The Vergecast - How AI will change phones — and the whole internet

Episode Date: February 6, 2024

Today on the flagship podcast of anti-glare coatings: 03:58 - Josh Miller, CEO The Browser Company, joins the show to chat about the Arc Search mobile browser. Arc Search: a new iPhone app combining browser, search, and AI The Arc browser is the Chrome replacement I've been waiting for  48:34 - Allison Johnson shares her review of the flagship Samsung Galaxy S24 phones. Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra review: all that and AI Samsung Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus review: smart choices 1:18:54- David Pierce answers a question from The Vergecast Hotline about the Apple Vision Pro. Apple Vision Pro review: magic, until it’s not Meta’s Quest headsets add spatial video and pinch controls to compete with Vision Pr Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of anti-glare coatings. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am doing my taxes. It's that time of year, my friends, the one time a year I need a printer, mine is currently broken, and suddenly I have to pretend that I understand a lot more than I actually do about complicated financial documents. And honestly, most of all, this is the time of year that I most wish I were more organized during the rest of the year so that this wasn't such a painful process. I have this beautiful filing system that I never touch until right about now and then I

regret all of my life choices over the past 12 months. But I don't really see that dynamic changing anytime soon. So here we are. Anyway, we have an awesome show for you today, but some quick housekeeping stuff before we get to that. First thing, you'll notice, it's Tuesday and this episode is publishing. We are from now on going to be publishing the Vergecast on Tuesdays and Fridays. There are a bunch of reasons for that, but mostly it just lets us cover more stuff more quickly.

When we had to wait until Wednesdays, it felt like we were doing a show and then really quickly doing another show and then not doing a show for a bunch of days. So this just kind of evenly spaces the Vergecast a little better. It'll let us be more on top of the news. It'll let us do all kinds of stories. And it won't, you know, bunch of our episodes up quite so much in your feed. Hope it's going to be great. Hope it doesn't screw up any of your routines.

Please let us know what you think. Also, we are going to start having a full post. post on theverge.com with all of our show notes, a whole bunch of links, lots of information about every single episode. We've heard all of you asking for better show notes and more links to stuff you can read about that we talk on the show. So we're just going to start doing that. At theverge.com slash vergecast, you'll be able to find all of that every single time we published an episode. That's a great place to leave comments. Tell us what you think of the episode. We're going to try to do a good job of being in the comments and talking to you and we want to

hear all the dumb things we say and all the times that you agree with me and not Nilai. Put it in the comments, tell us everything. We have lots more changes coming soon, actually, especially on YouTube. So stay tuned. The Vergecast as a thing is not changing. So don't worry. But we have little ways we think we can do everything a little better and make it all more fun to watch and listen to and download and all that good stuff. So lots more coming. Stay tuned. All right, enough of that. Let's get to the show. The first thing we're going to do today is we're going to talk to Josh Miller, who is the CEO of a startup called the Browser Company, which is trying to basically nothing short of reinvent the web browser

and do some big AI stuff and generally maybe change the internet forever. That all sounds big and ambitious, but it is big and ambitious, and it's fascinating. Then we're going to dig into all things Galaxy S24 with Allison Johnson, because it's only February and we might have already seen the most important Android phone of the year. All of that is coming up in just a second, but first I have to go forward. finish this one thing on this tax form, which is literally a form I've never heard of before. Hopefully, this only takes a minute. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped

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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. Welcome back.

Over the last couple of years, this browser called ARC has become super popular. It's available on Mac and iOS. It's coming to Windows soon. People are super into it, which is weird, honestly. I mean, when was the last time people got excited about a web browser? The new Netscape, power, and ease of use. It's free at Netscape.com. But ARC has some cool, unusual ideas about how browsers should work.

And it's just so much nicer to use than Chrome or Edge. It's just caught on for a lot of people as a result. Last week, the browser company, which is the company that makes ARC, released a new mobile app called ARCsearch. It's a mobile browser and a pretty good one, but it's way more than that. It's also an AI tool called Browse For Me that is like a comment. of search engine, AI chatbot, web page maker, and a bunch of other things. It's confusing to explain and frankly, kind of hard.

So let me just give you an example. Let's see. The Grammys were the other day. So I go into Arc Search on my phone and I say, what happened at the Grammys on Sunday? And then I type that in and then I hit Browse for Me in Arc. And it takes a second. It says it's reading six web pages, CBS News, New York Times, stuff like that. And then it pops up this page that says highlights of the 2024 Grammy Awards.

This is a completely AI generated webpage. It has a bunch of things at the top, like Killer Mike, the rapper was arrested, Taylor Swift won her fourth album of the year award, women dominated. There was a physical altercation, apparently. It just says that at the top. And then it has some search results. And then it has more information about Killer Mike being arrested, more information about Taylor Swift's wins, more notable wins. including Tracy Chapman, who didn't win but performed a duet. This is the thing about AI, right?

None of this is perfect. But anyway, it's this big long list of information and links and media and videos to watch that is all completely AI generated. It is building a web page for me every single time I search. It's neat, and it doesn't always work, as you can see. And it's weird, like a lot of AI stuff is weird. But it also points at something really big about how the Internet is changing. What does it mean for the web that I can just get information like this?

ARC is essentially just Googling for me, which is handy, but it kind of changes the whole dynamic of the internet. So I grabbed Josh Miller, the browser company's CEO, to talk all of that through, what ARC wants to be, how it's going to break the web apart, and lots more. I've been talking to Josh for years. I find ARC really fascinating, honestly. And he's always had these really big ideas about what a browser could be and also why he thinks a browser is worth building in the first place. And if you rewind four or five years ago, we're in this age back then where a couple of operating systems rule the world, right? Android, iOS, Windows, Mac. You want to do anything interesting, you have to reckon with those OSs.

And they are the ones that have the real control over how things work. But Josh had this inkling at the time that the web, and specifically web-based apps, were making a comeback. Figma, Notion, Slack, even Discord. These are all just secretly web apps running in web browsers, particularly. pretending they're not web browsers. And so the foundational observation of the browser company was, oh, my goodness, the next operating system is right in front of our eyes. It's going to look more like a web browser. It's going to be a web browser designed for the web, because, essentially, to use a Wall Street term, the cloud is underestimated, and the shift to the cloud

is underestimated. It is a fundamental shift that we take for granted that all of the things in our life-related technology are actually not in our lives anymore. They're out on a server or many server somewhere. And so the bet of the browser company was if you reimagine the interface to those things, to the internet, that would effectively become the most important operating system in our lives. And to be totally self-aware, that was kind of all we had at the time. So that's the frame here, right? The web is the thing. It's as if the app store was already around in 2004 or 2005 or whatever. And Apple went, huh, somebody should build an iPhone. to run all these things.

That might be cool. It's exactly backwards in the most interesting way. That's ARC's big plan. And now with AI, ARC can do that more and bigger and faster. But what is it trying to do? And is what it's trying to do what we want, both as users and, like, people on the internet? So that's where Josh and I really got into it. I asked him, you know, you've been shouting all this nonsense about web browsers for years now.

And this new app, Arcsearch, feels like the close. closest thing yet to getting to that idea about what an operating system can do to the web. So does this feel like you've finished, like you've done the thing? The first thing I'll say is now I know you thought I was spewing nonsense for these past few years that we've been friends. Listen, we're all spewing nonsense most of the time. It's okay. We're all spewing nonsense.

That's true. Another thing people don't tell you when you're younger. Yes, but not for reasons you may think. Okay. The reason that this new iPhone app, Arc Search, feels like. the truest representation of what we've been saying for many years. My dad has this phrase that he told me way too many times growing up, which is disregard the words. And the idea of this phrase is that we add these labels to things, these nouns, and they

gain all this cultural meeting to the point where we almost forget that they were made up. They don't actually mean it. They don't represent natural law. Yeah. And what we've been saying from the beginning and the reason that we use these phrases, the internet computer, an operating system for the web, as imperfect as they were and as ambiguous as they were, is that we were trying to say is that if you approach software and interface it to the internet from a human perspective, what does David need to do today? What does David's wife have to get

done today? Why are they turning to their computer? And you work backwards from that. You probably don't need a thing called a web browser or a search engine or a web page, because those are random nouns that were invented 25 years ago, the reason that Arc Search represents in its purest form to date, our big idea, is that it's something different. It's something new. It's kind of hard to put a label on it. You struggled with it in your review. Is it a browser?

