Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Verge.com. I'm gonna tell you a couple things, just to start. One, it's just the three of us again. So I'm here on the laptop, Dieter's in San Francisco.
I am, luckily in San Francisco. I've had a week and a half of just the worst travel. And Paul is here in New York. Hey.
The other thing I'm gonna tell you is that Paul has next a box, an empty box. They're building out more of the studio here. And we have discovered something called the DinkyLink DL85K IR receiver kit. So there's just, I can't get rid of these IR blasters in my book.
Is it DinkyLink real? It's called the DinkyLink. It's a trade book. DinkyLink.
I think they should call it the IR blaster? The IR like trade consortia. They're building it. The IR trade consortia.
They're so sad. We gotta keep it gushing. We save this for Paul's weekly feature that has the same name every week that we never forget. No, no, no, I got that covered.
The third thing I will tell the audience is that this was the week that we celebrated our nation's birth, 4th of July. And it's such. 240 years? Yeah.
Still going strong. Doing great. Doing just fine. We're gonna make it through.
I don't see that guy, but it's 241. See? I don't know. I don't see that guy, but it's, do you set the nation's birth at the Declaration of Independence or at the signing of the Constitution?
That's a big spread. I think of it as the, I think of the Declaration of Independence as our primary founding document because it lays out the principles upon which we were founded. And then we tried a couple things. Yeah.
We iterated. Too difficult. So it gets early days. And they spit out the Constitution.
They had up to 12 messaging apps. The next question of independence was our minimum viable promise. Thirdly, my third not to be that guy and then we can move on is, can I just say that using the phrase birth and nation in a sense together is a very fraught thing. Because if you screw that up, you end up saying the very wrong thing.
Yeah, it's true. But I did. But that's right. But because of that fact, there's no news this week.
So if you are listening to the Vergeast to be a round of tech news, we're gonna get through it all in the next 10 seconds and then just chitchat for a while. It's gonna be great. Yeah. Not got feelings about, I don't know, stuff.
Feelings about stuff. The Vergeast on this, the first week of July. No, there's stuff. There's a little bit of stuff.
First and most importantly, there's no overwatch here. Yeah. Doomfist. How do you guys feel about Doomfist?
It's a great name. Doomfist is out right now playable on the public test realms, right? Yeah. But it won't be available on consoles and in the regular ranked matches.
You could test Doomfist, but it's not a real true playable character. So which day should we take off as a company? Shouldn't it be the public test realm day or the wide release day? So in this metaphor, the wide release day is the Constitution.
No, no, no, no, no, it's not a metaphor. I'm just thinking, you know, we're a progressive 21st century media company. Yeah. And I really do this right now.
And I love you guys. I love coming to work. I'm not doing my job. But boy, I could be punching people.
I'm from New York. We do this. We ditch the office and go work on a bar. You can do that tomorrow.
We have to bring the 21 inch Acer predator laptop to the bar. Okay. By the way, can I point out the dinky link is labeled for use with all types of cable and silight boxes, works with LED, LCD and plasma TVs, and then also CFL lighting, which I don't understand at all. Anyway, that's a fact.
Why would it be kind of? It would interfere with what I are. I don't know. I don't know.
This is a real weird thing. I was going to talk about Zelda for the next 45 minutes. No, there's news. If you ever read Nick's article about the trials of the sword, highly recommend it, he nailed the feeling of it.
It's a great piece. Zelda DLC, that's news. Yeah. Everything is news.
No, there's actually news. There's a bunch of voice assistant news, which we're going to string together into a bundle of news. So we're going to craft a narrative. Yeah, Lauren Good reviewed the Amazon Echo look, which is the weird camera.
She was here. She had it here in the office when she was here last week. It is a startlingly weird device. I think her read on is a headline actually was it does more for Amazon than it does for you.
You should read her review. Watch the video. It's all great. It is stunningly strange to me that they would put out something that is so weird and creepy without promising you what actual value it would deliver.
So we encounter tons of these products all the time. Literally Google, it's early days. But just try it out. And as you people use it, we'll figure out what it should do.
