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- [00:01]
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- [00:42]
Nilay Patel
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- [01:31]
David Pierce
How's it going?
- [01:32]
Nilay Patel
We just got finished watching Samsung's unpacked event. There's a lot to talk about here. We got some new phones, we got foldables, we got flippables, we got watches, we got all kinds of stuff. This I just want to preface. Nilay was maybe the most impressive product introduction I have seen in 2026, and I'm very excited to tell you why. But first I want to know, wait,
- [01:58]
David Pierce
was it because Spider man was there? His favorite part of the whole thing?
- [02:02]
Nilay Patel
There was a brief moment where I thought, oh good, we're not going to get that deeply awkward moment. At every Samsung event, something weird happens and no one knows what to do about it.
- [02:12]
David Pierce
Honestly, the reason I agreed to do this live stream with you was because Samsung can't help itself. Like, I know Samsung can't help itself. And watching you go through it is very important to me.
- [02:21]
Nilay Patel
I really appreciate that. Yeah, one of the great moments was that they brought on, um, what's his name? Jacob Somebody. No, no. Yes. Jacob Batalon, who plays Ned in the Spider man movies. He did what I would call like a reasonably normal product integration. He explained why his character would use a Galaxy device, which. Sure, fine. And. And then for like eight seconds, just there was Spider man. And then they went right back to it. We were going to play the clip, but I. No one needs to Live through that ever again. But I do want to talk about these phones, Nilay, because I think the reason I am so compelled by this particular event is that I think Samsung did a thing I have been waiting for it to do for years, which is explain why you would want any of these devices, why you would want a device that folds, why you would want a device that's a different size that folds, why you would want a phone that flips. It actually, like, attempted to make a case for these kinds of devices. I want to talk about it, but first I need you to do something very important for me.
- [03:23]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [03:23]
Nilay Patel
I need you to rank the folding types. We have wide, we have tall, and we have flip. Those are the three phones. We're going to get into them, but I want to do them in the order in which you are excited about the size and shape. So we have tall, foldable, the TV remote, we have wide, foldable, the passport, and we have flip phone. Which do you want to be first?
- [03:43]
David Pierce
I'm going ranking best to worst.
- [03:46]
Nilay Patel
Yes.
- [03:47]
David Pierce
My personal best to worst. Everyone else can make up their minds. I gotta go wide, flip, tall. And there's probably a novelty bias here because wide is the newest and maybe it will make my heart sing in new and exciting ways. Although Dom Preston from our team wrote it up, he saw it, he's held it in person, he's used it, obviously. He's used some of the Chinese wide foldables that came out first. And he's like, this thing is way better in person than in any of the photos. And I get it. And I'm kind of excited about the squatter form factor when it's folded, when you use it that way. And then like the big decision to open it up, you know, and be like, I'm gonna. I'm gonna watch a video sideways, whatever that thing is. Yeah, that's my ranking. But I'm assuming there's some novelty bias here.
- [04:32]
Nilay Patel
My ranking is the same. I also think it's possible that there is some novelty bias. But that thing that Dom described in his piece for us, which is looking at the thing, it feels kind of short and kind of fat. And you think, well, this probably won't be as comfortable to hold in my hand as a longer, skinnier phone might be. And then you pick it up and it feels normal and natural. That reaction seems to have been everyone's reaction. I've been reading stories, I've been. I've been watching some of the videos like this. This is a phone that was made available to A lot of people in the last couple of weeks, almost everybody seems to have had the reaction of picking it up and being like, oh, this is actually maybe the exact right shape for this because it's a little shorter. I can reach it with. I can reach most of the screen with my thumb, which turns out kind of important on a phone. Um, it, it makes it, it's 1610 on the outside, so it's a little squatter than normal. And it's a, it opens up to a 4 by 3 screen on the inside. Both of those. In a way, if you're just going to say I have one screen for everything. Right. That feels roughly correct to me. And this is the thing Samsung spent a long time trying to make the case for that. You open it up and you can watch movies with less letterboxing. You can play Giant Fortnite, which they really like. Held for an applause moment that did not come, which I thought was very funny. But there's this sense of, I think everybody has spent the last several years trying to figure out the right middle ground for foldables. You want something that is phone ish on the outside, but a properly usable phone on the inside as well. And this, this just seems like the right, or at least the most right answer we have had so far. Even though again, like looking at a picture right now, it does look a little squat and a little fat. But I am trusting everyone who has used it. Neither of us have used it, but I am trusting everyone who has. Who says this thing seems to feel right in your hand very quickly.
