The Vergecast - Samsung announces the Galaxy S23 and the Galaxy Book3 Ultra

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Richard Lawler, Allison Johnson, and Monica Chin discuss the announcements from Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event. Further reading: Samsung’s S23 and S23 Plus look a little more Ultra  The Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra is a minor update to a spec monster Where’s the Galaxy S23’s satellite connectivity, Samsung? Samsung Galaxy S23 vs. S23 Plus vs. S23 Ultra: spec comparison  The Galaxy Book3 Ultra is Samsung’s shot at the MacBook Pro   Samsung’s Galaxy Book3 gets new chips and a big display upgrade  Anker launches cheaper USB-C fast charging options for Samsung Galaxy phones  Where’s the Galaxy S23’s satellite connectivity, Samsung? Apple’s iPhone 14 Pro supply problems sank its holiday revenues Apple won’t name a new head of hardware design Anker finally comes clean about its Eufy security cameras Mark Zuckerberg says Meta is making this the ‘year of efficiency’ White House goes after app store ‘gatekeepers’ Apple and Google Apple and Google face mounting pressure to remove TikTok from app stores Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the Vergecast, Allison Johnson and Monica Chin join us. We'll get into everything from Samsung Galaxy Unpacked, and of course all the big tech news this week. That's coming up right after this. 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. Prompt 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 Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-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 Bridgecast, the flagship podcast of loading your dishwasher. Liam, he won't do it. Our producer Liam just told us this is a true story that he could spend a full hour talking about how to load a dishwasher the right way.

Now he's rolled. he's like rolling farther and farther away from his microphone. If we ever watch a subscription tier of this podcast, it's just going to be dishwasher tips. I'm here for it. It's going to be amazing. We have a lot to talk about today. There's apparently a difference between modern dishwashers and older dishwashers.

And drying aid is a thing. Drying aid is a thing. It's a blue liquid. The only thing I know is that everyone has their own way of loading a dishwasher. If you are ever going to have a roommate or a partner, make sure that you see how they load a dishwasher first, because I guarantee you won't like it. Liam's way is the only right way.

Yeah, obviously. It's true. People say you should talk about money before I get married. You should sit down and be like, all right, here's a picture of a dishwasher. I want you to just start free associating and let's see if this is going to work. By the way, new dishwashers have two propellers, old ones, only have one, which Liam says changes your whole strategy. He's now turned his back. No, and I was looking at me.

If you haven't cattered your propellers, what are you even doing? Yeah. What kind of homeowner are you? All right. Cranz is on vacation, but we have an all-star lineup here. I'm your friend, Nelai. Allison Johnson's here. Hey, Allison. Hello.

Monica Chin. Hey, I'm coming to you live for my very own camera. It's good. We got some notes that turning on the cameras again, it just alters our vibe. I agree. Which we know. And now Monica's like, it is because now I have my own camera. Richard Luller's here.

No invidia effects. Yeah, what are you doing, man? They said it was illegal. We didn't give the people the effects last week. We had some technical difficulties. Here's what I'd like you to do. Just turn them on randomly throughout the show. And we'll see if people can notice.

We'll try and guess. Yeah, we'll try and guess if you're looking directly at the camera or it's AI power GPU software. That is my eyes. I guarantee this. None of this has been AI enhanced or written by chat GPT. Actually, can we get like a chat GPT version of me to host this show? Because that would be great. Everyone knows my job.

At this point, there's enough training material for chat. GPD. It's like he's going to bitch about Atmos and then probably complain about the government. And that's the whole show. What's Comcast doing this week? H. GMI 2.1 will come up. All right. There is a lot of news this week. There's Samsung Galaxy unpacked 2023. There's new laptops. There's the new S23 and S23 Ultra. There is some news about the government. The government remains hopelessly confused about the tech industry. And it's earnings. Richard and the news team have been deep in earning season.

We had alphabet earnings, meta earnings. Mark Zuckerberg said the word efficiency on the meta earnings call. 5,000 times in a row. He went from the metaverse to efficiency. So I would say things are going strangely at meta. All this stuff to talk about. Let's start with the most important news out of Samsung Galaxy Impact 2020, which was an announcement, and I think that we all agree that this is most important news.

mixed reality partnership between Google, Qualcomm, and Samsung. It's a lot of companies. It's a lot of companies. They announced it's the quote was it's more of a declarative announcement that they will work together on mixed reality in the future. But they would like you to be aware that at some point something will happen. We're aware. I mean, this was like a big deal. Like the middle of the event, Alice, and you were in the room, they like stopped the show.

They brought on the executive. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was a full, like, Academy Awards moment, you know, like close-ups of executives. And then they came on stage and they're like hugging and it accepted speeches. It was so strange. And then like it just instantly brought the vibe down. And you could just feel like everyone was suddenly like very confused and bored. And then T.M.Row was like, that's it. We're done. Yeah, they're like, we don't have any real plans. I was just going to read you some of these quotes. Each player is taking a leadership in each category, and then we'll be working very closely together across the different categories. Like, if I'm Apple and I'm working on my headset, I'm like shaking in my boots. I'm like, get to work, you guys.

How is it even possible that they could have so little to announce? I mean, like, meta makes a headset that runs on some variation of Android, right? Yeah. Samsung makes the displays that are in. The Quest 2, at its basic level, is a mid-range Android phone you put on your face. Like, that's what it is. It has a Qualcomm chip. It has an OLED display.

They're just like, I don't know, some lenses. It's just like bolt this thing to your face. This is the future of all reality. And it works. It's very convincing. But that's like what it is. And Google has been working on mixed reality hardware for years. They should be able to fake something, right?

They should be able to just make something up and have like a shadowy box on stage and say, I mean, rip to the cardboard. Yeah. We're exhumel. Google's Kori Miyaki, when asked for comment added, we're excited to work with our partners to build a new generation of immersive computing experiences that will further elevate what users can do with Google. This really sounds like chat GPT wrote it. If you were like, chat GPT, write an announcement. So here's what we're. Just add announcement in general. Here's like, here are the three players in the Android ecosystem. Get them on stage together. Helvating what you can do with Google. It's like, here's a bad.

So the reason I bring this up first is one, it's hilarious, just like fundamentally hilarious that they announced nothing. It's good. It's, I mean. So now it's that they're all friends. It's, yeah, we're just like that. That was the vibe. But two, this was Samsung's first unpacked in person in a long time. And like, I feel like this is a marker of a return to in person events.

Because if you were not in person and you're like, okay, here's what you're going to put out press release and we're going to make a video. Like, you would get to the stage where you like hired a video. crew to be like, make a video. And the video crew would be like, what is the video about? And then you would not do this. You would stop. But you're in person. You're like, all right, we got everybody together.

Like the Google executive is going to be here. The Qualcomm, let's just get him on stage. Right. It's just like a couple minutes. Throw them up there. Be like, we love each other. We got something coming. Watch out meta.

And then bail. And that's more or less exactly what happened. Yeah. That was like, that's the show. Everyone's looking for the moment that they think the pandemic was over. I'm telling you, it's this kind of nonsense tech company announcement that, like, it didn't, it didn't happen in the pandemic because you couldn't, you couldn't take the next step. Someone would have been like, no, let's not. Let's condense this a little bit, the producer in the back.

Yeah. Like, like the grammar checker in Microsoft Word is like, this is too many extra words. Just like, get rid of these. All right. So that's that announcement. I'm confident that Apple's reality OS team is panicking. right now at the future mixed reality efforts from Google, Qualcomm, and Samsung. But there was actual news, some really good stuff.

I would say, I mean, I've got the two of you here, the laptops, perhaps more interesting than the phones? Yeah, I think that's fair. That rarely happens. This is my moment. Yeah, this is shine. You got your own camera, kid. Let's get out there.

