The future of code is exciting and terrifying

22:56I think that is somewhere between nonsense and the far future. I don't think there's any world in which that's a real thing that you're going to be able to do with Cloud Code anytime soon. On the flip side, I think the idea that people are going to suddenly be able to solve their own problems with software rather than just having to find the thing that exists that is the closest is a meaningful change to the software business, right? Like what I've been doing on Cloud Code is I've spent a long time switching between to-do list apps and productivity suites. And I realized like a year ago. I'm shocked.

23:32Paul Ford:I'm incredibly surprised to hear this. Oh, my God. I know. It's weird that this is a thing. This is brave of you. I don't talk about this very often. Never heard of me. But I realized about a year ago, I actually know exactly what I want. And so I started calling around being like, why won't you give me what I want? And they were like, well, because what you want isn't what everybody wants. And then Claude Code for me was this light bulb moment of like, oh, I can just do it now. What a journalist moment. Like, you're just kind of like, I'm going to turn, you're all going to do this for me. And they're like, shut up, David.

24:02Paul Ford:And you're like, No, it was literally, I was like, what I want seems so simple and straightforward. I don't understand why every to-do list app doesn't ship a web clipper because a web clipper seems like such a blindingly obvious feature for all of them to have. And a bunch of them showed me telemetry that was like, actually, nobody wants our web clipper and almost nobody used it when we had it. So we could. I was like, oh, okay. So I'm the only one who wants this. But what this gives me now is the ability in theory with enough time and enough sort of accumulated knowledge to just build the thing that I want.

24:32And that means I'm not stuck paying for the one that got the closest to my needs, but never actually met them. It means I am not in somebody else's ecosystem that has a lot of ramifications. It means I can build my own solutions, which is very cool and also bad for all the companies who now don't get my business. And that sorting out where that one side of things ends and the other one begins is very complicated for me.

24:59Paul Ford:Can you bring up a web browser in this conversation? Sure. Okay. Go to, it's called polyend.com. Okay. Okay. Now, I'm a big, I'm a synth nerd. It's my midlife crisis. And so I like to track the news. And this product came out. And I think this product shows me something really interesting about vibe coding. Because I think Claude Code and it's like a really, really confusing. So you're at the Polyend website. And there's a guitar pedal on it. You plug, you take the wire out of the guitar, you put it in the pedal, you take the wire out of the pedal, you put it in the amp, and it adds an effect, delay, reverb, whatever.

25:37Paul Ford:This is how U2 becomes U2, right? And so they have a new product. It's called Endless. And it is a guitar pedal that is essentially a little computer, but it looks and acts. It has three knobs and two buttons. And if you go and you learn about it, what you find is that it has a programming environment where you describe in plain English the kind of effect that you want. And it writes, it compiles that, and then it sends it over USB to the pedal. And who is the company that's doing this? This is a company that builds digital synthesizers and digital synthesis guitar pedals. So they have all the pieces.

26:19Paul Ford:They have the digital signal processing effects. They have the tools. They have the understanding of how you sort of move one node into another. So they have all this intellectual property and they have all this smarts. And this is one of the, this is hard to program this stuff. It's really hard to make a sound that's good. It requires experience and expertise. So what they've done is they've essentially made a big library or what you might call like a runtime where you can go in and vibe code in this very specific domain and it can be executed on this very specific platform. It costs about 300 bucks.

26:53Paul Ford:But now you have a guitar pedal that sounds pretty good that is kind of entirely your own. And then they give you a white sort of faceplate for it that you can put in under the knobs and you can draw your own picture. and to me i'm like man that's a cool ai product like i get access to all their smarts i get to make exactly the thing i want and then i walk away from the ai and i play guitar and that's cool like i'm actually doing something cool that's not ai away from the computer that has enabled me to kind of have this very different experience and explore this different way of thinking but i still have to go get better at guitar and figure out how what to do with this so i'm not numbing myself by just like chatting right i'm i'm doing something i'm making something and so i think when we're talking about this right i don't think the world is going to log into cloud code in the future i just like that's but if you told me that like 10 years from now lots and lots of guitarists are like hacking their own effects pedals with this stuff and then playing out and they really like it and even though you don't hear it, they know about it.

27:58Paul Ford:I'm like, that is more believable. Like the effects pedal runtime makes sense to me as a product in a way that like everyone can code might not. Yeah. And I think that that's, it's a more useful way to think about a lot of this stuff, because then it means the downstream effects of all of this stuff are a lot more understandable. Right. I think when, when we talk about what if we create God, you get to universal basic income And it's like, OK, well, how do we how do we deal with the ramifications of everything changing all at once overnight because we've created digital Jesus? Also, David, like if anyone ever saying that ever seemed to really care about consciousness, like if they like they're always like, I want it so I can sell it.

