The Vergecast - Samsung's Galaxy Fold phones are breaking

Episode Date: April 19, 2019

The Samsung Galaxy Fold is here — and it’s already breaking. The Verge’s Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Paul Miller talk first impressions of Samsung’s new phone. Later, they discuss the end of the feud and lawsuits between Apple and Qualcomm and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Deeter, something happened to his Galaxy Fold. We're going to talk about it. And Apple settled with Qualcomm. And there's a little bit of PS5. This on the Vergecast. 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 Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Verge ecosystem. You know, people just send me emails. I get cold pitches from PR people now that are like, hey man, been listening to the flagship. That's good.

We've really put that out in the world. Anyway, I'm Nelai, your friend, Dieter Bonas, in the story. studio with me. In New York City. He's in New York. And what an adventure you have had in this city, my friend. Paul Miller is here. Hello. All right. You know, there's like all this stuff to plug. Just listen to last

week's episode, the top of it. Get all the links, get all the plugs. Like, there's something happening in this world. Yeah. And it's the Galaxy Fold. Being broken. So let me just set it up and then I'm going to take it away because this has been his

emotional experience. So Samsung Galaxy phone. As you know, if you've been listening to the Vergecast, we're all very excited about folding phones because they're neat. Yeah. That's it. There's no, there's no practical excitement here. We actually had to make a big, long, like, argument, especially on Twitter and, like, elsewhere, to get people to stop for just a minute and think about how they're neat before they jump right into, like, but what will go wrong? Just like, sit with the neatness for a minute. Yeah. It's neat. They're cool. It's like a little piece of the future. folding screens.

Do you want a taco? We made a whole chart of all the names you could give them. We had fun folding screens. And then Deeter got one. The Samsung Galaxy Fold, which a reminder, cost $1,980. Yep.

Did a hands-on? Did it hands-on? Played around with it? We were like a hotel in New York. Yep, hotel in New York. Found myself more impressed than I expected to be intrigued. I thought the hinge felt sturdy. Everything was like better than I thought it would be.

Yeah. Maybe not $1, 1980 better. but like better than I expected. Yeah. Yeah. Then what happened? Then? Nothing.

No, no. No raging controversy. Okay, so here's the timeline. Hands on Monday. Got a review unit. Very excited. No embargo at all so we can just do whatever we want, but I decide not to like spend my day tweeting about it.

I was going to spend my day using it and letting good photos and working with it. Cramming debris in the hands with a toothpick. Tuesday night. like, I don't know, 7 o'clock or something. I look at it and there's like a bump on the crease towards the bottom of the phone, like a little bump. And I'm like, what is this? And I feel like there's something hard underneath it.

I think it's hard? Do I really want to push on it super hard to see if it feels like it's hard or if it's soft? I don't know. So I immediately like war text everybody at Samsung. Just like, yo, something is weird here. Yeah. Finally, like, get somebody on the phone. We do a duo video chat, which is very exciting because I don't get to duo chat many people because everybody has iPhones and they don't use it.

Show the crease. I'm like, okay, well, we're going to get a replace tomorrow. I'm going to want a statement on this. Come in Wednesday morning. I write a whole article. I'm like, I'm going to write a whole article. It got it done at like, you know, midnight, Tuesday night. And then I just sat on it because I'm going to wait for Samsung to give me a statement.

Yeah. It's a responsible thing to do. I have no idea what caused this thing. Can I just want to end them? Yeah. In classic Deeter fashion, there was a lot of you blaming yourself. Oh, yes. It occurred in my direction.

Uh-huh. So I'm getting text. Dieter's like, we must have done something. Yeah. An entire theory was created. Yeah. Deeter's yelled at me at one point. It's just a lump in the crease, right?

A lump in the crease. That's all that's happened so far. And you're already doubting your life. What could have happened? Because I didn't have the phone the entire time. Other people had it. And, like, it, you know, could it have, like, gotten some piece of, like, mounting clay I've gotten in it? Could, like, sand have gotten in it?

Could, did someone drop it? And I didn't know. Like, a whole, like, we just start knocking down these theories left and right. Like, there's no way. There's no way. There's no way. And, like, I don't know. It's part of the hinge break.

It's my current theory is that part of the hinge broke at some point. Yeah. But we don't know. But we don't know. So at one point I say to Deeter, we don't know. We don't have to take the blame because we don't know. Right. We will happily take the blame once we do. And neither got mad at me because he so believed that he had broken the phone. Anyway, the next morning comes. The next morning comes. I open up the phone. It sat overnight. I did nothing. I was very careful not to push too hard on the bump, all the stuff. I'm not going to pop it like a Zit.

Yeah, which is gross. Gross. But would have played huge on Instagram. It was like one of those zits that's like deep in the skin and like you, you know, you know, you know. You know what I mean? You know, it's coming. It's going to take like a week to show up. Yeah. Yeah. Coming to the office, like, I need better photos.

We should probably shoot a video just in case, even though I don't want to put it until we have the review, blah, blah, blah, blah. Open the photo up to show people the bump. And there are the lines that you get when there's a crack in a screen. Just like there's a horizontal line and then a vertical line grows and like, yep, the screen is now officially broken. So I've war text Samsung again. They're like on their way to deliver me a replacement. They deliver the replacement. I have taken a bunch of photos.

There's a second bump, though. There's another bump that has appeared underneath the first bump in the same way that if you have growth. Can we stop doing this? Whatever is. Stop it. Screen is broken. Second bump. Very bad.

I no longer have the phone. I believe it's being, it has been sent to Korea for diagnosis. Driven straight to the airport. I offered to cut it up. with an exact knife to look at it. I was told not to do that, and I chose to abide by that. You do sign, like, an agreement

that you won't try and, like, intentionally destroy these phones when you get a review unit. Yeah. Anyway, so then I, you know, I'm sitting on the story. We rewrote the story, and then I see on Twitter,

Steve Kovac's phone was busted. And I'm like, ah, and I works for CNBC. He works for CNBC. His review unit was busted. And I'm like, okay, well, I'm going to publish. I told Samson,

I can't wait for the statement anymore. It's been hours. publish the story and then like the internet has already begun to explode because other journalists have had their phones like ruined. Mark German at Bloomberg and Marquez Brownlee. Yeah. And also Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal has a slight problem with hers, although it hasn't exploded into a full full bone disaster for her yet. Yeah. Yeah.

Can you rewind just a little bit in the emotional journey? Yeah. The moment that you found out that you weren't the only one. Yeah. How did that feel? It was very exciting. I had actually been planning on, like, if I didn't hear an answer, just, like, quietly texting a bunch of reviewers and finding out if I was the only one. But then Twitter took care of that problem for me.

