The Vergecast - Samsung 2020 with Marques Brownlee

Episode Date: October 13, 2020

Every Tuesday this month, Vergecast co-host Dieter Bohn hosts a series of discussions diving deep into tech review season, each focusing on a specific product. This week, Dieter talks with MKBHD aka Marques Brownlee about the various phones released by Samsung this year, from the S20 Ultra to the Z Fold 2 5G. The two also discuss the process of reviewing different tiers of phones and how it's changing the smartphone market. This episode was brought to you by Novartis. To learn more about Cell and Gene Therapy visit vox.com/ad/novartis 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. Greetings mobile accomplice, welcome to the Vergecast. I'm Dieter Bone, and on these Tuesday episodes, we have been doing directors' commentaries

on the reviews that I've been working on on other folks around the industry have been working on. This week, I'm very excited to say that we have Marquez Brownlee on, you know him as MKBHBHD on YouTube, and I wanted to talk to him about Samsung, like all of Samsung this year. We've gone over Apple and Google and Microsoft products, but with Samsung, I didn't want to just talk about the most recent review, but their entire year, because they've had a really interesting year, and Marquez has a really interesting

perspective, because like me, he has reviewed all of these phones. And so knowing how to review these phones in that larger context turns out to be really interesting, really important. In fact, we actually have a lot of similar thoughts. I ended up making a video that made a lot of the same points that he had made in a previous video, which is pretty funny. So we talk about that. We also go behind the scenes on his incredible video that he made about David Blaine going up in the air with balloons. And if you want to know what it's like to have a robot be your camera person, he also explains how that works. So here's Marquez Brownlee. Markaz Brownlee, welcome to the Vergecast. Thanks so much for coming on in the middle of a ridiculous hardware season.

Yeah. Thanks for having me. I sympathize with you're probably going through the What do we call this? Like a waterfall, like a fire hose of new tech. It just happens all at once, but this is fun too. It's like a windmill. It's just, you just get hit with it every couple of days or something new that you got to deal with. Yeah. So we're recording this on the Friday before this gets released on the Tuesday, which is the morning of the Apple event.

So I'm going to ask, just because it's happening the morning of the Apple event, we've got to say something about it. But also anything we say is going to be like instantly out of date within, you know, two hours of this thing getting released, but just, I don't know, real quick. What are you expecting out of Apple? Oh, yeah. Well, I always know what I'm hoping for and then what I'm, like, realistically expecting. So I'm expecting the new iPhones basically to be the focus. They talked about speed.

So, yeah, 5G, faster chips, faster screen, maybe, fingers crossed, I'm hoping. Actually, we should talk about that. We're going to get into the topic today, by the way, is Samsung. We're going to get into Samsung and, like, how they deal with screens. But I've been saying that at $1,000 you should expect a high refresh rate. And I think you've been saying some similar things. But is it okay that Apple doesn't because, like, generally the rest of their animations are really smooth? Or is it like, this is a miss?

You know, it's so for Apple, there's a couple weird specifics that apply to them. So number one, for me, the iPhone is the smoothest 60 hertz phone that I consistently use. So I'll give them that. But also, two, Apple's like the one company that consistently gets away with. The $4,000, I should be getting this spec, and I'm not. They get away from that as far as. is like numbers on paper pretty constantly. So we're not going to get a huge 4,500-m-amp our battery.

We're not going to get a 64-m megapixel camera. But just, you know, higher fresh rate, it's one of those things. I just, I love it on every other phone. I can't expect it to not be awesome on the iPhone. Just give it to us already. Yeah, right? I mean, they've had it on the iPad for, what, two years, a year and a half, something like that? I mean, I'm expecting the exact same thing.

I'm hoping that the stuff with, like, the wideband doesn't mean that it's going to be more expensive on Verizon if they decide to do that for a millimeter wave because a bunch of other people have been doing that. But I guess we'll see. I don't know. I'm on a really angry at Verizon millimeter wave kick lately. I just think that it's not really useful on phones. It's very useful for nine people. Right. Like if you stand outside underneath the right tower, you're great. Yeah. Otherwise you're doomed. Okay, Samsung. So I wanted to talk about Samsung because we're in this weird zone where we're working on a million reviews. But like this particular week, we're like in between. And I'd like to say we could take a breath, but it's not really like that. But

we both just reviewed the S20FE. I reviewed it. Actually, we should talk about that too. You just looked at it. But we've basically looked at Samsung's entire year of phones. And I think Samsung had kind of an interesting year relative to some of their previous years. They actually tried some new stuff and did some pretty good stuff this year. But I kind of figured we would just like go in order from the releases. Yeah. Okay. All right. So the very first thing was the Galaxy S20 Ultra. Today, our AI-prograde camera system changes how you capture photos and videos. And we've built three game-changing 5G phones around it that change mobile.

Introducing Galaxy S20 Ultra. All the S-20s, yeah. All the S-20s, they announced them all at the same time. The first one they gave us was the S-20 Ultra, which, by the way, what do you think of this? Every company now tends to send me the high-end spec when I kind of just want to do the low-end spec first. Like Microsoft always does this.

And now Samsung is sending us the ultras before they send us the regular ones. You know what? I feel like I've noticed that as a bigger trend. I don't want to zoom out too far, but I think companies in general have realized the power of the product and the power of the embargo. Yeah. Where instead of just being a simple, we'll send you one of the specs, which one do you want?

And here's the date and time. And that's the end of the story. Now it's a lot more. We'll send this one, this guy, this spec and this other guy this spec and this other guy this color. and we'll have two different embargoes. One of them you can talk about this thing, and then the next one you can talk about the next thing.