28:40Paul Ford:But it's like, you know, it's like go read a poem, like just do anything where you're like, God, that that external consciousness is really exciting. I like going to museums. If I could just hear those words, as opposed to in the future, AI will make museums for you whenever you want a museum, I'd feel a lot better. Yeah, I completely agree. Go Read a Poem is a good title for this episode, by the way. Just throwing that out there. Put that up there. Let's see how they're still going to piss people off, but whatever. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast.

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32:32So, all right. One other thing I want to talk about in this is next to all of this thinking about vibe coding and AI and cloud code, you're writing again on the Internet like a like a maniac. I don't know if you know this, Paul. It's been a minute since you were a blogger, but we don't do that anymore. No, we all make tick tocks. All of our stuff got ingested by AI companies that are putting us all out of business. Nobody goes to websites anymore. What what are you what are you doing?

33:00Paul Ford:um okay so i used to have a website i have a website it's called ftrain.com because the you will not give yourself enough credit for this but you were like you were like an og blogger in a in a way that like other og bloggers understood like jason kotke when you started blogging was like oh my god paul ford is blogging again like yeah no it's a little it's a little like a ghost has returned right um i if we're going to characterize me i was always very interested in the web as an exploratory medium. I also worked in AI around 2000. Like I was kind of waiting for some of these things to happen.

33:37Paul Ford:I didn't know they would be LLMs. And in fact, actually, I read an article. Wired gave me the cover in 2019 and I made a very bold prediction that we were kind of done and it was just going to be a bunch of crypto and the tech industry was probably had had its day. So I'm often wrong about stuff, like just to put it out there. But I think crypto made a lot of people bearish on the tech industry for a while there. Well, I'll tell you why. It's because when you use the computer to multiply things and make them cheaper, that feels very computer to me. But when you use the computer to make things expensive, which is what crypto does, it makes processor cycles into money, that feels really regressive.

34:16Paul Ford:I'm like, that's not computer. I don't like that. Whereas LLMs, even though they burn the world and they're raising the sea level, They really can make a lot of things for a lot of people. Like you got a billion people using them. So it's real computer, even if people hate it. And so anyway, I got to tell you, man, I'm running a business. The world is changing. The world sucks right now. I'm on Blue Sky, but those aren't my friends. They'll throw me out the window. And I'm middle-aged and I got into synths. and then I was like, I wonder if I could get my site back up as a personal archive because I've done all this stuff.

34:57Paul Ford:And if I'm going to be a thought leader and be on podcasts, it's kind of embarrassing that it hasn't been updated for 15 years. We should just true it up. And I was like, well, yeah, I always wanted a real CMS, but I had that weird data structure and then it built one. And then I organized all my stuff and I brought, I imported all my old tweets. I have 70 ,000 nodes of content on that site. If you click the little head on the top right, it all expands in a giant hierarchy. And I'm like, man, I always wanted this. And then because of everything I did, I was like, I got to be able to edit, got to be able to true it up, fix some old typos.

35:31And then I went, wait a minute, I have a text box.

35:36Paul Ford:And the problem with me is you give me a text box and it's just like, I don't, I don't have any sense of self-control. And suddenly I had a box to type into in the web. And it just felt real good. It felt real good to not really have to be defensive all the time. You know this from writing. You have to acknowledge 5 million readers who are going to be angry before you can get to your first paragraph, right? It's like, just, it's not easy to be in public in the way that it used to be. And when, I mean, and look, like I used to get death threats because of my blog in the 90s. Like it's the cult, humans are humans.

36:13Paul Ford:Nothing's going to change. But the sense of like, I would really like a space of my own, even though it's weird that I'm kind of corporate now and doing this. And even though I'm a writer out in the world and can write other places, I really missed this. I missed having a domain where I could explore an idea almost lazily, where I could be sloppy, where I could have 10 paragraphs instead of two and really actually kind of put my own thinking first instead of the readers. And I also love when other people do that. I really do. I like the unfiltered, messy parts of thinking. I like zines and I like ephemeral thought and odd one-offs.

36:54And I was like, wait a minute, I can have that.