Let's start with the laptops, Monica. a book three ultra, it looks like a MacBook Pro, but Samsung's pushing it this year with this stuff. Samsung's pushing it. So there are five new models, which, you know, everyone was a little overwhelmed

when they saw there were five until I explained to them that four of them are very boring and really only one of them we care about. So there are two Galaxy Books Pro and there are two Galaxy Books Pro 360, and then there's a Galaxy Book

Ultra, which is like this whole other thing. It starts at 2390. It has an RTX 3050 or RTX 3070 GPU. It can have a Core I7 or a Core I9 or 13th Gen Intel H series. They have 2880 by 1800, 120 Hertz, OLED displays. It looks a lot like it's trying to beat the MacBook Pro. It is $100 cheaper for the base model, which if you're shopping at that price point, it's not that much cheaper.

It's a pretty similar price. It's hard to say that it's targeting the exact same audience because a big part of this Samsung laptops appeal is that it's for Samsung people who really like Samsung and it has all these things with the Samsung phone. But it seems a little bit like it's trying to do the same thing that you see on the Apple side where they have all these different ways of the phone interacts with it. They have like Samsung apps in Windows, similarly to how their like iOS icons right now on my MacBook screen.

Wait, what iOS icons are on your MacBook screen? Well, like, you know, they have consistently been making the icons more. like the iOS counterparts over the past few releases. You're not one of like the few people running iOS apps. No, God, no. Hoof, let's clear that up right away. Yeah, so they, for the past few years, the Galaxy Book line has been this really like lightweight line.

Like they're super, super light. They have really nice screens. And those are sort of like the two things about them. Like they're really light. They have really nice screens. They're kind of like, I guess the best use case I'm usually able to like cobble together is like you really want to watch Netflix on the train. It's been like that kind of thing.

This is the first one we've seen in a couple years that really is like, hey, instead of buying the MacBook, maybe you should buy this. Now I have no idea how that's going to go. But the Galaxy Book 3 Ultra seems like it's sort of a play for that category. So last week we were talking about the MacBook Pros with M2 Pro Chips. I believe you made this comparison and then you immediately apologized for making the comparison. The GPU performance was like a 30-60. Yeah.

70. 37. Of the max. On the max. So the M2 Max GPU performance, bad direct comparison, but rough analog 3070. Yeah. This is an actual RTX 4070. 4070 or 4050, yeah.

And we don't know how much the 4070 model is going to cost. We don't know how well it's going to perform. There are a ton of things we don't know. In particular, we don't know how good the battery life is going to be. And that is a big question mark, both because of the chips and because the display resolution, which is high, because Intel doesn't have, like, the greatest track record with having great battery life in the past year because Windows machines with discrete GPUs really don't have good track records with having any kind of battery life whatsoever. Or any kind of thermal management.

Or any kind of thermal management. We have had some horror stories this past year of laptops that have done discrete GPUs and done each series processors and tried to be thin and have just like been blazing fireballs that died after two hours. So, you know, will this be able to overcome that? we'll have to see. I hope they can. Am I super optimistic at the outset? No, I'm curious. I think it's ambitious what they're doing. But I'm, you know, I'm interested to see whether they can pull it off. So one of the things that is kind of interesting about Samsung right now is they don't really own an operating system. Like there's ties in, which runs on washing machines and televisions. Right. That's great. Dishwashers, I'm sure, Liam. Liam, do you have any opinions on

dishwasher operating systems? Dishwasher Tysen. Just middling. Ambivalent on dishwasher operating systems. But, you know, they don't own Android and they've skinned Android to hell and back to Google's chagreate. It was actually, this is the first Samsung event in a long time

where they actually made reference to Google existing in any direct way. Like, putting them on station, like, here's a big answer. It's one thing. Even just mentioning that they exist is not normal for Samsung, right? Yeah, that was, it was unusual. I mean, I saw Deeter. I was like, what are you doing here? An agent, a spy.

Google spy. Like, recone. Yeah. But they, you know, they don't own Windows, obviously. Do we have like an analog to Deeter in Microsoft? Don't answer that question. But they are building this connectivity between those two by heavily skinny and modifying these operating systems.

Is it worthwhile? Yeah, I mean, I was at one of the things that surprised me was how easy this stuff was to set up. Like, because I assume, like, sometimes when you have to set up, like, fancy Windows stuff, it takes, it's just this whole thing. You have to open up, you have to download all the stuff. You have to, like, open up 17 different things. It doesn't work the first time, and it crashes.

And that I've had that experience many times setting up different connectivity features, for example, Razor. This actually worked very well. We set up the QuickShare feature, which allows you to, like, drag files from the, computer to the tablet or to the Galaxy phone. We set up second screen, which lets you use the Galaxy tab as like an external monitor next to it, which like is kind of slow but works. And it was all like a one-click thing and it worked pretty well.

It seems like something that could be useful. Like if you're a real like Samsung nerd who has all the Samsung stuff, which like I know some people like that. And I think it's, I think it could be beneficial. It seems like something could be handy. and it doesn't seem like it would be too much of a pain, which is a really nice thing to be saying about, like, a Windows laptop using third-party software to try to do fancy things.

That's, like, a refreshing thing to say. We got an email from our reader over the weekend, and it had the word Bixby in it, and I was like expecting to get a note. Every now again, we get a note from somebody who loves Bixby, but instead the note was about somebody who had gone to their local animal hospital, and a dog named Bixby had come to the animal hospital. And that's as much success as Bixby has ever had was going to the hospital.

That's the most favorable email that's ever been sent about Bixby to. And I thank you for that email. And if you ever run into dogs names Bixby, please let us know. It's very important to me personally. But that kind of like cross-layer combined the phone and the laptop, that's what Samsung needs to compete with Apple. I think so. And I think there's also, it's a similar.

sort of philosophy to what I think Apple has been pursuing over the past couple years with various releases of macOS where it's not only, it's been trying to make it just look more like iOS, not only in the way you use it, but just like in the way it looks. I think even the expense of some like functionality to some extent, like where they put the control center now and like how the settings now look like the iOS settings and not how like system permits is used to look. And I think you see this a little bit on these Samsung laptops the way that they like lay out the task bar and the way that some of the UI in these Samsung apps look.

Like, it looks to me as close as, like, it could to using a Galaxy phone as a computer. Like, it kind of feels like you're just putting the Galaxy stuff and blowing it up on a bigger screen, which, like, you know, if you're a person who's really used the Samsung interface, maybe that's a thing. Like, on the other hand, I hear from Samsung, people who use Samsung phones all the time that often, like, the Samsung apps are not the number one thing about them. which is like not, which is a little different from using Apple

where like those, a lot of those apps I use all the time. Well, because Apple prohibits you from using any other. Right. Or at your Windows person, is this laptop calling your name? This is,

it's interesting. It's, as you said, it looks like a MacBook. My main question is, I'm looking at the hardware. It's got the OLED. This is a touchscreen,

of course, right? Or at least you can't get it with the touchscreen? Ultra, I don't think is. Oh, it's not. Well, you, I look at it and I wonder if, If you're Apple and you're looking at Samsung's laptop that they've put together, they've put together this OLED screen.

It's got this, you know, best in class sort of GPU CPU power. Is this why we're looking at a 2025-ish MacBook Pro that's going to have at least some of these things? And we presume probably more GPU power and OLED screen. Is that part of why they're inspired to change? Maybe they're looking at this and seeing that some people might switch. I don't think most people would switch from Mac to Windows. Once you've made your choice, you're in there.

