The Vergecast - Reviews of Apple's Magic Keyboard, iPhone SE, and Logitech Combo Touch

Episode Date: April 24, 2020

Stories discussed this week: Google is now listing COVID-19 testing centers in search results CEOs sticking with Trump’s ‘open the economy’ group after he tweets call to ‘liberate’ states Bill Gates says countries will probably use interviews and databases to track the coronavirus Bill Gates is now the leading target for coronavirus conspiracies, says report Connecticut suburb deploys ‘pandemic drones’ to try to enforce social distancing Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot is helping hospitals remotely treat coronavirus patients The jury is still out on Zoom trials Marco Polo has been around for years, but it’s blowing up amid the pandemic Lo-fi beats to quarantine to are booming on YouTube Apps aren’t a reliable way to measure blood oxygen levels First at-home COVID-19 testing kit authorized by the FDA iPhone SE review  Magic Keyboard for the iPad Pro review: the best way to turn an iPad into a laptop Logitech Combo Touch review Microsoft prepares to launch Surface Book 3 and Surface Go 2 Apple will reportedly use 12-core 5nm ARM processor in a 2021 Mac LG V60 Dual Screen review: V for versatility Motorola returns to flagship phones with the Edge Plus - The ... Wi-Fi is getting its biggest upgrade in 20 years Snapchat use is, predictably, way up with everyone home and staring at screens Netflix adds 15 million subscribers as people stream more than ever, but warns about tough road ahead  Netflix says Tiger King is as popular as Stranger Things  HBO Max will launch on May 27th  Fandango just purchased Vudu from Walmart to better compete against Amazon, iTunes Sonos launches its own streaming radio service Samsung smart TVs are getting an Apple Music app Google Duo video calls are about to look a whole lot better Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, we go over the latest in coronavirus news. We talk about the iPhone SC review, the magic keyboard for iPad Pro review. Touch a little bit on the future of Apple's processors to the Mac. We hear there's an arm processor coming. Then we get into the future Wi-Fi with Wi-Fi 6E. Talk a little bit about the streaming wars. That's coming up on the Vergecast. Support for the show comes from Retool.

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Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA all. I'm a star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of our current situation. I prepared for that one. I thought about it beforehand. I'm Neelai. I'm your friend. Dieter Bonas here.

I was really hoping you're going to be. for an electricity joke there with current situation. Ooh, it's shocking. Paul Miller is here. Hello. I'm relieved that you weren't going for an electricity joke. I should just start calling you guys like lightning and thunder. Which one of you would be lightning and thunder?

Paul, I hate to say. I think you're thunder. Okay. I'll fine with that. I mean, they're both cool. So there's no like. I'm warning of the, no, wait, thunder, it's your way.

I'm still fighting my place in the world. It's a warning that comes several seconds afterwards. That's great. We definitely know how weather works. A delayed warning. Welcome to the Vergecast, a show where we explain lightning and thunder to each other. No, a lot going on this week. Like a lot going on this week.

Deider reviewed not one but two pretty important Apple products, the iPhone SC 2020, the magic keyboard. There's some big rumors about what they might be doing with chips. You got some other phones going. There's actually shockingly huge Wi-Fi news that we got to talk. about. Yeah. There's earnings season is in full effect, which in the time of virus is very interesting. We're learning a lot, particularly the streaming companies are telling us what's going on.

So a lot to talk about. But Perfee back from you, the audience, I want to start and make sure we call out some of the great coverage on the site about both the coronavirus, how we're dealing with it, and then the second order effects that basically worldwide isolation orders are having, which are quite frankly fascinating. So I got to say it. The show comes out on Fridays. Six Fridays ago, six weeks ago, President Donald Trump held up a flow chart. Well, actually, I think Dr. Debra Burks held up the flow chart. But Trump was standing next to the flowchart. Promising a website that you would do a symptom check on and then you would schedule a test in a parking lot of a major American retailer.

You would drive through. You'd get tested. And then the website would tell you your results. I know that that's what the promise was because, again, it was printed on a flow chart. Yeah. The other side of the flow chart, by the way, was that the symptom checker determined you didn't need a test. It was just like, you're good. But I don't know why it needed to be a flowchart, but so goes.

I think a nice subtlety of the announcement was there's like a dig on, like, unlike some websites, this website will be done very soon. referring to, of course, the infamous health. Yeah, the Obamacare website. The man can't resist to dig at Obama, which is, I mean, whatever. We're all the people we're going to be. Yeah, I was hoping it was going to turn into a dig on Squarespace, but didn't go there. Yeah, he was like, have you tried Wix? It blows.

I don't know, Wix is great. Whatever. I have a question about this, imagine, I don't actually know any inside information here, but imagine that Google actually is working on this website that was promised. Like imagine they actually were. They would be stupid to tell anybody because if they whispered it, oh, it whispered it. If they hinted at it, somebody would also hint to it to Donald Trump and then he would go out there and make another big unsupported promise. Yeah.

If they are in fact working on it, they kind of like can't tell us. Well, it's been six weeks. No federal website of that caliber has been revealed whether or not Google has, I believe, it was a 17,000 engineers working on it. It seems doubtful. It goes up by an order of magnitude every time. Maybe the site is live, but is built by the Gmail team,

so it's just still loading. It's still. Yeah. If you type command and then test really fast in Gmail, it actually opens, it's Easter. Anyway, site doesn't exist. We're just going to keep tracking on it because it's a pretty enormous promise.

However, a bunch of other stuff is happening more positively. Google is not listing COVID-19 testing centers in search results. So we are developing the capability to know where those centers are, to track them as other map locations. So Google's telling people, if you're searching, where some of those places are. This one is just the president leads to a, there's a style of thing you can do with the president that we generally don't do, which is he tweets something. and then we have to go and ask everybody what they think of a tweet. The Verge basically doesn't do this.

And I will tell you that Casey Newton thinks this is the dumbest story, like the dumbest story to pursue. Like imagine Casey, imagine his voice and then imagine him saying, you want me to ask them what they think of a tweet so that we don't do it because ever did say Casey's right. I feel judged right now. Yeah. It's like that's the correct decision. However, Trump announced that a bunch of CEOs would join his counsels to reopen the economy.

this was also rolled out in somewhat chambolic fashion. Many of the CEOs didn't even know they were going to be listed. But then like the next day, Trump is tweeting, Liberate Michigan. Liberate Minnesota. I love it. Which is. Rise up.

Yeah. Rise up against. See, every state, 50 separate states. I'm sick of this federal. Anyways, go on. No, I understand what you're saying. The country is called the United States. That's right.

Perhaps there's another sort of arrangement of those states, warring states, disunited states. Socially distant states. Socially distant states. Anyhow, Trump is tweeting, Liberate Michigan. So we actually, I mean, this was in such close proximity to announce to these councils. We went out and asked all the CEOs in our zones, car company CEOs, tech company CEOs, biotech company CEOs. Do you support this rhetoric, right?

You're on this council to figure out how to reopen the economy. Unsurprisingly, every single CEO declined. comment just flat declined to comment and I will I will just offer you this which I think is important one major companies like you know PR person who would issue this comment literally responded when I showed him the tweet my god and then another major major company PR person that we usually person we go through to talk to the CEO just said I wasn't aware we were on the council, which is brutal. And like this person would know.

And then a decline to comment. So that's, I think there's a little bit of that happening. We're kind of tracking what those councils are going to do, what the big tech companies, the big car companies are going to be involved in it because it's interesting. Third thing I want to call out, you've probably seen this around if you're paying attention to tech. Bill Gates has become this villain, this like conspiracy theorist villain. He's involved in these absolutely wild conspiracy theories.

that he did the coronavirus. I keep waiting for him to write, like, the Washington Post or New York Times editorial with the headline that's like Bill Gates, colon, I didn't do coronavirus. Oh, my God. But there's just a wild set of conspiracy theories around him. We're tracking some of that stuff. Eddie Robertson is paying attention to that stuff.