Yeah. The backfire of the no embargo is when your $2,000 folding phone breaks, everyone can just say it at once in real time. Yeah. People were accusing us of, like, being in cahoots. There are a bunch of people on Twitter like, oh, you must have, like, Samsung must have known it was broken. And so they made you all sign an embargo that you wouldn't write about it until. It's the exact same time. Because if you were on Twitter at around, what was like 2 o'clock Eastern yesterday,

and you just happened to follow a bunch of tech journalists, like within five minutes, it went from nobody was talking about the fold to it was the only thing that existed in the world. Well, so importantly, and this is the key point for me. Yeah. These phones broke, I don't actually know what happened in Johannes, but these phones broke in at least three different ways. I count two. Okay. What are your three?

So there's yours. Okay, I count definitely two, possibly three. Right. And I, you know, I told you not to take the blame for it, but it was your fault. Great. You, uh, you, uh, you created some sort of psychokinetic disturbance and raised a bump. Look, man, I grew up a Lutheran. It's original sin.

Uh, so there, you had the bump, the bulge. The bulge. Uh, so that's one way it broke. The bulge. Yep. Uh, at CNBC, Steve come back. His, just the screen just, just, just, it's just, flickered out so like the one side of the screen doesn't work. It looks like pretty bad.

It looks yeah. Yeah. And then I think Marquez and Mark German. Yep. They did a thing which I mean, it's a user error, but it's totally understandable. I almost I will tell you that I almost did the exact same thing. So everybody knows anybody. I'm assuming people who listen to the Verchast have purchased a new phone recently in their lives. You buy a new phone. It's got a plastic cover on the screen. First thing you do is you peel that off. Yep. It's just the normal thing that you do. Some models of the fold, apparently the T-Mobile version, has a little sticker that's like, this plastic film on the screen should not be removed. Yep. The one you got did not have that sticker.

That's correct. I got a unlocked European version. Well, everyone knows Europeans. They don't take any plastic films off their phones. Samsung never told me that it was like a sample or a prototype or anything. They're now calling them sample units, which I... You find a little retcony. Yeah.

But whatever. Anyway, so Mark German and Marquez Brownlee went to peel off what is called a screen protector. It's like a protective polymer film. Yeah, but like it doesn't imply that removing it will destroy the phone. Yeah. It's like thing that happened. It's like human skin is an organ protector. Yeah.

Yeah, man, we are deep in the dermatology game today. My sister's a dermatology. She's going to be horrified. Your skin is your largest organ. Anyway, she tells me this all outside. I hope you're all hydrating. But yeah, so this thing that looks like either the shipping film that you get on a phone or is called a screen protector is actually not. Yeah.

It appears to be a key part of the screen that when you remove it, the screen breaks. One of the things that you probably don't think about when you're thinking about a phone like this is the screen, you know, it's And so it has a different, like, physical structure to it than you're used to. When you get a phone these days, it's a beautiful, seamless, glossy slab, and the glass melts perfectly into the metal rail and blah, blah, blah, blah. The Galaxy Fold is not that thing. No. It has a plastic rail that runs around the edge of the device that sort of, like, holds the

screen down underneath it. So it's not a bezel. Like, the screen is, there's a plastic rail over the screen, and the best metaphor I've been to come up with is, like, it's like the metal thing. that holds a piece of carpet down before you get to the tile or the hardwood. The technical term is a carpet threshold, by the way, I had to look this up. And so there's that. And then within that, there is the extra layer of plastic that doesn't, there's like a tiny

little gap there. So it looks like a screen protector within that thing. And so it looks like a screen protector. But there's like, there's extra layers of like, how does this screen work than we're used to. And I have a theory. I don't know if it's true. but my theory is like this thing could they could have shipped this thing without that but because

you know it's a delicate piece of OLED film stuff they wanted a little bit more protection for it because if you ding this extra layer it's they could theoretically like you know squirt some gougon on it take it off without damaging the screen to replace it or maybe there'd be like a service option or something I don't know yeah but you'd rather you'd rather get a little ding or a nick in a like a protective layer of film on top of the screen than you know the quote unquote screen itself yeah is my theory I don't know. I mean, it's a good theory.

Yeah. Again, I think it's rooted in you blaming yourself. Well, they should, there should have, like, the box should have had a little, like, like, like, pop-up book diorama that when you open it, it's like, don't touch this thing. Well, I think they made it huge mistake in calling it a screen protector or making it look like a screen protector or not telling you, like, yeah. It is clearly an integral part of the screen. Yeah. Yeah, it's just, it's another layer that's glued on there with special flexible adhesive, but like it looks like a screen protector.

It's part of the screen even though it's technically like just another thing that's glued on top of it. They should have had it run underneath the carpet threshold. Yeah. The bezel. I mean, I take your point. Like if you scratch it, maybe you want to replace it, maybe, I don't know, every T-Mobile store is going to have a special little oven. You know, like that's how you peel it off. But it's like very clear that peeling it off damages the screen.

Yeah. Because there's at least two reports from excellent tech reviewers. The third report from Joanna was she tweeted a picture of like the corner of her screen where she had started to lift it off. It started peeling off. Did she do it? No, she said it started peeling off. Oh, God. So, I mean, depending on how you look at it, there's like between two and three different ways you think broke. And so yours broke spontaneously.

Steve Coax at CNBC broke spontaneously. These other ones are pretty, I would say pretty excusable user errors in the sense that. Oh, completely. This thing looks like a thing that you can remove on every other phone in the world and that we're not instructed such. And then Joanna is just peeling. Yeah. That's a lot for a $2,000 phone that's supposed to be a showcase of a new technology. It's a lot for any phone. Like some of the feedback I got is quit saying that this is unacceptable on a $2,000 phone because it's unacceptable on any phone.

Yeah, but if it was like 20 bucks, you'd be like, yeah, this thing's a piece of crap. Yeah, right. But this is like a, this is their flagship thing for the year is the full. They need to show it off. Yeah. And they blew it. Like the first question we had is, are they, it's supposed to ship next week? Are they going to ship it?

Yes. That's, they finally gave us a statement saying we're still planning on shipping it. After there are other statements, which we should get into. I mean, it seems like we will know very quickly if the model they ship is of exact same quality and information design as the first one, as the review unit, because in one or two days, like a million people will. break this? A T-Mobile executive tweeted the box and was like, no, look, like, here's the retail model on ours says, don't

remove this. Yeah, John Ledger's running around the warehouse, slipping stickers on the boxes. But that doesn't account for how yours broke. Nope, does not. And it certainly doesn't account for how it appears Steve's broke or how it appears Johnna broke, which is they spontaneously

like broke. And this is like one or two days. Yeah. Which is, in It's almost a best case scenario for something that fails. Like, you know, Apple, the problem with Apple keyboards is it will be three months in, and all of a sudden, you don't have a space bar anymore. Here, you quickly realize the error of your ways. Yeah.

The error of your spending $2,000. Yeah. It's just, I mean, we will know within one or two days if Samsung is, the shipping model is the exact same quality control. as Deeters. There is a lot of reconing going on here. First of all, calling them sample units is like hilarious because it's shipping a week. So if you're still like putting out sample units,

you could just wait one more week and put out real ones. That's a choice you can make. Then there's the retconning of calling it a screen protector or whatever, like when it's clearly a part of the phone. Right? Like those are two things where I think Samsung played some word games to get around.

what actually is happening here, which is fair. I mean, they're big company. They've got PR people. That's what they're paid to do. The thing that... I think it just didn't occur to them that people would try and peel that thing off because they've been living with it for however long they've been living with it. Yeah.

