite part of this whole story, anytime we do a story that has a good, like, dumb file format in it, and like we accomplished our goal. Like, this is what we founded The Verge for. It's like, we're going to do two paragraphs. and how the real problem here is a file format. So use Apple's tool. You upload to their service.

You pay their cut when people subscribe in their app. And then if you want any data about how this is going, there's not like a nice dashboard. There's like a G-zipped Excel file in like no, like all these podcasters like I don't, I don't know, man. I solve crimes. Like I don't, I know what this is. Yeah. So like all these people are getting this data in this file format. they have no idea how to access or read really and then no idea what to do with in the data

and Apple's just like dumping CSVs on the podcast industry and being like see we're doing great and it's like Apple it's getting to the scale now and we'll talk about Facebook in a minute but like Facebook has been a platform company for a long time YouTube has been a platform company for a long time and like if you listen to Neil Mohan and decoder like platform company executives they know that they have to be very careful and how they like address their audience about what the platform is going to do because they've they've just been taking the hits for a decade

and they have to build the tools. Actually one of the things Neil said to me about how YouTube makes decisions is he's like on the back end when we provide data to YouTubers we think carefully about where in YouTube studio it will be. Right? Do we want to put it on the first screen or the second screen?

Do we want to walk people? to an understanding of the data they're seeing. And that's like the kind of product review he's in. Apple's like, the podcast industry depends on our app. We're doing paid subscriptions. Here's an Excel file. And like they just don't have the muscles to serve that kind of audience yet. And as they start to do things like make TV shows, they're going to like run into all

these other kinds of problems. The child protection stuff, they're running into this problem where they're standard way of talking, which is to not say anything and just like ship another iPhone and be like, what more do you want from us? Like, it's just like running into the stuff the other platforms are good at. And I think that they maybe blinded themselves, or we just assumed they would be okay at this, because iTunes has been the default directory of all podcasts since forever, right?

It's like that is a place where you know you can find everything. It's the place where the podcasts have just gone, right? You might put yourself in other apps or other directories, but the thing is, being the default directory of all podcast feeds, literally it's just an iCloud folder full of text files. That's it. It's just RSS feeds that people upload to Apple and they update the, you know, the latest one when they put up their new thing.

It's just a big-ass directory of text files that they use to build, you know, their, like, public-facing podcast directory off of. And, you know, sure, it's more complicated than that. but the actual podcast themselves are hosted someplace else. And so the switch to subscriptions, part of the deal here, it's the same deal with Spotify, you know, needing to monetize is they need to move away from that very simple RSS XML format so that they can start collecting more data about which ads you listen to and when they get inserted and et cetera, et cetera, you know, how long you listen to the things and so on and so on. And so that has been the big overarching story of what's happening to podcasts over the last year is we're, Everyone's trying to dump the format, replace it with something that's smarter. But it turns out when you dump a simple, universal format that anything can use and go to something smarter, you also happen to introduce lock-in.

Yeah. That's happening in like two ways. Like, I don't think people love Spotify's podcast player. They're the other player. If you're listening to this in Spotify, thank you. I appreciate you. Please listen to the ads at half speed. But people, the feedback we get is like Spotify's podcast experience is like fine, not great.

People like Apple's podcast experience until this last update. Now they hate it. But what both companies are trying to do is get basically exclusives on podcasts. Spotify is literally buying them. Apple's saying, well, everyone's already in our app. Just have them subscribe here. Now they belong to us. Upload your audio to us and we will deliver it to them.

Right. The flip side of this is like right now, if you're listening to this and overcast or pocketcast or something, yep, there's a directory of RSS feeds like Dieter said. that directory points you at the Vergecast, which is served by our hosting provider megaphone, which is owned by Spotify. Damn it. That's the way it goes. But there are other hosting providers. Those hosting providers spit out a bunch of metrics.

They're competing to provide better metrics and add integrations. And then there's an ecosystem of companies around them that, like, we'll sell you other podcast metrics and ad integrations all the stuff. And you see this stack is like, yep, there's a stack of providers that will help you record a podcast. there's a stack of providers that will help you monetize a podcast. There's a stack that will help you distribute it. And then there's like two endpoints in Apple and Spotify. And then the other podcast players are much smaller. Apple's just trying to like eat up that chain and they're not doing a good job.