But you start to look at these things. people see that OLED screen and think, actually, that's a little better than the laptop I have. Yeah, that's interesting. I, my sense is that Apple's a big advantage of what, um, of like what the new MacBook Pro 16 brings, like is the combination of power and efficiency that it has. Like, it's not just that it's super powerful because like we know we're going to have laptops and possibly including this one next year that like are very competitive with it on power. But currently this laptop is bring, this Mac. laptop, it's like bringing efficiency that just like no one else is bringing. And those two things

in combination are what really make it stand out, not like one of those things or the other. And I think the, I just don't know about the efficiency on the Galaxy book. I think a big advantage that the Galaxy book does have over the MacBook is that it's a lot more portable. It's like it's around a pound lighter, I think, than the M2 Max MacBook. And it's a little bit less than a pound lighter than the M2 Pro MacBook. But it's a lot, I would much rather have it in my backpack than have like this chunky thing in my backpack. But then you have to take a battery with you. Right. So that's the question, though, is how much is the portability that the Galaxy Book has, like, mitigated by the fact that it might have no battery and therefore, like,

what's the point of bringing it anywhere? And that is something that I think, you know, if I were Apple right now, I would want to know how well it's doing there before I know whether to be scared, because I do think that that is a big advantage that potentially Samsung could eat into, but I don't know if it's going to, I'm not optimistic that it's necessarily going to do that on that front. Yeah, I think so. The potential appeal of this laptop is a bit limited by kind of everything I know about Windows laptops in general. So that's a downside. But it does have an Nvidia chip in it so you can run Nvidia's eye tracking software.

That's true. On it directly, which is critical. He hasn't turned it on yet. I'm so, I'm going to get you a turn out by the end of the show. There's more laptops. There's just the regular Galaxy books. What's going on there? So these are basically chip bumps.

So these are more of the, we've reviewed a bunch of these before. they are the Galaxy Book Pro and the Galaxy of Pro 360. The Galaxy Book Pro 360 is, they are kind of some of the few, like 15-inch convertibles that are left on the market. There are some of them, but convertibles in general have gotten, like, a lot, there have been a lot fewer of those released in recent years. And we're seeing more people go for the sort of Surface Pro-esque form factor with their quote-unquote convertible options instead.

And when I ask companies about that, they all just say, like, oh, like, no one's buying convertibles. Oh, no one puts their computer in TP mode? Yeah, no one wants to have it as a, tents in their kitchen while they're cooking or whatever they put in the video advertisements. Tent mode. Tent mode. Please don't cancel me for it. There used to be a Dell Xbox. BS 15 convertible. There's not that in the same form factor anymore. There used to be, there used to be a bunch of convertible think pads that are now just clam shells.

Those are not totally gone, but totally falling out of fashion. This is still the Galaxy Pro 360, like, one option you might go for if you're one of the, like, 12 people who, like, really wants, like, a big screen thing that can flip around into a tent. that's for you. So you're going to find it. That's what Samsung is for, though, is like very hyper-specific niche products. They have S-Pen support, which is, I think, pretty crucial if you have a convertible, like you want to be able to write on it.

And otherwise, I think the big upgrade here in addition to the processor is that the screens have gotten a lot better. So one of the things that I didn't like about the Galaxy Book lines of last year and the year before was that they, like, very stubbornly stuck to the 16 by 9 screen. And, like, Samsung's like a. company that's known for making good displays. Like, the displays should be, like, a huge draw of these panels. And, like, before they just weren't because they were Ph.D, they were 16 by 9.

So they've gotten a huge upgrade here. They have the 120 hertz. They're calling it 3K, but it's 2080 to 1,800. There's no three in there. And it, so these are going to be there screens. Can you think there's any other odd numbered Ks? There's not, yeah, 1K. If you're going to make up a K, that's fine.

All right, 5K. But there's only one product that has ever been 5K. Like an odd number K means you're off on your own. You're just like off in the technology. Here, there be dragons. It's like, I got a 5K display. It's like, yeah, you made a weird choice. Yeah, so these are quote unquote, 3K displays.

A lot of Ks, three whole Ks. But they look very nice. And I think previously it was sort of hard to figure out like where these might stand out, like what their niche might be. The big thing was that they were super light. There's like now one more thing to like make them stand out a little bit more, which is that they have the super nice screen. Whether this will make these into MacBook competitors, I cannot say.

Is that just like always the frame? Because Richard's point that people don't switch back and forth. It's like more or less been true for 30 years. Sure. Right? I think, I mean, I think that a question I get from people a lot is like, I would buy the MacBook air, but I'm like not an out person. what's the MacBook Air Alternative?

And I think that's currently kind of a power vacuum. Like there are lots of different models that could vie for that MacBook Air Alternative spot. We didn't have a decisive one last year. I said it was probably a Zen book, but like it was so hard to get AMD powered things last year that it was hard to recommend like this is one you could get that you could definitely buy. I think these are probably going for that Air Pro alternative slot.

They're super, super light. They're really portable. Generally, they have pretty good battery life, which is like a big thing. that was lacking in a lot of models last year that we really look for when naming that contender. So whether these will be the best one, let's see, they are usually pretty good, but they're also, because they're so niche,

because they're really the thing about them is they're super light and they have good displays, and that's not like, that doesn't necessarily lend itself to a big mainstream demographic that I'd broadly recommend it for. So we'll see, we'll hope to review these, but I think that Samsung is,

by making these big display improvements, is kind of trying to improve in the place that they, as Samsung, are best able to improve them. And I think that's probably... Because they're stuck, right? They're stuck with Intel's chips and Intel is having like a disaster run. Yeah. And he doesn't have supply. Like, well, they're like, all right, screens.

We own the screen factory. We'll do screens. Yeah, it's that. And the big thing they're pushing is the added continuity features, which is sort of the other thing that they are best able to control. The Bixby layer. The Bix. The Bixby experience. Like there's all these, the press release was like 75%.

Like here are all the ways you can use this with your Samsung phone, which you could already do last year. We're just going to repeat them. And then the last paragraph was like, and also their new display. There's a laptop connection. Actually, let's talk about Intel just broadly for one minute. These are launching into a market that basically has seen all the upgrades that are going to happen. All happen last year instead.

This just seems like the weirdest time to do laptops, right? It's a weird time. Apple's M2 chips are really, really good. Everyone else is really trying to make chips that are that good. We don't know what's going on with AMD's supply. We hope it'll have supply. We don't know. We hope Intel will fix its battery life.

We hope Intel will fix its company. We hope until we'll fix its company. There's lots of things we hope. I think within the next month or so, we'll have some answers. I hope so. But right now, it's a lot of crossed fingers that people can figure stuff out. When do we expect to get these in for reviews? I would hope the Ultra, they have not given us a release date, but I would hope it'll be soon.

I keep asking them. Before or after the vaporware mixed reality headset. Who can say? I can't get over it. All right, we've got to take a break. We'll come back and talk about the S23, S23 Plus S23 Ultra. Are there more S23s, Allison? That's it.

That's it. All right. At least three S23s. We'll see if Samsung announces another one while we take this for hands. We'll be right back. 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. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated AB testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one.

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Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. All right, we're back. Allison, and Curst me we have not really talked about this event, really. Their first in-person event in a long time. You were there. What was the vibe? It was, I mean, it was full on.

There was, you know, the lights, the stage. It was a pretty big venue, the Masonic, auditorium, which had a bunch of QR codes that said, like, understand more about free masonry. And that kind of weirded me how I did not scan any of those. Stand here for the Illuminati. It's good. Yeah. I avoided that. No, it was really kind of high energy, really high production. It felt, and I haven't been to a Samsung event in the past, but, you know, Apple was pretty subdued. and Google, Pixel was like very small and subdued.

And this was like, we're going all out. Samsung. Yeah. So. Did they have any Broadway dancers? There were no dancing. Oh, no. There was a time when, like, Samsung would be like full on.

Like, here's a cast of Billy Elliott. They're going to dance about phones. Like, truly some of the strangest events in my entire life occurred. Yeah. Okay. Maybe it was restrained then because this is like Samsung warming up to. They didn't have doors flying off their hinges at people. in the video.

Yeah. Like Apple has a vibe because they do their events on their campus. And like, you know, they play the, the new age music as you're walking up to the thing. Like every Apple event immediately starts with the energy of you might be raptured. Right.