They're like, oh, wait. Everyone in the world tries to peel this on. Yeah, but they've been... People inside Samsung have had this thing for, you know... They say they've been working out at eight years. So they've been messing around with this basic idea for, I don't know, minimum of six months, if not longer, right? So let's talk about how your specific...

typically broke because that's when you had. Yeah. So your theory, again, the one of Dieter got bad at me for saying he shouldn't just accept as the truth because we don't know. We do not. Is that so when we review phones and you look at all the cool shots of us reviewing phones. Yeah. Phones are like floating in mid-air.

Yep. Turns out we are not able to just levitate a phone. Yeah. Although we have done high-speed shots and then like reverse them where we like just drop the phone on a pillow and so it looks like it's like flying slowly through the air. Yeah. But that's some real TV magic happening. Yeah.

By the way, I don't know if the podcast is going up before or after the review, which I'm planning on publishing on Friday. Yeah. It'll go up after. It'll go up after. Make sure you watch the review because the cool TV effect shot that we've done is real practical effects and is within the top five or like top three or maybe the best, like effect we've ever done with a camera. It is very cool. It is unbelievable. It's very cool.

Anyway, to make this magic, go watch the video. Pull over in your car. Watch this video. Come back. The way you make these things happen is you've got to hold up the phones. It's like virtually every phone. We use a little bit of mounting clay, which is just like Plato. And we stick it on the back to the phone.

We stick it with something. And the phone magically is levitating in midair. Yeah. So Deeter just like is convinced initially. Initially that somehow the clay is sticking through the screen. So could it, there's like, when you bend the fold, there's like a tiny little gap on the front between the screen

and like the gap in there and then there's also a tiny little gap on the back of the phone on the hinge where like the two book covers come together but like we don't think it got in on the front so like could it have somehow like gotten in those tiny gaps in the back

and then like literally worked its way through the gears I included a gif of Charlie Chaplin going through the gears at modern times and then to get under the screen Let me just tell you what it's like to get a series of texts like this, 1145 p.m. I mean, I was very... Okay, let's just assume this is true. I was very troubled.

I was rattled. Let's just assume this is true. It was the rattle of the bulge. Assume this is true. This is a horrible outcome. Yeah. Because it means that if you have this thing in your pocket and there's dust or lint or you went to the beach, yep.

Anything smaller than a lump of clay can work at the same. its way into the phone and destroy the screen. Not good. I don't think I honestly don't think this, especially after you see all these other ones, right? Yeah. I don't think that's it either. If it was, it's still terrible. Yeah. But I don't think that was it. But I don't think that's way than a lump of clay can work its way into this hinge and destroy

the screen. It's a bad outcome. Yes. We don't think that's what happened. Yeah. Dieter and now you think the hinge itself, just like spontaneously destroyed itself. I did, like, I did you know, press on the bulge. And it did feel like not soft. It didn't feel like clay. Clay notably soft. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And then a second one appeared. So like some dust, like dust, some debris. Yeah. Ant colony. But debris is one of those words that like starts to look weird the third time you write it out, you know? Because I didn't want to say sand. I didn't want to say dust. I didn't want to say grit.

Something. Something. Yeah. And like the generic word for a little thing is debris. Anyway, something's in there. So maybe like someone opened or I opened the thing too hard or maybe there was just a failure in the thing. And like one of those tiny, you know, millions of. cogs that they have in there, like just got a little crack, and then that piece worked

its way up, Charlie Chaplin style under the screen? No idea. That's bad, too. It's also bad. Opening it too fast will destroy the phone. Yes. I know we haven't dissected it yet, again, because of that agreement. And we may never get to know because Samsung has it.

There's no chance we will ever know what this was. Yeah. Which means I can torment Deeter by saying it was his fault forever. Damn. But do we know what is under that crease to begin with? Nope. I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I'm, I, I, I'm, I, I'm, like, I'm like, like, like, Microsoft style look at all the gears stuff. And I haven't gone through and looked at

every second of footage that they've posted, but I don't think we know what precisely is sitting directly under the screen if you were like, just rip the screen off. I don't know. Yeah. This is going to be a great I fix. I really. Oh, yeah. Right. Well, Jerry rig everything like, like, they didn't give him one. He's like, he's like, oh, man. The one time I don't get the phone, it breaks up. It breaks up. It breaks. It breaks on its own. I don't have to do anything. Yeah.

Okay. So the phone is broke. We've established the phone is broken. And the world blew up. And now you have a new one. Yep. Well, no, Samsung gave a statement. We should read some of the statement.

Yeah. So a limited number of early galaxy fold samples were provided to media for review. Fine. We received a few reports regarding the made display. We will thoroughly inspect these units in person to determine the cause of the matter. I love that. Yeah. They're not going to have robots inspect them.

I have a slightly different statement apparently given to a Korean outlet in Korean, and I don't trust Google translate enough to actually like translate it, but they're looking into it. Yeah. And then they get into the separate thing about the main display features a top protective layer. Not a screen protector, a top protective layer, which is part of the display structure. Notably, removing the protective layer or adding adhesives to the main display may cause damage. I don't think Samsung wants people to like go by a screen protection.

and put it on this thing. Yeah. Especially those, like, fancy screen protectors where you got to, like, take a blow dryer to it and heat it up and all that stuff. I think if you put anything on this display, it's, you're going to be putting pressure on a bend that is, like, right at the limit of what it's able to do, even though they can bend it and unbend it, you know, 200,000 times. Yeah.

I think that even though we have to sign these agreements saying we're not going to intentionally damage, you know, review units, I think it is, like, time for us to make it official Verge policy that when we receive any device, we're going to put it in a bag of Doritos and shake it. We're going to take poured burritos on keyboards. We're going to put in, yeah. Yeah. Look, Max is going to be at Play-Doh age soon. We'll just see if we can work some clay into your phone.

That's just what we do. Okay. So separately from all of this, you also got to review the phone. Yeah. What do you think? Besides the fact that it's broken. It is. That's very hard to separate the fact that all of them broke within a day from the thing.

But you were kind of high on the thing. I'm actually reviewing this phone. Of course, we're talking about the breakage, but the bulk of my review is going to be reviewing it as if it didn't have this catastrophic critical problem that should prevent you from buying it. As if it didn't. And in that world, before I knew this thing was going to break, this was my conclusion. This is the – actually, take it back. This is my conclusion. Andrew Mr. Sturton.

And before I knew it was going to break, this was my conclusion. I have never used a phone, especially a premium phone, with this many problems that I've loved this much. There's the one problem. And then we added one more problem to that list. Can you clarify that statement? Are you saying that the pre didn't have a lot of problems or that you love it more than the pre? Ooh. Okay.

