How AI will change phones — and the whole internet

24:55Correct. And you were to reduce down even large language models, which also kind of doesn't mean anything. Just sounds fancier. Yeah. This sounds really fancy and smart, but don't ask me what. So if you were to reduce AI and LLMs down to their essence and explain it to a five-year-old. The thing you would say is, for the first time, computers can read. And if computers can read, then they can understand, truly understand what you're asking them. And so I think really the underlying principle of what ARK is doing with this new category of software on mobile and desktop is not actually even the output.

25:35That's not what's new. Yeah, sure, it will be new and that it'll be dynamic and it'll look and feel a little different. It's the idea that you can go to Arc on mobile or desktop and tell Arc what you're looking for and what you're trying to do. And thanks to these large language models, we can understand that for the first time and route you to the right place and route you to different things in different ways that wouldn't have been possible before. That's really what's the most different to me. And I think people fail to talk about that because they tend to focus on, oh, my God, it just wrote me a haiku about computers, even though why would I need a haiku about?

26:11I mean, it is wild, but that is not that's not really what's fundamentally new. It's the fact that our computers can read and think with us for the first time. OpenAI has this product or this part of their API called function calling and function calling is remarkable. What function calling is able to do is it's able to allow us to take an input from a person like you saying, what are best iPhone chargers? And then not only understand what you're asking, but then based on its understanding, route it to specific places and to specific things that actually have nothing to do with AI. So one of the reasons that people, including me, many months ago were a little bit bearish in all this AI hype was I was just seeing these blobs of text outputted and assumed that was AI.

26:57No, no, no. That was just one output. But thanks to function calling, you can say, OK, if David is asking for videos of Steve Jobs unveiling the iPod, iPhone, Macintosh, great. He's looking for these three videos. So go to YouTube and grab those videos. There's no hallucinating there. I mean, again, it's going to get it wrong. It's technology. It's as imperfect as we are. But that's actually wildly valuable and pretty unreal. Why isn't everyone talking about that? And it's because we get caught up in these memes and these words that just mean everything and nothing to us. So function calling, it's where it's at.

27:31And there'll be more of those in the future. That's super interesting. Well, and that's also just like straightforwardly the thing that comes after search engines, right? Like you're in a certain way, all that's doing is taking what would be a Google results page with a bunch of ads at the top and just skipping all of that. It's just saying instead of me having to go say, where's this video and then click on the video and then watch the video and then save it to my sidebar. It's just putting those things in my sidebar, which in a funny way to me is like actually way more understandable than a lot of the AI stuff.

28:04because one of the reactions to all of these things is basically like, actually, Google's very good and it's very good at finding information. And maybe we don't need to just completely reinvent this wheel with chatbots. And to a large extent, I'm actually really receptive to that argument. I think Google is a lot less good than it used to be. But it's still if you want to find a piece of information on the Internet, Google's pretty damn good. But then the next step after Google alerting you to the existence of that information is awful. And it's because web browsers suck. And this is like why I've always thought ARC is interesting.

28:36So you've just sort of backed your way towards the search engine. And now you're just like disintermediating it entirely. I agree. I think Google doesn't get enough credit for how it's innovated and pushed search forward and how actually wondrous search is. And I would push back on the idea that Google search gets us what we're looking for. Because if aliens arrive tomorrow and they're like, look, I just read this great book, God Save Texas by Lawrence Wright on the spaceship right over. And I'm looking for a new book. And you went to Google and you typed in books similar to God Save Texas by Lawrence Wright.

29:08And then, wow, magically, so fast, Google brought you what you wanted. And it's like, oh, wow, are those books? Well, no, not quite. Those are called links. And those links, yeah, yeah, click on the link. The book's going to be in there. Oh, no, so these aren't books either. These are listicles and in the listicles are books. And then if you click on this other thing, those are books. so the truth is that there are these abstractions that we forget about but google doesn't really bring on one hand to make it simple google brings you what you're asking for in the sense that it brings back a bunch of links and on the other hand it doesn't bring you what you're asking for and that it makes you stop at google first and oftentimes the thing you're looking for are buried in a bunch of links and a bunch of links behind that and now we have the technology to say let's just go straight to bringing you what you want and bring it right to you that's a that's a pretty big idea.

29:58And that's exactly how a human being wants it to work. I agree and disagree with that. And I like, I'm glad you put it that way, because I think one of the fun things we're going through right now because of AI is trying to figure out which new ideas are better enough to be worth unlearning decades worth of habits and which aren't right. Like I think about, I don't know, Siri and Google Assistant and Alexa, right? And the idea that voice is a much more natural interface for asking information than typing on a keyboard. Unequivocally true. The tech wasn't very good and also people are not used to it.

30:32And so we all kind of were just like, well, it's pretty easy to type on my phone. I'll just do that instead. I just was interviewing somebody for a future episode of the show about keyboard layouts. And like, you know, what's better than QWERTY keyboard layouts is everything else, but good luck trying to convince people to not use QWERTY keyboards, right? So I think That question of, can you build something that is so much better that it will actually make people make real behavioral change versus like, no, it's not the most human natural thing in the world that we all sort of learned how to type in what Google calls keyword ease.

31:06But I'm pretty good at it now. I can get what I want out of Google pretty successfully. And so, screw the aliens. What's it going to take for me to switch, I think is very much the open question. And this like path of AI over the next two years, I think, is really where we're going to start to see where it does and doesn't clear the bar. And I think it's going to be fascinating. I agree with you, unless you're a web browser. OK. And this is exactly why we built a web browser. This is exactly why operating systems have so much leverage in how we use technology. in that if I were to make an AI chatbot app called Chatty and it got really popular and wanted to radically change the way we get information, you got to remember to go to that tab.

