The Vergecast - Pixel 3 Lite leaks, Apple releases new battery cases, and Samsung readies the S10

Episode Date: January 18, 2019

This week on The Vergecast, Nilay, Paul, and Dieter run through a week of gadget news. Images of the Google Pixel 3 “Lite” and the Samsung Galaxy S10 have leaked, starting up a new season of phone releases. The crew also looks forward to what Google will do with its investment in Fossil’s smartwatch tech, Microsoft’s experiment with foldable devices, and how the Federal Trade Commission will react to Tim Cook’s call to give consumers more privacy. There’s a whole lot more in this week’s episode — including Paul’s weekly segment “Please replace magenta” — so listen to it all to stay informed. You can also check out our new narrative fiction series Better Worlds, featuring 10 stories by 10 different fiction writers about the future and hope. YouTube Verge Extras The Verge dot com   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com. I am your host, Dr. Neelai Patel.

I just want to make my mom proud. Dieter Bonas here. Hey, buddy. You know, the fact that I never got my PhD is one of the great regrets in my life. One, because I didn't get the PhD and I threw away seven years of my life. but two, no one gets to call me Dr. Bone.

Yeah. I mean, I will for the rest of this show. Adjacent to Dr. Bone, Professor Paul Miller. I don't know what this is. Hey, Paul. I'm a high school dropout. I'm basically like a child in Horatio Alger, you know? I made good.

Yeah, you did all right. Paul, it's good to talk to you, man. It's been a couple weeks. Yeah. How's, how you been? What's been new with you guys? Well, so you might notice that we don't sound quite so sleepy. as we have for the past few weeks, because we're home from CES, which was a ride.

I've been on a few other podcasts. We did this big fiction package called Better Worlds, which everyone should go and check out. We've got 11 sci-fi stories about brighter futures, optimistic uses of technology. Some of them are videos, which are on YouTube page. They're like remarkable animated shorts. We got some podcasts coming. If you go to the Verge Extra feeds, it's been rebranded as Better Worlds. We got five short stories.

We're going to drop some on the Vergecast feed. But anyway, so I'm, like, out promoting Better Worlds, like, appeared on Sci-Fi Talk Podcasts. It'll be out this weekend. And so you start talking about that. And then the host is like, so you want to CS. What's the future like? And I was like, the same. It's a lot.

Are you into smart plugs? And all I can come up with is, like, this is the year where everything is going to, where all the companies know they need to, like, work together better. Yeah. I really enjoyed Dieter's video where you got kind of creeped out by all the companies working together. It's like there has to be something nefarious about that, right? You always assume something nefarious

when there's cooperation, but you definitely assume it when it happens at CES, because CES, as I said, is the land of platform battles. And no one fought a platform battle this year. It was very strange. It's not that Amazon and Google are interoperating, right? It's the

set of vendors underneath them are basically saying, we don't want to pick a side. Like, we're not interested in this. Because if you are If you're Belkin, you don't want to make three different products for three different platforms. You certainly don't want to just, like, restrict yourself to one of the smart home platforms. Well, that was kind of the case. For a while, it seemed like you did have to pick a side.

You had to pick Amazon or Google. You had to pick Zigby or Z-Wave. Well, so that's the thing. That whole Zigby versus Z-Wave thing just sort of like frittered out, right? It got abstracted away to another fight between Google and Amazon and. someday Apple and Cortana, who knows. And they just, and smart things is in there. Bixby.

Yeah, Bixby. And so all of the, they all just ended up basically supporting everything. And so we don't have to worry about, you know, Brillo anymore, which is, frankly, a relief. It's almost like all computers down deep in the mathematical principles of the thing are the exact same thing. It's almost like touring was right. Well, IBM did try and show off a quantum computer. It looks cool. They made a special case for it that protects it from, I don't know, quantum interference or something.

I'm getting it wrong. But they made a cool looking box for their quantum computer. It does look really cool. I would just point out, no, quantum computers work. They fundamentally made a cool looking box. I mean, isn't that what CES is all about? It's true. That's true. My favorite product in CS like five years ago was a light up Sony box.

And it was literally a box of the light. And they're like, this one has 4K movies in it. Quantum computers work. Quantum computers that disrupt the world don't really exist yet. But IBM makes real working quantum computers. I was literally, I spent a lot of time on Monday at Microsoft. I saw Sachinadella, saw their quantum computing team. Paul, I was going to say I saw Jaron Lanier. He was like at this dinner at the end of the day. I'm going to try to get him on the podcast next week because I really want everyone to hear what you have to say.

But he pointed out that the touring test hilariously has two outcomes that no one ever talks about. So the first outcome is that the computer fools you. The computer is smart enough to fool the human observer. The second outcome is that the human observer is stupid and just can't tell the difference. And the third outcome is that the other human competing against a computer starts acting like the computer. starts acting like the computer and is thus undiscernible from a computer. Okay, good. But that's the touring test.

Yeah. What I'm talking about is the touring completeness. The idea that you can make a computer in Minecraft, and if you have unlimited memory and unlimited time, the computer that you build in Minecraft can run Xbox 360 games and Xbox 1 games, and it's all the same, you know, the Lambda calculus, and all computing is the same thing, in a sense. Somebody should build that because then if that happened,

there'd be somebody that was playing Xbox One games. Also, I have to say, we need a new metric that's like time to verge cast because this might be the fastest time to verge cast we've ever verge cast. Anyhow, Microsoft showed me their quantum computer, which does not. They're not ready. They have a whole different idea about how it should work. But I had this very revelatory moment where they were showing me how it works and make a qubit operate.

You've got to build a cold space because you need supercomputers. And they're like, this part of our computer gets, it's like 0.7 Kelvin or something. They're like, it's colder than outer space. And they're like, when it's operating, we believe this is the, the coldest thing in the universe. Like, it's the coldest known thing in the universe. And I was like, this is just like in a basement at Microsoft. It was like a wild mind-expanding moment.

Anyway, so IBM announced a box for the quantum computer. But a bunch of other stuff happened this week. We don't have to keep talking about C.S. Should we start with Google? Because it feels like the biggest, like the newsiest news thing is them buying this fossil group. So it's very strange. They bought a bunch of intellectual property and technology and then are an R&D. And some portion of the R&D team at Fossil is going to go work for Google now.

And apparently it came out of the technology that Fossil was developing based on its purchase of Misfit. Oh, my God. And they do, in fact, have a real product that they're working on that's going to come to market under the Fossil brand and under Fossil's many other. other watch brands. But because Google bought the IP, that means that they can also take this technology and put it in other wearables that use WearOS or whatever. So I don't think you can draw a direct line. The thing everybody wants to do is draw a direct line from this to like, okay, they're finally

making the Pixel Watch. I think it's more likely that Fossil figured something out or Misfit figured something out about health tracking or about modularizing smart watch componentry so you could just make a million different cases on the same basic guts, which is the move that Fossil makes with all of its smartwatches, or something that Google's like, oh, yeah, well, we should just buy that and do that because nobody else except for Fossil and Tickwatch

are bothering to make wear OS devices anymore. So if we do this and make it a little bit easier, maybe we can finally convince, you know, LG and Huawei and Samsung to, like, make this again. So you're saying they bought a bunch of IP and they bought it, they like aqua hired a team, right? Right. And then they're going to keep making something.

We don't know what it is. And Google's going to give that something to other people? Or they're going to put it like in the LS? I guess we don't know what this something is. Like a reference platform that will be easy for other people to manufacture? So here's the quote that I'm basing this on from wearable.com, which got the exclusive on this. This guy named McKelvey, the fossil group will bring the product to market across our full breadth of brands over time. And then in true Google fashion, the technology will be expanded across the industry over time.

to benefit all. Like AMP. Then they just do the same kind of thing with HTC, where they acquired a bunch of HTC engineers and a bunch of HTC patents and something, something, something, something is going to happen. I mean, here's my joke. Google wants to fix WearOS.

They want to do better. They want to make more stuff. They want to improve the technology. In order to do that, you need engineers who have some experience in working with WareOS. And if you look around the industry, who are the engineers that have experience working on WareOS?

who actually bothers to work with WearOS. It's Google employees and Fossil, the end. Yeah. And Tickwatch, I mean, to be fair. But, like, I think that's part of it. They just, they needed, they probably just needed warm bodies that knew how the platform worked. So it's like, they were, like, in a meeting, and they're like, you know, we need three more headcount for WareOS. And they're like, all right.

