Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of wearing foldable phones on your head like a hat, which is what I'm currently doing right now. Anywho, I'm Senior Wearables reviewer of Victoria's Song, and the new Pixel devices are out tomorrow. And that's the Pixel 11, the Pixel 11 Pro, the Pixel 11 Pro Fold, and the Pixel Watch 5. Woo! If we have a general thesis about these devices, it would be that it's all about the software, baby.
In any case, today, joining me are going to be my colleagues and editors, Dom Preston and Cameron Faulkner, but first, here's what's happening on The Verge today. I'm Nathan Edwards, and this is 90 Seconds On The Verge for Wednesday, August 19th, 2026. Last year, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wang said last-generation CPU's were basically worthless. This year, he says their new asset class. Liz Lopato has a report on the site today on the finance industry's latest innovation, which looks a lot like NVIDIA trying to find more people to lend money to its customers to pay for more NVIDIA hardware, instead of just handing the customers the money to buy the stuff themselves.
Fascinating. Amazon's drone delivery services expanding to Chicago, Cleveland, and Lampa Boise, and Syracuse, New York, with more to come by the end of the year. Amazon aims to deliver packages under five pounds in less than an hour, and each airbase has a delivery area of about 175 square miles, according to the company. So if you're within seven and a half miles from an Amazon warehouse, watch your head. Framework is upgrading its 12-inch convertible laptop with Intel's latest budget processors.
The pre-built version of the repairable Upgradable Laptop 12 starts at $699 and ships with Fedora Linux. Framework apparently found out that 80% of its laptop 12 customers were already running Linux, and this just helped save some money. That's compared to 5% of the overall PC market. I love this. It's the Earth Linux. Everyone should run Linux.
And finally today, on the site, Jennifer Tooie tested a robot mop with the robot arm. The can scrub areas in the office too tall to fit under or too wide to fit into, like around chair legs and underbar stools. If you have a dog, they will do the same work for less money. You can meet more at the Verge.com. That's 90 Seconds On The Verge for Wednesday, August 19th, 2026.
I'm Ina Garten, and each week on Happy Hour, I invite new and old friends for drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. On this week's episode, I'm joined by Julia Louis-Dreyfus. We talk all about attending a fashion show in Paris together, throwing dinner parties, and making her Broadway debut in other desert cities. New episodes of Happy Hour are available every Wednesday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.
Cheers! How far would you go to have a healthy baby? Embro editing is very much illegal in the United States. It is illegal in most countries. But there is growing interest as the technology has gotten better.
This week on Explain It To Me, the Ethics of Inbriel Maxing. Listen to new episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Alright, Dom, Cam, thank you for joining me on this beautiful morning. Let's talk pixels, Cam. You reviewed the standard pixel 11.
Before we get into the specs and the specifics, what are your overall impressions? My overall impressions are that it's a good phone. I mean, it seems like the culmination of the past few generations of hardware improvements bundled into one kind of like, I was going to say entry level, but it's not an A-series phone. Those are much cheaper. It's the entry level of the flagship line.
It starts at 8.99 and you get 256 gigs of storage, which is double from last year. But yeah, I switched from my Pixel 9 Pro, which I used as a daily driver to this. And it was very simple for me because it's the same size. The performance feels just as snappy. The camera app boots and shoots really quickly.
And it has some new features that I can't access on my old phone, which I'm a bit sad about. But yeah, the new features, I'm a little mixed on some of them. The proactive assistance AI feature with Gemini, David and Mel, and I kind of had some mixed experience getting that to work as intended. So the whole point of proactive assistance is to be able to do more for you on your phone so that you don't have to do like the really difficult work of tapping your phone screen and navigating your apps. It's so difficult. I kind of kid, but yeah, it kind of falls a little short
at launch of doing everything that we thought it would be able to. With enough tinkering, it was able to do most of the things that Google advertised it as code. Like David and I spent quite a bit of time going back and forth in text trying to use like natural language to trigger the Gemini chip to let us book a table at a restaurant that we knew was on OpenTable. We confirmed that the restaurants were bookable through OpenTable. But there were times that Gemini would be like, it's not bookable through OpenTable.