31:45And as you said, you have this great muscle memory. You know, it may be Chatty is better than Google, but you have to remember to instead of hitting new tab or command T, go to that Chatty tab. Yep. That's really hard to your point. It really is, yeah. It's really hard. If in fact you are the web browser and you are the text box that people type into to go to Google, you don't need to change your behavior. Your behavior actually doesn't happen in Google. Google's just a tab too. Everyone forgets that. It's actually the browser that is your interface to the web. That is the browser where your muscle memory is.

32:18And then you might say, yeah, well, if you send me to Chatty instead of Google, I'm still going to be mad because I wanted Google because Chatty's not as good at all the searches. Well, great. Thanks to function calling and thanks to AI, we can know if you're asking us something that really Google is the best at, or should we send you to Chatty, or should we not send you anywhere? Should we just bring it to you? So one of the other features that we're launching on Arc for Mac is, I hate to admit it, I have an alert set up, and not even an alert. At some regular interval, I go to Google and I type news about the browser company, or news about Arc browser, and I do that a lot.

32:56We have a new feature called live folders where whenever there's a new press story, hopefully written by David Pierce and hopefully glowing about Arc, it'll just pop up in my sidebar. I don't even need to go to search. So again, because we're the web browser, you don't have to change ingrained behavior. We're just going to pop it up right in your sidebar. So, yes, I think people underestimate how ingrained behaviors are and how hard it is to get people to change anything because at the end of the day, they don't really care about technology. And that is exactly why we built a web browser. where everyone thought we, why would you work on a desktop web browser?

33:29It could not be more boring. Well, it's actually, in fact, because it's so boring that we want to work on it because you happen to use it for eight hours a day. And so if you use it for eight hours a day and you're all over this rectangle, if we place things in this rectangle, or if we change where you go in the rectangle, when you type in something, that's actually a great place to be to change entrenched behavior without you having to change anything yourself, just abstracting that complexity. All we're proposing with Arc and this idea of a browser that browses for you is that we can then do to Google what Google did to the web.

34:02Google and all these other applications we use, which is, wow, there are now so many web apps open and tabs and Google Docs and all of these things. It's too much to reason about. I have to do 10 search queries just to find what I'm looking for. It's time for a layer that sits above that, which says, you tell us what you're trying to do, and we'll go use the search engines and web apps and read the articles for you. So that's the other thing that feels so exciting is it feels like a natural kind of march of progress toward making it your day easier and easier until one day you can really just tell Arc or whatever software comes next what you're trying to do.

34:38And it will go figure out what on the Internet you want to use. If you're right, two companies come to mind that are sort of perfectly set up to do the vertically integrated thing you're describing, which are Google and Microsoft. Like they're sitting on the whole tech stack more so than you are to do all of the things that you just described. Google has Google. Google has Chrome. Google has Gemini and all of it. Like all it has to do is like put three project managers in a room together and they could start to build something similar to what you're describing. Microsoft's the same with Bing and all the open AI stuff.

35:13And what's to prevent them from doing this too? I think there's real energy in the browser space because of this for the first time. And right now, so much of it is just like we stick a chatbot in your sidebar or some of the little organizational stuff. Like Google just launched a bunch of stuff in Chrome that is basically like less interesting feature rips of what ArcMax was doing a few months ago. But with real energy and resources, they could outmuscle you in pretty much every direction here if they chose to, right? You are absolutely right that I view our true competition as Microsoft, Google and Apple.

35:49Sure. I actually think Apple is the one that is in the best position to do this. And they're all trillion dollar companies with everything. Of course, that is terrifying. And of course, that is going to be a big challenge. You know, there's this famous story about Google Chrome where when you open a new tab, you see the new tab page. It shows you a tile of your most frequently visited sites. And the way that they used to show those tiles were with screenshots, you know, a picture of the web page. And then this PM had this idea. You know, it's actually much easier and faster to just show the logo of the website because people can more quickly identify, oh, that tile is Twitter than it is to identify the screenshot.

36:33And that PM was right. It made it so much easier for people to quickly find what they were looking for by clicking on one of those tiles. There was a major freak out at Google because overnight ad revenue, search ad revenue dropped by 5%, which is a huge deal at Google scale. 5%, red alert. What happened? What did we change? And it turned out that this PM, making it easier for people to get what they needed faster in the web browser, tanked Google's global ad revenue. because when you click on a tile, you're not doing a Google search. So on paper, do Google and Microsoft have everything it takes?

37:11Yes. Is there a lot of structural challenges to big public companies with shareholder pressures not to hurt the cash cow that is search ads? Yes. Sure. Can I remember the last time that Google and Microsoft invented something wildly new that revolutionized a category where nothing had come before it? No. Is this time different? Potentially. We're going to pretend like we're competing with them in a really big way, but I think that we're just going to keep doing our thing and hope that they keep loving search ads. Fair enough. So the reason I would think in that way of thinking to be most curious about what Apple is up to is that it seems to have a lot of those same capabilities and less to lose as a search business, essentially.

37:57Like Safari, I mean, the whole Google antitrust thing makes this very interesting with the Safari ads deal. That could get very complicated over time. But Apple seems to have a big, very successful, very popular browser that makes it a lot less is a lot less important to its future as a company than, say, Chrome is to Google. I actually think you're putting a little too much emphasis on search. I think it's one or two levels higher than that. What we're really talking about is this idea, which, by the way, is not original to us. But the idea is you tell ARK or you tell your interface to your computer or the internet what you're trying to do.