Maybe I should say it's been a long time. Yeah. It's been a long time. Because Supri had a lot of problems. It's been a long time. The unfinished operating system being one of them. The protective layer, I'm sorry, what do they call it? The protective layer picks up dings like nobody's business.

The one that I got had like a dimple in it right out of the box, and it's got dings on it that just magically appear. Don't know how. Android, on tablets, guess what? Just guess. I bet you have a guess. It's not great. It's good. This year, though, this year.

Yeah, it's going to happen this year. Wait, did you have, did you have like a moment where you're sitting down and you're using the tiny little screen and like, I wish I had this on a tablet? And then you're like, oh, I do. I could. And you swog it open and the app jumbo sized. And like, did you have the moment? No, sort of. I played with you just run for five seconds and I had that.

Yeah, no, I had that moment, but I never had the moment where I was like using the tiny screen because the tiny scene is so patently ridiculous from. jump is you never try. The tiny screen is definitely not big enough to do anything on. I've got lots of high flutin ideas why I like this thing. When you're sitting in a meeting and there's a bunch of people at the conference table and you pull out your phone and start doing stuff on it, you're the asshole. Yeah. Right?

You're like, what are you doing? You pull out the fold, though. You've got a tablet. You might be checking the Google Doc for the meeting notes. You might be like doing something important. The ideal form factor is the one that makes it look like you're paying attention. Yeah. Reading Kindle books on this thing is great.

Yeah. It feels like it's the exact size of like a regular old Kindle, but you can also turn it sideways and get two columns of text if you want. Video's fine. Like the screen is actually like pretty bright and color accuracy is good. It's just, you know, has dings in a crease. And also breaks. Oh yeah, we haven't even talked.

We haven't even talked about the crease. Yeah. Multitasking, like the Samsung has this weird like three panel system. It's janky as hell. if you have three app windows open or two app windows open and then you close it and then you open it again, all of your windows just disappear. Yeah. They don't know how to save state. You know, there's just like jank and weirdness.

But when you just like use it as like a basic Android phone, but it's just big, it's like a little tiny tablet, it's about the same screen size as an iPad mini. It's a little bit smaller, but you don't get the iPad minis bezels. You're like, oh, this is amazing. And the other high flutin idea I have about it, and this is definitely going into review, is you pull your phone out and you intend to look at that notification, and then all of a sudden 45 minutes have disappeared because you're on Instagram and you're on this or you're on that. You've got these, like, these phones are designed to, like, fill those downtime moments. They're like these in-between moments when you like just want to look at a thing for a second. And then that second turns into an hour. Yeah.

you can't do that with the fold because the tiny screen is so bad and so tiny and so impossible to type on and so impossible to do anything on that you like will do one thing and get be done like i literally the only things i have on that tiny screen are um google maps spotify and hold down and then i can use it on the subway and that's it um when you open it up you're using it like you're doing a thing you can't like casually like without really paying that much attention just happen to accidentally have your phone in your hand for 45. five minutes. It's like a thing you have to mean. Yeah. And so it like, it exists on either side of like what makes phones so like addictive, but it doesn't exist in that middle. And there's lots of problems like because like you can't hold it in one hand and like, you know, there's all

it's too thick and it's too heavy. Yeah. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But there's something really compelling about a device that forces you to either mean it or not use it at all. Yeah. Or that just breaks in that day. So you can't use it at all. Like how do you solve cell phone addiction? Wouldn't it be cool if I like didn't have to. If I could like say these things and you can actually think about it, go,

hmm, the only problem is it's $2,000. I have thought about this. Now, this is, this is a classic scenario of a status symbol. Very expensive and very obvious that you have it, right? I always had this theory that the original beats headphones, the original beats wireless headphones had horrible battery life. Yeah. And they stopped doing any audio once they ran out of battery. So I assumed when I would see someone on the street, wearing beats headphones, there was a 50-50 chance that they're out of battery and they were just wearing beats headphones to be seen. So I could imagine the scenario where somebody's at a coffee shop or at a conference or whatever and they're standing in the corner. They have to be

in the corner so nobody can see whether or not their screen is broken and they're out there. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's going to happen. That's how I feel about AirPods now. No, you see the AirPods people and I'm just like, whatever you're listening to sounds bad. I know it in my heart and you know it in your head. And that's where we're... In your ears. I don't think they're dead, though. I think iPods have decent battery left.

But, all right. The crease. We got to just wrap up. Can you see it? Do you feel it? Do you feel it? Does it bother you? You can see it. You can feel it?

Yeah, you can feel it. The screen temperature is slightly different on either side of it. Oh, there's another huge problem we got to get into. Oh, no, I know. Separate from the crease. When you're looking at it dead on and you're just like using it, you accept. accept it and like you don't like see it. It doesn't like viscerally hit you in the face. Yeah. So it kind, it's basically comparable to a notch, but it's like a little bit more severe because like it's a, it's definitely a crease.

But it does like become a little bit like you put blind to it in the same way that I don't know, like you don't see the spine on a book. I don't know. Like what's a like if you had if you have like a dot in the middle of your vision like literally on your eyeball or like your glasses are scratched, eventually your brain like see. around it. Right? It's kind of like that. The crease. Yeah. The notch is more annoying because none of the video apps

have any sort of way to pinch out to like get rid of the notch in the video. And so the only way to not have your video be notched off in the corner is to change the entire phone to notchless setting

and then you lose that entire top bar of the screen. Yeah. Yeah. Also the notch is a ridge like you're talking about the ridge over the whole thing.

There's like a little plastic. The carpet protector? Yeah, the carpet threshold. So like there's that ridge and then the notch has a little plastic. Yeah. It's all very confusing.

Anyway, but that's not the thing. I know the thing you're about to talk to it. So, I'm going to walk, I'm going to back into this. Okay. When you have a smartphone screen, there has to be a thing that, like, tells the pixels what to do, right? The controller, whatever. What does it call?

The controller. Sure. Turns out that that controller is usually on the top or the bottom of your screen for a very good reason, because it takes a millisecond longer for it to hit the opposite side of the screen than the, where? it's at for the pixels to do what they're supposed to do. So when you scroll, if you look very, very carefully, especially at like, you know, low-end phones or certain old-ed phones or whatever, you can actually see the thing you're scrolling kind of compress or expand depending on

where it is on the screen. If you really look, especially if it's like a black square on white, you will see it. Now, the fold can't have a controller on the top or the bottom of the screen because it folds horizontally. So they put the control. controller on the right-hand side of the screen. So when you scroll, the right-hand side of the screen is slightly more reactive and faster than the left-hand side of the screen because it takes a millisecond for the refresh rate to go across the screen. You don't see it. You don't think about it. You don't notice it. And then someone points it out to you. And then you're like, do I see it? Do I see it? Do I see it? And then you never unsee it. I can see it on my 10S right now.

Yeah. Are you holding it horizontally? You sure am. Yeah. And you can see a little bit of wave. You know, we call it like, what's the word we use? Like rolling shutter? Jelly. It's a little bit of jelly. Jelly scrolling. And so, like, because it's such a big screen and maybe it's, maybe the refresh rate is not as fast as it ought to be on, you know, this flexible panel or whatever, the jelly scroll is, like, pretty pronounced.