And like you can't touch it. Like the whole place is basically a museum. You're like not a lot. Like it's just, there's an energy to an Apple event that's a very specific. Google is like, I don't know, should we be quirky goofballs or not like,

you know, like you're in our house. And then Samsung is, always just been like glitz, like, pure glitz, like Vegas occurs with Samsung. So it's good to see they're all kind of like returning to form. Yeah. In their way? I think so. Yeah, this was, this was a full, full on deal. And, um, and they started right off with the, the ultra and stuck with that for a long time. Like, I was even like, wow, okay, I've heard a lot about the S-23 at this point.

They got so deep into the camera stuff. I was really surprised. I made the mistake of writing in an article that was on the verge.com. They will not say the words full well capacity on stage. I was like, you know, there's cool things happening with smartphone cameras, but they're just, they're boring. Like, you can't put them in a presentation. And they friggin said full well capacity.

They read your piece. Gosh. I was like. There's a guy scrolling off stage. Yeah. He said, get this in here on the prompter. She'll really hate it. Okay, let's talk with this camera.

They said nitography again. It's a 200 megapixel camera. It uses all of those pixels in different configurations based on lighting, from what I understand, or ambient light conditions. What's going on here? So, yeah, that really is, there really is the big story of all three of these devices. It's only the S23 Ultra that has this 200 megapixel camera. But it's really interesting. There's other improvements in a camera system.

There's like the optical image stabilization is supposedly a little better. There's a new selfie camera. All those little like tweaks and things they do every year. But the new sensor is really interesting because like you don't need 200 megapixels. Like nobody needs 200 megapixels. But that's not really the point. It's like you said, it's doing pixel binning in kind of different configurations. It can do, you know, four by four or 16 pixels, you know, all grouped together to give you, like, the imitation of a bigger pixel and in low light conditions.

So better light sensitivity, better photos in theory. I'm going to check it out. I took one, 200 megapixel photos so far and it's a lot of pixels. You have to explain what full well capacity means at this point of time. We're all the way here. You started there. You got to close, you got to finish it out. So the thing is like the pixels are so tiny on this thing.

It's like 0.6 micrometers. When the pixels are so small, it's, there's just a level at which they like can't capture any more light. They just, they're like done full. And you get, you get oversaturation like looming and ugly stuff in your photos. They figured out a way to do some magic that I don't. don't really understand and increase the capacity, the full well capacity of the individual pixels. So that's everything I know about full well capacity. So they spend a lot of time on the camera.

And it's not just it's better low light performance or less noisy performance, right? They're trying to do a lot of additional things with the sensor. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, I guess, dynamically, you know, changing between, you know, you're always going to get a 12 megapixel image when you're in 12 megapixel mode. But behind the scenes, it's doing some different things with those pixels and binning or using more of them if you're in good light.

Yeah, just kind of cranking up the computational photography, just that extra notch. And there's just there's other stuff that's really interesting. It's coming out. There's this app you can download called camera assistant. And it gets like really granular in this. stuff that it gives you a bunch more controls on the camera. It's, I believe, for S-23 and the S-22 series, but you can, like, you can override when it would switch from, like, if you're using the telephoto lens in low light, it would typically switch to the main camera and just

digital zoom because it's not enough light. You can override that. You can be like, no, I want you to stick with the telephoto all the time. It's, like, maybe a bad choice, but you can do that. Bigspeed now lets you make bad choices. It's like, yeah, you're like, can I have another drink? And Bigspey's like, you can. Right.

Should you? We're not going to stop you. Yeah. Like Samsung's vibe. Yeah, they're like, here you go. You want to mess up your pictures? You can do it. That level of control, right?

Samsung has sort of always offered it. Is it, are they making the main camera app simpler? because usually you just like offload that stuff to make the main experience way simpler. Yeah. Yeah. And it is it is like you have to go download it. And then all those settings will appear in the camera app like settings. So yeah, they're trying to keep it like, okay, you don't want to do the deep dive.

You don't want to get it in the weeds. Like you can just use this camera. But it's kind of cool. Is that the big feature of the ultra? Is there anything else going on there? They squared it off a little bit, which looks nice. Oh, yeah, I like it. Maybe I just, I spend too much time, like, holding phones and thinking about them.

I'm like, welcome to the Vurchast. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I'm like, if I, I sound crazy when I try and explain it. I'm like, well, it's like a tiny bit more flat on the sides. And my husband's like, this is probably the one place. But that's a big deal. Because I feel like the only thing I associated these phones with basically, or the big thing I did was like how round they were on the sides.

Yeah. Like super round. It sucks. You're like, and because you're trying to use a pen and it like keeps going over the edge because it's like an infinity pool of screen. So, yeah, the sides are a little more squared off this time. I like it. I think it looks kind of fancy. I like the cream color.

Twitter is yelling me about how they don't like the cream color, but I'll die on that hill. I mean, at this point, Twitter is just like a collection of like Elon and his bots. Like Elon doesn't like cream and like that's Twitter. There's just a whole bunch of bots are. L&M. $1,200 is crazy for this phone. Yeah, which is the same as last year. So at this point, we're like, well, it didn't get more expensive, so that's good.

But you do get a higher storage capacity at the base model. It's $256 now for $11.99. So that's good. But other things I didn't mention, there's across the whole series, there's a new, there's obviously a new Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 processor. it's like technically a very slightly different version that's like special for Samsung. It has just kind of like a higher performance ceiling. No, it has a name.

I'm just going to read the name. The name is Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy. Yeah. It's like similar to Microsoft's like little fancy Microsoft processors. They haven't all their surface. No, no, it's for Microsoft. Yeah. It's like Kwokom was like, if we turn it up a little bit, it's for you.

It's for galaxy. It's special. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. The bigger deal is that they're using it worldwide, right? Yeah. Yeah.

There's no more, you know, some areas get the Snapdragon. Some get the X-N-O-S chip. It's every phone everywhere all at once has the Snapdragon. That's really unusual. Is something going on with X-N-S chip? I guess we don't really get them in the United States. So I've never really known what's going on with X-N-S-chips. Yeah, they show that.

I read foreign publications. They're like, this, dude, and I'm like, great, the speed test. But I can't. use one. It's like illegal to use one here. I think there was like one or two mid-range phones I looked at that they just kind threw the ex andos in. There was really, it was just very quiet.

They're like, oh, yeah. It's got to clear out their closet. Yeah. Yeah, maybe they were lying around. I don't know. They're like, can you make Xenost for Galaxy? And Samsung was like, no. And it's like, but you're me.

X-NOS for me. So it seems like S-23 Ultra on the whole pretty incremental, right? We've seen a pixel-bending camera from Samsung before. It was really good. I think Becca's big camera test last year, she said the S-22 Ultra was her favorite camera. The best in this context is a very subjective thing to say. It was Becca's favorite camera.

Yeah. And Becca's the best camera viewer. So I think you can just close those dots together. But this seems like the next step of a big pixel-bending sensor, not a radical step. Yeah. Yeah. It's all pretty incremental.

And like I do think it's, interesting, like what they had to do to get here, like to get to 200 megapixels and the little tweaks under the hood are interesting. But yeah, at the end of the day, it's like, it is a pixel binning camera. It's got a newer chip. It has like slightly better gorilla glass and the square. It's square. Square, though. That's where we are at phones. Like this black rectangle is squared off on the sides. And no satellite. And no satellite. No satellite. Yeah. Because Samsung cares about things being ready before they put them in their devices. Yeah.

You wouldn't think they would just throw stuff at the wall like that, would you? Samsung and Qualcomm together? No. They never just announced nothing on stage. Why would they do that? The satellite thing is on the whole, I find the Apple commercials about SOS to be extremely weird. You know, and like I get that it works. If you don't have this, you're going to die immediately.