And then HR took it, and they came back. I'm like, everyone that you want for this job works at Fossil. And then Sunderra was like, oh, just buy Fossil. Like that, that's what that feels was. I mean, it's a joke. I don't actually think that's what happened. There is clearly some thing they wanted here because this whole thing is focused on like the R&D team and the new product innovation that has not yet hit the market and whatever.

So there's like there's a tangible thing that Google wanted to have the rights to be able to put on other wearOS watches, not just stuff fossil made. But yeah, I don't know. I will say I do squeeze my pixel. So HTC SecretTech really paid off. In fact, I don't actually know how to activate the assistant other than squeezing the pixel or like, I guess you can hold the fake software home button. How else do you get the assistant up? You can tap the little assistant button on the search bar or you can say, hey, Google.

Or you could say, okay. I try to say, hey, Google and it doesn't do anything. It's like I haven't set it up or something. It's really fussy about it, especially when it's long. locked. And they say that they're like, they fix that so it just does never seems to work for me. Anyway. Anyway, squeezing paid off. That was an aqua hire well worth it. We were told pretty explicitly, like the Pixel 3 wasn't the HTC one, right?

Yeah. Those people showed up on the day that they were like, well, we're putting these in boxes. You can work on the next one. So hopefully the next turn. But isn't the squeezing tech HDC stuff? Yeah, I think it's all kind of like, you know, they, they, They build the things on other people's reference designs, so HGC just had it. You know, like, you buy like a Lincoln, and it's still like a has Ford switches in it because it's all just Ford.

I think it's like that kind of part spin relationship. But now they're actually going to like design the phone. Speaking of the pixel, pixel three light, it can't be a pixel phone unless it leaks massively in Europe first. Yeah. And on like a site that never existed before this leak. Like they like went to see, yes, apparently it's Andro news. And everyone was like, who are you?

But yeah, they got one. And I got to say, like, there's a bunch about it that's definitely like low rent, right? No dual speakers, probably, you know, a slightly bigger bezel, lower resolution display, you know, down the lot, slower processor chief among those, like, low rent things. I think it's supposed to be that Snapdragon 670. But you know what? A relatively lightweight Snapdragon 670 Android phone, as long as there's not a heavy skin on it, fast enough for most people and actually pretty good battery life. And then if it has the pixel camera, like I don't know who I recommend the pixel 2 over pixel 32 over this. You know, if any of the previous words I said make sense to you, you're probably a pixel 3 person.

Yeah. But there is a whole giant group of people where if they can get the price down on this thing to something pretty cheap, this thing would be great for. Like how cheap? Is this a $300 phone? That all depends on the camera. If it's more than $400, they deeply screwed up. Yeah. I think 400 is a max.

What if it's the pixel 2 camera in there? Just like a hypothetical. A pixel 3 with a pixel 2 camera is still like a pretty great device, right? And that's like one way to bring the cost down. Yeah. Well, and the hardware differences between the 2 and the 3 are actually not that great. They're not that large, I mean. So again, that could be still make this a great phone.

Now what's confusing is supposedly it's going to be launching on Verizon. That's been one of the rumors. And it's also launching like, I don't know, middle of the year or who knows when. sometime in the near future. Maybe they'll announce it at Mobile World Congress in late February. So it's just landing in like a weird zone in terms of the year. And they really are going to need to figure out what they're going to do with it to compete with Oneplus because I think that the one plus phones, like the thing that this will have over

one plus is the camera, but they're really going to have to push that hard in order to make the sale for this thing. Otherwise, it's just sort of a confusing low-end phone that comes out way after their high-end phones, which is a theme this year. Google could sell me like a chunk off of a two-end. by four and if it had call screening, it would still be perfect. Call screening is the only good thing in my entire life. The only reason I live.

I get a lot of spam calls and I take such joy in hanging up on them from my watch. I hadn't worn the watch in quite some time and I got one over the holidays. I'm always just like boop-boop. It's great. I'm telling you, man, call screening gives you way more joy. You're not supposed to answer the spam calls. To be clear, you're not supposed to do that because it. it encourages them to call you back.

But if you get a spam call, you're annoyed by it, that annoyance, you're like, ah, and then you're like, ah, hey, ha, hey, you hit the screen call button, and then you just know that somebody on the other end, maybe a computer, maybe not, who knows, is having to listen to your computer, talk to them. It's always a computer.

And so you get to watch your computer and their computer fight on your screen in real time and then hang up when you're bored. It's the best. It's a little cathartic. I want to do a button on Google's call screening thing that just says waste as much of this person's time as possible. Yeah.

Deploy robot forces. Yeah. Deploy your robot forces. Fight back on my behalf. I'm busy on my computer anyways. And until I get another phone call, you can go ahead and just waste this person's time. So here's the thing about this pixel three light. Yeah.

You guys know and love Sean Hollister. Yes. He bought a Pixel 3. He is not switching away from his, you know, old Motorola phone because he can attach the battery module to it and the thing lasts like four days. So he still wants that long battery life. That's the most important thing to him.

But he wants a good camera. And so he bought a Pixel 3 instead of going out and buying like an RX100 just because he can, you know, it could do some other stuff in a pinch. And that is now his camera. I could foresee if Google wanted to, like buy this as your burner phone,

buy this as your spare camera, even if you have an iPhone. Think about it. I'm thinking about it. I mean, it's not realistic, but yeah. So I have a pixel 3 at my house, a lot of other cameras, got a baby. It's fun to like to take pictures of the baby. Move the family to Google Photos.

I'm reeled them in with the baby. It's like, we're all there. I don't know. I still don't pick up the Pixel 3 to take photos over. I still reach for the real camera. And then we're out and the iPhone just takes, I still think the iPhone 10S just takes crazy photos. Like they just continue to look like they're fake, but we do them.

And I like the way the pixel 3 photos, look, but at the end of the day, when I look at them on a big screen, yeah, it's not my pocket. And when I look at them on big screen, I'm still like, these are cell phone photos. Vlad was tweeting about this this week, too. He's like, I got a new monitor and it's, this is the thing that makes me realize these cameras have a long way to go. Yeah. So, like, I wouldn't spend that money on a pixel just to use it in my camera when you can buy a real camera. You get more headache. Yeah. You'll definitely get more headache out of it. But it just, it's, they're not quite there. I want them to be there so badly, but they're just not,

They're not quite there. My sense of the Pixel 3 overall is that it is not nearly as beloved as the Pixel 2. No, I don't think so either. I mean, what are the beloved Nexus and Google phones? I mean, the Nexus one only because it had a trackball, and I think that's cute. I actually loved the Samsung Galaxy, whatever that Nexus was, the Galaxy Nexus. Yeah. I used that for a super long time.

You could take the battery door off the back and get an extended battery, or you could take the battery door off the back, and then rip the inductive charger off of a Palm Pre and slap it onto the Galaxy Nexus, and then you could get wireless charging on the Galaxy Nexus. Wow. That was a move I did. I got to say the Nexus 5, the plastic one, the orange, was beloved by all. The original pixel, I don't know if it was beloved. It was more like, huh, okay.

But yeah, the Pixel 2 people deeply loved. The Pixel 2 people love so much the anticipation on Pixel 3 might have been too high. Right? I think that's true. Because the pixel 2 was beloved and it had like one notable flaw, which was a not great screen. So I think everyone just assumed they would fix the one thing and the rest. And then you end up with a gigantic notch, which is still ugly.

I don't care what you said. I use a little one because the notch is ugly. And I wanted a little fun. There was a bunch of software problems that it seemed to be getting addressed over time. I feel like Google didn't hit it quite as hard as they wanted to with the Pixel 3. So the idea of a pixel 3 light getting to like reset that narrative a little bit is not a bad one. Well, I've been hoping for a long time that they would come back to the Google makes an inexpensive fun. Like that was one of the reasons the Nexus 5 in particular was so beloved is you got a great phone for not a lot of money and then it took it went away and it took a while for other Android companies to make really good phones around that price point

So like we had this period where we like saw the future of like all phones are gonna be amazing and they're gonna cost $400 And then we missed it we lost it for a while and it's only just now coming back. Yeah how much was the Nexus 6p? I have a Nexus 6p at my house Oh God The weird Huawei one with the full body bump at the top. That was pretty expensive. The Nexus 6, the whale, the Motorola whale, was also pretty expensive. Yeah. It was called Chamu. It was like literally its code name.