38:32And then in this new world, it will go use whatever tools and any information it needs to do it for you and bring it back to you. There's almost universal agreement. That's how it's going to work. And in order for that to work, you need three things. First, you need a really rich data set about each individual. Everything that's going on in their personal life, professional life, what they type in text boxes, what they read on web pages, the documents that matter to their work. So you need a unique data set about each individual. The second thing you need is you need the ability to manipulate all of the tools and applications that people rely on to do what they do on their computers and on the Internet.

39:09Said differently, you need them to be logged into the apps. Sure. The third thing that you need is you need an interface, to your point about behavior change, that people use all the time, all day, every day. They don't need to change anything they do. They just keep doing their thing, and you can then go put the future in those places. You need those three things. There are only two types of software that have those three things. The first are operating systems. The second are web browsers. I promise you there is no way that the future powered by AI will exist in anything other than an operating system or a web browser.

39:47So the only thing that keeps me up at night are web browser companies and operating system companies, because I think those are the only two type of companies that have a shot at reimagining our interface to the Internet. So last thing, and this is a question I've been meaning to ask you for several weeks now. Did you see the rabbit launch at CES, this little AI gadget thing? I saw that thing and I, after talking about a lot of the stuff that you and I have been talking about for a while and a lot of stuff you've been talking about now, I looked at that and I was like, okay, if Josh and the browser company had become a hardware company, this is roughly what they would have gone after.

40:20The same idea of like, okay, if the goal is to have these tools accomplish something on your behalf, instead of building me like a nice web browser that I'm in all day, you would have built me like a fun teenage engineering gadget that I can press a button and talk to all day. Does that feel right to you? What did you make of what Rabbit's up to you? First of all, I love anyone that dares to dream and anyone that just goes for it. And I love that energy. They are nothing if not going for it, that team. I love anyone that stands up on a metaphorical stage and says, I'm excited. I think the future should work like this.

40:54And I'm going to dedicate my life to doing something really bold and different than what we're used to. So I have a lot of respect for that. I also totally agree that the future is going to work like you telling your computer, whether it's ARC or Rabbit, what you want to do, and it should go do it for you and abstract that complexity. I think the one place where I personally see a slightly different future is I don't want more gadgets in my life. I don't want more devices. I think the secular trend to the cloud and the secular trend toward our stuff, our digital stuff being out on a server somewhere, whether it's an application or our data, is that we can actually kind of free ourselves from the machines.

41:34We can free ourself from the devices because they're everywhere. I was on a United flight last night. I was like, I'm not sure if this for the first time, this seat in front of me could probably run the vision pro. It's like, it's the computers are going everywhere. And so what I'm really excited about is a world in which the computer and air quotes that you talk to the place that has all of your data and stuff is not another new box. I got to put somewhere on my body, whether that's on my face or in my pocket or another button I got to remember to press instead of that other button. But oh, wait, that's not the action button.

42:07That's the volume and screenshot. What I'm really excited about is the idea that your computing life just goes with you everywhere to every device. But I do think the rabbit is fascinating from a vision perspective and a boldness perspective. And I probably have a lot more in common with whoever started that company than I do with someone else that I shouldn't name. Fair enough. So what you just made me realize is that I've been talking about Arc in terms of Chrome for a really long time. And I should have been talking about it in terms of Chrome OS for a really long time. Internet computer, operating system for the web.

42:42But what you're describing, and one of the things you announced last week was this thing, was it Arc Anywhere, the new syncing service? That becomes very important, right? Because what you're essentially building me is not a piece of software that lives on my computer. You're building me a piece of software that lives everywhere that I can just sort of tap into in whatever way I need to whenever I need to. And all of a sudden, like Arc Anywhere becomes the thing as much as whatever it is on my device becomes the thing. Arc Anywhere is the product. Arc Anywhere is the computer. This all just clicked in my brain as you were talking.

43:15This is why we have to talk more. It isn't today. I'm not. I don't want to overpromise. It is a cross-platform syncing mechanism for getting your tabs wherever you need them. But right behind you on this recording, you have a TV. It looks like a TV sitting up on a little nightstand. It's a piece of crap. Never buy a Roku TV, people. Well, one day that piece of crap computer in five years will actually be a very powerful computer, just like the phone in our pocket is a much more powerful computer than it was a decade ago. And so the idea of ARC and ARC Anywhere is that one day when you're sitting on that couch behind you, looking at that screen you're looking at, which is now as powerful as the iPhone in your pocket.

43:52You should just be able to toss it a glance and authenticate that it's you. And then you're an air quotes computer. All of your apps and data and conversations and people should appear on that screen. That is the whole idea of ARC. That is the idea of this next wave is that your computer is just an old noun for saying the stuff that matters in your digital life that is yours. And that should go with you anywhere on any screen on any device. And the way that you should interface with it in the future is not opening seven applications and 19 search query tabs and 27 listicles. You should just tell the device in your life through Arc, here's what I'm trying to do, and it should bring it to you.

44:32It should be a browser that browses for you or a better tagline, because I don't love that tagline, but it feels weird to invent your own noun. All right, we gotta take a break, and then we're gonna talk Samsung and we're gonna talk Galaxies. We'll be right back.

