Samsung's next-generation foldables are here | The Vergecast Livestream

15:22David Pierce:Yeah, I think that's right. And I think we're also likely to see Google make its own move in this space. I think it would almost be more enticing. I would almost be more optimistic if Samsung had more aggressively picked a single form factor, right? Because the eternal problem with Android is that everybody is supporting too many phones with too many chipsets with too many versions of Android and too many ideas about how everything is supposed to work. And so if you're a developer, you end up either having to pick and choose your spots, or you just say, screw it, I'm going to make one app plug into, you know, the built in ideas about how to scale it and move on.

15:57David Pierce:And I think what Samsung showed here is that if you make real effort to make this stuff make sense on the specific devices and specific form factors, you can do some really interesting stuff. the problem is almost no one is incentivized to do that other than samsung until we agree on a form factor right and i think the the candy bar phone has been the phone for a very long time in part because i think it was the right middle ground for a very long time but also in part because it was just it was just one thing it just became easier to have one idea about phones for everyone for a very long time and i i sort of wish samsung had come out more aggressively and said we think the z fold 8 is the thing this is the new shape of foldables and and really pushed after it

16:41Nilay Patel:you think they should have killed the z fold ultra 8 i i do ultra i do i think i think the

16:47David Pierce:ultra is actually sort of a fascinating device in that it is finally the thing we have been waiting for samsung to do which is make a foldable phone without very many compromises right this thing has uh it has the camera setup you'd want it has three cameras including a 200 megapixel main camera the 10 megapixel telephoto, I think. And the 50 megapixel ultra wide. It has big battery life. It has a lot of the camera features that you want. It has the new silicon carbon battery stuff, which I think is very cool.

17:20Nilay Patel:We have to talk about that at length, by the way.

17:22David Pierce:Let's get to that in one second. But I think this is the first, David Amell wrote for us that this is the first actually ultra feeling Samsung foldable, which is a big deal. It is Samsung's most expensive phone. And every time Samsung has shipped one of these, we've been like, isn't it weird that it doesn't have all of the best features that Samsung is actually able to ship of these phones? And to take that and say, OK, this thing is$2 ,000 and you have to make a bunch of compromises in the name of less durability and more screen isn't worth it. This one still vastly more expensive, but at least makes you make many fewer sacrifices.

17:59David Pierce:So in that sense, I'm very excited about it. I still think it's just the wrong shape for a phone. and I think Samsung agrees like I really do think Samsung agrees

18:06Nilay Patel:well I mean they're hiding some price increases here right in the same way that everyone is going to have to hide price increases they're calling this one ultra because it is what$2 ,100 I mean this phone is bananas like and so you can't have compromises at$2 ,100

18:21David Pierce:they're calling it ultra in order to make it less obvious that it is less or that it's more expensive than the last model so that now that they have the one that's less expensive than the last model which they're calling the successor to the last model even though it's not It's all very shady. And again, the names don't make any sense. And even several people on stage from Samsung could not properly say the names of these devices. And if you, an executive at the company, can't remember the name every time, you have a naming problem. But anyway, should we talk about this battery? Should we just briefly divert?

18:53David Pierce:We should talk about the battery. It might be the

18:54Nilay Patel:most interesting thing about these phones in a real way. Make the case. Well, I think we all know that lithium-ion batteries have had pretty intense ceilings, right? We've made them slightly better, but there hasn't been a big jump in battery chemistry that will unlock more battery life, faster charging speeds. We've done a lot around the edges to make lithium-ion chemistry work. We haven't really seen new chemistries at scale. These are silicon carbon batteries. We have seen some of them in China, but this is the big new chemistry. Samsung spent a lot of time talking about how they are managing this chemistry and making it safe.

19:29Nilay Patel:Because if you will recall, Samsung has had pretty enormous problems with their phones lighting on fire.

19:36David Pierce:Yeah. One of the funniest things going in our comments of the stories we've been doing about this has been, there's one set of people who is like, I'm never ever going to trust Samsung with a battery again. Do you remember the Note 7? And another set of people who are like, yeah, you know who else remembers the Note 7 is Samsung. And you know who definitely has built a hell of a lot of infrastructure to make sure that never happens again? Samsung.