I don't think you can do that with a camera that's supposed to go in your bedroom and watch you dress. That part to me seems really weird. I will make one small counterpoint to that argument, which is she's right that it tells Amazon more than it gives Amazon more value than you get. I think that the comparison of outfits feature, her take on that also seems very accurate.
It seems very random and not very helpful. But there are people who get genuine real value out of logging their outfit every day. And they can look back and see what they wore. They can have just a log, just a series of photos put in an organized single place where they can have a nice picture of what they wore that day and what they want to wear the next day.
There is a genuine value there. Whether taking a picture with your iPhone in a mirror and then putting that in an album doesn't already solve that problem for you. What is this question? Why is this $200?
Yeah, so, Deedar and I were talking about this because that's a great use case. With your Echo Show Review. So much of the value of the Echo line is that it asks nothing of you. It sits there and you talk to it and it does something for you.
I think it's different when you put a $200 camera in your bedroom. That thing is asking something of you. It is asking you to trust Amazon every second of the day. I just don't...
I get what you're saying, you don't have the pictures. You have to deliver a stunning amount of constant user value. I feel like the people I know have stickers over their laptop cameras. Mark Zuckerberg has a sticker over his laptop camera.
Why don't we put stickers over our phone cameras? We should sell a vert sticker to put a picture. That's not a bad idea. I'm thinking about getting a Ross show.
But that is a good point. Really? Because I want a better set of speakers so I can actually hear the news while I'm taking a shower and having an echo in the bathroom is genuinely useful because you can ask it what you know is on your calendar and the idea of having the better speakers and a screen that will just cycle through it on my calendar for the day seems really useful. The idea that I wouldn't...
Yeah, the Echo Show. I definitely would put some tape over the camera if it were in my bathroom. Yeah. So the Echo Show has great speakers.
I listen to it a lot over the weekend. To me that HomePod, unless it is transcendent every time you turn it on, just selling it on audio quality alone is not a great. Well, it's got music facts. It's got music facts.
I just read this long Reddit thread about how it's doing DSP processing and what it's doing in the 4-inch woofer and the only speakers can match with it. It's like $80,000 on 90s. I love that stuff. I will read it all day and believe it, whether or not I truly, deeply understand what it means.
The simple fact of the matter is most people can't tell. Just can't tell. Most people think louder things sound better. Most people think brighter TVs look better.
And so the Echo Show is real loud. And as a screen, and that screen is kind of useful. I watched a bunch of YouTube videos on that screen. Yeah.
It's also kind of not useful. It really wants to display ads. They don't go full ad on the Echo Show, but they go like half ads. What's an ad example?
Hey, this movie's ad. Yeah, it's just stuff like that. They're headlines. They're all headlines about modern movies.
They're headlines about modern movies. They're headlines about modern movies. Yeah. The stupid fake news.
Sorry. They're fake news. That's why movies that don't exist. I don't know.
It's go see Avengers 7 out today. Just say Alexa, buy tickets. So there's a new voice assistant thingy in China, the T-Maul Genie from Alibaba. So Google's blocked in China.
Yeah. Google's just it. Well, they're blocked so much as they, I mean, they're blocked, but they also pulled out. Right.
They got out of China. Both things. And it's been a long running. Every time anybody asks Google, like there's a general Q&A session with Google, the first question is always, so you're going to make it back into China or what?
And there were rumors that maybe the store would get in there and maybe it did in like a limited way, the Play Store. But it's still, I don't know, it's still a mess. Yeah. That's why they're focused on India so hard.
I feel like good for them though. Yeah, they're making a stand. Yeah. I mean, I just don't think you can put any random assistant in a speaker and call it a product.
And I think that there's so much of that going on. And then I look at what Amazon is doing. And the show is a better idea about what the next phase of these things should be. And then I, you know, like, what's the, there's one with Cortana now?
It's like a Harman Carden one. Yeah. I don't think that thing, you can't match that up. It's the same problem as the iPhone and the App Store.