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48:36All right, we're back. It's been a couple of weeks now since Samsung launched its new devices, the Galaxy S24, S24 Plus, and S24 Ultra, which means The Verge's Allison Johnson has had time to put all three of those phones through their paces, and she's published their reviews. They're on TheVerge.com, put them in the show notes, and, like I said, post on the site with all the links you need. It's wild to think that it is only the first week of February, and we might have already seen the best Android phone of 2024, but I think that might be the case. Samsung, as always, has done some of its usual upgrades here with better screens and some design tweaks and a little bit of new camera hardware.

49:14But most of what's new here is AI. There is so, so, so much AI in these phones. It's nuts. But does it add up to anything? Or is it all just another gimmick in Samsung's long, long line of phone gimmicks? Like I said, Allison has tried it all, and she's here to answer that for us. Hi, Allison. Hello. Welcome out of Samsung chaos. This is very exciting for you. Thank you. It's a recent development, so I'm happy to be here. This is a tough time because you basically had to take three different phones that are the same phone but different phones and try to figure out how to make them make sense and also write something that is interesting to read about all of them, which is a difficult challenge.

49:55Yeah, and the same challenge as most phones lately where the updates are just pretty incremental. aside from Galaxy AI, which is a whole thing that, you know, we'll get into. But it's just an interesting dynamic looking at it this year. Like the Ultra has always been the like, we're just going to throw everything in a phone. And for the past couple of years, that has been like, this is great. Like you guys are killing it. And then the regular ones, the S and the S Plus just sort of felt like they're good. They're a good alternative if you're like, okay, with Samsung's take on things and you want a really good Android phone.

50:35And that's sort of the case this year, but it's like slightly different. Okay, we're about to spoil where I was going with all this, but I kind of think it's the opposite this year. Oh, really? So the Ultra is still very much the kitchen sink phone. Like it is the Samsung-iest of Samsung phones. And I mean that both as a compliment and an insult, as always with Samsung. But to me, I got to the end of all your reviews and I was like, okay, for the first time in a few years, I actually think the base Galaxy S24 is the best Galaxy phone for most people right now, which I don't feel like has been true for, I don't know, at least the last few years.

51:12I feel like I would have always tried to talk people up. And now I'm kind of like, you get almost all the stuff in a slightly better size for$799 instead of$1 ,299 with the base model. Like big win for the base model this year. It is. It's a big one for people who like smaller, big phones because they're all big. They are all big. Yeah. No, that sums up how I feel about them. And I guess I think of like the Ultra just always kind of feels like it's in its own little atmosphere. It's like, what phone do you compare it to that has an S Pen and 12 cameras? You know, it's kind of always felt to me like you sort of know if that's the thing you want and you want all that extra.

51:58Yeah, what feels different this year is that nothing on the Ultra just feels like, oh, yeah, I totally see why this is worth the extra money because it is more money this year. It's$12.99, which is$100 more than last year. And yeah, all of the exciting new features like air quotes, that's Samsung's words, the AI are on all three phones, like with no differences in how they perform or any of that. And this little phone, the regular S24, just feels like a good size. And I'm happy it's here. Yeah. So, okay, let's talk through this a little bit. Because I think the first thing you pointed out to me right before we started recording is the actual physical object itself.

52:43Which is, again, a thing I think that is sort of carried through all three versions of the phone. Correct me if I'm wrong. But they made this thing what seems to be a little, it's a little nicer. It's nicer to hold in the hand. And Samsung has a long history of making just the slipperiest phones on the face of the earth. And it seems like they solved some of that this time. Yeah. Well, Google took that crown away. Like the Pixel is the most slippery object. It should be studied by scientists. I don't understand it. Yeah. No, like Samsung, the Ultra still has, it has the flat screen this year, which like, yay, you have an S Pen, you want a flat screen.

53:21You're like running the pen over the edge. That stinks. still has a little bit of that like note design the s24 the s24 plus they i'm just gonna say it like they are just straight up iphones and that's fine like they have the the flat edges the s23 was still kind of a curved edge still had kind of a i don't want to call it a samsung look it had a different look to it it's not like a drastically different change but i find it more comfortable to hold when I go to pick it up off of the table. It doesn't like fly out of my hands. They look great. They feel great. And I think like, why reinvent the shape of a phone?

54:04Just go with what works. I agree. I feel like the two things that have always driven me crazy about some of these designs are either I'm holding it in my hand and it kind of digs into your palm in a way that feels bad or, and this is really my true slipperiness test. I'm holding the phone in my hand and I go to put it in my pocket. And there have been phones that in the motion of like moving it down to put it in my pocket, I have just thrown it onto the ground. Like I don't even drop it. Like I slingshot it out of my hand onto the ground. Yeah. With prejudice. Yeah. And yeah. And the Pixel is maybe the worst at that in history.

54:39But that is like the iPhone is they found the right mix of like the flat edges and the sort of rounded corners. And it just like it feels like an object in a nice way. And I'm glad that Samsung has landed in that same place. Yeah. My galaxy brain take is that phones over the next year are just going to converge on that design. Like the Pixel 9 leaks have the flat edges. Like this is fine. Let's just do it. Let's embrace it. We're going to go there. I think that's for the best, honestly. It's like there was that phase with laptops where everybody was like, what if they did weird stuff and they flipped around and moved to the left and we just moved the trackpad over here.