Here's all the information we can provide you though. So we would go back and forth refining the text using the full restaurant name instead of kind of like a shorthand using the day of the week, using the specific time. Eventually we got there. We worked with Google a bit to troubleshoot this. And they didn't seem to think that we needed to be so precise, but that's not how it worked in real world usage, at least with this pre-launch software.
So with reservations we eventually got there. It does quickly move through the process, like the flow. Like a lot of it becomes invisible to the user, which is cool. If there's a reservation, it will pull up all of the screens that kind of drill down into the process where it's like, okay, now you can enter your email address to confirm. It's very cool.
There was another instance where we were successful, but only after we kind of like followed some rules that were invisible to us. Like in order to get proactive assistance proactive, you have to connect apps to it. So it's like a manual opt-in process, which is good. It doesn't just have access to everything right off the bat. So for example, I wanted to do the thing that Dieter did in the hands-on video with all the pixels, which is like, I'm texting with my friend and I need groceries.
Let me hop over to Google Keep and all of a sudden my groceries are ordered. We weren't experiencing that being as easy as they made it look. And I know that there's a lot of magic added to those videos just to make it seem very easy. But we figured out that in my case I had a grocery list. It was called grocery list.
That was one might call it a grocery list. And in it, you know, just I had a couple items. They were all like burgers, different kinds of burgers. And I was told from someone who worked at Google that the grocery list needed to have the name of the app that you would like proactive assistance to connect you to in the title. So instead of grocery list, it was called Instacart.
And that's not something that I would call my grocery list. Maybe it would work if I said Instacart grocery list. But that's just kind of like a strange way of having to alter my behavior in order for the thing to work for me. But again, just like the reservation system, once I followed its rules, it was fast. It pulled up, you know, the Gemini chip.
It said that it was going to connect to the Instacart app and the next screen that I saw showed a list of retailers that I could purchase all of those things from. So it was elegant once I allowed it to be, basically. I'm curious whether how both of you feel about the lack of temperature sensors because when we did the live stream with Neoy and David, Neoy was like, no, my temperature sensor. I can't tell if he was trolling me or not. I think it was great that we got rid of the temperature sensor.
I know they get the particular useful thing about it. I'm curious whether you guys feel about it and whether you think highlight was a worthy successor to this particular useless feature. I agree that getting rid of the temperature sensor made sense. I don't remember ever using that on the Pixel 10s. I've used or I can either use some pics.
I half get wet there, but it feels like it adds cost to the build for this incredibly niche feature that most people will just simply forget their phone has. I regularly forget that those Pixel phones had a temperature sensor. People mention it like, oh, yeah, Google, they had a temperature sensor. That's like the odd thing they baked into that's fine. I'm glad it's gone because I don't think it makes sense.
I don't see why I was there to begin with. Highlight takes over the camera flash on the back of the phone, which instead of just being a white LED flash is now a multicolored LED flash. For camera flash, it works exactly the same. It's just the camera flash. It's white. It's normal.
This can be a colorful notification light. Or at least it looks like a notification light. It doesn't act like a notification light, which I think is the disappointing thing about highlight. It only does two things, which is it displays a multicolored Gemini glow when you're talking to the AI assistant. It only does this if you have the phone face down on a table or another surface.
If you're holding the phone or you've got the screen activated, the light won't activate. It's not like other people will see it. Google's logic here is if you're using Gemini with the phone face down and you're just talking to it, then you'll be able to tell when it's thinking and ready to reply to you. I'm just thinking with the big quote marks around that. I just can't imagine I've never intuitively used an AI assistant on my phone with it face down.
I guess if you've got a phone face down and then you do the voice activation and talk to it, you want to know it's heard you. I can half-see what they're going at here, but it just feels like they've replaced that one niche temperature sensor. With this other really niche activation of a light. They obviously recognize this and they've got this light and they should do more with it. Instead of just making it a full customizable notification LED, they allowed it to turn on when you receive phone calls from favorite contacts.