You can't just make another phone with another operating system. And like, this is just as good as the operating system everybody else uses. And I think that first move of our advantage for Amazon is just going to be incredible. But I don't, what I don't understand is how they can make the show, which is great.
And then make the look which is totally confused. Like, it doesn't do much for you. It doesn't even look modern. Yeah.
It looks like like early 2000s webcams. Yeah. It's just a big old lozenge. Yeah.
I don't know. But it's better than Amazon is putting out like 50 form factors. Lawrence saw a teardown of the look and it has extra cameras in it that they don't tell you about. Like, they know it's creepy.
So they've got the one camera. There's another camera behind the black thing that's the depth sensing camera. Oh my God. I think it also has an infrared sensor, which is, you know, which also sends out information.
I would like the Echo look if it was like, if it was an extension of like their mechanical Turk program. It's like 400 strangers judging you. No, no, no, no, no. It sounds like high school.
In opposite directions, like Amazon was just upfront about it. It's like, look, we need to learn about clothes. We're really into them. We want to know more.
For free, we will give you this thing. If you take seven photos of outfits every week, you know, you get to keep it. Eventually, we'll give you some advice back. Maybe sometimes we'll show you other.
I don't know. Just like, just like embrace the crowd sourcing of big data thing. It's exciting to me. It's exciting to me.
It's interesting. Don't hide it from me. You know how when you maybe you don't have this, but I've got, there's a little mirror by our front door and you leave the house and you're like, oh, look at the mirror real quick and see if you look like a doofus, your hair looks funny or whatever. But I forget to do it because sometimes I'm rushing out the door and then I'll get on the train and I'll look my fly is down.
That's awkward. And then you're standing on the train and it's really crowded and you got to like zip or fly up without anybody noticing you're zipping your fly up. That's awful. I want an echo look that sits by the front door that sees me coming and then like snaps a quick picture and then immediately does a bunch of information processing and then shoots me a text message that says your hair looks really dumb right now.
What are you doing? Get back in the apartment and fix it. There's brownie on your phone. Paul.
Paul. Yeah. I should get brownie then. Well, that's stage two of the AIs to figure out how to do that.
I'm providing Alibi for your situation. Amazon's vast cloud resources have examined you. Amazon Alibi provided one of the plausible backstories for your current commission. I would take that.
I just think it's a commitment. Speaking by the way of assistance, watch journalism Samsung making a smart speaker with Bixby, which was all but inevitable. But Bixby delayed in the United States because they don't have enough data. Which seems very, I don't know, all these other assistants weren't delayed because of lack of data.
I kind of don't understand what is truly going on with Bixby. And I think Samsung doesn't either. Well, their whole line with it on the phone is it's not meant to replace Google Assistant. It's meant to do all these other things on a phone.
But if you make a speaker with it, now you're head to head with the assistant. Yeah. Unless they really believe that there's like a deep smart things market for it. And that the Bixby speaker will be better at smart things than anybody else.
Also Samsung's Music Services, MIA, so when they launch their smart assistant, it's going to, I imagine it'll talk to Spotify, but they partnered with Google Music for Bixby. And so it'll be a Google Music speaker. I'm not really clear. I don't understand why I would want a Bixby speaker as opposed to an Alexa speaker or a Google home or a series speaker or whatever else.
I'm also not looking forward to the platform wars in smart speakers. That's just platform wars with phones was super fun with laptops and PCs, PC versus Mac, iOS versus Android versus Blackberry versus WebOS versus MIGO or whatever. That was fun. That was a blast.
There was some competition to get apps. If you buy a new one every two or three years and then you could compare it and shop to different platforms and you could compare it to different form factors and blah, blah, blah, blah. But with HomeSpeakers, it's just the idea that there's going to be a platform battle between Siri and Cortana and Alexa and Google and Bixby. Just sounds exhausting.
What's the... Am I just old? What's the thing I remember from that saga with all these different mobile platforms is like, look, how much we paid to get Angry Birds on our App Store? That's funded Instagram for a hot minute, right?
No, Instagram was never on Windows Phone. That was a thing. You never made it to Windows? I don't think it's a...