But next to that, Gates is spending a lot of money. He's investing a lot of money into vaccine research development. And he put out a long letter today on his own site, Gates notes. basically saying how he thinks it's going to go. And what's a notable about the reason I want to talk about it is he's like, this is going to be a manual process, interviews, databases, all this automated contact tracing technology stuff we're talking about. It's great.

It will be great for some people. But the way to really do it is to staff up and go and do it boots on the ground. So that's a little bit of a split. Obviously, Apple and Google are building contact tracing capabilities into their operating systems, you've got Gates kind of next to it saying still need some old-fashioned shoe leather, go talk to people, keep track of things. Although I think if you talk to Apple and Google, they'd probably agree with that. It's unclear.

I mean, we have to wait for the stuff to actually start rolling out for real from an iOS and Android, you know, in the two phases. And that's, I think we're looking at that in May. So we'll surely know more soon. And then the other thing to just say about Bill Gates, I mean, the conspiracy theory stuff is just awful. on so many levels. But he's also been banging the drum pretty hard that, you know, even if the best case scenario vaccine timeline happens,

we are not going to be prepared to actually mass produce it. So he has been, like, thinking very pragmatically about the need to, like, ramp up, you know, our capability to produce vaccines en masse because we're not there yet, just to, like, get ready for if the vaccine actually happens. So in general, I think that, There's a whole lot of discussion about what should billionaires be doing in terms of philanthropy and what's the role of that and oversight and blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's all like a super valid discussion I have. But like in this moment, Bill Gates seems to be doing like the right things in terms of like being a public intellectual and like staying in his lane, not over.

And just like he's doing some like good work here. Yeah. I think his his big quote is we're going to build seven factories to make seven different kinds of vaccines. One will be correct. The rest will be a waste, but it is the right kind of waste. Yeah. Right. That's like you have to have Bill Gates's money and brain to have that idea and then to implement it.

I think it is ridiculous that he has come out. He has become the center of the conspiracy theory. First of all, it is historically not hard to get Bill Gates to talk about pandemics. I've interviewed him. Ezra's interviewed him. Casey's talked to him. It's like a hop, skip and a jump from like, what did you eat for? today to I'm worried about global pandemics with like he's always he's ready to talk about it.

Like that's the scale of the challenge he he is focused on, much to his credit. And I think the idea that because he's been paying attention to it and warning people about it means that he did it just represents like a deep stupidity. There's no other way for me to to react to that. So it's out there. We're tracking it. We know our audience is interested in Bill Gates and his many, his many doings. So we're tracking what he's doing, and we're also tracking the misinformation side of it.

Some other stuff that's going on, this is just my favorite thing. There's a Connecticut suburb that has deployed pandemic drones to try to enforce social distancing. So they're just flying drones around to get people out of the parks. That's pretty good. Drones don't have that long a battery life. I'm very confused by this. Maybe they've got special drones that can stay in the air for hours at a time. But most consumer drones that a city has access to, I have to assume.

can't. Well, maybe they could have bought the, the bigger ones, you know? Maybe. Anyway, it's just very entertaining. It's like, we're going to see uses of technology like this. Another one along these lines.

Is it entertaining? Is it? Or just, is it incredibly creepy? Also, these are like, they like detect heat. Like they're doing like a low grade diagnosis of people with these drones, as far as I can understand.

I think the company, which is called Dragonfly, is making a lot of, of claims. I don't know that all of the features are being used. But we've seen these drones, these drones, similar ideas have been used in China. I think I've seen some similar reports out of South Korea. The idea that you need to like monitor these places where you're going to have gatherings and tell people to go home, you can either do it with police or I guess you could do it with flying robots with IR cameras. Well, I mean, it's like one little test in one

little Connecticut town, but it's certainly starting to happen. Similarly, Boston Dynamics, the spot robot helping hospitals remotely treat coronavirus patients. This is another in the, how do we get you the assistance you need without endangering our frontline workers? Very cool. And then just a bunch of like the second order stuff that I was talking about. Zoe Schiffer wrote a great story about courts holding their trials over Zoom, which is happening all over the place. My wife Becky actually had a hearing over Skype for Business today in the New York court system. I've got my lawyer friends in Wisconsin. They're doing trials over Zoom. Zoe talked to judges in California who were doing trials over Zoom. She also uncovered a letter from a judge in Florida who had to sternly

warn the lawyers in his court, please dress appropriately after a lawyer showed up, a lawyer showed up wearing no shirt and another lawyer showed up in a swimsuit. And he had to remind them that like a beach cover up does not hide the fact that you're on the beach. So a lot of, that's sort of second order effects. A big question that Zoe has been asking if you're out there and you know the answer to this. Unclear what's going to happen with jury trials, right? So this is a lot of motion hearings, a lot of summary judgment hearings, a lot of procedural stuff is happening over Zoom. You can do that, right?

That's usually just a judge and the lawyers. You need to seat a jury and you're doing it over Zoom. You've got like big problems. Yeah. So there's some. positive sides of this, those hearings and stuff. For example, Wisconsin is streaming all of that stuff over YouTube to make it open to the public. That's cool. Like that's a neat kind of like outcome of this. You had a jury to this makes. People can see the jury. The jury can record the stuff.

Like, ooh, big, big questions as this continue. So if you're out there and you're working on the stuff, hit me up, hit Zoe up. It's something, it's the next turn of the story we're really into. Ashley Carman interviewed the CEO of an app called a Marco Polo, which has been around forever. it is basically a Snapchat clone. But now it's blowing up. It just rocketed up the app charts. A lot of rhetoric about how they don't do ads, how they don't sell your data.

They have a little premium tier you can pay for. A little quote in there, they're like, we're not ended encrypted. It's not encrypted on the server because if you lose your phone, we want to back your stuff up. Which is just not my understanding.

Do you know the verb for Marco Poloing? Like if I want you to hit me up on Marco Polo, I say, hey, hey, Marco me. Yeah. And then a reply is a polo. I mean, obviously. Right. You're like, Marco.

And then Dieter's like, Polo. Okay, I get it. I get it. Have you never played Marco? Have you never been a child in a pool? No, I was just making. I'm just checking it. I was just checking.

Julia Alexander wrote about YouTube channels that are exploding low five beats to quarantine to talk to a number of those channel operators. This is just like a phenomenon that's been going for years, but now it's a, exploding. It's basically YouTube channels that play very chill beats. Interesting part of this, the chats of those channels have become little communities of people who are like lonely and scared during the quarantine. So they show up to like listen to this chill music to work to and then they end up chatting and having a community. That's like my favorite kind of urge story, right?

It's like it's a mixture of all of the things and what you end up with it is like a little community of people supporting each other. Love it. Check out that story. And then last two, just kind of most directly related to the virus I were tweeting it. The first at-home COVID-19 testing kit was authorized for the FDA. It's a box. They mail it to you. You swab yourself. You put the swab back in the box. You mail it back to them. It costs $119. Guess what's called? It's called the pixel. No. Sure is. But it works, right? We don't know. All this stuff has been approved by the FDA under an emergency title. So my understanding is this test is going to

health workers first. It will go to health workers first. I think what's interesting about the reason we wanted to cover it is it is obviously packaged, marketed, produced, priced, like a consumer product. Right. If you wait for the A series, it'll be a lot cheaper. It'll be a little cheaper, just good. I'll have a headphone jack. And then Nicole also wrote about this new trend, which is people using apps that use your camera or like your smart watch or whatever to measure your blood oxygen level there's a lot of chatter about blood oxygen level uh being an indicator of covid infections don't do that is basically

the the thrust of her story there's a there's a lot of this stuff out there but it's not nearly as reliable as it should be so if you're hearing about it check out nicole story it's really thorough um as all the mccal stories are it's i know it's very tempting especially because it's very hard to buy a thermometer right now. But read the story because this is a sort of thing tech companies want to do. Right. There's like rumors that like the next Apple Watch will be able to do Pulse Ox, right? There's like Fitbits can already do it. But it needs to be calibrated. It needs to be accurate. It needs to work in the situation and that stuff. Those loops haven't been closed for this particular use. And I think that's one of those things with consumer tech in particular.

usually when you use a piece of consumer tech for something it's not designed for, you know, that kind of works. I hacked it to make it do this thing. This is like it needs to be calibrated to read the thing correctly that give you the scientific result that you're looking for. And that's a big split. And the studies that she cites specifically say they're giving back your normal readings for people that may not be normal, which is incredibly dangerous.

