Google AI and foldable phones

In short

The Vergecast Episode Summary: Google AI and Foldable Phones

Podcast Overview Podcast Title: The Vergecast Hosts: Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz Release Date: (Insert Release Date) Episode Title: Google AI and Foldable Phones Description: The episode explores the current and future state of Google, specifically addressing the company's challenges, hardware announcements from Google I/O, and the implications for technology and consumer behavior.

Episode Highlights

Current State of Google
Threats Facing Google:
Google’s dominance is challenged by competitors such as Bing and TikTok, which are altering the search landscape.
The rise of AI-powered search engines and conversational AI, evidenced by products like ChatGPT, poses a direct threat to Google Search.
Regulatory pressures around privacy and app store practices add to the challenges.

Open Questions about Google's Future:
Can Google successfully integrate AI into its search products?
Will the company be able to maintain focus and avoid the pitfalls of releasing multiple concurrent products?
How will copyright and legal challenges impact Google's AI initiatives?

Google I/O Hardware Announcements
Pixel 7A:
Launched at a price of $500.
Features include a 90Hz display, wireless charging, and improved camera specifications compared to its predecessor.
The model appeals to budget-conscious users while providing essential smartphone capabilities.

Pixel Tablet:
Priced at $500, designed primarily for content consumption at home.
Comes with a charging dock that doubles as a speaker.
The tablet is optimized for use as a display for media while also providing basic app functionality.

Pixel Fold:
Priced at $1,800, this foldable phone aims to compete with Samsung’s offerings.
It features a well-built design with a flush fold and an attractive display.
The software experience is less feature-rich compared to Samsung but aims for simplicity and usability.

Discussions on Hardware and Market Dynamics
Market Positioning:
The discussion highlighted how, despite strong hardware, Google's pricing strategy may position it awkwardly in a crowded market.
The hosts debated whether the Pixel line provides enough differentiation from flagship models or if it falls into a confused middle ground.

Consumer Expectations:
The ongoing trend of consumers expecting lower prices for high-end technology was discussed.
The hosts speculated on how Google might leverage trade-in deals and promotional offers to make devices more enticing.

Hot Takes and Predictions
Google's Potential Future:
Predictions were made regarding the durability and consumer acceptance of foldable devices.
There was a consensus on the need for Google to be more aggressive in marketing and positioning its devices, particularly in the context of foldable phones.

Gadget Discussions:
The hosts expressed enthusiasm about Google’s gadget announcements, noting the potential for growth in the tablet and foldable markets.
There was speculation on whether Google should consider breaking up certain divisions to foster competition and focus.

Key Takeaways

Navigating Competition: Google faces mounting challenges from innovative competitors in search and social media, prompting a reevaluation of its strategies.
Hardware Innovations: New hardware products such as the Pixel 7A, Pixel Tablet, and Pixel Fold showcase Google's commitment to innovation despite market risks.
Future Outlook: The episode concluded with discussions on the potential future of Google, emphasizing the need for strategic focus and product differentiation to succeed in a rapidly evolving tech landscape.

Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:02Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Unfolded Aspect ratios. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting here at the strangely small desk in my hotel room in Mountain View, California. Just down the street from me here is Google's campus, and more importantly for this week, the Shoreline Amphitheater, where Google's I.O. Developer Conference is happening, well, right now, as you're listening to this. And that is what we're going to talk about this episode. We're going to talk about some of the news from I.O., especially around hardware, because this was one of the most gadgety I.O.s that I can remember, actually.

0:34but we're mostly going to talk about the present and future state of Google. It's this big, complicated, earth-shatteringly successful company that suddenly feels like it's under threat in a huge number of ways. So we're going to lay the stakes a bit and see if we can figure out where Google is headed. All that's coming up in just a second, but first I have to figure out how to turn up the temperature in this hotel room because it's like 43 degrees in here. Why is it always 43 degrees in hotel rooms? This is The Verge Cast. We'll be right back. When will AI finally make work easier? How about today?

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2:19Welcome back. So there's a lot of news coming out at Google I.O., and we're going to get into some of it. but there's a much bigger story going on here too. Google is one of the biggest companies on the planet, and I would argue has been the most important company on the internet for really the last two decades. From search to Gmail to Maps to Chrome to YouTube to so many other things, our experience of being online right now is really centered around Google. But right now, and kind of all at once, it feels like Google is under siege. You have lots of companies making new and, in a lot of ways, better browsers.

2:57You have TikTok bringing the fight to YouTube in a really real way. And maybe most of all, there is a huge fight happening in the search space that is really unlike anything I can remember. Bing has made a big comeback by going all in on AI, sometimes in deeply weird ways. And products like ChatGPT are showing entirely new ways of finding and interacting with information. And, not to bring up TikTok again, but these visual-first social networks are in a lot of ways better and more fun ways to explore the internet than just by typing queries into Google. And all of that is not to mention the regulatory pressure, the privacy questions, the fight over app stores, and all the other external forces trying to change and stop Google.

3:40This company, like, is the internet, and it suddenly feels really fragile in that spot. So before we get to any of the news this week, I want to talk about Google in a larger way. I grabbed Nilay Patel and Alex Kranz, before we knew any of the news coming out of I.O., to just talk about this company right now. I told them to come with open questions and hot takes, just as a way to see how we're all thinking about what's next for Google. Let's get into it. Alex Kranz is here. Hi, Alex. Hello. Nilay Patel, also here. Hey. It's Google time, and we're going to talk about Google. I'm very excited to talk about Google.

4:14We never talk about Google. It's like this little company that no one, we don't really care about on this show. So once a year, we have to like be interested in Google. All right. Well, let's do this. So I gave both of you the same homework. I did my homework too. Let's go in terms of the way we did it for the streaming draft. You know, the one who signs our checks first. Neelai, you get to go first. Let's do open questions. What's your first big picture open question for Google right now? Can Google get it together to ship an AI powered search product that lasts more than six months? Wow. Like just given the history of Google, I don't know the answer to that question.

4:49Will they have five of them? Will they ship a new one every six months? I don't know. I just truly do not know the answer to the question of whether Google can focus. That's really interesting. I mean, it is kind of true that the two ways Google operates are to either you do search, which is like you do one thing, you get it really right, and then you basically never meaningfully change it for two decades. or the messaging app strategy, which is to do a different one every quarter for the entire existence of your organization. Yeah, and it makes sense. Like if you just like look at Google's business, it makes sense.

5:21Like search makes all the money. They are focused there. That is an advertising business that Google never, ever talks about. And then they have YouTube, which is fine, but it's not nearly the size of search, also an advertising business primarily. And then they have like Google Cloud, also teeny tiny. Search is just a monster. And so they can't touch it. They have an innovator's dilemma problem with search, where to change it and to compete in the new AI market, they've got to take all of their profitable search customers and move them to a product that might not make any money yet. And that's just impossible.

5:55But do they? Because one of the things we've talked about a little bit, and I'm about to rev Neelai up, so apologies in advance, David. But one of the things, there's the copyright element of this, too, right? Oh, God. Yes. The law isn't settled on the chat box. Suppressed no longer. This happened so much faster than I thought it was going to. But right, like that is kind of a risky thing because the law isn't settled there. And so if they go and start rewriting Verge articles, theoretically, we could be like, hey, steal our shit. Yeah. No, I mean, this is again, this is like, do you have conviction?

6:29So like early Google and, you know, we're going to do a year of Google stories because we are currently obsessed with how Google will change. In particular, how the change in search behavior changes the whole internet. Right. Because it's just sort of the default, right? So one of the pieces we want to do is that all of the copyright law on the internet, most of the law of the internet, has interacted with Google in some way. And Google has mostly won because when they were a baby company spending venture dollars, they were like, look at search. Isn't search good? Look at our goofballs making search.

7:00Yeah. And they could burn money on lawsuits. They usually won because they were sympathetic. Now they're the villain. Right. They're the big bad. And it's like a bunch of Hollywood screenwriters are like, don't do AI. And they're going to go to court and they're not burning venture money. They're burning dollars that could otherwise go to their shareholders. And so like there's just a real tension inside of Google. Can you shut down this version of search while building up the new AI search while not pissing everybody off? And like, what if they try and fail and they shut it down and start a new one?