Microsoft couldn't pay off. Yes, it did. It did eventually. But it came when it was too late.
So what's the Angry Birds of smart home assistants? Is it Spotify? I mean, if Sonos is smart, it's Sonos. Anybody Instagram on Windows Phone is stolen, beta.
It did, okay. Sorry, that's a sad thing in the world. It only has a 3.6 rating. Anyway, that's really...
There's also... Sorry, I just watched Get Out, finally. And the Microsoft product placement in that movie is hilarious. Like, I don't know, watching this movie, you suspend your disbelief whenever you watch any movie and I'm like, okay, I'm in this narrative world.
I fully believe the creepy things that are happening here, except you have a Windows phone. I know you don't. It really does have a Windows phone. It's the least realistic thing happening right now.
Now, I can't really say much to speaker platformers. There was a big winner in phones, an overwhelmingly, at least in terms of developer support, right? Like iOS ran away with it and then there was a huge platform in Android and it seems like Alexa is going to run away with it and Google is going to make the cheaper one that more people buy. It feels like the same thing to me.
I feel like Google is trying to change the terms of the debate by trying to make stuff feel like the web or you could just ask it for anything and it'll go out into the internet and figure it out. It's actually moving in that direction a little bit. It's now pretty smart where if you ask it to do something and it can't, if it knows about a skill that could actually do that thing, I'll recommend that skill to you. But the idea that these things are going to fight using the field of battle for a home assistant, for a speaker, is very, very different than it was on phones.
On phones it was who has a coolest hardware, who has a fastest processor, who has the biggest app store, who has the best camera. But on home speakers, is it just raw number of skills? Is it sound quality? All of the things that are people are going to use to try and pick between these are really fuzzy and they're all other than sound quality.
Well, with sound quality, it's actually worse because it'll sound different in the store and do your house and it's very subjective to describe it blah, blah, blah. If it's number of things the assistant can do, everyone's just going to throw big numbers at you and you're going to not have any way to compare them. I have no idea as a consumer walking into a store what you're going to do to look at these five speakers or 10 speakers, whatever you can pick from and make a coherent decision. You're going to pick the one with the screen that's $100 cheaper than a home pod.
Yeah, there you go. The show is $229 and it has a screen and it's pretty loud. Like, unless you are so deep into Apple World and it's not even that integrated into Apple World, a thing you can't do with it is to play a movie on your Apple TV. Probably the next Apple TV will want to do that.
But it's like, I don't know, man, AirPlay 2 is going to change your life. We know so much about how it's going to work and what is it? Someone tell me. Do you know what AirPlay 2 is?
Please send me an email because no one seems to know. Call 1800neeli.com. That'd be great. That's a great phone number.
But I made up. Anyway, go ahead and release the speaker but no, don't. Don't. You really gave it a shot there.
Samsung fundamentally, they want to take on Google and Siri. They want to do it. But they know they can't because they know it's not there. So they've got this other angle.
Their story for explaining consumers is really bad. It's not out in a real way. It's delayed. And that was coming to a speaker.
Cool. That sounds like exactly. I want the beautiful Samsung experience that I get on early versions, early iterations of Samsung software talking to me in my house. That's what I want.
I want TouchWiz from the Galaxy S3, the audio equivalent of that. That's what the big speaker is going to be. It's going to be the auditory equivalent of TouchWiz on the Samsung Galaxy S3. It's going to make a little water droplet noise every time you walk in the room.
That's going to be great. If you're like, hey, big speaker, that is a version of the future. I do think Amazon is on to something. Eventually, the way we will think of these smart home assistants, they'll be impossible to separate them from the cameras.
Either the camera will be built into them or they will be connected to cameras throughout your home. But they're going to know, they're going to know Deeders flies down and then I've got brownie on my forehead. And they'll ask you if your kid is sick or like, where did your dog go? Or don't forget to do the dishes before somebody's coming over.
That's in your calendar. You know, if these actually are not just a gimmick to set timers and play music, then they're going to have to continue to get a lot smarter about what's going on in your whole home. And I think that's definitely an involved vision. Oh, there's no good soundboard.