I have to wonder, you know, as these apps get more publicity, like how much longer are they going to stay live in the app stores? Oh, the ones that like to use the camera to look at your finger or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that stuff just seems real dicey to me. So read that story. If you see people using this stuff, share that story. Nicole is just very thorough.

That story is great. Okay. It's the virus. Do we miss any big virus stories? I don't think we did. Six weeks. If you're one of the 17,000 Google engineers. I think it's 1700.

If you're one of the 45 million Google engineers working on this website. You just let me know. We're dying to hear from you. All right, we're going to take a break. We're going to come back, talk about this iPhone. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster.

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for 30% off. a Framer Pro annual plan. That's Framer.com slash verge for 30% off. Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts,

but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn, Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates

and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With hiring pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Deeter Ban. Hi. I feel like usually when we review an iPhone, there's like all all kinds of pomp and circumstance.

It was an iPhone review week. Yeah, I will tell the world that there seems to be slightly more interest in the magic keyboard from our audience than in the iPhone SE. I mean, I get it. It's a bunch of parts we've reviewed already. The parts are, like, this isn't ultra confirmed. We talked about this last week, but iPhone 10R camera. It is the iPhone 11 processor and everything else is iPhone 8, like the end.

but they didn't screw any of it up, right? And the camera in particular is really fascinating because in decent light, it is almost indisinguishable from an iPhone 11 Pro. Like I can see it, you can zoom in and see it that this isn't like, oh, all cameras are good in bright light. Like, it's genuinely good in bright light. And it is genuinely terrible in low light, in dim light.

Like, there's no night mode, but on top of there being no night mode, it is just noisy as hell. And, like, I have gotten decent, dim, you know, dark, dark shots from time to time. But it's so unpredictable and you will get garbage so often that I just, like, it's bad. Like, you just cannot trust it to, like, give you something that you're going to want to use when it's a little bit dark out. We should back up and start with the phone because I feel like I could start going in on this camera. Yeah. And my many conspiracy theories about the camera forever.

But when you say it's an iPhone 8, like, same home button, same touch ID, same. same display haptic feedback you know the long whatever they're calling they're long press haptics now same like there's no actual physical home button

you like press it the thing taps back at you and that's the physicalness of the home button same battery life honestly like the battery life is like a day is if you push it hard

you make it less but I think most people end up with a day it's like pretty good but it is not as good as the iPhone 10R or the iPhone 11 or the iPhone 11 pro

now a lot of their batteries come from just having bigger batteries than this one does. And I was kind of hoping they maybe came from the A13, but no. You just said it has haptic. It does the long press, right? Yeah. The iPhone 8 had 3D touch. Oh, yeah, they yanked 3D touch.

Did they put a bigger battery in? Uncleared. Apple will never tell you what the millie amps are. We got to wait for the tear down. Because the thing that gets me is like that that gives you extra space. Mm-hmm. Okay. Because the battery life is not spectacular here.

It's not spectacular. And like the only reason I'm like pretty nervous about it, like it's a full day. Like don't get me wrong. If you are, if you want to buy a phone for less than $500 by this phone, it is very good. And the battery life is like good. It's fine. It's just not like, oh, this is great. This is like, because in 2020 it was the year we're like, oh, wait, we can get phones that actually last a day for real, not for pretend.

Hooray. And this phone is not up to that spec. It's a day. But like, it's not like, oh, definitely, definitely a day. And the only reason I think it's worth thinking about is I think that this phone more so than maybe even like the high-end phones, you buy and you expect to hang on to for three, four, five years, right? People that buy the SE, like bought the original SE, like hung on to that thing because it was small and they loved it. And we all know that like the iPhone 6, 6S, 7, 8, people, those batteries eventually like wear out and you need to get them replaced. It's not that hard to replace a battery in that series.

is a pretty known thing to do because they've been around for so long. But you should maybe anticipate that if you buy this phone in two or three years, you aren't going to be thinking about replacing the battery on it. Yeah. You just said that I think the crux of it, which is if this is the amount of money you have to spend,

you should buy this phone. Like, no further questions need be asked. Like, it's this one. And I think that's, it's just so, the conversation between this basically being the part spin phone. Like, here's a bunch of parts Apple can get for cheap or is already invested in and they have the tooling and blah, blah, and then like what other cheap phones are? Like, I'm going to use this word and you tell me if it's

wrong. Like, there's a, for $400, this phone is like fairly respectful. Like, it's as nice as every other iPhone ever was. Oh, sure. Right. Yeah, yeah. But for $400 if you go to any other phone, you end up with a bunch of plastic or gaps or weird compromises in screens. Or build quality or whatever. Yeah. Right. And I think one of the questions here is, is like, and this is pretty unique because of Apple's scale and its strategy of using this particular case for a billion years. Would you rather have the best of the older technology or slightly worse modern technology? Like, would you rather have a bad 120 hertz screen or a great 60 hertz screen? Right?

Like that's kind of like the world, the split that's happening. Right. Would you rather have this phone with its, you know, two by two gigabit LTE. radio or a pretty flaky, unreliable, cheapo media tech 5G radio that might light on fire. Like, whatever those splits are, they're in here. That might be a little bit of a false dichotomy. I mean, the Aces Zen phone last year with its weird flippy camera was pretty solid. The Pixel 3A, you know, slow.

Like there are tradeoffs on the Android side more so than on the iPhone side. But there are tradeoffs on the iPhone side. Like all of those Android phones, all the like the 4A that's coming up, are going to have, much smaller bezels. And I get why the bezels are here because it means that they can just use the same damn factory they've been using for more than half a decade. Right. And so that's just they, that's what allows this to be iPhone quality, top quality stuff last year's best at 400 bucks. But I don't know. That's sort of like Apple's factories are not my problem. You know, they manage to make Android phones for like less money. And I don't know, I don't want to say it's

impossible to have like redesigned this thing to be a little bit smaller so the screen there's a better screen to body ratio like maybe it would have been and I think that like it's okay to say that like maybe Apple could have done it and they chose not to they could have like maybe accepted less of a profit margin on it right like Apple holds its margins really but I there's just not another category of thing or even any other company that even like does it this way where it's like we've remixed a bunch of last year stuff. put in this year's chip and now it's cheaper, right? Like, you can't go out and buy a car.

You can't be like, I would like to buy a Mustang, a 1965 Mustang with a 2020 engine for $10,000. Like, it's just not a choice you can make. Like, yeah, like, there are guys out there who will, like, build that car for you for like $150,000. But that's not like a thing that Ford offers, right? You can't, it doesn't exist with laptops. Right, processor bump laptops occur, but they just stay there in price.

This particular price curve against the design of the phone, it feels to be like wholly unique in terms of a product category. Well, and it's like, it's unique in the same way that's parallel to the iPhone being unique as a like consumer product in terms of its scale, right? Like what other thing can you go by that is made, that they make as many of them as they do at the iPhone at like the iPhone's level of like price. and sophistication. Yeah, it's not, it's like not many things. Like, I feel like it would be great to roll into a Mercedes dealership and be like, that, you know, that S class from three years ago looked great. Can I have completely modern internals and roll away?

Is this the slowest processor that Apple makes now? No. They make, they still are producing new devices with the A12. So the A12Z is on the new iPad Pro, for example. Oh, right. And, you know, there's like cores versus gigahertz versus the, you know, onboard GPU, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, but they're like straightforward actually coming off of Apple's lines.