All right. Well, speaking of inexpensive phones that do a lot for your money, Motorola is putting out a $1,500 limit edition razor. Yep. Which people were super into. You think it's going to have a folding screen? Wall Street Journal says it's going to have a folding screen. Why not?

Here's the problem with folding screens. they don't fold perfectly flat. And so, like, the whole point of a razor is it's little. And so if this thing doesn't fold perfectly flat, I mean, we're looking at a real droid razor situation here where it takes a storied brand and just ruins it. You could have two screens. Yeah, the idea that it's a folding smartphone or a folding screen is, right?

This is, like, one of those details that eludes. Like, you can get lost because there's, like, this big narrative about folding screens out in the world right now. And then some Motorola PR person's like, yeah, we're making a folding phone. And that just goes sideways real fast. Because the razor was a flip phone. The second sentence in the Wall Street Journal report is, the once popular flip phone is being revived as a smartphone with a foldable screen.

So there it is. It's going to be the Royale. It could mean anything. Literally could mean anything. I just, I don't buy it. I don't know why I don't buy it. There's something about this that just doesn't, that's not Lenovo's game. with Motorola, right?

Like, Motorola phones are low price, weird modularity. Like, they're just, like, really good mid-range Android phones. A $1,500 phone with a piece of display tech that Motorola doesn't make, and that the screen makers have yet to deploy at scale just seems crazy. Right. Like, Samsung's like, this isn't ready yet. LG is like, yeah, ours is really big and it rolls up into a tube.

It's a TV. Like, you know, and then there's FlexPy, which is like, this software is garbage. enjoy. Yeah, the idea that you take the thing that is most iconic other than maybe the MacBook Air, I would say way more actually than the MacBook Air. Iconic for thin gadget and you're going to put something inside of it that makes it not thin, which is a folding screen, is the most ridiculous thing in the world. I got to say every time I look at that flex by Raelle, I'm like, I still want this. Like I still want the phone that goes boop and then it's like a really big thing. I feel that. I'm into that in a big. way. But I just don't think Motorola or Lenovo is the company

that cracks it with the big screen to the masses. It reminds me of like the early days of smartphones when everyone thought another new hardware feature would be like the one that got everyone. And so like the mid-pack brands would like rush out and they're like, we also have a sliding keyboard and you're like that's

not a good idea. I'm stoked on this. Well one I wasn't around for the whole invention of the nagon notch. Can I just full disclosure? I feel kind of like, I feel pretty dumb. I've been thinking of all different ways to do notches. And the one I didn't think of is put the, literally think outside the box.

Literally put the camera outside of the rectangle. I egg on my face. But the, what was it? The oppo is coming out with like a 10x zoom. That seems like an exciting new thing for phones to do is have optical zoom by putting little periscopes in the body. of the phone, right? It feels like we're in, like, wacky season

for phone cameras and displays, right? I'm here for it. Yeah, exactly. Like, we got to rectangles. Everything's a black rectangle. And then it's like, what if we, what if the black rectangle was more dominant in this device? And so now we're doing notches and hole punches,

like trying to make the rectangle bigger. And then it's, and what's the other thing people care about as a cameras? So, like, what's the most insane camera that we can put together? And then you get folding periscopes. You get Nokia with, like, What if nine cameras? Yeah.

Right? There's Apple rumors that they're going to add a third one. I think nine or three cameras is important. It's got to be an odd number, though. That's the important thing. Yeah. I think periscopes are important. I think you've got to find new ways to get more light into this thing.

Well, wouldn't the periscope reduce the amount of light? Like, moment lenses effectively cut the amount of light coming. Not a lot, but, you know, like you put glass in front of the sensor. But for a zoom. Yes, zooms typically are like have less light hitting the sensor, but they have more of the light from the portion of the image that you're zooming in on hitting the sensor, right? I don't think so. Like you're collecting, right, but no, like, zooms just sort of like collect less light,

especially if you have a regular camera lens in a sensor and then you put another lens in front of it, which is what this would be. Like if you replace the lens housing and put a zoom in front of it. I'm not saying you end up with more light net. I'm saying you end up with more light related to the portion of the image that you care about, which is the thing you zoomed in on. Yeah, I just don't know. Maybe somebody's smarter than us can emotions everyone.

So if you're listening to this right now, just stop and tell us. It's just fine. It's like everyone is smarter than us. But I get what you're saying. I just, I think these sensors are really small and really noisy inherently. and anything that cuts the total amount of light is dangerous. That's just my general sense of camera sensors.

But I mean, like the larger point is we're going to have weird camera stuff, especially this Apple thing turns out that there's the Nokia thing. We have weird camera stuff. There's a bunch of sliders. Sliders are coming back and like you slide up the selfie camera, which is very fun because I love fidgeting with devices. And then screens, so we already have the Royal. We've got this razor.

Microsoft is rumored to be working on a foldable device. Tom Warren had a story about that. And we know that Samsung is going to be doing its foldable phone that it's already teased. And I don't think we're anywhere near done. I think that the whole year is just going to be wacky screen things and wacky cameras. And it's fun. Yeah. You know, like we have done it.

We have made the slab. We've made the black slab phone. And now we're going to try and make something else for a while. The thing that makes me happiest is like the smartphone sales plateau that everyone is hitting means they have to try really hard to get you to upgrade. And so that means half of the industry is going to do like 3D TV, right? Like just crazy nonsense will occur because that's how the TV industry reacted to like TV sales falling. They're like, what if what if it was 3D?

And they're like, no. And like, what if it was curved? And like we just went through years of that. But then there was a bunch of great upgrades like 4K and HDR and all this other stuff. So, like, I don't know which one it's going to go, but I think that plateau means even Apple has to compete harder to get your dollars now. Samsung has to compete harder to get your dollars. LGS can be harder to get your dollars. And you've got all these, like, mid-tier vendors who are, like, licensed to be insane because they know that it's not a guarantee that everyone's going to go buy an iPhone or a note or whatever.

So, like, I think there's going to be a lot of action in this market to just, just because they know, you have to try really hard to convince somebody to buy a new phone. and that means you have to deliver something that's tangible instead of it's an iPhone with another camera. It's a galaxy with more RAM. Although, to be fair, people do love buying a galaxy phone with more RAM. That's just like facts. Do you want to talk to this Microsoft foldable Windows thing? I mean, I do, but I also, like, it's a whole lot of, like, fairy dust in my mind.

Like, I'm, you know, one of the olds that still, like, remembers the career concept that was never real. But the interesting thing to know, I think, and Tom references this in his piece is that there's this a Microsoft Composable Shell thing. So it's still got like the Windows Core OS in it, but they're able to do more experimentation with the UI on top of that. And so I do think that it's going to be more than just a PC that folds out and it's going to be not a phone. I don't think they're going to go right to phones yet. Their heart still hurts from Windows phone.

And so does mine, frankly. But so I'll be really curious to see how they solve the interface problem. Because the interface problem for a foldable screen for a phone, especially running Android, is pretty simple, just like make it bigger. And people know how to use phone apps and they'll accept, like, the expanding tablet apps. The interface problem for a small, tiny device for Windows is way, way harder. I mean, I'm the person who bought a Surface Go, and I will just tell you that Microsoft hasn't fully figured out how to make Windows look good on tiny screens. so they can't just have it be a straight Windows interface. And I'm very curious to see what they're going to do.

Let me blow some minds. What if they just do Android? Well, huh. What if they just do Android? I mean, they could. Yeah. They've got plenty of good Microsoft apps for Android. I mean, yeah.

But like, right, what if they just made some Android stuff? That'd be fine. Like, would anyone truly care? And then you're, like, still using Office? when they like preload Outlook? This rumor is based on the idea that there's leaks of Windows 10 builds

coming out for new hardware. So like these rumors are based on Windows 10 being adapted. So it makes probably more sense for Microsoft to make it based on Android, but sounds like they're basing it on Windows. Which they should do because they own Windows. Just to be clear,

I'm just thrown at the crazy. idea. They're so embarrassed by Windows. I just get this vibe that Microsoft thinks of Windows as this old thing that they used to do as a company, and that's not where the future is. I get a really, I think Microsoft has a bad attitude about its operating system. So again, I was there, saw a bunch of Microsoft executives, I saw it, Nadella. Did they seem to have a bad attitude to you? No, I would say my trip to Microsoft. It was just, it was, it was, me and a bunch of other journalists. I think Adam Lyshinsky wrote up a brief summary in Fortune,

and Ben Thompson, the great analyst, actually published a full transcript of what Nadella talked to us about, which is 8,000 words. The only reason I haven't published anything, to be perfectly honest, is there was nothing tangibly new, right? So I sat down to write a headline, and Nadella says things I've heard confidently is, like, not a great news headline.