Look at this was TouchWiz Soundboard. I found one. I don't know. Yeah, we hit this survey that a morning or poll that morning console did.
They're priorities for voice control smart speakers. This is from consumers. Yeah. Price.
Then speaker slash audio quality. When accuracy of device's voice recognition, then compatibility with devices you may already own, such as your smart phone, then access to a variety of music streaming services, and then ability for device to integrate with other services or platforms, such as controlling smart light bulbs. So skills is pretty far down the list. Yeah.
I mean, I think the killer app for this thing is still the same playing music. Yeah. To that extent, like the home pod will be fine because they'll say playing music. If you have signed up for Apple Music, it will play some music at you.
It will probably sound amazing. But if you are most, I mean, if you are most people, you think your white headphones sound great, right? Or in pack in iPhone, your buds sound just fine. Or you're not bothering.
Well, you might not think that, but also you just don't care. Yeah, you don't care enough to like, I feel like if someone came up to you and asked you, like, well, I'm sure they're not that good, but that's good enough for me. I don't care. Right.
So why don't you buy the cheap products sounds fine? Yeah. Okay. All right.
I'm going to read the Squarespace ad. By the way, to the listener, I told you the show would be like this. I want you to know that I did not make you a promise to have a chill. It's a chill.
Our nation was born this week. We're all taking up next. How many years ago? But first, this ad.
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That's awesome. It's a free trial, but you get 10% off your first purchase. I made my own. Everything's very expensive.
I made a website in Squarespace the other day. Yeah. Was it wiser, brownie, before I got on? Just a blank deal.
Just a blank deal. They had a bad WordPress thing going on, and they're like, can you fix our WordPress ones? I don't mess with WordPress. I don't touch that stuff.
Do you use the off-code? Is it a real loud to use the off-code? I don't know. I built it and then handed it off to them.
Oh, but they can use the off-code? I told them to use the off-code. The off-code, by the way, is verge. You get 10% off your first purchase.
So, go to Squarespace.com and check that. It's great. It's probably one of the things. Was it the Red Phone?
You went to your segment early or was it a different thing? I got another thing. Yeah, another thing. Let's talk about this Red Phone.
I know you're hype about this Red Phone. Yeah. I love... Explain why you're hype about this Red Phone.
Okay. Red is a company, came on the scene like, I don't know, 2006 or something. We're like, hey, we set up a forum on the internet and we will post on the forum to tell you about fantastical cameras that we plan to build, but obviously this is going to completely fail and we'll never actually ship anything. They eventually shipped cameras and they shipped the 8K weapon camera.
Yeah. It was like what they shot at Guardians of the Galaxy. To me, it's like a real success story of this tech upstart against all odds. There's the cannons and the Nikon's, but they weren't delivering what people really wanted.
I mean, we used to troll for news in the Red forums where the founders would post pictures of new cameras. Yeah. They have the right sense of hype and buzz, which is just tantalize with just a little bit of information, keep people guessing, keep people waiting because you end up waiting a long time for them to actually ship anything and once they do, they don't ever make enough. Yeah.
But people who have them are making cool things out of them and they're beautiful and kind of this really aggressive black and red kind of way. So they announced the phone, the Hydrogen One, which is a 5.7 inch holographic display. That means something. With nano technology.
It's got to mean something. So here's my theory. Because just before this, Red is not a company that bullshit smuts specs, right? The specs are the only thing that's real.
Yeah, that's all they do. So whatever these words mean, they presumably mean something. I had this PDF up. So they basically, they put out one photo of the phone, which is of kind of the back.
You can see a headphone jack USB C plug. They've got to some interesting proprietary-ish accessory connector that's going to be high bandwidth. The phone will work. And like heat dissipation fins, it looks like?
I mean, they put heat sinks on it because they just love heat sinks. Like it doesn't matter if something's hot or not. They definitely put heat sinks on everything and they did it in this case. But let's see where I have this.
Well, holographic nanoparticles are pretty toasty. That's true. Okay, so here's the thing. I don't know if that's true.