Because, like, I wonder if it was the sort of thing where it's like, well, you know, we want to wind down old processor factories to, you know, we want to free up those lines. Like, obviously they don't own, they don't manufacture their chips as far as I understand. They just design them. But we want to free up that capacity to retool for whatever's coming next, A14 for Max. And so, you know,

we don't have a budget processor put in this thing. Because that's what's so astonishing about this phone. There are lots of amazing budget Android phones, but they don't have the 865 in them. Right. Like Samsung, for example, there's like the S10 Lite, there's like the A series,

and there's like, you know, 50 of them that come out every year. And they actually, the A series actually sells better than the S series worldwide. We haven't paid a lot attention to because they haven't made a big point. to sell them here in the U.S., but I think that might change this year. Didn't they do that one insane ad that had the song?

Yes, I know. I can't remember the song, but I know the ad you're thinking about because I watched it on a loop for an hour at the S-10 event. But, like, Samsung doesn't do this, like, let's just stick with the same form factor and, like, throw newer parts in it. They, like, they make new form factors, and they use, like, slightly lower-quality parts to bring the price down. And I think part of that is because Samsung knows that the way that they're going to sell

their inexpensive phones is to get carriers to push them. The end. They don't have the marketing infrastructure to say, this is the Galaxy A series. You want it. Like, no one, right? That's not how that works. Whereas Apple can be like, it's an iPhone.

And the but a pa, right? Yeah. All right, let's talk about this camera. I have developed a conspiracy theory about the camera. Well, that is what the Vergecast is for. Of course. So, as with all phone reviews, there was a flurry of activity on a Sunday afternoon

as Deeter uploaded full-res shots to a lightroom album and then everyone slacked and yelled about them. Those are the good days. That's the good stuff. Here, like Deeter said, what we noticed was in bright light, phone holds up. Looks a lot like an iPhone 11. It might be a little bit warmer.

Yeah, just depending on, yeah, depending. The light goes away, the thing starts to fall apart. Yep. No night mode. But if this is indeed the same sensor as the iPhone 10R, which all of us seem to think it is. Yeah. That makes no sense. It means that it's gimped in software.

It means they just didn't. They took the feature out. Maybe. It might be a smaller sensor. The 10R HDR did not look like the 11 HTR, but this looks like the 11. Yeah. So they definitely like change some software tuning on that side. But so Apple's claim is that the A13 allows them to do things that they couldn't do on the 10R or, you know, other 4.7 inch series phones, whatever.

So they have this phrase like monocular or something, something. And really, it doesn't actually refer to anything technical. It's just the word they use that says you can do portrait remote out of a single lens. And it is, it's straight up machine learning. They like trained it on a bunch of models and like, here you go. they're not doing like the you know the weird pixel depth thing that the you know the pixel phone does and to me like if you're able to use your a 13 to like get portrait mode and in some cases the portrait mode and like also the hdr stuff out of the SC is like totally respectable like pretty good

why are you able to do that and not the night mode like what's holding you back is it the size of the sensor is that you just didn't feel like i mean obviously it would have felt like it um i got to think it's like sensor size. The other interesting thing is the IC does not support deep fusion. So you don't get sweater mode on. No sweater mode. The sweater mode, the most insanely hyped, hard to see camera improvement in history, as far as I can tell. They should call it gaslight mode. Like, I don't know if it,

they told us they turned it on. It was like a big deal and they were telling us they were turning out. This is a bit of a tangent. One thing I really appreciated was the iPhone SE versus SE, the 2016 versus 2020. Oh, yeah. Like, it's an outdoor well-lit shot. And I don't know, it was just cool to see. Because like most of these, you know, reviews that the Verge does is comparing flagship versus flagship or like like versus like.

But this is like four years of progress. Like outdoor camera photos have been pretty dang good for five years. But they've clearly gotten better. And it's just kind of cool to see. Yeah. Yeah. The thing, like, they're both, you know, whatever the megapixels are. But the old SE, the new SE, the thing that really struck me was how big the advance in HDR was.

The sky on the original SE was like a neon aquamarine. And like, note, it should just be blue. And like the new SE got it. Yeah. I mean, look, it's for $400, it's absolutely impressive. I think the question is a pixel 4A will come out. It will be around this. It will probably look just like a pixel.

Well, and so the Pixel 4A and like the Samsung Galaxy A51 or whatever it is, like, we didn't just like anoint this thing, the best phone under $500 just, you know, because we know those other things are coming real soon and we want to be able to actually test these things head to head. So that's coming. I can tell you what I think is going to happen. What I think it's going to happen is Google is not afraid to limit its cameras features to the high end phone because they don't care who buys a pixel phone. They just need anyone to buy them. Yeah. any plus pixel sale is a good one. So I might as well just put all the features down there.

Whereas I think, I think there's a certain element of Apple, you know, pricing you up to the iPhone 11. So that's your conspiracy theory, is they held back night mode? They helped, yeah, I think if they wanted, night mode is like not a deeply complicated thing to do, right? They just take a bunch of exposures. And then the A13 is there to merge them together. I don't think that is incredibly sensor dependent. And I know it's, I know that it's not because Google just buys like whatever sensors on sale at Walgreens.

And they like, do it. It's like very obvious. So like, yeah, I think there's an element here. It's like the world's weakest conspiracy theory. Like cheapest phone does not have some features.

Yeah, that's probably true. But when you just sort of add up the parts bin, you're like, I bet. I bet someone's going to jailbreak this phone until the operating system. It's actually an iPhone 10R and like unlocks. The 10R doesn't have night mode, by the way.

You have to like use neural cam, but it didn't have any 13. They're slowing down the photons in software. Yeah. It's called a photonic speed reduction that Apple does to really. Yeah, it's a weak conspiracy theory. But it just, it does feel like there's some, there's some holdbacks in software that are not directly related to the raw capability. of the thing. But look, everyone's going to buy one. Like, I assume this will be one of Apple's most popular phones. For a couple years, yeah, until they, like, don't update it again for, you know,

five or six years or how long it was since the original S.E. And then they'll do it again. Well, one quick question. How'd you feel going back to, like, a fingerprint sensor on the front, bit of a throwback? It was great. I missed it. Yeah. Like, it's weird because you have to, like, tap the notification and then tap the fingerprint sensor, whereas with face-out knock, you could just go right into the app by tapping the notification. But, like, I mean, you know, how long have we been using physical home buttons? I still use, like, on screen home, or, you know, fingerprint sensors on Android phones. So none of that felt unnatural to me.

And, you know, like, I didn't want to make a big thing of this because the pandemic will end, but I didn't have to type in my passcode as much. Yeah. That is a really bizarre moment that's happening right now. And Joanna pointed out the same thing in her review. I think Marquette's pointed out the same thing in her review. By the way, you should go watch the video that Joanna Stern made for the Wall Street Journal. I mean, look, I love her and she's one of my friends.

I'm just deeply worried about the state of her mind. It's an anthropomorphized phone with lightning cables for arms that lifts AirPods as weights. That is an accurate description of the video that she made. Yeah. That is just dead on correct. The phone has self-esteem issues. Not an inaccurate description of the iPhone SE itself. Because there's no headphone jack.

You got to get AirPods. All right. Deeter, you reviewed, we said the audience was more interested in the keyboard. We talked about the phone. Magic keyboard, man. It's here. Yeah. And then Phil Esposito, we got to call this out.

Phil Esposito for our radio director. First bi-line on the site reviewed the Logitech version for the other iPads. Yeah. The Logite version in some ways is more interesting because you can separate the keyboard and just still have a kickstand so you can still use it. And also it has a function row. So interesting. But it's not made of gold

of the magic keyboard. Yeah, it's heavy. I actually finally just got by 11 inch and I haven't waited yet. I got to do that. But the 12.9 inch with the magic keyboard attached to it weighs basically exactly the same, like within an ounce or two of a 13-inch MacBook Pro.

Ways more than a MacBook error. And that, in a way, kind of tells you the whole story. In a very strange way, a keyboard is not designed for portability. It's designed to sit on a desk or sit at your home on your lap, and it doesn't have very good viewing angles.