36:57Paul Ford:And I can have it easily and cheaply and I can run it safely on a website that I control. I can log into a Linux box and I can enjoy this. and then I found that I really did and I launched it and I organized all my stuff and I can search for old tweets and it feels really good. Just feels good. Do you feel like you're blogging onto a different internet than you were when you stopped doing it the last time? Oh my God, yes. First of all, like everything is bots. Like you're like, oh, if I'd seen these numbers, I would have had a panic attack 20 years ago. It's like, you know, like one, like hundreds of thousands of entities are looking at the site and none of them are human like and it swarms about like i had to get claude to diagnose probably what claude is doing um in the back but like i really had to figure it out because i needed to um the server kept coming down because i didn't have a really good and just a great caching strategy around recursive queries and big images.

38:00Paul Ford:So, you know, like I had to tighten stuff up. I have all this domain knowledge and it's fun to kind of wake it up. So parts of my brain that I haven't used in 20 years are suddenly perking up. I'm not a manager anymore. I'm building. And, um, but yeah, no, I mean, the web is, we all know what it is kind of a toxic stew of bots. People are pretty cruel to each other and we've all retreated to group techs and weird slacks. And, uh, I'm going to throw my hat back in the ring for a while until it feels really bad. And then I'll stop. I love that. So, all right, I'm gonna let you go. But what's what's your current or next cloud code project?

38:35One of the things that really resonated about your your times piece was this idea that I think you said I collect tales of software woe. And it's the sort of thing that I've heard from actually a couple of different AI based software founders who are like, I, what I want to do is is build tools that let people build the kind of tools that are too small and too pointless for anybody else to make. So give me a list of those things for you that you're working on, your software woe that you're trying to fix yourself. First of all, God knows my blog would fit into that category.

39:05Paul Ford:Sure, that's a good one. I built a synth. It's on GitHub. It's called AnySynth, and it's a little digital audio workstation because I wanted to. And it compiles to WebAssembly so that it actually kind of is running its own little C code in the browser. I'm working on a long-term project that I've neglected for a long time, extracting time-based data out of Wikipedia and aligning it with archive.org Wikipedia so that I can see big timelines of history with all the art objects and all the music that people made. That one's cool. That's going to be called unscroll.com. It's there now. It's just broken.

39:45Paul Ford:It's fun to work in public. I'm on a server just doing this. And nobody cares. that's another difference with the old web. Like no one's ever going to see anything until you literally scream it at them 7 ,000 times. Like everyone is tired. Yeah. The idea of somebody just like stumbling on your website is such a completely impossible thing now. It's literally, there's an enormous infrastructure to make sure it never, ever happens, right? Like it's just never going to happen. I am very conscious of the fact that I am creating systems to feed LLMs at this point, right? Like my blog is now a tasty morsel and that's what, that's where the swarm came from.

40:23Paul Ford:Um, and so I have a, um, I helped a friend who wanted to convert a really ugly government database into something more tractable of higher education. It's got the worst name ever. It's called iPeds, I P E D S. And I gave that a nice interface and brought it into a proper database. Um, I've got, uh, and so, but yes, for next, I think next will be the timeline project. And then also I built a tool. There's one, I've registered a domain, which I haven't done in a while, but I'm taking piano lessons because, you know, midlife crisis. And I realized that a good name for a piano practice management app would be To-Do List, L-I-S-Z-T.

41:04Paul Ford:Nice. So I got, yeah, I know. But, you know, my spouse just looks at me. She's just like, are we doing this again? Like we put this, it's been a long time. Are we really back here? We're so back, Paul. We're so, so back. So I don't know. I mean, part of me, especially if I didn't have to talk about it in public, it's just a honeymoon, right? Like it's everything I love about computers. I'm also going to throw this at you because I think you'll – I'm curious what you think. This was the promise. This was Xerox PARC. You're going to be able to open up a little book and you'll be able to manipulate everything in the book.

41:41Paul Ford:And you'll talk to it and interact with it. And it will do what you say and it will make you a system and you will get smarter and better. We've never been closer to that. And at the same time, I've never there's a profound cultural rejection of that moment for a lot of really good reasons. But it's also just this vast bummer because the thing that I just loved about the culture of technology, like nobody even wants to have that conversation because so much stuff around it is so toxic. I agree. And I think I think a lot about like, how would we have felt if Microsoft had invented the Internet and stood to be the only company profiting from it?

42:20How the development of the Internet would have been different? And the obvious answer is it would have been different and it would have been worse. and i and i think we are staring down the barrel of this is not this this is bringing us a lot of features that we have wanted for a very long time i think you're right that like obviously the the chat is not the ui for everything but there are things inside of these products that are what we have wanted computers to be for decades and will make everyone's computing lives easier but it is it is the way that they were created who stands to benefit the most and And the cavalier way with which they all seem to be approaching what this stuff might mean just makes people feel icky.