They've created their own file format called dot h4v. They call it red hydrogen 4 view content, like the number 4 view content. And here's my theory of what it is, right? Yeah.
Ed Sean kind of said this in his Reddit. So I'm basically stealing from Sean. But if I'm wrong, I want to take full blame. Yeah.
Think of the 3DS, right? 3DS basically works by having pixels at different angles. And so when you look at it, you don't need glasses, but you can see 3D stuff, right? So basically, it has the resolution of the device to show you 3D images.
And then remember the fire phone, right? It had all those cameras on the face of the phone. And when you look around, you can kind of peek around 3D objects. So imagine those combined.
Imagine a screen that's 3D, but it's also like tracking your movements. So it's just real immersive content. Why would you want this in a phone from Red with heat sinks? Does it run Android?
Yeah, it's an Android phone. Okay. Of course, it has to. Actually, you know what?
Yeah. It says it. It's a standalone full feature, unlocked multi-band smartphone operating on Android OS. That just happens to add a few additional features that shatter the mold of conventional phone.
I love this phone. It converts to a two-dimensional audio and it will quote, assault your senses. I know it has a headphone jack. It has a headphone jack.
It just does have a headphone jack. There's so much bullshit in this. And the phone is $1,195 for the aluminum version, $1,595 for the titanium version. We've seen one photo of the back of the phone.
We don't really know what all this stuff is, but you know what you can do right now? This is a phone that's literally designed just for more kids around. I know, I know. It's targeting to him.
Exactly him. They're going to make you do a bit. She bought three. Of course.
I love that kid. I'm just saying. They're like. They know they're audio.
They had a bunch of leftover battery packs. I'm like, what do we just put a screen on them and call them a phone? And it has a modular connector on the back, which I really wish that I love standard ports, but we really need a standard port for crap you attached to phones. Because it's ridiculous.
The essential settings. There's the Moto Z thing. There's this thankfully product. It's not a fourth standard.
There's just too many different ways. We're doing micro-to-ne connectors. Microsoft has those connectors. Apple has connectors right on the iPad.
Oh, the smart connector. That's not quite the same. This is a little different. Yeah.
Because those are specifically for keyboards. There's nothing else you can plug into a smart connector on iPad. They're not like a high bandwidth thing. Yeah.
I guess you could standardize the connector. I mean, all I want to know is what was the meeting like when they're like, yes, go forth. Someone pitched this. This didn't come out of a giant consensus brain storm.
Someone was standing around and they're like, we should make a fucking fun. I do not know how Red the Company operates internally. Yeah. But my external experience is, I imagine, two possibly three dudes saying, I wish we had this.
It's like, well, can't we build it? And then they'll tell them, but people say it's impossible. They tell themselves, you know what? We've done the impossible before.
We can do the impossible again. So it's basically the beginning of the action movie shot on Red Camera. They were just watching out on the footage that was coming through the servers. They're like, we should, what would, if we had a montage sequence, it would be about building the world's best phone.
All right. There's other phone news. This one is weird rumor territory. And I think it comes down to what Apple is actually planning to do with the iPhone.
So there's just reports out in the world that the iPhone will not have a touch ID sensor. I don't believe it. I think it might just be on the back because there's been a lot of case leaks. Right.
Thus far with the space for that sensor on the back. Yeah. On the back makes way more sense to me. If there's no touch ID sensor, I have just a cajillion questions about how you'll do all the stuff that you do with touch ID.
Because when you have something like Face Unlock, it's just unlocks without asking it to do anything. It's also wildly insecure. And touch ID is an action. Like when you log into your bank app or you pay with Apple Pay or you unlock your phone, you actually have to actively choose, I am doing this thing now.
Even when you're just loading a free app. Yeah. Yeah. But it's like an authenticated button.
Yeah. Right. But you don't want your phone to just be authenticated all the time. You want to have some of those authentication actions happening.
I like the idea of the Face Unlock. I like the idea of the other day of password protecting certain apps or something. Touch IDFI for like to make a multi-user. Well, so here's where I think this is getting confused.