It can only go back to 130, which doesn't seem like much, but like every degree matters when you're tilting it back in terms of like your comfort and your ergonomics. And yeah, it's like they wanted to make like a, it's like more like a keyboard dock

than it is a keyboard case, if that makes sense. It's the sort of thing where if I just leave this thing on my desk plugged into the little, you know, USB pass-through charger and I use it when I'm, at my desk and then when I want to like use my iPad, I can lift it off really easily and then I

get to use my iPad without a case on it again, which is lovely. I love it. Right. This is what I've been saying. The iPad is this beautiful device when you're just wandering around like having ideas and jotting them down like on the go somehow. Where are you going, Paul? I don't know. It just feels really cool. I was telling you guys, I was doing music like that. I was walking around my house, wearing headphones, making music on the... Anyways, it's so light and portable outside of a case. Even the older case, you know,

it's a revelation. Try it. Well, so this is like, you know, my Dieter, what is a computer thing? Like, what does this do to increase the iPad's essence as an iPad? Does it make the iPad a computer? Does it make it a laptop?

What does it do? It makes it a laptop. Like, it makes it like a big, heavy, you know, you can only use it in a clamshell form factor laptop. That's what it does. But it enables the... the other iPad stuff that you want to do with an iPad because it makes it easy to pull the iPad off of it.

So, like, the best thing about the Magic Keyboard is that it makes it easy not to use the Magic keyboard. Doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement, but I'm hearing that as a ringing endorsement. But, again, that's mean because, like, the keyboard itself is great. Like, the typing experience is good. The trackpad experience is good. The backlight is good, even though you can't adjust it manually unless you go into the settings for settings deep.

as a physical piece of hardware, it is very expensive and it is very good and it should very much sit on your desk. And yeah. How is it? I know you don't know the answer because planes are illegal now. Is it going to be good on a plane? I don't see why it wouldn't.

Because the way that it, you know, it like pushes the iPad forward, you know, put that double hinge system. And that means it's less likely to get caught and smashed when the plate seat in front of you leans back. and it also, I mean, I think the real reason they did it was to like center the gravity a little bit,

so it's a little bit less tippy, and they didn't have to do as much heavy work on like the hinge. So that makes sense. But on a plane, yeah, I think it'll make sense because it'll be about the same in terms of like positioning as maybe even the smart keyboard. It's just be raised up a little bit. No, so that's the issue. The smart keyboard doesn't go back far enough. Oh, yeah, this won't go back far enough either. Like, again, 1.30.

That's all you get. I feel like the con it's like we've gone oh wait hang up by blah blah blah bel I'm sorry do you use the tray table yes okay just making sure because when you said didn't go back far enough I was a little bit I find myself on a plane almost always hunched like it's like I'm over the computer right that's just like the because you're in coach you got the tray table out the person's leaned back and you just sort of end up in this place where you're you're just more vertically over the computer you're not sitting back and looking at it so I need it to I need that screen to almost be perpendicular. And, like, a laptop will do that, just fine. An iPad in the regular keyboard case is, like, they just didn't think that people would use it on planes. So you can't go back farther than that. It, like, it kills my dream of using the iPad on the plane. I mean, the thing that I want to tell everybody to do is you don't know if, like, you would love this thing and let you know two things.

One, do you want to spend the money on this? Because it's so expensive. But two, you need to physically go look at it and hold it and pick it up. Be like, is this heavy? This is okay. Does the screen tilt back enough far enough for me? Yes, no. And then it's a very easy decision.

But I have to like describe it to you because you can't go to an Apple store to try it. And who's going on a plane anyway? Exactly. Speaking of describing things that are difficult to describe, can you describe the trackpad more? because this is Apple's first tiny taptic or whatever they call it. Yeah. Touchpad, right? So it is a real physical button, I think.

But you can click anywhere on it, not just at the bottom, like you can on a surface. I think it's great. It feels good. It's glass. You know, it's like, it just can hear it. It's good. But it's not like a haptic thing. It's physical.

It's a moving. Yeah. That's interesting. I'm moving it. Yeah. It's interesting they don't get it with like the thinner haptic thing there. I bet that's way more expensive. Yeah.

It's got to be price. And actually, I don't know that the haptic thing is that much thinner. I don't know. It might take it more power. There's a whole thing where I haven't done the full test of like, does this thing, drain the iPad in standby mode? There's a concern that it might, but I haven't noticed that myself. But I'm going to be running some tests on that next.

There's a theory going around the internet right now. And you didn't feel like it was too small to get around. What do you mean? Oh, no. I mean. The physical size of it. Because like sometimes on some Windows laptop. that have the tiny touch pads.

Like, a lot of surfaces have felt like this to me. It's like, this is not as much as I want to work with. I'm the guy that moves the acceleration on the trackpad to the max on every single computer.

And I'm also the guy that turns on hot corners on the Mac. And so, like, if I hand my computer to somebody, I know it's safe because as soon as they do anything that Windows will fly everywhere, it's great.

So the question in your review was, is what you want to turn your iPad into a laptop. That gets away from the iPad's strengths, but it appears, that everybody wants the iPad to be a laptop. And in the other case, the Phil review, the Logitech combo touch, like basically just turns iPads in the laptops, full stop.

Like, it's more of a surface than the Magic keyboard. The other thing that's in my review is the pretty trolley comparison to the Surface ProX. But it's not that trolly. Like, I do take it seriously. The Surface has been, you know, Microsoft's been working on this design for years and years and years. And it was designed from the jump to feel like it has a keyboard. attached to it. And it actually sucks without a keyboard attached to it, frankly. But this iPad Pro design with the smart connector on the back, which necessitates like a big heavy thing on the back

with like magnets and stuff to click onto it, just makes this thing necessarily thicker and heavier. And it's sort of like, I feel like there must be like some fight where like somebody inside the iPad team doesn't want anybody to attach a keyboard to their beautiful tablets. And so they like they purposely design it so that like attaching a keyboard to it is awkward. Well, just to be good. The surface solution is a kickstand. Right.

It's a kickstand and it's a smart connector on the bottom, which is, you know, there was a smart connector on the bottom on the previous iPads. But there's just a part of me that says that end result of this is Apple gives up and makes a laptop that runs iPad OS. I mean, they're just veering towards it so hard.

Apple is not the kind of company that like half step. it too much. But if you had a laptop that ran iPad OS, you couldn't rip it away and have it just be an iPad for a while. But if you have an iPad in almost any one of these cases, Deere's pointing at the magic keyboard, like you can just take it off and go. Yeah. I think that was like a design priority for them because you get your iPad back. But every one of their other cases, the smart, the previous smart keyboard folio that I have for my iPad pro, that thing, It just lives in there. You never take that out of there.

The thing lives in landscape and it lives in its keyboard talk. When you get your iPad back, it's great because you've got this thin little iPad, but then it turns out you want to like set it somewhere and watch a movie and you're screwed because there's no kickstand. Or any amount of typing. Yeah. Right. Like the entire iPad creativity versus consumption, blah, blah, blah, debate is like typing is bad on the iPad.

When you are freestyling an iPad, what's your guy? Oh, my God. What's your go-to method? because I've been trying the split keyboard. And it really breaks my brain. You can basically take what's like an iPhone keyboard and have it split into the two corners. And it just doesn't work for some reason. I mean, this gets really terrible.

So I'm trying the thumb swipeboard, but it's not very good. And I've also Twitter and Slack, that's my go-to split screen, one of those two, like when the auto-suggestion bar pops up at the bottom, it covers up the bottom part of the app. So I've turned all of the auto suggestions off because that makes that bar go away, which is great when I have a keyboard attached. But then when I don't, and I want to use the software keyboard, I have like zero affordances for typos.

I have to get it exactly right. So my go-to move is I use it in portrait. That really illustrates. Like I've had that tension before where I set up my iPad a little bit in a keyboardy way. Like I was into just as a hobby trying to code on it and get like a terminal running and stuff like that.

And yeah, you kind of start making these settings and then like, yeah, you use it away from a keyboard. I'm like, well, this doesn't work anymore. So, Neely, you bringing up, like, they're just, they're running pell-mell into making an iOS laptop. I would like that to be a 360-hinged laptop, but that's a different discussion. They are also, according to Mark German at Blomberg, definitely developing that arm processor for the Mac and it might come out in 2021. Yeah. And that makes sense. And German's report, you know, he suggests that it will happen at the lower end.