And yeah, I think Samsung's clinging into that a little bit more too. I'm not a fan because I guess I prefer the simple, like, let us just have one of the specs and let's review it because this is the thing people are going to get. But you can see why they do it. It makes sense. The ultra is the, it's the ultra. It's the best one.

Let's send out the best one. So historically, Samsung's like top flight experimental phone was the note, and that's where they put all their best new tech. But now it seems like they've made this entirely new category of phones called Ultra. That's fine. So the thing that defines an Ultra now is, I guess, the high megapixel camera, and also it's not sorry about being bigger. What do you think of this new tier of phone?

Yeah, I guess to me, when I see Ultra on a Samsung phone, I see a lot of big numbers. Yeah. To a lot of people, you know, Ultra, the word Ultra means the best or whatever. but I think a lot of people also see the big numbers and just think that that's all great. So the battery is going to be a big number, the screen's going to be a big number,

and the camera's going to be a big number. So that seems to be the ultra thing. And I actually, I think so. The first person I heard say this was probably Becca from the video team where she said like, So it seems like to me, if you're looking for the most specked out, badass Samsung phone,

the word to look for now is not note. It's ultra. Now, Samsung's sort of stretching that where it's just the ultra stuff. There's an S20 Ultra and Note 20 Ultra. I think that's better for actually both of us. Better for Samsung, better for us. We get a little more choice. But yeah, it's just kind of a big numbers world.

So the big number on the S20 Ultra is it's got to be the camera, the megapixel count. They had that new big sensor. And that didn't work out so well for them, at least from my perspective. So there were two big issues that I found. I mean, just in addition to standard camera quality stuff, there were like issues for me, I really keyed in on focus. It was using phase detect, and so it would just focus hunt like crazy. And then you actually pointed out something that didn't even occur to me that I think was really smart. And it doubled down on like this problem.

Andrew, can you play this little bit of this clip here? In this case, the sensor on this phone is so big. And that dual aperture feature that they've shipped in a couple previous Samsung flagships is now gone. So it is wide open at F1.8 all the time. These things combine to make a razor thin plane of focus. And so things that aren't in that plane of focus by even a couple of inches are out. Yeah, that is wild. And the interesting thing about that is it, even maybe more so than focus hunting,

is it really affects your day-to-day experience of the camera in a way that you might not notice until somebody points it out to you that that's what's happening. Yeah, no, this is something that's been creeping up into, into smartphone cameras. And I, you know, a lot of people always think, like, why is the longest part of your video always about the camera? Maybe it's because I'm just super into cameras, but like, this is something I start to notice. As these sensors get bigger, it's just a physics question of, like, the bigger the sensor,

the smaller, the plane of focus. And then this, this ultra-wide lens that you're basically putting on this tiny but also huge sensor makes this inevitable fringing and weird, you know, look to the photos. And you see it more than ever on these huge 100-megixel sensor. and I don't like it. So I pointed out, but I think most people probably don't notice until they take like the perfect photo that happens to exhibit those weird fringing things. Yeah. I don't know if you find that you take a lot of photos of close up subjects or you notice this more often.

But yeah, for me, I take a lot of close up photos and so it was bothering me. Yeah, I take a lot of close up photos. And I also, I mean, I test so many cameras on phones because it's always like the main differentiator. Like a lot of Android phones have got very similar specs in terms of processor and RAM. And so it's like, well, we'll talk about the screen and then we got to, like the cameras might be the thing that help you make your decision because otherwise the rest of the things are really similar. But it's the noticing what you can predict and what this camera is going to do that's just as important as saying, is it good or bad. So once I saw your video and knew, oh, it behaves in this way, I don't like it, but now I can accommodate for it. So I can like know that this shot will work or this shot won't work.

And I feel like a lot of the work of telling people about what's going on with the phone's camera is, just, yep, this one is 5% better than that one on, you know, some random, I don't know, imagine DXO Mark did a whole bunch of camera stuff, right? It's actually, this camera behaves in this way it made these choices, and you should be aware of these choices if you buy it because then you'll be a better photographer because you'll know what to expect out of it. Right. And like everything they do in these phones is a trade-off.

So I'm sure they think about that stuff. They're like, well, if we have bigger pixels and a bigger sensor, low-light performance is important to people. That's going to be better. and we'll sacrifice some of the, you know, those close-up photos. And maybe people like me complaining about it changes the balance of how those decisions get made. I don't really know. But I still think they have a pretty good finger on the pulse of like bigger sensors are still better.

So they're going to keep doing that. Well, I mean, they also must have a finger on a pulse of something that people want. Like my big problem with Samsung is the face smoothing on the selfie camera. I was actually talking to Jenner about this last week. Like, they must know that people want it because they keep doing it. They won't take it away. Absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of weird quirks in software that I notice, and there's a reason for everything.

So when you go into the coding, you see that intentional stuff, like, they keep doing this face smoothing. Somewhere out there, there must be people who just love the face smoothing. Yeah, that's got to be a group. And it's not us, but, you know, they're going to keep doing it. So the other thing that happened with the S20 Ultra is there was this, like, tiny little drama with it. And this was long enough ago that I kind of forgot about it until I was like trying to do. What are we going to talk about? What were the issues with it?

They had a software update for the camera to try and deal, especially with the focus hunting. And so we all publish our reviews and saying, this is bad, but Samsung says there'll be a software update, so I guess we'll see. And then there was this whole, like, blah, how dare you review it before the software update comes? And eventually, it was actually Michael Fisher, I think, who came out strongest with this, where he's like, look, this is the phone they gave us to review. This is what they want everybody to judge it on. So that's what we're going to do. And if there's a software update, we'll look at it again if it actually changed anything. But quite often, software updates just don't.