19:56Nilay Patel:We'll see. I have a friend who at the time of the Note 7 was like, this phone rules. I'm never sending it back. You can't stop me.

20:03David Pierce:I respect that, actually.

20:05Nilay Patel:But this is the first sort of mainstream U.S. phone with a new battery chemistry. And if it is the vanguard of longer life, lower power, more efficient, smaller size, that is incredible. Yeah. Straightforwardly incredible. and I would like to see more battery chemistry development for an enormous number of reasons, not just phones like EVs. Like there's a bunch of stuff where new battery chemistries are maybe the most exciting thing that will happen in tech. And here we have some phones that are using new battery chemistries. I think in a very conservative way, right? They're not going all the way in.

20:43Nilay Patel:There is a pretty conservative application of the new technology, but it is fascinating to see that Samsung has decided to make the leap.

20:50David Pierce:I agree. And I think they're actually doing this in roughly the right way for exactly the reason you just described, right? There are other silicon carbon batteries out there with more capacity in roughly the same size or even smaller devices. And Samsung has been very straightforward about like, we could have pushed this harder. We could have been more aggressive in how we wanted to think about the actual stated battery capacity on this thing. But it is also true that silicon is more volatile. It expands more. whether it can wear more over time. And I think Samsung is right to say this is still relatively new technology.

21:27David Pierce:We should do this more carefully. It'll be really interesting to me to see whether this comes to the next set of Galaxy S devices, which is very much the mainstream phone, right? Like these are not phones. None of the phones today are phones most people will buy or even consider buying. I think a lot of people should buy the Flip. We can get to that. Yay, Flip phones. But like the Z Fold 8 Ultra is a$2 ,100 phone. Like you said, most people are not going to buy this. So it is a useful science project for Samsung. Its actual confidence will come when it puts it in the Galaxy S device. How do you feel about a$2 ,100 phone, a$2 ,000 phone whose battery might wear down faster than a traditional battery?

22:14Nilay Patel:Bad, Eli. Real, real, real, real bad. I don't know if you buy like a Ferrari you're like if I run it real hard it'll explode like I mean this is the thing right like I

22:23David Pierce:there is no case for someone who is price shopping a phone to price shop your way up to this right like in the way that Apple is very good at sort of talking you up the chain of its phones there is no way that chain in the same way that that chain never gets you to I should spend the money for the iPhone era

22:41Nilay Patel:Ned from Spider-Man vibe coded an app didn't you see that they literally introduced him as the actor who plays ned from spider-man i know which is not i mean money solves all problems but i'm just pointing it out um i mean that that was like one of those moments where you know they're trying to make the argument for the four factors and i can vibe code an app or my fictional character can vibe code an app i i think these marketing departments get themselves so twisted to your point like people are going to do everything all the time. And like a neat little narrative about these phones, it just doesn't exist.

23:16Nilay Patel:Like everyone just sort of opens the phones and does whatever they want. The only thing anyone really cares about is longer battery life. And they were able to address that kind of at length with silicon carbon. But I think the other dimension of battery life is, will you be down to 80 % capacity in two years on your$2 ,100 phone? And if we don't pay off this bet on silicon carbon, Will there be replacement parts that fit into this case once that happens? And like, all of that is wide open. I think it's like worth noting if you spend the money, you're at the bleeding edge of technology here in a very specific way.

23:50David Pierce:Yeah, but it is true that this is generally believed to be a huge leap forward in consumer electronic batteries. And I think like almost everyone is betting on this idea in some way. So I'm very confident that it will work. I do think you're taking a risk on the first version of it.

24:10Nilay Patel:I mean, I'll make the comparison. It's different. It's definitely different. The risks were different. But when all the charging blocks shifted from silicon to GAN, gallium nitride, we actually ran a big story on this back in the day. Like, Anker was the first. They had an exclusive on it. And everything got smaller at first. And then everything got a little overpowered. And then a bunch of sort of like irresponsible Alphabet suit Amazon vendors started making ones that would light on fire. But now everything is GAN and everything is small, right? And that was a big shift in sort of material science and charging technology and power density, all this stuff.