Is it a search engine? Is it AI? Is it something else? And that makes me really excited because that is what we were trying to do. We were trying to start with, what does David need to do when he's at the restaurant with a bunch of friends and they have a random question about something that comes? comes up in conversation, find the answer to that as quickly as possible, and we should employ whatever tools and nouns and technologies we need to do that as quickly as possible.

And yeah, turns out, ends up looking a little different than web browsers of 25 years ago and search engines of 25 years ago and web pages of yesteryear. So that's what makes me so excited about Arc Search is it's a reminder to ourselves and everybody that, hey, we can invent new nouns. And in fact, if those new nouns are invented to solve problems and realize goals that we have, they might even be better than the old nouns. That's why I'm so excited about it. And one of our principles has always been the idea of a general-purpose web browser is deeply flawed. So you just brought up a bunch of things that I want to talk about, but we've started to talk

about the internet in a really different way than we used to, where I think you could make the case that we got the internet that we got, which I think by and large is a good version of the internet, based on this like overall value exchange that everyone. agreed on, right? Like, Google came up because Google made a bet that what was good for the web would also be good for Google and set itself up as a company that would work that way. And it worked that way for a really long time. And it went super well for Google and I think largely went well for the internet. Facebook built on some of the same premises, right? Like, there's this idea that I as a person on the internet am going to get value out of something. The people who make the tools

that I use are also going to get value that like everywhere along the way, if we can all find win wins, it's going to make the internet better. And I think with the advent of A, and what it has come to is, okay, the internet exists. It is now a thing to be mined for your benefit. And I think the people who are mad at OpenAI and chat GPT and the New York Times suing over the training data, there's this idea that like, well, we made things. And you used to take those things, but you would deliver value back to us. And now you're just taking them because the idea is that the internet is just out there

and everything that's out there is out there and you can just have it. And I think one of the things that I thought was really interesting about our searches. Not only are you doing the LLM stuff, which I think is interesting we should talk about, but you're also you're blocking ads by default, you're blocking trackers by default, you're blocking the cookie pop-ups by default. That's a big series of, I would say, potentially user-centric and maybe internet hostile set of things to do. You rely on the internet to work, but you also are sort of tacitly agreeing that the way the internet works doesn't really work. Like, how do you do both of those at the same time? I think if you look back at maybe

what some people would say were the glory times for the early web. When, as you're alluding to, maybe the incentives were better aligned and the value exchange was better aligned. I personally remember Craigslist decimating the business models of the offline media companies and especially in newspapers because of the innovations. At this moment in time when we're talking about the value exchange being great, I actually remember a lot of second order negative externalities that came from the web at this glorious moment. Yeah, that's a good point.

My belief is that having worked at Facebook after selling my first company there is that anything that transforms our world, again, sociology major, has very positive things that happen and has very negative things that happen, right? Airbnb is one of my favorite products and experiences. It's ruining a lot of cities. The same is true for almost everything that changes how we live our lives. as it relates to LLMs and AI and what you're alluding to in terms of its relationship to the exchange of value, I think the same is true here. I think it is absolutely true that ARC search and the fact that we remove the clutter and BS and make you faster and get you what you need with a lot less time is objectively good for the vast majority of people. And it is also true it breaks something. It breaks a bit of the value exchange and not just arc search, but all of these tools.

It's one level higher than arc search or chatGBT. We are grappling with a revolution in how software works and computers work. And that's going to mess some stuff up. And I totally agree with the premise of the question, which is, hey, someone's breaking and it's really going to break soon. I 100% agree. So I think the answer is, I think it will do more positive than negative. And I think it's kind of unbelievable how much of humanity's time has been wasted by how atrocious the mobile web is in support of the search ad business model. And we got to figure out a better way to get content creators and publishers paid because it's not going to work.

And it's not been working. And it's not been working since Craigless. So that is definitely a challenge for us all to grapple with. I do think the one difference, and I don't want to like dwell on philosophies of AI, but I think the one difference between the like Craigslist example, which is a really good one, and this is that Craigslist built a better product than all of those things, right? And I think what we're learning about the media industry in particular is that the media industry spent a long time building really crappy products and got eaten alive by better products. That just is what it is what is it going to be like, what does it look like for a media company to build product? It's a thing we talk about all the time at the verge.

It's like why we did the redesign of our website the way we did. It's like as we think about all of our future. It's as much about product as it is about anything else. And the difference between that and what's happening now is that what's happening now with a lot of LLMs, one way to look at it is it's as if Craigslist had taken all of the classifieds out of all of the existing newspapers and just posted them on the internet. And I think people would be like, well, that's not a better product. That's you stealing from me and repackaging it in a new way. And I think that would have been a very different version of the conversation. And again, I think there is a lot of like society-wide reckoning to do about AI.

there are a lot of people who are like, well, the upside is so high that it's worth the, you know, investment of all of our stuff into it because we'll get more utility out of it. But I just think like that fundamental question I don't think has precedent on the internet because it's just never worked like this before. And I don't think we have answers to it, which is going to be fascinating. And now you're right in the middle of it. So congratulations. It's really exciting to think about from a media company perspective.

What is the superior product? what is that next evolution of media? And what I would say is, candidly, I have a deeper relationship with the verge than I ever have before. I've been reading The Verge for over a decade now. I have never spent that much time and had that much depth with your publication. Now, I'm not saying that the economic incentives of your ad model with podcasts are working out, but that's all to say that in the same way that ARC can rethink our interface to the internet in a new way, thanks to this technology, I think the answer probably lies in the media industry and media

companies rethinking what they do as well. Sure. And I will say to your credit, one thing you have said to me many times over the years is that there is a big phase of this for ARC that is figuring out how to like be a good citizen of all of those things. You see this in ARC search, by the way, which is here's what we could have done. You could have typed in a question to ARC search and we could have answered it and given ourselves all of the credit, right?

look at how smart arc is. It's the smartest thing that ever existed. In fact, what we do is we say extremely prominently. We actually don't even let you do anything else until you read the fact that, hey, we are your browser. We are going to go read these six websites, these six websites, and then we are going to summarize a little bit about what each of those said. And then we're going to link to all of them.

We're going to link to them multiple times. we're even going to verify a pull quote from them. And so I think, again, this change is inevitable. I think it's good for most people. I do think their second order externalities. I think it is the responsibility of folks like us to do our best with the role that we have to be good citizens. And that's what we try to do here relative to other competing products, which I shouldn't name because I got PR training. But I don't think it's enough.

And I think the answer to this question is one level higher than the browser company or Verge. or anyone else, but it is absolutely something we need to grapple with. So I'm glad you brought up the UX of it all because I think how is an AI tool supposed to look is my favorite question in the world right now. And I think people on this podcast are tired of hearing me rant about it. But the one thing I believe for sure is that a text box is not the future of the internet. But I'm curious, like the one thing I know about the browser companies, you spend a lot of time prototyping. You spend a lot of time experimenting and building stuff. And you landed on arc search the way it is, which is an interesting.

interesting mix of kind of what I would call like there's media stuff at the top and then there's kind of a like bulleted summary and then there's a bunch of links and then there's more summary and then there's more links. Is that a fair description of the situation? The two things that you're missing that I'm especially proud of is we embed YouTube videos. True. So you can watch videos in line and then we embed verified quotes where we pull a quote from one of the articles and then we use AI and we say, hey AI, you actually make stuff. a lot. So do us a favor. This pull quote you told us you pulled, just go double check to make sure it's actually there. And then if it is, then we say, hey, this quote's verified, we can show it.

