The Vergecast - The summer Intel fell behind / earnings for Apple, Google, Samsung / Nothing's Ear 1 earbuds

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Alex Cranz, and Chaim Gartenberg discuss this week in tech news: quarterly earnings for the big tech companies, the state of Intel, and the Nothing's Ear 1 earbuds. Further reading: CDC reinstitutes mask recommendations for some vaccinated people Apple will require masks again in most of its US stores Communication around masks is still terrible Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine’s protection against severe disease holds steady over six months The pandemic made it even harder to check on the ocean’s vital signs Next Gen - the future belongs to young people The iPhone 12’s strong momentum helps Apple to another huge quarter Google sets all-time records as search and YouTube profits ... Microsoft reports weaker Surface and Windows revenue amid ... Samsung boosts profits and pledges to 'mainstream' foldables ... Amazon’s earnings show why Andy Jassy is now in charge The summer Intel fell behind Huawei’s P50 announced with Snapdragon 888 and HarmonyOS Leaked Surface Duo 2 photos reveal new triple camera system The Oppo Watch 2 launches in China with a promise of 16 days of battery life Nothing officially reveals its $99 Ear (1) true wireless earbuds  Nothing Ear 1 earbuds review: almost something LG’s new true wireless earbuds have a privacy-conscious ‘Whispering Mode’ New Samsung Flip and Fold leaks show water resistance, renders, and an S Pen case White House says infrastructure deal includes $65 billion for broadband T-Mobile’s new prepaid offer is a direct play for the Boost customers it sold to Dish It’s not just you, streaming the Olympics is a mess Activision Blizzard employees walk out of work to protest rampant sexism and discrimination Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on The Vergecast, Alex Cranz and Haim Gartenberg, join us to talk about earnings from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Amazon, and more. We go into what is happening at Intel. We talk about the Huawei P50, and we end with a little bit on DISH Network and T-Mobile. That's coming up on the Vergecast now. 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. Proms 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 goals. 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 Britishcast, the flagship podcast of audio huddles. I should really make Slack pay me for that. That's, anyway,

I'm here. I'm Neil. I'm your friend. Deeder Bone is here. I'm your EBITA. Oh. You're generally accepted accounting principles. Peter Bow. Alex Cranz is here. I am neither of those things, but I enjoy them. I don't know.

Who doesn't enjoy accounting? And Heim Gartenberg is here. Hello. There's a lot going on this week. Every big tech company had earnings. They're doing fine. They're going to make it one more quarter, guys. There's some rumors.

There's some earbuds. There's just a lot to talk about. But I want to start. we always start, which is the pandemic, still the biggest story in the world. And it's back, everybody. Yay. Are you excited? I feel bad for Delta Airlines, which currently has the worst branding in all of industry. Yeah, but they did, they did extend everybody's status for another year. They're just like, screw it. You can have it for another year. I didn't know that. And that's, where the Burgecast is done, everybody. That's the most important news of the week.

I was so sad about my status going away. I'm good. I mean, I got it. Maybe you didn't. I don't know. Is Delta status a thing to brag about? No. It's trivially easy to get. The only thing worse is United status.

The one thing about, this is very off the rails. The one thing about Delta status is that if you live in New York City, you can make your entire personality Delta status and then go out and wander like the bars of New York City, finding other people with that personality. And you're like, here's how I. I got silver medallion and someone's like, oh, I got gold this way. And you're like, how am I having a whole conversation about fake airline money? Wait a minute. I wouldn't even bother talking to somebody with gold or silver. That's not even worth my time. You see what I'm saying. It's just a real thing

you can do in New York. And I've done it more than once, which I'm like, if you saw me, you would notice, I'm embarrassed by this. It's like a wave of embarrassment is watching over me. Anyhow, Delta variant, however, is rising. It's taking over. The CDC has reinstituted mask recommendations for some unvaccinated people in some areas. It is very confusing. It feels like the recommendation should be to just wear a mask. And then on top of that, big companies that were planning full on return to offices are now caught in a pickle because Delta is rising across the country. So Google is now going to require employees to be vaccinated. Facebook. will require U.S. office employees who vaccinated. Netflix is going to mandate vaccinations and all productions in the United States. I feel like I have to issue this disclosure. We are currently making a Netflix production. It's like the other thing I do when I'm not doing this.

And Apple is going to require masks in its U.S. stores. Apple also has a strange policy Zoe Schiffer reported this yesterday. Yeah. If you don't tell Apple you're vaccinated, they will assume you are not. And they will put you into a different protocol as they return to work. Well, they may. A bunch of companies, especially big tech companies, like, you know what, get vaccine. If you have to get vaccinated to come to the office.

Whenever we figure out when we're opening up, you have to be vaccinated. If you're not, you have to mask or you're not coming to the office. Apple's internal HR site, according to Zoe is, if you don't provide your vaccination status, your vaccination status is assumed to be unvaccinated. Okay. If you're not fully vaccinated working on site on Apple building, additional health and safety protocols may apply. Yeah. That may is like an out, you know, like. It's doing a lot of work.

Yeah. A lot of like major Supreme Court opinions are like premised on the difference between May and Shell. Right. And like the May is the out. It's like, I don't know. I think you can read it as Apple will do this. Right. But if you're really nice to them, maybe they don't. So we'll see. I would expect Apple of all companies is, you know, the most energetic about coming to the office. It seems like they're going to mandate vaccines soon to be back in that office. But we'll see. And if you, if you are listening, you. No, tell Zoe, because she is trying to report that out. So just a lot going on with Delta and masks. We have a story, the headline speaks for itself. Communication around masks is still terrible. We're just like, we're not doing a great job, and we need to get vaccine numbers up, and so it goes. But Delta, it's here.

It's like, we thought it was over, didn't you? Early summer, June, you're like, hmm. So we'll see. But the good news is hospitalizations and deaths are down because the vaccines overall, the vaccines are still effective against Delta. It's just very communicable. You thought it was hot vac summer. Unfortunately, it's not vax summer.

Hot mask summer. Oh, God. I will say we have another story. There was a study, you know, the vaccines have been out for a while. The Pfizer vaccine is still, still protects you against severe disease after six months. There's a lot of data about that now, obviously. So that's good news. Second order effects, we always talk about these with the pandemic.

The common cold is back because everyone just like went outside again. I will tell you, I have a cold and I panicked. like we like went and saw some friends our kids played together kids the second other like little kids see each other they get colds like it's like at visual range they just like give each other cold and then max like sneezed in my face and like immediately had a cold and like yesterday i was like crap do i have coat it's like got a COVID test and it's like just a cold but the common cold is bad like everybody know has a cold which is super interesting just from a sort of public health statistics perspective and then this is like a 13th or order effect, all the people who are out in the ocean doing measurements of ocean temperatures in the ocean biome came back. So our ability to see what is happening in the ocean has completely dwindled. We have a great story about that on the site and Howard might be able to get that back. And the autonomous systems that have been deployed to replace our ocean sensors because the people aren't on ships anymore. There's like a quote in the story that's like,

we were out for like a long-term thing and we came an express steam cruiser back home the second COVID hit. So they're like they're building all this technology to measure the ocean, which I think is neat. Last thing before we get into it, we have a package that we internally have been calling Team Verge all week. It's just, it's actually called NextGen. It's on the site. We had a bunch of younger writers tell us about their experiences with technology with, with software.

We've written, we're starting to write about that stuff more. It's a really cool package with incredible. Incredible art. Just incredible art. It's some of the best art we've ever done. Really eye-opening perspective on technology if you don't regularly hang out to young people and talk to them about it.