55:17And everybody's like, oh, no, what if it just looked like a laptop and we worried about other things? And that is that is the correct answer. Yeah. Nobody's like, oh, I wish my refrigerator looked cooler and different than other. It was like, you just want to know where stuff is. 100%. So my first question with all Samsung phones is how Samsung-y are these Samsung phones? And I will say to Samsung's credit, it used to be horrific. I used to tell people do not buy a Samsung phone because it will torture you with pop-ups and duplicate apps and things you will hate. And I no longer feel quite that strongly, but I still think One UI is a mess in certain ways.

55:55So how Samsung-y are these phones this year? They're like tolerably Samsung-y. There is the like list of stuff I go through when I'm setting up a Samsung phone and it is much longer than any other phone I use. You have to sort the app drawer so apps are alphabetical instead of just like nonsense order. Sounds right. There's 10 million things in the quick menu settings. All that is still a reality. It's just like, and this is kind of where I keep landing with like Pixel versus Samsung, is that you just kind of have to work for it a little harder with the Samsung. You put in the work ahead of time, you disable the pop-up notification, like sell me a new Galaxy S-series phone.

56:39Like, I don't need that. I'm using the new Galaxy S series phone. That was one of your best lines in the review was opening up a Galaxy S24, setting it up and getting a pop up saying, have you heard about the new Galaxy S24? Every year. It's like, guys, we're doing something wrong here. Every year I treasure that pop up. I'm like, oh, there it is. Yeah, you can disable it. It's just if you don't, it comes for you. Yeah, you can get to a place where you can just live totally peacefully with it and it has very good things going for it another iphone feature that they wisely stole is the always-on display that the wallpaper just kind of dims so you see that all the time but you get those widgets too so you have like your little calendar widget or the battery indicator or is it gonna rain in the next hour it's like i love that i should give me all the information.

57:33I think this is the thing about these phones that you are most wrong about. But that's okay. This is just personal preference. I think the iPhones always on display is bad and just makes me think my phone is on. And that's stupid. You're not alone. I hear that a lot. I'm going to die on that hill. It's listen, you know, to each their own. You're wrong. And so is Samsung. And that's fine. And so is Apple. I think the Pixel got it right, where it's just like, I want to know the time and like the little thing where the song is playing into that. Love that. Don't need any more than that. And just the thing where it kind of seems like I turned the brightness all the way down on my phone is not an always on display.

58:09And naturally, there's a setting in the Samsung phone. You can turn that right off with just the wallpaper part. So you can have a normal always on display. But I think that is kind of the basic difference between like Samsung's philosophy and Google's is like on the Pixel, you have at a glance. and you don't need to go in and set up a bunch of widgets. It's just going to tell you something on your home screen or on the lock screen, like, hey, you got a calendar appointment coming up or doesn't always nail it. Sometimes I'm like, oh, that would have been a useful thing to know. But it's just kind of going to do those things for you.

58:44And Samsung's like, here are 10 ,000 settings you can mess with and you can get to a place where you get all that. I wish Samsung would dial in the balance of the defaults there a little more, but I've come to really appreciate over time, especially as Google has kind of worked down towards giving you less to do. Like part of the reason people like Android is because it is so much more customizable. And Samsung, to its credit, is like, listen, everything there is to do, we are going to give you a way to do. And I actually think to some extent that's the right approach. I wish it made better choices about how it initially sets up the phone.

59:21and I wish there were some things that were less duplicative. Like I think you mentioned that there are basically like three different augmented reality search products on this phone. Like that's bad. That's just bad user experience. But I do appreciate the thing that Samsung is like, look, do you want there to be 650 things in the settings that you can touch? We have that for you. Seriously, I think it's a good thing. People like that about Android. I think it's the right thing. They deliver it. Yeah, there should just be a version of Samsung phones that is like, when you set it up, it's like, do you want to do this the easy way or the hard way?

59:49Yeah. And you can pick either one. Like the easy button. Right. So the thing on the Ultra that really jumped out to me, I have basically two Ultra specific questions. The first is the screen. And it seems like of the specs in the whole series, the biggest upgrade from the 24 and the 24 Plus to the 24 Ultra might be this new display. Was that your takeaway? If I was putting my money down on these phones, that's what I would pay for it for the Ultra. It has a new Gorilla Glass that is supposedly much more scratch resistant. I put my phone next to my keys. It's bad. I always get those little like hairline scratches without fail.

1:00:31I don't have a single one on the Ultra and it's only been it's a small sample size, but so far so good. But you're pretty brutal on phones. Like your your review period is not easy. Yeah, I don't have a case. My kid will touch it. He's got like, you know, peanut butter on his fingers. The works. So yeah, there's that, which is promising. And the anti-glare coating, which is just, it's a little bit like magic. Like it's not like some brand new technology. It's just literally an anti-glare coating on the phone screen. But you hold it up against another phone outside and the Ultra gets really bright.

1:01:10So you have that working for you and it just cuts the glare way down. and you sort of prepare yourself to like squint at the phone when you look at it outside. You're like, oh, I can see this just fine. Like it's almost as good as just in my house. Yeah, that's huge. And I think glare is one of those things we've all gotten used to on our phones. Like I was thinking about this reading your reviews that I've gotten used to the thing now where you kind of learn how to block the sun with your body as you're using your phone. And you sort of keep it down here and you like hunch over it to not have glare.

1:01:43but once you don't notice it and like once it's gone that's a huge change and it's like for especially things like taking pictures and if you have to hold it at an angle and you're sort of looking down off axis at your phone like anti-glare is a bigger deal than it seems in a lot of ways i think which is pretty cool yeah i liked it better than most of the ai features we're gonna get to those in in one second yeah but the other thing that i'm curious about with the ultra specifically is this zoom trade-off that Samsung made. They went from 10x zoom on the lens, and then it was digital zoom in between.