So those are two other interface innovations I'm especially proud of. Okay. So of all of the things you tried and thought about and played with, why did that feel like the right setup? I think we're still in this phase again of there are a million ways AI can present itself to you. Most of them right now are chatbots. What about this one stuck out to you as feeling right? right for our search. So as you mentioned, we prototype a lot. So we tried 50 variations of that experience before we landed on the exact one you see in arc search today. And in fact, down to the tiniest details, like do we show emojis as bullet points or do we just show bullet points? You landed on emojis, which was the right call, by the way. Thank you. Thank you. I take no credit for it.

Shout out to Nate. The way that we landed on it is, I agree with what you said, which is, why does everyone think text boxes are like the future? There's got to be something better. But I think the way that we approached it was not, you know, hey, should it be this or should be that? We really try to approach it as, hey, let's write down throughout the week. What are the things we look up on the go on our phone? Just quickly make a note of it.

And then let's go through all that stuff that we turn to our computer in our pocket and our internet for on the go. What are the commonalities? What are the sort of things we wonder about? Okay, great. It looks like I'm really bad at cooking. And at the age of 33, I still don't know how to make kuskos. That's problematic for a bunch of reasons.

But if I need to know how to make kuskos and I've got one hand because my other hand is dirty and the water is boiling and I got other stuff to do, what is the fastest way we can get you the information for that job to be done and the others? And what you end up finding is it's not just a wall of text. It's not just photos. It's not just video. It's sort of a mixture of things, but it's all grounded and not, hey, let's go make a product that is a web page or a text box or a photo gallery. But we really tried it to ground it in what are you turning to this rectangle in your pocket for every day?

And how can we craft a dynamic interface that as best as possible tries to shape shift itself to answer exactly what you want? So what you'll notice is if you ask Arc Search for how to cook cuss-coose, you're actually going to get back a very different experience. then if you asked it, what is the meaning of life, for example? Sure. It's very telling to me that the phone was the centerpiece of that, because one of the things I was going to ask you is, does this same paradigm make sense on a desktop browser? And I almost don't think that it does. One of the things you've always said to me, which I think I mostly agree with, is that most people don't want to use technology. They have a thing they'd like to get done. And they use technology and service of that.

They're not just like goofing around on their phone. They mostly have like a thing they'd like to do. And so your job is to help them do it faster. And I think if that's how you think about it, the way you put our search together makes a lot of sense. But in a world of like, I am just sitting here and I want to like learn as much about MachuPi, Pichu as I can. The idea of delivering me what ARC search is, which is sort of like a finished product thing, makes a lot less sense. But that's also not what people do on their phone. So like, does this feel like a sort of truly mobile-centric and even maybe mobile-specific way of solving this

problem? So three things. The first is you're absolutely right that which device you're on will radically change what it should and will look like in ARC. Okay. And so the sort of questions you're wondering at the bar when you're talking to your friend are different than when you're at your desktop on a Sunday trying to do some big research project for a big purchase you and your wife are about to make. And so, yes, it will look very different on desktop because what you're trying to do is very different. The second thing is the principle behind arc search, which is these artists formerly known as

the web browser, the search engine, and web pages are archaic ideas that should be merged and blend it together into a new dynamic interface definitely applies on desktop and definitely applies on mobile and other ways. Okay. And an example of that is on desktop, one of the features we just launched is something we call instant links. And instant links, you can type in, you can hit new tab, and on desktop and arc type videos of Steve Jobs unveiling the iPhone, iPod, Macintosh, and iPad.

and hit enter, and Arc will go out, and it'll grab a video of each of those Steve Jobs unveiling events and put it right in your browser. You skip the search engine altogether. Right. That's the same idea. That's the exact same idea, but tailored to the thing you were trying to do on that device in that moment. So that foundational principle of there's a new type of software, a browser that browses for you that merges these three things is there. I think the final thing I'll note, which I think is more broadly applicable, is if you were to really reduce down this phrase AI, which also means kind of nothing. Correct.

And you were to reduce down even large language models, which also kind of doesn't mean anything. Just sounds fancier, yeah. This sounds really fancy and smart, but don't ask me what. So if you were to reduce AI and LLMs down to their essence and explain it to a five-year-old, the thing you would say is, for the first time, computer's, can read. And if computers can read, then they can understand, truly understand what you're asking them. And so I think really the underlying principle of what ARC is doing with this new category of

software on mobile and desktop is not actually even the output. That's not what's new. Yeah, sure, it will be new and that it'll be dynamic and it'll look and feel a little different. It's the idea that you can go to ARC on mobile or desktop and tell ARC what you're going to you're looking for and what you're trying to do. And thanks to these large language models, we can understand that for the first time and route you to the right place and route you to different things in different ways that wouldn't have been possible before. That's really what's

the most different to me. I think people fail to talk about that because they tend to focus on, oh my God, it just wrote me a haiku about computers, even though why would I need a hykoo about I mean, it is wild, but that is not, that's not really what's fundamentally new. It's the fact that our computers can read and think with us for the first time. OpenAI has this product or this part of their API called function calling. And function calling is remarkable. What function calling is able to do is it's able to allow us to take an input from a person like you saying, what are best iPhone chargers, and then not only understand what you're asking,

but then based on its understanding, route it to specific places. and to specific things that actually have nothing to do with AI. So one of the reasons that people, including me many months ago, were a little bit bearish on all this AI hype was I was just seeing these blobs of text outputted and assume that was AI. No, no, no, that was just one output. But thanks to function calling, you can say, okay, if David is asking for videos of Steve Jobs unveiling the iPod, iPhone, Macintosh, great. He's looking for these three videos.

so go to YouTube and grab those videos. There's no hallucinating there. I mean, again, it's going to get it wrong. It's technology. It's as imperfect as we are. But that's actually wildly valuable and pretty unreal. Why isn't everyone talking about that? And it's because we get caught up in these memes and these words that just mean everything and nothing to us.

So function calling. It's where it's at. And there'll be more of those in the future. That's super interesting. Well, and that's also just like straightforwardly the thing that comes after search engines, right? Like you're in a certain way, all that's doing is taking what would be a Google results page with a bunch of ads at the top and just skipping all of that. It's just saying instead of me having to go, say, where's this video and then click on the video and then watch the video and then save it to my sidebar? It's just putting those things in my sidebar, which in a funny way to me is actually way more understandable than a lot of the AI stuff.

Because one of the reactions to all of these things is basically like actually Google's very good. And it's very good at finding information. And maybe we don't need to just completely reinvent this wheel with chatbots. And to a large extent, I'm actually really receptive to that argument. I think Google is a lot less good than it used to be. But it's still, if you want to find a piece of information on the internet, Google's pretty damn good. But then the next step after Google alerting you to the existence of that information is awful. And it's because web browsers suck.

And this is like why I've always thought arc is interesting. So you've just sort of backed your way towards the search engine. And now you're just like disintermediating it entirely. I agree. I think Google doesn't get enough credit for how it's innovated and push search forward and how actually wondrous search is. And I would push back on the idea that Google search gets us what we're looking for. Because if aliens arrive tomorrow and they're like, look, I just read this great book, God Save Texas by Lawrence Wright on the spaceship right over. And I'm looking for a new book.

And you went to Google and you typed in books similar to God Save Texas by Lawrence Wright. And then, wow, magically, so fast, Google brought you what you wanted. Alien's like, oh, wow, are those books? Well, no, not quite. Those are called links. And those links, yeah, yeah, click on the link. The book's going to be in there. Oh, no, so these aren't books either.