Again, only if the phone is face down and the screen is off. It won't light up otherwise. It's only your favorite contact. You can customize the color per contact, but you've got a choice of five colors to pick from. You have no big color wheel, no huge set to select from.
There's just five colors. I have more than five people who regularly ring me, so that just immediately breaks how useful this might be. You can't use it for any other notifications. Google has said message alerts are coming down the line. Knowing Google, I assume that just means it's own messages app rather than other apps you receive messages on, which means WhatsApp is the only way I receive text that really matters to me, so that will be useless.
Maybe at some point, eventually, this will just be a general notification where you can set the color and have it flash for different things coming in. It currently isn't that. It's just this really, weirdly artificially limited feature, which it feels like this was a Gemini light, and maybe really late in the process. Someone at Google said, oh, it has to do something more than Gemini. They threw this basic app version of call lights in and said, and we'll do more than that, we'll figure it out. This is a notification LED. This is worse than notification LEDs were 10, 15 years ago.
Why bring it back if you're going to do such a weird version of it? Yeah, I just like kind of like how Cams experience with the proactive Gemini suggestions, you kind of had to be proactive about getting it to actually work. I found that like organically, it just never happened for me. I'm someone who keeps my phone face down all the time, so I thought it would be useful for me, but it ended up being a thing that was just like, oh, it never ended up happening at all, at least not organically, if I was forcing it, sure. I had to get my phone to make a phone call to myself from that just to confirm this does work, right?
Yeah, no, I had the same experience, but like, Cams, do you feel like you missed out on a highlight? Because it's not on the standard pixel 11, or listening to this, are you just like, cool, cool bro. I mean, I'll never turn away more features in the base model. It is personally for my desires, it's nice to know that I'm not missing out on anything, especially as someone who owns an older phone. But yeah, the lack of highlight, while not a huge deal to me personally, it really calls into question the way that Google is building the tears of its phones.
It is viewing highlight as a premium feature. So to not really have anything interesting to show for what it does is kind of concerning at launch, and what these phones can do at launch is really important. And I know that Google promises seven years of OS updates for these newer phones, dating back a couple of generations too, and that's great, and they continue to get better over time, which is great. We don't know the ways in which they will get better, but going back to your point on highlight, only working on the phone to space down, I would kind of love if the Gemini light would show while someone is using it. So you could get first in his dog and do an AI while they're out about that.
Yeah, I would love that too. But kind of to your point about a little bit of confusion among the tears. I mean, Dave and Mel, he reviewed the pros for us. He can't be here today. But what do you guys feel about the differences between the standard, the pro, and then also the fold?
I just to your point, Cam, I'm just kind of sitting here thinking about the differences between them. Also, the fact that a lot of the updates across the entire pixel lineup this year are very software based. So it's sort of just like, I think a lot of people will be wondering if upgrades are worth it, if we feel the changes between both the tears and the previous versions make sense. Like less RAM this year, right, from the base pro, compared to the pro 10 and the 9 pro, but at the same time, more storage. That's good.
How do we feel about the way Google's navigating, Ram again, because it comes for us all? Yeah, it's tricky because I feel like we're in the midst of the changes and it's tough to see what's going to come next, but the pixel 11 series is certainly like, an interesting first step through Ram again, I suppose, if you're not counting the 10a, being very, very iterative of the phone that it succeeded. Yeah, it really just seems like for the pro, it's the slightly updated camera specs, none of which are really all that new compared to the generation that came before. It's just slightly better camera specs layered on top of some exclusive features that for now are exclusive to the pixel 11 line.
So, you know, I feel pretty mixed about it. Like as a Pixel 9 pro owner, I'm feeling features aside pretty content with my phone. Yeah, I agree. Like looking at the pros, it's really just how much do you care about the improved camera specs? If you aren't willing to pay, you know, a couple hundred X or whatever it is for better senses, I can't see much reason you'd go for it.