- [06:29]
David Pierce
It is a remarkable consensus of vibes. Right. Obviously everyone's got to get the phone, we got to review them, we're going to do all that. But the early vibes are, oh, this was the right size and shape. I will give credit to Samsung for retconning its way into an explanation for why it's the right size and shape. The Chinese makers have been doing this. There's lots of rumors that Apple's about to do this. Samsung's like, have you ever thought about making it a little shorter and then opening up to 4 by 3? And it's like you could have done this anytime in the past several years. You waited until the market told you what to do and then you did. In classic Samsung fashion.
- [07:05]
Nilay Patel
Yes, very much so. So I actually, I wrote down the, the sequence of events that they imagine will transpire on this phone. Samsung is, is very determined to tell you how you use your phone in these events, which I always get a kick out of but again, genuine kudos for going way out of their way to be like, here is the purpose of this device in this specific way. And the, the wide fold this which is the, the Z Fold eight. And we're going to get into the names because as ever, Samsung's naming systems make me angry and they don't make any sense. But here we are. So this is the Z Fold eight and the way that they described it is basically purely as a content device. And, and the beginning of the flow is you're on the outside screen and you're watching Instagram Reels or YouTube shorts. That was like, this is what everyone does on their phone all of the time. We're just gonna start there. So you watch it and you watch it normally it looks more or less like a normal phone. That's actually a little bit complicated because these companies are going to have to do a little bit of work to adapt to this screen in a way that makes sense.
- [08:06]
David Pierce
They did immediately announce that Instagram has partnered with them on adapting the Instagram app, which is not a thing Apple will be able to do in a few months time.
- [08:12]
Nilay Patel
I think that is correct. So that's great and that's fine, that's going to work. And then the idea is you open it up to dive in further is essentially the idea. And on the one hand you can see it bigger. On the other hand you can see video on the left, comments on the right. And she said something along the lines of. Because half the fun of the video is seeing if, if everyone agrees with your reaction, which sure, fine, sure, you can, you can then expand it to fill more of the screen and then you can, you can start to dive in and make stuff yourself. And then they go through the whole creation flow, right? And that's side by side editing so you can, you can see the changes you're making in real time as you make them. Like again, this is, this is a real argument about how a person might actually use their phone. That makes some sense to me. I don't know if this is the one user flow that justifies buying a $1,900 phone, which is what this costs. But it's like I kind of get it. I get why this is appealing and why it would be useful to have more screen available to me when I
- [09:13]
David Pierce
open the phone based on the same argument as the tall foldable.
- [09:17]
Nilay Patel
So yes and no. Um, well, and this, this is what I mean by Samsung doing a good job explaining the difference. The way Samsung seems to see it is that the Tall Foldable is for using two apps side by side foundationally. That is the thing. It is a productivity device. I, I think that's fine. Right. And I, I, they, they, they explain well why this might be useful, what you might use it for. The all of the things were like work related that they imagine the Tall Foldable as extremely productivity focused and, and then the, the wide foldable is the more casual content based one. And again all of this is like made up nonsense about phones. And the reality is everything is everyone is, is to all the time. But at least they're starting to draw a stink, a distinction that makes a little bit of sense to me. You would not want to use two apps side by side on the Z Fold 8 because they would both be squat and there's not quite enough space. But the, but the, the idea of being able to sort of move in and out of this like side by side experience into there's a little more screen, it's a little more immersive, like there's something here for me. I don't know.