7:32What if they do six at once like messaging? To me, this is just the biggest open question. Can they focus? And then all the things you're talking about, like copyright law and regulation, that's all underneath. They have to believe in what they're doing to overcome all those problems. And historically, with new products, Google's belief runs out at 6 to 18 months. Yeah. And one of my questions was almost, this is like my alternate question, was does Google actually need to worry about the AI revolution? revolution because it's like the the innovators dilemma thing is so real but like is there everybody is really worried about the future of google i'm not sure if that's based on anything and like chat gpt is very successful and like a mess and full of problems many of which are going to get worse and people are starting to get more and more concerned and like the guy the godfather of ai just retired and said he regrets his life work and we're in this place of like there's a pretty big, I think, pendulum swing back in the AI hype that we're due for.

8:31And the question of does Google actually need to bet the company on AI in the way that you're describing? I really wonder if that's true. And if you're Google, you really can't afford to wait because if it is true and you wait, you've lost and your trillion dollar company starts to disappear. But it does not seem like a guarantee to me that Google absolutely needs to bet the farm on this right this second. I feel like as long as their primary competitor is Bing, they can just sit back. That's exactly right. They don't need to work. Bing is the underpinning of so much of that, and it's garbage.

9:03Well, Bing's search, but ChatGBT is not garbage. Yeah, but ChatGBT is currently garbage at the kind of search that Google does well. That's true, but the fundamental thesis of Google for so long is ask this robot a question, and it will tell you an answer. And ChatGPT is better than Google at that thing. Yeah. And also, like on top of it, there's a lot of reporting recently that Apple's big search deal with Google that is under scrutiny from various antitrust regulators, that's up for renewal. And Microsoft has somewhat muscled it. God, I mean, if Apple signs with anybody, it would be ridiculous.

9:37Bing is so bad. Don't do it, Apple. They're going to extract all of the concessions they can out of Google there. There was reporting, I think last week or the week before, that Samsung's deal for search is up. And Samsung is like, well, we're already pretty mobbed up with Microsoft, the preload office on the phones. They might move because a chat GPT-powered assistant, especially when you're up against Siri, is like not a bad competitive advantage. I don't think it's gonna go overnight. Like Google is Google. They're the plumbing of the internet in like a huge and important way. And they're not going anywhere.

10:09But the threat is real. And their ability to focus on handling it, containing it, and growing through it, again, that's just my big open question. Can they focus? It's a good one. All right, Alex, what's your first open question? Okay. So my question is, what does Google Assistant look like in like a chat bot world? Like if chat GPT is out there doing its thing and we've seen like it hacked to work with Siri and make Siri actually not stupid. What's Google Assistant like? Like they've been kind of one of the top ones and they've kind of sucked. Nobody talks about it anymore. Yeah. Remember how for like eight years, Google Assistant was the absolute future of everything and no one at Google would shut up about Google Assistant.

10:50Yes. And now all of a sudden they're like, they're like, ah, well, who cares? And it's, and you are right. Like it is Google Assistant plus like the underpinnings of some of this large language model stuff could be right back in the mix there. Like it's not, it's not super far off, but it does seem like all these companies are starting to run away from these voice assistants. Well, I mean, And there's a huge problem with voice assistants, which is you really can't check their work, right? Like you ask it a question, it tells you an answer. And you're like, all right, I'm just going to go ahead and inject some bleach.

11:22Like, sure. That's what it said. I don't know. You ask it for directions. And it's just like, an LLM confidently lies to you. And you drive on a cliff. These are real problems for that model of interaction with a computer. And Google, I think, has always been, to its credit, very responsible with, we shouldn't lie to you too much. Sometimes the answers at the top of the Google search results page have been wrong. Google Assistant has been wrong. Alexa has been wrong. Yes, there's an error rate. But Google at least has been like, we should keep that error rate low. And I think if you just let a chatbot go wild underneath that, that error rate goes up in dramatic ways.

11:58So you're saying the stakes are too high with audio interfaces versus written interfaces. Yeah. I mean, we've already seen written LLMs try to convince their users to do dumb things. Right. Siri tries to convince me to do dumb things all the time. Like start timers. They're always wrong. Siri's like, they're a football game that you're already watching is on. Would you like to switch to it? No. Alex, do you buy audio as an ongoing interface? I feel like voice has been through the hype cycle like six or seven times. Right. Yeah. I still think it is. I mean, I watched a lot of Star Trek in April.

12:32So that could be like fueling this year. Right. Like you want Majel Barrett telling you that the ship's got red alert right now. But yeah, I think it is very, very useful. I think it allows some people who can't use other versions of like computer interaction. It gives them that accessibility. But it's also just really useful when it's like two o 'clock in the morning and your dog's throwing up and you want to know what time it is because you don't have your glasses on. Right. But that's all commands, right? You're like lock the door, engage the water dispenser, like whatever it is, right? But, you know, I think that cooking continues to be that killer application.

13:05Like, they do it every time, right? Every Google I.O., they're like, look at how great a system is at preparing your chicken. And I would love for it to be better because it's still very, very stupid. Right now, if you ask it conversions and stuff like that, stuff you really need to be doing quickly while you're cooking in the kitchen, sometimes it doesn't. And sometimes it's like, I don't know what you want for me. Yes. I asked it how much percentage of something something else was. And I was like, here's some stuff I found from the web. And I was like, you're a computer. This is the one thing you're supposed to be able to do.

13:34And if it had like that large language model underneath it, maybe it would be inaccurate, but it would be more sound. It would be confidently wrong. It'd be confident. I want it to confidently tell me what a tablespoon is. But this is what I'm getting at with voice in particular, right? We've seen people have these like lengthy, disconcertingly horny conversations with Bing, which is, it's a thing that we've all experienced together. And they had to cut down the number of repeated interactions you could have with most of these chatbots because they go off the rails after a long period of time.

14:07Now just like take that and impose it on a voice assistant that sounds like a person that's talking to you and give that to a kid or a lonely elderly person or someone who is not feeling so great. And they're having these like long conversations with a computer. It sounds like a person that sort of like knows what you want is a complicated fictional story where you're the hero, which is like in the end you bang the computer. it was the whole like joaquin phoenix did that with you literally just wrote the movie her again i'm just saying literally what you just did it's once again they're like huh that movie was great we should make it and it's like no that's not the point of that movie but the end of that movie all of the ais get together and they don't they they get in a rocket and leave earth forever we're just like okay and this ai conversation over they went to the moon it's done okay here's here's my question this is my second open question i'm trading in the one i had in reserve do you think the future of google assistant is as horny as big it has to be i think it is a requirement my prediction is that google there's no horniness inside of google whatsoever but you can't it can't that company cannot produce whereas like microsoft apparently had a latent horniness yeah i mean it's it's it's a bunch of people who have like worn suits to work for 25 years and they've all had really boring desk jobs and then all those people definitely have like you know weird stuff they do to each other on saturday nights google's the opposite they all come to work and like slide down slides all day it's like there's no they they turn out to be the less interesting people over time that's how that always works they've never used incognito mode at google microsoft we're we're about to take a very strange turn into the actual culture of google and Let's just leave that door closed.

15:54Okay, so my first open question, we can sort of skip past because we've talked about it a bunch. But I think one of two things is true, and I want to know which one it is. Either Google has been making correct, responsible decisions about AI for the last decade, or Google has been massively stupid and mismanaged an incredible lead that it had in technology and should have shipped all of this stuff eight years ago, and it's going to destroy it as a company because it couldn't move fast enough to do so. So it's one of those and there is no in between. And I don't know which one it is. It's the first one.

16:27100 % the first one. I kind of think you're right. And there was like, there's been some really interesting stuff that has come out recently that like, we've sort of known for a while that Google has like had this barred tech baking for a long time and had no particular plans to release it anytime soon. And then chat GPT happened and then Bing happened. And then Google went like, oh crap, we have to do this now. And I think like, would the world be better if none of those things had launched yet? But I think you could make a pretty convincing case that the answer is yes. But also, this is the world now.

16:57And so, yeah, so it's like, you know, Neelai, we had that briefing with Google a while ago where they said they've been using versions of BARD since 2019. And it's like, should Google have just launched BARD in 2019? Would it be in a better position now if it hadn't slow rolled this so aggressively? Or is Google the only responsible company in AI right now? Do you mean the BARD we have today or the BARD that 2019 Google would have launched? Fair question. Realistically, it's probably the one 2019 Google would have launched. But let's say, even hypothetically, if Bard could have been as good as it is today in 2019, I still probably think Google wouldn't have launched it.