Yeah, I like to go back to like the original purpose of a review program, which is like, if you zoom way out, it's like, okay, the phone's going to come out. And people kind of want to know before they buy something if it's good or not and if they should buy it or not. So what we'll do is we'll give this thing to a few people to preview so that they can share their thoughts and people who want to buy it can see that they like the thing. Yeah. Now, if you give us the thing and it's not quite the same as what people are going to be buying, that's a them problem. That's a Samsung problem. You should give us the thing people are

going to be buying. And so the mechanism of this review process where like now they have all these other, I don't even know what to call it, but all these other things in place where like, oh, there will be a software update and we'll fix these bugs and give us a chance to address this, that and the other, it's like, well, now you're throwing so many wrenches in there. It's like, I'm still going to review the thing you gave me. And if I can say, you know, the thing I always say is don't buy something with the promise of maybe future updates, because that's usually a toss-up if you're going to get it ever. Buy it based on what I reviewed. And if it gets better, good for you. That's a win for everyone. Yeah, I totally agree. So the don't buy something now on the promise of a

future fix is something I'm actually struggling with right now with 5G. We were just talking before show I'm mad at Verizon because I don't think anybody can use a millimeter wave, but Apple's about to release a bunch of 5G phones. Samsung is like all 5G. Everything they did this year is 5G. And like they say their future is 5G in folding phones and get ready. But 5G is bad right now. I've been trying T-Mobile's 5G. I've done a little bit of testing in AT&T and I can only use Verizon if I go to the right city in the right spot. And I would say that I've yet to experience other than like standing in the right straight corner of Verizon killer speeds. And T-Mobile's 5G in my area, either on T-Mobile or piggybacking on Google FI, is like the same or slower as

LTE. And so my struggle is, I don't think anybody should buy, go spend the extra money on a 5G phone just to get 5G, although it might be the only thing you can buy, so it's fine. Right. But the question is, should you wait to upgrade? Or if you need a phone, should you buy something good with 5G now? Because we trust that 5G will get better, and people are hanging out of their phones for longer.

And so the responsible thing to do is to be ready for the future. You know, that's a good point because 5G has this much slower evolution and people hang on to their phones for three, four, five years. And by the time you get down the road, maybe it was worth picking a 5G phone. The answer I would give to like someone buying a phone would be don't buy it because of 5G now yet. Maybe we'll be surprised in 5G turns out to have been, you know, a better thing. And oh, you missed out on this amazing thing. But at least if you're buying what works for you and is good now, then you won't regret it.

if you spend the extra money on 5G, you could end up not taking use of that for the entire lifetime of the phone, and it's actually a missed opportunity. Yeah. So I'd say today still, I guess if I'm giving advice, I still say don't buy it just because it's 5G. Maybe it's a bonus. Yep. And maybe it will be surprised, then, you know, 5G will be great.

Yeah. Okay. So after we reviewed the Ultra, we had like the regular S20, S20 plus. I think you called these a default. That's kind of how I feel about them. like the default Android phone, most people, especially in the U.S., end up getting. It's actually the one that I usually buy. I try to limit myself to personally buying only two phones a year, and usually ends up being a Samsung and a pixel.

Although I'm starting to think about One Plus. These phones are great. I think they're really good. I really like the fingerprint sensor is good enough, and it's better than Face ID when I'm wearing a mask. But do you think Samsung can hang on to that default position? Oh, and just all of Android phones? Yeah, because, like, One Plus is hard charging. I don't know.

I wish we should actually talk about Sony, but it's, it's a little. It seems like they're the default because they're the default. They're so big. They do so much marketing. They have so many deep partnership with carriers. Right. One Plus especially seems like it's starting to make some good partnerships with U.S. carriers. Google's trying, but I mean, I don't think the pixel is ever going to be the default.

But do you just see Samsung just continuing to dominate, especially in the U.S., in terms of just the mindshare everyone assumes it's the default? Right. I think they really worked their way up to that default position through a lot of what you're talking about, the marketing, but also in the U.S., those carrier partnerships are underrated, massively important to getting in front of people who never would have found another phone otherwise. And so no matter how good, say, a one plus phone is, and I talk to my friends about this all the time where they're like, well, Marquez, you can have any phone. What phone are you using now?

And I'll say, one plus eight pro. And they're like, the what? And so I have to explain it a little bit. But I think if you put that phone right alongside, if you give it the same marketing and the same carrier partnerships as a Samsung, I think that spot is in danger a little bit. But you can't really take that for granted because Samsung's bazillion dollars of ads is really hard to replicate. So I think for the foreseeable future, Samsung's got a pretty good stance in that default spot, but I wouldn't mind seeing that challenge. Yeah, I'm the same way. I think it's not just Samsung's a bazillion dollar of ads. It's also like the, I don't know if they're backroom deals, but you can walk into an AT&T store and they will just like chuck two Samsung phones at you and be like,

all right, two for one, there you go. I just needed to buy a case and you walk out with like three Samsung phones, right? And so they have a ton of those deals and they just are constantly pushing them. Yeah, and maybe that's, maybe you have to have the right department. Maybe you need to just have an inn at Verizon or whatever and a lot of the other companies don't. But I have noticed that too where it's just like, listen, name a price. We've got six phones for you and they're all by Samsung. So yeah. There you go. All right. So next. is the Note 20 and the Note 20 Ultra. Note 20 and Note 20 Ultra have the fastest processors in the Galaxy series.