43:02So we're and this is part of why I wanted to talk to you. Right. Is it's so hard for me to divorce this feeling of what I get when I'm sitting here building software. I don't know how to build, but I am building it right next to I hate everything about everyone who is going to get rich and what this is doing in some data center. And I don't I don't know how to separate those.

43:21Paul Ford:No, and you and I get this really big cop out because we're able to be like, but I'm learning about it to share. I get to share it with everybody. And I'm doing my service while I play with shiny toys. This is what I tell myself. I'm going to write a story at the end of this so it's allowed. That's what I tell myself. We are enormous hypocrites, but I don't know how else to be right now if I'm going to really understand what's happening to the world. And I actually kind of – I don't really welcome people telling me I'm a horrible monster because I wrote about AI. But I do welcome people who want to resolve that hypocrisy.

43:54Paul Ford:I mean, I think there is the element of like, boy, it would be nice to just step back from this. There's also an element like maybe we should just be advocating for more and more stricter regulation all the time. I don't know. The tricky thing, too, is like, but then you talk to climate scientists and they're like, boy, I was finally able to cut through that hideous data set. And then you're just like, ah, yeah. This stuff matters and feels bad. And I don't know which of those wins or if we can ever pull those two things apart from each other. I guess what I would say, like, you and I are a couple of nerds and we're culture nerds, but we're nerds.

44:28Paul Ford:And it'd be really good if people could come into this conversation from worlds that are pretty resistant and realize that we think there's real value here. Like, I would love a couple poets to scream at me for a while or just like a few. I'd love to get like, just, I'd like this culture. This conversation needs to get broader because it will not go back in the box. And if the only thing you believe is put it back in the box, you're going to be really frustrated. So we should talk about that. But if it's going to be out of the box, what the hell are we going to do? Because it's also really cool.

45:00Paul Ford:And so this is an ugly wrestling match. Yep. And it's, yeah. And it's, but it is out of the box. I think that that is a thing you and I agree on. It is. there is no going back from here. For better or for worse, there's no going back. I know we're closing this up, but I would leave everyone with the question, like, how would you put it back in the box when most of the core technology is freely available and can run on your phone? And so, like, no servers need it. Like, we could be, you could destroy OpenAI Anthropic and DeepSeek, but it would still be out there. So it will not go away any more than, like, BitTorrent can go away.

45:41Yeah. I would argue we solve a lot of things by getting to the it just runs on my phone end state as quick as humanly possible. Yeah. But that is for another podcast. Paul, thank you so much. It was great to have you. Let's do this again sometime. I will answer your emails in, you know, nine months or so. All right, we're going to take a break. We'll be back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database.

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46:51Oh, hey. Sorry, love to chat, but I'm busy shopping all the rollbacks and more at Walmart. Grab a what? Cancel that. I got to grab these big savings on the Walmart app online and in store like right now. See who? Ugh. Nope, unavail. The only thing I want to see are the prices just lowered on Tech Home and all my must-haves. Wait, you want to shop Walmart with me? Alrighty, I think I can fit you in. K-Pop Demon Hunters, Saja Boys Breakfast Meal, and Huntrix Meal have just dropped at McDonald's. They're calling this a battle for the fans. What do you say to that, Rumi? It's not a battle. So glad the Saja Boys could take breakfast and give our meal the rest of the day.

47:35Paul Ford:It is an honor to share. No, it's our honor. It is our larger honor. No, really. Stop. You can really feel the respect in this battle. Pick a meal to pick a side. And participate in McDonald's while supplies last.

47:55All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the VergeCast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. The Verge's Dom Preston is here to help me with today's question. Dom, hello. How are you doing? You're just on a run of weird phones on the Vergecast. I love this. It is weird phone time of year, apparently. There's been a bunch of them. It is, in fact. We have a question that actually dovetails perfectly with something you and I have talked about pretty recently. So I'm just going to play the question. Let's get into it. Hi, this is Chris in LA.

48:28I was listening to the Friday show after Mobile World Congress, and I hadn't heard of most of these phones because I live in America. Like, I've never heard of Honor before. I think I'd heard of Techno, like, that week for the first time. And now I'm out here wondering, like, am I missing out on a better phone by living in the U.S.? I don't even necessarily know if there are mainstream features in other countries that don't, like, exist in the U.S. Is there mainly more global competition, like, at the low end or, like, for foldables or for niche stuff? but the top sellers around the world are generally similar to features on the top sellers in the US.