Spotify's trying to eat up that chain and they're not doing a great job. And like they could do a good job. But they're so confident that because they own the last link in the chain, they don't have to. And that's like always the problem for me. Okay. we got to take a break. We're going to come back and talk about Facebook getting sued in VR. That's a good mashup. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront,

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There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB. It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. Okay, we're back. Two pieces of Facebook news today, and I promise you they happened simultaneously for a reason. Right? Sure.

Yeah. If you remember, the Federal Trade Commission and a collection of states all sued to break up Facebook and Instagram, what's that? Their complaints got tossed out. The states go away, you're done. Too late. You had her chance. You blew it in 2011 or whatever. judge says to the Federal Trade Commission, which was under the previous chairman, the Trump appointed chairman, hey, you forgot to make the case of Facebook as a monopoly.

Like the quote was like this whole thing feels like everyone thinks Facebook as monopoly, therefore it is. Let's break them up. Like you got to make the case that they're monopolizing something here. And so he dismissed it. Today was the deadline for the FCC to refile that case. In the meantime, right, Joe Biden appoints Lena Kahn to be the chairman of the FTC. LenaCon does not like Facebook and Amazon. Facebook asks the FTC to make Lena Con recuse herself from this case.

I don't know why they thought that was going to work. She's like, no, I'm in charge of the thing. Her response in this refiled complaint today is, well, there's a judge. Like, my job is to sue you. Your job is to defend yourself, and the judge will decide, not me. Right. Like, you're going to get your due process, but my job is to sue you. So that's her whole response.

and then lays out this like scorching, like refiled complaint, Russell wrote it up, but scorching definition of what she thinks the relevant market is, if you think about it, the judge basically said, you didn't do this part right, do it better. Yeah. So they did that part way better. The definition is very narrow, personal social networking, and the complaint tries to explain why, like, TikTok is not a competitor to Facebook because it doesn't, it's not about your friends and family. Right.

And like, why Reddit isn't, and YouTube is really just a video distribution platform. And so the whole point is Facebook is about your friends and family. And then it's like Twitter is there to help users keep up with the news. And I'm like, no, these are, I made some friends on Twitter. Have you yet to make any family on Twitter. This is happening today. Everyone knows it's going to happen today because it's the last day. Right.

You've got to do it today. All indications are today. So then this morning, our man, Markey Z, shows up on CBS with Gail King and announces, Facebook has built conference rooms in VR. It's called Facebook Horizon Workspace. And they do the interview in VR on CBS as morning. It's like, it's hilarious. Alexi, throwed it up.

We've got some clips of Zuck and Boz from Facebook talking about it. In VR. In VR. I used it today. I've got a Quest too. I plugged it in. Like, what's really funny about is if other people don't have VR headsets, there's like fake Zoom in VR. So like you're sitting in a virtual conference room and you're like a cartoon avatar.

And I'm like, Sean Hollister. like on a screen, like on a fake TV and VR in front of you. It's hilarious. The whole thing is hilarious. I'm kind of, Alex, I'm going to make us start doing our meetings in this. I've got my quest too.

I'm ready to go. Disclosure, I'm not saying anything about any of this ridiculous stuff because my wife works for Facebook. He's just listening. Yeah, but anyway, it was just a very naked, like,

it's a cool product. It's worth talking about, right? We had Zuckerberg talking to Casey on the virtual show a few weeks ago about the Metaverse and this long range plan to get there. This is but one more step. It's a good flashy demo. And he's been like promising VR office meetings for like years at the Oculus developer

conferences. Yeah. I mean like the Facebook executives insist that they have all their meetings in VR. I refuse to believe that. Yeah. That's a good question. That's true. You can decide in your heart whether Zuck is really doing all this meetings from VR.

But they say it's. better. I'll say that in my 15 minutes in VR today doing a meeting, I thought it was really weird. It's just a really weird way to, like... How does it feel to be a cartoon? Super weird. Can I just say this? Yeah. Every time any software product is like, make an avatar of yourself, I have a moment of pure crisis where I'm like, I don't know what my nose looks like. Shut up. What are you saying?

Pick your eyebrows. When is the last time I considered the shape of my eyelashes? No, I don't know what I look like. Just in a mirror. Yeah. Pulling your Oculus Quest headset off over and over again to reference yourself. It's such a weird demand that keeps coming up. Like I have the new mad and it's like, make an avatar of yourself.