Yeah. Like the one commercial where they're on the mountain and that helicopter comes like, this would be, yes, I'm appreciative that this exists. This is the weirdest commercial to be watching the middle of football. Like, it's just like things get real dark for 30 seconds and you're out. And you're like, oh, you know, I look at my phone. I'm like, one day you'll save my life. Right. It's just weird.

Yeah, S23 Ultra is just going to leave me in the woods. Yeah, you're doomed. It's just going to be done. You know, you can fire off all 200 megapixels. I hope you don't like staying alive, Allison. Yeah. So the satellite stuff is there. I don't think those networks are built out yet.

Even like Apple's network is still pretty low bandwidth. You can see why on a very expensive phone, they're not adding more costs to it until it means something to people, whereas Apple just needed to differentiate it and best we get cart. Like Apple is like, we'll just scare people in the buying phones this year. Like if you're close to death, iPhone, that's weird for them. That's their positioning. Have you looked at God today in the iPhone?

In the middle of football. Can you trust your kids with another phone in an iPhone? The next Apple commercial is Tim Cook being like, if you want to stir death in the face, iOS is free. That's good. It's a very gothicier for Apple. The HomePod comes in black first.

Anyway, Anyway, that's a satellite, whatever. I just want to come back to the camera for one second. It seems like we are at this place where the mainstream is beginning to realize the cameras are really processed and the photos look weird. And maybe the tech industry,

particularly Samsung, was like what people love is insane colors and no contrast. And soon Gen Z will just be like, this is what photos look like. And the answer is everyone realizes that that looks a little too wild. and it has not become sort of a default look.

Are they backing off yet? I really haven't seen it. I think it's just they're sort of like doing like Apple where they just pile on options. They're like, okay, here's our version. You don't like that fine. You can use cool contrast or whatever they're all called. And yeah, I'm sure there's some setting

and some camera assistant menu on the Samsung that will be like, make the blue sky like a little less neon. blue next time. But it's like, yeah, it's sort of on like us to figure that out. And I would kind of like, could you maybe do something? So like I take a picture of a sunset. It doesn't suddenly look like violent purple.

Like that's my basic ask. Yeah, there's just something going on here with these phones where it's the like they've learned just as the TV manufacturers and Best Buy have learned like really bright things win or like. Pepsi learned in the 80s. Pepsi will always win the Pepsi challenge at the theme part because that has more sugar in it. But then you live with it, you know, like, my TV looks bonkers. Like, this is too sweet. And then I think people now with their phones are like, these photos don't look good. Like, I don't love every photo that's coming off of this phone because they're all, they're also noticeably over processed or far from reality.

And it, it just doesn't seem like either one of these companies is willing to blink yet. Like Apple's getting closer to Samsung. And we've talked to that so many times. And every year we're like the phones are getting closer together and in good light they're kind of indistinguishable. But that target of indistinguishable photo is getting weirder and weirder. Yeah. I just still, I take pictures of people with an iPhone and they're orange.

And I'm like, why are we still having this problem? Yeah. I don't know any orange people. Well, I'm just wondering because once you have a 200 megapixel sensor, I mean, the phone's huge, but it's still small, right? And you've got full well capacity that's still teeny tiny.

In order to get any image off of that, like we're well beyond what is a photo and into you might as well type in, make a photo of a sunset and let like the phone, like chat, GBT generate the answer for you. Right?

Like you're so far away from, we're going to open the shutter and close it and show you a reflection of reality. You're fully, there's a computer at the level of even just gathering the light. Yeah, yeah, just the basic mechanics of like photography and making a photo are just like so far behind us. We are well into the future of neon sunsets and I don't see it like coming down anytime soon.

No, my prediction is the next, the Galaxy S24 instead of how many lenses this time in the back? Five, one, two, three, four, five. It will have zero. And it will just be like a mid-jury problem. That's like, I'm with my family. That's what Microsoft and Samsung are working on with their mixed reality. It's chat GPT being the camera. It's just like you tell Biggs me, like, make a photo of my mother. Yeah.

In front of the Grand Canyon. It's like generates that for you. Zero lens cameras. You heard it here on the WordCast first. It's going to be great. I'm looking forward to it. What's going on with the S23 plus and the regular S23? So those were even less interesting, honestly.

they really got just little incremental upgrades. They got the new 4-Galaxy Snapdragon Gen 2 processor. I think maybe the most meaningful thing is that they got slightly bigger batteries. The S-23 is still like relatively small. It's 3,900 milli-amp hours. And then S-23 plus is 4,700. In the battery life and the S-22 phones, I think, was like not great. It wasn't, it wasn't like deal-breaking bad, but you just kind of like, you start to get the like, your palms get kind of clammy by the end of the day when you're like, oh, I'm at 20% or whatever.

So I think a little battery boost could actually be a big, a good thing here. And that's kind of it. They got the new gorilla glass. The S-23 plus got the base model storage upgrade, but the S-23 didn't. No, no change in price, which is good new. I think. It's squares. I don't think those ones are.

No, they had like straighter edges to start with. They already kind of looked like iPhones from 2016, which I secretly really love. So they were already on the right side of history there. We're going to talk about earnings for a bunch of companies in a minute here. Apple just posted their earnings. Google posted its earnings. Samsung is in the same spot of these phones as they are in with laptops

and sort of everybody's in, which is everybody bought their upgrade in the pandemic. And now they're like, I don't need another phone or laptop. And I think particularly for these mid-range phones, like I thought the iPhone 14 plus would be a huge seller because it's a big cheap screen. And it's like, fine, you know?

Like the thing that's selling is the really high end and the sort of mid-range everybody has already upgraded through. Yeah. Do these S-23s, are they just kind of like, well, we got to have something, or are they like actually trying to get people to upgrade? Yeah, I think these are, This is just the current phone on the shelf with the like new for 2023.

It's this one. Yeah. It's like, is it your year to upgrade? Here you go. You know, you don't want last year's model. You want the brand shiny new one. I think like the whole whole kind of launch event and all the like pizzazz and whatever is is more about like kind of convincing you you're in the right ecosystem more than like. Oh, I've got to run out and go get this S-23 Ultra because 200 megapixels.

It's sort of like, you know, when your time comes around, you're like, I'm going to upgrade this year. Kind of remember, you're like, yeah. That kind of tracks with the laptop stuff too, because so much of their pitch was like, hey, remember, you can do this stuff with your galaxy phone. Yeah. Just FYI, guys, we've had this for a while. Yeah. I mean, Apple does that too, right? They're like, here's a new version of macOS and then launch the laptops like 90% of it is like macOS features from WWC.

Fine. I'm just saying like, it's great they had an event. It's great everyone's back together. Like, we're back in it. Samsung next year will have Broadway dancers once again, I'm sure. But it's just a weird spot, right, where everything is very incremental. And the market is very much saying, we don't need new stuff. So it's not, I just like, I'm looking at these phones.

They're great. They're fun. The edges are more square. The chip is for Galaxy now. I mean, that's huge. Oh, yeah. No one else can have that chip. That's all anybody's been talking to us.

Apple go away. No one else can have a snapdrying chip. Get it. But it just seems like they're launching into sort of market that's kind of bored or has already done its upgrades. And on top of that, the 5G upgrade cycle is it is the thing. I mean, you know, you all know how I feel about that. That's what chat GBT would really be like is like the robot. And it's like 5G is bullshit.

But like it's. It's just sort of like happening. It's a default. It's not a reason to upgrade. It hasn't pulled anyone forward. Yeah. Is that just like, that's, is my vibe. It's like Samsung had to announce a bunch of stuff.

