The Vergecast - IFA 2020 gadgets / Intel announces 11th Gen Tiger Lake CPUs / Nvidia announces RTX 3080 and 3090
Episode Date: September 4, 2020Nilay, Dieter, Chaim, and Chris dive deep into all the gadget news that dominated this week, including all the announcements at IFA 2020's virtual event showcase. Stories discussed this week: Apple ...and Google announce new automatic app system to track COVID exposures Apple releases iOS 13.7 with support for new automatic COVID-19 notification system The CDC’s testing guidance will make the pandemic worse Emergency COVID-19 vaccines will have to convince a skeptical public Robert Pattinson reportedly has COVID-19, and The Batman has halted production Super Mario 3D World and other classic Mario games are coming to the Switch Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit is a Switch racer that uses RC cars Nintendo is releasing a 35th anniversary Super Mario Bros. Game and Watch Intel announces its new 11th Gen Tiger Lake CPUs, available ... Intel debuts a new logo alongside its 11th Gen chips Asus’ latest ZenBook laptops feature Intel’s 11th Gen CPUs and Thunderbolt 4 ports Acer’s new Swift laptops include Intel’s 11th Gen processors Toshiba laptops are no more, but here are Dynabook’s new notebooks with Intel’s 11th Gen parts Samsung launches Galaxy Book Flex 5G, the first 5G Intel Evo laptop Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080: launching September 17th for … Nvidia's new RTX 3090 is a $1,499 monster GPU designed for ... Qualcomm's next budget Snapdragon 4-series chips could ... Qualcomm’s 8cx Gen 2 5G processor promises a new wave of better ARM-based laptops Qualcomm hopes to topple AirPods Pro with ‘adaptive’ noise cancellation for true wireless earbuds Sonos patent gives possible first look at unannounced headphones Bang & Olufsen’s $800 noise-canceling headphones copy the best part of Microsoft’s Surface Headphones Samsung announces The Premiere, a luxury ultra-short throw 4K laser projector The new Philips Hue lightstrip mounts to your TV and syncs with what’s on-screen Lenovo Smart Clock 8BitDo made a mod-friendly, wireless arcade stick for the Nintendo Switch and Asus Zenfone 7 Pro review: fun flipping cameras with a bulky phone attached Samsung announces its cheapest 5G phone and new Trio … We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: voxmedia.com/podsurvey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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This week on the Vergecast, Hymgartenberg and Chris Welch joined the show.
It's talk about Intel's new 11th gen Tiger Lake CPUs, the new Nvidia, G4s, RtX 3080 and 3090,
all the gadgets that are coming out of EFA, and then a little bit of Dieter's emotions about folding phones.
That's coming up now on the Vergecast.
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Hello, and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Nintendo of America.
They don't know it yet, but we're going to...
You just conquer the territory you want.
That's my feeling.
I'm Neela. I'm your friend.
Dieter Bon is here.
Howdy.
Wow.
Hym Gartenberg is here.
Hello.
And Chris Welch is here.
Good day once again.
We have, there's a lot of gadget news in this world.
So I wanted Hime and Welch to join us.
Go through EFA is technically this week.
It's a huge European gadget show.
And they're actually sort of doing it.
There's like real things that you can go sort of attend virtually and even some real world stuff.
There you go.
So there's a flood of news.
This is that in September.
We've entered sort of the fall.
hardware season. It's time. So we're going to get into all that. There's some cool Nintendo stuff
to talk about. And then Dieter just, I think every week, we're just going to make you think
about folding phones until the reviews are here. But as always, I want to start with the two
biggest stories in the world. It is, it's funny, it's 25 weeks. That's a nice round number.
25 weeks since Donald Trump and Dr. Deborah Brooks promised us a national testing plan involving
a website that would be built, I think, by Sundar Pichai, Ed.
Google himself.
Right.
He was, you know, he's like, look, I was the architect of many of Google's cloud
services.
I worked on the Chrome team.
I'm going to make this website for you.
And then he forgot his Squarespace login.
Ooh.
You know, the trick was that you just hit escape on the home page that brings up there.
25 weeks since that happened.
That is good context for some of the other stuff that is going on with COVID right now,
which is the administration sort of promising a vaccine around the time of the election.
I think I've been harping and banging away on this, on this web,
website joke for so long, just to make it clear that we have to hold people accountable for
these promises. So that's very obviously like a stunt that is happening, this promise of a vaccine.
The CDC has been giving guidance. I think we wrote a piece, Adi wrote a piece. The headline was
just the CDC's testing guidance will make the pandemic worse. The New York Times wrote a piece that
was like, do we should just, it's time to stop listening to CDC. All that's bad. All of it comes down to
we need a proper test and test, test and trace program in this country before we can.
get beyond the pandemic, get beyond, you know, until a real vaccine that has been properly
tested hits.
Nicole had a piece for us this week on vaccines, on how these emergency developed vaccines,
are going to have to convince a public that is already a little skeptical of vaccines.
That's a big deal.
That's a big cultural problem to solve.
And then on the test and trace side, we've uncovered this for a long time now.
Apple and Google obviously announced that contact tracing exposure notification, I think is
what they're technically calling it, exposure notification.
system, the APIs for that system were released a while ago.
There were some apps across some states that used those APIs.
And by some you mean like app or maybe two.
Or like not enough.
Yeah, not enough.
So then the next step of the Apple Google exposure notification system is going on.
It's good.
It is also very complicated.
So they've built the APIs.
The phones can do exposure notification.
They can trade the Bluetooth keys and they can check those, you know,
the list of keys on your phone gets checked against a database.
If any of those keys in the database are registered as having tested positive,
you get a notification that says you were notified per some parameters,
or that you were exposed per some parameters,
a different states can set.
That initially required you to have an app on your phone.
So the system was working in the background,
but to do something like submit a positive test for yourself,
you needed an app from Public Health Authority.
Apple and Google are now taking the next step.
So iOS 13.7 just came out.
It now has the interface for that stuff built into the app if your local health authority wants to enable it in some way.
The Google side is just very different.
It's very Android in its way that your local health authorities can give the phones a set of parameters that will then auto-generate an Android app that works with the framework.
Yeah.
Very complicated.
Wait, why is that complicated?
It's just, it's so Android and that they can't really bake it into the UI of the operating system
without going through all of the update machinations of Android.
So it is easier to like dynamically compile an application on the phone that touches.
I mean, that's like hilarious, right?
Yeah, okay, that's fair.
Whereas Apple is just like, is pushing it.
You know, we've been covering it very closely.
I imagine if you've been listening to the show or reading The Verge, you're aware of it.
If you just read these stories and read how it works,
I worry that it's so complicated.
All of this stuff is so complicated and requires so many,
so many different sorts of agencies and public health authorities and hospitals and people
to understand how it works to make it effective.
I think now that it's here, it's time to kind of hammer on that.
So I think that's kind of the next step here.
But that's good news overall.
The system has been in development.
Apple and Google, for all of the other noise around those companies and all their challenges
and all their congressional testimonies,
They appear to be just making steady incremental progress on this, which I think is great.
Can I just say one thing about these situations being complicated, these software solutions being complicated?
Needing them to be simple isn't just for simplicity's sake.
It isn't just for aesthetic reasons that simple things are nicer or even just easier to understand.
It's that in a situation where there are bad faith actors who will use any complicated thing,
anything that's difficult to understand as a cudgel against it or as a way to like muddy the waters,
complicated things actually become really problematic.
It's harder to muddy the waters with a simple thing than it is with a complicated thing.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And here, you know, the nature of the thing is that you don't think of your phone having a relationship with your local government.
That is just phones exist outside of that framework.