49:06Like, my iPhone is great. Even if my message was brought to Android, I would still probably pick an iPhone, at least today. And I'm not a huge foldable person. So am I just missing out on gimmicks like 240-watt charging and 200x digital zoom? Or are there mainstream features that are missing out on the stateside? I don't even know. Thanks. Okay, I think this is the perfect framing for this question. because we've talked about all the stuff that is available in other countries that's not available in the U.S., right? Like, do you want a phone that has features not available to you in the United States?

49:41Are there lots of those abroad? Of course, yes. The answer is tons of yes. But I think the question is, like, if you are a person in the United States in particular, are you missing something? Is there something important and valuable and meaningfully better in some way that you are missing out on by virtue of being in the United States. And I want to sort of roll up to that question. But you've seen a lot of weird phones. You've seen a lot of these things with new features and brands that only exist in, in some cases, like only in China and in some cases everywhere but the United States. What have you seen in this weird phone season that strikes you as sort of a particularly interesting new idea about

50:21Dominic Preston:smartphones? A lot of it has been in the concept stuff, right? The really interesting stuff is stuff that isn't even actually in products. We've got the caller mentioned Techno, who were at MWC, and they had this modular phone, but they had just a slightly different take on modular phones to what we'd seen before that felt very clever, but it's still not a real product. This is still just them saying, we found a better way of imagining what a modular phone might be, but we still can't build it at any meaningful scale and sell it, right? I think the stuff I've seen from Sony from the last few weeks and in general from the last six months, year or so, in terms of the non-US phone market.

50:56Dominic Preston:The biggest things are actually in a way boring, but it's big, boring, practical things that are nice to have, like better cameras and bigger batteries is honestly where a lot of it lies right now. Sure. Talk me through better cameras, because when I think about some of the phones we see, there are a lot of bizarre cameras, right? Like you've covered ones where the camera comes with a whole professional camera rig or camera comes with, you know, huge lens attachment. Is that the kind of stuff you're talking about or is there other camera work happening? There is definitely other camera work happening.

51:27Dominic Preston:So that stuff is fun. I really enjoy playing with these phones that are building on big gimmicky accessories that push the limits of what you can shoot with a phone and build more of that idea that what if the phone was kind of a camera body and you could slap more stuff on top and make it a semi-professional shooting device. But that's not what most people want. The caller mentioned, am I just missing out on gimmicks? Yeah, that kind of stuff is maybe gimmicky and you probably aren't going to spend an extra few hundred bucks on this kind of add-on telephoto lens that looks really kind of goofy when it's attached to your phone and you know even if you buy it you're not going to use it every day i think the bigger thing is particularly looking at the high and looking at the flagship space and looking at the ultra models so you've got this funny thing in the us where there's only one real ultra phone and it's samsung's phone um and they do an ultra every year and they kind of introduce this this banding this like above a flagship price category um in terms of bigger phones with better cameras, better zoom, things like that.

52:19Dominic Preston:The funny thing now is that when you look at the rest of the market, Samsung's Ultras don't feel very ultra. Samsung's Ultras feel like everyone else's regular flagships. And you've got then this space where you've got Xiaomi, Vivo, Oppo, Honor, Huawei, who are throwing out what they're calling ultra phones, which are a step more expensive than Samsung's generally. They're in the kind of, some of them are starting around the same places as Samsung's Ultra, but some of them are pushing$2 ,000 for kind of, you know, as you up storage and get add-ons and special things like that. But really, they're just going all in on cameras.

52:54Dominic Preston:And Samsung hasn't really touched his cameras in a meaningful way, even in the Ultra. The Ultra this time got some slight aperture tweaks, but it's fundamentally the same system. We're seeing really big main camera sensors, sometimes in megapixel count, 200 megapixels becoming very standard in these phones. But really, it's more about actual sensor size. One inch type sensors are very common, or sensors getting close to that size. There is no one in the US selling a phone with an image sensor that big. And these basically are just meaning you're getting one of the side effects of the bigger sensor is a lot more depth to images.

53:27Dominic Preston:You get this real camera feel where that kind of portrait mode thing of trying to get blurry backgrounds that has to be done digitally and various algorithms make that happening. It just kind of happens naturally. It's a funny thing that leap even, I remember this moment in low-end digital cameras when we went from the 1 over 2.8, the sort of standard digital camera CMOS sensor to the one inch sensor is like the leap in it feeling like a camera, like you said, is so enormous that there's all kinds of new stuff that becomes available just in that one physical sensor size leap. And like, I don't pretend to be a camera expert, but I have been trained over the years that the single best way to make a camera bigger is to make the sensor bigger.