24:44Nilay Patel:And it just took a while for it to become the standard in a real way. I think we're on the same kind of journey here. It's just, will it light on fire on an airplane is a different question.

24:55David Pierce:Yeah. I mean, yeah, who knows? That's one of our review tests will be to take it on an airplane and just see. Just go on several planes. Who knows? we're gonna rent a Cessna and then like panic for an hour um can I ask you how you feel about the

25:11Nilay Patel:the word nitography which I had a real about nitography for years okay it's just every time

25:18David Pierce:I see that word it really it just gives me like a visceral yuck face uh I will say Samsung spent less time in this event doing weird camera things than it has in the past um there was a really bizarre ad with obviously AI generated gerbils. I think they were gerbils that I didn't super love. But but whether it was just this event or not, there was much less focus on here's all the weird, creepy, uncanny valley stuff you can do with your phone. But they did say the phrase focus on the moment and let galaxy take care of capturing it. And I was just like, oh, this is when Eli just throws his computer into the sea.

26:00David Pierce:What if the future of photography is you don't even take pictures? You just tell the AI to capture everything around you. You think, gosh, it would be great to have a picture and it takes it and it does it. That'd be so fun.

26:09Nilay Patel:I mean, that is where the camera companies have wanted to go for some time. Yep. Right, is you just push this shutter button and it will decide what the best photo is and it will make that photo for you. And they've gotten there. I think my argument is like, what's left for Samsung to do inside of their camera app? Right, we're already just rendering the moon out of nothing. We're already moving people around on park benches. Like we've announced all of the AI stuff short of there isn't a lens on this camera that you can reasonably announce. And so I kind of get why they're backing it off. Also, the backlash is real.

26:43Yes.

26:44Nilay Patel:It's just real everywhere. The idea that, you know, AI pictures of food and restaurant windows are a thing that you should vandalize is just a thing that is on the local news now. This is a real story in San Francisco. and I don't know if Samsung wants to run right into it while they're also promoting agentic AI and they're wide foldable.

27:01David Pierce:Fair.

27:02Nilay Patel:So I think like it's a good camera is like all they really need to say at this point and the sort of like Gen Z, Gen Y camera culture is about point shoot cameras with flashes right now. So what are you going to do? Like you can't compete with that.

27:21David Pierce:Yes, that's very true. There was one of them, I think it was the the regular fold, the wide fold, where they said when you hold it up to take a photo, it will feel nostalgic, like you're shooting with an old digital camera. And I was just like, no, it won't. Like, what on earth are you talking about? It's going to feel like a phone. It's fine.

27:39Nilay Patel:I watched three different TikTok videos over the past week of people adjusting the settings on their Canon point-and-shoots by, like, rotating the dials and going through those, because they're incomprehensible. And I was like, something is happening here that, one, I love, and, two, all of these companies should pay more attention to. Like, people don't want this other thing. They're chasing this other look, which is good.

28:00David Pierce:Yes. And I think, to some extent, there was evidence in this event that Samsung gets that. And I think that's part of why they talked so much about the hardware and about the way that you use it and about playing games and consuming content. And you get the sense it's like, there's an investor-mandated number of times you have to say agentic AI in a 90-minute presentation or else your stock price just starts to tank. but in general they spent a lot more time talking about here's why this is a good phone that you will like in your life and much less on here is all the the wacky llm stuff we've enabled you to do and i think that's the right thing to do right like in this particular case especially for samsung to say here is our bleeding edge set of phones here is the stuff that we are demonstrably better at than all of our competitors in this space they they made a big meal out of how they're winning at foldables and they are like it's true the question is is this going to continue to be the sort of mainstreaming moment for these foldables and if it is can samsung still win right now it's winning a game no one else is really playing in the same way at least in this country yeah but right but to say here is what we think this is for and why we think you should use it just felt good to me right like they just they make a case for what you are supposed to do with your phone and a few times made the case that actually what you should do is not look at your phone, which is not a thing we hear from phone companies very often.