And here they need to have a very deep relationship with your local government.
Because that's the scale of the problem.
And that's really how our response has worked.
And we're just going to find out how good local governments around the country are at working with app vendors and operating system vendors.
Anyway, but it's happening.
That's generally good news.
And then last bits of COVID-19 news, Robert Pattinson tests positive for COVID-19.
The Batman halted production.
And the Rock announced that he in his entire time only tested positive.
and then he was mad about masks.
I only bring this up to remind you that if The Rock and Batman can get COVID-19,
it is very likely that you can too, and you should be very careful.
That's the COVID stuff.
The other side of it is the movement for racial justice in this country,
which, you know, I think these are the two stories that will take away from 2020.
Not so much Tiger Lake, but we're going to talk about Tiger Lake.
We obviously talked to Bejohn and Maria about our huge capturing the police project
on the interview show this week.
I encourage you to get to listen to that.
It was really good conversation.
It's very hard when you are interviewing your own reporters about a project you edited.
I'm just making SpawnCon.
And it actually turned into a really good and meaty conversation.
So check that out.
Check out Capturing the Police Project.
We worked on that for months.
Almost everybody on the site touched it in some way.
It's just a big deal.
And I keep coming back to how deeply intertwined everything that we talk about on the show is with this movie.
It's cameras.
It's social media distribution.
It's who gets to moderate.
It's who gets to take it down.
it's how the platforms operate, what they surface, what they make a viral.
It's all wrapped up in there.
So go check out that project, check out that conversation with Pajon and Mario.
We're very proud of it.
Okay.
The business aside, the biggest gadget news of the week, I think we have to just say it out loud at the top.
It's that Nintendo released Mario Kart live.
Yes.
Do you want to, I mean, I just assumed you'd freak out over this.
So it's Mario Kart, but what you do is you do is, you.
actually have little remote control carts with cameras on the top, and then they drive
around your living, you drive them around your living room, and they map out a virtual Mario cart
track in your living room. So I don't know how they do that. So there's clearly gates, right,
so that you can set gates, and then the track needs to go through the gate, one, two, three, four.
But I think you can also map out the thing, because they've showed a little thing where there's
like a weird curly cue track, right? And they can do stuff like if you get hit with a shell,
you let your cart slows down. So it's possible that if you go off the track, they will slow
the cart down. And that's how they enforce staying on the track in between the gates or whatever.
But it seems pretty cool. This is legitimately the only AR thing I've ever been like, oh,
that'll work. People will like that. Everything else is like, yeah, I'm going to put this couch
in my living room. What's so clever about it is it fits so well into like,
what's capable and possible with AR right now.
So you can see the other carts and then you can have digital effects on those carts,
but they're not trying to map anything wild on, you know, curved surfaces or whatever.
What you see is like what the cart sees and the things that are digital are the things that you'd expect to be digital from the game.
And then the things that are real, they just like, it just needs to be a floor, right?
So the cart has a little camera on it.
The cart has a little camera, but it doesn't need to do like real time rendering of three.
3D surfaces while the car cart is in motion.
They've got those gates, and so camera will be able to recognize those gates.
It'll be able to recognize other carts.
But if you just have little, you know, the equivalent of QR codes on that stuff, you can do that
really fast and on the fly.
And so take what's possible in AR and then come up with clever solutions for making it seem
like you've done something bigger than you actually have.
And then make it Mario Kart, because who doesn't love Mario Kart?
Literally, I don't know anybody.
If you haven't watched the video, go look at the post, watch video on a site.
So it's a cart, a little Mario cart with a little Mario in it, a little like F1 racer-shaped thing.
And then right below the wing above Mario's head is a camera.
So just the steps here are the camera has to stream video to the switch somehow.
That's a thing that probably has to happen.
You play it on the switch.
You drive around and the cart moves or anything.
The game has to know the layout of your living room and that's a stream video to your switch.
the switch has to overlay graphics on the video it's streaming in and then you can play with another
person with another cart so all of that has to talk to each other all of this seems like not the
most challenging problem but that sense of this there's just a lot going on in terms of network
performance and processing to get to hear like that just blew me away like it's a toy but the
amount of like just tech that has to happen for that toy to work seems mind-blowing I also noticed
at the video. I don't know if this is like,
these are like a bunch of camera nerds on the show this week, but
their room was very bright.
The first thing I thought was,
I wonder how this is going to go in the dark or at night with like one
lamp turned on.
Yeah.
It's like,
huh,
there's a lot of sunlight in this room.
Also,
that couch is perfectly positioned in the center of the room.
But I can't wait to play.
It's like,
of all the gadgets we saw this week,
this one was by far the one that to me is just like totally new.
Like I haven't seen anything like this before.
There was the, what's the company that eventually turned into Anki and, you know, made the
Drive.
Yeah, Anki Drive.
They had that, you know, and it was at the Apple Keynote.
So this is sort of a logical extension of that, but this is, this feels way more advanced.
Or just way more clever in how it integrates AR into, like, the existing system of, you know.
Can I admit something to you?
I still have no idea what Onky Drive was.
Tim Cook came on stage and Apple Keynote.
He was like, I want to show you something.
something amazing. And it was like a micro machine racing around in a circle. And he's like,
this is the next frontier of AI. And I still do not know what he was talking about. And the company,
the company is folded, right? It's gone. Yeah. And I think that is the problem. I think,
I think there's a clear link between not having any idea what's going on and the company,
the cars are supposed to like drive around each other. Yeah. They used, they used AI to like do some of
the twitchy things so you wouldn't have to do it, like drive around each other and, you know,
stay, you know, within certain parameters and whatever. And, you know, eventually they took that
idea and they made a robot that you were just supposed to hang out with that didn't do anything.
It was very cute. I got one. And it made you feel good that you had a little robot that
would chirp at you when you walked in the door. But that turns out is not a real business.
Mario cart, however, you could just make money on that anytime you want. You just have Mario make a
cute little Mario noise and they're done.
I mean, all this is coming out in the context of Super Mario Brothers' Turning 35.
They've released the new versions of it.
There's remastered versions of various Mario games coming to Switch.
There's a game and watch, like a little handheld that plays Super Mario Brothers.
I'm definitely going to buy that.
Yeah.
People are going to have a chance that haven't to play Super Mario Sunshine,
the most unfairly hated of the Mario 3D Mario games.
and I'm excited.
I love Super Mario Sunshine.
Everybody that hates Super Mario Sunshine can go away.
All right.
I'm excited for The Verge to become
the Super Mario Sunshine blog.
It's going to be great.
So that's Nintendo stuff.
I just think it's amazing
that this little Mario, like,
go watch that video and think about
all of this AR conversation we've had.
The iPad has a LiDAR sensor
and we're like, why?
And Nintendo's like,
this little crappy car can run around your house.
Like, they beat them to the punch
in a serious way and it looks amazing.
And also I just love this contrast.
You've got Sony and Microsoft saying, here come are groundbreaking, powerful new consoles.
And here's Nintendo saying, well, here's Mario and some RTC cars.
And we're going to sell boatloads of these things.
We're just going to throw Mario at people.
That's our strategy.
Yeah, here's a Super Mario game from 35 years ago re-released.
Go ahead and buy that one.
It's great.
Real trip there.
All right.
My gadget news.
Actually, a big week of processor news in the broadest sense, Intel announced Tiger Lake, the 11th generation, Tiger Lake, Nvidia.
announce the G-Force RTF 3080.
Qualcomm has some stuff.
There's headphone chips.
Let's start with Intel.
Haim.
Did they explain to you why they made their new logo in Microsoft Word?
The new logo is the future.