54:09Like forget everything else, make the sensor bigger and you make the camera bigger. And a one inch sensor is actually, at least in my experience, a real sort of inflection point in the kinds of photos you can take. So that's a really interesting kind of big

54:21Dominic Preston:deal. And so what we're seeing now is I think you're right that that's a big inflection point. And part of the reason it feels that way is that the manufacturers have all said, cool, this is as big as we need to go. And I don't think Samsung and Sony are really making larger image sensors than that yet for phones. And the manufacturers, I don't think, are pushing them too because everyone's like this is great our main camera sensors are big enough these are wonderful now the race is can we make the ultra wide sensor bigger as well can we make the telephoto sensors bigger as well you know how many of these big sensors can we fit in a phone no one's putting in more than one one inch type sensor yet i was gonna say three one inch sensors it's like there's literally only so much physical room someone's gonna try they're working on it you know they are pushing the limits of what they could do here i mean so we saw this you know weird stuff like i afternoon she tried this phone but uh huawei had a phone uh last year called the pura 80 ultra um and the fun thing that that did was it wanted to have two telephotos but to save space on having two telephotos it just has moving lenses that share one sensor so it has two different telephoto lenses that move in and out from above the one larger sensor which allows them to fit in a bigger telephoto sensor than they could have if they were just doing two different telephotos genuinely This is kind of the same reason Xiaomi's looked at this continuous zoom.

55:37Dominic Preston:It's a Xiaomi 17 Ultra, where it's kind of getting the same thing of having two telephotos. It's just one lens with real zoom. But again, part of the point of that is instead of fitting in two telephoto sensors, we just have to do one. That means we can get a better one. And it's teeing them up to keep making them bigger and better down the line as they go. And this is really the race we're seeing right now. And I think telephotos in particular, I wrote a piece for our newsletter, The Step Back about this just before MWC, so maybe a month or so ago, about how the telephoto camera really outside of the US just feels like the place where everything is happening on smartphones.

56:09Dominic Preston:And let's go back to this, you know, the question we had was asking if they were just missing out on gimmicky 200 times Zoom. I said, the answer is no. Like, we are still seeing people pushing things like nothing the other week announced 140 times Zoom for its 4A Pro. I tried it at the launch event. It was terrible. It's blurry. There's AI filling the gaps. It doesn't look good. You're not going to get anything usable out of that. But what matters here is that three to five times range, maybe up to 10 times, suddenly you're getting really, really, really good photos. And you're getting photos that are as good as, maybe better than a lot of the main cameras you're going to get in a US flagship.

56:46Dominic Preston:So when I'm reviewing one of these ultra phones, when I'm reviewing a Xiaomi Ultra or Vivo Ultra, I honestly spend most of my time shooting on the telephoto because I find it's a more natural distance to shoot product shots, which I do for work food shots which i do and i'm out about taking photos of friends that kind of portrait distance um anything like that it creates a much more natural feel whereas i'm sure everyone's had that feeling of trying to take a photo of like something close up to them and you feel like wow my just the main camera is so zoomed out actually they're always kind of quite wide angled these days and they're still kind of moving the camera really in and it distorts things a little and the angles start to look with so the telephotos are getting this effect where actually you're getting incredible quality shots with natural bokeh and depth that do amazingly well in low light.

57:28Dominic Preston:You know, you're not getting a low light drop off from these telephoto cameras anymore. They are as good as the main cameras. If you want to go shoot complicated nighttime scenes, things like that. So you're really getting this feeling more and more of a complete camera system in these ultra level flagships where you can go between the main and the telephoto and feel there's just no quality drop-off whatsoever in almost any lighting video or stills and in some cases i think vivo and oppo the two brands pushing this side they're trying to do that for the ultra wide as well and trying to really make it feel like you can go between any of these three lenses and they're just going to do they're going to feel like the main camera in an iphone basically yeah that is a very compelling argument i thought like i look at some of these things you know the huge batteries and you've been playing with the new Oppo phone with the creaseless foldable.

58:17All that stuff strikes me as a good ideas, but sort of be obviously coming, right? Like the minute Samsung can do this, it will. And it might be a generation behind some of these Chinese companies in particular, just because of the way the manufacturing world works. And that's all fine and good. But like, I think if you're a U.S. customer, you don't need to feel deep, loathing jealousy for a creaseless Oppo phone. Like, I think it's fine. You will get that when it is time. It is just true that the camera is the most important thing on your phone right now. And the idea of it being not just slightly better because of AI processing, but like meaningfully physically better is, I think, a huge deal.