It's like, why? Where is this going to be? Do you play in Madden as yourself? You can. I don't because first of all, I was very flattering to myself when I made by Madden avatar. That dude is jacked. It's just every time, every time something asks me to make an avatar myself, I'm like, I don't know, man. Oh, yeah, same.

Beard guy. Can you pick, can I just pick a beard guy? It'll be fine. Everyone will know what I'm talking about. Just lady with glasses, go. On this screen. in workspace where you're making the avatar, there's this incredible disclaimer.

It says all product features might not support legs. Just so it's like, wow. That's a real problem, isn't it? That's okay. And like, it's funny because when you're sitting at the table, you don't see anyone's legs.

Yeah. So like no product features support legs. None. But you can turn around. You can go to a whiteboard behind you. So, I mean, like, the actual product in use, technologically amazing. So you sit down, you're like, if you've ever used Noculus, like, it can, you know, it has pass-through mode.

So you can kind of see a grainy black and white around you. Yeah. So you tell it where your desk is. You know, draw a box over your real desk. Right. It can detect your keyboard. You tell what model of laptop you have. Oh, no.

You're like, I have a 16-inch space grade MacBook Pro. Does it support mechanical keyboards? I might be in trouble. It's like all the way the bottom unless you're like, I'm a mechanical keyboard nerd. So you can tell it what model, and it will detect your laptop. It will place your laptop in VR.

Incredible. And then you can say, I want a whiteboard. And you can get up and walk to another part of your room and pass through. Draw a whiteboard, like a big virtual whiteboard. And then when you're sitting, you get pass through of just your desk.

So you can see all the stuff on your real desk. Yeah. You can see where your lapboard. laptop is. And then incredibly, because it's a conference room, you need to have a laptop dongle. There's an app you can run on your laptop, Oculus Remote desktop, that will mirror your laptop display in like, you know, full res in front of you in VR. So you can type in your laptop, you can see what's happening in a laptop, look around this conference room, and push a button, walk somewhere else, and like draw on a whiteboard with a controller. That's cool. All this is nuts,

right? And like, your laptop hates this. Like, it's like, the fans, running. Just is it a jet in my house? No, it's just my laptop. It's just like all of this is like technically stunning. Yeah. Right? All of it is also extremely distracting because the hand tracking is like, you know, it's like a

beta. So like your hands are like flying like a fine, like cartoon hands are just flying all over the place. Just sort of flying over your head while you're trying to type. And everyone else is just like their video conference in like normal human beings, just taking screenshots of your cartoon just like freaking out all the time. Just Sean staring at you. It's credible. It's entertaining is what I would say.

I don't know that we should actually have meetings in it yet. But I was very entertained by playing with it today. Get the Quest 2s out to everybody. It'll be great. You know, the Quest 2 is like I've said it on the show many times. Like it is a remarkable product. It is like a complete, excellent consumer product that happens to be made by a company with a litany of other problems.

But it is a remarkable thing that exists. I use mine like almost every other day. I adore it. for. I use it for supernatural. Oh yeah. Supernatural is great. It's fantastic. I love it. I use it all of the time. I hate that I have to like use Facebook. Like I hate that like Facebook is a part of it. But I love everything about it. One day I will finish playing like the Jurassic Park game. It got too scary for me. I had to stop. Too many dinosaurs. I tried to play the one where you're in a space station and something bad happened to you. And I was like, I'm very nauseous. And also. so I don't like these kinds of games. Okay. So that's Facebook. They were successful, right?

I spent more time talking about VR than their antitrust complaint. Facebook, for its part, says the antitrust complaint will fail. The thing's already been dismissed. They tend to believe that the market definition is still too broad, that they have a lot of competitors. I think they have a pretty good case to make that Facebook actually competes with a lot of different things. Like TikTok is a real competitor to Facebook. Right. Is it the kind of thing that Facebook is?

It is not. I mean, that's why they just launched Reels today, too, right? Yeah, Reels and actual Facebook. Yeah. Or in the United States. So, like, they know it's a competitor. Yeah. I think the thing people will say is it is ridiculous to think that the market for all things is just attention, full stop.

Yeah. Like, there are different kinds of products that occupy your attention in different ways. And if you just define the market as attention, then everything is competitive with everything all the time. Can I, I just close, but I just want to point. out that as part of my full Z Fold 3 review, I opened up a split screen with TikTok on the left and Instagram Reels on the right and just had that experience for 20 minutes. That's incredible. It's amazing.