And the fact that it looks like it was made in Microsoft Word can only lead me to assume
that Intel believes that Microsoft Word is the future of computing.
It's not wrong.
It's not a coincidence that the only,
the only real performance metric they gave for the Tiger Lake chips was that it does office
productivity like 20% better than the 10th gen stuff.
No.
Because Microsoft Word is the key.
I love it.
That was really the metric?
That was the metric.
The metric they gave is that it is 20% faster speeds on day-to-day office productivity
and a 20% increase in system level power where there are two metrics on the processor side.
They are more excited about the graphics than the processor.
Right.
Yeah.
So walk us through 11.
10th gen Tiger Lake. All right. So 11th gen Tiger Lake. This is, you know, the classic Intel
TikTok mechanism. Last year, they jumped to a new architecture. They were, they finally released
their 10 nanometer chips. And so this is the refinement of that. They announced actually in
their last earnings call that they're not going to hit 7 nanometer for at least another, you know,
year plus. That's delayed. So this is a refined kind of version of last year's stuff. But Intel is
typing this up as a very big jump forward.
And one of the reasons that they're doing that is that they're finally rolling out their new
Z graphics, which are Intel's really big graphics push for the first time in a very long time.
It's going to start rolling out.
They're doing dedicated GPUs and external GPUs, which is a thing that they haven't done
for a very long time slash ever, depending on what you count like one weird project from a while back.
But this is, this is, you know, the first wave of that.
It's the integrated graphics.
This is actually the worst of all their stuff.
They have much more powerful stuff on their roadmap.
But they're promising big stuff.
They're claiming that, you know, it'll run a bunch of like AAA games at 1080P on an ultra book,
which is impressive if it works, which we'll have to see.
But yeah, that's sort of where they're starting from is, you know,
they're claiming 2x better graphics.
And that's sort of the base point.
So the TLDR here is the processors themselves are a little bit faster,
but the integrated graphics that you'll get with most of these processors is, in theory, way better.
It's hard for me to, I mean, you say if you believe that.
That's sort of the question for me is like, how much better?
Like, better so that, you know, I guess I was just about to say MacBook Air, but the heck.
Better so that an ultra book that's really thin and light doesn't sort of feel like it's chugging.
If I do anything more than open up, you know, an edge tab or whatever.
whatever, or is it actually better to run games and do something that I normally would never
would have done on an ultra book?
So Intel is claiming the second.
I mean, we haven't tried out these machines yet.
They're going to start shipping in the next couple weeks.
I'm sure our whole reviews team is going to be, you know, putting them through their,
their paces.
But Intel is really saying, you know, video productivity, you know, video editing, actual games
that were showing off, you know, Doom, PubG.
Like, you're not going to be playing, you know, battlefields, whatever the new battlefield that
they're releasing is at, you know, 4K graphics at, you know, 60 frames,
for a second or 120 frames per second. But for for you know middle of the road stuff,
you'll be able to play it I think well is sort of the goal here. The gap between because of all
the TikTok sale drama like I've just been playing with TikTok and the gap between like the
TikTok or the Instagram Reels video editor or Snapchat in terms of what they can do in real time
editing a video feed at almost any laptop is so dramatically huge now.
So for Intel to be like, this laptop is better at video editing.
I don't think the comparison is to previous laptops.
It has to be to phones, right?
And I wonder just how much of a whole, like, an entire generation of kids is going to, like, grow up expecting their phones to do real-time video effects and, like, AR effects and Snapchat.
And their laptops are like, just, they just explode because they just don't have the horseback.
Like, that's like the next step for graphics and laptops is to just catch up to work.
phones have been for a couple of years now. Not necessarily in the game front, but in the, when you
talk about video editing. The other reason I bring that up is obviously Apple's going to bring
out arm laptops very soon, and presumably they will just bring those capabilities to their
laptops. That's sort of the difference that we're seeing, and we'll get to that later,
between the Intel stuff and the Qualcomm stuff, Qualcomm is pushing its ability to, you know,
offer this real-time AI processing and camera stuff. The stuff that its mobile chips are already
very good at, we've seen stuff like, you know, the eye tracking and the
AI replacement is the demo that always gets thrown around on the Surface ProX. It's the kind of
tasks that, you know, we've optimized, we spent years optimizing our mobile processors for,
which are very easy to bring to laptops. And that's, I think, sort of where that breakdown's
going to come. I feel like Intel has always been just like chasing the glory of the past in many,
almost every way. So like once upon a time, Centrino laptops were a thing. Then they tried to make
ultra books a thing. And now they've got a new thing called Evo. You forgot about a theme. You forgot about
Athena, which was not a thing.
They said it was a thing. Then they said, no, no, it's not a thing.
Don't call it a thing. And then we said, why isn't
it a thing? And they're like, hey, just kidding, it's a thing.
And now they've forgotten about that being a thing.
And so now we have Evo.
Evo is the thingification of
Project Athena in a way.
That's the most
in the weeds thing that we've said on the Vurchast in
like six months. It is
taking Project Athena and it is putting
a name. It's going to be a sticker
that you're going to see on your Intel
laptops. It's going to be
a brand with the new logo and everything.
It is pretty similar to Athena.
It's a little stricter.
It's, you know...
We should just say what it is.
It's basically a certification that your laptop meets certain criteria that Intel has set
for performance and battery life and graphics or whatever.
So is it...
You have an Evo laptop or it's an Evo certified laptop?
It's an Evo verified design.
Evo verified design.
It means that you'll get nine hours of, quote,
real world use according to Intel's tests on a single charge on a 1080P display,
that it'll fast charge for up to four hours of charge in 30 minutes,
that it will support Wi-Fi 6, Thunderbolt 4,
that will have system wake in less than a second,
and that it has an 11th-gen-Tigerlake processor are the only ones they're certifying
with it right now.
That battery life claim is actually a big deal.
It feels like nine hours is a floor,
and I think their claim is like this is a real test, not a fake test.
They have, you know, an internal test that they do on it, apparently.
That is how they're defining it.
It's not manufacturer says this lasts for nine hours.
Trust us.
Intel is doing some sort of actual verification here.
It's sad that nine hours is, I'm like, oh, that's pretty good.
Because I just feel like battery life on laptops has been dropping for a while.
So a question I have is, you know, with your 20% better office performance, are you going to get actually get nine hours out of this thing?
Well, so actually, I got to point out, like, all that list of
requirements sounds great, but they just, they just kind of snuck Thunderbolt 4 in there, didn't they?
I mean, Thunderbolt 4 is default on anything with its 11th gen system is also a requirement,
and all 11th gen systems have Thunderbolt 4. This just means like you can't get an Intel Evo
stamp, I guess, if you had an AMD processor, but I don't think you can get one anyway.
What is meaningfully different from Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 4?
Thunderbolt 4 is faster, and it supports more screens.
Fair.
It raises the bar again on power and speed and the amount of displays that you can hook up to a thing.
It also might finally mean that we're going to start to see, like, actual real USBC hubs that let you add more ports to stuff between Thunderbolt 4 and USB 4.
But that is a different rabbit hole that's not directly related to.
Every time you come on the show, I might feel like I assign you the what-the-fuck USB C post.
It's such a mess.
But I'll wait.
I'll wait for Thunderbolt 4.
But then there's actual laptops, right?
Yeah.
As is tradition, there is a wave of laptops that already announced.
Intel says that there will be 150 different designs in the coming months.
ACER, ASSO, STEL, Dynambook, HP Lenovo, LG, MSI, Razor, and Samsung have already promised
on board.
There's a handful of those already announced today.
A lot of them are refreshes.
Acer, Swift 5 and Swift 3.