I mean, if highlight was more compelling, I think that probably would sway a bunch of people. At least, you know, sort of among a die-hard Android kind of crowd. I think some people would jump a big fancy new notification light. I think otherwise it is just, are you willing to pay a bit more for slightly better cameras? But I think the cameras, I mean, the fold has a pretty similar set of cameras to the 11 and I'm pretty happy with them.
So, I don't know how compelling that sales pitch of paying more for better cameras will be for most people. I think you've really got to deeply, deeply care about the camera in your phone to see that as a compelling jump from what they've managed to put in the 11. On the RAM side, coming from reviewing the fold, I've got this sort of, it's a slightly different perspective at the fold because it's gotten the same $100 price bump as the other phones, but it's got the same RAM and storage as last year. So, it hasn't had the RAM drop, but also it's not had that storage bump. It's still at a 256 gig starting point and that's what it was last year as well.
So, you can kind of justify that price bump on some of the other pixels. You're getting more storage. It's kind of a price hike. It's kind of not a price hike. The fold really is just, yeah, it's a price hike. It's $100 more than last year's for not that many big changes in terms of the improvements,
which makes it a harder pitch, I think, in that RAM again in context. Are you tired of hearing about business, tech, and finance from the Rose? We are the Tiger Sisters, a top business podcast with the Vox Media podcast network. Tiger Sisters releases every Monday and we decode money, power, and love. And who doesn't love all those things?
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So I actually got to play around with one and I legitimately was just like, I don't know what I'm doing. So I need your fold expert insights onto this thing. How does this compare to the to the wide boy, Galaxy Z Fold? And also like when I was at the made by Google event, I was talking with like, hi, foldable friends who are experts. How should I feel about this gigantic crease right here? And I'm just curious to hear your thoughts on all of that.
Yeah, the fold is in a really funny position because the foldable market has changed a lot in the last year or two, and we're expecting it to change a whole lot more in a month from now. The Pixel 11 Pro Fold feels a little dated to me. I'm coming from the context I have reviewed both of Samsung's new big folds, the ZepleDite and ZepleDite Ultra this year. But I've also been reviewing things like Honor and Oppo's foldable this year. So these are the kind of China and Europe only flagship foldables which have been pushing the hardware side of this for a while.
Compared to those, the 11 Pro Fold is thick and it is heavy. It is thinner and lighter than the 10 Pro Fold, but they haven't done enough to get it into the same ball park as what Samsung Oppo and Honor are doing. So if you pick this up and compare it to any others, you will basically be like, oh, this is hefty. It's still got that problem foldables had a few years ago in general where everyone picked one but that's such a bulky, heavy phone. I'm not happy with that. The latest foldable Samsung's ones this year, they are basically the same weight as a big iPhone or a Pixel Pro XL.
There's not much of a weight difference, it's not much of a size difference. That's not true here. If you're going to go for the foldable, you are getting a bigger, heavier phone and you've got to make a piece with that. You've got the crease. We have seen particularly from Oppo and also kind of from Samsung, they did really well this year.
People have been working so hard to get rid of the creases. Oppo had this fun technique where they 3D printed to fill the gaps in the hinge. Samsung basically rebuilt its display tag with all these titanium layers. Both have the same effect which is the crease as much as it was before. Head on, you just don't see it, you can't really feel it. Particularly in the Oppo, you've really got to hold it round at weird angles to try and catch the light just right to be like, oh, yeah, that's the crease.
I can kind of see it if I really go hunting for it. It's very visible on this phone. It is there, it is head on, you can feel it. If you run your finger over the gap, there's a very noticeable dent where your finger goes over. And that's fresh out of the box. It will only get worse from here because that's how these folds work. Over time, the crease is deep and become more pronounced.
I have generally been in the view with foldables that the creases aren't that big a deal. And the ones you use one for a week or two, you kind of stop noticing it. Once it's just your phone, you get used to that being how your screen fills. But if the crease bothers you, I would not buy this foldable in particular. And if you're in the US, where basically your option is this or Samsung, or maybe we'll have Apple might do soon, then go for the Samsung because the crease there has made a lot better and a lot subtler than on the Pixel.