When you scroll, the whole display goes like, diagonal. Yeah. It's wild. Yeah. And you don't see it at first. But once you see it, you, like, see it. And if you shoot it with a high-speed camera, the kind that, like, causes that those. like black bands to go across the screen.

Those black bands are actually the screen refreshing. Yeah. And you can see it like stepping down across those black bands. Like you see literally the refresh happening. This is a lot of compromises in this phone. This is, yeah, this is way too many compromises in this phone. But it sounds like you like it conceptually. I mean, my, my biggest worry, let's say they got all the technical kinks out and it just works

wonderfully, right? Uh-huh. My biggest concern is that this seems too big to put in my pocket. It is too big to put it in your pocket. So it doesn't feel like a phone anymore. I have never had a phone with this many problems that I liked this much. Like, this many problems should make you just want to throw this thing away. But you don't want to because it's like a beautiful little iPad mini that you can stick in your pocket.

Except it runs Android. So you just said you don't put it in your pocket. Well, you can like put it kind of in your back pocket. Like cargo shorts. You can put it in your pocket. Yeah, you need cargo shorts. That's actually the biggest compromise at all is that it comes to the pair of cargo. shorts that can't be removed

and that destroys the phone. I mean, bring back holsters. No. No. We got to wrap this up. Dieter's like getting cargo shirts in a holster to use his broken folding phone.

Where are we should? So there's many more folding phones coming out. We've seen like three of them. Motorola is going to do some like weird vertical razor thing. They all use the same core underlying to These plastic folding OLED screens.

Yep. I think the question is whether they're all going to have the same problems. Or similar problems. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's really what we're learning. Like maybe this is a Samsung problem and they just forgot to engineer a hinge to block out items smaller than a lump of clay. And they didn't do the screen.

Like maybe these are all Samsung execution problems. And when Huawei puts out the mate 10, whatever it is, it's not going to have. happen, even though that screen's on the outside and that seems like Dents City. Maybe Motorola is like, or maybe this is like inherent to these plastic oil screens. And I think we just don't know, but that's the thing we're about to discover. Samsung also put out of phone that literally exploded. Like, it's hard to know where the blame lies right now. The exploding phone came in a landscape of primarily non-exploding phones.

What is so disconcerting about this is that this is our first experience with the folding phone and I want it to work out. I don't, but I don't want anybody feel burned by it. Like, I want that person to spend $2,000 on the phone because they're, because they're going to look really cool, right? Yep. And get marginal utility out of it, but not be mad when it breaks. And so I want everybody to be happy so that five years from now, when I buy the super thin, affordable, great folding phone, you know, it's all been, it's all been worked out. Well, I will say the narrative of this phone is all but set. Yeah.

Right? It's not a mainstream product. You're not going to put it out. And then everybody, remember the iPad came out? Everyone made jokes about the name. And then, like, 20 minutes later, millions of people have iPads and the jokes away because, like, the culture had just taken the thing away. Yeah. Like, that's not going to happen to this thing.

Like, 10 people are going to buy this product. And all anybody else is going to know is that the screen broke within a day of, like, all the reviewers having it. Yeah. It's going to take them some generations to get to the place where. Right. But the first thing anyone is going to be with a folding phone now is I don't throw play at it until it breaks. But you don't get more generations

if this is a completely losing proposition. We got another generation of the note. They brought that back from explosions. Yeah. They didn't really mention it. They're like, not to worry. This time we've tested for explosions. I think the risk of releasing another note was mitigated

by the fact that there had been other notes that didn't explode. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think that this, this bumpy rollout is going to stop them from iterating and refining folding. Yeah. Okay. Like, everyone seems committed to it. So we'll see. But we'll see. All right. We've got to take a break. Then we've got to talk about Apple and Qualcomm because that is just surprises for days. 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,

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help your business grow. That's UPWRK.com. Upwork, Okay, we're talking about Apple and Qualcomm, and they settled their lawsuit. I'm teeing you up, Neely. You just want to jump into it. I'm so like, rare and to go. We were expecting. You remember the Samsung Apple trial? We got Discovery, which meant that executives had to go on stand and speak on the record, and internal documents from the companies got released in court records, and we found out all this exciting dirt about the birth of Android and how pissed off Steve Jobs was and Eric. Rick Schmidt and like all this really juicy, exciting stuff. And this lawsuit between Apple and Qualcomm, we've talked about it before.

It's been a while, but it boils down to Qualcomm has a million patents, and they want phone makers to pay them a percentage of the cost of their device, not just a flat rate for licensing their patents and getting their chips. And Apple thinks that that is highway robbery and they're very pissed off about it. That's like the core of it. And they have been escalating their rhetoric to a high level of vitriol. and Apple had started putting Intel chips at Intel modems and its phones

and so we were like these people did not look like they were willing to negotiate or settle. They hate each of them. And it went to trial and we're like, here we go. Yeeha. Yeah, documents.

Yeah. Tim Cook on the stand. Yeah. We're like ready for it. And then after the first day, they announced they settled. And then like 45 minutes later, Intel announced that it was no longer making 5G mode.

We're done of that. So that's like a wild ride. I will say the first day of this trial, the opening arguments were legitimately just like comedy level. Because, you know, patent licensing modem chips, they're complicated. Yeah. So Apple's lawyers tried to do this like earthy, you know, like, folks, let me explain to you what's going on here. Right? To the jury, because I think the jury's dumb.

Did they have a hip analogy? Oh, no. Let me just read this to you. This is like a Kentucky fried chicken that refuses to sell a bucket of chicken to customers. First, you have to go to a different counter, KFL, Kentucky Fried Licensing, and you have to go pay the eating license fee before they'll sell you any chicken. That's what they went with. I've already lost.

I've already lost. They went with Kentucky Fried Chicken. They have all of the things that you can buy. I want to know when they were preparing this opening argument, how many other fast food restaurants they went. went through before they landed on KFC as being the thing they think would work. No. Like you need a bucket of patents and so you need a bucket of chicken?

No. That would have been better. No. They just went with KFC. Because Qualcomm's entire model is they get you to pay twice. Yeah. Right. And Apple hates paying twice.

So if you want to buy at any other scenario. So I'm going to do it too. Oh, God. Here we go. If you go to Hardee's. What's the burger at Hardee's called? I hate this so much. No, but think about your actual phone.

Yeah. You purchase a phone. Your phone is full of parts. Yeah. Those parts are encumbered by thousands of patents. You don't have to buy a patent license to buy your phone and use it. Right. Right?

So, like, I bought a phone. Dieter received a Galaxy Fold. Yeah. Samson, he broke it very quickly. On purpose. It broke. With great intention. I didn't break it.