So maybe I'll do something. something. But anyway, the point of this was they were super confident. Like, Microsoft is a very confident company. They just wanted my sense of that event. They were very clear. Like, we just want you to come here and, like,

see the spread of things that we do. And, like, meet the executives. You know, they're flying high. The stock's really high. They were, like, the most valuable company for a minute. You know, they're trading back and forth with Amazon. But, you know, the business is going well. You know, people think Nadell is a good CEO. I think he's a very confident CEO.

he's gotten much more confident. He knows what he's doing, right? He knows what his business is. My sense of, like, you know, they had a hardware presentation for us. They talked about the surface line. They talked about their big dreams of what they want to build and interaction.

And they're like, Windows. Like, this is what Windows is for. Like, we own it. They talked about Xbox. Like, we have as good of a shot to build high-end game streaming service as anybody, and we're going to try. And it turns out that's a client of Azure.

So, like, this all works together. Do you see? So my sense of this event was, it was great. I was there. I was happy to be invited. Like, happy to talk to everybody. But there were a lot of reporters there who don't otherwise think about Microsoft's breadth. And this was like a good showcase of like, we do all this stuff that Google and Amazon and Apple do as well.

And we do it at a high level. And it's true. I think it's the sense that they're like, Windows, I think what you're sensing, Paul, Windows used to be the thing. It was their business. Right. Now Windows is just one of their businesses. It's not even their driver the way that it used to be. It's like Azure is their driver.

Microsoft 365 is their driver. Windows just happens to be another thing that they make that's important. It's like an implementation detail. Yeah. And this is the reason to maybe be up. There's two ways to look at that. If Windows is just another thing that Microsoft does, it's not their primary focus. It's not like the existential thing that they have to make perfect and it has to win.

Then like they're going to ignore it. And that seems scary and bad for people. people that like Windows. But the possible upside there is, not to put too final point on it, but like it lost. It lost Android. More people use Android phones than use Windows computers right now. And so if Windows is no longer the like must win, must destroy everybody else existential thing for Microsoft, it's just another thing that it does, that could theoretically free them up to try more stuff and do more stuff that they wouldn't otherwise do if they were, you know, in a fight to the death to like win desktops or phones or whatever.

And I don't know if that's actually how it's going to play out. There are like sometimes there's positive signs, sometimes there's negative signs. So there's been a bunch of negative signs that they were really going to use Windows to push a whole bunch of other Microsoft services that I don't care about, namely like Cortana and Bing search. But, you know, we just saw that the next version of Windows they're going to split out search from Cortana. And maybe that's just them admitting that, you know, maybe someday someone's going to want to not use Cortana on a Windows machine, but use Lexa or whatever else. So they were also very clear that we have Cortana, we're great, but we're not interested in being in a consumer platform war with Amazon and Google,

which you can see because they have that deal with Amazon, right? Yep. And they're like, we don't know how this is going to shake out. We need to be in the space because maybe you don't want your assistant at work to be the same as your assistant at his home. We need to build skills and we need to understand what we're doing here, but we're not interested in competing for that. And so I really came away with the sense that they're concerned.

consumer offering fundamentally is Surface and Xbox. And everything else, and that is just radically different than where they used to live. You know what I would point to more specifically? And I'm not saying like Windows is the best thing ever. Like, you could certainly use some polish in some places. But it's just like an understatement of the century. But Microsoft revitalized the Windows hardware market with Surface. And they plowed a ton of money into doing that.

right remember the first surface came out and they had to like write off like a billion dollars they like stuck with it and like windows laptops are great now and that just wasn't going to be the case five years ago until Microsoft decided to fix it by doing surface by like putting their hardware stuff in the world by frankly being cool with their hardware vendors like ripping off surface stuff so like Lenovo put out a Surface studio clone like I can't just I can't imagine the people at Microsoft who design the service studio are like, hooray. You know, like, you just see it. Like the whole Microsoft hardware ecosystem around Windows is stronger,

and so much of it looks like what Microsoft did. So I think that commitment is there. I just think they don't talk about it. They don't talk about it like they're the winners, which to Deider's point. They talk about it like it's a thing that they do and they're going to keep doing until there's another paradigm shift and they're going to be there. But, you know, when you talk to Nadella, it's like the drinking game is, how many, how many, like, rhetorical

pivots till we talk about Azure again? And it's usually like two. Because that's, that's the money. And it's going great for them. We, like, went from Google Pixel 3 light leaks to Microsoft Azure. Time to Vergecast. We just, like, did it again.

All right, we're going to take a break. We're going to come back. We're going to talk about some Apple stuff. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Murrow to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated AB testing,

your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com, Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible. Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash verge for 30% off for 30% off. Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. I said we're going to talk about some Apple stuff,

but we should talk about the cell carrier tracking thing because that leads into today and time. So motherboard, which is a great site, which I encourage everyone to read, they're all good, lovely people, good friends of ours. Published report saying it is trivial to buy location data from carriers, sourced from carriers, around a phone number.

So if I have Deeter's number, I can go to some shady data broker and like it will just tell me where Deider's phone is. Yeah, they literally just hired a bounty hunter, got permission from the person they were tracking, and the bounty hunter said, give me 300 bucks, went to a shady data broker,

and was able to track this person's location in basically real time and like find out where they were. Sounds about right. He's exposed this thing that people sort of vaguely knew that carriers track your location and just blew it open and be like, not only the carriers know where you are, but they're happy to sell it to people,

and it doesn't take very many links in the cell to people chain before it just becomes a thing that anybody can go get. Which is horrifying. So the carriers all responded, sort of one by one. We're going to stop doing it. AT&T had the most AT&T response, which was we're going to turn this off even for uses that we believe have benefit to the consumer.

Wow. Which is like, guys, I just want you to provide me a data connection. There's no other benefits, please. Please put all your other benefits away. Lower the price. Does that be like a 911 reverse tracking sort of thing? No, it was pretty ambiguous. There were some stuff like that.

There were some, but none of that has to do with resale of data. Like, of course they know where I am. You know, a lot of people believe that ad targeting is actually, it's the kind thing to do. Yeah. What every user. Because you see ads that you care about. I just, look, I walk through the streets of New York. I'm sure this happens to you in Washington.

And I just hear people clamoring. Why aren't these ads more relevant? It's just like the shriek of the user on the subways of New York Anyhow, so 18 says that we're not doing a Verizon It's Congress and credit where it's due The Republicans, the House Republicans are like, we need hearings on this So they're asking for it And then Ajit Pye is like, I can't come

I can't do anything because the government shut down Which I don't think he's personally shut down But he's like, I can't I couldn't possibly I thought the FCC was pretty pretty shut Didn't Russell do a piece on that that you can hack your Wi-Fi router and start blasting all sorts of bizarre frequencies until you're not going to get arrested until they come back? Yeah. So that story is super funny, right? That's more of like a user behavior story.

Like it wasn't like the FCC was like war driving looking for illegal, right? You just like shouldn't do it and the fines of you got caught were really high. But the FCC is like not in the office. Like they did shut down the FCC because they shut down. We all got a press race race about it. So then people responded by saying, now I can do this because the cops are like out of work. So they're, it wasn't like every router suddenly like got a software switch that allowed it to happen. It's just people are crazy.

But the FCC is like, it's the purge, but for your routers. Yeah. It's a router frequency purge. A script that I've been pitching for some time, it just doesn't see. to be going anywhere. Anyway, so Frank Pallone is a Democrat for New Jersey, sent a letter to Pye requesting an emergency briefing. Pi refused to hold the briefing. He said, these egregious actions are not a threat to the safety of human life or property that the FCC will address during the Trump shutdown. That is wild to me. This dude, I feel like his goal in life is for

the FCC to be shut down. And like, yeah, I think this happened and he was like, well, that was easy. now. The only thing about the FCC being shut down that Ajipai is sad about is they lock the doors to the office and that's where his Reese's coffee cup is and you can't get to it. Anyway, hopefully the government will open again. It really does

seem like the privacy, their year of consequences for the privacy stories of the last year, it's here, you know what I mean? Like, we spent a year with Facebook data privacy. We spent a year talking about Google. This year opened with this motherboard report. There's a new Congress. There's all this

energy as soon as the government begins again, it seems like the reckoning will come. I will say, can we get rid of phone numbers? Well, what's that going to do? Well, it's a public identifier that you have to give out sometimes to people. Like, nobody's asking for my Mac address, right? Like, your devices are probably pretty easy to track. Like, I'm sure the carrier could track you by your Mac address, right? But I don't have to give out my Mac address when I'm, like, signing up for, like,

like a spa sweepsticks or something like that, you know? So I'm giving out a very, what turns out to be an extremely personal piece of data. Like it turns out my phone number is a password that sprinkled a little, some dollars on it, and now you know where I live, or where I am all the time. Right. Can we, do you're saying can we abstract the hardware identifier from this number? Like the phone number is a hardware identification key. Deeter, would you like to?