They look like the old ones.
They have, you know, the new chips.
Zen books, old ones, new chips.
Toshiba's Dinabook is back.
Sort of.
Sort of.
And, you know, again, they look pretty similar to the old ones, but they have Tiger Lake.
Yeah.
The most interesting, though, of the new batch is Samsung's, actually, which is the Samsung Galaxy Book Flex 5G.
So significant, it is the first 5G Intel Evo laptop.
Intel, I mean, 5G laptops are early on.
The only one that's been out so far is a Qualcomm one that uses Qualcomm stuff.
This is, you know, the first one that is Intel that is not directly related to Qualcomm.
It doesn't do a lot of 5G.
It does sub-6.
It doesn't do millimeter wave.
But it is at least a start.
And it's, you know, a way for Intel to be like.
You can get a regular Intel laptop that has a regular Intel processor, but it'll have 5G.
I mean, that's good.
That's important.
Here's my question.
Imagine you work inside Samsung and you make, you've made an amazing product.
I don't know.
You've made the most incredible.
microwave ever, right? And you take it to your boss and you're like, look at what this microwave
can do. And your boss will say, does it have 5G? And you'll say, what? And then your boss will
smash your microwave and fire you on the spot. My version of working at Samsung, I think every
time there's a new Samsung product, we all imagine what's like to, it's like you made this laptop.
And you're like, man, we did it. We get the first Evo verified laptop. That's a thing that's meaningful.
Go with me on this.
It's got a 5G modem.
I passed that test.
What should we call it?
And then someone is like, you know what's a great word to put in the name of a laptop?
Flex.
And then everyone on whatever Samsung clone Zoom that they're using was like, yes.
And then they named a laptop after literally the worst thing that the laptop hardware can do, which is flex.
I mean, I'm fine with it.
I mean, it's a weird flex, but okay.
I hate you.
This shows is from the same people that brought you the Galaxy Buds live instead of the Galaxy Beans.
True.
That's true.
It's been quite a year for Samsung's marketing team.
Do you think they were just like, we can't just call it the Galaxy Book?
People need to know it's a different one.
There are other Galaxy Books out there.
There's the Galaxy Book.
There's the Galaxy Book Flex Alpha, which is a different one than this one.
There's a lot of these.
Samsung's Flex in here.
That's why I wanted to stop it before you got right there.
All right.
So that's the Intel stuff.
Obviously, a lot of laptops coming.
As Hym said, our reviews team is going to be all over them.
Carry on a chip news.
Invidia has the G4s RtX 3080.
Hime, walk us through that really quick.
So, G4s RtX 3080 and also the G4s RtX 3090.
These are the next generation, Nvidia, GPUs.
These are their big flagship cards.
These are the ones.
If you must have the best gaming PC known to mankind, this is what you're putting in.
They are physically just enormous.
They're based on Nvidia's new Amper architecture.
They're promising twice the performance of the RTX 2080.
Their old flagship, it'll be even faster in the ArcticX 280, 10 gigabytes of GDDRR6 memory.
That's on the 3080.
It is just a big, beefy graphics card.
It doesn't necessarily do a lot different.
The 3080 is just a lot better at it.
And then the 3090 is really the big wacky one.
It costs $1,500 more than presumably whatever an Xbox Series X and a PlayStation 5 will cost combined.
$1,500, 24 gigabytes of memory.
And Nvidia says that this can do 60 FPS gaming at 8.000.
8K resolution, which is a first, really.
I'm not sure entirely who that's for or what games it's even worth playing at 8K, 60
FPS.
Like, it is going to take time for the market to catch up, especially given that, you know,
we're still waiting for these new consoles to come out, and the consoles sort of help
drive that bar higher because at the end of the day, there are very few gaming companies
making AAA games just for PC that, you know, will run on only $1,500 graphics cards.
But like, you know, if you have those big games, you know, when cyberpunk comes out, it will probably look very, very good on this.
How old does this play Microsoft Flight Simulator?
That's my question.
I think it can just barely run Flight Simulator.
Flight Simulator, we should do an entire show on Flight Simulator.
It is, it's so interesting and so cool and so much is happening, and then it's so inaccessible until the next Xbox comes out.
Like, you have to have a monster PC, so it's like, I just think a whole dynamic is so interesting.
I keep bringing up to 3080 because it's so much cheaper than the 2080.
And the demo of Doom that they were running where it's just like holding over 100 FPS
and pretty much staying at 120 at 4K is like pretty amazing.
Yeah.
So part of that is really they've really focused on updating the thermals and the cooling
versus, you know, just raw increases in in memory or power, at least on the 3080.
That's one of the reasons why this is so big is, you know, bigger fans.
more cooling.
So it actually has like two fans and like the amount of heat this thing must be kicking
out.
There's got to be off the charts.
And they even, they're switching to the, every time I read about new graphics cards
from Nvidia like, oh, and now we finally have the 12 pin connector instead of dual
eight pin connectors.
And they're saying that's to free up space for heat too.
Like how much of this, it's like this and Intel are both like we can go faster if we
can let it get hotter.
And with Nvidia, they just have the benefit of they don't have to worry about your battery
life.
So they can just make it bigger and hotter.
And it's like everybody else will just bend around them.
So they can nobody, nobody's mad at Nvidia and the same way that people are mad at Intel.
Because in video, like, no one expects them to have to like compromise on other things.
They can just make it bigger and hotter.
I mean, if you had to carry around an RtX, you know, 3080 glued to your laptop, you
would probably start to look a little less kindly at NVIDIA.
Fair.
I mean, that is true, though, that they just, because they don't have that constraint,
they can push it, the real question is whether any of that can come.
Right.
Like, PC gaming is a big segment.
It's growing.
There's a lot of interest in it, especially right now.
But it's just funny to see, like, that's one world.
Then there's, like, consoles in the middle which are the consumer world.
And then the big consumer world of mobile is just in a different ecosystem entirely.
All right, so that was Nvidia.
Speaking of mobile, there's just a little bit of Qualcomm news, and then we should take a break.
Deere, you want to walk us through this Qualcomm stuff?
Oh, so they've got budget Snapdragons that will support 5G.
Here's where I've landed on 5G.
I don't think you should care about it still now, but I think that you should care about it soon.
I don't care that it's going to be on the next iPhones, but I think that eventually, like, 5G will matter in the U.S.
especially on sub-6, I'm going to say late next year.
Right now it's like barely faster if you can get it.
But I think by late next year we'll start to see more network build-out.
Verizon just won a huge big-ass auction to like get a little, you know, more bandwidth for its sub-6 network.
And so if you're buying a phone, the reason to care about 5G is, in theory, in a year and a half or so, the networks will be there while you start to see some benefit.
So if you're going to keep your phone for two to three years, you maybe want to get a 5G phone, maybe.
And the flip side of that argument that you're making is don't buy a phone this year.
Yeah, no, I think that that's not a terrible thing to not do.
Like, yeah, it'd be fine to not buy a phone this year.
Did you see, I think Joanna did in her, like, drive around in an RV video testing 5G around the country?
Like your perspective is Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal.
But, like, that perspective of it's not ready yet is such a U.S.
perspective, because if you look at the charts of U.S. 5G speeds compared to everywhere else in the world, my ideas, we have lost the race. Yeah, I'm here to report. Part of it is the chips aren't there yet. Like, Qualcomm still doesn't integrate a 5G modem into its, you know, core snapdragon chip. If you buy a Galaxy S20 today, it has a separate modem chip in it still. That's, you know, sapping power. We're not even at the point where the best processor has built in 5G. They have the step down one does. But like, like,
like the biggest best processor that you're putting in your flagship phones, which are the big
expensive phones that people want to buy, don't even have the best form of, you know, just hardware
on a very basic level that they can yet.