It broke. Samsung's not making Deter pay a patent license fee to get the fold. I don't have to pay a patent license fee to use my laptop. Right? To buy, to get a Qualcomm modem, the Foxcon, Pegatron, those companies are required to also take a license to Qualcomm's patents. So you pay a patent licensing fee, and that's the only way Qualcomm will get you to buy the chip. There's like a million different ways that you can, that Qualcomm would spin this as like being totally reasonable. Apple thinks this is the worst.

Foxxon thought this is the worst. I feel like that is not so hard to explain because I just explained it. It's a lot easier to explain than the KFC analogy. And what we went to instead, and I'm just going to read this again, it's like a Kentucky fried chicken that refuses to sell a bucket of chicken. First, you have to go to KFL Kentucky Fried Licensing, which is, It doesn't exist. You're asking this jury to invent another counter in a KF.

Anyway, so that happened. So one theory is it. Wait, one second. What you're really doing is you're going to KFC. You're buying a bucket of chicken, but to be allowed to buy a bucket of chicken, you also have to buy a license to the recipe to the chicken, although you are not allowed to use that license, that recipe, to make your own chicken. Potentially.

You have to, I mean, we, how. I'm not sure how this particular K&C operates. How have we not brought seven herbs and spices into this metaphor? I've changed the license is clearly for seven herbs and spices. So another good analogy. But isn't Qualcomm's argument that they also have, like, they also control, like, if you make a bucket that they also make the bucket, I don't know, never mind. Again. Because their patents aren't just for the thing inside their chip.

It's for like a whole host of other things. I feel like I'm just, I'm getting older. the second. I'm dying. What about the mashed potatoes? It's all bad. It's a bowl that it has like all of the foods all at the same time. Meanwhile, Intel can't even figure out how to make coleslaw.

Yeah. And so it's bad. So Intel's like, what is this? Is this chicken? Like we don't know. We've never been able to identify a chicken. Okay. It's Kentucky Fried Pigeon.

On a serious note. Is the fact that nobody can make. the chips that Qualcomm makes because Qualcomm has the patents? Okay, so this is like a deeply complicated secondary layer. Yeah. The 5G is a standard, right? So a bunch of, you invent the stuff, you give the, so the way you like, a classical sort of economic sense, the way you create incentives to buy into the

standard is, or to develop against a standard is Qualcomm does a bunch of forward investing, they do all the R&D work to invent the technologies for 5G, they go to the standards group, whoever else, Wally's there, Erickson's there, so on and so forth. They say, okay, here's a bunch of technology we've invented. We're going to put our patents into the standard pool and anybody can make stuff that uses or interacts with the standard, and we will promise that we will license this out for fair, reasonable, non-discriminatory rates. Frand. You might remember Frand from the Apple and Samsung trial. Right? where Apple had all their patents and trade dress and trademarks and blah, blah, blah, on iPhone stuff,

and Samsung had a billion patents on Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and Fran's stuff. And Apple literally Tim Cook said to me at a code conference when I said, why is this trial still going? He said, we just want to make the Fran's system better. And like the code conference audience laughed at him because who gives a shit? like that is the most ridiculous like nobility it was just it was a waste at the end of the day Samsung paid some money

they took it all the way of the Supreme Court they took it all the way down and you know what everybody's still making phones Samsung their phones do break after a day just put it out there but one of their phones it's one of their phones the other phone exploded oh for two it's like this is basically liable It's like, it's too libeling.

It's true. It's two flagship phones. Stop libeling Samsung. They've put out like 20 flagship phones. Oh, fine. Anyhow, the point of this is that trial was obviously a waste, right? Like, they did all this stuff and at the end of the day, someone paid some money, whatever. No frowned issues were truly resolved. In this case, Qualcomm's big set of patents, some of them are frowned.

Some of them have to be licensed out as part of the standard. fair reason and non-discriminatory. Some of them don't. But Qualcomm just makes you sign a blanket license when you want fair modems. So that's what Apple's objecting to. This is extortionate. This isn't fair, reasonable, non-estrimidtribut.

Intel, though, has access to the standard. Huawei has access to the standard. Samsung makes a bunch of stuff, has access to the standard. So you could... As long as they pay Qualcomm. No, as long as they pay into the standard pool, license the full set of 5G patents and take them back out. Can we actually like, I think that the way I see this,

and I think actually the way I'm going to zoom out from the legal argument, just for half a second, is from like the legal, how should the Fran's system work perspective, from like the moral perspective, like I think Apple probably has a little bit of high ground here, but it seems obvious that from a leverage perspective, from a power perspective,

Qualcomm had Apple over a barrel. So I think what happened here, so with LTE, they were able to go to the Intel chips, right? And Qualcomm spent a bunch of money, and they owned a bunch of LT patents. And if you look around the industry, there's Qualcomm modems everywhere, right? And great.

Apple went to Intel, said, make us these LTE modems. It took them a couple generations. This last set of phones, exclusively Intel modems. People generally think they're not as good as Qualcomm modems. In the grand scheme of whether you're using iOS or Android, that's not enough to sway a purchase. But the Qualcomm modems generally perform faster at LTE. It's just a thing that the industry kind of knows.

Then you get to 5G and Intel just doesn't get it right. They just don't have it. Like Qualcomm first demonstrated their like millimeter wave 5G modem like a year and a half ago. Like super wonky trade so stuff, right? Like here's a booth. It's a white box. There's a chip. there's like a LED display that says like 200 down.

Yeah. Like no one, like this is stuff where I, we see it at CS, we see it at MWC. It's not even worth writing about. Qualcomm demonstrates a modem. I assure you four people care, right? So this stuff is happening in the background. Intel is not demonstrating those modems. They don't have it.

In the meantime, it is very clear that Apple is like hiring modem engineers in San Diego, which is where Qualcomm is located. So from a leverage perspective, it seems very obvious that Intel just is not going to get it. They're not going to get there. Apple's going to make their own modem in the end. But they can't do it in time for them to put out a 5G iPhone in 2020 or 2021 or however long it's going to take. So I think eventually they just realized they had to cave. My question, and I think people saw this coming a long way away.

Qualcomm was ahead in terms of the technology, in terms of shipping the chips. there are 5G phones, right? Like in the world right now, they're a little bit silly in the sense that the most available one is a Moto mod for the back of a Motorola Z3 that you can use in like one square foot of Chicago. LG just delayed its 5G phone

and there's a really good quote. We're going to concentrate on the completeness of the phone. It's really Zen, actually. We're very early in the ramp, but if you want to ship the phone when the networks are ready, when the technology is ready, when you can put it in a small package,

you need the chips now. You need to start the development now. And Intel has nothing. Intel's stock went up when they announced that they were done making five cheap items because they were just dumping money into this thing. Is this like Intel's like fourth mobile failure? Yeah. How many times have they tried?

Yeah. And for a minute, you know, like having the iPhone modem business is not, a bad thing. Yeah. They just literally couldn't get it right. So, okay. Intel, but here's my question. Yeah.

Apple knew this yesterday. Apple knew this a month ago. Apple knew this a year ago. What happened that they got to the KFC argument and they're like, all right, we're out. We're settled. Like, they had to know Intel was going to like pull out of the business. Right.