We've just been begging. for this for 15 years. I wrote about this with the palm phone that it's dumb that we have to pay, you know, a per device fee just to have a phone number enabled on it. I just want to clarify which palm phone you mean. Oh, God. Because you said 15 years and then you said palm phone. Yeah, yeah. You didn't write about it. You wrote about it like two months ago with the palm phone. When I told Eli, hey, this is my thing about the plan phone. He's like, yeah, dude, I wrote that but this is my next. Here's,

here's the link. Yeah. I said we should get rid of phone numbers and it was going to get replaced by Skype. Like, okay, I didn't get it right. Chat handles. You know what they're embarrassed by it's not Windows.

It's Skype. Like, we still operate Skype. Like, I don't like email, but at least with email, like I've got this hot new email address for service spam at gmail.com. I'm very proud of it.

Wow. So like at least with email, you can like have extra. email addresses to like to do dumps like you know you could have different avatars you know different representations of yourself but phone numbers unless you like use like a google voice number or something you have that one number and it's it's really you yeah although i will say if you call my phone now it will ring this watch it will ring my laptop it will ring the like AT&T has an abstraction service just to pay for it in a variety of ways including having to use AT&T software to set up

number sync, which... Yeah. A little dicey. Well, so the point I wanted to make is it's that the heat is on. It's on the street. It's on the street. We both went there. And it feels like this Congress...

Roe Kana, the representative from California, was on the Veritcast last year. He said, within six months of the new Congress, we'll have a date of privacy law. Maybe that'll be true or not. But you know who else believes that? Is one Mr. Tim Cook, who published an editorial in Time Magazine today. Time magazine, owned by

Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, so real Silicon Valley get together there. But Tim Cook wrote an article saying we need data privacy. I want this stuff to be more transparent. And to some extent, he said I wanted it to be illegal, which cuts right at the heart of, you know, the internet. Yeah. I mean, he repeated his four principles, which, great, I like the idea that there are four principles. I think that they get fuzzy real fast in the details. The thing that was new for him, that was new from his speech last year, where he stated those four principles this year,

was he specifically went after data brokers. And I don't know if he was drafting off of the location stuff with data brokers from the motherboard report or if it's just been a thing that's on his mind. But I think for him, where he wants this thing, like if company A collects your data, fine. They should tell you everything that they've collected and they should let you delete it from them and so on.

But once that goes from company A that you have, you know, you agreed to give your data to, We've consented to give your data to to company B, C, D, E, and F, you lose track of it. So I think to him, the principle that in the legislation he wants is it needs to, like, you need to explicitly give consent for your data to go from company A to company B to company C, which, you know, effectively nobody will ever do, right? Like, would you? First of all, I don't think Tim Cook wrote this without talking to Apple's, like, lobbying group, right?

They have a team of attorneys. And I mean lobbying, not in like the evil way, but like there's a team of policy people at Apple and they advocate for things. And some of them are, in fact, lobbyists. But Tim Cook has a big platform. He's going to write an article for Time Magazine. Those people are involved. So this is a specific regulation that Apple as a company wants to see pushed forward. Right.

And then there's the sort of like real problem here, which is let's say the government creates a data broker clearinghouse. is Cook recommends in this piece. Someone will run it. The Federal Trade Commission will now run a data broker clearinghouse. What does that really look like? It probably looks like a website. It's like, right, where you can look stuff up, you can make requests. It probably looks like a bunch of well-meaning kids fresh out of college, like doing paperwork.

And the companies all do that. Is any consumer going to go look at that? No, it's the people who are going to do the press and other regulators, mostly the press. And then what are they going to do? So it's like it'll be easier to find out the bad actions are happening, which is good. But then this piece where it's like you have to give consent well you kind of are anyway. Like every terms

of service includes this class. We may share your data with other people. So then you have to write some law that makes that paragraph more meaningful or gets rid of it all together and says when Google wants to send your data somewhere else.

So Google talks to Netflix and Netflix says we're going to send some of your data to Google so we can display watch the next episode of you on the Home Hub. That is recommendation data. It's not just like an API call, right? Like they're going to send you some data so Google can predict what you might want to do in your day.

Well, you would probably just say yes to that. That's the problem, right? The amount of utility you can provide by sending the data around is high. It's that next step that's like Facebook is going to let Cambridge Analytica run a thing on their service, and then Cambridge Analytica is going to have collected a bunch of Facebook poll data that they sell to another person that there's another person and then there's Brexit. Like that. Like, I don't think you get a bunch of consumers saying no to that one.

You wanted more gyms for like a bejewel type game that you were playing. And so you gave Facebook permission to look at your other contacts so you could invite them so you could earn gyms. Yeah. And that's how you, is the solution to make a very fine-grained? Because I'm so sick of saying that I'm okay with cookies. Yeah. And then GDPR did it again where I had to say that I was okay or not okay with a million different things.

And now am I going to have to say if I'm okay with every single thing? Because in a sense, that does seem like the moral thing to do. It'd be nicer if they just didn't want to spread my data around all the time. Yeah. So I'm not saying Cook's plan is unworkable. I'm saying that it's great to write that. And then the details look like, okay, we're going to start a new government website that basically only Russell Branden will look at. A bunch of policy journalists will look at, a bunch of security journalists will look at, and we're going to start asking users to make more decisions more often.

And none of that seems like the solution to the problem of, like, pervasive tracking. So like if Tim Cook really wants to stop this right now, you know what he does, he bans a bunch of weather apps from the app store. Because every weather app is selling the back end of that allocation data. He also stops taking billions of dollars from Google to make Google the default search on Safari on the iPhone. Also, he leaves China. That's that. Yeah. So one of my new favorite kind of tweets to do is like very ambiguous tweets, just because

people, you just never know. So I tweeted a link, number one was a link to Tim Cook's thing, and then number two was a list of the top free apps in the app store, which are Netflix, Gmail, Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat. And people, mostly people, like, what they picked up on was that I have the ICloud icon next to my Facebook, because it's the one I've deleted. And then there was this discussion of, like, could Tim Cook just, like, kick Facebook off the app store, right?

Like, could you just say? Like, you know what? I hate what you're doing. And I think the answer is no. Like, fundamentally, it's no. Well, it can't be. Because Facebook is the thing that makes the iPhone valuable. Right?

The reason people want iPhone just to communicate, every one of those apps, save Netflix, is, like, an app to communicate. Yeah. He can't be like, I'm making the iPhone less valuable. And so how does he influence how those companies operate? Well, I think he can change the apps that store terms and conditions. I think you should absolutely find a way to write an app store regulation that prevents weather apps and flashlight apps from selling your location. That seems very obvious to me.

You just ban weather apps. You know what's built into the iPhone? A weather app. It's not as good as Dark Sky, though. Sure, but like, okay, buy Dark Sky. They have billions of dollars in cash. That one's a problem they can solve, right? if they wanted to be this harsh.

But the question of how do you get Facebook to be a better actor using the power your platform and your control over the store offers you? And it's really quite tricky. And it won't help any Android users. So if you are really like good-hearted, you're saying, well, the government should do it. And then the real question becomes, what, like, what does that policy look like? And I think the answer is, honestly, if they boil down to it should be more transparent and you should have more choices, then I actually don't think that we'll get.

to any better solution because people will just start wording those questions in more devious ways. Right. Or they'll ask you to make the choice more often. My other fear is like a GDPR style. There's like there's rules that you can't do this as a company, but there's also rules that add obligations to companies. And my fear is that there's incidental, accidental data collection order that's just part of running a service that you do act, get information about people.

it can be very hard to set up the infrastructure to give everybody the ability to retract that data at any time. Like, in a sense, you need like an ID way, like a way to track everybody's personal information for the lifetime of that information. But information doesn't really work like that. It's easy to strip off some metadata from information and keep copying it. So it's easy to lose its origin. And also theoretically, you want to lose the origin. It just turns out sometimes, even though, you're going to lose the origin. sometimes even though you tried to strip off metadata, it works in such a way that you can backtrack it.