Just go. Sometimes it felt like they were interacting with each other. There was like the bad knockoff reel on the right and the good TikTok on the left. Oh, that's really good. Yeah, it was really solid. Content being piped into your eyeballs. All right. We got to wrap this up.

But Alex, there's like a lot of Intel GPU news this week. You want to take us through real fast? Yeah. A lot of things happen. Not a lot, actually. What happened is every year, Intel does like three pre-announcements. Like I think Google is just like taking from their playbook with the Pixel 3 where they're like, this is coming, this is coming. And then like later on it'll be like, okay, it's finally here.

So today they, or yesterday, I believe, they had this big thing. They invited all the journalists and stuff. Heimgartenberg went and listened in on everything. and they announced that the Alder Lake chip, which is like a new CPU that's on Intel 7, which is not 7 nanometer, but 10 nanometer because it's Intel. And it's actually kind of a cool chip

because it's trying to compete both with Apple and all the arm-based stuff that Apple's done that's really, really good at battery, and also trying to compete with AMD and Risen, which is really, really good at power. And so it's saying, okay, we're going to start doing big and little cores, essentially. They're going to have an efficient core and a power core and merge them together in this chip.

And it's going to be really, really good at battery life and also really, really fast. Not a whole lot of details beyond that, especially on things like numbers, like how fast. They were crucially comparing it to some older CPUs because they always do that. Every time they're like, it's 70% faster than this CPU. from seven years ago. So we still don't know a lot about it, but it's, it's just neat. It's just neat that they're trying, they're thinking a little bit outside the box because for like the last five or six years until his whole plan has been, we're going to make

this 14 nanometer chip just more and more and more and more and more and more efficient. And so now they're having to actually do like some weird, cool architecture stuff. And there's some really cool architecture stuff happening there. Haim did a fantastic kind of breakdown of it. Highly recommend you go read it. He also learned all about their new GPU, which they've been announced. They announced like three years ago. Yeah.

And it's a little closer now. So this time they were like, okay, we're going to now talk about like the name of these GPUs. And specifically it's called, hold on. Arc. Well, it's called Arc. It's the stupidest name in the world. because like, it's like the architecture this time is called alchemist.

Okay. And then later there's going to be battle mage just in case you're concerned about like where we're coming. And then celestial and then finally druid. Okay. So this is like the next three or four years, I think, of this roadmap of architecture. But they're promising that they're going to, they're going to be like selling to consumers. And this is where I get a little bit stuck because new chips, they sell through blah, blah, blah. But what has Intel successfully sold directly to consumers in recent memory?

Like, they just canceled real sense, not that that really was ever meant for consumers. They sell CPUs. Yeah, that's it, right? Everything else they've not been able to do. And so is selling a GPU close enough to selling a CPU that they'll be able to pull it off or not? I mean, they assume so, right? They think that they're going to do it because they look at AMD, who is a much, much smaller market share. And they're like, well, AMD can do it and is very quickly coming for us in a lot of different spaces.

And so we're going to do it too. And like the interesting thing is the money for them isn't in these GPUs that they're selling to consumers. Like the alchemists of the battlemage and stuff, that's not where they're going to make money. They're trying to really compete, not with AMD, but with Nvidia in the server space and the interoperable. prize space because Nvidia is just like taking everybody to school when it comes to these big GPUs that everybody needs for AI processing. And so that's like, that's what Intel's actually trying to do. But they're also like, oh yeah, and also we're going to do like GPUs for everybody else. And we'll be able to package it together like AMD and it's going to be super great. And you're

going to love us. And we will continue to be the biggest name here, even though we've sat on our laurels for so long. They rotted. We fell. Rodden Laurels. Like, it's, Ronald Lurals rot. I mean, they probably did. They are literally organic, you know.

Yeah, they probably rotted. And like, Intel is just really screwed up for years and years. Really, like, didn't pay attention to, to their competitors and where their competitors were going. And is now quickly trying to play catch up.