These are listicles, and in the listicles are books. And then if you click on this other thing, those are books. So the truth is that there are these abstractions that we forget about, but Google doesn't really bring, on one hand, to make it simple, Google brings you what you're asking for in the sense that it brings back a bunch of links and on the other hand, it doesn't bring you what you're asking for and that it makes you stop at Google first

and oftentimes the thing you're looking for are buried in a bunch of links and a bunch of links behind that and now we have the technology to say, let's just go straight to bring you what you want and bring it right to you. That's a pretty big idea and that's exactly how a human being wants it to work. I agree and disagree with that.

And I'm glad you put it that way because I think one of the fun things we're going through right now because of AI is trying to figure out which new ideas are better enough to be worth unlearning decades' worth of habits and which aren't. Right? Like I think about, I don't know, Siri and Google Assistant and Alexa, right? And the idea that voice is a much more natural interface for asking information than typing on a keyboard. Unequivocally true. The tech wasn't very good and also people are not used to it. And so we all kind of were just like, well, it's pretty easy to type on my phone. I'll just do that instead. I just was interviewing somebody

for a future episode of the show about keyboard layouts. And like, you know what's better than QWERTY keyboard layouts is everything else. But good luck trying to convince people to not use QWERTY keyboards. Right. So I think that question of, can you build something that is so much better that it will actually make people make real behavioral change versus like, no, it's not the most human natural thing in the world that we all sort of learned how to type in what Google calls keyword ease, but I'm pretty good at it now. Like, I can get what I want out of Google pretty successfully. And so, you know, screw the aliens.

What's it going to take for me to switch, I think, is very much the open question. And this, like, path of AI over the next two years, I think, is really where we're going to start to see where it does and doesn't clear the bar. And I think it's going to be fascinating. I agree with you, unless you're a web browser. Okay. And this is exactly why we built a web browser. This is exactly why operating systems have so much leverage in how we used to

technology in that if I were to make an AI chatbot app called chatty, and it got really popular and wanted to radically change the way we get information, you got to remember to go to that tab. And as you said, you have this great muscle memory. You know, it may be chatty is better than Google, but you have to remember it instead of hitting new tab or command T, go to that chatty tab. Yep. That's really hard to your point. It really is.

Yeah. It's really hard. If, in fact, you are the web browser and you, you're, you're in. You are the text box that people type into to go to Google. You don't need to change your behavior. Your behavior actually doesn't happen in Google. Google's just a tab too. Everyone forgets that.

It's actually the browser that is your interface to the web. And is the browser where your muscle memory is. And then you might say, yeah, well, if you send me to chatty instead of Google, I'm still going to be mad because I wanted Google because chatty's not as good at all the searches. Well, great. Thanks to function calling and thanks to AI, we can know if you're asking us something that really Google is the best at, or should we send you to chatty, or should we not send you anywhere?

Should we just bring it to you? So one of the other features that we're launching on ARC for Mac is, I hate to admit it, I have an alert set up, and not even alert. At some regular interval, I go to Google and I type news about the browser company or news about ARC browser, and I do that a lot. We have a new feature called Live Folders where whenever there's a new press story, hopefully written by David Pierce and hopefully glowing, about ARC, it'll just pop up at my sidebar.

I don't even need to go to search. So again, because we're the web browser, you don't have to change ingrained behavior. We're just going to pop it up right in your sidebar. So, yes, I think people underestimate how ingrained behaviors are and how hard it is to get people to change anything because at the end of the day,

they don't really care about technology. And that is exactly why we built a web browser. Everyone thought we, why would you work on a desktop web browser? It could not be more boring. Well, it's actually, in fact, because it's so boring that we want to work on it, because you happen to use it for eight hours a day. And so if you use it for eight hours a day and you're all over this rectangle, if we place things in this rectangle, or if we change where you go in the rectangle when you type in something, that's actually

a great place to be to change entrenched behavior without you having to change anything yourself, just abstracting that complexity. All we're proposing with ARC and this idea of a browser that browses for you is that we can then do to Google what Google did to the web. Google and all these other applications we use, which is, wow, there are now so many web apps open and tabs and Google Docs and all of these things. It's too much to reason about. I have to do 10 search queries just to find what I'm looking for.

It's time for a layer that sits above that, which says, you tell us what you're trying to do, and we'll go use the search engines and web apps and read the articles for you. So that's the other thing that feels so exciting is it feels like a natural kind of march of progress toward making it your day easier and easier until one day you can really just tell ARC or whatever software comes next, what you're trying to do, and it will go figure out what on the internet you want to use. If you're right, two companies come to mind that are sort of perfectly set up to do the vertically integrated thing you're describing, which are Google and Microsoft.

Like, they're sitting on the whole tech stack more so than you are to do all of the things that you just described. Google has Google, Google has Chrome, Google has Gemini and all of its, like, all it has to do is like put three project managers in a room together and they could start to build something similar to what you're describing. Microsoft's the same with Bing and all the open AI stuff. And what's to prevent them from doing this too? I think there's real energy in the browser space because of this for the first time.

And right now, so much of it is just like we stick a chatbot in your sidebar or some of the little organizational stuff like Google just launched a bunch of stuff in Chrome that is basically like less interesting feature rips of what ArkMax was doing a few months ago. But with real energy and resources, they could out muscle you in pretty much every direction here if they chose to, right? You are absolutely right that I view our true competition as Microsoft, Google, and Apple. Sure. I actually think Apple is the one that is in the best position to do this. And they're all trillion-dollar companies with everything. Of course that is terrifying.

And of course that is going to be a big challenge. You know, there's this famous story about Google Chrome where when you open a new tab, you see the new tab page, it shows you a tile of your most frequently visited sites. And the way that they used to show those tiles were with screenshots, you know, a picture of the webpage. And then this PM had this idea. You know, it's actually much easier and faster. to just show the logo of the website because people can more quickly identify, oh, that tile is Twitter

than it is to identify the screenshot. And that PM was right. It made it so much easier for people to quickly find what they were looking for by clicking on one of those tiles. There was a major freak out at Google because overnight ad revenue, search ad revenue, dropped by 5%, which is a huge deal at Google scale. 5%. Red alert. What happened?

What did we change? And it turned out that this PM making it easier for people to get what they needed faster in the web browser, tanked Google's global ad revenue because when you click on a tile, you're not doing a Google search. So on paper, do Google and Microsoft have everything it takes? Yes. Is there a lot of structural challenges to big public companies with shareholder pressures not to hurt the cash cow that is search ads? Yes. Sure. Can I remember the last time that Google and Microsoft invented something wildly new that revolutionized a category where nothing had come before it?

No. Is this time different? Potentially, we're going to pretend like we're competing with them in a really big way. But I think that we're just going to keep doing our thing and hope that they keep loving search ads. Fair enough. So the reason I would think in that way of thinking to be most curious about what Apple is up to is that it seems to have a lot of those same. capabilities and less to lose as a search business, essentially. Like, Safari, I mean, the whole Google antitrust thing makes this very interesting with the

Safari ads deal. That could get very complicated over time, but Apple seems to have a big, very successful, very popular browser that makes it a lot less, is a lot less important to its future as a company than, say, Chrome is to Google. I actually think you're putting a little too much emphasis on search. I think it's one or two levels higher than that. What we're really talking about is this idea, which, by the way, is not original to us. But the idea is you tell Arc or you tell your interface to your computer or the internet, what you're trying to do.

And then in this new world, it will go use whatever tools and any information it needs to do it for you and bring it back to you. There's almost universal agreement. That's how it's going to work. And in order for that to work, you need three things. First, you need a really rich data set about each individual. everything that's going on their personal life, professional life, what they type in text boxes, what they read on web pages, the documents that matter to their work.

So you need an unique data set about each individual. The second thing you need is you need the ability to manipulate all of the tools and the applications that people rely on to do what they do on their computers and on the internet. Said differently, you need them to be logged into the apps. Sure. The third thing that you need is you need an interface to your point about behavior change that people use all the time, all day, every day. They don't need to change anything they do.

They just keep doing their thing, and you can then go put the future in those places. You need those three things. There are only two types of software that have those three things. The first are operating systems. The second are web browsers. I promise you there is no way that the future, powered by AI, will exist in anything other than an operating system or a web browser.