Okay. Which earnings do under your first, Teter? I kind of put it in the order I was thinking, but if you want to change that around. That was an inside the show question. Oh, that was me segueing to you. Okay. Can we do it again?

Yeah. All right. What earnings do you want to do first, Teter? Well, I mean, we should start with Apple. It was just big. Every time Apple has a big quarter, we're all just like, money, Apple makes so much money. Ooh, boy, hard to tell how much money Apple makes. You can't even put it into human context.

This is one of those quarters. The story to me is, there's a few stories, but one, just like, iPhone sales are up 50%. This iPhone 12 is very popular. And I personally think it's because it's a nicer design than the iPhone 10-based design. People were sick of that design. It's the purple one. Like it. It could be the purple one.

Everyone's just going to be, oh, it's because 5G. Everyone just really wanted 5G. I know that some company, I don't know if Apple's internal. But other companies have told me, like, when they do consumer surveys, those surveys somehow tell them that consumers want 5G. So they have, like, created this demand, and now they are fulfilling it. And now the story that all of mobile industry is telling themselves is 5G is a success because it's selling tons of phones and hooray. Yeah, maybe that's true. They did a lot of marketing.

Yeah. People got confused. People think the vaccine gives you 5G. Like, the 5G marketing was a success across many dimensions, I would say. Have you seen the 5G horse flyer? Because that's like my favorite. No. I think it's a joke.

There's just a dumb flyer, like a picture of a flyer. And it's like 5G horse sided in backyard. And it's like an ethereal horse. Like, it's really dumb. this is what happens when you do the show in the morning. I've got too much, like, dumb energy. So, yeah, I buy that all of the hype around 5G created some demand for it. And if you gave people a list of reasons why they may have purchased a phone,

the thing they could not have before ranked higher than all of the other things. Do you, like, did you buy it for a better camera or do you buy it because of, like, I don't know. You can't. I bought it because it's purple and you didn't have the. that like on the list. Right. So I'm doing 5G. It looks nicer. That said, 50% is incredible to me. I mean, Hyam, you've been covering Apple earnings forever. That is like surprising even not in COVID, not in an iPhone 12, 5G year. That's just a huge number. It's a, it's a huge number. And it's especially a huge number for Q3 or whatever quarter Apple calls this one, the June quarter over here,

because this is typically the, oh, there's new iPhone. coming out in two, three months, I'm going to wait. Like, this is when, like, you know, carriers are, like, literally giving away the phones because they're trying to clear stock on, like, the old models before they start hyping up the new ones. So the fact that they're up this much now is really impressive. Well, so there are a ton, and this is kind of that 5G, like, back and forth, right? Like, AT&T will just, if you, like, open the AT&T website and you're an AT&T customer, they're

like, do you want a phone? Any phone you want, it's free. Just take it away from us. Like, they will aggressively run promotions to get you onto their 5G network and give you a 5G phone, especially with an iPhone. Yeah. So there is a little bit of that like discounting promotional stuff going on that might be driving these sales. And it might be good for Apple because their business is taking money out of every button that you buy on the iPhone. So, like, you know, I think we're used to, I'm curious for your perspective on this. I, We're used to like that two-year boom and bust cycle, right? You get the phone, everyone gets a phone at the same time.

You were historically on the regular cycle or the S cycle with the iPhone, right? And then the contract would come and there would be another spike in sales. Here it's like, because of all the promotions, because of 5G, like that cycle is very clearly broken. And Apple doesn't seem to care if the phone is discounted immediately because they're trying to make all the services revenue. Yeah, I mean, that's like a big, a big key part of this is iPhone. in pockets are iPhones that can buy Apple TV Plus subscriptions. But will they? That's a different question, but that's revenue that goes much farther than the purchase of the phone.

It's almost like a return to like the carrier subsidization model, but on the other side where like before AT&T would just like pay for nine tenths of your phone because they'd lock you into a couple years of paying for overpriced cell service. This is like, we will give you the phone somehow and then you'll pay for the cell service, but also pay for all the other stuff. I mean, this is Deeter's whole argument of Apple turning into a carrier, right? Like, as long as they can get the hardware into your hand, they know they're going to make money in all these other places. Yeah.

I mean, it looks like they're making money on the hardware, too, judging by the earnings. They're not doing badly on that front either. Actually, we should talk about the other places. So Apple breaks down its revenue, its sales into iPhone, Mac, iPad, wearables, home, and accessories is all one category, and then services. So, you know, iPhone huge jump, you know, up across the board, whatever. But wearables, home, and accessories, edged out iPad and Mac, made more money there. And that was half of what they are pulling it in services. So like, in order of it's iPhone, hardware money, and then the next one, about half as much is services.

and then everything else is about half as much as that all grouped together, but wearables home and accessories just edged out. And I look at, like, I look at wearables, home, and accessories and services as basically the money that Apple can extract out of iPhone users, either by selling you AirPods or by selling you services. That's not totally fair because, like, an Apple TV is not necessarily just a, you know, iPhone accessory, but, and neither is like a HomePod mini. Although, I don't know.

Is anybody buying a HomePod Mini who doesn't have an iPhone? I have two. I bought them like immediately. I love my HomePod. I'm the reason here. Tim Cook is like, get Cranz. He did it, nailed it and won. But like, why?

What about wearables? Because we had this whole conversation all of last year and into this year about wearables and about like this potential magic ability to detect COVID and other diseases. And that was a huge part of the conversation. And now we're seeing that like wearables, which is a big part of that, that chunk sold. And like the Apple Watch is the best selling wearable out there. And they all kind of sell their, I think their numbers tick up this year. So like I wonder how much of that was also these watches.

Yeah. I just think that the total market for wearables, home, and accessories is the size of the iPhone market. Yeah. I guess these numbers are big enough that statistically there's some Android user out there with HomePod minis. That's not me. That wasn't me. But like you can't have an Apple Watch for that.

an iPhone. Right. Right. Yeah. And the other ones are so closely tied to it. So however big the market for the iPhone is, the market for wearables is some percentage of that. Yeah. However big the market for the iPhone is, the market for services is some percentage of that with a multiplier that Apple can monkey with because they can be like, now ICloud costs $2.99 or whatever. And they just like turn on more money from you. Yeah. The market for the Mac and the iPad and all the other stuff does not have that just sort of direct relationship to the size of the iPhone market. So you can see where they're going. They're making the iPhone market bigger. They're selling more iPhone stuff. And they're happy to invest in the other things. But even at whatever percentage of the size the iPhone market is,

it's still a gigantic market. So there's just more people with iPhones to sell things to. Whereas, like, I don't think of a Mac is an accessory to an iPhone. And Macs are very expensive. iPhones are pretty expensive too. Yeah, but did you see that chart that was flooding around that's like AirPods by themselves are a bigger business than like Netflix. I did not see that chart, but it's it's a hard chart to work with because Apple doesn't release hard numbers for any of this stuff anymore, which is incredibly frustrating. Yeah, people argued about this chart for the reason that you are describing, but that Netflix's business is like a $7 billion business.

Right. So depending on what you think the biggest chunk of wearables revenue is, if you believe it's AirPods, you're like, oh, that's the whole business. Yeah. Which is a lot to say about AirPods and a lot to say about the iPhone. This is, by the way, not to drill this with a USBC rent. This is why the iPhone is never getting USBC. Does it need it?