29:28David Pierce:But you start to see these companies are starting to understand the way the winds are changing, right? That there is real energy for people to not want to use their phone so much and to want it to fit more naturally into their life and not be completely subsumed by it all the time. Is this the thing they're actually after of course not they all want you to use their phones more and ruin your life but they see the the cultural change happening and that's the thing that convinces me increasingly that that cultural change is happening is that these companies are now having to respond to it in a real way we've spent 15 years watching everybody just power through the idea that people are mad about privacy and mad about the the incursion on their lives and mad about the algorithmic stuff and like

30:09Nilay Patel:everybody using the screen time controls in your phone yeah they would just they would they

30:14David Pierce:They would throw you a bone every once in a while, but mostly would just assume that eventually they'll win and you'll give in. And they are now starting to move. And I think that to me is the clearest sign that there is real change happening. But you don't agree with me. You're making a face.

30:28Nilay Patel:I agree with you in the sense that there's a lot of cultural pushback on the dominance of phones and particularly social media. And we see it all over the place. There are age-gating laws all over the Internet in various countries and states. Sure. We see the pushback against, I don't know, data centers. I'm much just to balance it out AI is a technology that is really really good at summarizing things and a lot of what you're describing is like what if the cover screen summarized more things for you sure do you know what I mean like and so it's they're using the technology they have to make a feature that connects to a cultural thing which is what they should do I'm not even disagreeing with you I just don't think that I think that they're backing into an answer as opposed to being like we see the cultural winds are changing we ought to make a product they're like Like we have a summarization machine.

31:13Nilay Patel:Can we point it at this problem? And like, well, you know, the next turn is like the agentic stuff, which will maybe point at the problem even more. And that, I don't know that they've connected the AI will make you use your phone less to there's backlash against technology as directly as maybe you would hope.

31:30David Pierce:Maybe not. That's, it's very possible that that is the case. Also, I would point out that it's not called the cover screen. It's called the flex window. And that's, that's two words camel or it's one word camel case. And it's very important to me and to them.

31:43Nilay Patel:And the hinge is called the armor hinge. Yes.

31:47David Pierce:And it's all part of one UI nine on the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8. I hate these names.

31:54Nilay Patel:It's too many words. I can't do it anymore. There's a little more to say, but I feel like I have to ask this now because you mentioned Samsung making it space for one. Actually, before you do, we have an ad to play.

32:06David Pierce:Oh, my God. So brief cliffhanger. We have an ad before I forget to do this. and we get to the end of the show and I get yelled at. Here's an ad. We'll be back in 60 seconds.

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35:21Nilay Patel:All right, we're back.

35:22David Pierce:Neal, you were saying.

35:23Nilay Patel:All right, here's my wrap-up questions on the phones. Hit me. then we got to talk about the watches and everything else. All right. We've talked a lot about how Samsung has made its case for foldables. We've avoided it thus far, but presumably in September, Apple's going to put out an iPhone that folds in exactly the same way. I'm going to ask you a question that my friend Casey Neon asks us all the time. Did Samsung show anything here that would make one person buy a Samsung phone instead of the iPhone that they already have? Yes.

35:54David Pierce:Okay. um a they showed that you can scan a qr code to switch from your iphone to a samsung phone which as somebody who has switched a lot of phones in the last year boy is that exciting yeah uh quick share coming across devices big exciting thing everybody seems to have just hacked airdrop and apple seems to have just waved the white flag and is like whatever

36:15Nilay Patel:right apple's like we need to fight with the eu about ai you can have stupid airdrop Yeah, pretty much.

36:22David Pierce:But I think in general, Gemini is vastly better than Siri, even what we've seen from Siri AI so far. The, what do they call it, now nudge, all of these little things that appear in the course of using your phone where you're like, we need to put that on the calendar and it'll just pop up a thing being like, add the calendar. Again, Siri AI is trying to do the same thing. That's going to be a big part of the competitive landscape over the next couple of years is the actual sort of minute to minute proactive experience of using your phone. Gemini is just a mile ahead at this moment in time. So if you think that that is a core part of how you use your phone, this is a big part of it.