It comes with an all-new laser autofocus sensor. And for Pro Video Mode, we also built in extra controls to give you videos an extra kick. The Note 20 Ultra, it just was like, okay, well, you saw the issues with the S-20 Ultra, you added a laser to it, and then you made it made it a note. It seems like it was really straightforward. I thought it was really good, but it seemed like it was a really straightforward phone. Yeah, I bet if there were no focus issues on the S20 Ultra, it would have just been the same thing in a much more square potty, basically, and a stylus. So that was probably the plan. But yeah, they fixed that focus issue, went from face of tech to laser, and then they made it a note.

And that's what a lot of us were looking for. So I like that phone. Well, and it's like, you know, if it ain't broke, you know, don't fix it. So they fix the thing that was broke and they kept the rest of the same. True. The regular Note 20, though, is just a baffling phone. What is the deal there? I called it the Nope 20.

I was really happy with that title. Which I loved. That was the best title ever. I was so jealous. It was, I mean, it's $1,000. And for the longest time, I didn't really, in my device reviews, go super deep on pricing. Because, you know, especially even with a Samsung phone. You know, it's going to go down over time.

You know, things change. There's various deals in different markets, blah, blah. So I would just analyze, like, the device. Yeah. But now pricing is so important. There's so many different tiers. and so much competition at each price range. And the note 20 came out and it was just like,

you put it up against the other $1,000 phones and you're like, this is not anywhere near what it's supposed. Like what happened here. This is not the right price. And I think that actually took away from like it actually being a pretty decent phone. Like that's what I ended up talking about in the video is like, take the price tag off of it. Like that's a unique combination of check marks like for a phone.

And they're offering that. And, you know, once you slap the price on it, then you're like, clearly this is a bad buy, but it was a weird choice for that launch price. Well, so, I mean, the big thing for me was the lack of a high refresh rate, which on the note is in particular importance because it does actually help with the latency on the stylus a little bit. So you really feel it.

In theory, I think you're right. It is the right. It's a really interesting accommodation of checkboxes because if there are people that really desperately need a stylist, you're like in that note world, there should be a lower cost option for you. Like that's a great idea. And then so they made the phone that was a lower cost option for people. And then they didn't put it at a lower cost.

Yeah, there's like two other phones with stylists that I've seen this year. I think one's like a $400 Motorola phone and maybe one other. And it's like they did make a pretty unique phone there. I almost wonder, do you know if it's still $1,000? Are they finally lowering it? No, I mean, there's those inevitable Samsung discounts. So you can find it for less. But, I mean, I just published my review of it.

It was relatively late. And my original headline was like, don't buy it without a discount. Like, that's actually the long and the short route. If you can find it for relatively less, then go ahead and get it. If you can't, then just wait. The thing you said about factoring in price is really interesting. And I want to talk about Fold, but maybe we'll jump right into the fan edition stuff here. So to try to decide how much to factor in price is an interesting question because at the high end,

you're like, well, people are going to either be able to afford it or they're going to amortize it and, you know, pay it in installments over two or three years. So the difference between $11 or $12 or even $1,300 when you're talking about like the ultras and the flagships is like, yeah, you'll mention it, but it won't be like the thing. But once you start getting into this new category of sort of premium mid tier, premium mid range, premid, I don't know what to call it. Right, we need a word for it. We should come up with that, like right now. then price factors in way more because like it actually makes a bigger difference when you're starting to make all these tradeoffs of what flagship features get in and what lower end features get in. Right.

And so you start having to have a different calculation how you talk about it. Yeah, without giving away too much because you said this is going up Tuesday. So there's a certain phone I'm reviewing. Where it's like that's what I talk about in the video is like, okay, phones go from anywhere from $100 to $2,000. bucks so in this middle area you can check like any combination of boxes you can go high refresh rate but plastic and and stylus or no stylus like you can you know go crazy with all these different options and so the choices a buyer you have to make isn't really so much like 600 versus 700 versus 800 it's like pick your price and then look at all the options for that price because

there's a whole world of things you can pick we already know pixel 5 is 699 that goes right up Next to Fan Edition, which is $699. One of those is plastic. One of those is metal. They both have wireless charging, but one of them is going to have an ultra-wide and a standard, and the other is going to have triple cameras. One of them is going to have Google. One of them's going to have Samsung's skin on top.

It's just like there's a whole spectrum at that price. Yeah. One of them's going to have a slightly slower processor. One of them's going to have like the standard 865, right? Yeah. It's actually harder, I think, to buy a $7,800 phone than it is to just buy the best one and be done with it. Actually, that's a good point, yeah, because at the highest end, you're like, what do I want in a phone? Let's just go get it. Like, I care about cameras and build quality and it better have a dope screen. Let's go just get the best. And you just find note 20 or something like that.

Yeah. But in the middle, it's like, well, every time you go high level on one thing, there's a compromise somewhere else. So you're really swimming upstream sometimes. Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, we've been circ around the fan edition. We should just talk about it directly. So funny thing happened. I published this video this week that was just me. I'm not going to try and do a video for the fan edition and the No20. I'm just going to do a video that's like looking at Samsung's gear. I knew we were going to do this podcast, so I wanted to get my thoughts in order. I'd like to talk to you about these phones in front of me.

They're all Samsung phones. And they're just a portion of Samsung's 2020 lineup. It's kind of impossible to keep track. So here's a question. Why does Samsung make so damn many phones? phones. So I make the video. We're about done.