59:00And it makes me wonder, this is obviously a giant question we don't really have time to get into today, but why do you think that stuff hasn't come to the U.S.? It's not like it's a less competitive camera landscape in the U.S. Like, why is this not totally standard on every phone everywhere now? Every company, Apple on down, seems like it has every incentive to put the best camera it possibly can into its phone as fast as possible. I think there's a couple reasons.

59:28Dominic Preston:I mean, one is the U.S. brands prioritize the U.S. market above every other market. They are playing in other markets. Samsung and Google, particularly Samsung and Apple, are obviously big players globally. But they still see the U.S. as probably the biggest, most important market. And because the U.S. market is small, they can get away with pushing the boat out a bit less because they know they don't have this competition. They're not up against ultra kind of cameras in the U.S. market. They don't exist there. So Apple just has to look and be like, well, do we have a better camera or on a par with what Google and Samsung are doing?

1:00:03Dominic Preston:And that's what they're all looking at in terms of the US market. Obviously, they're thinking about other markets and where they get away with. Part of the benefit these guys have is they all have brand power, especially Apple, have this added cachet of just the brand. People are going to buy, a lot of people are going to buy the new iPhone Pro, regardless of whether it's the best camera on the market, because it's the best iPhone on the market. And that will be a big thing. um samsung and google have that cachet less internationally but still to some extent obviously in korea samsung does um then the second part of it i think for me is and this is especially an apple thing i wonder how much it from them is an aesthetic thing um because you know you look at these big ultra flagships and the one thing that unifies them is a design language which is they all have a big round black circle packed with lenses which takes up about a third of the back of a phone and juts half an inch out of it and they're just big monster giant these are already like 6.9 inch display phones they're quite thick they're bulky devices you know they're not like comically enormous these aren't like those energizer phones with crazy batteries in or anything but they're they're you know they are bulkier than a samsung ultra they're generally around the same size as an iphone pro max that's what you're kind of getting um and these brands are not generally trying to fit these kind of cameras into smaller phones we're beginning to see that a little bit, but still very tentatively.

1:01:25Dominic Preston:And there are compromises to the cameras as they do that. We're kind of not getting that true, true ultra camera in the smaller sizes. And yeah, they just look kind of ugly. I say this is someone who loves these ultra phones, who, if I just had to go right now and buy a phone for me, that was my phone every single day, and I didn't switch review devices all the time, I would probably think, yeah, all right, God, if it's the one I've got to use every single day for the next five years, I'm buying one of these ultras because I love the cameras too much. I'd struggle to give it up now. But I do it being like, I hate how ugly this thing is.

1:01:56Dominic Preston:And can you imagine Apple putting out an iPhone that just has this enormous camera sticking out of the back? I think already they get so much stick for how big the cameras on the iPhone pros are. And they're tiny compared to what we're seeing from these Chinese ultra phones. They're not on the same lead. So I think Apple in particular is just not going to do it until they can find some way to do it without completely compromising the aesthetics of the phone makes sense this also seems to me that if google had any guts at all and was at all actually interested in winning at hardware this is this is what they would do like google should just come out and just absolutely boat race everybody else's camera exactly yeah and be like look our phone's enormous it has the best camera you can buy let's fight like that's that's what google should be doing what does it have to lose like i get why apple wouldn't do this right if you're apple you have 20 years of this that you don't really want to undo by making a giant ugly phone what does google have to lose go make giant ugly phones google people want good cameras they already went and did the the big camera ball first which kind of feels like it's maybe making the space to do this and i have seen someone make the point that is apple's move to the camera plateau you know is this kind of about making the space inside that in future generations, they can start to do bigger cameras and stretch that out because now they've kind of set a new design language that does make more space for a bigger camera if they want to use it like that.

1:03:21Dominic Preston:The funniest one of them all is Samsung, who makes many of these image sensors that the Chinese rivals are packing in their phones and is not using its own best image sensor output. The phone building bit of Samsung is looking at the image sense a bit of Samsung and saying, we don't really want your best products. Like we're not interested in that. Right. But you can always find a company in China that will take it and do something weird. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. That, that, that Samsung piece of it feels like a perfect explanation of the whole thing that's going on here.