No, it's why the iPhone doesn't, but why the iPad does. Because the iPhone market is too big and too important to let anyone mess with that without explicit permission. Yeah. Interesting. Or explicit tax collection. Yeah. And Rand, Mini Randover. I just want to end this Apple section by calling out Elon Musk for being the only CEO in the world,

who will say on his own earnings call, for Tesla. It is not our goal to create a walled garden and to use that to bludgeon our competitors, which is used by some companies, and then to literally do the cough take and say Apple. He was like, on his own earnings call. Amazing. You can say what you want about Elon and everybody will. That was hilarious. Like, just the funniest thing ever. Okay. Other companies also doing well, Google and YouTube are just the ad dollars are moving away from TV and moving towards the digital platforms, which everyone said what happened 10 years ago, and it's definitely happening now. Yeah.

Well, there's been a lot of dunking on Netflix. Like, YouTube's revenue is like almost as much as Netflix's entire company. Yeah. Apparently. The thing I wonder about, especially with the ad money, is, is the big jump this quarter just, you know, everyone thought COVID? was over and the economy's back and like it's time to like turn on the the ad dollars and start making money again and so because Google, Facebook, Amazon have such a huge portion of the online ad market that they just are the beneficiaries of it or is it like I don't know in

particular did more money happen to go to like Google especially because like everyone knows that Google will figure out how to make ads work whether or not people turn off app tracking on the iPhone. I think it's both. Yeah. Right? Like The story of the pandemic is everyone started shopping more from home, which made online advertising more valuable because it has this known return. I constantly joked in Instagram ads, sucker me every time. But this is the whole underlying argument of Facebook and small business and cookies and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, is if you are a tiny inventor and you've invented a marginally better car mount, the cheapest way to acquire me as a customer is online advertising. It's not billboards or Olympics advertising or targeted cable advertising or whatever. Google is like right at the bottom of that funnel.

You search for car mount and Google's like, here's a car mount. And people are going to buy those ads left and right. If you have if you're a traditional TV advertiser and you know people are watching less TV and cord cutting continues unabated, where are you going to put your beautiful TV ads? You're just going to put them on YouTube. Yeah. And that's like the other side of this puzzle. And you're certainly not going to put them on peacock.

the fact that Peacock has a tier that you can pay for that still has ads I don't know man I don't know what they're thinking over there but yeah you just look at these numbers and we sent the last few weeks on the show complaining about Google and it's going slow and it's like feels kind of stuck and then you look at these numbers and like oh they're doing they're fine yeah they're stuck because they can't get through all the money it's like gumming up the engine it's like blocking the tires yeah Yeah, we've got this tweet in our Google earnings story. In 2010, Google's second quarter revenue was $6.8 billion.

In 2021, it was 61.9. Wow. You go back one year, it was 38.3. Like, it's close to doubling, right, from one year ago. This is going to sound like I am, like, I'm a freshman who just read his first Karl Marx essay, but I understand that the economy is not a zero-sum game and that everything, like the pie can grow overall. But if you just step way back and be like, should we be pursuing antitrust right now, the massive profits that these companies, like this 10x in a decade or whatever, is it possible that we would be doing better if some amount of that revenue was split up amongst more than five companies? Yes.

That's not, I mean, I'm like a diehard capitalist. I say that on the show every week. Right. But I'm just saying like, oh, man, big tech made a shit ton of money this quarter. Maybe that money should have gone elsewhere. Just on the face of it, it's like, well, what do you mean? They worked hard. They built businesses.

They should make money. But there is like, I don't know. Yeah, I guess it's like who's losing out on that money. Well, that's the thing. We don't know because they weren't able to exist because Apple captured the entire iPhone accessory and services market. I think a less existential way of saying this, which is difficult. for the Birchcast because we tend to veer into existential as fast as we can.

And RCS, but yeah, yeah. Guess what Google isn't investing in. Google is, their business is being a middleman, right? They don't like to think of it that way. And I'm sure people will tweet and email me for calling them that because what the internet is supposed to do is disintermediate you. Google makes its money getting in the way of what you want from them, search results, and placing advertising from other companies.

And there isn't another competitor to that ad market. That's what all the antitrust pressure in Google really comes down to, right? It's all that's the suits from the state's attorney generals here. The state's attorneys general here in the United States is the ad market. The EU is the ad market and like the order of Google search results. It's Google being a middleman, right? You go to Google and you're supposed to go somewhere else. You go to Google and you want something and they show you an ad for something else.

And so that middleman profit is historically the thing. thing with the internet internet disintermediates. And because they are such a monopoly, it is impossible to disintermediate Google from advertising on the internet. Yep. Right. That's like just a problem. And you can see that their ability to collect that tax is going higher and higher and

higher. Right? The ad dollars want to move from TV. There's a lot of shopping going on online. Where are you going to spend it? You're going to spend it with Google and Facebook. You're not spending it with Netflix. So I keep dunking on Netflix.

Like you can't give Netflix more money. They can just, they can just. They can just run out of people to charge. Right. Whereas Google can collect more taxes. With Apple, this is Apple's antitrust problem, right? They're a toll collector for a huge amount of economic activity on the phone. And that's why they're so invested in services.

Because as Haim has written, wow, 5,000 times now, like, the biggest chunk of services revenue is like whales and candy crush. Right. Should they be a tax collector of that size? Like, probably not. And the second order, like, what innovation didn't we see? It's like, it feels farther down the list to me than just saying like, yeah, look at these numbers. They just sit between people and what they want.

And they charge a toll for every one of those transactions. And that seems really problematic. I mean, I guess I should say disclosure, we are part of a media company that makes its money on advertising and has its own advertising product. And so there's a little piece of this. It's like our company might be worth more. we weren't just picking up the crumbs of whatever people are just giving to Google by default. Right. I mean, like Google took over where media traditionally existed.

Those are the dollars it took, right? It took the dollars from TV. It took the dollars from newspapers. It took the dollar from digital media companies. And now it's just very happy with that. And it's also taking the dollars from all these other places, too, besides just this big chunk that all of media lost. Yeah. But like if they take all the dollars from TV, right, which is.

You want to make the big argument about cord cutting and the TV ad market and YouTube. Like, now they're starting to take the dollars away from TV advertising. It isn't, regardless of how you feel about cable news, it is probably good that there are multiple cable news channels. Right. Right? Instead of like one algorithmically driven cable news channel, which is YouTube. If you coalesce all that money into YouTube, like YouTube has too much power. Yeah.

So like, I don't know. Like, I look these numbers. It's great. these companies are doing well. You can see the A to B consequence. Like the pandemic happened, people started shopping from home. They bought more technology. The money followed suit.

Oh, that makes sense. Should they be toll collectors of the size? I have no idea. Facebook had earnings too. Their earnings are also up. And like Mark Zuckerberg spent the entire time talking about the Metaverse and not advertising. And you can tell.

He's like bored with his monopoly business. Advertising. And he was like, what if I did the Metaverse? Like there's a part of this business that. is unseemly. They don't want to talk about it. They want to talk about consumer innovation. But it's their business.

And I think there's a reason in particular. You see Google get distracted from the products we wish they would invest in. Because at the end of it, they have to tend to the money and the money is out of control. Some more to get through. Time, do you want to walk us through Microsoft and Samsung? Yeah. Microsoft also made money, to the surprise of no one. Revenue is up 21%.

They made a boat of money. You can look up the numbers. The interesting thing with Microsoft is that a lot of that was, with, actually, it's not that interesting. It was exactly as expected, which is a lot of it was from their cloud and office services, which were up. And then they experienced the hit from the global chip shortage. And like, you know, surface and surface revenue was down because, you know, you can't sell computers and you can't sell Windows licenses to OEMs. If they can't sell computers, which need chips. Also, it's been a hot minute since there's been an interesting surface computer. Yeah, right? That's true. Maybe they're just, they're taking a break because they're, they're, they're, they're just thinking about the surface duo in their hearts. They're just like pondering it. There was that leak this week? Yeah, there was the leak this week that there's going to be a new surface duo.