17:33I think 2019 Google would have launched a Bard that was so limited and so pre-programmed and so safe that everyone would have played with it like a toy and not moved on. And OpenAI's big innovation was they were like, here it is. See what happens. And people were like, it is now writing plays for me or whatever is happening. It's writing code. I watched somebody use the newest version of GPT to write an entire Apple Watch app. Wow. Incredible. Like, I don't think whatever version of Bard in 2019, I think Google would have, even Bard right now can't do that. So I don't know. I think like Google thought of it as toys and little demos.

18:09And if they'd rushed it out, it still would have been toys and little demos. Whereas what is happening right now is people are like, I will use this incomplete messy product and integrate it into my fortune 500 companies workflow and then lay off 10 % of the staff. Like there's no hesitation. And I just, I don't think Google has ever been that company. I don't think they will ever be that company. And so I think they probably have amazing technology. I just think they, they want to know how it works and what it will do before they put it into a position to replace search, which makes all their money.

18:42And like, it's very simple. It's like Google makes money when you type questions into a text box. And if you move from the profitable text box to the expensive text box, that's weird for Google. And like, that's just, they just have to manage it. And I think that they, they want to at least pretend that they're neutral, which they are definitely not in search, but they want to pretend that they are and actually answering the questions for you puts them in a position of like extreme non-neutrality. They're now Google's going going to tell you the answer and people are going to pay a lot of attention to what those answers are.

19:16Yeah. So you, you land closer to the, like Google has actually made relatively responsible decisions here, not just totally failed to capitalize on its own good ideas. Yeah. I mean, should they have done something like opening? I did in beta or with a smaller group of people or publicized it more, I don't know, but right. Google is beset with controversy over how it's using these models, what these models do, what biases these models have. they fired their own researchers who have written papers about those problems. Like, I'm not saying Google is purely responsible. I'm saying that the turmoil inside of Google about that responsibility is important.

19:55It tells you more about Google and its products and what it has accomplished than the products themselves actually do. I buy that. All right, we're taking way too long at this. Let's blow through some more of these. Neelai, do you want to stick with horny bard as your second question, or does you have another one? Yeah. Will bard be horny, I think, is a great open question for you. Okay. We'll just leave that one right there. Alex, what's your next one? So my other one's totally unrelated to AI. And it's like, what's the actual ambition of Android now for Google? What do they want out of it? Because for a while it was, we want to own all the phones.

20:26And they did that. And then it was like, we're going to do our own phones. And they didn't do that very well. And like, okay, so what's the point of Android right now? Besides like, obviously being an engine that runs a ton of our world. Like, is that enough? Ironically, I think to some extent, this actually is sort of an AI story in the sense that I think it's a search story. Like, Neil, I was talking about the default deals that Google makes with, you know, Apple and Samsung. And I'm like, Android is nothing if not Google's most successful search mode. It is just a really good, powerful portal to Google search that you have to use to do Google search a lot.

21:00And I used to think there was a lot more going on than that. And there are obviously other ways that they make money. But I really, like, I've become sort of radicalized by the idea that actually you can understand everything about Google if you just figure out how it makes you do more searches. that makes Chrome make sense to me. It makes Android make sense to me. It makes hardware make sense to me. Everything Google is doing is just like, how do we make sure you touch the search box more often? Well, and then there's the other, at the back end of it, which is how do we make sure the web remains legible to the search crawler, which is a real problem when it comes to Instagram and TikTok for Google, right?

21:31They can't really see into those platforms and is increasingly a problem for us as people because the entire web is designed to be read by the search crawler and not by us. And that's weird. Well, and Apple, as Apple continues to win, Apple continues to push more and more stuff out of the web and into apps and onto your device. And so, like, Google needs Android to keep, like, pulling the web onto people's phones. That's a good point. Well, you guys kind of, I feel like you guys almost answered my question. It's not open anymore. The most open version of that question to me is, like, what is, is Google going to ever do anything with Android?

22:03Like, when was the last time Android was made meaningfully, powerfully better? It's been a while. When was the last time the iPhone was made meaningfully, powerfully better? It's also been a while. I don't think Apple is lapping Google on that front too. But maybe the question is, is there runway left for smartphone operating systems to some extent? Is Android finished? I don't know. The thing that jumps out to me when you ask that question is Google does monetize Android the same way Apple monetizes iOS. There's the Play Store. You can buy apps. And it takes a cut of in-app purchases. We're actually about to see the Epic versus Google trial, which seems like it will go much more poorly than the Epic versus Apple trial because Google does less, all this stuff.

22:43But they have that other, they have the entire same set of like business models as Apple. What's fascinating about particularly this moment in tech, I think we've talked about this before. All of the cool stuff is happening on laptops and web browsers because the app store model for phones, even though your phone is likely more powerful than your laptop. If you have like a new phone and a slightly older laptop, depending on where you land, your phone is potentially more powerful than your laptop. You are so limited in what you can do with a phone that that processing power is like it's reserved for future usage.

23:15Like the fastest iPhone is really good because it will last a long time, not because you get any value out of the processor. That's wild to me. I think the web has a life for Google. And the question is whether Google will be able to see it and serve it in search results. And Android, along with iOS, has kind of just hit a maximum. Like, here's what you can do with a phone. And that's the end of it. And I think that's really weird. And maybe Google does have an opportunity with Android to finally find a way to break past that. I mean, they just put BARD on the Android phone, right? Yeah, but it's more like, can you, you know, they put Tensor chips in their Pixel phones.

23:47And we're about to go into I.O. Are they going to unlock a new suite of AI capabilities that run locally on your phone that app developers can use? That would be cool. Yeah, would be. It seems very unlike Google, but that's the sort of thing I think they need to start doing. Yeah, because they've kind of closed off innovation for these devices, right? Like Apple and Google both have just said, don't innovate on these. Live within our system and make money and that's it. And suddenly over here, everybody's doing innovation and they're like, oh, wow, you could do that too if you weren't an app developer.

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24:19Yeah, if only you hadn't listened to us for the last decade, you'd have all these interesting things you could do. I like that. Okay, so my last question, which I am not even sure I am serious about this being an open question, is just should Google break up for its own good? Like, should Google as a company just sit down and just siphon the company off into 25 different parts and just move on with its life? because Google, as we've talked about with the culture, is this big, giant, sprawling company where nobody knows what anybody else is working on. Everything's a mess. They launch 50 of the same thing every year.

24:50Bard has just been sitting inside of Google. They haven't been able to figure out what to do with it. Should Google just split itself into 12 different companies and have them actually compete with each other? Like standard oil style where, you know, Rockefeller still makes money from everybody. Like let Sundar get rich off of everybody, but run them all as actually separate companies. Let's do an old style trust. Yeah, hell yeah. Walk right up to Amy Klobuchar and punch her in the nose. This is great. I've got copyright law. We've done the open web. And now we're doing org charts. Like you just hit all my interests.

25:19Neelai bingo. Yes, but I don't know that even that will help, right? Like part of the reason that Google has six messaging apps is like every product manager at Google runs a little kingdom. And they're like, we should do a messaging app. What do Google Meet users really want? They want a messaging app. All right, well, roll out an enterprise messaging app. And then over here, the Android team is like, we got to do RCS. And they haven't talked to each other. And that's just like, you can just see the company. I think part of the reason I'm so obsessed with org charts is because I pay so much attention to Google.

25:50And I'm just like, how do you end up this way? And the answer is like, inevitably the org chart. It's the same with Microsoft. Old Microsoft was very much aligned this way as well. So like you could break it up and then you would have like six different Googles because they're all already pretty independent. And I don't know that brings any of those products into focus because their instincts are already to duplicate all of their own efforts. Maybe. I think that's where I land, though. It's like just instead of playing this game where they all kind of duplicate each other's efforts but have to, like, pretend to play nice with each other, like, just bring the knives out for real.

26:22Yeah, just full competition. Neither can live while the other survives kind of situations here. All right. We're going to put this in the show notes. There's a very famous drawing of big tech company org charts and the Microsoft one is all the divisions are in boxes and they all have hands sticking out of the boxes, pointing guns at one another. And that's kind of what you're describing. Yes, that's Google now. Yeah. It's what Google could be. It's not quite there yet. The violence, the hatred towards the other different groups at Google isn't quite there yet. That's what I'm saying. We need more hatred.