Like the dream I have is, you know, Apple has the event. And I don't know. That's the whole dream, by the way. Apple has the event. It's a small set of dreams lately. Yeah, I leave my house. That's dream one. No, you know, like Apple has an event and Tom Boger comes out.

He's the guy who does all the Mac intros lately. And he's like, here's the new 11-inch MacBook Air. it has eight core arm processor, the Apple A-29, whatever it's going to be. And you're like, bop, head explodes. It's amazing. Battery lasts for 45 years. Adobe apps are slow, but one day we'll get there, right? Like, whatever.

It's the thing. It's the Mac. It's the, right? Because they can't do it in the MacBoo. They can't do it in the MacBook Pro. They still need all the additional horsepower that Intel has. But they can do it on the small wall. So you can do it on the air.

Okay. Here it is. done. And then like Tim Cook is like, but there's one more thing. And then Phil Schiller comes out. And he's like, screw you, boger. I don't know why, why would be so hostile? I haven't been to an Apple event in a while. It's like very clear. But Phil Schiller comes out. He's like, screw you, top. Here's the new iPad laptop. iPad book or whatever they call it. And it's like the same processor running iPad OS. Yeah. And then. And then Craig Figuerie comes out. And he says, it's a Mac running an arm processor.

It's an iPad running an arm processor. It's a Mac running an arm processor. It's an iPad running an arm processor. Are you getting it? They're the same thing. And then he reveals that there's just a switch. And you could just like hit a physical switch to search between them. And there's a kickstand.

And there's a headphone jack. Craig Federi comes out and he's like, and you can buy whichever one you want. Good night, everybody. We have absolutely refused to reconcile these two things. But that's where they're headed. They're headed into an ultra-portable Mac with an arm processor that runs Mac OS.

Yeah. That doesn't have a touchscreen. And just sort of necessarily, Microsoft had to do this with the surface. Eventually, they just made a laptop. Yeah. Because the form factor of a laptop is better when you put the weight on the bottom part.

What if you could go into a split-screen mode a la iPad on your arm map? and it's half back, half arm. It also runs Android. I get it. I'm just saying like they are cruising towards that moment, probably a little bit less hostile than the one act play that I've just written. Although Apple keynote team,

if you want to talk to me about how to spice up these events, I got nothing but time. Kind of reminding me of like a youth group skit. Thanks. Wow. It's a harshest burn that's ever been delivered. I am so, I'm sorry. I'm so excited.

I'm so excited for our Mac. It's just, it's going to be, we've been so held back. Like we, it feels like laptops have been at a snail's pace for like three or four years because Intel can't chip a better, like a generationally better processor. and this could, at least in this first form factor, could totally be that. And I'm so excited. I don't know. I really can't.

I don't think there's going to be an iPad laptop. It sounds just like a thought crime in Apple's mind. But at our Mac sounds like such a good idea. And I'm so stoked. Well, I mean, assuming they can engineer these things with everybody working at home, they can light up their. supply chains, 2021 cents,

great, we'll see. One more products, we talk about Surface. Microsoft's getting ready to launch a Surface Book 3 and a Surface Go 2. Yeah.

I would say the laptop form factor wars are like in full swing right now. Yeah. You guys know that I love the Surface Go. It's near to my heart.

It's so small and cute and tiny. They got to fix those bezels. And I'm very, very, very interested in their thought process

on putting an Intel Core M3 inside this thing instead of an arm processor because they've got an arm surface and other than the fact that you can't run half the apps you want to, it's pretty good. So I would think that it would be a perfect fit

for the Surface Go. But no, they apparently are going to stick with Intel on that thing. I didn't realize, and maybe this is just, I'm reading Tom's article here about the Service Go 2, Microsoft be offering a model with the Intel Quorum 3 alongside the typical Intel Pentium Gold option. And I just hadn't realized that Pentium Gold, like, they say it proudly.

You know, like, it's Pentium for senior citizens. You get a discount at the diner. Okay, we got to move on. Oh, wait. Last thing. Surface Book 3 is fascinating because it seems like they're finally putting a new GPU in there that is actually, like, optimized for pro users and not like, maybe you can game on it. I don't know. It's like, nope, you're buying this to run Adobe. Here you go.

Yeah. I mean, do you guys see it? Speaking of GPU, do you see the InVIDIA RtX audio demo this week that was going around? Oh, very clever. So good. It's like, why can't I have an Invidio graphics card on my back? It'll make all the calls sound better. All right. Take a break. We're back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in.

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and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.aI. slash vergecast. Paul Miller. Hello. Every week, my friend. I do a segment. and it's always been called

Tap me on the shoulder The Yeah, okay So I know you're still getting used to the name So Motorola I just have to take you through my thought process So you understand what I'm coming from Motorola

It's got this new flagship out The Edge Plus And it's got these curved sides The things Since the same was at the Galaxy E as eight or whatever. I forget when they started doing this. I've never liked it. I think it's a bad idea. But one of the things that they mentioned as a possibility, and of course you never like

buy a phone based on a promise of future software, but that you could use that tapered side as a for shoulder buttons in a game, right? And obviously we've been searching the internet over for a true phone gamer. I got a, you know, I got a couple mentions. on Twitter, but neither of them really, really. One of them, it was clearly a screenshot of a tablet, and the other one said, I bought a gamer phone, but not for games. But so you can imagine a gamer phone with a fan inside,

and don't do the curved edge screen, that's dumb. Put the Taptic-style fingerprint sensor, like the iPhone SE has, and then have a good haptychs engine inside of your phone so that you can get like tactile feedback when you click. I'm doing all these gestures, but nobody can see. When you click, so just basically good shoulder buttons on a gamer phone, I think would vastly improve gaming on a phone.

That's all, that's really my whole point. Okay. Yeah. I mean, haven't you just made a switch light? Don't they have physical buttons? Oh, I see what you're saying. Just the squeasy buttons on the side? Yeah, yeah, buttons that just, yeah, they vibrate to let you know you've pressed them, but they're not like, they're not hard to press like, I don't know, I guess that.

Yeah. You know what I mean. Like typical side phone buttons are like hard to click. I want like quick buttons for aiming down sites and pulling the trick. Yeah. The average quality of haptics on any Android phone is so low that you are basically asking them to like do cold fusion. Give him some time to fix haptics LG makes pretty good haptics

Yeah, okay Actually, so okay, we've got this edge plus I really want to see if these curve sides are any good And if it's like, it's just like accidental touch city But then Chris Welch just reviewed the V60 Yeah, it has the second display Yeah, if you want, you can get the second display It's like what I love about LG is like, okay, so Samsung

They got us beat on prettiness They're gonna have us beat on like build quality and edge to edge and they're going to have a speed on marketing. So we're not going to do any of that. We're just going to make a phone that just does stuff that's like really basic looking. And we'll have a case

with the second screen on it and a headphone jack. And I like, I kind of respect it. They're like, they're not going to try and take Samsung head on. They're just going to be like, well, we're just going to make our thing. We know that it's not going to set the world on fire like the note did. Yeah, it's like fine. It looks pretty good. Okay. I mean, headphone jack.

I'm always interested. With like a high-end DAC, though, I really, I really want to, I want to do like a comparison of, like, a phone like this versus like my, I guess my dongle for my pixel is dying anyway. So that's not going to be a good comparison, but the theoretical dongle that used to work. Vlad used to just like wax poetic about LG stacks. They're very good. You have to, like, commit to not streaming low-quality Spotify to tier it. But make the commitment, Paul. Okay.

I will. All right. I won't because I'm not going to buy this phone. I'm sorry. There you go. You're like, I'm going to keep using my broken pixel. Keep trying, guys.