And now you know where I live. Right. So one of my favorite Google Maps features, it's kind of like little known is like it predicts traffic. So you can tell, like, I'm going to make this trip at noon tomorrow. How long do you think it's going to take? Right. Obviously that is built off of years of Google Maps data, people driving out of Google Maps open and like the various vendors they bought that data from. So if I'm just like, I'm going to opt my data out of that data set, right?

Like, I've taken the strip 100 times before. I'm going to take it tomorrow at noon. Oh, by the way, I want you to delete my data. Like, what does that actually look like for Google? Right? Like, what does it mean for them to not know the aggregate or like to take one set of data out of that calculation? Like, that's a very complicated problem.

And also does it even matter? Like, maybe it's like a disassociation. Like, just don't. You can still know that a car went here, but I need you to do. associate me from it is not the same as deleting that data. It has to be scrubbed. It's all crazy. Could we come up with a scrubbing standard?

Yes. My fear is I wouldn't want a law that's easier for Facebook, Apple, and Google to comply with than it is for smaller upstarts. I don't think you're ever going to get that. Oh, I think GDPR was kind of like that. It's easier. No, you know, that's exactly right. It is easier.

It is always easier for a big company to comply with the new regulation, right? because they can just hire one more lawyer. A small company has to exert some resources. But at the end of the day, there's a lot of regulations around cars in this country, and, like, Tesla exists. A bunch of car makers that literally can't ship one car exists now, right? Like, there's still an explosion of interest in the sector

because there's opportunity. So I think you just have to make sure you don't foreclose opportunity. And right now it's like you just want to squeeze the balloon and put all the interests somewhere else, all the energy somewhere else. You want to squeeze the balloon and say, like, collecting data to make money by reselling user data is no longer allowed. So take your capitalist instincts and try something else.

And it's definitely not cool. It's a lot. We just run PSAs where, like, bad egg companies are collecting data. But the cool hip ones, don't do drugs and also don't collect data. I mean, Paul, I know you haven't worked fully at the Virgin sometime, but you ever want to come back and just make a bunch of weird PSAs? It's our new video strategy. It's aggressive PSAs from Paul. You fly me to New York and I'll do a whole string of PSAs with a VHS camporder.

Beautiful. All right. Well, I said we're going to talk about Apple, but actually we're going to take a break. Come back and talk about these battered cases. Support for the show comes from Upwork. The days of doing it all all by yourself. are over. There's no romance in burning out while you're trying to scale. Instead, you can check out Upwork. Upwork helps grow your business by giving you fast access to specialize talent across more

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That's upw-w-rk.com. Upwork.com. Support for this show comes from What Not. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But What Not flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love. On What Not, you go live and sell directly to people in real time.

They see what you've got, ask questions, and buy. And they keep coming back. Whether it's beauty, collectibles, electronics, luxury fashion, and yes, even cookies, sellers are building real thriving businesses. And for a limited time, What Not says they'll match your first $150 sold in the first month. You can visit Whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. that's w h a t n o t dot com slash sell whatnot dot com slash sell okay deeter can you walk me through this apple battery case shenan so they surprise released battery cases for the iphone s 10s max and 10r which nobody was really

like sure if they're going to do or not and because they were like surprise released there was a whole lot of questions and full disclosure, we got this wrong in our initial article. We had to correct it. And a bunch of other people, like most other people, got something wrong about these battery cases because, well, first of all, here's what's cool about them. They have a wireless charging pass-through so that there's a coil on the back behind the battery and that it's able to wirelessly charge. They could also wirelessly charge on their own. One of the things that people got wrong at first because it didn't seem to work right away. It may or may not work with an iPhone 10. It should or it shouldn't. It does. Sometimes it pops up an error for some people it didn't.

And then there was the question of the battery capacity, because the way that most people refer to battery capacity is in millie amps. When you look at the millie amp rating inside the thing, it says it's really small. So we're like, oh, wow, these batteries are really small. They don't add that much. But then it turns out that you need to like do the full, you know, calculation with watt hours, you know, amps times volts, equals watts, blah, blah, blah. And then it turns out there actually have more battery capacity, and you're able to charge faster, blah, blah, blah, than previous cases.

It turned into this whole big mess where Heimgartenberg, electrical engineer, basically had to re-educate the entire Verge staff on how electricity works. And we had to, like, do a whole big long back and forth to, like, figure out just what are these cases, how much power do they have, how much do they provide, and how do they work, how do they actually do, you know,

wireless charging? It was just a whole folder all. Yeah. The end of the story is that Apple is making some battery cases for the phones. They seem good. They should be able to get you up to 75% across all these phones. If you have an iPhone 10R and you put a battery case on this thing, I mean, it'll just last like three months because of 10R. It has great battery life.

And most importantly, more important than any of the questions about how math and electricity works is they move the hump for the battery all the way down to the bottom instead of having a weird, like, thing bulge sticking out of the back. Yeah, it's a fully rounded thing instead of like a square glued on the back. Yes, which I'm very happy about. So did Apple just print the number wrong on the inside? It's possible that the number on the inside is referring to one of two cells

that are located inside the battery case because they, and that is why, since there's two of them, they just have to print the size of one of the batteries because there being two cells means that like when you're like, I don't know. that's that's like one idea it's very confusing well i'm going to get one for my 10s and i'm never going to charge again yeah the thing that gets me about all of these apple accessories is it's just so obvious that they choke out their third parties so they can make their own right like there's

not other like mofie just put out a case and it it finally allows lightning pass through for audio right like it's just kind of obvious that apple like waits and waits and waits until it's they need to serve the market and then they're like Like here's some ones that we like neutered from our third party MFI program. And then here's the one that you want from us. Yeah. They're just not good at ecosystems in that way. It's so funny to think of Apple is not good as ecosystems because their app ecosystem is so good.

But the hardware ecosystem around their products is like always so messy, especially when it's one of the things they control. Well, it's been messy with USBC, right? I was really hoping that when they switch the Macs to USBC, not just the little MacBook, but they went across the whole line with it. that would mean that all that stuff would settle down. And it super didn't. And this is why fundamentally I'm mad at them for not switching the iPhone to USBC because that would have been a good forcing function

for the industry to get it to act together and that still hasn't happened. Sigh. Wait, can I tell you how Mofi solved their lightning port problem? I didn't realize this. So Apple made their case that has a lightning port at the bottom. Yep. And then it plugs into a lightning port of your phone.

So it's like a lightning pass-through. So it charges your phone. And if you need to do lightning data or lightning audio, you plug into the lightning port and you can charge it for a charger. Mofi, which is not allowed to do a lightning pass through, just left the lightning port open on the bottom of the phone. And their new battery case charges through Chi. Charges your phone, quote unquote, wirelessly.

Yeah, so you just put it in a thing, which is way slower than a regular. But come on. And wasteful, right? That's got to be. I mean, I'm no hym. I don't understand electricity, but that sounds like really wasteful. Haim Gartenberg understands electricity. Yeah, I mean, it's like that, right?

Like, if you want to have partners in your ecosystem, let them make good products and not hacks, right? That's a hack. Like, Mofi made a hack to solve this problem. I still maintain the fact that there's not a single case with an integrated audio jack. Like, come on. Like, you're just neutering this ecosystem from existing

because what? Because you want to sell your case? Like, you sell the $1,000 phone. Like, let someone. else solve a problem, make some money. Like, it just drives you crazy. By the way, this entire segment I realized looking at this list is about Apple and batteries. Yeah.

The whole thing, because they revealed that one of the reasons they didn't sell as many iPhones last quarter as they want is normally their place one to two million batteries, but then they announced the battery swap program after it was revealed that batteries make the processor slow down. And they did 10 million battery swaps. I think it's 11 million 11 million battery swaps

revealed this, yeah which is insane and I think speaks so much to the conspiracy theory which I still believe is a conspiracy theory that Apple slowed down

your phone to make you buy a new one and the reason I say it speaks to it is young people did instead of buying a new phone they replaced the battery for way cheaper

and their phone got faster yeah how much of this big number was people like just not realizing that that was even an option for them That's the conspiracy theory, if it's a conspiracy that I believe in.