26:51Yeah. Let's get some hatred. But this is the flip side of what I said at the very beginning, right? Can they focus? You're basically saying, no, you should let them split up and let competition focus them, which is a totally fair answer. But I don't think that Google is actually going to break itself up unless some government around the world insists upon it. It's not going to do it until Amy Klobuchar gets what she wants. By the way, Google already did this. It is important to note that they broke the company up into Alphabet ages ago. And now Sundar is the CEO of both Google and Alphabet. And the distinction between the two is like erased, right?

27:29Like DeepMind, their AI business was part of Alphabet. And Sundar was like, this is done, and just scooted it into Google. And like, oh, okay. I guess you can do that. Yeah, sure. I think like their problems really are what is the thing that will create actual focus for them. Yeah. All right. We need to take a break. But when we get back, we're going to switch gears a bit and get into all of our hottest takes about the state and future of Google. This is going to get weird. We'll be right back.

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30:27All right, let's burn through some hot takes and then get out of here. The rules for these hot takes, just to clarify, is you have to believe it at least 25%, which means you can't just, you know, say, give Google to Elon too. He'll do it. But you can't actually be confident in these beliefs. So they have to exist right in that like liminal space. Alex, you get to go first on this one. Give us your hottest take. Bart is the best AI chatbot. Wow. There's no way you believe that 25%. There's no way. So it's not as horny as Bing, which does make it less fun. A strike against. Yeah. Yeah. And it's not as like confident as chat GPT, which again makes it less fun.

31:05But I also think both of those things makes it a better chatbot because it's like, it's not as likely to lie to you and be bad at information this take is not as likely to furiously hit on you at 2 a.m when you're depressed and just that's why that's why this take is nuclear so like it's the safe one and the safe one makes it the best one if we're defining best as like least likely to cause the end of civilization then like yeah i'm looking for sure that's the new challenge verge cast challenge can you get barred to somehow do something bad get it to buy you some email vergecastoftheverge.com email us the worst thing you can make Bart do please I want all of it please don't do that please do alright that's a good one Neelai what's yours I'm going the other way from Alex usually I've done the AI ones and Alex is like I'm going a different way so I'm flipping the script I'm going pixel I think five years from now pixel doesn't exist again it's a 25 % maximally nuclear take I'm saying it only to provoke but I think I can make the case go the pixel line it's not a business like it still isn't one as near as we can tell it's there to to provide some check against samsung in this market and against the competition in other markets but it really doesn't do anything for google right it's like they want to control some experience they want to have something that they can show as being the farthest edge of what they can do i don't know that apart from the camera it has accomplished any of that.

32:33And all of these companies are in a moment of extreme efficiency seeking. And that, I just don't know if there's a future, especially if you think phones are mature. I just don't know the answer to that question. If they can re-sign their search deals with Apple and Samsung, are they just running this to have a threat? That's a good one. Why? Every year at I.O., we're like, this is the year they're going to do it. So my 25 % scalding hot take is, what if this is the year they're like, we're not going to do it? Like, never mind. No more of these. Well, this goes nicely with my first hot take, which is that Google will never, ever, ever be a serious hardware player.

33:10Yeah. Because I actually I'm like, I'm closer to 75 percent than 25 percent on that one for exactly the same reason. Right. Like Google is famously a company that talks about how it only wants to do things that reach a billion users. Right. And that is like the path to success for Google is at that scale. And the path to a billion pixel owners like almost certainly doesn't exist. and even if it does it's going to take a lot longer than google historically has patience for an interest in they'll shut it down 60 more times and hamstring any efforts to get there and it requires playing all these games with carriers and set and marketing and all kinds of stuff that google is like not historically very good at and then you throw in tablets and laptops which google has never shown long-term interest in like they this is like the third time Google has been like, we're serious this time about tablets.

33:59And I sort of hope it's true. Like Google is capable of making stuff that's good. And I hope it's true, but I just, I don't see it inside of Google's culture for them to care about this stuff. So I think my, my take is probably slightly less fiery than yours, Neil, because I suspect they're going to keep making these, but I don't see Google ever actually making Samsung nervous in any real way. Let me ask you this question now, the, if you think the next turn is AR headsets or whatever it is. Google has false started there as much as anybody. Don't you have to have a hardware division to at least make one of those to say, here's what it looks like if you run all of our software and you have like a Google AR experience.

34:38Google, by the way, very well suited to AR, right? To like image recognition and finding information and layering it. Like that's the thing that they do. And they don't seem to have any vision there right now. Why do they need it? Yeah. I'm kind galaxy brain this i would say if i'm google google maps is the much bigger opportunity in an ar future than making ar hardware for google but how do you get google maps on apple's device it's never going to happen that's what i was about to say the first phase of this is everybody going to be trying to own the entire experience themselves and so google is going to have to play along because everybody else has figured out that if you own the whole experience you can take 30 percent of the oh they don't do that that way so everybody else is going to try to play this same game and Google's going to be in trouble if they don't also.

35:23But I think in Google's perfect world, they will happily provide all these same services to all of the AR headsets around the world and not be a serious hardware player. They can just sit there and wait because everybody's going to try to do a closed ecosystem for their headsets. Everybody's going to get sued into the sun for doing closed ecosystems. Epic is just waiting to sue them all again. And Google's going to come to be like, look, Google Maps for your meta headset, because meta's garbage. It's going to be absolute garbage. Meta maps? You're not feeling good about meta maps? But meta maps is not going to be a thing.

35:59The only deal they get in that world is on Humane. I'm just telling you right now. They're going to be the exclusive provider of mapping software to the Humane Pocket Square. Womp. Womp. All right. One more round of takes, then we're out of here. Alex, what's your next one? Chromecast with Google TV could be good. Could be. I want to say could. wow i can't say is good i don't believe that but it could be good if they would like if the theme of the day focus just just focus like a little bit it could be excellent you're a beautiful dreamer alex i love you i honestly i'm totally with you on this like google did the fast tv thing recently they put a bunch of fast channels on it they've invested a bunch in cert like universal search for streaming stuff that could work like if they could figure out how to make the YouTube stuff integrate better.

36:45Like it's all the pieces are kind of right there. It's so close. Yeah. It could be good. 25%, I believe that. Three people who have thought more about how Google can integrate its TV services than anyone at Google. Yeah. It's true. Well, I hope someone at Google is listening because this is easy. Let us do this for you. I just want a good set-top box. That's all I want. Please. I love that. All right, Neal, what do you got? This is also nuclear and designed only to provoke. they should spin off YouTube. Yes. Is that that nuclear? I'm not sure that's that nuclear. Well, it's, I mean, they're never going to do it.

37:20And it is probably a bad idea, but they should just let it go. Right? Like it is such a distraction from their other problems. It is becoming more and more of a cable service. YouTube looks more like HBO Max than anything with every passing day. Right? And like it needs to go compete in that world because it has YouTube TV and it's doing these like streaming channel bundles. And there's what you're talking about with the actual opportunity on TV. It's like making YouTube carry the baggage of Google around is super weird. And it probably can go faster and do better without it. And then excusing Google from the we have to run a social network.

38:04Welcome to hell. Baggage of YouTube is probably good for Google. And I think everyone can see this, which is why they kind of like sine wave in and out of being integrated with each other. But at some point, you just got to say, look, that is just a different set of problems for a different set of people and a different set of investors. And like, we're just going to let them go handle it. I do think YouTube as a separate company immediately becomes like the most powerful company in entertainment. Yeah. In a really fascinating way. And it would be really interesting to see, like, the beauty of being YouTube is that you can throw all this money at other stuff because Google proper is just printing so much money.

38:42Like, it's very easy as an entertainment company when you're a wing of a much bigger company that makes money on other stuff. So it would be fascinating to see YouTube have to go sort of compete on the merits in that way. Let me rephrase this. Let me rephrase my hot take. It's the same hot take, but it phrases a prediction about Google I.O. We're going to go through all of Google I.O. and they're going to substantively mention YouTube zero times. They might mention that it exists or that whatever Pixel phone can share to it or that YouTube shorts is great. And we might see some creators, but like actual YouTube features, cool stuff you can do with YouTube, totally zero.

39:20And I think that is just about as indicative of the relationship between the two parts of Google as anything. And I would say the second half of that is, I suspect YouTube will be very happy to have it that way. Yes. Yeah, YouTube has like its own events where they never mentioned Google. Yeah. All right, my last take, and then we're going to go, this is the spiciest one of all. I'm very excited about it. Google should absolutely build another social network and it should do it right now. How do you believe that 25 %? I literally mean this with like most of my heart. I believe this. Wow. Google has tried so many times and it's so bad at it.