I'm starting to prep and watching all the videos that we've made about Samsung phones. And I watch your S20 Fan Edition video. And in the middle of it, you do this thing that is like the whole concept of the video I just published. I'm like, shit. If you actually go to Samsung.com right now and sort their smartphones by price from low to high, of all the phones they'll sell you right now, they'll offer you a phone at $99. $1.29.29.225. 325. 350. 425. 475. 499. 599. It literally looks like I was plagiarizing. So I'm like, okay, like, we're going to drop in a voiceover thing. And I'm going to make sure that I, like,

give you credit for the ideas, even though I didn't see him. And like, I try not to watch too many other review videos before I do my own. So after we finished this video, I went to go check out what Marquez Brownlee had to say about the Galaxy S20FE. And it turned out that he makes a lot of the same points in his video. So shout out to a great mind sticking a like, and I will link his video down in the description below. The point that we ended up both making is I don't think that Samsung cares about whether its product categories make sense. Like we just created this idea that there's the ultra tier and then there's a regular flagship and then there's the Primo mid-range, mid-tier zone, and there's a low-end zone. But really, Samsung just wants to make sure that's got a

a phone at as many price points as possible. Yeah. Well, first of all, I don't, I think great men's think alike. I think we're reviewing the same thing. The same stuff is going to come up. Yeah, no, I almost think, yeah, you have the note and the S and the A, but like, it's almost just for like organization for other people's sake. And it's more of just like, Samsung is going to offer stuff based on price.

And that's all they really care about. Yeah, I'm fully on board with that. I think, and you saw that and like, you know, how many phones. they came out with at all these different price points. The only ones that didn't matter so much were the most expensive one and the least expensive one, probably. Right. Yeah, totally.

So earlier, I mentioned your quote review of the fan edition, but I actually corrected myself in the middle of saying that because I don't think you called it a review. Yeah. Which is fine. Like, I didn't call mine a review. What do you think about the fact that no matter what kind of video you make, no matter what you call it, you just get emails and tweets and comments saying, great review, or you got this wrong in your reviewers. Like, I didn't, I didn't review it. It's not a, it's not a review.

Yeah, you know, it's funny. I've talked about this in a video too, but it's like, I think the word review, whether they understand that this is what they're saying or not, to us as reviewers has a certain implication or it's like, this is an evaluation based on my experience of a certain amount of time, and I will evaluate this product here. But we also make other videos that are exploring other topics and talking about different concepts in the world of tech that aren't reviews. But, if you ask somebody what we're doing who isn't as familiar, they're tech reviewers. They're reviewing tech. And so the word review just kind of gets floated out for everything. So you're right. Yeah, YouTube comments will just be like, nice review. And I'm like, this is the initial hands-on in

the product demo area. I'm not reviewing it, clearly. So for us, I guess, you know, we hold this word, this review word, like a little bit more preciously than the average person. And it probably bothers us a little more, but at the end of the day, as long as they eventually notice the actual review, hopefully that's a win for them. Yeah, fair, yeah. Okay, so the last category are those fold devices, the Z line now they call it. And this is one of the reasons I think Samsung had an interesting year is like the Z fold two and the Z flip 5G.

I hate these names. They're just like quietly fine. They're like really good. And like they don't seem to have real durability issues. There was a huge fiasco with the original fold. And then they just like, hey, we fixed it. And we're like, did you? And then they're like, yeah, we did.

And we're like, oh, yeah, you kind of did. Yeah, this might be my favorite little subsection of Twitter, which is just like a couple of my friends, Austin and Quinn, who just love their Z flip too. And we'll like toss it on the ground and like slam it shut. And like, it's fine. It's fine. Guys, this is a good phone. and I guess it's we have this like preconceived notion

that a folding phone must have some sort of build compromise I guess just because of what happened at the first fold and just notorious build testing videos but yeah they've held up fine which is great for them and I almost wonder now that

you know we see the first two generations of those phones what is the next generation of Z the name is the Z flip the Z flip 2 5G what does that one look like yeah right so I ended up having to buy the Razor 5G

because Motorola decided not to seed review units which is usually a really bad sign when the company's like, yeah, we're not sending out review units, we send up to, you know, they sent one to you, I think. So I bought one and I've been using it and it's like, oh, this is like, this is totally fine. Like all the problems with the first one, it's not a perfect phone, I've got some issues with it,

but they basically did the thing that Samsung did where they iterated a bunch, solved the worst problems, and it's like a perfectly good phone. Yeah. The thing that's interesting to me, comparing the Z Flip 5G with the MotoRaser 5G is

I think the Moto Razor, even though it's got bigger bezels and blah blah blah blah is like a prettier phone it like maybe it's just nostalgia but it feels like a more elegant device especially when it's closed because they've got that weird hinge that lets the screen get it fully flat. But the Samsung phone is

like all around a better phone I think still. It's got better cameras all around it just works better as like a phone. It's just not quite as pretty as the razor. Yeah, I can't wait till there's more flip phone folding screen phones to choose from. Because right now, like, we have no choice but to compare them to each other. But I think we have to simplify it so much because there's only two of them.

But also the screen on the outside of the razor is a big usability improvement over the Samsung. Even though I'd still prefer the Samsung, I wish it had that outside screen. So there's a lot of things. There's a lot of stuff there, a lot of nuance to it. But at the end of the day, I think, yeah, the Samsung is still. a better flip phone, basically. At least when it's open, right? Yeah, so I'm with you there.