There are some new chips. There's some new camera capabilities. And like, here it is. And I think Apple's like in the same place too. I mean, we chip bump MacBooks is the same deal, right? Yeah. I mean, I think it was interesting talking to people at CES because I did get a sense that a lot of them were sort of like, yeah, we're trying to figure out how to keep the PC

exciting and target you know convince the high end that these PCs can do things that they couldn't do before and like a lot of what they were pushing was web cam features that was like a big thing they're like well Richard with Richard you won't do it not yet he's on my real arm web game is like oh you're you know you're conferencing a lot now you need this um there was a lot of push on the gaming side and people saying like your game these new games that are coming out you can play them now with all this this this new gaming laptop And Samsung didn't, has not been a huge player in either of those spaces with its previous galaxy books. And so it seems to me like the book Ultra is maybe the closest thing they have to something that could appeal to the gaming demographic.

The way they said it to me at the event was like, you know, you could game on this. Is it for gamers? No, but you could game on this. We'll sort of like their vibe, which, you know, is fair. Is it sort of the Apple thing too at this point. So I think that they are coming. That's, I think, the most. citing one of these and the one that I can see people upgrading to, especially if they have a Galaxy book that doesn't play games really well. Like that could be a reasonable sell for them.

All right. We'll see. But, you know, we'll see. That's the news from Unpacked, right? And there was, that's it. I mean, again, I don't want to, like, end on a down note, which I have been told not to do over and over again. We have to wait for new foldables. Yeah, we got to wait for new foldables. They got some new screen tech. We're not ready. Yeah. It's like these are this year's Samsung rectangles are here. Bigsby, like, how many times was Bigsy mentioned? Do they mention it all?

Oh, my gosh. I don't, I don't think I heard Biggs. They must have said Bixby, like, once at least. We got to do, we did our usual super cut. We got to start doing Bigsby supercuts. It's just like, one person would be like, and it was not a Bixby. But that layer, that service layer, they're trying to build, they keep mentioning it, but it hasn't gone anywhere else.

Yeah. Okay. I mean, look, Apple needs a competitor. They're the leader of the market. Google's like, we sold more pixels than ever before, and it's still like seven. Yeah, I mean, the continuity stuff, I think the continuity stuff is cool. It works. Is it as smooth as Apple's continuity stuff?

I think no. I know you said before, like, oh, people don't switch. Like, I switched from Windows to Apple not too long ago. I think that we're at a point where... That's another full hour paid... That's another full... It's like watching the same for the full story. for my journey.

I think there are, this is the first year that I know some really hardcore Windows people who are starting to say to me like, should I look at these Macs? And I like I,

many, many years in this career, I've never, I've never heard that before and I think if I were, Sam then I'd really be trying to pull out the shoe lates here and put out

a competitor because I do think, you know, if only to stem the tide of people leaving to Apple if nothing else. Because of the price performance in the process.

Yeah. All right, we'll see. We've got to take a break. We, Like literally as we've been speaking, Apple earnings broke, there's alphabet earnings, just, we've got to talk about some money. We'll be back in a second. We'll go through it. We'll get back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn.

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You know, like, I spend a lot of time on CMBC and I'm still bad at this. I just want to be clear. Just talking about money, man. Yeah. It's just a little unimportant thing. Well, you know, I have this theory. And I've thought about this a lot. covering tech, especially for a site like hours,

it has like an inherent built-in, like big reviews program is the weirdest part of the media. Like there are very few other parts of the media where you're like, we're going to cover the people, we're going to cover the events, we're going to look at the thing, we're going to make jokes about Bigspee, and then we're going to take your product

and we're going to look at it. And Allison's going to be like seven. Like it just like never happens. Like it doesn't happen in politics. the voters vote, right? But that's not you doing it. In sports, the teams play and there's a winner and a loser, but you didn't, like, sports writers are not like out there being like, you're going to win.

And we are very much like, you lost. HomePod. Good try. Try again. Right. The only thing that, the only external thing that happens is earnings where the company sell you if like they made money or not. It's a whole different language to learn the EBITDA and the run rate.

And yeah, it's like being thrown into a. different world with different people who say different things. Yes, and care very little. Like, you cannot tell. I cannot go on CMEC and be like, it's got a 200 megapixel camera. They're like, who cares? They're not going to hear about the full well capacity. The next time I go on TV, I'm definitely going to be like full well capacity.

Just throw it out there in like zero context and see what happens. Oh, my gosh, do it. The actual usability. What people actually think does not matter. How did it do financially? And how do they project that it will do financially next quarter compared to last year, last year over year, same quarter? I'm just saying this is the weirdest, this is the weirdest little intersection of covering tech. Because nothing else has this part where the journalists evaluate the end result.

We're like, Google, we covered everything that you did. And it's a four. You know, like, it's just like, and then there's this other part of the business. Anyway, I just want to point out it's weird. We talk about it a lot. But it's because these earnings every quarter are the moment where the company tells you, the public companies tell you how they did, right? Did people like our phones?

And the answer, we'll start with Apple. The answer is people like the phones, but they can't make any. So they didn't make as much money as they usually do. Is that about right, Richard? Yeah. So they reported their earnings for Q1, 2023. They took in $1.17 billion. Which is the holiday quarter.

Apple's quarters are scooted over one. So Q1.23 is really December quarter 22. That's the other thing about it. You have to learn a whole new calendar that isn't your regular calendar. And not all the companies use the same calendar. So you're going to be saying weird things all the time. People will look at you like you are insane because you're like, oh yeah, it's Q4. Is it?

Maybe. Anyhow. But yes, there's been wait times for the iPhone, for the high-end iPhone 14 models, they make the most money on. They've had these supply issues. They are kind of reshuffling their supply changes. to rely less on China. There have been so many issues in China with COVID and other issues with labor, everything that is all kind of combined to affect the profit of one of the most profitable companies over the, or perhaps the most profitable company over the last few years.

Also, they have a problem where the last generation, when you look at their laptops, the M1 laptops were such an incredible upgrade over what had been out there. The M2, a little bit better, but it's just a little bit better. So Apple did predict that Mac sales would decline substantially compared to a year ago. They were correct in this prediction. Mac sales are down 29%. And I think that all feeds into it. Like the M1 MacBook error, like, we were like, throw your laptop out the window and buy this thing.

And then combined with the pandemic, it was the thing to buy. And that's a great, no one is, unless you are very picky about webcams, which I am. And that webcam is garbage. There's no reason to buy a new MacBook Air, and I think most people are not that picky about webcams. So you can see Apple's just like running, like this is a company that makes most of its money on the iPhone

is having really hard times making enough iPhones to sell, which might mask the fact that people don't want those lower mid-tier iPhones, Allison. Like they want the pros. And maybe all the demand for upgrades in the mid-tier is satiated by pandemic upgrades. Upgrade cycles are getting long.

So they can't make enough of the high-end stuff. And then all the Mac upgrades are done for now. So they're kind of stuck with services, right? Seems like it. And that's why we suddenly have Apple TV Plus. We have them bundling all their services together says you can get your iCloud and your Apple TV and your news and everything else. Because the people who buy those highest-in devices,

the people who get the most expensive subscriptions and get the package, they just want to find another way to get something from you because that's the way that they can demonstrate revenue growth to their investors. other than, of course, launching a car. Or this headset. So services revenue for Apple up 6%. They now have more than 2 billion active devices running the services. I'm sure this means an iCloud storage, upgrade, push notification is about to hit all 2 billion of those devices.

Did you know that Apple has games in Apple Arcade? 2 billion beeps all at the same time around the world. Tim Cook's like, we made some money. The one that surprised me, well, two that surprised me in company. Wearables, which has Apple Watch and AirPods down, which tracks because I think most of those things get bought along with an iPhone. So I think there's some, well, AirPods people lose. But I think the vast majority of AirPods get bought with your iPhone, the vast majority of Apple Watches

get bought around an iPhone. So if iPhone sales are down, those go down. iPad revenue up 30%. Even though the iPad line, from what I can tell, is more confusing than it has ever been before. but maybe that's it. People are just going to the store and they're freaked out.