So the only thing that keeps me up in night are web browser companies and operating system companies because I think those are the only two type of companies that have a shot at reimagining our interface to the internet. So last thing, and this is a question I've been meaning to ask you for several weeks now, did you see the rabbit launch at CES, this little AI gadget thing? I saw that thing and I, after talking about a lot of the stuff that you and I've been talking about for a while and a lot of stuff you've been talking about now, I looked at that and I was like, okay, if Josh and the browser company had become a hard, company, this is roughly what they would have gone after. The same idea of like, okay, if the goal is to have these tools accomplish something on your behalf, instead of building me like a nice web browser

that I'm in all day, you would have built me like a fun teenage engineering gadget that I can press a button and talk to all day. Does that feel right to you? What did you make of what rabbits up to you? First of all, I love anyone that dares to dream and anyone that just goes for it. And I love that energy. They are nothing if not going for it, that team. I love anyone that stands up on a metaphorical stage and says, I'm excited. I think the future should work like this, and I'm going to dedicate my life to doing something really bold and different than what we're used to. So I have a lot of respect for that. I also totally agree that the future is going to work like you telling your computer, whether it's arc or rabbit, what you want to do, and it should go do it for you

and abstract that complexity. I think the one place where I personally see a slightly different future is I don't want more gadgets in my life. I don't want more devices. I think the secular trend to the cloud and the secular trend toward our stuff, our digital stuff being out on a server somewhere, whether it's an application or our data, is that we can actually kind of free ourselves from the machines. We can free ourselves from the devices because they're everywhere. I was on a United flight last night.

I was like, I'm not sure for the first time this seat in front of me could probably run the Vision Pro. It's like it's the computers are going everywhere. And so what I'm really excited about is a world in which the computer and air quotes that you talk to, the place it has all of your data and stuff is not another new box I got to put somewhere on my body, whether that's on my face or in my pocket or another button. I got to remember to press instead of that other button, but oh, wait, that's not the action button. That's the volume and screenshot. What I'm really excited about is the idea that your computing life just goes with you everywhere. every device. But I do think the rabbit is fascinating from a vision perspective and a boldness

perspective. And I probably have a lot more in common with whoever started that company than I do with someone else that I shouldn't name. Fair enough. So what you just made me realize is that I've been talking about ARC in terms of Chrome for a really long time. And I should have been talking about it in terms of Chrome OS for a really long time. Internet computer operating system for the web. But what you're describing, and you know, one of the things, things you announced last week was this thing, was it Arc Anywhere, the new syncing service? That becomes very important, right? Because what you're essentially building me is not a piece of software that lives on my computer. You're building me a piece of software that lives everywhere

that I can just sort of tap into in whatever way I need to whenever I need to. And all of a sudden, like, Arc Anywhere becomes the thing as much as whatever it is on my device becomes the thing. Arc Anywhere is the product. Arc Anywhere is the computer. This all just clicked in my brain as you were talking. This is why we have to talk more. It isn't today. I don't want to over promise. It is a cross-platform syncing mechanism for getting your tabs wherever you need them.

But right behind you on this recording, you have a TV. It looks like a TV sitting up on a little nightstand. It's a piece of crap. Never buy a Roku TV, people. Well, one day, that piece of crap computer in five years will actually be a very powerful computer, just like the phone in our pocket is a much more powerful computer than it was a decade ago. And so the idea of Arc and Arc Anywhere is that one day when you're sitting on that couch behind you, looking at that screen you're looking at, which is now as powerful as the iPhone in your pocket, you should just be able to toss at a glance and authenticate that it's you. And then you're in Air Quotes computer, all of your apps and data and conversations and people should appear on that screen.

That is the whole idea of Arc. That is the idea of this next wave, is that your computer is just an old noun for saying, the stuff that's the whole idea. matters in your digital life that is yours. And that should go with you anywhere on any screen on any device. And the way that you should interface with it in the future is not opening seven applications and 19 search query tabs and 27 listicles. You should just tell the device in your life through ARC. Here's what I'm trying to do. And it should bring it to you. It should be a browser that browses for you or a better tagline because I don't love that tagline, but it feels weird to invent your own noun. All right. We got to take a break. And then we're going to talk

Samsung, and we're going to talk galaxies. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I really put my all

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your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. It's been a couple of weeks now since Samsung long. launched its new devices, the Galaxy S24, S24 Plus, and S24 Ultra. Which means the Verges Allison Johnson has had time to put all three of those phones through their paces. And she's published their reviews. They're on the verge.com, put them in the show notes, and like I said, post on the site with all the links you need. It's wild to think that it is only the first week of February, and we might have already seen the best Android

phone of 2024, but I think that might be the case. Samsung, as always, has done some of its usual upgrades here with better screens and some design tweaks and a little bit of new camera hardware. But most of what's new here is AI. There is so, so, so much AI in these phones. It's nuts. But does it add up to anything? Or is it all just another gimmick in Samsung's long, long line of phone gimmicks? Like I said, Allison has tried it all, and she's here to answer that for us. Hi, Allison. Hello. Welcome out of Samsung chaos. This is very exciting for you. Thank you. It was a recent development, so I'm happy to be here. This is a tough time because you basically had to take three different phones that are

the same phone but different phones and try to figure out how to make them make sense and also write something that is interesting to read about all of them, which is a difficult challenge. Yeah, and the same challenge is like most phones lately where the updates are just pretty incremental, aside from Galaxy AI, which is a whole thing that we'll get into. but it's just an interesting dynamic looking at it this year. Like the Ultra has always been the like, we're just going to throw everything in a phone. And for the past couple years, that has been like, this is great.

Like, you guys are killing it. And then the regular ones, the S and the S plus, just sort of felt like they're good. They're a good alternative if you're like, okay with Samsung's take on things and you want a really good Android phone. And that's sort of the case this year. but it's like slightly different. Okay, we're about to spoil where I was going with all this,

but I kind of think it's the opposite this year. Oh, really? So the Ultra is still very much the kitchen sink phone. Like it is the Samsung-yest of Samsung phones, and I mean that both as a compliment and an insult, as always with Samsung. But to me, I got to the end of all your reviews, and I was like, okay, for the first time in a few years,

I actually think the base Galaxy S-24 is the best galaxy phone for most people right now, which I don't feel like has been true for, I don't know, at least the last few years. I feel like I would have always tried to talk people up. And now I'm kind of like, you get almost all the stuff in a slightly better size for $799 instead of $1,29, with the base model. Like, big win for the base model this year. It is. It's a big win for people who like smaller big phones because they're all big. They are all big. Yeah, no, that's some. up how I feel about them. And I guess I think of like the Ultra just always kind of feels like it's in its own little atmosphere. It's like, what phone do you compare it to that has an S-Pen and 12

cameras, you know? It's kind of always felt to me like you sort of know if that's the thing you want and you want all that extra. Yeah, what feels different this year is that nothing on the ultra just feels like, oh yeah, I totally see why this is worth the extra money because it is more money this year. It's $12.99, which is $100 more than last year. And yeah, all of the exciting new features, like air quotes, that's Samsung's words, the AI, are on all three phones, like with no differences in how they perform or any of that. And this little phone, the regular S-24, just feels like a good size and I'm happy it's here. Yeah. So, okay, let's talk through this a little bit because I think the first thing you pointed out to me right before we started recording is the

actual physical object itself, which is, again, I think that is sort of carried through all three versions of the phone. Correct me if I'm wrong. But they made this thing what seems to be a little, it's a little nicer. It's nicer to hold in the hand. Samsung has a long history of making just the slipperiest phones on the face of the earth. And it seems like they solved some of that this time. Yeah. Well, Google took that crown away. Like the pixel is the most slippery object. It should be studied by scientists. I don't understand it. Yeah. No, like Samsung, the ultra still has, it has the flat screen this year, which like, yay, you have an S-pen. You want a flat screen. You're like running the pen over the edge that stinks. Still has a little bit of that, like,

note design. The S-24, the S-24 plus, I'm just going to say it, like they are just straight-up iPhones, and that's fine. Like, they have the flat edges. The S-23 was still kind of a curved edge, still had kind of a, I don't want to call it a Samsung look. It had a different look to it. It's not like a drastically different change, but I find it more comfortable to hold. when I go to pick it up off of the table, it doesn't like fly out of my hands. They look great. They feel great. And I think like, why reinvent the shape of a phone? Just go with what works. I agree. I feel like the two things that have always driven me crazy about some of these designs are either I'm holding it in my hand and it kind of digs into your palm in a way that feels bad or, and this is really my true slipperiness test. I'm holding the phone in my hand and I go to put it in my pocket. And there have been phones.