They're going to give another. I have many feelings about the new surface duo. But, you know, the Surface Pro, the main, like the surface that we all think of, it still has the big bezels and design has been updated in forever. We're going to get into Intel and its problems in a minute. But, you know, the Surface Pro X, is there the prettiest surface? It, no one wants to buy it because the arm in Windows is bad. They haven't done anything that's like, oh, man, the surface is like a big deal.

If we care about it. If I were to go out and buy a PC today, surface is not on like the list of things that I'm thinking of first right now. It's Acer, Ais Razor. It feels like they're doing like some soul searching. Like there's going to probably be a Windows arm equivalent of Apple's M1 stuff at some point or a Windows. I love this optimism. Qualcomm's going to make it. I don't know who's going to make it, but I am optimistically assuming that someone will figure out what Apple has done here.

It cannot be some sort of magic thing that only the great minds of Cooper Tino are able to figure out. It took Android some time, too, and it still needs four times the RAM, but they got there eventually. So, like, someone will figure this out. I think Microsoft very much wants to be that someone, and that was the whole Surface X stuff. And I think they're just doing some soul searching and figuring out how to actually make that work. Yeah, well, their soul searching is they told us the future was dual screens. Yeah. And then all that got blown up.

Yeah. And then they're like rethink, like, you know, Nadella was on decoder and he's like, Windows is a platform for platform. Like they pivoted windows. Like they're, they're just like, I think they're changing their relationship to that stuff. And they don't have a surface Neo. That was the big two screen. That was a, yeah, yeah. And that thing just got shelved.

and they kind of pivoted windows. I would say it's soul-searching, but we kind of know what it looks like, right? Yeah. I guess. Just not what the hardware looks like. Yeah, that's true. Xbox is doing fine.

It's just not doing as well as PlayStation, which everyone could have predicted that. Yeah. Also can't sell that. I was about to say, Xbox is doing exactly as well as the number of consoles. They have physically been able to manufacture. I had the moment this week,

because, you know, flight simulator came out for the Xbox. Yeah. And I was like, oh, I'm going to buy an Xbox. And, you know, like, you just have that, like, oh, here's the reason I was going to buy the thing. I'm going to, like, open the web browser and buy the thing. And I was like, oh, wait, what am I thinking? That's not how that works anymore. Now I'm going to engage a network of scalpers and thieves to see, like, robots to see if I can get one of these things.

I mean, I'm going to buy a play date, and I can't wait to get it in 2024 or whatever the queue looks like these days. That thing looks so cool. Okay. Samsung. Samsung also made money. If you're not a day. there's a trend here. It's a good time to be selling tech stuff.

They made money. They noted that there were component shortages, which is the same story we've seen for a lot of these companies. They are starting to take more material hits on these. I think we're going to see more of that coming up in the next quarter, especially with the new stuff coming up. Apple's already started to be like, you know, we might have issues with supply.

Microsoft has said. AMD is like, you know, we're doing our best. And, yeah, Samsung also, like, started teasing slash Outlight just saying, oh, we're going to have more foldables in, like, a week. In the worst kept secret since the last Samsung announcement. Yeah. No, they basically announced the phones in a letter, a blog post, and then they mention it again here. Wasn't the line that they're going to make it, like, more mainstream? Yeah, mainstreaming the foldable category and solidifying its leadership in the premium smartphone segment.

That's a contradictory statement. If you're going to mainstream it, it needs to not just be the premium smartphone segment. The flip needs to be like $800. That's a hilarious thing. That used to be very expensive. I know. Yeah. I know.

I would just say, let's just pause for a minute and just react to using mainstreaming as a verb. Damn it. What's going on there? Mainstreaming the foldable category is just, Like, can you imagine going to work as like a Samsung junior marketing associate and being like, I'm inspired by that phrase? Like, it's just not a vision. Like, everyone is going to have these phones, right?

Eventually, all the phones are going to fold. Eventually, or they will fade away into the memory pit of bad tech ideas, like the 3D phones. Are folding phones? Are they 3D? Are they curved? Or are they... We already tried curved phones. We tried curved.

Yeah. I think all the phones are going to fold eventually. I fully believe it. Like, just like the, you know how like the Metaverse came out of nowhere? Because the Oculus Quest 2 exists. And so now like a bunch of tech executives can be like,

oh, I get it. Like it's not anywhere close. But it's a sci-fi vision. It's a product that people can see. Yeah. And like understand in a way that 3D phones or whatever was more nonsense. Like this is a thing from movies. You have a small screen that folds into a big screen.

So are holograms. Like, sometimes the technology just isn't there. Like, these are not, there's not a lot of good ways to make, like, a durable thing that folds that doesn't, like, disintegrate after a year or two of use. The Wall Street Journal had an amazing article about, you know, bendable OLED screen technology. And they had a prototype that was a tube and then the phone would roll out from the tube, you know? Like a, I don't know. If you could see me, I'm, like, pulling a phone out. It's like a scroll.

Yeah. And, like, you know, bendable screens and, like, semi-transparent. and like very, very cool, like the technology exists, and people could probably start making this stuff. By the way, this article is from 2001. I'm just saying if Samsung is getting to a place where they're using mainstreaming as a verb, yeah, what they, I think what they're actually suggesting

is a remarkable disregard for the conventions of the English language, first of all, which bold, I appreciate you. And second, they know it's about to happen. Like it's about to flip. Like that's a big promise to make to your investors, especially ahead of an event where you have a bunch of products coming out. And I think it should be obvious that Samsung is,

they also white label displays, especially OLED displays. So I think they know that their display division is ready to ramp scale on a product that, to Heim's point, like, can survive. Yeah. It's just, this is just ready to be a component that Samsung sells. And that means everyone's going to have them. once that happens, it's, you know, it's the same as with anything. Once the form factor settles down, what is most important, the software, and then Samsung's right back where it started.

But aren't they going to, are they still going to be delicate like the current ones are? Because the current ones are like even more delicate than the phones we have now. Like our phones are getting more and more and more and more delicate. And that feels like we're going backwards, even though I'm excited to fold something and fit it in my pocket. Yeah. We are one generation out from the foldable that came with like an entire YouTube video detailing what not to do with this phone. Yeah. Handle it with kid gloves like a newborn child.

Yeah, let's not forget Dieter's review. The first fold canceled the product. Yeah, I mean, you know. Yeah, I get it. I'm just, but this is, this will be the third generation, right? Right. Yeah, this is three. Yeah.

Yeah. So this is, this is the third generation. but the one that we are currently on is is still one out and it still has issues. There was the whole video like going around a couple weeks ago of like the six month or the or the nine months with a Z fold. And it was like, yeah, just crapped out one day. And now there's like this giant line in the middle of the screen. Yeah, I just feel like the technology is still way far out. And also that like, I don't know, there's diminishing returns on the OLED.

Like everybody's demanding so much more from their phones. they want a good picture, but they also want good battery life. They want it to like last longer than two days. And I feel like going super, super premium to something that you have to like coddle isn't going to actually do it for mainstream. For mainstreaming. Yeah, mainstreaming. Sorry, sorry. Sorry, Samson.

I didn't mean that. I remain a folding enthusiast. I think it's clear that Hym is a folding pessimist. Am I the only one here that's actually spent his own personal money on folding phones because I've done it? Yes. Yes. Yeah. Okay.

What do you think? Yeah. You've been notably quiet. Well, I mean, I return them. I get text from Deter's like, I did it. Okay. The third generation of tech products is historically when they get good. Okay.