39:51But if you were Google and you want the open web to win, and you want all of this stuff to actually work and be open and build on existing web standards, this is the moment. Facebook is in flux. Twitter is in flux. Instagram is whatever. TikTok is going to get banned from the US. If you're Google, this is the time. Call it YouTube text or whatever. I don't care. Google should build a social network and it should kill every other thing it has ever tried. I want an activity club social network, if I'm being honest. Wow. But just go build me a social network, Google. I will use it this time. What does it look like?

40:29I don't know. That's their problem. Like, is it a TikTok social network? Is it a Twitter social network? Is it just Google Plus? I think Google should make more moves to make people contact each other better, right? Like, they have so much infrastructure between Gmail and Google Contacts and some of the messaging apps that they've done that if you just... Some of the messaging apps. Yeah, some. Other messaging apps were bad at letting people contact each other. They literally were. They were good at letting you contact Google Assistant, but not people because no one cared. But there's like a status layer and like let people actually interact with each other in different ways.

41:08That is all just sitting right there for Google. And I think Google is desperately afraid of trying it because Google Plus was such a disaster. But I think I think it could work and I would use it for five minutes. you just want away messages in gmail like that's that's that sounds that's literally all i've ever that is that is the social network the world needs is is literally just away messages finally here at the end david reveals the truth which is he just wants gchat a product which never formally existed right it would be amazing if io sundar pachai was like all right we've only got one announcement gchat it's called gchat it we actually never had a product named gchat the universe willed it into existence and now it's here yeah david just sobbing camera slowly zooming in on that single tear i will just start hawking money at the stage in mountain view it'll be incredible it is easily i can't we should have done the whole the entire everything on the show should have been about google missing the moment with gchat i literally like my entire early relationship with my wife was in gchat like that's how important it was and they're like I don't know.

42:17Phones seem hard. Do you want hangouts? We made that for you. Yeah. All right. Thank you both. This was really fun. And we'll do it again. G-chat forever.

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45:01Welcome back. We're going to save a lot of the actual specific I.O. news for our Friday show once we've had a chance to process and play with some of the new stuff. There's a ton of coverage on the site, though. Go check it all out. Theverge.com slash Google. Lots of stuff going on. But I couldn't end this show without talking about the gadgets. Google I.O. is not necessarily known as a super gadgety event, but this year I think some of its biggest and most interesting announcements were the gadgets, oddly enough. Google launched a tablet, a phone, and a foldable phone, all of which I think are more exciting than your average Google gadgets.

45:36The Verge's Dan Seifert and Allison Johnson both got early looks at some of those gadgets, and Allison has actually been playing with one of them for a while now. So I called them up to talk about their first impressions. Allison, hello. Hello. Dan, hello. Hello. So it's Google hardware time, which means it's time to talk about many devices that we often think are very cool and that no one ever buys. So with that as the setup, we have three devices to talk about. We have the Google Pixel 7a, we have the Pixel tablet, and we have the Pixel Fold. I want to start with the Pixel 7a because my theory is this is like the sort of least capital-I interesting, but also probably by a wide margin, the best selling of the three things that Google is just about to put out.

46:23So, Allison, the reason I'm interested in this phone is because for several years now, it seems like the A line has been kind of the best thing the Google phone business has going for it. Is that true? I think so. You know, we get the flagships in the fall. You're like, they're great. They're cool. They're flawed. You know, whatever. Then the A version comes out and you're like, this is a really friggin' good deal. You get like all this stuff at like a very aggressive price. So, yeah, that's been that's been my impression, too. And Dan, you've been covering this for a bunch of years, right? It feels like the game that Google always plays is like, what can we get rid of to save some money without meaningfully destroying what makes this phone great?

47:08And if memory serves, I didn't actually go back through all of them, but if memory serves, Google has had kind of a mixed bag of success on choosing which features to keep and not keep over the years, right? Yeah, that's fair. For each iteration of the A line, as the new one has come out, they've kind of like added another feature that was missing. So like the first one came out, it was pretty basic. And then another year later, and they were like, oh, we were able to make it water resistant. And then like another year later, it's like, oh, we're able to give it the same processor as the bigger phone.

47:40Or another year later, you know, they add another feature. And I think where we're at with the 7a is that they are like finally checking off all the features. Like the 7a has the 90 hertz screen. It's got wireless charging. These are things that you didn't get in the A series, but you had to pony up for the proper full pixel line to get. And now we're going to getting them in a device that's 500 bucks, which is pretty cool to see. Yeah. Okay. So, Allison, run down the baseball card of this thing for us. You've had it for a little while, and I want to get into your experience with it. But, like, what is the sort of top line?

48:11I keep forgetting that, like, this phone is brand new and most people don't know it existed. I feel like we've been talking about this forever. Tell us about this phone. What's going on here? Yeah. So, it's still the 6.1-inch display, which we all know is... The perfect size for a smartphone. The size it should be. Well-established. Yeah. This is the official opinion of the Vergecast. But yeah, that gets the bump up to 90 hertz this year. It was the standard 60 hertz in the 6A. It just wasn't, it wasn't a great screen. Like, I think that's one of the real big benefits this year. It has a little bit brighter, like peak brightness capability.

48:48You get the wireless charging. It's IP67, which is the same as the 6A, but that's still really good for$500. That's like drop your phone in the puddle and it's fine kind of rating. And there's a bump up on RAM. It's eight gigabytes versus six. Obviously, Tensor G2. And there's a new asterisk camera. It's not the one in the Pixel 7 and 7 Pro, but it's a bump up to 64 megapixels from 12 megapixels. And just to confuse everyone, that's like more resolution than the Pixel 7 cameras. But it is a slightly smaller sensor than what's in the Pixel 7 cameras. This is a good time to remind everybody that megapixels are not everything when it comes to smartphone cameras.

49:39If you look at megapixels, it's just a number. It means so much less than you think it does for how good your photos are actually going to be. And trying to communicate different sensor sizes is just so confusing. I'm not even going to bother. It's just a little smaller. That's all you need to know. That's fair. So with the caveat that we're recording this before your review comes out, when you're listening to this, Allison's review will be out. So go read it for all of her final takes. But you've been using this thing for a while. How does it feel? What's the verdict so far? Well, the thing is really I'm thinking about as I'm using it, I just tested the Samsung Galaxy 854, which is really the only competitor to this phone, like has been many years running in the US.

50:25And I think what's becoming clear is like the Pixel 8 Series phone is the one to get for a camera if you care about that, which a lot of us do. And the frequency of the software updates, the clean kind of Pixel software that we prefer generally over Samsung. But I don't think it's, I mean, it's definitely not beating the A54 on screen. You know, the A54 has a 120 hertz display. It's bigger, not remembering the exact measurement right now, but it's appreciably bigger than the 6.1 inch screen, which is the right size screen. So yeah, it's just seeming like more of the same. But the interesting thing This year is the higher price tag.

51:13So the A54 is still at$450. Pixel goes up to$500. How much of a difference does that really make to people buying a phone from their carrier? You're just signing away three years of your wireless carrier life to get either of them. But yeah, that's my impression. What's interesting to me is before the 7a came out or was announced today, you could have gotten the regular Pixel 7 for like 450 bucks pretty easily. Like it was like been on sale for the past couple of months. And then it like throws a real curveball into the whole equation. If you're shopping for these, do you wait for just another Pixel 7 sale or do you go for the Pixel 7a?

51:51And I don't know, it makes it a lot harder. Yeah, I've really started to have a hard time with smartphone prices. And I suspect for you guys dealing with the reviews for all these things, it's really tough now too, because on the one hand, like as we've talked about in the show many times, if you just walk into a carrier store, like they're just going to start throwing phones at you. Like you can walk in and you're like, you just have a piece of glass and like a AA battery. And you're like, this used to be a smartphone. And they're like, sure, have a new S23 Ultra for free on us. Promise you'll stay with us for five years and we will give you all the phones.

52:20Yeah. And so it makes me wonder with something like the A series, even excluding the ridiculous sales that the Google phones always seem to be on at this point, whatever, six months after they initially came out. How even to factor price into some of these decisions? I just, I'm totally out anymore. I almost don't think about price when I tell people what phone to buy anymore because it's like, God only knows what it's going to cost you. And there's the flow chart of how much does this phone cost is so complicated that I don't even know how to litigate it anymore. It gives me a headache every single day.