I just think that when this drama hit, people heard about it, and then Apple announced this program, and people were like, oh, you can do that. And it might actually work. And that's why that number hit 11 million instead of one million. Because it was like a cool insider hot tip, hot tip, secret trick that only a million people knew. And now everybody knows that if your phone is slowing down, you don't want to buy a new phone, you can spend way less money, get the battery replaced. and it might be worth a shot to see if it'll just feel good again. My read on it is nobody made the association between battery life and performance before. Right.

So I think a lot, it's fairly hard to live in a city or go to a mall and not see like an iPhone repair shop. They're around. Like they just, they appear in the wild. And of course they're going to change your battery. So I think people knew my battery life is sucking. I can replace the battery. No one thought my phone is slow and crappy I should replace the battery. So I think there was an education there.

I don't know that Apple can... I really and truly believe that they were slowing the phones down for the reasons they said. We've said it on the show many times. Apple has many things. They're very frustrating. They have never just openly lied to us in this way. So I truly believe that they were like,

look, the phones would just turn off, right? And they said they're going to do it again with the iPhone's 10. Like they're going to modulate performance to make sure the phones don't just randomly turn off when the battery capacity is diminished. So I believe them. But I don't think they were prepared for everyone thinks their phone is fast enough. And if you can just keep performing at that level, then they're not going to say, I need an A12 bionic.

Right. Every one of these phones already has so much headroom beyond what people are doing with them. Which, by the way, if you remember that list of apps, is Netflix, Gmail, Instagram, Messenger, Snapchat, TikTok. Like, you don't need an A12 bionic for that stuff. And they're never going to be able to unring the spell, right? Like, you know, going back to the concern about their cordial numbers and how many iPhones do they sell and whatever. And I don't care how many iPhones they sell.

I fundamentally don't. But from now on, when a new iPhone comes out, one of the default things that people will say is, I don't need that. I'm just going to replace my battery. Right. Like, that's a new response to the iPhone coming out that didn't exist a year and a half ago, two years ago. And that's going to have an effect on them forever.

Yeah. Or they can just raise the price of batteries. I mean, like, turns out this battery, Johnny Ive, he milled it himself out of aluminum. It's $700. Okay, so that's batteries. And then air power. We talked about the new battery case. Instruction manual for the new battery case mentions air power.

Says you can charge it on an air power charging mat. And there's a rumor that it's going to be in production now. It's going to happen. You recall that the reason it didn't happen, by the way, the rumor was that. that it was starting on fire. So presumably, they've solved that problem at scale. Airpower is like, it's like one of those running jokes. Yeah.

Like, you know how I do a segment every week and it always has the same name? That's, for Apple, it's called air power. Well, my question is, and Paul, we should get to that second. My question is how many people at Christmas got like a knockoff? Like, my sister got one. She got a Chi charging pad. that has a spot for her watch and a spot for her phone. And it works.

So how many people are going to buy an air power that already got this thing? Because there's endless variety of air power knockoffs that are just a little crappier. Because, you know, the thing with air power is that you can put it anywhere for $129. But if you just buy the crap one on Amazon for like $35, you have to put them in specific spots. Yeah. It's like, I just, you got to wonder. Anyway, Paul, my man, every week, you just mentioned it. It's called air power.

Yeah, it's called air power, usually. It's usually called air power, but this week I wanted to call it, please replace magenta because this is, I didn't make it all the way through both of your, or all of your CES podcast episodes, but I didn't hear you guys talk about the inkjet printer for your face. No, we did not on the podcast now. Procter and Gamble's OptiWand, that's O-P-T-E, it's like an inkjet printer for your face. It's you just, I don't know how it really works, but it seems like you just drag it across your face and then it looks at your face and it looks for blemishes, and then it covers them over with

tone-appropriate makeup in that one spot. It's very exciting. It's like an inkjet printer for your face. That's basically all that needs to be said. The comments on this thing on this thing were really heartening. My face got red because I'm old. And so I will wear sunscreen that's got a little tint to it sometimes. But I'm on camera.

I got to like powder. And, you know, typically when you see a bunch of sites write about some sort of beauty gadget, there's a bunch of, you know, I'm just going to say, like a bunch of guys that are just like, screw this thing. This is stupid. And, you know, like the default reaction to beauty gadgets is usually like, yeah, this is dumb. But everyone was like, oh yeah, actually, sure, I could use this. This is interesting.

Like this could actually make it easier because like figuring out what, you know, kind of, you know, foundation, color, what tone I might want is a thing that a lot of people are just really dumb about. And a thing that, like, can automate that and is also a neat little tech gadget that can, you know, customize it to where it is on your face and so on. I was really pleased by the reaction that I saw to this thing. This thing itself might be complete, complete garbage and terrible and will burn a hole through your cheek. To be clear, I'm not endorsing this thing. I'm endorsing the reaction that I saw of a surprising amount of interest and acceptance in the idea of this thing.

Can I give you my admittedly somewhat addled theory to where some of this acceptance is coming from? Everyone spends more time on camera now than ever before. It doesn't matter who you are, right? Like, you have a, you point a camera at yourself. You, like, you have some dream of being a YouTuber in the back of your mind. You are on Instagram stories. Other people are, and you're like, ah, oh, I should have covered that up. Yeah.

And it's like, yeah, you know, there's like 50% of the population has been doing that for a long time. Yep. Maybe I should do that, too. It's like, you can, you can just, like, see it coming. Like, you know, the YouTubers, they're like, as always ahead of the curve a little bit. They're like, oh, I should look, I should look better than I do because there's a camera pointed at me all the time. It's so tough. So I, you know, all of us have done a lot of, like, being on camera.

And so we get makeup for that. And I always feel like I look a lot better on camera after I get makeup. But then I always, like, it's so important to me to take it all off. And then I see other photos of me and they look terrible. And, well, it's because I don't have makeup. But I don't know. I really go back and forth on this whole thing. I'm going to send you an inchette printer for your face that will definitely fry a hole through your skin.

Maybe this will finally, yeah, maybe accept that I could just fix it. Just a little bit more. If there was a slider and it just made me 5% more beautiful. Look, I have two requests for our sort of shared social video aesthetic. One, everyone just get over it, touch it up a little bit. And two, for God's sake, fix the white balance. The dominant video aesthetic in this world is like shitty orange white balance. We're all going to wake up 15 years from now and be like,

2019 was orange. As far as we can tell. You know, it's like little kids are like, was the world black and white in the old days? They're all going to be like, was the world bright orange for a few years on the internet? Those are the two things I requested you. Fix your white balance. Touch it. Touch it right up with an ancient part of your face.

All right. Can we end on Samsung? Yeah, we should probably, we should probably, make it pretty quick, but there's been enough Samsung stuff that I really wanted to talk about it. They announced their event, I believe it's February 20th. We've already shown off

a prototype of the folding phone. I'm hoping we see something final on February 20th. And they're going to be announcing of course the S-10. It's the 10-year anniversary of the Galaxy phones. And according to the Wall Street Journal, you count up

how many phones that they are planning on having this year, maybe even at this event, and it's five. Wow. So there's the S-10 and the S-10 plus. Those are to be expected. There's a new, like, another one that they mentioned that was like a low-end one or a mid-range one or it's not very clear. There's a rumor that it won't have the in-screen fingerprint sensor, but it'll be on the power button on the side.

And, you know, we don't know. It's sort of, I don't know, I don't know where to categorize that. So that's three. And then there's a fourth one, which is they're going to launch a 5G phone. on Verizon, probably later in the spring, they could announce that as well. And then the fifth one is the foldable phone. So two S-10s, another one that's a new kind of S-10 or something, the foldable phone and the 5G phone.

That's a lot. That's a lot. I mean, Apple announced three. So, I mean, this is just two more than Apple, but still. Well, the foldable phone and the 5G phone are vanity projects. They're concept cars, right? Right. Yeah.

They're corvettes. Yeah, so there's three phones and two corvettes. Yeah. And then everyone's going to end up in the Chevy cruise, which was like the $400. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm not a car expert, but corvettes are concept cars? No, no, no, no. I said concept car, but that's not what I meant.

Okay. The foldable phone is a concept car. Right? Right. They announce it. It's going on stage. Everyone's going to look at that foldable phone. Dream big.