that in the motion of like moving it down to put it in my pocket, I have just thrown it onto the ground. Like I don't even drop it. Like I slingshot it out of my hand onto the ground. Yeah, with prejudice. Yeah. Right. And yeah, and the pixel is maybe the worst at that in history. But that is like the iPhone is, they found the right mix of like the flat edges and the sort of rounded corners.

And it just like it feels like an object in a nice way. And I'm glad that Samsung has landed in that same place. Yeah. My galaxy brain take is that phones over the next year are just going to converge on that design. Like the pixel 9 leaks have the flat edges. Like, this is fine. Let's just do it. Let's embrace it.

We're going to go there. I think that's for the best, honestly. Yeah. It's like there was that phase with laptops for everybody who's like, what if they did weird stuff? And they flipped around and moved to the left and we just moved the trackpad over here. And everybody was like, oh, no, what if it just looked like a laptop and we worried about other things? And that is the correct answer. Yeah, nobody's like, oh, I wish my refrigerator looked cooler and different than other

reverend. It was like, you just want to know where stuff is. 100%. So my first question with all Samsung phones is how Samsung-y are these Samsung phones? And I will say to Samsung's credit, it used to be horrific. I used to tell people do not buy a Samsung phone because it will torture you with pop-ups and duplicate apps and things you will hate. And I no longer feel quite that strongly, but I still think one UI is a mess in certain ways.

So how Samsung-y are these phones this year? They're like tolerably Samsung-y. There is the like list of stuff I go through when I'm setting up a Samsung phone. And it is much longer than any other phone I use. You have to sort the app drawer so apps are alphabetical instead of just like nonsense order. Sounds right. There's 10 million things in the quick menu settings. All that is still a reality.

It's just like, and this is kind of where I keep landing with like Pixel versus Samsung, is that you just kind of have to work for it a little harder with the Samsung. You put in the work ahead of time. You disable the pop-up notification and like sell me a new GalaxyS Series phone. Like, I don't need that. I'm using the new GalaxyS Series phone. That was one of your best lines in the review was opening up a GalaxyS-24, setting it up and getting a pop-up saying, have you heard about the new Galaxy S-24?

Every year. It's like, guys, we're doing something wrong here. Every year, I treasure that pop-up. I'm like, oh, there it is. Yeah. You can disable it. It's just, if you don't, it comes for you. Yeah, you can get to a place where you can just live totally peacefully with it.

And it has very good things going for it. Another iPhone feature that they wisely stole is the, always on display that the wallpaper just kind of dims. So you see that all the time, but you get those widgets too. So you have like your little calendar widget or the battery indicator or is it going to rain in the next hour. I love that. Give me all the information.

I think this is the thing about these phones that you are most wrong about. But that's okay. This is just personal problems. I think the iPhones always on display is bad and just makes me think my phone is on. And that's stupid. You're not alone. I hear that a lot. I'm going to die on that hill.

It's listen, you know, to each their own, you're wrong and so is Samsung, and that's fine. And so is Apple. I think the pixel got it right, where it's just like, I want to know the time and like the little thing where the song is playing into that. Love that. Don't need any more than that. And just the thing where it kind of seems like I turned the brightness all the way down on my phone is not an always on display.

Naturally, there's a setting in the Samsung phone. You can turn that right off with just the wallpaper part. So you can have a normal always on display. But I think that is kind of the basic difference between like Samsung's philosophy and Google's is like on the pixel, you have at a glance. And you don't need to go in instead of a bunch of widgets. It's just going to tell you something on your home screen or on the lock screen like, hey, you got a calendar appointment coming up or doesn't always nail it. Sometimes I'm like, oh, that would have been a useful thing to know. But it's just kind of going to do those things for you.

And Samsung's like, here are 10,000 settings you can mess with and you can get to a place where you get all that. I wish Samsung would dial in the balance of the defaults there a little more. But I've come to really appreciate over time, especially as Google has kind of worked down towards giving you less to do. Like, part of the reason people like Android is because it is so much more customizable. And Samsung, to its credit, is like, listen, everything there is to do, we are going to give you a way to do. And I actually think to some extent that's the right approach. I wish it made better choices about how it initially sets up the phone. And I wish there were some things that were less duplicative.

Like, I think you mentioned there are basically like three different augmented reality search products on this phone. Like, that's bad. That's just bad user experience. But I do appreciate the thing that Samsung is like, look, do you want there to be 650 things in the settings that you can touch? We have that for you. I seriously, I think it's a good thing. People like that about Android. I think it's the right thing.

They deliver it. Yeah. There should just be a version of Samsung phones that is like, when you set it up, it's like, do you want to do this the easy way or the hard way? Yeah. And you can pick either one. Like the easy button. Right.

So the thing on the Ultra that really jumped out to me, I have basically two ultra-specific questions. The first is the screen. And it seems like of the specs in the whole series, the biggest upgrade from the 24 and the 24 plus to the 24 Ultra might be this new display. Was that your takeaway? If I was putting my... money down on these phones, that's what I would pay for it for the Ultra. It has a new gorilla

glass that is supposedly much more scratch resistant. I put my phone next to my keys. It's bad. I always get those little like hairline scratches without fail. I don't have a single one on the ultra and it's only been it's a small sample size, but so far so good. But you're pretty brutal on phones. Like your your review period is not easy. Yeah. I, I don't have a case. My kid will touch it. He's got like, you know, peanut butter on his fingers. It's the works.

So, yeah, there's that, which is promising. And the anti-glare coating, which is just, it's a little bit like magic. Like, it's not like some brand new technology. It's just literally an anti-glare coating on the phone screen. But you hold it up against another phone outside. And the ultra gets really bright. So you have that working for you. And it just.

cuts the glare way down. And you can, you sort of prepare yourself to like squint at the phone when you look at it outside. You're like, oh, I can see this just fine. Like, it's almost as good as just in my house. Yeah. That's huge. And I think glare is one of those things we've all gotten used to on our phones. Like, I was thinking about this reading your reviews that I've gotten used to the thing now where you kind of learn how to block the sun with your body as you're using your phone.

Yeah. And you sort of keep it down here and you like hunch over it to not have glare. But once you don't notice it, and like once it's gone, that's a huge change. And it's like for especially things like taking pictures and if you have to hold it at an angle and you're sort of looking down off axis at your phone. Like anti-glare is a bigger deal than it seems in a lot of ways, I think, which is pretty cool. Yeah. I liked it better than most of the AI features. We're going to get to those in one second. Yeah.

But the other thing that I'm curious about with the Ultra specifically is this Zoom tradeoff. that Samsung made. They went from 10x zoom on the lens, and then it was digital zoom in between. So if you wanted it like 5X, it was digital zoom to the opposite. Right now it's a 5X lens, but you can digital zoom to 10x. I am deeply suspicious of this change because digital zoom is a lie that we tell ourselves it's just cropping. What did you find?