If you just like look over the arc of time, right? It's like the third generation of any Microsoft products is the one where it gets good. Yeah. I'm willing to give them the benefit of it out in this one. We are hearing that like Apple is like looking at these devices, right? and Apple is historically the one who finally figures it all out and makes people go, oh, yeah, I would put this in my pocket. And there's rumors that Google is making a folding pixel. And that's the one that's going to blow this market wide.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, wide open. Yeah, it's just it all, at the end, all this display stuff comes down to can one of two display companies make these things at scale, right? I'm still holding out for e-ink here. I think, you know, they got the color this year. We give it another 10 years. It's going to look. It's going to look almost like a real thing. It's going to be great.

Coloring is also one of those ones where I think we could pull up an article from like 2001. No, it did totally change this year. They're doing more colors. Does it look like mud? Yes, yes, that's true. But it's closer. It's so close. I love this energy.

I am waiting for a really good mirror assault display. Oh, my God. Guys, Amazon hasn't put you. USBC on the Kindle yet. I would, I would maybe not get too far ahead of yourself. The most substantial upgrade the Kindle has gotten in six years was a color temperature backlight. Yeah.

And that Kind of like, can I just be honest with you? I bought a Kindle Oasis for Becky on Prime Day because she's a Kindle addict. Yeah. I read no reviews. It was just cheap. And I bought her the Rose Gold one and I gave it to her. And then like three days later, I was like, do you like your new Kindle expecting to like win that conversation?

And she was like, it sucks. Wow. Because it has no battery life because of the stupid... You got to keep it in the case. You got to keep it in the case. And you got to turn off that one backlight function they added. Just use it under the sun. It's like a Game Boy advance from 2001.

Meanwhile, Amazon made $113.113.1 billion in revenue growing 27% year over year. None of that was Kindle. They hit their estimates, basically, their guidance, but... The investor class thought they were going to make way more. And someone was very like sad panda about it. I think they'll be fine. Yeah, they're going to be fine. Oh, no.

My heart goes out for them. Okay. Yeah, Amazon made a lot of money. We're taking a break. We'll be right back. We're going to talk about Intel. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard.

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And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focused shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Okay, we're back. Haim. You wrote a long piece this week about last summer for Intel that led to all the changes.

New CEO, new executive team, new plan. They also had earnings. Andy had earnings. Tell us what's going on. All right. So earnings came first, actually. The earnings were last week. Intel made $18.5 billion, which was half a billion-ish above what they were expecting to make, up 2% year-over-year. They did fine. AMD made $3.8 billion. Revenue is up

99%. So obviously, we're in a little different categories there, but percentage-wise, AMD is also doing just fine. But the big thing from Intel wasn't actually earnings. It was on Monday, their new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, had an event called Accelerating Intel. Or Intel accelerated. I think, sorry. And it was to announce their new Intel Accelerated. It was to preview the next five years of Intel's roadmap in terms of their processor architectures and their processor nodes, their packaging technology. They also rebranded all of their stuff to make it look like they are not as behind as

they are in some respects. So they were doing, a lot of it is marketing. A lot of it is damage control from. Last year's big thing, which is that Intel delayed, it's 7 nanometer, which is now called Intel 4. You can read there's a whole breakdown on the site. But basically, last year, Intel was like on their earnings this summer, about a year ago today, they're like, our next generation ships, which we're supposed to ship at the end of 2021, are not coming until 2023. We messed up a thing in making them, and now they're super delayed.

Sorry, isn't this like the 15th time Intel has said something to that effect? We're going to, the thing that the smaller processes, we thought we had it, but no, it turns out it's really hard. We screwed up a thing. It's going to be longer. Are you referring to the six years it spent trying to get its 10 nanometer chips out the door? Yes. They're almost out the door. The 10 nanometer chips are mostly out the door.

They still have not done it on desktop. That's one of the problems of the desktop chips is that they're now doing like some 10 nanometer stuff on the 14 nanometer scale. There are like some reviews that are like just by last years. These are not as good because they have fewer cores. course. So the big thing I wrote this week was kind of taking a look at last summer when everything kind of exploded for Intel and then what they've been doing since. So there are three main things that happened, pretty much in the span of a month. Intel's like Mr. Fixit chip designer that they had hired, Jim Keller left the company very, very suddenly. It was for personal

reasons. Intel hasn't really given details. Keller hasn't really given details. Well, he's opened his own company, says, fantastic. No, he's, so he's working on a new company on their board. He usually stays places short, but just to give a little background, he helps Apple design the A-series chips, the A-4 and A-5 when they first came out. He helped AMD design its Zen architecture, which is what AMD is currently using to very aggressively compete with Intel. He helped Tesla design its self-driving computer chip. He has a really impressive resume for this kind of stuff. And then Intel brought Keller on to run its entire Silicon Engineering team in 2018. and he was like very much there to get everyone back on track.

Literally like a month before he left, there's like this giant interview in Fortune with him about how like Intel was betting everything on Keller. And then three and a half weeks after that went up, he left the company. So it may have just been, you know, his time was up. He usually comes in for short times, unclear. A couple days after that, Apple announces

that it is no longer going to be using Intel processors and its Macs because it wants to let the Mac jump forward so that they can make better products. It was this big giant sign that said, we do not think your chips are good enough for us. And this was coming after a lot of frustration with Intel in the past. Bloomberg basically reported Apple was frustrated with Intel's roadmap. Cook had noted it in 2019 that, you know, they had issues with supply constraints from Intel stuff. It was not necessarily the vote of confidence or lack thereof that Intel needed at this point. while they're in the middle of this big 10-9mm-r rollout,

they had finally gotten these chips out the door. And then a couple weeks after that, Intel had to announce that its next-generation chips, the 7-9meter Intel 4, whatever you want to call them, they're probably more on par with TSM and Samsung's 5-nometer chips. That's the whole marketing rethink. Can we just take a pause there again, the marketing hustle to call their 7-nometer Intel 4 because the other guys were at 5-nometer? There's incredible.

Zero percent of people bought it, but I respect the hustle. Yeah. It's the 5GE of chips. So in Intel's defense, they do have some, some legs to stand on here in that all the points are made up and none of this means anything anyway. There's no, if you take a 5-9ometer M1 chip that TSM makes on their 5-9ometer process for Apple and you look at it under a really big microscope, there's not a single thing on that chip that's 5-9metre in some. size. These are just like approximate terms to indicate jumps. The quote-unquote five-nanometer known is for EUV, which is, you know, ultraviolet etching technology that they're using. Intel is going to start using that on Intel 4. It's not entirely unfair to say that.

It also doesn't change the fact that Intel is still on its 10 nanometer or 7-9mmeter, whatever you want to call it equivalent, and everyone else is already churning out 5-nometer chips and has been for over a year. So. Well, it hasn't actually turned it out, though, yet. Right? Like, it's still way behind. So, yeah, Intel is in the middle of its 10-9meter, everyone else's seven stage. Like, it hasn't gotten there on desktop yet versus, you know. Everybody else is looking at 5.

You can buy a 7-natometer AMD desktop chip and stick it in your gaming computer today if you can find one on a shelf, which I wish you good luck. So Intel isn't there yet. And even if they were, everyone else is already on the next thing. Like, you can buy a laptop with a 5-nometer chip. I'm using one right now. So Intel's big thing was we're going to catch up. They cleared house after that.