1:02:21So if you wanted it like 5x, it was digital zoom to the opposite, where now it's a 5x lens, but you can digital zoom to 10x. I am deeply suspicious of this change because digital zoom is a lie that we tell ourselves it's just cropping. What did you find? Was this the right trade? Was this the wrong trade? Well, the slightly less evil version of digital zoom is this like actual crop into the middle of the sensor that they're doing. And that's what's happening now at 10x. I was a big fan of the 10x lens. I thought it was great. It was so much fun. So I was really kind of bummed to see it go. But the more I kind of sat with it, the more I get it.

1:02:59Like 5x is more, there's just more utility kind of in every day. you can kind of take a portrait of someone if they're across the room. You're not taking a portrait with a 10X lens. That's true. 10X is kind of a party trick in a way that 5X is like a thing you might do anyway. That's interesting. And it's a higher resolution sensor. It's actually a little bigger than the old telephoto. All these things going for it. Samsung is like, so don't worry, The quality at 10x is like actually just fine. And that's like kind of true. If you don't like I pixel peep, it's kind of a pointless exercise, but I go there.

1:03:41And I think the detail captures about the same, but you just see the where the little tiny lens falls apart. You're like, ah, that's there's a little chromatic aberration. It's like that's in the 1 % of like what anybody should care about. It is totally fine for just about anything else. And I suppose I can get behind the idea that you're trading really good 10x zoom and mediocre 5x zoom for really good 5x zoom and mediocre 10x zoom. In real life, that is probably a decent trade, I suppose. It makes sense. Okay. They said, they were like, oh, even at 10x it'll look better because it has more megapixels.

1:04:17And I was like, I bet that's a lie. And I'm happy to know that it wasn't. It just makes me feel better. Yeah. So, okay, let's talk about the AI stuff because I think that's kind of the point of these phones, right? And I think my sense of your review was basically there's a ton of AI stuff here. You tested a lot of it. But I'm curious, like for you, not as a phone reviewer, but just as like a person who has a phone, what of these AI features feels like it would actually be a thing you would use in everyday life? And leave the camera out. We'll come back to the camera in a sec. But of the like, there's the translation on a phone call.

1:04:52There's the recorder stuff. There's a bunch of other stuff. Like what feels like it actually could insert itself into your life? The thing I see as the most useful that I don't currently have a use for it, but it's kind of nice to know is there, is the translation stuff. So that's where you call someone and you can turn on this live translator and it'll just, you talk and it speaks for you and the other person and it translates back and forth. I called V song our wearables reviewer and she speaks Japanese and her take on it was like it gets the gist of it right if your conversation is like kind of transactional or you like I need to make a reservation or whatever sure it's going to do those things fine she tried to tell me her cat was eating her chair and it said that she was eating the chair it was confusing very funny But I think that's kind of where a lot of these AI features are.

1:05:46You're like, it's actually more useful than not to have that there as long as you're not relying on it as like, yeah, this is going to perfectly translate, you know, whatever I want to say to this other person. Or you're not expecting like, I want you to summarize a page of notes and you're just going to blindly be like, well, my notes summary, my AI summary said this, so it must be true. It's just kind of like a good starting point. That's where I see it. Yeah, and I think with a lot of this stuff, the sort of don't rely on this too much footnote is a useful one. But I think you said at one point in one interview, there's no way in which this is worse than not having it.

1:06:25So I'll take it, which is fair. And I think the challenge of some of these phones for me now is Samsung wants you to buy these phones for the AI features, right? And Google increasingly wants you to buy these phones for the AI features. And I think on the camera, which we're going to get to in just a second, There are compelling cases to be made there that AI is letting you do genuinely cool, new, like worth getting this phone over another phone sets of things. I don't know that I see any of that here, that it's like none of these strike me as a tiebreaker over another device, if that makes sense.

1:06:58Like nice to have. You'll probably use them if you're there. Like the recorder is a cool thing. And I've always loved the Pixel recorder, but I've never bought a Pixel because of the Pixel recorder. Do you know what I mean? And does any of the AI stuff feel like it clears that like this is why you would buy this over something else bar? I don't know if we're quite there. I think that maybe with a small asterisk for the Pixel on the like face swap stuff, which we all have, you know, feelings about. But that's the one that people I talk to who are like not online, you know, are like, oh, I saw this Pixel phone does this thing.

1:07:32I'm like, yeah, actually, it's it's really useful. And like people see the utility for it. Yeah, there's a lot of AI, like camera and non-camera that I just sort of feel like, is this helping it? Like, is anyone going to use this? Like the, especially the chat assist stuff where it's like, I'll write something, but you know, put some emoji in it or make it sound professional or casual. Like, I'll like write a text and think to myself, like, should I use this? I'm like, no, I have no reason to try it. But the photo stuff is interesting. I think it's at a place where it's a little more compelling to people.

1:08:09And Samsung's take on generative AI photo editing is interesting. Yeah. Compare and contrast it a bit to what the Pixel is doing because the underlying models are mostly Google's, right? So in theory, it's dealing with the same underlying technology. But what is Samsung doing differently from what we've seen on the Pixels? Yeah. So you kind of have the interface for the tools and they're like very similar. You go into this separate kind of editing pane of like you're doing AI and you can select an object and move it or erase it. That's kind of the same on Pixel and Samsung. I will say, though, by the way, for anyone who has not yet read Allison's review of the S24 and S24 Plus, the funniest thing in that whole review is a picture that you took, I I think what of your husband's arm draped over a couch that you tried to remove?