Before I go down a razor hole, we should take a quick break, and then we'll come back and we'll talk some more. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify. Millions of businesses around the world

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Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. Go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. All right, we're back. The other thing that makes me think a lot about Samsung is Samsung's unpacked event for the Galaxy S20 in March was the last big tech event that I got to go. to. It was like the last one, right? They had the temperature sensor, but then ever since then, it's just been either no event they cancel it or it's been this online stuff. Yeah, I remember that

because we were in, what city were we in? It was California somewhere. We're in San Francisco. Okay, San Francisco. Yeah, and I remember like, that's an international event, people flying in from everywhere. And I noticed some people have the masks on. Some people don't. There's people taking selfies. Some have masks. Some don't. And I just remember looking around like, this is, I've never seen this like look before, but it's different. And then, yeah, like a week or two later, it's like no more events. Yep. I also, whenever I think of these Samsung events, I always think of like how poorly they

translated to like a live show with no crowd. Yeah. Because unpacked after that was, I'll just say in my own podcast, I put it at the bottom of our power rankings for a well done online event. Wow, there it is. The Galaxy Note 20. And here it is the tab S7. Oh, wow.

That looks so beautiful. Don't you guys think? Are you guys seeing this? I see our Samsung member are real excited. So what do you think makes for a good online event? Because we've obviously watched them all. Actually, everybody can watch them all except for Amazon's, which was weirdly only for press.

But the thing for me that makes one bad is when it starts to feel like an infomercial. When they're talking to somebody like 20 degrees off camera and there's like tinkly piano music. and it's like, like, you could, if you could, if you could watch this thing at three in the morning when there's nothing else on, then it's bad. That's, that's like my line. Yeah, I, so it's still hard to say, like, what exactly makes these events new? Because they're all new to us. We're watching them one by one. It's like, see how Apple does it, see how Google does it. And I think now that we've seen like six to eight months of them, it's easy to just look at apples and be like, okay, those were the best. But why were they good? I think it's because they're just talking directly to the camera the way they would if you were sitting there in front of them and they were explaining the product. They have good presenters. They have good scripts. They have good production. But, yeah, the whole 20 degrees off camera thing where it's just, I'm watching an ad now. Yeah.

I'm just watching an ad. It kind of throws you off when it's live because now there's no crowd and there's no one clapping. And so you're watching a live ad, but it was pre-recorded. So why is it a lot? I don't know. It's hard to say what makes them so bad, but there's a number of reasons why they're a little cringy. Well, so Apple does a pretty good job of making it feel like a little, I don't know, event-y because they've got those like, CGI drone swoops through the campus.

Here's Jeff to tell you what's next. Apple Watch has made a profound impact. They're so good. If you go all the way in the other direction, be like, well, we can't have an event, so we're just going to have someone sit in a studio and talk to somebody sitting next to the camera. It's like, what are you doing?

That's not good. Yeah, and also, like, as a customer, if we forget reviewing tech for a second, like, I want to watch this and learn the new information. Yeah. So with that Google event, I remember it was like 15 minutes in a row of like some demo of surround sound, something, something. I remember just like sitting back and being like,

I haven't learned anything about any new products in 15 minutes. Why am I still watching this? Where a lot of times I'm watching, you know, what Apple's talking about in every minute there's a new spec, a new thing, a new feature, and it just keeps going, and that's what I'm here for. So I think that's a big part of it is like I'm here for something. If I don't get that, I sort of start to tune out.

Yeah. So what's really interesting about my experience of these events is we always do a live blog, right? It's history. People enjoy them. We get to crack jokes in the middle of it. And we also know that a big portion of our audience, they might be at work where they can't just sit down and watch a video, but they want to get the news right away. And they can sneak a look at a phone and look at somebody typing out what's happening. So that's one of the reasons we do it. Now, at Apple events, historically, their in-person events, it was always kind of relaxing. I mean, the whole thing is I get there early. That's my joke. And like, you get all keyed up and excited. So I missed that. But then once the event starts, you might not realize this, but they talked really slowly at their live events. They had a much, like, chiller pace, and so I could be there and be typing and, like, keep up and be able to, like, make some commentary while it was happening, and everything was, I just knew what to do. Now, when Apple's doing these online events, their pace is so much faster.

They're giving you information at, like, twice the rate that they used to, and it's actually really hard as a live blogger to keep up, but I think that for the average person watching, It went from I'm watching somebody on stage and I'm only half paying attention because it's kind of slow and whatever to like a really engaging video that you can like stick with because it has that faster pace. Interesting. I didn't think about that, but that makes sense for a couple of reasons that are coming to me now, which is one. I feel like they've been a little shorter too. Is that right? Usually they're like a two hour thing now.

It's like a one hour thing. Maybe not even. But also there's no applause. Yes. So there's no like applause break time for us to write that one last thing or tweet that one last picture. they're just flying through Apple Campus to the next thing and we're here. So, yeah, that's another thing. It's like they're just on this clip.

But I'd appreciate that as a viewer. Like, I don't need that downtime. Well, and also the applause are always like, uh, like this is, it's not real. It's kind of real, but not real.

The worst company for fake applause for me was always, that's not fake. It's genuine. Like T-Mobile would hold these like uncarrier events. Oh, really? They'd invite like, I don't know, 50 press and 300 of their retail employees. Welcome to the loud and proud T-Mobile front line here.

And let me just see if there's any T-Mobile people here. Like, it's great. If you're just working at a T-Mobile store and, like, John Ledger shows up and hands you a free trip to San Francisco to go watch a tech event and cheer, like, that is awesome. I'm excited for you. I'm excited for when you're clapping. But to have, like, a two-minute applause break for, like, the latest iteration of the

Netflix bundle, it's just like, come on. Yeah, it's a different scale with everyone. You know, Apple has their people in the front row. Samsung has their people in the front row. And I've noticed in a different way every time, but that's a pretty extreme ratio. 300 to 30? Yeah, it was wild, man. Wow.