52:53And especially something like the Pixel 7, when it comes out, you're sort of like, okay, here's where it is in the market. And then six months later, I'm like, what the heck is this? Is it a mid-range phone? Is it like a really fancy budget phone? It's just kind of like floating around, confusing me. How does it feel? I think the one thing I've heard over and over from people is that they wait for the A-series because like we've said, it's the phone that is the right size. It's a little smaller. It has always tended to like feel smaller than it actually is in a nice way. Like it doesn't feel like sort of a big chunky phone, even in the way that some other 6.1-inch phones can.

53:29But the Pixel 7, if I'm remembering correctly, is 6.3 inches. Is this meaningfully smaller? Like, are the small phone people going to be happy? Dan's holding them both up. This doesn't look that different to me, I got to tell you. It's really not. I'll let Allison speak, but, like, if you're just putting them side by side, it is, like, very tinily taller is the 7. But I think the 7a is actually slightly wider. Yeah. Yeah, and for some reason, like when the Pixel 6a came in, it felt like, oh, this is like a smaller version of these giant phones. And when this one arrived, I didn't get that impression.

54:06It was just kind of like a different version that's Coral. I don't want to brag, but I have the Coral version, and it's very exciting. I love a good color phone. I really do. As someone who owns a black phone, I'm really happy that other people have nicer colored phones. I think that the size difference is impaired by the fact that the 7a has a slightly larger bezel around the screen. It's not enough of a thing where it's like, oh, I'm looking at this gross, disgusting bezel. But if you put it side by side with a 7, the 7's slightly trimmer. And so therefore it makes it slightly narrower. And that's like the main size difference.

54:44But like, as Allison was saying earlier, the 7a has a different camera system. So the camera bump visor thing on the 7 is larger. It sticks out more. So if you put them both on a table, it's like the 7 sits higher than the 7a. It's like a bunch of these weird little small differences that you might notice if you put them side by side. But ultimately, I think in everyday use, they kind of feel like the same thing. The only difference is the 7a has a plastic back versus the glass back. But again, if you didn't compare them side by side, would you even know? I don't know. And if you're going to put a case on both phones, who cares?

55:21Exactly. One last thing, and then I'm going to move on from this because we have other stuff to talk about. But I think the thing that I'm wondering at this point with these phones, especially, and this kind of goes back to the pricing thing, is what is the 7a doing for Google at this point? Because for a while, everything else was really expensive. And this at least gave Google like a slightly smaller, slightly cheaper way in to having a very good phone. Now you can get, like you said, Dan, a Pixel 7 for theoretically less than this thing will cost. And I could imagine a world in which Google came in and said, OK, this phone is slightly worse than it is.

55:52Maybe it still has a 60-hertz screen, but it's$199. And that I can see is like, okay, Google is going to try and make real moves at the bottom of the market here. But now it just kind of feels like the 7A seems sort of lost in a middle space that I don't totally understand anymore. Yeah, I mean, I'm curious what you think, Allison. Yeah, I think that the 7A and the 7 are actually designed to aim for different target markets. audience of the Vergecast, us, we kind of like know to play the game of like, you just wait six months and the discount is there. But most people buying a phone are just going to go into their carrier store and buy something, right?

56:28Like you said. This one just came out is like a very powerful phrase. Yeah. But the 7a, I think appeals or is really designed for the customer who is expecting to pay full price for their phone. Maybe they're on a prepaid plan or something like that, and they are not getting on like a contract plan with their carrier. And so it's priced kind of in that like mid-range thing that's not really super budget, but it is affordable enough that like you can, it's not, you're not paying 800 plus dollars out of your pocket right away for it. And I think that's kind of like where it plays. And it's just a theory.

56:58It's just like, I don't have any evidence outside of like my gut intuition on that, but that's kind of how I see the difference between the two. They're just appealing to different markets. Yeah, I agree with that. And I have one data point and it is my father. He is a Pixel 6a owner and it's just kind of the right, hits the right spot for him. Like he really does not care for the high-end features. He's not gonna get, you know, fussy about IP68 versus IP67 or whatever, but it's like a very easy buy for him to just, you know, order it, pay full price. You're gonna be able to keep it for God knows how long my dad is going to keep his phone well past the point where it's getting security updates, unfortunately.

57:43So when the Pixel 13 comes out, you're going to be like, my dad, the Pixel 6a owner. Five years of me begging him to get a new phone. Yeah. The other consideration is that at launch in May, yes, there is the option of the Pixel 7 and the 7a. Come the fall, the Pixel 8 will be out and then that will be more expensive and the Pixel 7a will look like the more value option for the time period until this 8a comes out, right? So when people are mostly buying their phones, which is in the fall season for the holidays, that is like the thing that they will see more than what we're seeing today at launch.

58:17Yeah. Okay. All right. That's fair. I buy it. All right. Let's move on and talk about the tablet. Dan, I want you to tell me about this tablet because my first memory of this tablet is Google I.O. last year where Google said, we're building a tablet. It's the Pixel team. It's going to run Android. And I believe your exact phrase was, that is a plastic Samsung looking piece of junk. Like they could just say, we're going to launch a tablet next year and like tell that same story. But for some reason, they decided we're going to also show this hype reel of this tablet, which looks like it was designed in 2014 and is like the combination of a 2014 era Samsung tablet and like an Amazon Fire HD.

59:00That was the distinct vibe that we got. It's this big, plastic looking hunk of nonsense. And now it's coming out. It didn't make a great first impression, at least in their promo videos, right? I will agree with you there. I've had a chance to see it in person now. I will say that in person, it looks a lot nicer than it did a year ago at Google I.O. in their slideshows. Is that because they fixed the bezels or just their better bezels? The bezel is still there. It comes in a couple of different colors, so you can get it with a black bezel. But there is a version with a white bezel, which is all we had seen last year was a white bezel version.

59:33So you can get it either way, depending on your preference. It looks plastic, but when you pick it up and touch it, it's actually aluminum with what Google calls a nano ceramic coating. So if you're one of the very few people who touched a Pixel 5, it's the exact same thing as that. Okay. That was nice. If I remember right, that's a good thing. Yeah. Yeah. It feels pretty nice. Like it's, it's got this like matte finish to it. It doesn't feel like flimsy or plasticky or creaky. Like those old Samsung tablets were like super creaky, but it doesn't like, doesn't shout premium at you when you look at it from a distance.

1:00:03And then, you know, it's fine. I think the pricing kind of speaks to that as well. It's only$499. And that includes the charging dock that we'll talk about. But this is very much kind of like a tablet that's designed for tablet things that you do at your home, which is watch video sitting on the couch. Like that is like what this whole thing is geared to. So it's a screen. It's very much an 11 inch screen you hold in your hands and it's got four speakers and And you'll watch your Netflix or YouTube TV or whatever it is on there. And, you know, you can run a few different apps on there. Of course, it's got the whole option for Android apps.

1:00:42It's running Android 13. It'll run Android 14 when that comes out. And you can do some basic split screen multitasking and stuff. But it's pretty telling to me that Google does not expect this, A, to ever leave your house and B, does not really expect you to use it for getting a lot of work done. Is there a stylus or a keyboard or anything coming with it? So Google is not making a keyboard case. You can pair a Bluetooth keyboard with it if you'd like, but Google's not making one. It is not making a stylus. It does support USI, the stylus standard, if they're like as close as we can have to one.

1:01:15So you can buy a third party stylus and use it on there. But again, Google is not building it and Google is not bundling it. And Google isn't really pitching it as that, which is very different than like the story of tablets that we've had for the past five years. of the iPad Pro and the Surface Pro and most recently the OnePlus Pad. They all have like keyboard cases and styluses and they are like designed that you're supposed to like get this idea of, you know, you can use it for productivity or you can use it for content consumption or it's really thin and like, like kind of flexible type of screen.

1:01:47This is very much like, this is really great for content consumption, which is all that anyone uses their tablet for. So that's what we designed it for. And then the little trick that it has beyond that is they are bundling a speaker dock, which has pogo pins and magnets, and you can just put the tablet on this dock and it will charge the battery, which solves the problem that Google said it was trying to solve of most people's tablets end up in a drawer and they have a dead battery and then they don't get used. So this allows you to store it in a place and have the battery charged. And then when it's connected to the dock, any audio that comes out of the tablet will instead route through the dock speaker, which is larger and a little bit more fuller.