1:08:58What happened when you tried to remove this? So, yeah, I selected it and I hit, you know, take it out of the scene. I did this on the Pixel and the Samsung and the Pixel just kind of tried to like fill in the background. It was like, there's a couch here. Samsung was like, you want a new arm made out of pillows. Creepiest freaking thing I've ever seen. And it's so cursed and it's now on the web. It's on the verge.com forever. That's good stuff. That's what we're here for. But anyway, I derailed you. Sorry, keep going. Yeah, no, that kind of sums it up because like, I think the Pixel in like what it'll actually generate and they are running on same Google models.

1:09:36The Pixel is a little more prone to be like, okay, you want to fill in the background here. It doesn't always look super great. Sometimes it's really good. Sometimes it's not. But the Samsung phone, for whatever reason, is very eager to just like throw something else in there. It's such Samsung energy. I love it. It really is. Yeah, like you, I selected a lamp on a table and I tried to take it out and I put a different lamp in. That's not what I wanted at all. It's like, what's behind this? Another lamp? Probably. Let's see. Just infinite lamps. Like, it's so strange. That's so good. Yeah, it's Samsung energy.

1:10:11The one we talked a bunch about on the Verticals when this launched was the ability to take any video and make it into a slow motion video. And Neil, I got like very in his feelings about how this is creating frames that don't exist. What was your experience of actually using this thing in life? How did it feel? So I don't quite have the same philosophical hang up with it. I'm like, okay, sure. This is fun. I can slow down a video of my kid on a swing. I think that's where most people are. It's great. Based on the emails we got after that episode, I think most people agree with you. All right.

1:10:44That's the consensus. Yeah. So when we tried it out just initially in the kind of product demo time, both V, Viren and I were like, this is really impressive. Like it looks pretty convincing. And then you kind of throw more complexity at it and it falls apart a lot of a little bit. You can see where it's like things sort of look jerky. And the one I did was my kid on a swing. And, you know, he pulls him back and lets him go. And it's like so cute. And he's just like overjoyed. But then the chains of the swing are just kind of flickering in and out of existence. Yeah. And it's trying to decide what the mulch on the playground should look like in every one of those frames where it doesn't exist.

1:11:28So it just kind of looks real warped and kind of... It's a little distracting. It makes the mulch look like it's moving, looking at the video. Have you ever seen the thing where there's just a billion ants all together and it looks like sort of a solid thing, but it's just churning? Yeah. That's what it makes the mulch look like. It's a little unsettling, honestly. It is, yeah. It's like, take something very cute and fond and makes it just a little, like, cursed. Yeah. The one AI thing I forgot to ask you about was the circle to search thing. And this is something that is not technically a Samsung-only feature.

1:12:02It's also on the Pixel now. And it's kind of, you can, like, hack your way into something very similar just using Google's overall multi-search stuff. But I think this is very cool and strikes me as the kind of thing in general that is like just a good feature. It's also a good reason to have an S pen like yay for the ultra. Yeah, but you've tested this a bunch. I have not been able to use it at all. What's been the verdict on circle to search? Yeah, I think it's something that I'm going to miss when I don't have it. It's not like you're constantly, I'm like, oh, I'm going to circle everything, search it in this Instagram post.

1:12:34But when you do need it, and you kind of have to unlearn the old way of doing things. Like I was texting with a friend and they mentioned the name of the restaurant where you're going to meet at. And my instinct was like, go open Google Maps and type it in and search it. And I had to backtrack. I was like, no, no, no, I can just like highlight this. And, you know, you don't have to leave the app you're in just pops up with everything you were going to look for in Google Maps. Yeah, I'm like, oh, this is how we should have been using our phones. Like, this feels so much more intuitive. And I think I'm going to miss it when it's not an option.

1:13:10Yeah, it's the kind of thing that seems weird until you do it about four times. And then it's like, oh, this makes sense. Yeah. It is insane that I have to copy text in a text message, close this app, open another app, go to the search bar, type on that and hit search just to get the map for the direction that this person sent me. Like that's a bad user experience that we're just all used to. Like this is the thing about AI in general that I think is kind of exciting. It's just finding ways to shortcut all of that stuff because it can start to figure out, oh, this is an address. There's really only one thing you want to do with an address.

1:13:43Let's just do that for you. I think that's very cool. Yeah, like don't write me an email like Shakespeare wrote it. Just like give me those shortcuts. Totally. Do the grunt work for me, please. Exactly. Okay, last thing, and then I'll let you go. One of the big promises Samsung made here is seven years of software support, which I think in the abstract is very cool. Google also said seven years, right? So this is now like the gold standard. I think that's very cool. Is it realistic if I'm buying an S24 to assume that I'm still going to want this phone in seven years? Like the big spec missing for me is the Qi2 charging, which I think is whatever.

1:14:18Seven years from now, you'll probably want better wireless charging than this phone gives you. But even looking past that, like, is it realistic for this phone or really any phone to say I am feasibly going to keep this thing and it's going to be useful to me for seven years? For the vast majority of people, they're going to be trading in their phone before that, especially with the Ultra sort of feels like people who buy that phone are on a quicker upgrade cycle because they want the next big thing with all the with all this stuff. Yeah, the Venn diagram of S Pen users and people who only upgrade every seven years, I don't think is huge.