I have better thoughts about Samsung than I did before today. Like the steering, like BMW announced the car. car where the steering wheel is an iPod. Yeah. It's like, you're crazy, man. Samsung, those are dreamers. I'd like to associate myself with them. Yes.

It's a concept car. Then you got your Corvette, which is the 5G phone, which is like horribly impractical unless you live in Dallas. The bad gas mileage. Right. It shows a certain lack of taste. Wow. No, no.

That's the last thing. Is that true? I hate you. I hate you both so much. And then you got your like Silverado, which is like the S10 plus, like your pickup truck. That's the Chevy's pickup truck. It's a big, yeah. Right?

So you got your bestsellers. And then you got your like Chevy Cruise, which is like your $400. You walked in thinking you were buying Corvette and you're like, looked at your wallet. And you're like, I'll take your midsize reasonable car. But, you know, it makes me think that I'm in the brand halo of this foldable phone. Yes, yes. Yeah. By the way, that is actually how carmakers think.

I have no idea if that's how Samson thinks. I'm also pleasantly surprised at how many popular Chevys I'm aware of. Yeah, that's wild. You didn't mention the Malibu, which I'm impressed by. The Malibu looks so bad. Dude, whatever people are like, the American car makers are ceasing production of sedans, because all people want are trucks. And then you, like, look at Honda and Toyota's sedan sales, and they're just fine.

it's like, yeah, because they didn't make their cars look like whales. They actually look like angry spaceships, and apparently that's what people want. Anyway, so is that February 20th? It's like a month from now? Yep. Yep, and that's right before Mobile World Congress. So presumably Samsung is not going to be doing much at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which is right after.

It's like February 23rd, I think. Wow. Yeah. I'm excited for the S-10, if only because I'm excited to try one UI with its giant headers. I'm also interested to see if they can catch up on cameras a little bit because there might be some extra, who knows how many lenses they're going to put on these things.

But the de facto opinion for the past, you know, a couple of years now has been pixel wins, iPhones a close second, so is the S9 sort of, so is the Note 9, sort of. And I would love for Samsung to like get back in that mix a little bit more aggressively in terms of camera quality. They've always been up there as like in that in that mix of the top three but they haven't definitively won in quite a while and

I'd like to see him try to take a crack at it. They have to stop doing their crazy smoothing choices. Well there's that. That's the thing that keeps them out of the race. Although when Marquez Brownlee did his huge bake-off of cameras. Oh, that was the best.

The worst cameras won because they took the brightest photos and it feels like Samsung could just like. turn that knob. It's the same camera, but the default exposure setting is like two ticks up. They would have a comparison. We haven't talked about the most important thing. What's that? It's going to be hole punch.

I thought I saw a picture of like a double hole punch in some cases. The flagship S-10 is going to be whole punch. Yeah. With an in-display sensor. I love the hole punch. Would I rather have a notch than a hole punch? No. Why not?

The whole punch, if done correctly in the status bar, just looks like another icon, which is dope. Oh, I see what you're saying. Okay. So if you get it right, it just looks like another thing in your icon tray. You're making an aesthetic argument, not like a screen real estate argument. Because a screen real estate argument has been a lie the entire time. How tall is your notification bar, Eli?

It looks nothing like an icon. No, no, I'm saying, if you get it right, if they do the software right and they make the thing, you know, like they do, like the pixel notch is gigantic and they're still making the screen space argument, right? So if you make the notification shade, like, do it right, or the menu bar correct, and they size up all the other icons, then it's like, all right, there's another cool icon that's actually like a hardware sensor. That's neat. I don't know if they're going to do that. Nealai, you assign a story to me every Vergecast. I'm assigning a story to you. And here's the title. You already have enough pixels. No, I can't write that story. I don't feel that. I have no passion my heart for that story. You're going to knock down the argument that like notches and hole punches are about getting more screen real estate. It's not about getting more pixels.

It's about making it look good. Okay. I'm with you on that. I do not, I cannot, and I think the listeners of the show know that I do not believe you have enough pixels. You need more of them. We should get more of them as a culture, as a people. Yeah. Right.

Okay. My problem with the whole punch is I think my most used app other than threes is YouTube, right? Other than threes. Top left, if you're looking at a full screen video in YouTube on Android, top left exits out of full screen, top right is like the three dots, bottom right also exits out of full screen. Bottom left is the, I don't know, you can't cover up one of these quarters, it seems like. Yeah, corners historically the most valuable real estate on the screen,

among the most valuable real estate on the screen, especially for UI stuff. So we'll see how it goes. I'm just saying if you get it right, it might look like it's not even there, which is the goal, right? The real goal is you completely hide it behind screen and it only appears when you need it, which would be cool.

I think what if it is just the little thing that sticks out the top like on these laptops, the Neganotch? I'm ready for Neganotch. I'm super pro-Nagin-Knotch on phones. I would be down for it. I think it would look like retro future cool. Well, that's the Vergeast, everyone.

We've started saying Neganotch too much. Little bunny ears You can put one One in each side So it's symmetrical Little buddy ear Or what was the The trio

The trio had a huge Like mega notch Which was an antenna I was gonna say I just want to bring back antenna stubs Yeah Okay And put a little camera on them

I'm gonna just go ahead and say This has been among the most Verge casts of all Verge casts Paul's like still going I missed the 5GE I missed 5GE. That happened during CES. Yeah.

And I just wanted to make sure we're all on it. Like, well, I'm not. I don't use AT&T. AT&T can do whatever they want, right? But at least to me, this means AT&T thinks that the people,

its users are total idiots. Yes. Right? Like, you're so dumb that we can sell you something and just change the name of it. It's like selling, it's like selling people,

Corvettes. but really they're Malibus. Yeah. They just switched the logo on it and they're like, look, we got you a Corvette. Like, so how do we publicly shame 18T better? That's all I'm wondering. We're doing it right now. Okay.

We've been working really hard. I think about it every morning when I wake up. Okay. They have no shame. I mean, their CEOs out there being like, I'm so proud of the fact that we change the narrative in the industry. Yeah, he said, I'm glad I have beachfront property in my competitors' heads. And I think Verizon's like, I'm.

I'm glad we have a 5G network. Like, I think it's just, it's just that time. And I think all we can do is point out they're not selling you shit. Like, Paul, if there's ever an argument for a little bit of like government standards body action,

it's this. It's what you say should be true and it should be rooted in some meeting and you should be punished if you lie. And wireless standards have just never had that in this country. Right. In Europe, like, they all pick and they have to say what they're doing. And even their phones, right?

It's like it says H plus and then it says 4G and then it says 4G plus for LTA. Like we don't do it. So AT&T is like, what about 5GE? Yeah. I don't know. Why does it want them to suffer for being liars? You know when you said we should be on it? I was going to ask you if he's on Verizon because technically he probably is.

Because if you have LTA on Verizon, you're on what AT&T is calling 5GE. Yeah. I don't know what version of LTE am on Verizon right now. Well, you're like a major American city. Yeah, it's like a, it's not working. Anyhow, look, if you've taken one thing away from this podcast, it's to do what Paul says. It's to take a minute out of your day and shame AT&T. Just like find a way to do it.

But like in a polite way. Like, don't walk out into an AT&T score and like screaming it. They're cool. Just for like a fun, cute way to shame them for being liars. Yeah. Okay, everybody work on it and tweet it Paul with your ideas. Also, what car he should buy? Because I don't think that he's pulled that off.

Well, it's obviously a Corvette. Okay. please go listen to Better Worlds. If you're not on the Verge Extra Feed already, jump over to it. Our first podcast went up. It's just such a fun project. It's going to run through mid-February.

We've got videos. They're amazing little animated shorts going up on the YouTube channel. We've got stories on the website. We've got podcasts and the extras feed. So go over there right now, subscribe to it. We would love it if you listen and let us know what you think. I'm super excited to be doing something that's just like big and positive for the world at this moment. So go check that out.

please follow us, Twitter, Instagram. I'm at Reckless Deaters, at Backlon, Paul's, at Future Paul. We'd love to hear from you. Go give us five stars on Apple Podcasts. That would be wonderful. We've earned it. Speaking of Apple Podcasts, go listen to all of Season 3 of Why Did You Push That Button. It wrapped up.

They did a cool show at CES that is definitely worth listening to. So check that out. You can also check out Pivot with Karras Swisher and Scott Galloway. Check out Function with a Neil Dash, which is super fun. All of those, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. And we will see you next week. Rock and Roll. Paul.

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