37:07David Pierce:I also think there's a shot that the iPhone Ultra or whatever it ends up being called is going to be even more expensive than this. I mean, and this is really the thing it all boils down to, right? Like I look at all of these and I think Samsung got a lot of things right here. And I will almost certainly never recommend any of these phones to anybody because they're just too expensive. Like fundamentally, these things are just science projects. And until they are cheaper, they don't return what they need to in order. I have a hard time imagining what it would take for me to tell you to spend twice as much on your next phone.

37:39David Pierce:I don't think the iPhone Ultra is going to get there I don't think these phones get there I'm a little more compelled by the Z Flip just because it's only$1 ,200 it is some of this stuff in a vastly cheaper form factor so that's all very exciting but to me this thing that they have where in a strange way Google has allowed Samsung to be the bleeding edge of its own AI stuff odd but is really good for Samsung in the sense that it gets a lot of that stuff actually going on. They're starting to build better other devices. If you're a believer in smart glasses, there's going to be a real reason to use Android phones.

38:18David Pierce:I think Samsung is getting there. I think the switching costs between iOS and Android might just be prohibitively high for everybody. But I think at the very least, Samsung has made it much harder for people to leave and go to the iPhone, right? Which is that that's the thing Samsung needs more than anything is to not lose whatever market share this is to iPhone people. People who want the best and wildest technology. The fact that I think a bunch of people will look at these and be happy with it and not feel like they have to go immediately by the iPhone because it's so obviously the best foldable.

38:57David Pierce:Samsung did a relatively good job of that today.

39:00Nilay Patel:Yeah. I mean, my prediction that I was basically wrong about was that foldables would be a form factor shift that led to people switching. I don't think that happened in any meaningful way.

39:10David Pierce:It's just the price, man. Like, I think you would have been right if they had figured out a way to stop selling them for$1 ,800 and more. And the iPhone also is going to cost that too. And like, it turns out price matters, right? Not a lot of people bought the Vision Pro because it's$3 ,500. dollars like most people especially with this device are not looking for the wildest thing at all possible costs like even even the iphone air which i think uh has had a funny sort of resurgence in a lot of people's minds that like there are a lot of people who thought it was dumb and they use it for a while and they're like oh this one's actually kind of lovely doesn't matter right like people are price sensitive people are going to buy the things that are more stable and more familiar and in many cases cheaper, these things are just going to lose until they can compete on price.

39:58David Pierce:And you can maybe talk me into like$100 or$200 more. Like if you had the base at$800, the Pro at$1 ,000 and the foldable at$1 ,200, you start to be somewhere. But doubling the price, you're nowhere. I just don't think it's ever going to happen at that price. Yeah.

40:15Nilay Patel:I'm very curious how Apple prices its phones, but I think the idea that Samsung made a big case for how people use these phones just a few months before Apple puts out similar phones and makes a similar case with their ability to market, it's going to frustrate a lot of people who know that Samsung has been shipping folding phones for a long time.

40:33David Pierce:Apple is going to pretend that it invented foldable phones. And I just want everyone watching and listening to know that we know it didn't. We know. We believe you. We're here. We've talked about it. I also really like this comment that just says, if I could replace the screen, if they break for less than the price of a mid-range phone, then I'd consider them. Yeah. Fabulous point. That is exactly the problem. Should we talk about the watches? We should quickly talk about the watches, yeah. You are a noted Apple Watch Ultra believer. Are you wearing yours right now?

41:04Nilay Patel:I am, but the Apple, you know, in 27, this thing is gone. So I got to get a new one. So I'm in the market. Although ecosystem lock-in is going to drive me exactly to one option.