Yeah, but I think that is worrying about a problem that seems solvable because you can,
you as a person might be able to buy one phone or another, worrying about the network is just
waiting on Verizon and AT&T and T-Mobile to like finish the job.
The spectrum fights are real.
Verizon AT&T have been complaining that
T-Mobile has too much spectrum now, which is very
like choice considering that
merger just went down.
So I think like the infrastructure,
wanting the cost, extra process for the heat,
all that stuff is in weight of the infrastructure
to get built out and that's
still, I mean, we've been saying that forever.
All right, we've got to take a break.
We've got to come back and talk about some gadgets to you.
We'll get back.
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All right. It's EFA. What does EFA stand for?
Oh, it's the German word. And you're going to look at me because I got the German name to do it.
And I super can't.
All right.
Well, If it's happening.
Focusing on the actual trade show aspect of the trade show is whatever.
Lots of gadget news.
We were talking about Qualcomm.
Let's start with Qualcomm.
Chris Welch, they're going to come after Apple with some headphone chips.
Yeah.
So it turns out there are quite a few companies that use Qualcomm's chips for their true wireless earbuds.
You rattle off some of these.
There's Jabra, Skull Candy, Senheiser, B&O.
So there are quite a few brands that kind of depend on them.
So we've seen a lot of earbuds that have noise cancellation, but usually it's like an on or off thing.
So what Qualcomm is trying to do is kind of copy what Apple is doing with the AirPods Pro.
If you ever look at the AirPods Pro website, it says that they adjust the noise cancellation 200 times per second.
I don't know how any human being could ever confirm that that's what happens, but that's what Apple says.
And so now Qualcomm says they're going to do something similar.
So like if you're fit or seal isn't perfect, I was talk about how important the seal is for good base and good noise cancellation.
So if that's not quite perfect, this new chip is going to help you out and just talk about.
kind of adjust things on the fly so it'll sound better and be more effective. And so we'll see how
well it works. But like I said, there are a lot of companies. I think Sony and Sound with them,
of course, use their own chips for this kind of stuff. So they're not going to be involved here.
But this could help out many, many brands over the next year or so.
It's interesting to think that we now need to pay attention to ad phone chips in the same way that,
the capability of the standard headphone chip will determine the capabilities of many, many,
many products.
Right.
Because Qualcomm have competitors besides sort of the custom Sony, Samsung, like.
Sony, Samsung, Apple.
I'm not really sure who else would also be in there.
But, uh, but yeah.
I mean, you just know how I feel about competition.
Like, is there like a, is there like a broadcom in the mix, like pushing Qualcomm along?
I guess not.
Uh, then there's actually new, uh, Bang and Olson headphones.
Yes.
These are $800 noise cancelling headphones.
If you buy $800 headphones, I think you're in a different tax bracket than I am at
so slightly.
They look really good.
I think I'll stick with the Sony
1000 XM-4s.
But they did steal at least one very good idea
from Microsoft service headphones.
They have those dials on the left and right cups
that you can just turn
to adjust the volume and
and C levels.
And so they stole that idea.
They said that they were inspired by
the aperture ring on cameras.
And I said in my post, you know, just give the company
credit for a good idea for once and say
Microsoft did this really well.
and we just want to take that and build upon it.
But no, they said it came from aperture rings.
Okay.
But these look really nice.
I'm sure they sound amazing.
I did not like how the surface headphones sounded at all.
Really?
Yeah.
I love the knob.
I thought that was so much fun.
It was like, I've never adjusted the volume on my headphones so much.
But I did not like the way they were just really muddy to me.
The surface headphones too sounded a bit better, so it might be worth checking out.
And then there was a patent for the Sonos headphones that we've been hearing about for a long, long time.
And so I'm kind of excited for these.
I think we know what the big trick is going to be.
You're going to have them on.
You're going to walk into your house.
And then your music is going to just move to your sono speakers.
And that'll be the big Wahoo fancy trick, I think, of the sonous headphones.
But we have an idea of what they look like.
We don't know how much they'll cost.
Isn't it's supposed to maybe it's also supposed to support both Alexa and Google at the same time?
Maybe not at the same time.
I don't know.
They're in a little bit of a lawsuit over that.
They're a little bit of a thing there.
A little tiny NHS lawsuits.
situation going on there.
I wonder if they've delayed it because marketing a product about you can leave your house
and come back seamlessly is like a little...
Not quite the moment.
Yeah.
Do you think they're going to be targetable in the way any other Sonos speaker is targetable
from the Sonos app or from Spotify?
Like, are they going to be like full-on Wi-Fi headphones?
Because to me, like, there's no point.
If it's literally just Bluetooth headphones with the Sonos badge and it like, it can like somehow
communicate to a speaker over Bluetooth or something to like pass it off.
Like that's not enough.
I actually want to be able to like hit the source button that looks at sees all the Sonos
targets and choose the headphones.
Why?
Yeah, we'll see how it works out.
Because I mean, it could like always also like move too soon from headphones to your speaker
like before you're even fully inside.
So it'll yeah.
They'll have to kind of smooth that out to see how all that works.
But I'm excited for new new Sonos gadgets.
You know, the move is a really good speaker that I enjoy a lot.
And so it's fun to see them kind of just branching.
out more. Deeter, why do you want to have music stream to, like, your headphones and to some
speakers in your house? Well, or speakers. I want to be able to switch it from the speakers to my
headphones. Or I want to be able to, like, I don't know, have the headphones, like, ask the
digital assistant or something to have it go there. In Spotify, it, when you can tap your targets
and, like, having the headphones be there via Sonos is interesting. It just, it feels more
integrated than having headphones that are connected to your phone via one system, and then
your house speakers that are connected to your music ecosystem via an entirely other system.
They should just all talk to each other.
Yeah.
I mean, the reason that's crazy is that it would imply that the headphones need enough
processing power to go and fetch an audio stream from the cloud themselves.
Yeah.
Why not?
Sure.
Now the headphones have fans.
Soon the headphones will have ray tracing.
Let's do it.
Let's get out there.
Chris, there's a bunch of TV.
Well, not a bunch, but I mean, you know, I'm a sucker for T's stuff.
New projectors, new hue stuff.
What's going on there?
Yeah, Samsung has a new short, thorough 4K projector for all of us who are turning our garages
into home movie theaters and whatnot.
This is coming later on this year.
There's no price.
It's probably going to be very expensive because it's part of their lifestyle lineup with
the seraph and the frame and all that stuff.
Isn't the frame relatively inexpensive?
The frame's inexpensive, but...
You can buy an LG OLED for like half the car.
cost of what a frame costs.
Now, you can get a 65-inch frame for $1,500.
Yeah, the frame is pretty cheap, but it's still kind of pricey for, like, LCD standards, I think.
That's true.
But this thing is definitely going to be up there.
I mean, they say it's a luxury product.
So when Samsung says something is a luxury product, they tend not to mess around.
I'm surprised there hasn't been more, I mean, I think the first really great short-throat
projector we saw was from Sony and CS, like, years ago.
I'm surprised that hasn't matured out more, right?
Like, this is a product that right now, it's like, you can have a gigantic screen in your living room and it won't take up your actual wall.
Seems like a very, it's just a promising thing to market right now.
It just hasn't seemed to hit.
Yeah, for sure.
I think LG announced one not too long ago that has pretty close specs to this one.
For me, it's like, I just, I don't think it's going to have the lumens that I need for my living room.
I very much want to switch to a projector.
I'm, like, super tired.
Like, I have a big TV.