Was this the right trade? Was this the wrong trade? Well, the slightly less evil version of digital zoom is this like actual. will crop into the middle of the sensor that they're doing. And that's what's happening now at 10x. I was a big fan of the 10x lens. I thought it was great. It was so much fun. So I was really bummed to see it go. But the more I kind of sat with it, the more I get it, like 5X is more, there's just more utility kind of in every day. You can kind of take a portrait of someone if they're across the room. You're not taking a portrait with a 10x lens. Like that's true. 10x is kind of a

party trick in a way that 5x is like a thing you might do. Exactly. That's interesting. And it's a higher resolution sensor. It's actually a little bigger than the old telephoto. All these things going for it. Samsung is like, so don't worry. The quality at 10x is like actually just fine.

And that's like kind of true. If you don't like, I pixel peep, it's kind of a pointless exercise, but I go there. And I think the detail captures about the same. You just see where the little tiny lens falls apart. You're like, there's a little chromatic aberration. It's like, that's in the 1% of like what anybody should care about. It is totally fine for just about anything else. And I suppose I can get behind the idea that you're trading really good 10x zoom and mediocre 5x zoom for really good 5x zoom and mediocre 10x zoom.

In real life, that is probably a decent trade, I suppose. It makes sense. Okay. I just, they said, they were like, oh, even at 10x, it'll look better because it has more megapix. And I was like, I bet that's a lie. And I'm happy to know that it wasn't. It just makes me feel better. Yeah.

So, okay, let's talk about the AI stuff because I think that's kind of the point of these phones, right? And I think my sense of your review was basically there's a ton of AI stuff here. You tested a lot of it. But I'm curious, like for you not as a phone reviewer, but just as like a person who has a phone, what of these AI features feels like it would actually be a thing you would use in everyday life? And leave the camera out. We'll come back to the camera in a sec. But of the like there's the translation on a phone call, there's the recorder stuff.

There's a bunch of other stuff. Like what feels like it actually could insert itself into your life? The thing I see as the most useful that I don't, I don't currently have a use for it. But it's kind of nice to know is there is the translation stuff. So that's where you call someone and you can turn on this live translator. and it'll just you talk and it speaks for you and the other person it translates back and forth. I call the song our wearables reviewer and she speaks Japanese and her take on it was like it gets the gist of it right. If your conversation is like kind of transactional or you like, I need to make a reservation or whatever.

Sure. It's going to do those things fine. She tried to tell me her cat was eating her chair and it said that she was eating the chair. It was confusing. Very funny. But I think that's kind of where a lot of these AI features are. You're like, it's actually more useful than not to have that there. As long as you're not relying on it as like, yeah, this is going to perfectly translate, you know, whatever I want to say to this other person.

Or you're not expecting, like, I want you to summarize a page of notes and you're just going to blindly be like, well, my notes summary, my AI summary said this. So it must be true. it's just kind of like a good starting point. That's where I see it. Yeah. And I think with a lot of this stuff, the sort of don't rely on this too much footnote is a useful one. But I think you said at one point in one of our reviews like, there's no way in which this is worse than not having it. So I'll take it. Which is fair. And I think the challenge of some of these phones for me now is Samsung wants you to buy these phones for the AI features. Right. And Google increasingly wants you to buy these phones for the AI features. And I think on the camera, which we're going to get to in just a second, there are compelling cases to be made there that AI is letting you do genuinely cool, new, like, worth getting this phone over another phone sets of things. I don't know that I see any of that here, that it's like none of these strike me as a tiebreaker over another device, if that makes sense. Like, nice to have, you'll probably use them if you're there, like the recorder is a cool thing. And I've always loved

the pixel recorder. But I've never bought a pixel because of the pixel recorder. Do you know I mean. Does any of the AI stuff feel like it clears that, like, this is why you would buy this over something else, bar? I don't know if we're quite there. I think that maybe with a small asterisk for the pixel on the like face swap stuff, which we all have, you know, feelings about. But that's the one that people I talk to who are like not online, you know, are like, oh, I saw this pixel phone does this thing. I'm like, yeah, actually it's, it's really useful and like people see the utility for it. Yeah, there's a lot of AI like camera and non-camera that I just sort of feel like, is this helping it? Like, is anyone going to use this? Like the, especially the chat

assist stuff where it's like, I'll write something, but you know, put some emoji in it or make it sound professional or casual. Like, I'll like write a text and think to myself like, should I use this? I'm like, no. I have no reason to try it. Right. But. The photo stuff is interesting. I think it's at a place where it's a little more compelling to people. And Samsung's take on generative AI photo editing is interesting. Yeah, compare and contrast it a bit to what the pixel is doing. Because the underlying models are mostly Googles, right? So in theory, it's dealing with the same underlying technology.

But what is Samsung doing differently from what we've seen on the pixels? Yeah. So you kind of have the interface for the tools, and they're like a very similar, you go into this separate kind of editing pane of like you're doing AI and you can select an object and move it or erase it. That's kind of the same on pixel and Samsung. I will say though, by the way, for anyone who has not yet read Allison's review of the S24 and S24 plus, the funniest thing in that whole review is a picture that you took, I think, what of your husband's arm draped over a couch that you tried to remove? What happened when you tried to remove this? So, yeah, I selected it and I hit, you know, take it out of the scene. I did this on the pixel and the Samsung and the pixel

just kind of tried to like fill in the background. It was like, there's a couch here. Samsung was like, you want a new arm made out of pillows. It's the creepiest freaking thing I've ever seen. And it's so cursed and it's now on the web's it's on the verge.com forever. That's good stuff. That's what we're here for. But anyway, I derail you. Sorry, keep going. Yeah. No, that kind of sums it up because like, I think the pixel in like what it'll actually generate. And they are running on same Google models. The pixel's a little more prone to be like, okay, you want to fill in the background here.

It doesn't always look super great. Sometimes it's really good. Sometimes it's not. But the Samsung phone, for whatever reason, is very eager to just, like, throw something else in there. It's such Samsung energy. I love it. It really is.

Yeah. Like you, I selected a lamp on a table and I try to take out and I put a different lamp in. That's not what I wanted at all. It's like, what's behind this? and another lamp, probably. Let's see. Just infinite layups. It's so strange. Yeah, it's Samsung Energy.

The one we talked a bunch about on the Vercast when this launched was the ability to take any video and make it into a slow motion video. And Nila got like very in his feelings about how this is creating frames that don't exist. What was your experience of actually using this thing in life? How did it feel? So I don't quite have the same philosophical hang up with it. I'm like, okay, sure, this is fun. I can slow down a video of my kid on a swing. I think that's where most people are.

It's great. Based on the emails we got after that episode, I think most people agree with you. All right, that's the consensus. Yeah, so when we tried it out just initially in the kind of product demo time, both V, V, Varon, and I were like, this is really impressive. Like, it looks pretty convincing. And then you kind of throw more complexity at it and it falls apart a little bit. see where it's like, things sort of look jerky. And the one I did was my kid on a swing. And, you know, he pulls him back and lets him go. And it's like so cute. And he's just like overjoyed.

But then his like the chains of the swing are just kind of like flickering in and out of existence. Interesting. Yeah. And like it's trying to decide what the, the mulch on the playground should look like in every one of those frames where it doesn't exist. So it just kind of like looks real warped and kind of, It's a little distracting. It makes the mulch looks like it's moving, looking at the video. Like, have you ever seen the thing where there's just like a billion ants altogether? It looks like sort of a solid thing, but it's just like churning. Yeah.

That's what it makes the mulch look like. It's a little unsettling, honestly. It is. Yeah. It's like, take something very cute and fond and makes it just a little, like, cursed. Yeah. The one A I think I forgot to ask you about was the circle to search thing. And this is something that is not technically a Samsung-only feature.

It's also on the pixel now, and it's kind of, you can, like, hack your way into something very similar just using Google's overall multi-search stuff. But I think this is very cool and strikes me as the kind of thing in general that is, like, just a good feature. It's also a good reason to have an S-pen, like, yay, for the ultra. Yeah. But you've tested this a bunch. I have not been able to use it at all. What's been the verdict on Circle to Search? Yeah.