And maybe they'll do it. You know, these, these GPs they're saying are really fast. Maybe they'll do it. The Intel. story. They're providing some cool, like, software solutions the way that NVIDIA does with like DLSS. So they're kind of their own competitor to that in the works. And something that they do really well that AMD has really struggled with and only kind of caught up in the last year or so is that software integration. Like they're really good at integrating the software and making all the different parts of a computer work together well. So it could be a real viable competitor to AMD. And, and Enidia, but we'll have to see when it actually comes out, because we still don't know enough about it to, like,

actually know anything besides neat. I mean, I feel like the Intel story is, like, Intel, you're going to love us again. Yeah. Yeah. And to be fair, they have a new CEO who I've been trying to get on Decoder for months. Pat, come on. Talk to Neely, please. We've been doing Decoder for almost a year, and, like, the push and pull of getting CEOs

to show up in the show is, like, very interesting. Like everyone wants to come in riding on the high, and I want everyone to come in when they're the most embattled. Because the most interesting question is, how are you going to fix it? Right. So I think they're waiting. And like the thing is all of this stuff that's happening right now, he didn't really have any part in. Like this was all in process for years now. And so his thing is like some of the other moves he's been making with like making deals with smaller manufacturing.

to produce their chips and stuff like that. Like, that's where he's coming from. And begging the government for money. Yeah. Yeah, and begging the government and be like, look at all this stuff we're doing in Arizona to compete with China. Which, Justine Kalma has written a very good article about how both Intel and TSM want to build these chip factories. But there's a giant water shortage and chip factories require a ton of water. Yeah.

So my first question is, why are you building a chip factory in the hot dry place? But it turns out that there's a lot of sun, which is very good for solar power, for powering these factories. And also because they just have built up a little industry, little parts of the world end up randomly being good at certain kinds of industries. And Arizona is randomly good at, you know, making chips and having chip experts at the university and whatever. But this water crisis on the West Coast is getting very real. And it's going to be very real for Arizona. and I don't know how viable it is to be wanting to build lots and lots of gigantic water-dependent chip factories out there. Anyway, Justine's story is great.

You should read it. Yeah, go read it. I think she does a really good job of explaining the issue. And, you know, I think it's really about, like, there's that initial cost of water for these companies, but they've gotten really, really good at recycling that water and reusing it and stuff. So they've got, like, giant pools, basically. And it's just, they fill it up. And so that initial thing is going to be, it may take longer. Who knows?

But yeah, go read her story. It does a way better job explaining it. And just fantastic work. Can I just point out that Intel TSM, real companies, the real product with a shockingly huge demand cut sweetheart deals with Arizona and to build their ship factories. They want to cut additional sweetheart deals. They built a network of suppliers and a talent base in a state that didn't have it before. A critical component is water.

but they've got a plan to get water in the desert. And Foxcon built a factory in Wisconsin with no products on the roadmap and built no labor base but managed to literally build a pipe from the Great Lakes to their empty building. Yeah. She's killing me here, man.

I have a solution. We're coming up on the end of the verge cast and I think I know what needs to happen because it's the end of the verge cast that just came to me. I think that they should make ORAN. The Foxcote factory in Wisconsin should make ORAN chips for Jenna 5Sys. A Japanese carrier called Rakuten, literally put out a brochure this week that has been tweeted

at me numerous times. It's like, Oh, Rand's real. Our network runs on it. And I'm trying to figure out why they put out this lengthy blog post. And I can only surmise that someone there's listening to our show. because like who are you convincing except for the eight people who make it to the end and they're like

I'm skeptical about O-Rand just whispering to D-Eart. I'll send it to everyone. Okay, I want to end on this piece of news. It's my favorite piece of news from the week. It really sums up a lot about the largest companies in America. GM and AT&T have announced a plan

to bring 5G to Chevy Cadillac in GMC vehicles by 2024. You're doing great guys. We won't be halfway through the 6G hype cycle. It's amazing. Okay, that's it. We went long. We did it.

Yeah. I'm proud of us. Yeah. We love hearing from you. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless Deiders at Backlond. Alex is Alex H. Kranz with Z. Dan is D.C.

For Allison, Allison Joe won. Thanks again for coming on. Decoder next week. Give me a good one. Doug DeMuro. Oh, shit. The YouTube car reviewer. We got into it.

Hell yeah. My hand talks some smack. Did you talk about the quirks and features of his business? We talked a lot about the quirks and features of his business. If you are interested in being a YouTuber, you've got to get good at Excel. That's what I'm going to tell you. And he talks a lot about what he tracks and how he thinks about things. But he also just like talks some smack.

It was great. It's going to be a great episode. That's going on Tuesday. We'll be back next week with more Virgecast. I'm assuming more, like, the news is coming, right? End of August into fall hardware season. Oh, it's going to be. Get ready.

Four-hour verge cast. Get ready. It's never going to stop. That's it. Rock and roll. Get a vaccine.