Their head of engineering, Dr. Murty. We interviewed him on the rich. We interviewed him. He's no longer there. He left right after that announcement was made. They announced shortly after that that CEO Bob Swan, who was previously their chief financial officer, would be leaving. And they replaced him with Pat Gelsinger, who is the current CEO, who was Intel's

original chief technology officer, it was really a shift back towards getting their leadership on the engineering side of things. They've been rehiring, you know, old, old designers, old hardware people who had since left the company in the last, you know, 10 years of delays. And they have this very ambitious roadmap, which aims to catch up to where everyone else is by 2024 and to jump ahead by 2025. And they are doing that by more or less releasing new architecture nodes every year for the next four or five years, which is very ambitious. So it's just like a tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Almost.

It's not quite a tick tick tick. Like Intel 3 is more of a talk. It still would be based on the upcoming thing, but it's going to be a fairly big jump. Wait, the numbers are going down. Yes, the numbers always go down. So the roadmap is... Wait, there's just a logical endpoint to that plan, right? Oh, no, tell him, tell him. Tell them.

Okay. I am so glad you asked that, actually. So right now, Intel is on its second generation 10 nanometer tech, which is 10 nanometer superfin. Previously, Intel had a system where they would use pluses. So you had 14 nanometer plus, you had 14 nanometer plus plus. It was not the best system. It kind of indicates how long the 14 nanometer era went on. Didn't they get to a 14 nanometer plus plus plus? I think there might have been.

I have to double check. This is great. So 10-9-meter-plus would have been this current, the Tiger Lake stuff, which was renamed to 10-90-meter superfin to reflect the technology in it. Also, it sounds cooler than 10-9-meter plus. This year's chips were supposed to be 10-9-meter-plus-plus, the third generation one. It's Alder Lake, which is coming out later this year, and uses some interesting new technology. So that's been renamed to Intel 7. Okay, keep going.

But the lakes are still there, right? It's still... Yes. So the lakes are the internal code names. Yeah. So that's coming later this year. Alder Lake is a big little style chip that uses a hybrid, you know, performance core and efficiency core similar to armed products that we see. Intel had released an earlier version of that with the Lakefield chips.

This is the second generation of that, is the third generation of its 10 nanometer tech. And that'll be out later this year. So that's Intel 7. Okay. formerly known as 10 nanometer superfin. No, no, no. So 10 nanometer superfin is now is Tiger Lake. Okay.

Intel 7 is the third generation 10 nanometer, which is Alder Lake, okay. Coming out at the end of this year. Intel 4 is the, or what was previously, the architecture, the artist previously known as Intel 7 nanometer, is Intel 4, which was originally supposed to be out of the end of 2021, and will now be coming out in early 2023 with Meteor Lake, with production starting in the second half of 2022.

They've already locked in a few things. And there are going to be big jumps with that. Like, that's the big jump that Intel's been waiting to do. So they're saying like a 20% jump in performance per watt, which is not inconsiderable. And cutting down on overall area of the chip, like it will be a big jump when it comes. It will feature a much higher transistor density.

than even TSM's current 5 nanometer nodes. So it will be a very interesting piece of technology when it comes in another year and a half, hopefully. But we're running out of numbers now. We are running out of numbers. So Intel 3 is the second generation of that 7 nanometer product. So it's the second generation of what would have been the 7 nanometer one. It is actually also promising a roughly 18% increase in performance per watt for Intel 4. or so, it's a tuck in that it's a second generation thing, but it will also have a fairly

big jump. Intel is expecting manufacturing in the second app of 2023, and it'll be available in 2024. Probably they haven't put a hard date on that yet. Now, as Nilai had pointed out, we are running out of numbers here. So these numbers are not really standing for anything. You notice they're not Intel 3 nanometer. They're not reclassifying as that because, again, the numbers as they stand right now don't actually stand for anything. There's no 5 nanometer or 7 nanometer transistors on these chips. That said, the next generation after Intel 3 is not Intel 2, but Intel 20A. Yes!

Yes! We really had to lay down the groundwork. So let me give you a bit of an explanation here. So the 20A, Intel 20A is meant to evoke. the Angstrom era of semiconductor design. What? Oh, I love it so much. So Angstrom is a unit of measurement that is smaller than a nanometer.

So 20 Angstrom is equivalent to two nanometers. Now, this is not a two nanometer scale thing, nor is it standing for 20 angstrom. It is just meant to evoke that. So it's a lot. With the A. No, you know what, anytime a company just jumps its numbering system to 20, you know that they've given up. Samsung did this with the S20.

what, whatever. It's 20 now. We know it'll always be bigger than the iPhone number. Yeah. All joking aside, though, this is probably going to be the biggest jump in Intel's chips in like 25 years. But it's going to happen 25 years from now. Yeah. Not 25 years. And like, in like 10, 15 years, it's their first new transistor since FinFet, which is the basic technology that every major transistor has been using since 2011. So this is the next really big jump forward. They're using something called Ribbon FET, which is an all-around transistor. It allows for a lot greater transistor density, smaller sizes.

They are doing a lot of interesting stuff, technically, or are planning on it. It'll be out sometime in 2024 or 2025. Hopefully. Ramping is 2024. It'll probably be in hardware you can buy in 2025, hopefully, assuming that none of the delays that have plagued the company for the last 10 years pop up. Wait, 28. I just want to come back to us.

20A is 20 angstroms or too na. centimeters. Yeah. That number still has to come down. Indeed, it does. You don't want to go to 30A. So the generation after that is 18A, which is the farthest piece of the roadmap. It is the vagus thing. So it's the second generation that'll use that ribbon-fet technology. It is in development for early 2025 is the only thing Intel gave. At this point, we don't have hard numbers anymore for improvements that it's expecting in performance per watt. And 18A is the most important piece because that is the part where Intel says that it will be back at the head of the pack. So all this, all this was to say that Intel is not ahead right now. Like as a fact right now, Intel does not

make the most technically advanced chips on the planet. And it expects to be making that again when 18A comes out in 2025, 2025, 2026-ish. Okay. What's smaller than an Engstrom? So smaller than an Engstrom, I'm so glad you asked this. The Angstrom is not actually a scientific, It's not an SI unit. It is an alternative unit. It's imperial. It's an imperial unit. One angstrom is 0.1 nanometers, but the metric scale generally only goes in units of three.

So we go million, which is, you know, three billion, which is another three digits. So the next thing down is pico, pico meter, but we're probably a ways away from having to use that. And Intel's even further. But somewhere on the Intel chart, they're like 20P is coming. 20p might be coming. before the heat death of the universe. They should have just been like 200p and then just like given themselves

all of the numbers in between. Yeah. Look, when they switch to measuring things in angstroms, I also think they need to get rid of lakes and switch to ponds. All right, we got to end this. Every time you're on the show, I'm like, explain the USB version numbers

or explain Intel's name scheme. And it's always so much more complicated than you can possibly imagine. And that's why I appreciate you. I apologize to everyone for this. Amazing. Well, Hym is very much on the chip beat lately. If you're listening to this and you're the person in Intel in charge of picking

angstroms, just email Hymme because many questions are coming your way. Okay, we're going to take one more break and we got it. Dude, we have a lot of gadgets talk about it. Yeah. All right. All right. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn.

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Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale,

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And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. start building at MongoDB.com slash build. We're back. Deeter, what gadgets do you want to start with? I want to start with the Huawei P50, which is launching, for real.

It's got Harmony OS. Because in an alternate universe where this thing didn't have Harmony OS, this would be the phone of, like, the fall. You know, iPhone is probably on some sort of S cycle, whatever number they give it. Samsung's going to make another Samsung phone. You know, Google's going to try for the pixel.

you know, like all the stuff. But like up until the ban, Huawei was like gunning for Samsung in like major markets. And they were the, they were the, that was the competition. It was Samsung versus Huawei. And then that just is gone. So this phone, the P50 and the P50 pro is like from an alternate universe. You know, I'm sure it will do fine in China. You know, we've already talked about Harmony OS and how it's, it's not Android, but it's Android.