It's a Vizio.
I hate it because of software is.
terrible. I love that it's big. I would happily ditch it for a projector if I felt like I'd be
able to watch it in the afternoon. Like, I'm ready. Well, this is the world's first HDR 10 plus
projector, so you will be able to watch approximately nothing on it in HDR. And then, Chris,
we've got to talk about these few lights. I mean, they're just so silly. Yeah, they've had these
before, I think, but now they can show more than one color. So Phillips, he just announced a new
a light strip that goes on the back of your HDTV, and it'll match the colors that are on screen
and put those on your wall. So you need the strip, which starts at around $230, I think. And then you
also need the $230-hd-h-h-DMI switch, syncbox. So all told you're going to spend over $400 to have
pretty lights behind your TV. But I just bought new LG-C-10, so I wouldn't mind giving this a shot.
You bought a C-10? Bought a C-10. And it doesn't get very bright. So I'm starting to learn that
O-Lid. That is indeed the downside of O-Let.
Are these just really fancy bias lights?
Because, like, you can get these for like 15 bucks.
I'm sure there are cheaper options, but, you know, it's part of the Hugh ecosystem.
And it'll just work once you spend all the money on all the, all the bits.
Well, I just love that it's like you, the last step before plugging the HDMI cable into
your TV is plugging it into this box so that your lights can flash in the correct colors.
Yeah.
Like, that's pretty good.
I'll take it.
But also, you've got to pick what H.D.I. gets the pretty lights. Do you pick the Xbox? Do you pick the cable box? What H.D.M.I. goes into the pretty box. And then you can't use your built-in apps. Do you buy an H-DMI switcher to go in front of the H-DMI box? And then, like, you're living in that world? Yes.
Yeah. Do you buy Kava? It's obviously, no, don't buy a comma. It's good. It's just, it's definitely an Android computer that lives under your TV.
It's a problem for the YouTubers to figure out because the only people I've ever seen with these lights upon their TVs are YouTube content creators.
No, I got to say, the amount of gamer lights proliferating across the Verge staff is very high.
Like, streamer lights, like when I did a podcast with Bijan earlier this week, I was like, do you have streamer lights?
He's like, I'm on Twitch.
They kind of has streamer lights.
Like, it's all over the place.
All right, Dieter, tell me about this flipping phone.
You reviewed a flipping phone.
Yeah, talk about this story.
So it's the Zen Phone 7 Pro, John Porter reviewed it, and, you know, the cameras, they flip, so you don't have a selfie camera.
The good cameras on the back flip around.
Only they're not that, they're not that good.
They're just like, they're okay.
Which, you know, what do you really expect?
AIS has never, like, been known for amazing cameras on its phones.
It's just, you want them to be, you want it to step up just a little bit because they moved it up a price tier, right?
Like, they've added the 90 hertz display.
There's still a huge battery on it.
And so it went from like the phone, like, oh, wow, this thing is great last year to this year being like, yep, you did it again.
And that's fine.
There's nothing wrong with doing it again.
I just wish that the camera stuff were just a little bit better.
Yeah, that's it.
That's all I want.
Just like improve the cameras just a little bit.
And then this thing, I'd be super, super into it.
You do lose IP ratings because it's got moving parts.
But really, who's going anywhere near water right now anyway?
Let's just be honest.
Quite a few people.
Okay.
I mean, the promise here is that you get to use a real camera for selfie, right?
I mean, that's the whole game.
Is it better than the iPhone selfie camera?
That I don't know.
I mean, yes, in terms of just like basic quality of the sensor, I'm sure.
But in terms of like image tuning, I think I've got a little bit more faith in Apple than I do in ASA.
So, I mean, you look at John Sample photos and you kind of see what I mean.
It's like, oh, yeah, you're not quite there.
Apple compensates better for its tiny sensor than this thing can pull off with its big sensor.
Yeah.
All right.
And then so, hi, and then you are very excited about this smart.
Where is this like gadget grab bag out of EFA?
There's a smart clock.
Tell me about it.
Yeah.
It's a clock.
It doesn't do anything else.
It doesn't have a camera.
It doesn't have a screen.
It shows you the time.
It shows you the weather.
You can set an alarm and it can play music and like do basic Google assistance stuff.
So it's not like the smart clock that's actually Google sensor.
a display where you can see photos of your loved ones.
It's literally just like it's got like the classic like LED eight.
Yep, like old school LAD numbers.
Sometimes I just need the time and I don't need the time on like a hard to read background
because my loved ones are there.
I love my family and friends, but sometimes I just need to know like.
I can't see the weather because of this dumb baby.
I love it.
I mean, you know what's interesting is that Google's ecosystem,
technically more open than Amazon.
So you can buy a bunch of weird Alexa stuff.
You can buy a bunch of weird Google stuff.
But like Amazon has more form factors for Alexa.
I mean, Amazon has one of these.
Yeah, but the little, the spot, the little round one.
Yeah, the little echo with the clock on it, which is also a great idea.
And just like, it's just funny that Google needed to go like third, blessed third party approach to what's at a clock to the echo dot or to the Ness mini.
I have that old Lenovo smart clock with the screen.
Yeah.
And it makes it.
sitting on my desk at the office, which I will just never see again.
It's just been showing photos of Macs to no one this whole time.
It's very depressing.
And then Dieter, tell me about this arcade stick.
Okay, so 8bit do, 8 bit DO, 8 bit, 8 bit do, whatever.
They're the company that makes a bunch of different, like, retro Bluetooth game controllers.
And you should start looking at them because we're about, we're about to get X cloud,
GamePass Ultimate, whatever, for Android.
Stadia still exists.
And so I've been looking a lot more at game controllers.
And so, of course, they popped up a radar.
They're making an Xbox controller.
So they made this classic arcade controller that's completely programmable.
You can go in and do all sorts of wacky stuff to it.
And it has the aesthetic of the arcade controller for the original NES, just with a million more buttons.
And I kind of want one because playing games with, like, like, those.
those huge buttons and like being able to like really move the joystick around is super fun.
And it's super programmable.
It's 90 bucks.
So it's not cheap as far as these things go.
But if if you want to like build your own little, you know, arcade system, you know, you could just go get the thing.
Trust that the buttons are good.
And then you can really start messing around with it.
Take it apart.
Rewire it.
It looks like it's a blast.
I just had a deep flashback to getting the NAS advantage and just being the happy.
The happiest child.
Oh, it was called the advantage.
That's right.
Yeah.
The NES advantage, it was like a sensation.
Yeah.
And they had the other one called the NES Max that had the weird circle that was the wrong choice.
Like the advantage is a cultural touchstone and the NES Max is a, is something that only I remember.
Yeah, I have no idea what you're talking about.
I don't believe it ever existed.
It didn't work.
All right.
Let's take a break and then we're going to let Dieter, Deeter just have emotions about folding funds.
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So, Deider, you're in the midst.
I'm a midst.
In the middle.
These are some of the weirdest embargoes we've ever dealt with.
Yeah.
So there's no embargo at all on the Z-fold 2.
I can tell you as much as you want to hear about with the Z-fold 2,
although I'm trying to write the review.
So the more I tell you, the less I feel like I've said original things in the review.
But the duo is still under the I can talk about the hardware,
but not the software embargo.
But I can talk about the software in theory because I know from looking at it from
when we had a hands-on year ago.
Yeah. Let's wait for the review. I mean, both these reviews are, they're incoming, so we'll have that moment. But, okay, you've now, like, the Z-Fold 2. What are these names?
No, just think of it as that, just pretend that it's French.
I just, the Samsung marketing department.
The Samsung Galaxy Z-Fold 2.
It's horrible.