So, okay, as long as we're talking about things changing because of the pandemic, when we first went into lockdown, I was like, oh, man, how am I going to make videos? I'm not great with the camera myself. I'm lucky to have a whole verge video team. So we got to this point where I would shoot some and that I would hand the device off to somebody to shoot B-roll and go back and forth. and we've been iterating the way we make videos over time. And now we're at the point where, like, we'll sometimes meet in person when it makes sense to, like, shoot some stuff. How is your video production change from, like, the very beginning of lockdown when we weren't really sure?

Like, I was afraid of my doorknob, right, to, like, where you are now. Yeah, I think it felt actually kind of like a little bit of a throwback. I have always been behind the camera. And for, you know, maybe the first six, seven years of what I was doing, it was just me, just me editing. just me behind the camera, just me in front of the camera, just me focusing. So over the last couple years, we've built a team at a studio, and we've had a much more involved team process. And when we quickly had this whole lockdown thing where it's like, I have guys who are not

from this state, you know, everyone stopped traveling, everyone stopped coming to the studio. It was just me, like alone in this building with a camera again. And it kind of felt, yeah, like a little throwbacky of just like the videos are a little simpler. They're a little less flashy or animated. and there's not as many robot shots, but I'm just back to focusing on the tech a little more. Yeah. And that was fun.

Yeah, we're slowly getting back to the full studio process now. We still have someone out in San Francisco who is not able to travel still. I mean, he's able to, but we're trying to be safe about it. So we're slowly bringing it back. But yeah, that was the initial reaction was like, oh, yeah, this is how it was in 2009. The robot thing. Can you, I don't know if people understand, like, having the robot attached to the camera,

We've done it a couple times. We're nowhere near at your level with it. But why is lockdown mean that you have fewer robot shots? Because in my head, it's like, oh, it's a robot. You should just be able to have it do it. You don't need multiple people for that. Yeah. Okay.

So for those who haven't imagined this, imagine one of those machine arms that might like pick up a door of a car and like put it on the side of a car. And it's like articulating. It can right, right, right, put it on there. Yeah. So one of those, but with a camera plate and a camera attached to it. And there's all these electronics. and we have a FIS, which is Focus, IRIS Zoom, motor control, all attached to a computer.

So the computer is what we'll use to control basically all these keyframes to put it in a timeline with software, and then we have an Xbox controller that can physically move around the robot. Okay. So when we do a robot shot, it's one person on the Xbox controller moving the robot, and then one person on the timeline who is marking the keyframes, and then one person standing in the shot or moving the props around as the robot moves. So that's at least three people to sort of safely pace out what's going to happen with this few seconds of camera movement. Yeah.

So for me to do all of that by myself, I think would be impossible. I'd have to have the Xbox controller in my hand and stand in the shot, but also have a view of the camera. It's a lot. Way too much. We kind of chilled on those for a couple months while we didn't have the team. Yeah, we've chilled on that. I mentioned this before, but our big thing now is we're trying to get multiple devices and then we can send them out to multiple people and that'll help. But we can't do that.

Like, I'll shoot for a while, and then I'll drive out and meet Viren in San Francisco, and then we'll shoot together, and then I'll hand him to the device, and then, you know, I'll wipe it down, hand him the device. He'll shoot for a while, and then I'll go meet him again. And, like, we're just, it's like, a thing that used to take one or two days now takes three. And it's annoying because, like, I lose a bunch of time with the phone, and I also have to, but it's nice because I get to go out of the house because I have to drive to go, you know, drop the phone off and pick it up again.

Actually, while we're talking about producing stuff, can I just, can you tell me a little bit about what this David Blaine balloon thing was like? Oh, man. That was surreal. That breathtaking stunt by illusionist David Blaine soaring over four miles above the Arizona desert while holding on to 52 giant helium-filled balloons. Wow. All right, David, welcome back to Earth. Thank you. From the ground, that seemed like it went about as well as it could have gone.

but I used to. Yeah, it went beyond, but I could have imagined. They wanted you to come host it. Like, what was that like? It's like behind the scenes. Okay, so this is a totally honest behind the scenes of how it very, very first started. Okay. Is I get an email saying, David Blaine wants your phone number.

Can I give it to him? I'm like, David Blaine wants my, uh, okay, sure. Yeah. I gave them my phone number. I get a text from David Blaine. The first text is, have you ever jumped out of a plane? The first text. What? David Blaine? What? No. So this whole project evolved from, if you haven't seen it, it's him going up in a bunch of balloons up into the sky. We did it in Arizona. Initially, that was scheduled to try to happen in New York City. Oh, I didn't know that. That's crazy.

Yeah, so that would have been a lot harder to do it in the busiest airspace in the world. But we both have a connection at the Liberty Science Center, and he would have taken off from New Jersey, flown over the river and over the city. And that would have been cool. But naturally, COVID and the whole weather thing, there's a hurricane actually that came up the coast at that time. Moved it to the West Coast. But, yeah, I was out there for a couple of days. It was a kind of middle of nowhere shoot, Page, Arizona. Beautiful town, but absolutely nothing there.

Yeah, yeah. Which made it ideal for, you know, not much wind. And, you know, this really crazy live streamed YouTube Originals project where David Blaine floats five miles into the sky with some video gear on. It was pretty sick. Yeah, it was really. And just like him talking to his kid and the, like the drama at the end where he couldn't go to his original landing zone, it was like way more compelling than I expected it to be.