41:14David Pierce:That is the problem. But so Samsung launched two. There's the Galaxy Watch 9 and the Galaxy Watch Ultra 2. the watch 9 is basically a chip bump and a battery bump fine easy easy upgrade from one or the other um the the ultra 2 i think is is more interesting again in terms of what who samsung imagined this for um they made a bunch of noise about divers it it has a spec for diving accessories that it adheres to it does nitrogen absorption monitoring uh they have a partnership with a well-known company that makes a diving app. They have sort of carved out this is for divers in the way that Apple has really tried to carve out this is for outdoor adventurers for the Watch Ultra.

41:57David Pierce:It has a bigger battery. This I actually thought was sort of fascinating. Vsong on our team wrote a story about this. It has a 35 % bigger battery than the last model despite being actually a little thinner on the Ultra. And they say it gets 60 hours on a charge. but V got 70 hours on a charge from the last ultra which means there's a world in which the battery on this thing is like three or days plus three or four days which I think would be a big deal um I don't think this watch is particularly attractive it's kind of big and blocky and uh undesigned in a certain way to my eyes um but I don't know what do you make of this thing

42:39Nilay Patel:I agree with you on the design piece, right? Like the idea that watches are for tasks is challenging when they are as powerful as these watches. Like this watch, the Apple Watch Ultra, the sort of big smartwatches are little computers that can do little computer things. And then you kind of run into the fashion problem. I think there's a reason whoop bands are really popular and everyone's making one because they're unobtrusive. I think the Google one, you can, you can just hide on like a regular watch strap on the back. So people are finding ways to like hide the sensors if all you want is the health tracking features and take the display away.

43:14Nilay Patel:And then you have these products, which are gigantic. It feels like they're only going to keep getting bigger in very specific ways and getting more powerful. And then you're like, what am I doing with this giant computer on my wrist? And maybe the answer is like having a great time. I know a lot of people want a giant computer on their wrist. I just keep looking at

43:33David Pierce:these pictures and it's one of our commenters just described it as circle and squircle, which I think is right. And this to me just, it keeps looking like a prototype that they forgot to take the outer case off of, right? Like that the thing inside should be the watch and somebody forgot to remove the outer casing before they shipped it. It just doesn't, there's something about this that just doesn't look finished to me. Yeah.

43:56Nilay Patel:I mean, they've, they've got to handle all the ventilation. They've got it. You can see it's more, it's form follows function here in like a very specific way yeah which is fine i the thing that gets me about all these watches is again the the thing that most people love about their smart watches is is the health and fitness features and there's just a lot of competition in form factor there yeah like there there just is um

44:18David Pierce:and there's been this recent push towards no screen at all for some of that stuff that actually what i want is just a device that collects everything and then i will do all of the

44:26Nilay Patel:management of that on my phone yeah um i'm where i'm curious there will be and there's a reason i I mean, I find this thing bananas, but the CEO of Whoop is coming on Decoder soon and we're going to talk about it. Nice. But you can see that there's that, right? What Apple figured out in the sort of Apple Watch journey was this is a health device and they really, really focused on it. They have maybe lost that plot a little bit. Yeah, I think I agree with that. And these screenless devices are coming up to take it over. And then it's like, okay, what is this smartwatch for? And we should put a big processor in it.

44:59Nilay Patel:We have all this stuff. and you just kind of, you get to, oh, we're going to reboot this a little bit and it's going to get even bigger and even crazier and we're going to need air pocket ventilation, like all this stuff that you need. I'm excited for it because I think it's going to be a new turn in these watches because their core feature, health and fitness, is going in a different direction, is going in different form factors. We'll see. The thing that makes me sad about all of this, it's the same with headphones. Once you buy a phone, you're in an ecosystem, and that ecosystem traps you into this device.

45:33Nilay Patel:So does this thing actually compete with the Apple Watch?

45:37David Pierce:No, it doesn't. Not in any way. It competes with keeping the money in your pocket. I mean, that's what it is. I will say, I think, again, Samsung has spent a lot of years making a lot of noise about the overall Galaxy ecosystem, and I think has not really delivered a ton on that. But there were some interesting demos today in that they were talking about how you might use the watch to control your glasses and the sort of interplay between those different form factors, watch, glasses, phone. I think both of our feelings about glasses are well established. And ironically, boy, did they not make a compelling case for smart glasses in this entire thing.