Which fold is that one? Oh, it's Z-Fold 2.
Oh, my God.
All right. So that's like, you know, the second iteration. They've had time to polish it up. And then you've had this other one, the duo. Where are you at? Are these the future? Because like, we talked about a flipping phone. There's that LG wing phone. We're obviously in a moment of phone hardware rethink. Yeah. Potentially. Or it could all just the could all fail. Yeah. So, man, there's so many things we could say here. I am going to say that it's not.
the future until something costs less than a thousand bucks. That's how I like ended the video I just
made, looking at the three versions of this hardware that are, that have momentum right now.
There's just, this just costs too much. And until it comes down and then when it comes down in
price, more people will have them and then we'll start to understand what people actually want
instead of, you know, super nerdy early adopters like me. So that's number one. Number two,
and I think this is, I'm going to have a lot more to say about this because I am obsessed with the UI.
The way that these companies are approaching, turning Android into something that works on an unfolding screen or a bigger screen or on two screens, they all have different approaches and they're not all the same.
And they all feel like they're just layers on top of Android instead of Android.
Android has the rep of being bad on tablets.
and that's still true,
and it's true at like a deep level,
not just that the apps don't size the way you want.
Like, say you want a multitask.
You go to the thing where you can look at the little cards
that you can choose, right?
On the iPad, when you go to that view,
what you see are like,
oh, I've got Twitter and Slack together here,
and I've got Office and a web browser, Safari here,
and I've got, like, you know, this other game full screen.
Your splits are all, like, put together.
Android doesn't understand that that world is pop.
It doesn't believe that anything exists other than a phone.
And so, like, when you go to multitasking view, you've got to, like, figure out a way to take that floating window card thing and fit it to your world of split screens or dual screens or floating screens or whatever the hell.
And everyone's got a different solution for that.
Which one is the best so far?
Yeah, no, none of them are good.
They're all bad.
Is this like a Google to solve it at the platform level problem, or is it a Google's going to let everybody experiment and then cherry pick the best one and make that the default solution?
Either one would be fine with me, honestly. Pick one. I don't care. Pick one. Well, one implies like a season of chaos.
Yeah. Well, we're already, we're in the season of chaos. It's just that the only people that experience the chaos are people that are willing to spend $13 to $2,000 on a device. So it's like, fine. I am experiencing the chaos. And I'm,
I am like pre-nervious about it for everybody else if these things ever end up costing less than a thousand bucks.
You remember, like, I bought the very first Itty Biddy Macbook, and I had this USBC thing.
And I was like, you guys, pay attention.
This is a problem.
These dongles are going to be a problem.
And everyone's like, ah, Deter, you're just an early adopter.
What are you talking about?
And then I was right.
Yeah.
That's how I feel about interfaces for fancy, weird, new form factors on top of Android.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's weird that Google seemed like he was getting ahead of it with the folding stuff.
Yeah.
No, they were like before the fold was even announced, the original one, Google's like, you know, form factors are changing and we're ready for it.
It's like, are you?
Yeah.
Okay.
And they kind of were, but now they're like, it's like, it's getting away from them.
So what does Samsung actually, not to get too deep into it, but just briefly, what have they been able to actually refine about the full to?
So if you remember Samsung has a system where.
where you slide in this dock from the right-hand side,
from the edge, and then you can drag icons out to the left or the right,
and then there's a split pane,
and then you tap little dots in the split pane,
and you can move stuff around,
and then you can bring out a third one.
What they've done is they've made that all feel just a little bit more fluid,
which sounds like whatever,
but it actually is hugely important,
because if you lose your window state,
you've got to recreate it again,
and you want it to be fast and easy.
And you can also now save app pairs in that dock,
so you can quickly get back some setup that you had before.
So it feels almost a little bit like the iPad when you bring its dock up
and then you drag an app icon out to do something with.
It's just theirs is on the right and a completely separate subsystem
relative to like the standard Android dock and home screen.
And this has to make more sense when you're looking at it.
It makes more sense when you're looking at it.
Like you drag the deck out, dock out, you drag the icon out,
and there's like drop zone.
So left, right, center.
And then you let it go and like a thing happens.
but like here there's left right and then there's like then you can split into three if you want
and then there's a center one that makes the app a pop-up window that then turns into a bubble
if you want to minimize it and you can also choose to have that pop-up window be semi-translucent if you
want please please stop i'm not afraid to give you options i need this to come to an end like all of that
what sounds great like if the android app ecosystem was like quickly updating for the later
features of a thing.
Oh, and it also sounds great if, like, if I said the word bubble and I know what that
means, if you don't, if you're not intimately familiar with the history of bubbles and how
Facebook started chat heads and then Google, like, started to do it on Android and then took
it away and is going to put it back again and the relationship between Google's idea of bubbles
and Samsung's idea of bubbles and Facebook's idea of bubbles, like, if none of that makes
sense to you what I just said, then this is going to be like a pain.
Like, it requires way too much knowledge of like the history of Android U.S.
to understand what's going on on the fold tube.
But if you do, it's great.
It's just so funny because one obvious answer to this is just like Windows.
Like this problem is deeply solved on other large screen, multiple screen computers.
Yeah, well, it's a 7.6 inch screen.
So like, do you really want windows on it?
If you do, Nelai, you could just do it.
You could just like drag stuff into that center and pop out windows.
Of course you can.
What was I thinking?
It's just funny.
Like the duo is like a, a.
dual screen computer and they're trying to reinvent, right?
But it doesn't just have Windows from the company that makes Windows.
Yeah.
Well, you're asking for some kind of phone that runs Windows, Neely?
No.
Like a Windows phone?
All right.
I've come full circle.
No, I think about this with the iPad too.
What is the one thing I want my iPad pro to do to just have wind overlapping,
windows that I can switch between.
At what size do you want the windows?
What size screen?
Because I will tell you, just having windows on this 7.6 inch screen, which is like the size
of an iPad mini, basically, would be a nightmare.
It's like, eh, and the fingers and shave your finger down like Steve Jobs make the joke,
and it would suck.
But at like the 11-inch iPad, I'm like, yeah, actually Windows would be great.
But also as a track pad.
Isn't that just an arm Mac?
That runs iPad apps in Windows?
With the track pad?
Yeah.
You can really see how Craig Federigi got there.
He's like at the whiteboard, he's doing the flowchart.
He's like, oh, that's just that.
He's circled that.
He's like, just make me one of those.
Speaking of Apple, we should wrap up on some Apple rumors.
Mark German, he says orders for the next iPhones are placing high, high orders.
75 to 80 million 5G iPhones this year is.
German says Apple's ordering.
That's basically where they're.
They are maybe slightly above the last couple of years.
Disgressive.
We'll see.
That's a big bet on people wanting 5G phones.
And we started out by saying maybe this is a year to just not buy a new phone.
Yeah.
I will tell you that I ask, I always ask a question, why are you pushing 5G?
Is it because the carriers are forcing you to?
Like, that's like every time I do a product briefing.
So I ask that.
And the answer is always, no, no.
When we do like market research, like number one is screen size.
Number two is battery life.
Number three is 5G.
Yeah.
I mean, which is weird.
Stop wanting 5G, everybody.
Sounds like there's just a ton of stuff coming this fall.
I mean, they're saying four new iPhones, two Apple watches, there's new iPad Air,
and that has the same bezels as the pro, and those long-remered Apple headphones are still
supposed to come this year as well.
You know, that's funny.
Apple bought Beats, and yes, we know they bought them for the streaming side of it,
but then they turn that at Apple Music and, like, really nothing of Beats persists, right?
Like, remember Beets had the personalization bubbles?