They're surrounded by a wall of iPads. I know like I got to have one. I'll take a ball. There's got to be one for whatever. So all I feel like they're at a point in the cycle where people are upgrading iPads. Like I bought a new iPad last year. All right.

There's got to be somebody who's like, oh, okay. You know, that old one is just not cutting it anymore. Yeah. All in all, all this adds up to the iPhone is down, the Mac is down. That means Apple's down. Right. Apple's year every year, 5% down in the holiday quarter.

That's a big deal. That's one of those, like, Wow. Usually Apple sluts records in this quarter, and I think they're hurting because of the COVID stuff in China, in particular. So that's Apple.

And as you mentioned, Samsung and Apple and everyone is kind of having these same things. And Samsung had just, after a string of record breaking quarters, had like their worst quarter in eight years. Yeah. And that's just where we are now.

Liz wrote that great piece last week about all the companies doing layoffs in tech. I don't know if we have a lot of, like, NBA students or MBA professors out there. There's a paper or a book to be written. about the single greatest business mistake in our generation, which is everyone thought the things that happened in the pandemic would happen forever. They're like, everyone will buy a new laptop every year to work at home.

We should make thousands of it. And it's like, no, dude, they're going to buy one. And then they're going to go back outside. Like the entire business community was like, what are these motherfuckers never go outside again? And like, here we are. We got them. No, like, Marks, like, here's what they're going to do.

They're going to stay inside all day and they're going to be brains and vats. and I'm going to build the Metaverse for the VAT brain people. And it's like, I don't, I could have told you what was going to happen to. No, they would rather go to concerts in person. Yeah, it turns out, Fortnite concerts were only interesting when you were not allowed to leave your house. Right. We have options now. Yeah, it's pretty good.

It's a little better. Just touching grass alone, not in Fortnite is great. And so Apple's launching pay later, as Tim Cook said on CNVCC said, coming to. So this is very late. They announced this a while ago, but they, they still not out. Getting big into financial services. Apple is not a bank yet, but they're getting closer. You know, they can let you earn interest on your, your balance. And suddenly this is a very important thing for them. Like this is, this is, as we said, we're talking about the money here. This is what Tim Cook's whole compensation is based on. What can he do to grow Apple? They're trying

to find something. And I don't. Well, there's only three categories. Right. There's only three categories are big enough to move the needle for Apple. It's health care, cars, and the banks. Like, you can't, I'm like Apple should make a TV and you look at the entire TV industry. If Apple's like 100% market share of the TV industry, they'd be like, that wasn't enough. That wasn't enough percentage growth. And like, this is, this is like a champagne problem. Like Tim Cook cries about this problem while breaking open a magnum of champagne on his yacht. He's like, how do I move the needle? I don't know. Bring me another magnum of champagne. Right, but this is their problem.

To move the needle, they have to go play in the biggest remaining industries, which is why they're chasing cars, which is why they think they're doctors. And now it's why they think they're a bank. Kind of terrifying. It is. Speaking of other gigantic terrifying companies, let's talk about Google. They also had, they had like a flat earnings quarter, and it's partially because of the advertising slowdown, partially because of Apple. But partially because they're now having to like spend money. to invent new things, which Google has not, I would say, had a great track record of doing.

You may have heard. They, their new products don't always turn into something, or they launch something, and then a couple of years later, they're killing it. I'm not talking about Stadia, but it could be. But, yeah, when you're talking about advertising revenue, they set us down $2 billion. So, yeah, that's a pretty significant hit. And somehow Google will have to get by after their profits for the quarter were only $13.6 billion, which I would think is pretty good.

because they made $20.6 billion the year before, they're not so happy with. Yeah. Google also just had layoffs. Apple's the only big tech company that has not had layoffs recently. Google obviously just had its first mass layoffs in its history. Amazon just had layoffs. Microsoft had layoffs.

We'll get to that in a second. It sounds like Zuckerberg wants to have more layoffs because he just keeps prattling on about efficiency, which is, I know what that means. You all know what that means. But Google, like, you know, Google is an advertising company. Like fundamentally, that's how Google makes money. He's advertising on the web. They've, we, I've been hammering on this for past couple weeks.

Google's in the hardest spot I think it's ever been in as a company, right? The DOJ is coming after the ad stuff. ChatGPT is coming after Google's search results in both directions. You can ask chat GPD for answers and then shady SEO farms are just making chat GBT webpages to ruin Google search results. So the product is getting squeezed on both sides. Apple's ad tracking transparency stuff, not great for Google, right? It's ruining its ability to track users across the web and deliver personalized advertising. It just feels like the hardest spot Google's ever been in.

And I would not say that these earnings showcase any glimmer of the future. No. And the new things that they've been developing aren't really filling the gap. You look at the cloud, not doing it. YouTube, not doing it. Pixel hardware. I mean, look, we're trying, but it's just not doing it. The Pixel Watch is unfortunately not making a dent in that $2 billion.

Wouldn't it be incredible if Pixel Hardware? hardware just like saved, saved Google. Like tomorrow the pixel is like, all right, that's the end. That's the new iPhone. We did it. We did it. So just to be specific, lots of Google's main revenue drivers are down over the past year. Advertising down by $2 billion, as Richard said.

Services, which includes Android Chrome hardware, which is a bonkers thing to put in services. That's how important hardware is to Google. They just threw it in there. Yeah, just lump it in with Chrome. But services includes Android, Chrome, hardware, Google Maps, Google Play, search, and YouTube down by $1.5 billion. And then it also spent more than $1.5 billion on R&D. So you just see Google's in this place where it has to invent something new because the things that make a lot of money are going down. And then on top of that, YouTube, which is a bit of a bright spot, they just roll that monetization for YouTube shorts like yesterday.

So if this thing is going to become the next generation of the YouTube creator economy, which TikTok does not have, which Instagram does not have. So they can actually get the payment split to creators right on shorts. You might see more creators going to YouTube, but that's still pretty insignificant and a long way out. That's a pretty tough combination of things for YouTube. I think the executives are walking around asking if anyone has a $7 billion idea for the next quarter. We've got Sergey Brin putting in pull requests, I think, for the first time in years. So just if anyone who's still there, if you have a way to make $7 billion, they're certainly interested. Well, maybe start with Google search and make it a less miserable experience.

I don't know. Like, it's so bad now. I don't know. I need to read the article we're passing around. But, like, there's so much junk you have to, like, wade through to get to whatever you were looking for. It just feels like it's something, a product has been, like, piled on and piled on and just kind of forgotten about.

Yeah. Well, because it's a monopoly. It's a bit of news that came in just as we were getting into the earnings. They've scheduled an event to show off some AI search stuff. We don't know what's going to be the chat bot, but February 8th, 830 a.m. Eastern Time, live from France, AI search stuff. Oh, that's great. All right. That's definitely not a panic scheduled event.

No. This is rumors. I think CNBC reported this week. Google has a version of the search landing page where it just tells you the answer. and it has some suggested prompts of things you might ask its chatbot for. Now, to be perfectly clear, Google's claim, and this is what people in the industry believe to be true, is that Lambda, its big LLM, its competitor at chat GPT, is superior to chat GPT. That's the claim.

That's what people have been saying. They won't release it because like every AI chatbot, it will just confidently lie to you. So that's a real problem if you're Google. Google. So we'll see how they deploy this thing. They obviously are very defensive about the fact that they invented a lot of this technology. And they have had the scruples of not just releasing it. Whereas open air is like, I don't know. The robot's going to lie to you. See what happens next. There's also a rumor that the Google version of the chatbot will be able to answer questions about current events, which is like that's where the confident lying becomes a real problem, you know. So we'll see. I want to keep talking about earnings. I want to talk about meta, but real quick on micro. Microsoft. Microsoft is just high on life because it has this open AI investment. So they're just like starting to announce things. Teams Premium has features powered by Open AI so you can let ChatGPT talking teams for

you. They're rolling out tech to write sales emails using ChatGPT, which is like Microsoft is so excited about having the tiniest tread of a lead in AI. And the first thing they thought about doing was like MailMurge. Like the most Microsoft thing. I can't believe they didn't bring Balmer back for that one. Yeah.