46:16David Pierce:There was a whole long thing about all of these other devices and why you might want them and what they're for and why they're worth having in this particular shape. and then they're like glasses he's just like well you could take pictures do you like that well okay so no one knows what smart glasses are for but they do it they had this thing where it's like okay you can use your watch to control your glasses so that you don't have to be you know touching your face all the time and there and there are a little again these little pieces of the ecosystem that are starting to come together and it's a real shame that no one else is going to be able to do these things apple is more locked in than anybody android is a little more open it will have some more hooks into this stuff.

46:55David Pierce:It'll be interesting to see how Google enables that stuff across the ecosystem. But it is true that if you are going to buy one of these phones, you are almost certainly going to buy a Galaxy Watch next to it if you buy a smartwatch because you don't really have any other.

47:07Nilay Patel:Look, you tuned into a Vergecast live stream about Samsung products. You're going to get some literal Galaxy brain takes. So here's mine. All of these ideas where you're going to buy a Samsung watch to control the Google AI and your Samsung glasses designed by Gentle Monster, whatever nonsense. Fine, whatever. They're all going to run into the same problem, which is the history of user interface is more and more direct manipulation, right? We had, you held a mouse in your hand and you would move the arrow and like literally click on the thing you want. And there's like a very direct manipulation of what's happening.

47:43Nilay Patel:We got to touch screens. You're literally pushing on the pixels to change what you want. All of these devices are indirect manipulation where whatever your hand is doing off in space has almost nothing to do with what you're seeing and controlling. And that stuff is a dead end. It is true on the meta glasses with the neural band. It's just like, it just unwires people's brains in a way that's like, can I just use my phone? I just use my phone, right? And until you get to like literally reaching out and pointing and clicking, which runs into all kinds of other problems. Steve Jobs used to call it gorilla arms.

48:17Nilay Patel:Whatever, man. Like the industry is chasing the stuff and it is willfully forgetting the things it knows about user interface paradigms.

48:26David Pierce:Yeah, I think that's right. And I mean, we're back to like buttons in cars again, right? People like buttons and knobs. And I think we are probably due for a lot of that. Yeah, exactly. And it turns out that is worth pushing back towards in this case too. There's so many interesting, I encourage everybody to go like look up Brett Victor and all of the work that he's done on how do we make a projector see the way. the room and react as you literally move physical things around as a computer wild exciting stuff out there that i actually think has much more bearing on how reality should work than pinchy in front of my face as i use something um but the was there anything in the in the watch ultra that you thought was particularly cool are you psyched about 5 000 nits of brightness they made a big

49:09Nilay Patel:deal out of 5 000 nits of brightness i know but you know i don't i'm not i'm not like climbing everest that's 2 000 more nits neil i'm good man like i'm turning down the brightness of my watch all the time i have a baby you understand like yeah uh the baby's like i do you want me to sleep or do you want me to pot this watch like that those are our choices yeah that's fair um i do

49:29David Pierce:think some of the um preventative health stuff is interesting samsung is resolutely trying to boil everything that it collects about you into a series of scores that it can give you on your watch which I would say I am kind of constitutionally against. There's nothing I hate more than waking up tired in the morning and having it be like, you get a 59 for last night. I'm like, well, I hate you. We are not friends. You and me. Right now, it's Google Health that I'm furious at. Every morning I wake up and it's like, gosh, you didn't sleep very well last night. And I'm like pouring coffee on my face.

50:03David Pierce:I'm like, I'm aware. Thank you, Google Health. Uh, but, but again, they're, they're deep down this, can this be not just a fitness device, but an actual like capital H health device. And I think that that's the direction Apple is pushing to. That's the direction Samsung is going. And again, the question of how big is the total addressable market for a device like that, for people who want things like that remains unclear to me, but, uh, it is interesting to see Samsung really dive after this in the same way. way i mean there there is a certain amount of just doing what apple's doing here like they

50:39Nilay Patel:launched a galaxy card i don't know what i mean oh wait by the way that was the funniest part of

50:45David Pierce:the whole thing where the again the moment where he said stable coins are now in the samsung wallet and literally paused for applause and got nothing i mean like dead air in the room and then one person goes, woo! And he's like, yeah!