Then that's the size thing because Samsung has just rejected sizes. If you say we now have a white boy, we think Apple might do a white boy, though we're not sure. We're going to find out. This is a slightly funny one because the Pixel has always sat a bit wider than Samsung's regular foldable. Samsung's folds have always been these really tall and thin ones.
And Google's have always been a little wider and a little shorter. So in a funny way, this actually sits neatly in between Samsung's two sizes. I could well do it a favor because I think some people might go and be like, wow, Samsung's got these two extremes. And I can buy this really short and wide phone, or I can buy this really tall and thin phone. And if that's your reaction to Samsung's options, then this might feel a bit like the Goldie-Ox foldable from a form factor perspective because it is not quite as skinny as a Z Fold8 Ultra.
It's taller and slightly summer than the regular Z Fold8. That said, you open it up. It's still basically square-ish. It feels closer in size to Samsung's Ultra than it does to its Z Fold8, despite being a price match for the regular YA Z Fold8. I really like the Z Fold8 form factor. I really enjoyed it. I found it suited how I use these foldables, which is as content devices.
I open that screen up basically when I want to watch something or when I want to read something. And that 4x3 form factor on the inside really suited me. I find these square ones. It feels like it's more designed for multitasking. It's that split screen. I'm working on my phone.
I need my emails and my stocks and all these things going on all at once. I need to multitask and tap between five different apps on the fly. And I've never used to find like that. I've tried, you know, I've tried for reviews to be like, let me simulate this version of myself. I'm not sure. So there's an audience from that. And if so, there's still fit, swale in that audience.
I guess the last thing I wanted to ask you about the Fold was, you know, Google kind of positioned this as the durable Fold. Yes. Maybe. And that's the trade off you get because it's more durable. So deal with the extra chunkiness. Do you think that's like a valid argument?
I feel like I spent close to $2,000 on a foldable. I would wrap it and bubble wrap everywhere. I'd like because that's a huge chunk of money. So on the one hand, I could see that as a really compelling argument. But you've used all the foldables. All the foldables.
How convincing is that? I think this one is going to vary a little depending on where you live. And those what other foldables are available to you. So if you're in the US and right now your options are Samsung or Google, and again, that may change with my iPhone soon. We don't want to come there. But right now you've got Samsung on Google. So you'll choose them between the Pixel, which is IP68.
And Google is already touting the durability of its design. It's got this new composite back material. It says it's three times tougher. That is going to be more durable than either of the Z Fold 8s. They are IP48.
That basically means they're just as protected against water, but they are more vulnerable to dust. I fix it to the teardown of one of the foldates and kind of make that point. They really emphasize this is still very vulnerable to this stuff. Even the kind of pocket lint can get inside this hinge. And you can get hinge damage from, you don't have to kind of go to the beach and dunk it in sand for it to be vulnerable.
Just a little bit of dust in the atmosphere in your pocket and places your layoff phone down can get inside the Samsung ones and potentially cause your problems down the line. In theory, the Pixel is more protected against that. The caveat for that is, like I said, it depends on where you live. Because the oner foldables are IP, I think that IP69 now, which is even tougher. It's got even better water resistance.
That's like protection against high temperature and high pressure water jets, which I probably wouldn't expose a foldable to. Anyway, if you can avoid it, no matter what the box says. But yeah, if you're outside of the US, you do still have another phone that's also offering that level of durability, but it's thinner and lighter and has a big battery. So there you might look at it on. I think there are good software reasons to maybe prefer the Pixel anyway.
I'm also saying it's totally clear, currently on as a better phone. But that narrative of, well, this is the tough foldable. I think that will work in the US and I think that makes sense to a lot of people in the US. I think outside the US market, there's still a little more choice in that sense. Any other thoughts on phones? Because if not, we can move to this little guy on my wrist, the Pixel Watch 5.