It's very good. And then there's this pretty lightly sourced rumor in Semaphore that the next version of Bing will have chat GPT in it powered by GPT4, which is a huge hype balloon. People think GBT4 is going to be like the best thing that ever happened. Even like the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman is like people are going to be disappointed by chat GBT that's powered by GPD4 because you've hyped it up so much. You have no choice but to be disappointed.

That said, A new version of Bing that has GPT four-powered results is a threat to Google, just from mind share alone, right? Just from seeming like the cutting edge alone. And I think that's why Google is like, oh, we got to start announcing some stuff. And then last thing we should talk about meta. Mark Zuckerberg is having like a religious experience, it seems like. Like he went to like the Church of Prophets.

It's like, we need to make them. Because he got, you know, he was like, he spent all of his time in like, I'm going to do the metaverse, billions of dollars. Let's lose all the money. And then app tracking transparency happened. The market crashed. The advertising market crashed. TikTok happened.

Instagram stopped being cool. And now he's like, I got to fire everybody. I don't want managers, managing managers, managing managers. I want people who do stuff. So maybe we're going to get more efficient. And then he had this earnings call where he said the word efficiency 500 times in a row. Oof. Which is like that just means he's going to start clipping people.

Yeah, you're going to be doing a little bit more, a little bit less. But even with all the bad news that we've had about Facebook, about the growth, about how many people are using it, they record over 2 billion daily active users in this last quarter, the highest that we've ever seen. And I wonder what's going on there. Is it because we've got the apps kind of integrated now?

All of your logins are shared. Like, what is causing these numbers that we've seen? Is this real? So from what I'm saying here, it's the 2 billion is Facebook itself, the blue app. And then the family of apps... is 3.7 billion people monthly across family of apps. On Facebook, it's 2 billion daily actives.

That's crazy. And is it just that they added reels to Facebook? Like, at this point, it's like, you open the thing and like, it just starts playing video at you, right? They just boosted TikTok's move. What they don't have is any monetization strategy for this stuff yet or any creator strategy for this stuff or really any strategy for this stuff. They're just like, screw it. They have NFTs on Instagram. I'm out.

That'll do it. You will non-fungible these tokens. That'll do it. Oh, no. Zuckerberg on the call pointed out people like Reels. That's what people like. Reels don't have as many ads. They don't have as many ad products.

He's like, we got to optimize. You've got to make it more efficient how we monetize reels. Just that word again. So I think they're just in the part of the Facebook growth curve. We're like, here's all the stuff. You like Reels have add it. And they're going to start adding ads onto it. And I feel like this happened to Instagram already.

five times in a row where like Instagram was great and then Instagram was shit and then they were like fixed it and they made a crap again and that's what's going to happen to Reels. All this in the context of YouTube

adding creator monetization and in the context of TikTok basically just being like under attack from everybody. Like there is not a big tech company or at this point a politician America who's like we should have TikTok

in this country. So there's just a weird, that weird scrolling video moment I think we're going to look back on it in five years. I'm like this was one of the weirdest periods in tech. When everyone was like, here's what you want.

You want vertical video to scroll by as fast as we can make it. And mostly it's weird people dancing. Like, and we're just, I think we're just going to look back on this video. This is such a weird format war. Like, there's like HD, DVD and Blu-ray, and there's going to be real versus shorts versus TikTok. And we're going to be like, that was bizarre. Because by the end of it, I think the government's going to have booted TikTok

out of the country. And Facebook and YouTube are going to have realized that these products don't monetize as well as regular long-form video on YouTube or Facebook's other monetization products, and they're going to start to decline them in relevance in their algorithms. That's my prediction. Then you need more efficiency. You need more efficiency. You just get more efficient.

Yeah, I mean, I'll say this is the last thing. Actually, these two headlines together are great. I think they're very funny. Perfect example of where the government is at with the tech regulation right now. White House goes after App Store gatekeepers, Apple, and Google. So, Commerce Department was like, you guys are gatekeepers. keepers, you got to open the floodgates, you got to let more things happen on your phones. Apple and Google face mounting pressure to remove TikTok from their app stores.

And it's like, guys, either you open the gates and you're like, stop being the gatekeepers, or you say, use your power to boot this app off your phones by removing it from the store. You cannot have both things. Open the gates, but not like that. Exactly. Shut up a little bit. I'd say this is like a totally weird moment, right, where TikTok is still in its ascendancy culturally, for sure, because the Chinese government pours money into Bight Dance. And Bightance is not a public company, so we have no idea how it works here.

We can't see into the company to see if it's growing or the advertising is working. And then these other competitors are all public companies that are losing money because the market's down, all this other stuff, and they're under pressure to compete with TikTok. And it's just a weird dynamic where the answer is going to be Facebook convinces the United States. It's its government to ban TikTok. I swear to you this is going to happen. It's going to be great. All right, we got to wrap this up. We are over, as always.

I want to call out some things. Great piece about the EV Price War, where my contributor to the Virgin, Patrick George. Basically, his thesis is like, you see the Mustang Waki, you get a price reduction, you see the Tesla get a price reduction,

just wait until there's actual competition in this market. I think that's good. I want to call it Sean Hollister, who has just dogged the Ufi company for claims about encryption on its home security cameras. I mean, you just got to read the lead of his piece. It's like, first they lied, then they deflected, then they lied again, and now they've

telling me the truth. And the truth is the cameras are not encrypted. And then he has all the responses. No, they had a lot of words for not encrypted. It's a fascinating read. Yeah. Into end encryption and somehow became into, not really. Yeah.

End to somewhere. I want to call it Addie Robertson, who wrote, the great headline. The OK computer about the Lisa, the Apple Lisa. It's the history of the Lisa. We've got a big partnership with the Computer History Museum to make stuff like this. So this is part of that partnership.

It's an amazing piece, which is the history, the Genesis of Lisa. This thing obviously failed. You can tell that the Verge loves failed technology. We're like, Springboard, the Lisa. This is what we do here. The sob stories. There's actually much more to come on Lisa coverage

because of the anniversary. There was a big event at the Computer History Museum. It was like adorable. All the people were from Lisa over there. It was fun. We sent a bunch of people there. And then lastly, I got a shout out Mia who wrote, I would say a disappointing piece. The piece is good, excellent reporting.

Mia's a great reporter. Well written, the whole thing. But the police is disappointing about CNET and this private equity company that is like hollowing it out from the inside. And it's our direct competitor. So there's your disclosure. I know that CNET's our competitor. But we know a lot of people in the CNET newsroom. They have been a great competitor for a long time.

And now it's like a private equity vultures turning it into this like SEO driven machine. It is worth reading. I keep going on and about Google, as Alison mentioned, like Google search results are getting worse. Why are they getting worse? Because companies are getting better at gaming Google. And so like the architecture of the web is like based on Google's influences. And the CNET story is like a microcosm of what happens when you pivot from making good stuff to making things you think Google will like. And there's a real difference in that.

We'll see, though. But, okay, that's it. Go read all that stuff. Thanks to Monica for joining us. Allison, thank you so much. Thank you. Richard, as always, you can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless.

Allison is Allison Joe 1. Richard is RJCC, and Monica is MC squared 96. Next week on Wednesday, we're going to run a special Land of the Giants episode. We're doing a series on dating apps right now. Dating apps are like the Wild West of technology. They're the weirdest. The Land of Giants is the rise of dating apps this season. It's very cool.

day. You can call the hotline 866 of Verge 1-1. That's it. That's Vergecast. That's Vrdcast.com. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice, or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at

Vergecast at theverge.com. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Vergecast is a production

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