Make it smaller next time. Okay, some things to wrap up on. This one is very important, but not important for a minute. Today, FCC voted. Paul, this is like a classic Paul story to make a big chunk of six gigahertz spectrum unlicensed. So you don't even license. to use the last time they did this i think the FCC freed up the spectrum in like 1989 and then it took like a decade for Wi-Fi to happen this time the Wi-Fi people were like ready so on top of the FCC voting

to free up the spectrum there's a new standard which is horrifically called Wi-Fi 6e they came so close if you remember like a few months ago they're like we got to simplify these Wi-Fi names it's a Wi-Fi three four five and the new one is six not now you got six E which reminds me of nothing so much as AT&T's lie of 5GE. I'm not sure why they wanted to ride that bandwagon. But Wi-Fi 6 is the new Wi-Fi in the existing 2.4 and 5 gigahertz bands. Wi-Fi 6E operates on the 6 gigahertz ban. The amount of spectrum, Jake Kastrak has wrote a great explainer on this.

He's been tracking it forever. Basically, it's an enormous amount of spectrum. So the channels can be huge inside of the 6. gigahertz band, presumably you're going to be able to, you know, as products come out, they'll move off of the 2.4 and 5 gigahertz span on the wider channels and 6 gigahertz, thus freeing up the old channel. So that's like sort of a knock on improvement. And then because they're big channels, you don't have to do the like channel jumping that you used to have to do. I mean, I think two of the new channels in Wi-Fi 6E, the 6Gar channels, wouldn't even fit.

And the amount of spectrum allocated for 5 and 2.4. With the existing Wi-Fi spectrum, between the 2.4 gigahertz area and the 5 gigahertz area, there was like 400 megahertz worth of spectrum. And the new, I can't do this math really quick, but there are 760 megahertz channels in the 6 gigahertz. So 7 times 160. So that's 1220. So like 3X more capacity is in the 6 gigahertz band than was existing in Wi-Fi right now, which sounds amazing. I'm so excited. Yeah.

So what does this mean in sort of like real-world terms? They're saying you might be able to get one to two gigabits down on a Wi-Fi 6 channel, which is incredible. That's like real world to a phone. None of these products exist. Obviously, the Wi-Fi Alliance is like ready to go. everyone's excited about it. They think the first products are going to be routers and some smartphones. There's already a Qualcomm chip.

There's already a broadcom chip. Intel says it'll have chips in January. And then Linksys and Netgear have said it. And importantly, Apple has all it says is the FCC's approval sets the course the next generation of Wi-Fi networks. You can just read into that. The Apple's doing it tomorrow. Airport's coming back, baby. Airport. The airport's back.

So just super exciting news. It's one of those things where you know, the policy side of it, the spectrum policy side of it will have sort of immediate repercussions. An important note is the SEC didn't do this for Wi-Fi. They just made the spectrum unlicensed, sort of knowing the Wi-Fi people were ready, but other people can use it too. I think some 5G networks, they're going to use some of the spectrum is like overcapacity in some places, which is interesting. So do that, so hang on. If some 5G networks, if some 5G networks, they're going to use some 5G networks are going to use some of this. Would that interfere with Wi-Fi 6E?

And if so, you would think that whoever gets it done first would get to use the spectrum. Therefore, it's a race. I have, can neither confirm nor deny these reports. I have no comment at this time. There's some like neat stuff that has to happen here, like automatic frequency allocation to avoid some misinterference. It's just neat, like it's a big, neat idea.

that is, first, a big political decision had to happen. It's taken a long time. But the immediate excitement from sort of the technology community is there. You should read Jake's piece. It really goes into all the weeds of it. But it's something to keep an eye on. And it's funny every time we write about the nitty gritty of Wi-Fi or write about new routers, the audience is absolutely there.

It's like one of my favorite verge quirks. Like we go to CS in the old times and we like, look at this router. It would be the most popular post on the site. This is like critical infrastructure now. So the idea that it's going to get better and we're going to get out of the choke points where existing networks, a big deal. Can I run a wild idea by you? Yeah. So DISH network has all this spectrum.

And they're not doing anything with it, right? I looked it up and their market cap is $11 billion right now. That's $33 per U.S. person. if we did the world's largest Kickstarter and we bought DISH, because you know, my goal is for the FCC to make all spectrum free and let people do cool things with it and figure it out. I'm sure we could have managed to communicate across the country and across the globe without the FCC like auctioning and spectrum monopolies off. But in lieu of that, we buy DISH and we just make all of its spectrum free. I love that the idea here in its most reductive form is, what if we buy out dish, which is run by a single person, Charlie Ergen, who's been hoarding the spectrum and doesn't know how to use it, but still effectively a dictator of the spectrum. And what we're going to do is replace it with everyone in America owning one tiny slice of it.

And we'll somehow make that a more effective decision-making process. We would own it under, but we would release it under a permissive license. Well, we would, we would need to form some sort of organization to like, you know, maintain and run it. Yeah. Like a communications. No, just let people fire radio. We would run it together. Maybe we like a federation.

Yeah. Or like, I don't know, like, like a society. Like we would socialize it is what Paul is suggested. You don't have to do that with Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is open. Open for business is what I like to say. Oh, okay. There's literally, they're called the Wi-Fi Alliance.

Yeah, for Wi-Fi, but I could go and come up with the Paul Alliance. And the Paul Alliance, it's going to make a very similar spec that's slightly, slightly and implausibly incompatible. And I can do that because 2.4 gigahertz and 5 gighertz. Oh my God, do you hear that sound? I got an email. Qualcomm is supporting the Paul Alliance. It's Qualcomm Betts Business on Paul Alliance.

That's amazing. Paula, I hear what you're saying. There's a reason there's been this push to open up this spectrum. I think what you don't want is to like knock out every cell tower in America because one guy decided that he was going to blast 700 megahertz signals out. That's the problem. Right. The thing I want, like the big upshot I want, I want to live in a world where I could move to a neighborhood and a neighborhood could like band together and like, hey, we've got

bad cell phone signal here. Let's build a tower. And now we have our own tower and we have the best cell phone service in the world. Like, I want that kind of scenario. That exact thing that you are describing is why cable television was called cat TV for a long time because they called it community access television. And so the neighbors would band together. They would buy a satellite dish.

They would pick up the satellite signals from the big. broadcasters using like big C band dishes and then physically run cables to all of their houses that is the genesis of cable television this country is like just a bunch of people like Ted Turner was like a cowboy who just like ran some cables up the hill and then you like blustered his way into like Turner networks and with I just think it's harder with wireless because it interferes but I take your point by the way if you ever want to read about the history of cable like I think it's a Susan Crawford book. I'll figure out what it is. I'll tweet out. But like, it is a bunch of

renegades and misfits who just like took on the broadcast networks and we're like, well, you don't, you don't have antennas near us. So we're going to do it ourselves. It's neat. I feel like I have to disclose the Comcast as an investor. That's also how Comcast started. Okay. Speaking of cable and streaming wars, just some stuff to run through. It is earning season. We're actually paying extra close attention to earnings right now because of the virus. We, you know, the companies that we follow closely are obviously impacted streaming stuff. Snapchat, doing great in isolation. Snapchat use is way up with everybody home. Their ad revenues are up. That's super interesting. Netflix added 15 million subscribers. They're warning, though, that they're

going to quote, pause on product innovation because they're, they just need to support the amount of use that's happening. Tiger King is as popular as Stranger Things. It's like one of their big hits. Julia had this great tweet where like Reed Hastings and Ted Stry, Grandos ahead of content at Netflix for doing their earnings haul. And they're like, look at our list of top tens. It's all Netflix originals. And Julia was like, well, you buy them, you program the algorithm. You show them and recommend, like, of course it's the stuff that you want.

This is an insane top 10 list. Like, this doesn't map to anything. And you don't, you don't know. I'm at the point where if I want to watch a movie, turns out and paying $4. Like, because I try to ideate movies like, I'm living here with my sister. we try to come up with what do we want to watch and we think about it we go over our various want to watch lists and then i go on just watch dot com and it's always four dollars like the amount of good movies that seem to land on these streaming services just seems like i don't know it seems

like it's vanishing it's absolutely vanishing because they're all all the studios are pulling back for their own streaming services which leads to the next thing hbo max is launching on may 27th NBC Universal's Peacock is launching. I'll just disclose it again. Peacock is owned by Comcast, blah, blah. There's the best relationship there. You already, you know. Peacock seems, right, they're betting heavily on some of their archive stuff.