Just curious. I would love to know about the watch. Tell me about the watch. Oh boy, this is a weird review period because all the health features are not available yet. Ha ha! That rolls out in September. So check back in October because some of these health features will take a while to populate.
But yeah, so kind of a weird review for me because on the one hand, I'm just like, yeah, compared to the Samsung watches, it's really striking how it's kind of the opposite of the phone thing where I think Samsung is still leading the way, innovating, doing stuff with the phone space. And in the watch space, it's just sort of like Google's sort of been leaving Samsung. And it does over the five iterations of the Pixel Watch, so that's interesting. But it's the same story where the hardware has not really been updated that much and everything is a software update. Except the software updates. It depends on each software update, but you know, they'll come.
A lot of them will come to the Pixel Watch 3. A lot more of them will come to the Pixel Watch 4. So I'm just like, ha, hi guys. Here's my review. The hardware is basically the same as last year's slightly new chip, slightly bigger battery.
There's AI watch faces guys. Okay, now you got me. You got me. So does it just generate the design with AI or is it like? Yeah, it generates the design with AI, but you're kind of constrained. So like the prompts that they told me were to be like,
design a watch face with X with this type of font and maybe this type of color scheme. So, you know, I love cats. I was like, oh, give me a cat watch face based on a brown tabby with an elegant font design, and then it'll show you like three versions that it's created. The one that it gave me, because I have a brown tabby. So I was like, oh, yeah, it'll be like, PDA, it'll be so cute. It's a little curse looking.
I would describe it as like a tiger print that's just blobby. It's a little challenge. There were like three iterations and I chose this one. They basically all look the same. It's just kind of making the numbers out of whatever material you say rather than sort of creating backgrounds or patterns or anything. They're just weird misshapen numeric versions of potentially cute things.
I actually have a question about generating them. Do you have to generate them through the phone app or can it all be handled on the device? You can do it all on the watch face. You don't actually have to do it on the phone app at all. It takes a half second to generate them. So like maybe 30 seconds or so. Not too long, but when you're watching something
generate in real time, they're like, wow, this takes forever. With a very finite battery life. Battery life has actually been pretty decent when I've been testing. I got to think about 36 to 40 hours, which not horrible. Pretty good. The other thing that I really like in terms of the UI is that the pinchy pinch and the wrist flick,
which is not new or unique to Pixel. We've seen them on other smartwatches from other smartwatch makers, but it is just the chips activate when you can use it. So I thought that was really smart because sometimes when they introduce these gesture features, you don't remember that you can do it. So it kind of teaches you in a really organic way, which I liked. And then, yeah, to your point, the proactive Gemini, I was just like, this is not popping up super organic for me in testing.
So I kind of had to fake push the stuff and it was mostly calendar things. It is super helpful to be like, oh, check my calendar. No, I'm not free. But sure, sure, it's there. The GPS was an interesting thing to test.
So I went on a series of walks in the West Village and other areas which are not that friendly to GPS because Google did go and say shots fired. Everybody we are going to. We do believe that our GPS is better than the Apple Watch Ultra 3 and the Garmin Phoenix 8. And so I was like, whoo, bold claims, very bold claims. I will say off of roughly three 20 minute walks, the Pixel Watch 5 did outperform the Apple Watch Ultra 3. I did some crazy tests where I went zigzag across the street
and I would like run circles around my friend to see if it could pick up these silly little shapes and things. It did. I was like, oh, crap. Like it did catch this one time where I did a loopy loop around my friend being annoying. Or it did catch this one street where I kind of zigzag down. Was it a perfect zigzag? No. But it did like render it more accurately
than my Apple Watch did in a very challenging environment. We'll see if the difference is really compound in a less challenging environment. Maybe it depends on where you live. If you're in an area where it's not challenging for GPS, you might be like, okay, go like, okay, whatever. It's not that much difference. But if you do run in cities a lot, I did find that it was marginally better.