Presumably Intel told them like, this isn't going. Well, like some people are wondering, like, what? What happened first? Did this settlement happen? And then Intel's like, you know what? We're out? Or did Intel tell Apple, hey, actually, this isn't going to work. You should probably figure something out.

And then they settled. And then Intel announced. Yeah, this sort of like this chain reaction of events. There's the first day of the trial. They settled just like they put out the press release. The pressure release is super terse. Qualcomm, obviously, like, I don't know how to. You can't read into it too much because they won't say the number.

But Apple signed a six-year agreement to use Qualcomm chip. with a two-year option to renew. They signed a license agreement. So Qualcomm got what it wanted. They selling chips and they got the license. And an unspecified one-time fee from Apple to Qualcomm, which presumably is all of the licensing fees they hadn't been paying already. Yeah.

Right? So like Qualcomm won. The Apple press release has a longer laudatory passage about Qualcomm in it than about Apple. So you know at the end of every press release, it's like Apple is the world's best company. And you should only buy it. Like it's there. There's like two paragraphs of how Qualcomm in it. Welcome invented everything at the end of his first.

The finest purveyor of patent encumbered modem technology. So they obviously like one running away. So what happened that Apple decided we're going to get through opening arguments of this trial? And that's when we'll stop. And I maybe that would always be a mystery. I have seen lawyer shows on CBS. Maybe they read the jury. Yeah, that's like whatever I'm saying.

And it's like, well, then you should have tried harder than this KFC situation. Like, you, like, you thought you're going to win this trial opening argument and you're like, here's what it's like. It's like buying chicken. Who hasn't bought some chicken? Like, imagine you're Tim Cook, one of the richest company in the world. And you're like, I just want some chicken. Like, why did you think that would have been a good argument? And, like, did you read the jury enough?

Right. And Qualcomm's opening arguments were basically a sob story. Like, they took all this money away from us. Now our engineers are sleeping in the same. streets. You know, we're just, we're just out here inventing the future. Big old bully apples showed up. Like, maybe that.

But if you're in a game where you're trying to get leverage and you think based on your opening arguments that you've lost enough leverage, you need to settle right then, maybe argument was never that good. Yeah. And so, like, that, to me, is going to be the mystery forever, is why do we get all the way here? The one, the one comparison I have, which is, one of my favorite verge moments of all time is Uber and Waymo went to trial over self-driving tech.

You remember this? Yeah. Like the dumpster diver? Yeah, he took his laptop, he downloaded all the files. Waymo, which is on by Google, sued Uber. It was like a whole, I mean, this is like trade secret theft. It was like a whole thing. It was chaos.

Yeah. And everyone thought Google would win running away. And Sarah Jong was at trial covering for us. And she wrote, I think for day three or four, she wrote the headline, like, Waymo's case is pretty weak. And, like, there was, like, dead silence from, like, the Google PR people and the Google lawyers.

And we're like, we probably pissed everybody off. And, like, 20 minutes later announcement that they had settled. And I was like, we just made them settle. Like, we just called them out and they settled. Like, we're very proud of that moment. There wasn't any of that moment here, right? Like, there wasn't any of that moment where, like, it was just, like, very obvious that one side was going to,

had a weak case. I don't know. To me, it's, it's remarkable. It does cement Qualcomm's hold on this industry. And even if you think Apple's going to do the thing it's probably going to do, which is make its own modems, they're not going to license those modems not to anyone else. Yeah.

Right? So everyone else is still enthralled. It would have been a good thing for Intel to figure this out and become a component supplier to the industry because then you get competition. No, Nilai, we're always talking about. You're only allowed to have one big. company in each industry. There can only be six companies.

And now Qualcomm can be half of that. Well, it sounds like the, the hot thing to do in this industry is to design the spec and then be ahead on the tech for the spec. So Apple should design 6G with its brand new poached employees. Well, sure. I mean, it's hired an awful lot of employees. A lot of those X Intel employees are apparently going to Apple. presumably Apple things are just going to work harder

because there'll be in a spaceship. This building is a circle. You should be able to figure it out now. But that's sort of the rumor is that they're all going over to the Apple side. Intel is just generally struggling at an engineering level. Yeah.

Right? So who knows? Maybe it's all going to work out. But yeah, the game Qualcomm has played to perfection is forward investing in the spec, owning the huge swath of patents. in the standard, and then leveraging that against the industry.

And so, like, their version of this, the happy version is, well, we invent all this stuff. Like, we spent the money up front and now we want it on the back end. And everyone else is kind of like, well, shit. Like, that was basically Apple's response to them. It's really frustrating. It's one thing, a typical patent in a non-standardized industry, it's like, well, we don't need to make technology that's compatible with your patented technology. so we can go our own way, you know.

But in this scenario where there's a standard and the standard is encumbered by patents, like it's kind of, it's probably way different. But I know there's been a long-term work to get the browsers video playback, not be completely just drenched in patents. And same with like image decode, you know, like it's because it really limits, I don't know, it's frustrating. patents are garbage is my opinion. I don't see how any

consumers are benefiting. It's not like 5G want to be worked on and invested in if there weren't these patents. Yeah, this is a huge argument around Frand in general. Like, does this work? Is this how you want it to work? And sort of the arguments are, well, it works everywhere else, right?

Like, we are not having this argument about Wi-Fi, which is also patent-encumbered. We are not having this argument Bluetooth, which is also patent encumbered. Like, there are the, the, this is so walkie, but like the Frann methodology operates well

around the world and you just never see it. You never think about it. Right. When Apple wants stuff, like Frand is like thrown into question. Like Apple wants to sue Samsung, like all of a sudden Tim Cook is like, we need to reset how Frand works.

Apple is mad at Qualcomm. Like, we're having this patent discussion. Is Qualcomm's this model extremely aggressive? Sure is. But like, how do you incentivize a bunch of companies to contribute their technology to a standard if they're not the ones who are going to get paid on the consumer end?

Like, that's a very, like that is as complicated of an economic question as I think there is. Would Qualcomm just do it out of the because they think if they invent good enough stuff for the standard, their chips will be better? Well, that is true. Because Intel couldn't make them. But like, in a world where

Samsung can just lift all that tech and make something equally as good. Like, you probably want to get a return on that investment. So, like, I don't know. Like, it's as complicated as anything. And there are places where there isn't a patent ecosystem like that, and there are lots and lots of places where they are. And it just seems to be like Apple sits in the center of it all the time. And they cast themselves as, like, the victims of an unfair system

when they are also the richest company in the world. And so, like, we'll see. I just, the thing that kills me is it would have been better for everybody until it sorted this out. Because then you would have had two competitive, like, chips that were being sold as commodities instead of the Apple world and then the Qualcomm world, which is where we seem to be going. All right. That's enough patent talk for today. Mr. Miller, every week, you do a segment. Always, it's called Keyboard in the Front Club Honorary Inductee Edition.