1:14:50Not a big one there. But, you know, I look at like my parents or like, bless his heart, my husband with his iPhone XR. Yeah. They just want to not shop for a phone. They're like, I hate that. I don't want to deal with Verizon doing a whole bunch of things, Jedi mind tricks. Like, I just want my phone and I want it to work for a long time. And I think that's fair. I think Samsung has a good track record in that respect. They've sort of been pushing forward with more years of support. And they were doing better than Google for a hot second, but Google caught wise. So I'm glad to see it. I think it's probably going to make a difference for a minority, but I think it's important.

1:15:33Yeah. And I guess I do like the idea that you should be able to decide to upgrade your phone before your phone forces you to upgrade it. Right. Right. Like, I think that's a good thing. And I think seven years is probably two years longer than even most sort of normal people will keep their phones, partly just because of, like, battery health. Right. Like, it's just going to get to the point where your phone doesn't charge for very long anymore. But, yeah, then at least I'm in a position where I get to say I want a new phone rather than my phone being like I'm dead. Exactly. Get a new phone. Yeah.

1:16:04So S24, Samsung usually is like the default Android phone. Does it stay there this year, do you think? Like, is this the phone of 2024 in the Android world? I think so. And when I reviewed the Pixel 8 and the 8 Pro, I was really impressed. And I was kind of like, Samsung's going to have to really come up with something. And I think they did. There's an asterisk. There's, you know, if Samsung software is very unappealing to you, You just want something a little more turnkey. You don't ever want to think about whether Bixby exists or not. The Pixel is a great option. And there are things I think that are compelling about it.

1:16:45You know, if you do like the face swap, that's there for you. The way the Assistant like processes natural language is a little better than on the Assistant on the Samsung Galaxy phones. so there are still reasons to look at the pixel but i think yeah i think samsung keeps keeps the crown fair enough all right we're gonna do this many more times but i'm especially i'm gonna play you that clip when we do the pixel 9 whenever that comes out this year okay and we're gonna see how it holds up but i appreciate it thanks allison thank you all right we gotta take one more break and then we'll be back to answer a question for the verge cast hotline we'll be right

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1:20:37welcome back let's get to the hotline as always the number is 866 verge 11 and the email is verge cast at the verge.com we love all of your questions it's been so fun hearing about everybody's vision pro experiences and we're going to try to keep putting that stuff on the show as much as we can we don't want to overload you with vision pro stuff but we think this thing is fascinating This week, surprise, we have a Vision Pro question. We're going to get to a bunch more of these, like I said, including your experiences, which I loved hearing about on Friday. But I thought this one was interesting and actually made me think a lot.

1:21:09It comes from Dan, I think. Maybe Stan? I think it's Dan. Either way, if I got your name wrong, I'm sorry. Here it is. Hey there, this is Dan from San Francisco. I got a Vision Pro icon in my iPhone camera app today. And I think that it wants me to start shooting in spatial video. Should I do that, even though I might not buy a Vision Pro ever? Can I shoot everything in Spatial Pro already? Or should I wait and shoot normal video now only? Help me out. Thank you. Okay, so I've gone back and forth on this question a bunch since I first heard it. And I think the answer is no. I think at this point, if you have no particular intention of getting a headset, the answer is kind of no.

1:21:52Spatial Video has some really neat stuff going on, especially the way it's integrated with the headset. If you just shoot it on your iPhone, you're kind of just capturing 3d video. And that's all well and good. The vision pro has that neat way of presenting it where it has those kind of misty borders around it. So it looks a little like you're looking through a portal rather than just looking at a video. But the other thing about the vision pro is that actually, it's a great way to just watch regular video and you can get 4k video off of the iPhone, you can't get 4k spatial video. Spatial video is huge.

1:22:24It's about twice the size of a normal 1080p video. So I think at this point, if you're not anticipating getting this soon, if you want to use spatial video as like the second thing you shoot, right? You're like, I'm going to take a video of my kid's baseball game. Take the regular video first and take it in the highest quality you can and then go back and get the spatial video. It's a fun sort of neat thing, but I wouldn't treat that as your main media capture situation. That said, I do think spatial video is coming in the sense that I think everyone agrees that this is a format that is going to be around for a long time.

1:22:58Meta is now supporting spatial video on the Quest headsets. Apple is obviously all in on the Vision Pro, both as a capture thing for spatial video and as a way to watch it back. I think this format is real, so it's a fun thing to start playing around with. I don't think it's like the 3D video of eight years ago that kind of went nowhere and now you don't really even have a way to play it. I don't think spatial video is going to die, but I also don't think it's going to be the main way you consume media anytime particularly soon. especially if you're not going to be a headset person. So I would say start goofing around with it, have some fun, but don't feel the need to like switch your default settings and start shooting everything in spatial because 4K video will do pretty well even in a headset.

1:23:43All right, that's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everyone who's on the show and thank you as always for listening. There's a whole lot more from this conversation at theverge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes. All the links you need are gonna be on theverge.com, theverge.com slash vergecast. That's where you can find everything. And there's tons of news going on. Verge.com. It's a good website. As always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or S-Pen uses you really want to tell me about, you can always email us at vergecastattheverge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE-11.

1:24:12Tell us your Vision Pro experiences. Tell us which Galaxy phone you bought. Tell us all of your feelings about everything happening in tech right now. We do a hotline question on this episode every week, which again is now on Tuesdays. So keep them all coming. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poore. The Verge Cast 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 Google chaos, all the AI stuff going on, and lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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