And the cameras look ridiculous. I love how giant these camera modules are in the back of the phone. And they've had to, like, always in such a bad spot. One of the quotes here is like, 5G phones are beyond our reach. We have to go with 4G by removing the 5G module from our chip design, again, because of stuff. And so this, I'm waving my hand at stuff a lot. So that's kind of what I have to say with this phone. I would love for this to have been the phone that,

that puts Samsung on notice that is taking on the ultra in a more serious way. It would have been a huge clash of the Titans. And instead, it's an interesting side note. Yeah. That's what I got to say about the P50. The Harmony OS thing is like, we'll see, right? Yeah. If you're Samsung, you're watching the C if Huawei can peel off from Android.

Right. And actually pull it off. Yeah. Because that indicates that maybe you could do the same thing, which is like the big back and forth historical tension with Google. Yeah. Well, and so the other thing I guess to pay attention to is can they get an app ecosystem going? You know, I'm sure, you know, Android compatible there, can they get a store going? Will people actually use and update their apps on that store?

Because there's like, there's maybe a little bit of Android store competition potentially happening because, you know, the Amazon app store is going to show up on Windows now when Windows runs Android apps. Huawei's going to be doing this thing in Harmony. it may be that that could be another interesting like sideways thing that this does. I just, I don't want to give it that much credit quite yet. But I think you're right that Samsung is paying attention to that. Can this run the Amazon App Store for the same stuff? You know, I have no idea. If you were to just like side load the Amazon App Store on Harmony OS, would it just like happen to work?

I bet it would just happen to work. I'm just, yeah. But like, no one would. Like, no, I mean, like, how many people? in America are going to be buying this. Zero people. Zero people. Deeter Marquez. Yeah. Two people are going to be buying it.

Everybody else is going to be buying it in China, where it'll probably do really well because Huawei is like huge there. No, this is explicitly for the Chinese market. Like, to be clear. I'm just saying that like in an alternate universe, it would have been for the world. Actually, you know, we talked about Apple's earnings. Like Apple's biggest market is China.

Yep. So in a very real way, the P50 is Apple's biggest competition. Right. They are paying a lot of attention to this phone. Yeah. And I think you already are seeing, like, in China, like, their own app stores are really popular already. Like, everybody's kind of gotten used to having their own app stores, and you just go put your app on all 12 different stores for all 40 different products out there. So it feels like this is probably going to do just fine in China, although the 5G thing is really weird.

The 5G thing, yeah. we were just talking about that. That's a big point of contention here in the United States. Yeah. We'll see. It just reminded me that the last time Apple had one of its like deep dive camera meetings. They talked about Huawei way more than I expected. And this all just brought it full circle for me.

Right. Because that's who they are competing with. Like they care a lot about Samsung. They care a lot about the pixel in one of their biggest markets, if not the biggest market quarter to quarter. Yeah, it's Huawei. Well, and not for nothing. It may be that the Chinese government has a vested interest in seeing some success of Harmony OS and wants to do what it can to support it. And so that could also be a reason that it could be successful in some way.

And they won't just default back to Android if they're ever allowed to again. And that could also create weird pressures on Samsung and Google. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because Huawei is very friendly already. You're going to get an email from Hawaii. I'm about to get an email. They don't like it when you say that, but they are very friendly.

Lots of other gadgets. Apo Watch 2 in China. Deere another, it's like another Dieter special. I mean, is it sure? I mean, it's, look, it's running the sort of same whatever OS we have been seeing out of Apo for its watches. It would be very interesting if this thing ran a more standard OS. It looks fine, but it's, again, it just solidifies for me that the wearable accessory market for Android users is just the most depressing thing in this precise moment. You can get a Fitbit, you can get a bad wearOS watch.

And the WearOS watch, like upgrade story is a fiasco. Don't buy a wearerless watch right now. Just do not. A very, a perishingly small number of them are even going to be upgradable. And that upgrade process requires a hard reset. And like you just got to start over from scratch. fossils releasing watches this fall that will be upgradable, but they're not going to launch with WareOS3. We're expecting Samsung to announce some WareOS3 watches imminently, of course.

But, you know, like if you treat these watches as, I don't want to say disposable, but like with all of these watches, the Apple Watch 2 included, you should just assume that what it does out of the box is what it does. Period. And if what it does out of the box is good, like long battery life keeps time, counts steps decently, or at least halfway decently. well, then, you know, more power to you. Happy you got something that does what it said it would do out of the box. But do not expect it to be, like, a platform that you install apps and, like, it gains new capabilities over time. Not right now.

Yeah. I mean, we'll see what this wear-ass-three stuff looks like. Obviously, Google and Samsung, I mean, they got their asses kicked to come together in a way that you just wouldn't expect historically. Yeah. So we'll see. Alex, tell us about these nothing earbuds, which. feel like they also came out of nowhere and were like a hype supernova this week.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I feel like we've been hearing about them sort of for a while now, which is really annoying because the name is nothing. And I just keep being like, oh, like, there's just so many puns. Like, it's just inviting them. But new earbuds, they look a lot like an AirPods pro, but I think nicer. I personally like them. I think they look really cool as hell.

Yeah, they look cool as hell. Yeah. But they're only $100 instead of $250. But that also means, you know, you can't lose that much money and expect them to have the same quality. Like, that just doesn't exist. So the big issue, I think, is that, like, the noise cancellation kind of sucks on them. And that's... Well, and they're buggy as hell.

Yeah. Yeah. The software is just, like, not great. It could be better. But they look cool. And they got wireless charging, and you don't have to, like, spend extra for that. and they're $100. Yeah.

I think that's neat. That is not nothing. It is not nothing. Wow. All right, I got to go now. See you later. If that made me grown, you know, it's bad. I just wanted, do you think these are going to become like the default Android buds?

Right? Because they like have the look. They have a look. I think it's a problem for Google if these become the default Android buds. Is it Google or Samsung? Nobody. Google. Or Samsung, both of whom sell ear buds.

That are okay. Samsung's buds are really pretty solid defaults. Although I will say I bought the Buds Pro this week and just completely broken within a day. Wow. The noise cancellation on one of the buds is just like, we're just going to make some static noise now. So those are going back. But they're like the regular Buds Plus, as far as like lowest common denominator, you trust them to last a long time and sound decent and like not just be broken.

They're great. I love them. So Samsung, I think for Android users is like probably like the, you know, one of the, I mean, there's a bunch. People like the Jabras, people like a bunch of the other ones. But this could be like the default cool one for at least a hot minute. Yeah, but like for Android users. But like Bluetooth headphones are a huge business now, apparently. Like it makes a ton of money for Apple.

So it's when nothing came out like the first thing we're going to make are Bluetooth headphones. phones. We're all like, ugh. But actually, maybe that's just, that's where the money is. But also, you have to, you have to, for these to become like the next default for Android users, they have to find them. Like, these are sold right now through nothing's website. You're not, you're not rolling up in a Best Buy and deciding between these and a Samsung. You can't see, they're not on Amazon or, or, I mean, they're trying to like replicate that one plus thing, right? Where, where, where all the Android users. That's super successful one plus strategy. Yeah. I was about to say.

I was about to say, this feels a lot like Oneplus, which is not like a retail success. It has not broken through the phone market and unseated Samsung. It'll be really popular with Android influencers. It's very hard to unseat Samsung, even if you make a better phone than Samsung, which you could argue that One Plus did in some ways. You've got to get the carrier deal. Like, there's just a million steps between you and selling a thing. There's just like other suits show up and demand whatever concept. sessions. They're just like made some headphones. And like there's a huge market of Android users.