51:00Nilay Patel:Stable coins. That's very good. This is terrific. Look, I... Health and fitness-wise, everyone is chasing Woop. Like, I don't... I can't be clear about that. Like, that's... They have emerged as a particular kind of market leader in a particular kind of way, and you have a lot of feelings about that. Particularly about whether or not AI is a good or stable or healthy health companion, which V talks about all the time. Literally today, like, this morning, OpenAI got sued for giving incorrect health advice to somebody. And like, that's just gonna be a big lawsuit. So whether or not these metrics and gamifying your health is actually effective in the way that people want it to be effective, I don't know.

51:40Nilay Patel:But I know what everyone's chasing is that number go up is a compelling thing to put on a stat sheet and in marketing materials. And now Samsung can be like, Samsung Health AI is gonna do it for you. Whether or not they are the best one or it feels irrelevant to the reality of they're all kind of the same. They all tell you to go to bed at 11 p.m. and get nine hours of sleep. And they all tell you not to drink so much and like eat a little bit less than you move. And like, I just told you that. Will you pay me the subscription fee?

52:12David Pierce:And the fact that they're all essentially identical products at this point is completely irrelevant because of the ecosystem thing, right? Like it's not, you're not actually choosing between a bunch of hard to pick between products. You're picking the one that works at the phone that you have. and that's the long and short of it. And so, great. I think every one of these good features should immediately be copied by every single one of these competitors because it doesn't matter. They're not competitors.

52:37Nilay Patel:Yeah, I mean, this is going to be the... This is the fight that maybe AI overcomes. Maybe. I don't know, man.

52:44David Pierce:If Gemini, it becomes the ecosystem unto itself, we get into a really interesting place. I don't think that's happening anytime soon.

52:53Nilay Patel:It does not seem like it's happening anytime soon.

52:54David Pierce:um all right we should get out of here but i will say um i think the reviews for these devices are going to be really fascinating um in in a sort of unusual way for a phone in 2026 there are a lot of ways these could go they've made a lot of noise about durability they've made a lot of noise about whether these devices have creases in the screens again we're back to titanium technology that supposedly makes them stronger uh but also a cleaner and crisper there was a very cool video of how they laid out the screen so that it's much more uniform now. This is the kind of stuff that Samsung should be good at now after all of these years of making foldables and theoretically potentially way ahead of everybody else, even the Googles and Apples of the world.

53:37David Pierce:But is the battery going to expand and or explode? Are the cameras good enough that you're not going to mind some of the trade-offs on the other devices? does the like actual expansion of size on the fold in particular make sense like these feel like unknown phones to me for in sort of an unusual way particularly the wide fold like to actually live with that thing for a while i think is going to be really telling uh yeah i kind of

54:07Nilay Patel:have no idea how it'll land i mean this is why i ranked it first it's novel in a very particular way especially if you think if you believe in your heart that talking to gemini to do agent stuff is a way that we will use phones maybe it's this i don't i'm not even selling it man

54:27David Pierce:yeah so these funds are shipping august 7th i think everything that was announced today is shipping august 7th uh historically speaking i would say reviews from everybody will land somewhere between here and there. We will have lots more to talk about, so we'll get back to here. But for now, we should get out of here. Neelai, it's been a pleasure seeing you. We don't talk about gadgets enough. We should talk about gadgets more.

54:50Nilay Patel:And now the actor who plays Spider-Man.

54:52David Pierce:And now we sit silently while Spider-Man sits up there for a while. All right, thank you to Travis and Eric who are here producing. Thank you to our whole team for making all of this happen. Thank you to all of you for being here, watching and listening and commenting. That's it. That's the Vergecast. Neelai.

55:08Nilay Patel:Rock and roll.