1:02:24and it makes the thing look like a smart display. I'm not going to say it is a smart display because it's not, but it looks like a smart display and it can show a slideshow of your Google Photos similar to what the Nest Hub does. Allison, is that pitch compelling? Are you going to buy this thing? Honestly, yeah. And I feel like I'm an outlier because everybody else's impression seems to be like they want it to be a smart home hub. I'm like, my home is dumb as rocks and I have a little Google Home that we yell at to set timers. I'm like, this is kind of compelling. Like it could just sit. But then I'm like, I don't really use a tablet that much.

1:03:04So do I need a tablet in my house? That's the question. The thing I was thinking about as you described this, Dan, is my wife cooks a lot and she likes to watch shows while she cooks rather than listening to music or something. She just likes to have sort of the background music of Law & Order SVU. And what she does almost every time is bring in her laptop and put it on top of our toaster. And that's just where it lives while she cooks. It's like, it's sort of out of the way. It kind of works fine. And to me, I'm like, what we actually need is like a kitchen tablet that is just like, it's, it's the, it's essentially like our family computer, right.

1:03:38That basically just like has all the streaming apps is logged into everything and just kind of lives there. And like you're saying, Alison, you can, you can set timers, whatever. And I have an iPad that I like aspirationally bought a magic keyboard for. And use basically to just like type Netflix into spotlight to open Netflix. And so in theory, the idea that you're describing, I think really makes sense that there is something to this idea that like you want something that is kind of in the home around everybody that isn't my personal device that has all of my personal information on it. It's like, it's our, it's a television, essentially.

1:04:13It's the kitchen TV that sort of$500 for that feels like a lot of money, Yeah. But I don't hate the thesis. Yeah. You know, I think Android actually as an operating system has an advantage there for that purpose and that use case because you can support multiple users on it. That's the first time anyone has ever said Android tablets have an advantage. It's wild. But you know what? Apple has been making the iPad since 2010 and you still can't use multiple users on it. So like, you know, it's not really a great shared device. This is really meant to be a device that can be shared in a home and is a communal.

1:04:47It's meant to be kept in an open area or whatever, show you photos, be there for your, uh, Hey G voice commands to set timers and things like that. So I think it actually has a little bit of an advantage there. What I think Google built here though is, and this is not to knock it because there's like a place for this type of product. They built a tablet for how people are using tablets now and just like kind of leaned into that as much as they possibly can. They don't, people don't really take tablets out of their house. They use them for very specific consumption based things. and they're solving a problem of how to keep it charged and adding, giving you a little bit better speaker.

1:05:22Or, you know, the problem that your wife has, David, of, like, putting her laptop on the toaster oven, like, this would likely be a little bit better of a scenario for that. I don't think they're really, like, pushing the envelope with, like, tablet computing. It doesn't feel like this is, like, the future of computing or anything of that sort. And that's fine. It's a$500 tablet. But, like, it is helpful to just kind of, like, put that perspective on it of, like, what this product is and what it's going to be good for and what it's not going to be good for. I don't think it's going to be a great productivity device.

1:05:50It's not really designed for that. It's also really not designed to be a smart display. It looks like a smart display. And that's what everyone's like looking at it. Who's like familiar with the Nest Hub, which is a smart display. It's like, that looks like a Nest Hub. That's going to be a better smart display. And I don't think it's going to be a better smart display. If you use your smart display for certain things, like controlling your smart home or making video calls or other things that we've been like pitched on smart displays doing. This is like has limited capabilities there. But ultimately, it's an Android tablet and it runs Android and whatever apps you use on Android, you can use on this.

1:06:24And then you could put it on a little speaker dock and listen to music or listen to the audio from your video. OK, how does the speaker sound? It's good. I mean, it's like it's similar to the Nest Hub, Nest Hub Max, I should say. I don't know if exactly spec for spec, it's the exact same size and things like that, but it's very similar to that. So it'll get louder than the speakers on the tablet itself. It'll also just kind of sound fuller. It's got a larger driver and things like that. I don't think it's really doing any spatial audio tricks. I could be mistaken. But again, we're talking about a pretty small speaker dock here.

1:06:53It's like comparable to a good Bluetooth speaker that you might pair to a tablet. Okay. I have a really dumb question I should know the answer to. Does the tablet itself have a headphone jack? Do they still have those? Nope. Oh. What? Nope. That stinks. No, it's got a USB-C port. Oh, okay. Like, can I give this to my kid when he gets bigger and he can play whatever, Paw Patrol or whatever? I mean, so the solution there would be you would use a USB-C adapter to plug in wired headphones or pair Bluetooth headphones. Yeah, boo. But yeah. Yep. All right. Before I let you guys go, we have to talk about the Pixel Fold.

1:07:29Have you both seen it or just you, Dan? I think it's just me. Just Dan. By the time you listen to this, anyone listening, Allison will have seen it. Uh-huh. But at this stage, it's just me. All right. Well, then, Allison, I want to know all your thoughts based on what you've seen and read. But Dan, tell us about the Pixel Fold. It looks great. That one video we've seen made me very excited about this thing. Yeah, it's exciting. I mean, we've been waiting for this product for I don't know how many years now. It's been leaked forever. It's been rumored forever. And finally, Google is shipping it.

1:07:59And it's kind of exciting to have, at least here in the U.S., some competition for Samsung in the folding phone space. And in terms of like, like you said, David, in terms of like design and hardware and things like that, it looks really nice. It feels really nice. It's a nice like just gadget to hold and use. It's really well built. The hinge is really strong and sturdy. It crucially folds flat with no gap, unlike Samsung's. Yeah, that's huge. It's very, you know, flat when you've got it closed. And then when you open it up, the crease that's famously there in a Samsung phone is not nearly as visible.

1:08:34It's there if you look for it, but you really have to kind of look for it. And it's much more flush. And then the Pixel Fold has a very large kind of landscape orientation display on the inside when you open it up. On the outside is a 5.8-inch screen, which is large enough to be a normal phone. You can do normal phones, things like that. It's not a weird aspect ratio. Apps look normal on it. They behave like you expect. And then when you open it up, you've got almost like a small tablet-sized screen in there in a landscape orientation. and you can do two side-by-side apps and things like that.

1:09:06And it looks really great. I think in terms of hardware, they really got Samsung beat in a lot of ways. It's thinner when it's closed. It's no gap, lower crease, nicer aspect ratio on both the inside and the outside of the screen. So that's pretty exciting. It's still expensive. It's$1 ,800, which is a lot of money to put on a first-generation Google product. But that's kind of what the going rate for high-end folding phones is. And yeah, it's pretty compelling. If you've been like kind of watching folding phones and not really jumped in for a lot of valid reasons, I think it is a pretty compelling option because of the nicer hardware.

1:09:44The other half of it, of course, is a software story. It's running Android 13. It will get Android 14. Google has been working to add things to foldables. And some of the features it has are, like I said, you could split screen the app, the screen with two apps on side by side. you can start playing or using an app on the outside and open it up and it will automatically launch that app on the inside when you open it up and it will fit the larger screen and things like that but if you compare it if you've been using a samsung fold if and you compare them it's actually a lot simpler and a lot fewer features than samsung offers uh samsung kind of lets you do like the full samsung experience you can put like three or four apps on the screen and then have a floating one on top of it and then pull up the sidebar and then like like you could do all these things.

1:10:26You can plug your Samsung phone into an external display and launch a desktop environment, all this kind of stuff. The Pixel Fold does not do nearly that many things. And maybe that is a little bit easier to approach and maybe that's easier to get into. But I almost kind of feel like we might get to the point where it's like we want the Pixel hardware, but some of the or a lot of the features that are available on the Samsung phone to make most of the use of that hardware. Or maybe not. Maybe people just want it at a time. What this sounds like is the Surface Duo, which you and I, Dan, are America's great defenders of.

1:10:57It's very much like a Surface Duo. If the Surface Duo didn't have two screens, but just one big screen, that's what it feels like in terms of like looks and design and the way the hinge works and things like that. It reminded me a lot of the Surface Duo, except instead of two screens, it's one big screen. And then when you put two apps side by side, it's like having that Duo experience. I am pretty intrigued, actually, by your take, Dan, that this is actually like secretly the best small phone um yeah the cover display is small and it's like the small phone size but then you open it up you have you can do things that are annoying to do on a small phone like that like light bulb you know it's like that's what i want a tiny phone to be able to do yeah i mean i think that's a that's a great hot take reality is it's heavy so it's like twice as heavy as a small phone might be because it is a whole folding phone.