- [10:24]
David Pierce
Yeah, I like that you're so taken with the, there's a little more screen to watch video and what happened bigger. Right. Like there's something to that. It's a very normal use case. I was more struck by how they, you know, in the way that everybody has to do it now. They talked a lot about AI and then at the end of the event, you know, Rick Ostler was out to talk about Google Gemini Task Automation, which is yet another horrible name. And my. Because it's launching for real now.
- [10:52]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, right.
- [10:53]
David Pierce
On these phones you can just say hey Gemini, do a thing and it'll bop around your phone and do stuff for you. However slowly or quickly it can actually do those things. And it just struck me that the smaller screen, the more squat size of The Z Fold 8 might be the AI device everyone wants. Like you have a little phone, it's littler and you can just tell it what to do and maybe it will do that stuff. And then when you want a phone you open it up and it's a phone and like there's something about that, that particular size and shape where I'm like oh, maybe it would drive me to just ask the phone to do things. And it's not really about opening it up to see the comments on TikTok, although I will certainly end up doing that because I think they're right that I do want to see the comments on TikTok.
- [11:39]
Nilay Patel
But that's their argument for the flip like, and this is where it's possible they're solving a two device problem with three devices that actually what we need is two form factors and not three. But the big part of the argument for the flip is this is a phone you can put away, right? Like they spent a lot of time talking about it as a way to just ask your agents to go do stuff on your behalf and go about your life.
- [12:05]
David Pierce
That's a lot of trust in agents. Like I'm not there, like I need a little more screen, you know what I mean? Yeah.
- [12:09]
Nilay Patel
I also think it was very funny. One of the notes I wrote down in the middle of this is Samsung has developed a very good argument for the hardware here and why you need these different things and what they might accomplish in your life. No one knows what AI is for. And even still it's like they ran the same two tropes that everybody runs out every time, right? It's, it's for planning trips and buying tickets to things, which is a not a like particularly complicated multi step activity. To buy concert tickets. Like you just buy the concert tickets.
- [12:40]
David Pierce
Well, it depends. If you're like robot, go fight with the scalpers and the queues, like, sure, like maybe that's the future.
- [12:48]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. But I think, but even in general, you know, Rick Osterlo gets up and he's like, we, we have 40 new apps for making all of your AI stuff work. And then he, I think the list was retail reservations, travel event tickets, which if you think about it is buying stuff. Buying stuff, Buying stuff and buying stuff.
- [13:04]
David Pierce
Every Google demo ends in a transaction. They can't not do it. They have to point out all of that data center investment is going to pay off because they will take tiny slices of your transactions.
- [13:14]
Nilay Patel
We will automate your shopping cart process is essentially the limit of agentic AI at this point.
- [13:19]
David Pierce
Right? But that's. What is that? Ticketmaster, Uber, Doordash, Resi, Expedia. Expedia, right. And it's like, all right, well those, I'm sure those apps are gonna have something to say, but fine, if that's the limit of what agentic AI can do today, fine. But I don't think, I don't trust it on a flip phone. Like every time I use a flip I'm like, this is so cool. If only I had the discipline to use this tiny cover screen, right, to check stuff. Because that's kind of their vibe, right? Is there's the new AI Power Summary and the cards and the like the little widget that tells you to drink more water.
- [13:54]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. Because they're doing a lot of work to get you sort of in and out of your phone more quickly.
- [13:58]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [13:59]
Guest/Producer
And.
- [13:59]
David Pierce
But the whole app ecosystem has to participate or you have to fully participate in the Galaxy Health ecosystem. Right. Which I just don't want to do. I'm sorry, I just don't want to do that. And all of that is it. It's gesturing in a future that isn't here yet, where all of the AI can read all the databases and present you with these neat and tidy summaries on a tiny little screen. And I just, I don't think that's here yet. I think that might be a vision of the future that might come one day, but it's not here yet. And so this middle size, where it's a phone but like an uncomfortable phone to use, will like usher some of that discipline in while the rest of it comes up. And then when you need a phone, you can open it and just like use a phone. And there's something about that size and shape that I wish the industry had coalesced on earlier.