I have one question about this, which is like after multiple seemingly like successful wearables, I guess I'm kind of like curious on your thoughts on this. Like how much has Google primed itself to be able to have tiers, different tiers of wearables? You know, they obviously have the fit that line up in their portfolio, but like Apple makes a budget-friendly wearable. They make an Ultra. You know, you were saying that the GPS in this watch out outperforms the Ultra 3 based on your testing so far. It just makes me wonder for a company like Google that has many, many phones in its portfolio.
So only have two sizes of one watch version seems, I don't want to say like a missed opportunity, but it's just kind of interesting at this point because they seem to have landed on an aesthetic, a fit that works for them. So I'm just curious what you think about that. Yeah, that is something I asked Google this time around and they were talking about hardware differentiation because they're like, if you're entry level and you're not going to fit in this, you obviously now have the fit there. It's a platform agnostic rather. So you can have an iPhone and use the Fitbit Air, which that's frankly really great. And when you get to the smartwatch level, you do need an Android phone to be able to use this. You can't use it with an iPhone.
So it is still very siloed in the smartwatch space. I directly asked if they were ever planning on like an Ultra version of it. Didn't sound like it. It seems like they think this is kind of where you're going to go for the premium experience and because last year they made it repairable. They're like, it should be good.
We can talk about more durable materials like Sapphire because these clearly don't have Sapphire yet. Listen, we cracked two pixel watchers early on in the pixel watch journey. Seemingly, for reasons we don't fully know how they cracked, but you know, they have been an acknowledgement about the durability in the sense that they've made these more repairable. But I don't think we're going to see an Ultra anytime soon from them, which I don't know if that's because they plan on having something more under the Fitbit brand or not. We have to remember that the Google and Fitbit merging was a little bumpy and continues to be a little bumpy as they integrate this AI coach.
So I think they're still stressing out if they want to differentiate the hardware further and under what branding they'll do it for. But I don't think we're going to get an Ultra pixel watch any time soon and by any time soon I mean in the next year or two. So yeah. Anyway, that's all the devices. Is there any last pack takeaway that we should think about for Google's hardware strategy, particularly since a couple of weeks we're going to be seeing new iPhones and Apple watches?
I mean, I think as we've said, the big takeaway here is just the focus of software, not hardware. And that's clearly partly a response to the RAM again stuff. It's a way of trying to minimize how much their prices have to climb. They don't want to cram loads of new stuff in. They've clearly been a bit careful to make sure every phone gets some sort of camera bump and that that maybe feels to me like maybe they see that as the big upgrade incentive is I'll make sure there's some sort of camera hardware change across the phone lineup to push people to say, look, no, we are doing hardware stuff.
But really, this is them just saying, right, we're going to play to our strengths, our strengths, our software, our strengths are having full control of this platform in Android and being able to do this pixel exclusive stuff. So let's just lean into that as much as we can and hope that that kind of covers them. I think especially in that foldable space. It's about making sure they kind of know they're being locked a little on foldable hardware right now. But there's enough software stuff being thrown into these phones that they can kind of protect themselves a little bit from the behemoth maybe about to end to that market.
Yeah, and I'm personally a little bit more interested over the next six to nine months in what the Pixel 11's innovation mean for the rest of the pixel lineup, including older pixels currently on the market as well as, you know, the possible pixel 11A. As Dom said, a lot of the focus this year was on software. And as I mentioned earlier, Google is really good about kind of democratizing a lot of features across Pixel phones. But it definitely remains to be seen which of these features, if any at all come to other Pixel phones. Will this be kind of like a line in the sand moving forward of if you want these features you need to pay versus we want everyone to have a good time just to get a pixel we're all friends here.
So I feel like Ramagetten has definitely kind of spurred some change and we may have only just seen the beginning of it. So we'll just have to stay tuned. Thank you guys for joining me. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for joining us. Are you getting the new pixel stuff? Send us your thoughts and questions to Vergecast at the Verge.com or call the hotline at 866-Verge-1-1 to support everything we do here and get ad free episodes.
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