1:11:51And it's also going to be thicker because it is two halves that you're putting together. But in terms of using the outside screen with one hand was awesome. When I tried it out, tested it out, it feels right. It's sized right. The Samsung phones have had these weird aspect ratios on the outside screen, which made it hard to type on. It made apps look strange and stretched, and they didn't lay out really all that well. Even though Samsung has been slightly changing it every year, it's still not a normal aspect ratio. This feels like a normal phone on the outside and like a small tablet on the inside.

1:12:21And that's exactly what I want. That's super exciting. Yeah. And I think you're right that that to me is the thing that is the most wrong with the Galaxy Fold is that you can't use it in one hand ever in any way, shape or form. It's too big. It's too tall. It's a TV remote. Like it just doesn't work. And yeah, it seems like at a very basic, like what shape should this thing be? Google got it. If not right, then at least pretty close. Yeah, it's very similar to like we've seen in China. Oppo has released some folding phones and some other manufacturers, and they've kind of released very similar looking devices.

1:12:54And we've always like not had access to them in the US. So it's exciting that like we have an access to this, but it has seemed like for a while that this is like the right shape and size for foldables versus what Samsung's doing. Totally. So Allison, we talked on the show not that long ago about whether this was going to be the year of folding phones. And one of the things we brought up was the Pixel Fold. It was like, this is going to be maybe potentially real competition here. You're going to have to review this thing. What's like top of the list of things that could go totally wrong here and may dampen all of David's enthusiasm for the Pixel Fold?

1:13:27Yeah, I guess just a lot of it depends on the intangible stuff. It's like, how does it feel when you use it? How much do you actually want to use it? because I think that's where it could come out ahead of Samsung. Like Samsung has this just huge list of things you can do with the phone and it's like it will do them. Sometimes it takes a little like finesse and sometimes kind of ugly, but that's what makes that phone, you know, really impressive. I think this phone, I'm kind of looking for like, like make this feel a little more like comfortable to me. And I just want Samsung to get off their butts now because there's competition.

1:14:11Yes, that part's going to be very good. I will say Google says that it's optimized over 50 of its apps for Android for the fold experience. 42 of them are messaging apps, just 42 messaging apps and eight apps you actually want to use. So when you are running Gmail or Keep or one of the many messaging apps, it will have like a dual pane interface on the inside, which is nice to see and stuff like that that doesn't mean third-party apps will work across the screen all that well uh so that's like a thing that we have to see uh the other question of course with all foldables is like how durable is this thing going to be over time google says the hinge is rated for 200 000 folds but what if i get a rock in between it so you know we'll have to kind of see how that is and that's hard really to suss out in a in a review period that's like a long-term type of take.

1:14:58Yeah, for sure. There's definitely going to be a like six months in how successfully have I destroyed this thing? Although if it goes like the first fold did, it's not going to take nearly that long for six hours. What do we make of the price here? Like$1 ,800 strikes me as we are not necessarily attempting to sell this in big gigantic numbers, which I think has been true of the fold and stuff too. Are we still in the kind of foldable phones are a neat science project phase? Yeah, I think for a lot of people, they are. They've also been weird, right? So like, you know, they're expensive. I guess what we could say is that there's been a lot of barriers to adoption of a folding phone so far.

1:15:39There's been the price. There's been the question of durability. There's been like the weird sizes and aspect ratios and things like that. There's been some really like vague messaging on how this benefits you. Sometimes it's obvious like, oh, it's a bigger screen, but then how are you going to use that in your day-to-day use? And I think that's where like the duo falls apart. It's like, oh, you got two big screens, but you have to open it every single time you want to use it to make a phone call. This kind of addresses a lot of that. You can use it like a normal phone on the outside. It looks and feels normal there.

1:16:05It does give you a bigger screen on the inside. I think it is beneficial to Google that Samsung is four generations into this. They could look at what Samsung did for a long time and learn from that and not hopefully makes many of the similar mistakes. But the price barrier is still there. And I don't know how aggressive Google is going to be with promotions to get this into the hands of people. The one way that Samsung has been selling a lot of folds is by throwing lots of money on trade-in deals. And so like an$1 ,800 fold suddenly becomes$900 when you are able to trade in a phone towards it.

1:16:40And they do lots of bundles and things like that. And they cut the price and do all the whole Samsung promotions. And I think that's how a lot of people have gotten into it. Either they've gotten a carrier deal or a really great trade-in deal. We'll have to see if Google does the same thing. I know they've got some pre-order promotions. They'll throw in a Pixel Watch if you pre-order it, which is a nice perk. Google will throw in a Pixel Watch if you do two Google searches. If you want a Pixel Watch, it could not be easier to just acquire a Pixel Watch right now. Yeah. Well, you'll get one with a Pixel Fold if you pre-order it too.

1:17:09There you go. They do have a trading program as well. But how committed to that is Google, we'll see. And I think a lot of people who are familiar with the Pixel line and familiar with Google products know that the first generation is always probably the shakiest and that you might just want to wait a generation or two for them to work out the kinks. But it does feel good or nice that they are in this in a serious way and providing competition. And hopefully that kind of spurs on, like Allison said, Samsung to get its butt in gear. Yeah. All right. I buy that. Okay. Quick recap. And then we're going to get out of here.

1:17:40The Pixel 7a,$500. Shipping now? Yeah. So you can order it starting May 10th, and it's shipping from there. Okay. And then the tablet, also$500. Shipping not today. You could pre-order it now, and then it'll be shipping later, I believe, in June-ish is the information that we have so far. And what about the Pixel Fold? $1 ,800 shipping sometime in the future. Sometime this summer. I believe in June-ish is kind of like the vague area that we've been told, but you can pre-order it now. Okay. I was going to say these things are all still technically vaporware, but you guys have seen them. They exist.

1:18:18I've touched it. I've used it. Fair enough. All right. Well, once we do these reviews, I want to come back and do a big fold versus fold shootout because I think the like, what do you actually get out of your life with a foldable phone is a really interesting question, and it's going to be fun to dig through that. So start thinking about that. Until then, Thank you both. Appreciate it as always. Yeah, thank you. All right, that's it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to everyone who talked to us for joining the show. And thank you, as always, for listening. There is lots more from this conversation and a ton more from Google I.O.

1:18:50At TheVerge.com, we'll put some links in the show notes. But just head to The Verge, read everything. There's a lot going on, including a lot of stuff we didn't cover here. But like I said, this is a big year for Google. And this is a story we're going to follow a lot in the coming months. In the meantime, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or foldable friendly apps you want to tell me about, you can always email us at vergecastattheverge.com. Or keep calling the hotline. It's 866-VERGE-11. We're going to start using the hotline more often. Maybe in every episode, every other episode. I don't know.

1:19:19We're going to use it a lot more. So please keep sending in your questions. We love getting them. They spark some of the best stuff on this show. So thank you as always, and please keep calling. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neil, I, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about all of the specific news coming out of I.O. and all of the things we were wrong about on this episode. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

1:19:54Support for this show comes from S.C. Johnson. We've all been there. Choosing not to wear your new white shoes because there's a 10 % chance of rain? Bending awkwardly over the tiny coffee table to enjoy a sip of your latte? Not ordering the red sauce. Those feelings of dread are what we call Stainziety. But now, you can break free from your Stainziety with Shout's Triple Acting Spray that has stain-fighting ingredients to remove a huge variety of stains, so you can live in the moment and clean up later. Just breathe and shout with Shout Triple Acting Spray. Learn more at ShoutItOut.com.

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From the publisher

Today on the flagship podcast of unfolded aspect ratios:
01:03 -The Verge's David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Alex Cranz discuss the present and future state of Google — it’s this big, complicated, massively successful company that suddenly feels like it’s under threat in a huge number of ways. The crew lay out the stakes and try to figure out where Google is headed. Hot takes included.
38:55 - David, Allison Johnson, and Dan Seifert talk about the hardware revealed at Google I/O: the Pixel 7A, the Pixel Tablet, and the Pixel Fold.
Further reading:

Google I/O 2023: news, rumors, and announcements

What happens when Google Search doesn't have the answers?

The Pixel Fold is Google’s $1,800 entry into folding phones

Google’s new Pixel Tablet is a $500 slate for the home

Google Pixel 7A review: a better deal

Email us at vergecast@theverge.com or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
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