- [14:47]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [14:48]
David Pierce
And I'm quite excited to see what happens both with the Z Fold 8, which we should point out is very expensive at $1,900. And obviously in a few months Apple's going to attack the same form factor. And whether or not this is the form factor that lets AI become more of a primary interface, I think is a good and interesting open question. Because certainly this will be the form factor that most people at the high end of the Android ecosystem encounter. Gemini. And certainly it will be the form factor that most people behind of the Apple ecosystem encounter. Whatever. Siri AI. And that looks like the battle to me.
- [15:22]
Nilay Patel
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.
- [15:37]
Guest/Producer
Right.
- [15:37]
Nilay Patel
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. And I think what Samsung showed here is that if you make real effort to make this stuff make sense on 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 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 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 really pushed after it.
- [16:42]
David Pierce
You think they should have killed the Z Fold Ultra 8 Ultra?
- [16:46]
Nilay Patel
I do. I think the 8 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. 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.
- [17:21]
David Pierce
We have to talk about that at length, by the way.
- [17:23]
Nilay Patel
Let's get to that in one second. But I think this is, 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, okay, 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. 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.
- [18:07]
David Pierce
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. Yeah. And so you can't have compromises at
- [18:21]
Nilay Patel
20% 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, 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.
- [18:53]
David Pierce
We should talk about the battery. It might be the most interesting thing about these phones in a real way.
- [18:58]
Nilay Patel
Make the case.
- [18:59]
David Pierce
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. Like 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. Because if you will recall, Samsung has had pretty enormous problems with their phones. Lighting on fire.
- [19:36]
Guest/Producer
Yeah.
- [19:36]
Nilay Patel
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.
- [19:56]
David Pierce
We'll see. I had, we, we. 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.
- [20:03]
Nilay Patel
I respect that, actually.
- [20:05]
David Pierce
But this is the first sort of mainstream US phone with a new battery chemistry. And if it is the vanguard of longer life, lower power, more efficient, smaller size, that is incredible. Straightforwardly incredible. And I would like to see more battery chemistry development for enormous number of reasons, not just phones like EVs, 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. It is a pretty conservative application of the new technology. But it is fascinating to see that Samsung has decided to make the leap.
- [20:50]
Nilay Patel
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, 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 there. It, it can wear more over time. And I think Samsung is right to say this is still relatively new technology. 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.
- [22:05]
David Pierce
How do you feel about a $2,100 phone? A $2,000 phone whose battery might wear down faster than a traditional battery?
- [22:15]
Nilay Patel
Bad, Nilay. Real, real, real bad.
- [22:19]
David Pierce
I don't know. If you buy like a Ferrari, you're like, if I run it real hard, it'll explode.
- [22:22]
Nilay Patel
Like, I mean, this is the thing, right? Like, I, I. 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 this in the same way that that chain never gets you to I should spend the money for the iPhone.
- [22:41]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
I don't know, man.
- [22:42]
David Pierce
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.
- [22:49]
Nilay Patel
I know.
- [22:50]
David Pierce
Which is, I mean, money solves all problems. But I'm just pointing it out. I mean, that, that was like one of those moments where, you know, they're trying to make the argument for the form factors. And I can vibe code an app or my fictional character can vibe code an app. 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. 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.
- [23:26]
Nilay Patel
Yep.
- [23:26]
David Pierce
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 I. All of that is wide open. I think it's. It's, like, worth noting if you spend the money. You're at the bleeding edge of technology here in a very specific way.
- [23:51]
Guest/Producer
Yeah.
- [23:51]
Nilay Patel
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. I'm very confident that it will work. I. I do think you're taking a. You're taking a risk on the first version of it.
- [24:11]
David Pierce
I mean, I'll make it. The comparison. It's different. It's definitely different. And 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. 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.
- [24:55]
Nilay Patel
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 see.
- [25:02]
David Pierce
Just.