They're betting heavily that it's NBC. That sort of makes sense. We're going to keep an eye on it. It's rolling out to like X-1 customers first. And then there's a wider launch later. So they're doing it in phases. They're not going to have a big Disney Plus moment. HBO Max, the launch,

seems insane. Like, it is impossible to, if you just, like, read their web page, I encourage you to go, do it. But halfway through, you just lose all sense of time and space. You're like, what is HBO? Does it come with this? I'm unclear. It's bundled with, like, half of 18th's plans, but not the other half. A quarter of 18th's plans get, like, a couple months free trial.

It makes these weird references to how it uses your wireless data, and then your wireless data might get throttled. And it's like, what? You didn't remember to zero rate your own service. That makes no sense. It is just crazy. So we'll have Julia on next week or week after because this stuff is launching. And literally she's the only person understands it. But HBO, HBO, the thing with Westworld, that's going to remain.

It's like unchanged. HBO Max is like a streaming service that has HBO in it. And then a bunch of weird other stuff, like teen dramas and a Snapchat interface and, like, friends. and that's the thing that you pay for. So if you already have HBO, you don't get HBO Max, unless something else you subscribe to some other AT&T thing. I think this is hopelessly confused.

And to me, it's like they put out a press release and the guy Greenblatt who runs HBO Max is like, we're so excited to have AT&T as our strategic distribution partner. And it's like, dude, AT&T owns you. Like, if they turned you down, you should run. Isn't this like that, you know, like there's a thing in tech where product development kind of follows the organizational structure? Yeah, you ship your org chart. That's a Steven Sinovsky quote.

Okay. That seems is that what, is that what's happening here? Yes. It seems like no one. AT&T is a huge. Yes. I think the answer is yes, but I think it's like worse. AT&T is a huge diffuse organization, right?

They run direct TV. They run another. television streaming service, which is called a shit you nap AT&T TV Now Max. I don't know what that is. That's just another thing that they make. They run Uverse. They run obviously AT&T wireless. They now own Warner.

Part of Warner is HBO. HBO runs HBO Max, but that's run by it. They own CNN. Is that part of all? Who knows, right? Like it's this a massive conglomerate. And usually in like the ship your org chart scenario, all of your little department heads or little fiefdoms, right?

They're like power centers. And then the product represents that clash between power centers and everybody's represented. Here it's like, I don't think anybody understands AT&T. And so it's just like this model of ideas that isn't focused into one thing. So like someone tried to draw the org chart, but then someone came by and like accidentally smudged it and then there's ship that. It's just super confusing. This one, it just feels like it will be the. one that it's your point about mergers paul it's like you can just wait him out because

anything of this size and scale and ego will just eat itself but anyway it's launching what we're going to see if you can make heads or tails of that website uh please please let me know um otherwise i'm just going to keep pasturing julia at t and t if you're looking to offload some spectrum and you want a fair price the paul alliance is waiting a few more other little things fandango just bought it's another disclosure fandango is owned by Comcast. Really? Yeah.

And Dango just pot Voodoo from Walmart. So I'm a Voodoo Stan. I think this is great. I think, well, I just, the best thing about Walmart owning Voodoo is Walmart didn't know what to do with Voodoo,

so they left it alone. And Voodoo was just like, oh, well, our niche is like making the best, offering the best quality stream. So we're just going to do that until Walmart notices

that it costs a lot of money to do that. And like, Fandango, like, Fandango? Have you, like, interacted with that product ever? Yes, and I understand why they bought Voodoo. Yeah. I am just super worried about meddling.

I am super worried that they're going to fandango up Voodoo, and that is the last thing Voodoo needs. Yeah, and there's, like, the element of the conglomerate, right? They're owned by NBC Universal. Will Universal take advantage of having a distribution service? We'll see. Will Disney get mad that Universal owns this other thing? not offer their movies for rent on this service?

Yeah, it's a lot. And the reason I was voodoo stand is they had the Marvel movies in 4K HDR and iTunes did not. And so if you wanted to watch the Marvel movie, with all the lights, you became a voodoo stand. So we'll see if that continues. But that's like a good niche for them. Sonos launched a streaming radio service, which is really interesting. It's all free. It's like a default service.

Like you just plug in the Sonos and it's the thing that works. They're doing it out of the basement of their like New York office, which I think is pretty funny. They kind of said they would never do this. I think this is the beginning of a service offering from Sonos. It's also like if you look at the Roku model, this is how Roku makes its money. There's the Roku channel, which I never think about. I'm assuming most people don't think about, it's like the heart of their money. It's like ad-supported content on the Roku channel and around the interface.

So we'll see that happened. Another little move. There's just more. Stream-a-stream wars are often running, even though everyone's in isolation. Samsung Smart TVs are getting Apple Music app. which I think is utterly bizarre. Like, why? Like, who wants to sit and click around with your Samsung remote to use a music app?

There must be people. I mean, there's demand for it, right? So they made it. And also... But Samsung Smart TVs have Airplay, too. You can just do it on your phone and send it to TV. Well, you know, sometimes... Maybe not everybody that owns the Samsung TV has an iPhone.

Maybe there's a bunch of Android users. And yet they subscribe to Apple Music. Apple Music also hit the web this week. Like, they're going fully horizontal with Apple Music, which is interesting. They've already done the work to bring Apple TV to Samsung TVs, and they've done the work to bring Apple Music to the web. That effort is probably related. A bunch of smart TV apps are just web apps anyway.

Yeah, but Apple doesn't do it because they can. They usually have some strategic reason. And maybe they realize like a bunch of people are signing for Spotify on their Tyson TVs. Like I would love to see that spreadsheet that's like the growing threat of Tyson. Well, but like Apple Music, they showed up on all these TVs. at like a C.S. It was Apple TV showed up on a bunch of TVs two CES ago. Apple music has been on Android forever.

It just if there's an un-Apple division of Apple, it feels like that's kind of it. They're just like, yeah, we're just going to keep doing our thing. We're going to make ourselves available on other platforms. And like that division of Apple feels more like AT&T or like another like music service than any other part of Apple. Well, I mean, that division Apple was beats. So in many ways it is. last one. I just want to call it out because it's something we've been paying attention to a lot.

Google Duo, their video call app, they're saying quality will improve because they're using the AV1 video codec now, which is like the thing we've been waiting for because when AV1 rolls that wide, it means finally YouTube and 4K and Apple license. Right? It's the consort, like Apple and Google, like they all came together and made their next generation video codec. So using it in Duo is like, it's, it's the first little test shot. We'll see. Well, like, we'll see if that means, but it's interesting to me that Google, Google's shipping AV1 in a product now. So that's it. That was our stream. We got to have Julian to walk through, especially HBO Max.

Figuring out who gets HBO Max for free is so much more complicated than it should be. Because the answer should be everyone who has an AT&T account, right? But you would be wrong. Or no one. By the way, do you know what an AT&T, U450 account? is? Nope. Because if you do, you get HBO Max for free. I think it's a U-V-Vos account. It's just crazy. So we'll have Julian soon to walk us through this next round of Stream Wars because between HBO Max, between Peacock, between Netflix's like, like, it's here, it's big news.

And we got to check it on Disney, which is like in a weird place right now. Super weird place. So there's no one better talking about Disney and Julia. But we'll do that in the weeks to come. We're done for now. That was the Vergecast. You can tweet at me. I'm at reckless. You tweet a Paul, future Paul, Dieter's Backlon. You can subscribe to Home Screen, which is T.C. Sotic's newsletter, newsletter, about fun things, which I know people want. You can subscribe to Deiter's newsletter processor, which is about computers. And you subscribe to the interface with Casey Newton. In the feed right now, Interface Live Event, Casey interviewing Sarah Frye from Bloomberg about her book, no filter the inside story of Instagram. That was a great

conversation. We'll be back on Tuesday with the interview show, back on Friday with chat show. That's it. It's a faircast. Rock and a pro pro pro quo.