This is my thing. It could be wrong. All of the rumors were they're going to do virtual home button and they had figured out how to do screen through fingerprint scanning. Right.
And there's a bunch of like component makers out showing stuff off. But it seems like the delta between the component makers being ready and Apple needing to ship this phone is too high. Okay. So they probably weren't able to put the fingerprint sensor on the front, which is I'm assuming what they wanted to do and they just stuck it on the back.
And so they pulled a Samsung. Yeah. So somewhere that is exactly what Samsung did with the Galaxy S8. Yeah.
So somewhere in that murky chain of rumors and leaks and whatever, then taking it off the front and putting it on the back, got turned into a won't have a fingerprint sensor. That sounds completely plausible and probably correct. One of the screen through component vendors was like Apple didn't place the order and that got turned into really they just moved it to the back. Because I cannot imagine them taking touch ID.
Like Apple pays built on Touch ID. And the idea of you like holding your phone to the reader and then like craning over to look at it makes sense. Click noise slash vibration when you buy stuff. So sounds like a little bug.
I got any phone. I held on the 6s and by the 7. It's like the weird pirate battery in it gets a little hot all the time. It won't charge about 88% which I believe is just a sign that I should watch next to the future because I don't want to think about the fact that I've broken battery.
So okay. Let's assume for the sake of argument that they put the fingerprint sensor on the back of the phone. Let's also assume because I think it's pretty safe for the sake of argument that the high end iPhone, the 10th anniversary iPhone has a near bezel display on the front. Let's also assume for the sake of argument that they will iterate upon their dual camera system but it will still, you know, it's not going to be a massive crazy improvement.
What is going to be hardware wise on the 10th anniversary iPhone, the super fancy one that John Rivers is going to cost $1,500? That wasn't already done, potentially I'll be at Nod as elegant away on the Galaxy S8. Yeah. That's sensing camera for air kit.
Yeah. Right. Isn't that the answer? I think that's the air kit.
I feel like they can't put a feature like that on a hyper premium. I haven't heard all these rumors about a $1,500 phone but they can't make a hyper premium phone that needs developer support to be really good. Okay. So the going rumors are going to be that there's going to be a 7S and a 7S plus and they'll be iterations on the current form factor.
Blah, blah, blah. Then there'll be a premier super fancy high end iPhone that will have a bezel display and whatever the new way to authenticate is and presumably depth sensing cameras and it's going to cost a ridiculous amount of money and it's not going to come out until next year. And the big question I have is what can Apple do to this phone to justify $1,000 plus price that isn't just slight iterations on the stuff before. If they had an under screen touch ID, that would be something amazing.
If they, I don't know, there's a million other things I suppose you could do to a phone to make it that whole crap. Well, your mind. We could make it out of moon rocks or something. Sure.
But I feel like it's going to, the whole value proposition of this high end iPhone is going to ride on the quality of the cameras unless they've got some insane thing up their sleeve or the screen, right? Then you, an OLED screen with ProMotion, like there's all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Like I feel like the bezel list makes it like interesting and premium.
I just, man, that's true. That's going to suck. Like, stunning now it's just from the line. Like, I always assumed like the iPhone 7, which was so, so similar to the iPhone 6S, which was so similar to the iPhone 6S.
It's like, it's like they've been saving it up to go real different. A lot of what the iPhone 7S isn't different and you got to like wait until next year to get an anniversary edition to get something different. Yeah. That's a lot of years of nothing different.
The enormous narrative around the 7S was we held back because we're going to do something crazy. Right. And that was seeded out. That was not just a bunch of like guessing.
That was very obviously put out into work. It's definitely hard to do this new, different fancy stuff. But at some point we got, we're ready for it. And Samsung's doing some pretty fancy stuff.
Well, the question is why can't, if Samsung can figure it out on their timeline, how is Apple not able to figure it out? I don't know. We'll see. That's what I'm saying.
I think the amount of bad information flooding into the world right now is. Yeah. There was like rumors today about like the iPhone 8. Like, it's like at some point like we can't take seriously rumors about phones that aren't out for three years.