- [25:04]
Nilay Patel
Just go on several planes. Who knows?
- [25:06]
David Pierce
We're gonna rent a Cessna and then, like, panic for an hour.
- [25:11]
Nilay Patel
Can I ask you how you feel about the word nightography, which I felt
- [25:15]
David Pierce
bad about nightography for years.
- [25:17]
Nilay Patel
Okay. It's just every time I see that word, it really. It just gives me, like, a visceral yuck face. 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. Um, but, but they, 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. Um, 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 Nilay just throws his computer into the sea. What if the future of photography is you don't even take pictures?
- [26:03]
David Pierce
Yeah, you just tell the AI to capture everything around you.
- [26:06]
Nilay Patel
You think, gosh, it would be great to have a picture and it takes it and it does it. That'd be so fun.
- [26:10]
David Pierce
I mean, that is where the camera companies have wanted to go for some time, 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. Yes, it's just real everywhere. The idea that 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, fair. So I think like, it's a good camera is like all they really need to say at this point. And this sort of like Gen Z, Gen Y camera culture is about point and shoot cameras with flashes right now. So what are you going to do? Like, you can't compete with that.
- [27:21]
Nilay Patel
Yes, that's very true. There was one of them. I think it was 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 gonna feel like a phone. It's fine.
- [27:40]
David Pierce
I watched three different TikTok videos over the past week of people adjusting the settings on their Canon point and shoots by rotating the dials and going through those men 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 they don't, people don't want this other thing. They're chasing this other look. Which is good.
- [28:01]
Nilay Patel
Yes. And I, yeah. 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 a, 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 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
- [29:07]
David Pierce
same way, at least in this country.
- [29:09]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, but to, 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, 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. But you start to see these companies are starting to understand the way the winds are changing.
- [29:33]
Guest/Producer
Right.
- [29:34]
Nilay Patel
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 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 incursion on their lives and mad about the algorithmic stuff. And like everybody not using the screen
- [30:12]
David Pierce
time controls in your phone.
- [30:13]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, they would just. They would. 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 sense.
- [30:29]
David Pierce
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 COVID screen summarized more things for you?
- [30:54]
Nilay Patel
Sure.
- [30:54]
David Pierce
Do you know what I mean? And so 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 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, we have a summarization machine. 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, maybe not.
- [31:31]
Nilay Patel
That's. It's very possible that that is the case. Also, I would point out that it's not called the COVID screen. It's called the flex window. Um, and that's. That's two words. Camel. Or it's one word, camel cased. And it's very important to me and to them that you can.
- [31:44]
David Pierce
And the hinge is called the armor hinge. Yes. And it's.
- [31:48]
Nilay Patel
And it's all part of One UI 9 on the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 8 I hate these names. It's too many words. I can't do it anymore.
- [31:59]
David Pierce
There's a little more to say, but I feel like I have to ask this now because you mentioned Samsung making its face for one.
- [32:04]
Nilay Patel
Actually, before you do, we have an ad to play. 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.
- [32:18]
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- [33:23]
Nilay Patel
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- [34:54]
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- [35:22]
Nilay Patel
All right, we're back. Nei, you were.
- [35:23]
David Pierce
All right, here's my wrap up questions on the phones and you gotta. We gotta talk about the watches and everything else. All right. We talked a lot about how Samsung has made its case for foldables. We've avoided thus far. But presumably in September, Apple's gonna put out an iPhone that folds in exactly the same way. I'm gonna ask you a question that my friend Casey Newton asks us all the time. Uh, did Samsung show anything here that would make one person buy a Samsung phone instead of the iPhone that they already have?
- [35:54]
Nilay Patel
Yes.
- [35:54]
David Pierce
Okay.
- [35:55]
Nilay Patel
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.
- [36:06]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [36:06]
Nilay Patel
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, right?
- [36:16]
David Pierce
Apple's like, we need to fight with the EU about AI. You can have stupid Airdrop pretty much.