I was like, oh, well, I mean, this is just physics. There's going to be, he'll have a parachute. but they added just enough sort of like, I know, the logistics of like, what are you going to attach to where and what are you going to hold on to and how is it going to work? Like, you couldn't look away.

It was really well done. Right. And yeah, just when I was watching, I first got there behind the scenes they'd been set up for a few days, but I literally came like into the aircraft hangar and David was like 12 feet off the ground but like had this rig on him

and he was like hovering, remembering the steps of like how to put the parachute. shoot on properly so that he didn't slip. And, you know, it's just walking in and seeing that was like such a tone setter for like what I was about to witness for the whole couple days. And that's actually when I had to get my fold two shipped out there instead of here. Yeah, I remember that. You were like, I'm out here.

You'll see why. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was a whole exercise. But we ended up crazy enough making that work. All right. So we should wrap up on Samsung just a little bit. So we've already established that there's this new. I don't know.

We've got to come up with a name, mid-tier. Mid-mid, middle-naceness. Middle-naceness. Middle-nicest range. There's the S-20F-E. I would say like the one-plus, like, eight, or at least the eight pro are like sort of in there. And we know that there's rumors that more come in. And then the pixel is trying to live in that zone.

And I think probably, I mean, the iPhone 11 and presumably the 12 is in that zone. That seems like it's the most interesting zone right now. Like the high-end stuff, like it's iterative changes on. camera stuff and the screens fold. But like the action is what parts of the Taco Bell menu of ingredients are you going to put in your $700 phone now? Yeah. And actually, I really like the way Dave 2D framed his video about the Pixel 5 initially, which was when your middle nice phone is your middle phone. It often doesn't get the full nice treatment. Yeah. These are like super simple words. Yeah. But Pixel 5 is Google's absolute best phone. It's going to be there essentially flagship.

and so in this middle-nice price tier, they're going to put as much as they possibly can, and that's an advantage for it. So we're going to see stuff like that. We're going to see different choices companies make to either protect their higher-end phones or try to separate themselves from other phones in that price. So, yeah, I agree.

It is the hottest new price tier, middle-nice. Yeah, middle-nice. I like it. And I guess maybe to wrap up, reviewing this mini-Samsong phones in particular, like it gets tough, right? Because, like, they're all kind of samey. The software doesn't change that much.

So it gets a little bit tiring. You've got to come up with something new to say. But looking forward, we're going to have a lot more of these middle-nice phones. We're going to have, I don't know, maybe folding phones will come down in price. Is there anything that we think we should be paying more attention to as we're reviewing next year's phones? That is like the big trend that's next. To me, it's paying more attention to that middle-nice tier and paying more attention to the things that people actually care about and the things that actually should be there and that it's okay to not have, you know, the nice thing at the high end.

I'm curious if there's something that you're, like, going to be trying to do more in your reviews. Yeah, I think, so the way I kind of see it is we've always seen smartphones as like maturing. Like, you know, they're not getting crazy different from year after year. Yeah. Like they plateaued is like the line, right? Right. But I actually think now that we're seeing all this competition and all these different options at this middle nice price, I think that's another version of it maturing. And I actually want to pay more attention.

We called it folding phones, but it's more of just like this alternate form factor transforming. Is that the word? Transforming. Like we have the LGWing. We have the dual screen phones. We have the folding screens. And I think there will be way more exploration in that, whether it's flipping or folding out or 360 hinges. I can't wait to see second generations of some of these things.

So, yeah, I think just paying attention to what actually is a good idea instead of just looks cool. in those alternate form factors is going to be one end of it. And I think paying attention to what boxes you can check in this middle-nice tier of really where most of the volume is going to be is the other end of it. Yeah, no, I think that's totally right. I'm really excited to see the second generation of the Surface duo that hopefully will be good. And I think it's also going to be really important in all of those new form factors to pay attention to software, to pay attention to how do they handle software support.

will Google and Android be good enough to support all these different things? Will there be enough apps that do interesting things and all these form factors? Because it's easy to say this is a good idea and I could see the potential. But until that turns into something you can actually tell people that they will be able to use, it's just another example of don't buy something now based on a promise of a future software update, right? Yeah, potential doesn't, it's not useful. Yeah. Potential is awesome, but it's not useful to when you're actually buying something.

Right. So you can have as much potential as you want, but turning that potential into real use for people is going to be the key to actually making this stuff work. Yeah. Cool. Hey, Ben, thank you so much for joining. Good luck with all of the reviews that you're working on or going to have to be working on. Where can people find you on the internet if they want to go watch your stuff? Sure.

Well, thanks for having me. So the five letters, MKBHD is usually where you can find me anywhere. YouTube, Twitter, TikTok now. Oh, yeah, great. So, yeah, we're all out there. MKBHD if you want to look at it. All right, that was a great conversation. My thanks to Marquez for coming on. And we were going to end the run here, but we're going to keep it going by popular demand. A lot of you've been sending feedback. I love to hear it. Please send me more. I'm at Backlon on Twitter. You can also just email me. I'm Dieter at the Verge. Let me know what you think of these shows. We're just going to do a few more of them. Obviously, there's a big Apple event that's happening, the day that we're releasing this thing. There's still pixels out in the world. There's a lot more reviews coming, and so I think we want to keep talking about them. So stay tuned for a few more of these special Tuesday episodes. The Vergecast is produced by Andrew Marino and Sophie Erickson.

We'll be back again on Friday with the chat show, and then another one of these episodes after that. Thanks for listening.