Okay. So, as you all know, I am the president and CEO of the keyboard in the front club. Yeah. Mostly inspired by the amazing Asus Zephyrus laptop, which has the keyboard in the front, right? Touch pad in the back. Touch pad to the side. Touch pad to the side, okay. Hot, hot laptop above the keyboard.

Yeah. Does this make sense? You don't have to lay your hands and wrist. across hot laptop to touch a keyboard. Keyboard in the front club, especially for hot gaming laptops. Well, the new Acer Predator Helio 700 has a twist on this

where the key, it's so hard to explain. The whole top of the laptop, where the keyboard and trackpad are, right? It slides forward, revealing fans and inards of the laptop. Ooh. It slides forward and the touch pad like tilts down because now it's off the shelf of the laptop, right?

Right. So you're bringing the keyboard towards the front, but it's not technically in the front because the track pad, while I'm guessing not even functional anymore, is still technically still attached and in front of the keyboard. It's like in the winter when you've got like a giant sheet of ice on your roof and it like starts to slide off in one big piece but doesn't quite completely fall off. So like so it's hanging off the eve. Thank you. Yeah, it's a slide out.

That's a very good illustration. And so basically it becomes a nice like tapered wrist rest so you can use your keyboard, which is now basically in the front of the laptop. Because obviously if you're going to play a video game, you're going to plug in a mouse. And so yeah. So we have an honorary inductee in the keyboard and the front club. And I'm very excited. Welcome. I like it.

I can't wait for you to have just like 50 gaming laptops. That's what your home should look back. This is my wall of gaming laptops. All right. Let's have a PS5 for five minutes. Wire had a big piece. Yeah. Yeah.

I will say that I don't put anything past Sony. Like Sony can say anything that's insane and I'll believe it. So at one point they were talking about how it would have better audio. and there was a typo in the wired piece. Okay. The Sony person was saying like, you know, we're going to have this better audio.

It's going to be much more immersive. It's kind of sounded like they're going to add at most of the PS5 because the PS4 doesn't have it. But it's like, but it's only going to be headphones and visual surround sound. And I read it. I was like, visual surround.

What does that mean? And like I, like the Rube I am, I just assume Sony's got something nuts. Yeah. Of course Sony is like, The future is visual. No, no, no.

You were just hoping that it was DJ speakers. You were just hoping it was light up speakers. Visual son. No, it was just a typo. They meant virtual surrounds. Oh. Reading this piece, it sounded like two middle schoolers. Like imagining a game console.

Yeah. And it's like, what do you think the PS5 is going to be like? Well, let me tell you, it's going to be so good. It's going to have, he's going to have 8K. Well, what about the audio? Oh, man, the audio is going to be so good. It's going to be 3D audio. Yeah, it was a lot.

But they're doing ray tracing. So far has not been anywhere except super high. I think we saw the first big ray tracing announcing, announcement, CS. And then like the heart of this piece, and Paul, I'm interested in your take it. Because the whole world is moving to cloud stuff. And they're like, it's going to have an SSD. Oh, the SSD is huge. It's amazing.

Okay. At some point in this piece, they say it's kind of vaguely worded. Like, this SSD is about 20 times faster than a regular SSD. Yeah. Okay. Or it could be faster than the fastest. I don't know. My guess is that it's a, like, m.2, like an MVME.

It's not a SATA SSD. Right. This is the impression I'm getting. So it's not just a good SSD. that you get in your desktop, it's very fast. And that's very exciting. But yeah, I mean, it seems obvious. It's kind of RAM.

Like, when you have a 100 gigabyte game, you're not going to put it all on RAM, so you need a secondary slow RAM. That's what storage on a video game console is. The problem is you have these 100 gigabyte games, and the thing they don't mention is what capacity this SSD will be. And very fast SSDs are very expensive.

So are you going to have 128 gigabyte SSD that can only hold one game? What if it's a 128 gigabyte SSD and like most of it is designed for just pre-cashing what they think you're going to need from the cloud? So it's like half stream, half streaming. Maybe. I don't know. They say they would have physical media too. Yeah.

So here's the future I envision. people that live out of the country where they can't get good broadband because our broadband policy, all comes back to broadband policy is garbage, and they have to have something fast and local. We'll get PS5s. And everybody else who can get good broadband in the cool hip cities are going to get Microsoft or Google Stadia. Because then instead of having a cool PS5 under their thing, they'll have an amazing, more powerful machine in the cloud. I don't think this Stadia machine is going to be that much powerful than this PS5. Okay.

I mean, obviously, it's the cloud. They could upgrade Stadia as soon as the PS5 launches. Also, they haven't launched Stadia yet, so who knows. But I'm not, are you that bullish on Stadia? I'm not. No, but Microsoft is like, you know, going to be taking another swing. And I'm talking like three years down the road. Yeah.

Right? Like, we're not going to bring 500 or, you know, gig speed. to all of America in the next five years. It's just not going to happen. No. But it is going to happen, and I do think that we're going to have high enough speeds and interesting enough,

like cloud gaming technologies, where the latency will hit an acceptable level for all but the most hardcore gamers. Yeah. Like, in five years, that is a reasonable thing to expect. And so all of a sudden, we live in this, like, five year in the future world where, like, the only reason to buy a PlayStation is

because you live in a place that can't get broadband. Or they have better games than the Xbox. which has historically been the reason to buy a PlayStation. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, it's an interesting time for this piece to come out. That was like, there's, you know,

there's the tech narrative, like what are they saying? Is it cool? 8K ray tracing, visual surround sound. It's still wrong. Visual surround sound, it would be true. But like, here's all these specs that's going to have this SSD situation.

And then there's like kind of like the media narrative, which is like, why now? Like, why put this out now? Like, what are you trying to prep people for? And it seems like the response is, I don't know, Microsoft just put an Xbox 1S that is literally the same Xbox 1S without an optical drive. Yeah. In Google announced stadia.

And like, well, we got to have something. Let's just put some letters out there and see what people think. Well, they are prepping people for not having any exciting Sony News at E3. Yeah, that's probably true. I know. It's interesting. I just, I'm asking the Veritcast audience, if you can come up with an idea for what visual surround sound is.

please let me know because it was a really exciting like hour where I thought it was real and then the correct the typo. We don't have time, but I just want to say I'm very happy that Google and Amazon have stopped having the stupidest fight in technology and are allowing YouTube on FiretTV and Amazon Prime Vodita support Chromecast. It was very dumb. Okay. That's it.

It was just very dumb. Yeah. All right. That's it. We've been a broadcast this week. Like I said, there's there's two folds. There's a galaxy fold and there's Apple folding and those are the two stories. Wow.

Yeah, I did it. Okay. I made a funny, Dieter. All right. We're out of here. We'll see you next week. Tuesday's interview episode, Friday's chat show. You can tweet at us.

I'm at Reckless. Deer's at Backlon. Paul's future Paul. We want to hear from you. Just do all the stuff. Sign up to all our podcasts. Watch all our videos. Just go to our website as many times as you can in a single day.

We love you forever. Rock and roll. Snip, snap. Paul.