- [36:23]
Nilay Patel
But I think in general, Gemini is vastly better than Siri. Even what we've seen from Siri AI so far. The, the. What do they call it now? Nudge. All of these little things that appear in the. In sort of 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 to 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. 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 these. 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, they don't return what they need to in order. I, I have a hard time imagining what it would take for me to tell you to spend twice as much on your next phone. 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, the Z flip just because it's only $1,200. It is, it is some of this stuff in a vastly cheaper form factor. Uh, 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. 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 buy the iPhone because it's so obviously the best foldable. Samsung did a relatively good job of that today.
- [39:00]
David Pierce
I think, I mean that 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.
- [39:10]
Nilay Patel
It's just the price, man. Like it's. I, I think you would have been right if they had figured out a way to stop selling them for $1,800 and more.
- [39:18]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [39:19]
Nilay Patel
And, and the iPhone also is going to cost that too. And like it turns out price matters. Right. Like, not a lot of people bought the Vision Pro because it's $3,500. 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 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.
- [39:47]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Right.
- [39:48]
Nilay Patel
Like people are price sensitive. People are going to buy the things that are more stable and more familiar and cases cheaper. These things are just going to lose until they can compete on price. And you can maybe talk me into like $100 or $200 more. Like if you had the, the base at $800, the Pro at a thousand and the foldable at $1200, you start to be somewhere. But doubling the price, you're, you're nowhere. I just don't think it's ever going to happen at that price.
- [40:15]
David Pierce
Yeah. I'm very curious to see how Apple prices its phones, but I think that 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. It's going to frustrate a lot of people who know that Samsung has been shipping folding phones for a long time.
- [40:34]
Nilay Patel
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.
- [40:43]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
We're here.
- [40:44]
Nilay Patel
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.
- [40:53]
David Pierce
That.
- [40:54]
Nilay Patel
That is exactly the problem. Should we talk about the watches?
- [40:56]
David Pierce
We should quickly talk about the watches.
- [40:58]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. You, you are a noted Apple watch ultra believer. Are you wearing, are you wearing yours right now?
- [41:04]
David Pierce
I am, but the Apple. You know when in 27 this thing is gone. So I got to Get a new one. So I'm in the market. Although our ecosystem lock in is going to drive me exactly to one option.
- [41:15]
Nilay Patel
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. The Ultra 2 I think is more interesting again in terms of who Samsung imagined this for. They made a bunch of noise about divers. It has spec for diving accessories that it adheres to. It does nitrogen absorption monitoring. They have a partnership with a well known company that makes a diving app. They, they, 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 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 Vee 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 four days plus three or four days which I think would be a big deal. I don't think this watch is particularly attractive. It's kind of big and blocky and undesigned in a certain way to my eyes. But I don't know. What do you make of this thing?
- [42:40]
David Pierce
I agree with you on the design piece. Right. Like the idea that watches are for tasks is challenging.
- [42:46]
Nilay Patel
Sure.
- [42:47]
David Pierce
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 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. And then you have these products which are gigantic and they're. It feels like they're only going to keep getting bigger in very specific ways and, and getting more powerful. And then you're like what, what am I doing with this giant computer on my wrist? Maybe the answer is like having a great time. I know a lot of people want a giant computer on their wrist.
- [43:32]
Nilay Patel
I just keep looking at These pictures and it's, it's one of our comments. There's 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, 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.
- [43:56]
David Pierce
Yeah. I mean 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, which is fine. The thing that gets me about all these watches is again, the thing that most people love about their smart watches is the health and fitness features. And there's just a lot of competition in form factor there. Yeah. Like there, there just is.
- [44:19]
Nilay Patel
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 management of that on my phone.
- [44:28]
David Pierce
Yeah. Here's the whooping. There's a reason. I mean, I find this thing bananas. But the CEO of Whoop is coming on decoder soon and we're going to talk about. But you can see that there's that. Right. If. If 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've maybe lost that plot a little bit. Yeah, right. I think I agree with that. And these screenless devices are coming out to take it over and then it's like, okay, what is the smartwatch for? And we should put a big processor in it. 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. So does this thing actually compete with the Apple Watch? No, it doesn't.