1:03:51And I hope more people make more weird phones. I think like to the caller's question, right, this feels like a good way of looking at the whole story because on the one hand, I think there is a case to be made that the most sort of sensibly thought out, correctly put together mainstream devices either originate in the US or sort of are made for the US market. Like that is, it is the most mainstream of mainstream phones. So the question of like, am I missing something mainstream is probably not because the US is the mainstream market in so many ways. But if you want to see what's next, and I think more importantly, if you just want to have more options, like options are good.

1:04:30And if you want a giant ass phone with a giant ass camera, you should be able to have that. And that's the thing that I think sucks about the US market is that literally, it is not available to you, right? Like if you want to buy a weird phone, I believe it is your right as a human to buy a weird phone. And it's just a shame that that's not available to everybody. Last thing before I let you go here, out of all these weird phones you've seen, is there anything that just grabs you personally, emotionally? You're like, this is a dumb feature. No phone needs it, but I love it with my whole heart and I want it really bad.

1:05:00what what has captured your heart in the last few weeks okay this is uh something we're seeing a few

1:05:06Dominic Preston:of the the chinese oems work on at the moment i think particularly oppo and honor are the two really pushing this and they are taking picking up where google kind of like has done it's like oh we can figure out like a kind of awkward back-end way to make airdrop work and they're like all right hold my beer because like the honor magic v6 has come out and been like okay it supports all the features of airpods so you'll get that like quick pairing you can see the airpods in the us all of this stuff it supports find my for airpods not any other find my but it will support just the find my for your airpods nothing else uh you can do notification syncing with apple devices you can do file sharing with apple devices so they've got all this access behind apple's walled garden somehow through just kind of accessing the back end stuff that apple like has not quite been able to lock down in in the way that we all thought it was and they've all figured out and every announcement there's some new bit that they've chipped away and they're like oh now we've added this and now you can do this but my favorite bit of it all is you can just do direct screen sharing of somebody so on if you get an oppo or an honor foldable you can screen share and remote control your mac to the phone so you can then turn your foldable phone into a tiny little foldable macbook and have the full mac os on this minuscule screen that you're trying to like use the bottom part of the foldable phone as the trackpad and it's an awful experience i i used it you know tried it for review and thought this sucks you could i could see it in like an absolute pinch like i really desperately need to you know do this one thing on my mac and i can remote into it uh you would never do it for anything more than that because it's the worst experience in the world but i love that i can make my foldable phone into this tiny little macbook i especially love that because there is no world in which apple lets you do that with the iphone fold whenever it appears No, even though it should.

1:06:54Apple, listen. Yeah, okay, Dom, first of all, A, lead with that next time. That's the answer here. Listen, buy this weird Chinese phone and you can use your Mac on your phone. Hell yeah. Also, that, like, this whole, we're going to have to do some more digging into all of this quick share airdrop stuff because there is a weird falling of the walled garden thing here that Apple is either unable to stop or just not choosing not to fight against. that I find utterly fascinating. And it feels like all of these different companies are poking in all of these different directions. And if they can just get far enough, they start to make really interesting enroads among Apple users in a way that I think could end up being really, really important.

1:07:37Dominic Preston:Well, the funny one is Honor has really actively, publicly started pitching, at least in China. It's Magic V6 foldable, which has all these kind of Apple integrated features. They're not saying like, ditch your iPhone by this. they're saying you've probably got an iPhone from work like buy this as your personal phone because you're already in Apple this way you're you're this can be your second phone it connects to your iPhone it connects to your MacBook that's your iPad but like we know you're an Apple user and we know you're not going to fully give up the iPhone but like have this foldable as well and it will do all this other stuff and that's a niche they're targeting a very affluent niche right but there's people in that space that they might be able to win over that's really interesting All right, Dom, thank you as always.

1:08:17I promise you can be done talking about MWC now. That's a lie. I don't promise that, but at least for now. For another few days. Thank you. Thank you as always. All right, that's it for the show. As you can see, I am back. The power is not. We soldier on. Thank you to Paul and Dom for being here on the show with me. Thank you to you as always for watching and listening. If you have questions or feelings or you want to talk about vibe coding, I think the conversation I had with Paul has left me thinking about a lot of stuff and I'm curious to hear how you react to it too. As always, call the hotline 866-VERGE-11.

1:08:49Send us an email, vergecast at theverge.com. We love hearing from you. This show is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced today by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchuk. We will be back on Friday. Lord willing, I will have power and Neil and I will be back to talk about the AirPods Max, which just dropped, a bunch of other news, all the AI stuff and everything else going on. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.