And you could just sell cool headphones to them. Yeah. If you put these in Best Buy, I feel like they would do amazingly well. Yeah. Well, they got to finish them first because they're very broken. They have to make that. I mean, the trick here to me is like make earbuds that kind of are cool because AirPods had a moment of like being cool. But now they're just kind of boring default. Yeah. I can't think of any other earbuds. I'm like, oh yeah, those look cool. They all look terrible. Beats used to be cool before Apple. Apple on them. But not the earbuds. But those are headphones.

I'm talking about like earbuds. Yeah. Yeah. Airbuds like you've got the bows with your giant satellites on your ears. Yeah. And you've got like you've got what the beans, the Samsung beans. Those are. They didn't call them beans, man.

This is very, this dicey area on this show. Just going to get wrecked. They're definitely beans. But they do. I mean, those look cool. And yeah, like these look neat. These look like the next step in that Apple design, which we could all a bit, was probably really, really good.

Have you been watching, if you watch the Olympics, just watching athletes not care for their AirPods is incredible. Like, I was watching swimming last night and, like, dudes are just, like, pulling their AirPods out and just, like, throwing them loose in their pockets. Oh, my God. And I was like, ah! I'm like, freaking out. Just a full-on horror movie.

But that's, like, that kind of marketing is impossible to, to, like, overcome. Right? Like, everyone has them. They're ubiquitous. They're white. People see them, but I think it has a long ride. It's cool to see that kind of competition in a way that, you know, Verizon isn't involved in this transaction.

Yeah, I like the little pop of color. I like the metal elements of it. It's just, they just look neat. Well, hey, I want to talk about these LG earbuds real quick. Speaking of earbands. So they have this thing called whisper mode where you can take the right one out and then hold it up to your mouth and whisper into it. And then it will, like, that will just work.

It'll become, like, a dedicated microphone. So instead of being an earbud, it turns into a microphone. LG Product Design is watching a lot of TikTok. That's what I'm saying. Like, everybody on TikTok is, like, holding up their little microphone from their wired headphones up their mouth. And now you can just do it with a Bluetooth headphone. It's amazing. I love it.

It's so dumb. It's great. It is great. It's just very funny that they had to brand it as whispering mode instead of, like, TikTok yelling mode or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. TikTok rant mode. It's real good.

Last few things. I mentioned the Olympics. Katie, Keck, our new streaming reporter, has a great piece on how hard it is to stream the Olympics. Disclosure, Comcast, NBC Universal, investors in the box media, Boehner of the verge, whatever.

Nothing about this piece suggests that they were pleased with us. It is very hard to stream the Olympics. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Ridicously hard. It is. And then, like, Peacock is a mess. The best thing to do,

the best way to do it is to have cable and then use the NBC Sports app. But even that app is terrible. He didn't say it was a good way. He said it was the best way. You've got a number of that options in your best one is the NBC Sports app. The thing that is, poor Katie, I was like, here's what I'm mad about. NHK, which is like the most advanced broadcaster in the world, is producing the games in Tokyo. NHK is a Japanese broadcaster.

200 hours of it are on 8K. They're just like way ahead of the curve. And if you have an AK TV, you can actually watch. a kid in hk in japan nbc in japan nbc taking the 1080p feeds and upscaling into 4k in united states amazing what are we doing guys just dropping the ball um and it's very hard to get those 4k feeds you either you have to live in basically one of 50 cities it's uh it's very messy and i don't like it that said if i if i was able to watch the swimmers take the aeropods out loose and just like toss them out in higher resolution like i might be dead yeah

Lastly, it seems like a giant infrastructure deal is going to go through Congress with $65 billion for broadband and a bunch of other stuff, including charging infrastructure for EVs, has not passed yet. But it's coming. That's going to be a big story for us in the coming week. And then I feel like I end every episode of the show by updating on the calamity of the T-Mobile Sprint Dish Network deal. So stupid. Dish. I mentioned this last week. Dish signed a big deal with AT&T.

Yep. And now to, because T-Mobile was supposed to provide them with service, but they suck at it. So DISH left. And now T-Mobile is launching a competitive prepaid service. Yep. To get back all the customers, it's sold to DISH as part of this deal with Boost Network. Yep. None of this worked.

I just like, it didn't work. We tried to design some overly complicated system. And now I have to know the phrase. O-RAN open radio access network. That's just like a thing I have to know about now. We have to pay attention to the MV&O contracts of AT&T, T-Mobile, and DISH. Yep. And there's only three carriers in America.

So here's my question about this. Was this T-Mobile's secret evil plan all along, A? Yes. Very clearly, yes. But what, but I have a different theory. What if it wasn't? They had good intentions or like, you know, non-completely evil intentions. and the deal was complicated enough,

and it was so obvious that no one was paying attention that they just forgot the deal was there. And so some random marketer somewhere inside the T-Mobile Goliath was like, you know what would be cool is if we made a deal, and then they created the deal and put it out there and forgot that they had promised never to do that. They just, like, didn't occur to them that there was a thing because it was so, they were so unafraid of it having an actual force of law.

that it didn't like there was no memo sent out to the company saying hey don't do this stuff yeah maybe i mean big companies are messy and dumb but i just remember when they they have all these press conferences when they announced the team mobile and sprint deal and like that was from john ledger was still the CEO and my seebert was there and like people would ask john ledger like are you are you going to support dish and he'd be like they can figure it out then he would smile right like uh because he's always like he was he knew what was going to happen yeah john ledger very clever man and he, I think it's fair to say he was smarter than the clowns at the FCC and FTC that created this nightmare of a deal. And now I have to know what O-RAN is.

And so do you because you listen to the Vergecast. I just, we're going to keep tracking it. It's just like in the background of everything. It is just true that we went from four national carriers to three. Yeah. And somewhere over there, DISH Network is attempting to set up something called Project Genesis spelled with a five in the word Genesis. I think it's important to pay attention to. I just think it is also tiresome and annoying.

Yeah. I'm still upset about this. Okay. Last thing, there's a lot of news coming out of Activision Blizzard. Horrible working conditions at a company. There's a lawsuit from the state of California. There was a walkout. Zoe Schiffer went to that walkout.

We have a story about that. Polygon is doing great job covering that story. We're going to dip in and out of it. It's not 100% our world, but we're going to do some coverage. But if you're interested in it, Polygon is doing a lot of coverage. and Chris planned the editor of Polygon and I have been talking about the best ways to cover it. So check out Polygon, check out Zoe's story. That thing is going to keep building.

And I think a lot of change is coming to the gaming industry because of this story. I just want to call it out it's important. We didn't talk about it too much. On this episode, I get the sense we'll be talking about it a lot in the future. That's it. We did under an hour and a half. I was expecting to go, like, when we were like deep in Apple learnings, I was like, oh, man, five-hour Vergecast. We did it.

I'm proud of all of you. I'm proud of you. Especially Hime. When I think of Hymme, I'm like, Heim 20A. You can tweet at us. I'm at Reckless. Dieter's at Backlon.

Alex is Alex H. Kranz with a Z. Heim is C. Gartenberg. On Decoder this week, we had Chuck Todd from NBC News. Speaking of Peacock, he's launching a bunch of shows on Peacock. That was a really interesting conversation. Next week, Neil Mohan, the chief product officer of YouTube, Alan's going to be spicy. That's my promise to you.

And then we'll be back on Friday with The Richcast. That's it. Thank you so much. Rock and roll. Please, please get a vaccine.