I think it's something that I'm going to miss when I don't have it. It's not like you're constantly, I'm like, oh, I'm going to circle everything. everything, search it in this Instagram post, but when you do need it, and you kind of have to unlearn the old way of doing things. Like, I was texting with a friend and they mentioned the name of the restaurant where you're going to meet at. And my instinct was like, go open Google Maps and type it in and search it. And I had to backtrack. I was like, no, no, no, I can, I can just, like, highlight this in it. You know, you don't have to leave the app you're in. Just pops up with your, everything you weren't going to look for in Google Maps. Yeah, I'm like, oh,

this is how we should have been using our phones. Like, this feels so much more intuitive. And I think I'm going to miss it when it's not an option. Yeah, it's the kind of thing that seems weird until you do it about four times. And then it's like, oh, this makes sense. Yeah. It is insane that I have to copy text in a text message, close this app, open another app, go to the search bar, type on that and hit search just to get the map for the direction that

this person sent me. Like, that's a bad user experience that we're just all used to. Like this is the thing about AI in general that I think is kind of exciting. It's just finding ways to shortcut all of that stuff because it can start to figure out, oh, this is an address. There's really only one thing you want to do with an address. Let's just do that for you. I think that's very cool.

Yeah, like don't write me an email like Shakespeare wrote it. Just like give me those shortcuts. Totally. Do the grant work for me, please. Exactly. Okay, last thing. And then I'm going to let you go. One of the big promises Samsung made here is seven years of software support.

which I think in the abstract is very cool. Google also said seven years, right? So this is now like the gold standard. I think that's very cool. Is it realistic if I'm buying an S24 to assume that I'm still going to want this phone in seven years? Like the big spec missing for me is the Chi 2 charging, which I think is whatever. Seven years from now, you'll probably want better wireless charging than this phone gives you. But even looking past that, like, is it realistic for this phone or really any phone to say,

I am feasibly going to keep this thing and it's going to be useful to me for seven years? For the vast majority of people, they're going to be trading in their phone before that, especially with the ultra sort of feels like people who buy that phone are on a quicker upgrade cycle because they want the next big thing with all the stuff. Yeah, the Venn diagram of S-Pen users and people who only upgrade every seven years, I don't think is huge. Not a big one there. But, you know, I look at like my parents or like bless his heart, my husband with his iPhone 10R. Yeah. They just want to not shop for a phone. They're like, I hate that.

I don't want to deal with Verizon doing a whole bunch of things, Jedi mind tricks. Like, I just want my phone and I want it to work for a long time. And I think that's fair. I think Samsung has a good track record in that respect. They've sort of been pushing forward with more years of support. And they were doing better than Google for a hot second, but Google caught wise. So I'm glad to see it. I think it's probably going to make a difference for a minority, but I think it's important.

Yeah. And I guess I do like the idea that you should be able to decide to upgrade your phone before your phone forces you to upgrade it. Right. Right. Like I think that's a good thing. And I think seven years is probably two years longer than even most sort of normal people will keep their phones, partly just because of like battery health, right? Like it's just going to get to the point where your phone doesn't charge for very long anymore. But yeah, then at least I'm in a position. where I get to say I want a new phone rather than my phone being like, I'm dead. Exactly. Get a new phone.

Yeah. So S-24, Samsung usually is like the default Android phone. Does it stay there this year, do you think? Like, is this the phone of 2024 in the Android world? I think so. And when I reviewed the pixel 8 and the 8 Pro, I was really impressed and I was kind of like, Samsung's going to have to really come up with something. And I think they did.

There's an asterisk. There's, you know, if Samsung software is very unappealing to you, you just want something a little more turnkey, you don't ever want to think about whether Bixby exists or not. The pixel is a great option. And there are things, I think, that are compelling about it. You know, if you do like the face swap, that's there for you. The way the assistant, like, processes natural language is a little better. than on the assistant on Samsung Galaxy phones. So there are still reasons to look at the pixel. But I think, yeah, I think Samsung keeps the crown. Fair enough. All right. We're going to do this many more times.

But I'm especially, I'm going to play you that clip when we do the Pixel 9, whenever that comes out this year. And we're going to see how it holds out. But I appreciate it. Thanks, Alison. Thank you. All right. We've got to take one more break,

and then we'll be back to answer a question for the Vergecast hotline. We'll be right back. Support for the show. comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, acid compliant, enterprise ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code.

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prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon.

Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful. enterprise, that you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care

if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary. Third, like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America actually. Let's begin. Welcome back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 8, 6. V-6, Verge 1-1, and the email is Vergecast at theverge.com. We love all of your questions. It's been so fun hearing about everybody's Vision Pro experiences, and we're going to try to keep putting that stuff on the show as much as we can. We don't want to overload you with Vision Pro stuff, but we think this thing is fascinating.

This week, surprise, we have a Vision Pro question. We're going to get to a bunch more of these, like I said, including your experiences, which I loved hearing about on Friday. But I thought this one was interesting and actually made me think a lot. It comes from Dan, I think. Maybe Stan. I think it's Dan. Either way, if I got your name wrong, I'm sorry.

Here it is. Hey there, this is Dan from San Francisco. I got a Vision Pro icon in my iPhone camera app today. And I think that it wants me to start shooting in spatial video. Should I do that, even though I might not buy a Vision Pro ever? Can I shoot everything in Spatial Pro already? Or should I wait and shoot normal video now only? Help me out.

Thank you. Okay, so I've gone back and forth on this question a bunch since I first heard it. And I think the answer is no. I think at this point, if you have no particular intention of getting a headset, the answer is kind of no. Spatial video has some really neat stuff going on, especially the way it's integrated with the headset. If you just shoot it on your iPhone, you're kind of just capturing 3D video, and that's all well and good. The Vision Pro has that neat way of presenting it where it has those kind of misty borders around it. So it looks a little like you're looking through a portal rather than just looking at a video.

But the other thing about the Vision Pro is that actually it's a great way to just watch regular video. And you can get 4K video off of the iPhone. You can't get 4K spatial video. Spatial video is huge. It's about twice the size of a normal 1080p video. So I think at this point, if you're not anticipating getting this soon, if you want to use spatial video as like the second thing you shoot, right? you're like, I'm going to take a video of my kids baseball game. Take the regular video first and take it in the highest quality you can and then go back and get the spatial video.

It's a fun sort of neat thing, but I wouldn't treat that as your main media capture situation. That said, I do think spatial video is coming in the sense that I think everyone agrees that this is a format that is going to be around for a long time. Meta is now supporting spatial video on the Quest headsets. Apple is obviously all in on the Vision Pro both as a capture thing for Spatial Video and as a way to watch it back. I think this format is real, so it's a fun thing to start playing around with. I don't think it's like the 3D video of eight years ago that kind of went nowhere and now you don't really even have a way to play it. I don't think Spatial Video is going to die, but I also don't think it's going to be the main way you consume media anytime particularly soon, especially if you're not going to be a headset person. So I would say start goofing around with it, have some fun, but don't feel the need to switch your default settings and start shooting everything in spatial because 4K video will do pretty well even in a headset.

All right, that's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everyone who is on the show, and thank you as always for listening. There's a whole lot more from this conversation at Theverge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes. All the links you need are going to be on theverge.com. Theverge.com slash vergecast. That's where you can find everything. and there's tons of news going on.

VIRG.com. It's a good website. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or S-Pen uses you really want to tell me about, you can always email us at Vergecast at theverge.com or call the hotline 866 Verge 1-1. Tell us your Vision Pro experiences. Tell us which galaxy phone you bought. Tell us all of your feelings about everything happening in tech right now. We do a hotline question on this episode every week, which again is now on Tuesdays, so keep them all coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Willpore.

The Vergecast is a Vorge production and part of the Vox Media. a podcast network. Neely, Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about Google Chaos, all the AI stuff going on, and lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.