Yeah. Or you can't take seriously rumors about hardware decisions on a phone that will presumably ship in September or be announced in September. Because they've already started building them because they have to because they have to make a good thing. Yeah.
Okay. Here's what's going to happen. We're doing a bunch of experiments on anchor because we need to get more podcasts into our motto podcast. So we've been doing tons of segments.
You should listen to them there. Go to anchor. It's great. But Ashley commented one that's really cool.
She called it spotted. So I'm going to read an ad. We're going to run Ashley's segment. We're going to come back.
Wrap this thing up. This type of version asks you about transfer wise. You have to send money internationally. If you do, you'll know it can be expensive and time consuming and you're exchange rate.
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That's TransferWise.com. A woman in a blue sleeveless blouse wearing matching blue eyeshadow sits next to me on the train. She has Candy Crush loaded up on her phone. She begins to play.
After five minutes or so, her eyes start to close. She nods off. Her phone doesn't have automatic locking, so Candy Crush stays loaded, waiting for someone to find a match. She begins leaning to her left away from me.
Eventually, that falling motion wakes her up, and she immediately looks down to see her phone, still in her hand, still running Candy Crush. As if nothing had happened, she makes a few more Candy Matches, but then, yet again, she closes her eyes and falls back asleep. This pattern continues for the entirety of the ride, which was at least six stops. I feel like I got a glimpse into her nighttime routine while in a very public place.
Also why not automatic lock girl? Your battery's gonna die. We're back, and there's breaking news. Qualcomm, everyone's favorite company.
Qualcomm. It's sued the National Trade Commission to block importation of the iPhone, because they say it was at six-teater, six-pattens. Yeah, there's six-pattens that have to do with extending the iPhone's battery life, and importantly, and this is the key thing with Qualcomm, Qualcomm says that these are not related to a standard. They're like specific Qualcomm technologies that Apple isn't paying for.
Well, it makes sense. So, man, I gotta do the big Qualcomm piece. It's been a long time since we've had a good knockdown ITC fight, because there was a long time ago, HTC actually lost one of these and temporarily had its imports manned, and then it got it figured out. So the International...
This is just a day-to-have-oo for me. So when you file a patent lawsuit, there's two ways to go. You can choose them both if you want to, but they were two ways to go. I can just sue you.
No. That'll court. Just do it. You're violating my patents.
You go through a lawsuit, you pay me. Or I can go to the International Trade Commission and say, hey, these patents are being infringed on this product that's being imported. I would like you to halt all imports of this product. So people didn't vote.
The ITC is way faster. How does the ITC work? It's not fast. Like, are the ITC police running around?
Are countries agreed to do this? No, it's the U.S. International Trade Commission. So it's inside the United States.
It's a federal agency. And it's got a bunch of administrative law judges in it. And it can shut stuff down. And it can halt imports.
It can do a bunch of other stuff, too. This is like a main function. So Qualcomm has only filed for this? They just filed.
So what you do, so when Apple was suing all the Android makers, it would file a lawsuit. And then it would file the block imports in the ITC. Because that's death. You can wait the lawsuit out for years and years and years.
It sounds like forever. But if you can't import the phones, you're toast. So this is like, patent holders do this for you now. So if you got a lot of money.
I mean, I've never heard of them. But apparently I use them every eight seconds. That's so creepy. I got to...
The complexity of the Apple or Qualcomm dispute is so high that I have yet. I mean, I've talked to Qualcomm's general counsel. I've talked to Qualcomm people. I've talked to Apple about it.
The complexity of what they are fighting about is so... It's just so beyond my ability to synthesize it into something that makes sense. Because the core thing that I think is not intuitive to people is that Foxconn sells iPhones to Apple. That's a thing that happens.
So Apple doesn't have any licenses from Qualcomm. Foxconn has licenses from Qualcomm. And then there is just an insane shell game of money that happens. So Apple pays, Foxconn, Foxconn pays Qualcomm.
Qualcomm pays Apple back. This is all true. What does Qualcomm pay Apple for again? Like literally marketing agreements and buybacks and things.