- [45:39]
Nilay Patel
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 this 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. That they're just like. 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. They have 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 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. 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 ones.
- [47:08]
David Pierce
Look, you tuned into a Vergecast livestream at 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. We got to touchscreens, 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. But. And that stuff is a dead end. It is true. On the meta glasses with the neural band. It. It. It's just, like, ever. It just unwires people's brains in a way that's like, can I just use my phone? I just use my phone.
- [48:09]
Guest/Producer
Right.
- [48:10]
David Pierce
And until you get to, like, literally, like, reaching out and pointing and clicking, which runs into all kinds of other problems. Steve Jobs used to call it gorilla arms. Yeah, whatever, man. Like, I. The industry is chasing this stuff, and it is willfully forgetting the things it knows about user interface paradigms.
- [48:26]
Nilay Patel
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 probably do for a lot of that. Yeah, exactly. And it turns out that is worth pushing back towards in. 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 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, pinch 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 deal out of 5,000 nits of brightness.
- [49:12]
David Pierce
No, but, you know, I don't. I'm not. I'm not, like, climbing Everest.
- [49:15]
Nilay Patel
It's 2,000 more nits, Neil.
- [49:17]
David Pierce
I'm good, man. Like, I'm. I'm turning down the brightness of my watch all the time. I have a baby, you understand? Like, the baby's like, do you want me to sleep or do you want me to pot this watch like that? Those are our choices.
- [49:27]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, that's fair. I do think some of the 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'm. I hate you. Like, 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. I'm like I'm aware. Thank you Google Health. 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 too. 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 it is interesting to see Samsung really dive after this in the same way. I mean there is a certain amount of just doing what Apple's doing here. Like they launched a Galaxy card, you know what I mean?
- [50:42]
David Pierce
Oh wait, by the way, come on,
- [50:44]
Nilay Patel
that was the funniest part of the whole thing where again the moment where he said stablecoins 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.
- [50:59]
David Pierce
And he's like yeah, that's very good.
- [51:03]
Nilay Patel
Terrific.
- [51:04]
David Pierce
I look, I, I health and fitness wise ever everyone is chasing woo. Like I don't, you can't be clear 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 and particularly about whether or not AI is a good, 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, that's going to 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 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. But and now Samsung can be like Samsung Health AI is going to 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 11pm 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?
- [52:12]
Nilay Patel
And the fact that they're all essentially identical products at this point is completely irrelevant because of the ecosystem thing.
- [52:18]
Guest/Producer
Right?
- [52:19]
Nilay Patel
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.
- [52:26]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [52:26]
Nilay Patel
And that's. 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. Like, they're not competitors.
- [52:37]
David Pierce
Yeah. I mean, this is gonna be the. This is the fight that maybe AI overcomes. Maybe. I don't know, man.
- [52:45]
Nilay Patel
If. If Gemini, it becomes the ecosystem unto itself, we get into a really interesting place. I don't think that's happening at. Anytime soon.
- [52:53]
David Pierce
It does not seem like it's happening anytime soon.
- [52:55]
Nilay Patel
All right, we should get out of here. But I will say I think the reviews for these devices are going to be really fascinating 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, but also cleaner and crisper. There was a very cool video of how they laid out the screens so that it's much more uniform now. Like, 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. 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 actual expansion of size on the fold in particular make sense? These feel like unknown phones to me 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. And I kind of have no idea how it'll land.
- [54:08]
David Pierce
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.
- [54:28]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. So these funds are shipping August 7th. I think everything that was announced today is shipping August 7th. 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. Nilay, it's been a pleasure seeing you. We don't talk about gadgets enough. We should talk about gadgets more.
- [54:50]
David Pierce
Now the actor who plays Spider Man.
- [54:53]
Nilay Patel
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 this happen. Thank you to all of you for being here watching and listening and commenting. That's it. That's the Vergecast. Neali Rock and roll.