Like, all of that is gone.
I don't know, like, what they really bought.
It's still, like, unclear what value.
Jimmy Ivan is not wandering around Apple campus being like, I'm Jimmy.
Like, he's, that's not happening.
Dr. Dre, as far as I can tell, no longer works at Apple.
And then they had the headphone business, which is a huge business.
And they've just slowly crushed it.
Yeah.
They crushed it with AirPods.
And they're going to do their own sort of AirPods over-ear headphones.
And then what remains of beats is, like, just an open question.
They still make the neck buds.
Yeah.
For now.
The neck buds and the Power Beats Pro are great.
The Powerbeats Pro are super good.
Is it just a low-end Apple headphone line?
Right?
It's like just a weird place to that brand to have lain.
Like they invented the premium.
I mean, they're not priced low-end is the thing.
Like these are still two $300 headphones.
I think it's just the lifestyle Apple line.
It's, you know, if you want the sporty, you want the sporty headphones or the cool
headphones, then you get beats.
And if you want the nerdy headphones with normal.
always canceling you get AirPods. I don't think AirPods are that nerdy. I'm trying to go with you. But
anyway, it's just interesting to see where Apple has just decided that Beats is not where its ambitions
lie. You know, like they're going to make their own. And then there's a rumor of a smaller,
cheaper home pod, which I think is great. I just like they're committed. They're going to try it again.
Does it have a clock built in? Because I'm on board. Like, it needs a clock. They need desperately to
make the home pod work better with the TV.
Like make, make it so that that's an always-on voice assistant that does TV stuff,
or there's like a connection between the TV and your home pod to play audio.
Like, many opportunities await them with the home pod.
Little baby home pod surrounds.
Little baby home pod surrounds would be great.
A home pod sound bar.
Like, I mean, they, I don't know.
So nice, but make it Apple.
I mean, every other company is doing that, right?
Like, Amazon is just straight up doing that stuff.
We talk a lot about regulation from Congress on this podcast.
And all I want at this point, forget antitrust, forget breaking them up, forget privacy regulation.
All I want is to have a freaking law that says that the rooms in the Sonos system, the Google system, the Amazon system, and the Apple system, and the Google system all have to be the same.
Like, they all have to interoperate their rooms.
The end.
That's all I want.
Pass that law.
Dieter's law.
But everyone would call it Dieters Law.
I know what we'll understand what it means.
I think it's about food.
Yeah.
I mean, so just a flood of Apple stuff.
Should we talk about the fact that there's going to be four iPhones and like one of them
is going to be small apparently, like 5.4 inches and that one is going to be huge?
I'm very excited for the small iPhone.
I'm mad that they're making the smaller pro one bigger.
Like the 5.8 was good and now it's a 6.1.
But like, this is the smallest iPhone since 2016.
I don't know. The Pixel 4A has kind of shown me that I have moved on from small phones.
It's fun and it's cute and it's a good phone, but it's just, it's tiny.
I have large hands. And so I think I'm firmly going for the giant iPhone 12 whenever it's available.
Oh, yeah, I'm definitely getting the biggest one.
I'm like, this thing is my computer half of the time, right? Like, might as well just have the biggest screen.
Bigger screen means Windows.
If it had Windows, it would be incredible.
Well, no, that's the thing. It's at 6.7 inches, you should be expecting something more than just blown up
apps, phone apps, you should be expecting tablet interfaces, right?
I mean, they've been trying that for a year. Like, ever since they first did the 6 plus,
like, you know, the 6 plus had, you know, a sidebar and, you know, you turned it sideways,
and it's just never gone anywhere. Should you expect split screen on a 6.7 inch device?
I mean, they can do picture and picture already. That's coming to all of them.
I mean, I could do split screen on my Galaxy S20. I just do it.
Yeah. I don't think, until they have the
confidence to say what they want to do with iOS on the iPad screen, which they do not.
I don't think they should monkey with the iPhone.
Maybe it's time to stop complaining about Android tablet apps and start complaining about
tablet apps on the iPhone.
That's a reasonable thing.
It's the next generation of the VirchCats, 2021.
These iPad-sized apps on the iPhone are bad.
Where's my Instagram app?
That's all I've wanted for 10 years.
Yeah.
The iPad has a weather widget now, but not a weather app.
Yeah, it's good to see the small size is now just like part of the lineup and not like an SC every two or three years kind of thing. So now it's like firmly part of the lineup. And so moving forward, I guess next year there'll be another small iPhone every year from now on. So that's good to see for people who do tend to prefer. So I think the screen sizes here is where we this conversation is sort of assumed the bezel sizes will say the same. But I think it's reasonable to think the bezel sizes will yet shrink in these screen size increases are actually the same sort of form factor size, which would be, I mean, that is the
How much has Apple told us that that's always what they wanted?
You just hold like a sheet of class.
The real question is whether they can do anything about the notch.
And there's been, as far as you can tell, zero notch-related rumors.
Yeah.
Even though Apple did for a minute have like under, and we've seen one now,
a camera under the screen, some sensors under the screen, that's the real dream.
I wonder if they, like, will Apple be willing to do an in-screen fingerprint sensor at some point and just have both?
because I will tell you, I think I've said this before, wearing a mask, the phone that annoys me the least is a phone with a fingerprint sensor.
Yeah, and that's funny because all the face idea was about just making you set it up so you don't have to worry about a code to make it easier.
And now it's like, oh, I'd type in that code 5,000 times a day.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I think obviously what's most important here is the small home pod.
So that's the ticket.
Dedicated small home pod event.
That would be the best.
Do you remember Apple when Steve Jobs held an entire event for the iPod hi-fi?
Yes.
I mean, that was like the height.
He was like, everybody get together.
I made a boombox.
The iPod hi-fi was a underrated classic.
I have a friend who still uses his hi-fi.
I would still use one if someone hadn't stole it in college.
Woof.
I'm sorry.
That's terrible.
Yeah, someone stole an iPod hi-fi in my Zoom collection.
So they really made off, they really made off like a bandit.
Wow.
I just like picture the look on this guy's face.
when he got to like the pawn shop or whatever and was like,
look at all this stuff I had.
Not getting many bites on Craigslist for this stuff.
What's going on?
I would buy that Zoom collection right now.
Dude,
Hyme,
you can buy an iPod,
high five for $130,
$0.35 right now.
Ooh.
That is bad,
that is bad information for me to have.
All right.
Well,
we're going to end this so I can start shopping.
Uh,
that was Vergecast.
Uh,
thank you.
Gentlemen,
we,
you can tweet at everybody.
Uh,
Dieter's at back,
on. Haim is at C. Gartenberg. Chris is at Chris Welch. I'm at Reckless. We love hearing from you.
If it continues, there's going to be tons more gadget coverage on the site. So check that out.
We have a save of a flood overview's coming. And there's all the rest of our coverage around
all the other things is happening. I'm being told that we have a new podcast survey. So please
take it. Go to voxmedia.com slash pod survey. We're just trying to craft our shows. We're thinking
about some new shows, some expansions. So your feedback is just invaluable. So go to voxmedia.com
slash pod survey, please take that.
You can read Deeter's newsletter called processor at the verge.com slash newsletter.
Casey has the interface.
It's the verge.com slash interface.
I'm pretty excited about this.
Our Tuesday episode next week, the interview show, Mark Levoy.
Yeah.
Ex-Google pixel camera engineer jumped to Adobe to make, quote, a universal camera app.
We're going to ask him, what on earth that means.
So that's kind of on Tuesday, very excited about that.
Other than that, we'll see you next week.
It's virtual cast.
Rock and roll.
Wear a mask.
Thank you.
