Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Quick Share, which is kind of like AirDrop only different. I'm your friend David Pierce. I am joined by two of our friends in the New York studio, Neil Patel. Hello, sir.
Quick Share is European AirDrop.
Exactly. It's European miles.
It works the same, but all the numbers are slightly different and none of it matters all that much. Anyway, we are here because today is Pixel Day. Google, in its inimitable wisdom, has chosen yet another deeply bizarre way to launch a bunch of its new products. It told us about these products a while back. They're launching this morning, and then there's a big event with Trevor Noah tonight that V, I believe you have been conscripted into attending. Correct.
I'm excited for you. How are you?
Trevor is a delight. You're going to love it.
The Jimmy Fallon event last year was, I would say, borderline awkward enough that it was maybe not a great time. I feel like Trevor Noah will at least be a good time.
I lost my mind last year watching Jimmy Fallon, especially when he held the phone upside down and then clapped his hands like a seal saying Tensor.
Oh my gosh. Yeah. Look, there's a thing happening that we should just say out loud. There's the event for nerds to hold phones and write about specs. That's our event. Then there's what you have to do to get hundreds of videos that are like, 'Come with me to Google's Pixel event where Jimmy Fallon says the word Tensor for money.'
Those paths are diverging inside of us. There are two wolves, right? There's the creator money, which maybe we should go get, and then there's like doing the news. And I think Google is just like, 'Screw it. We got to split them up,' because I think they tried to do them both at the same time last year and it drove everybody bananas.
No, the embargo was still earlier than the event last year and everyone thought we broke embargo and it's like no, no, no.
They think that this year too. Don't worry about it.
Oh yeah, I know. But we didn't.
It's all been very complicated.
It's... You know what? It's not in Brooklyn Navy Yard this year. I don't have to trek to the most isolated part in Brooklyn that is accessible by ferry and like the F via York Street. I can go to Hudson Yards, which is like the other inaccessible part where no...
Well, now you know where V is going to be tonight.
Everybody go say hi to V, but be cool about it. We should talk about all the stuff that they launched. So, there's a new line of Pixel phones, there's a new Pixel Watch, there's a new Pixel Tag, there's a foldable phone, there's a couple of like little software announcements we should talk about. But we should start with the phones, right? And to frame some of what we're about to get into, our friend and current contributor David Al went and saw these phones. He is like gallivanting in Europe somewhere right now, so he couldn't be on the show, but he went and saw the phones and he made a hands-on video. We're going to show it to you right now. And then we're going to dive into these phones.
Camera bar. So, it's a little more, you know, edge to edge there. The glass on the cameras is straight across the camera. It's very edge to edge now. And overall, these phones are just a little nicer and a little more refined than they were previously. Another new feature on the Pixel 11 Pro that replaces the temperature sensor from last year is the new highlight feature. Highlight is effectively a little visual LED that glows when you're talking to Gemini and when you get calls from your favorite contacts. There aren't a ton of hardware changes this year in the phones, but there are a lot of changes in the software. On the pros here, you are getting a 30% bigger telephoto lens, so you're going to get a lot better optical quality on telephoto shots. You're also getting things like much faster Night Sight on the Pro, which is up to four and a half times faster than the previous Pixel. But one of the new biggest camera features this year is the new camera looks mode. So camera looks is Google's response to people wanting a more vintage look out of their smartphone. Smartphone cameras have gotten a little too good in the last few years. So they've added a bunch of new modes that kind of give you a digicam style look. There's about 10 total looks in the camera, but these aren't just filters. They're actually changing the way that they do the HDR capture at a sensor level, which is a pretty big deal. There's also a new magic capture mode, which is really front and center in the camera here. When you enable that and start recording, the phone will automatically pull out really good photos and videos from the scene around you when you wave your phone around. It's actually pretty cool. There's also all new creator suite in the video mode, which gives you things like a teleprompter, automatic clip project folder saving. You've got an audio visualizer, kind of everything that a social media creator would need to make videos on their phone. Now, there's a lot of colors available for these phones, so make sure you check out the website to see all of them, but the Pixel 11 is going to come in at $899 starting, and the Pixel 11 Pro is going to come in at $1099 starting. If you want to see more about all of this, make sure you go to theverge.com to check it out.
It's great advice from David Al. Do all of that right after we finish this live stream. Don't go anywhere until then. So, okay, we should go through these phones kind of one by one, but the just basic sort of overall information about the new lineup of Pixels, there's the Pixel 11, the Pixel 11 Pro, and the Pixel 11 Pro Fold, and the Pixel 11 Pro XL. Four phones with all different complicated names. Anyway, the phones are all... and well, we'll get to the watch. V, just... Oh, you have the fold on you?
No, I fold and fe it back. Okay, so these phones, there are a few things that are sort of overall true about this whole lineup. They're all $100 more expensive than last year. Like David said, the 11 starts at $899 and they go up from there. The good news next to that is that they have gotten rid of the 128 gig storage model and now the base model of all of these phones starts at 256. The lesson we're learning from the tech industry is that like flash drive memory is cheap and RAM is expensive. So, everybody is doing less RAM and more storage, and that's fine. Basically, they all run the Tensor G6 chip. The 12 gigs of RAM is the baseline. Now, some of them go as high as 16. They're promising better battery life. They have Qi 2.2 charging that's a little faster. In most ways, these phones are identical, and we can get to some of the ways in which they are different, but the Pixel lineup has always kind of been like this. Their big idea is about software and Gemini and AI and all of the things that they can do without needing bleeding edge hardware. And it is worth saying nothing about this is bleeding edge hardware, which is kind of where I want to start on these phones. Just from a pure like what's in the box here perspective, Neil, I don't think we expected to be like blown away by what Google came out with on the spec sheet of a Pixel, but this is pretty milquetoast when it comes to Pixels.
Yeah, I mean I can probably spend the next half hour just talking about what they're doing in the camera.
We're going to... Don't worry. Your point that Google never tries to be at the bleeding edge of hardware specs and is constantly trying to push forward what Android can do at the software level. Obviously, you know, the amount of Gemini in this phone, there's a literal light on the Pro that's like, look at me, I'm Gemini. Like, that's what the focus of these phones really is. Yes. And then we can always just be honest about the reality of the Pixel line as a whole, which is that it's for enthusiasts and to keep Samsung in line. Those are... that's its job, right? As long as those two things exist, like job done, which is why I think Google rolls them out the way they roll them out. Fundamentally, competing at the high end of Samsung is not the point.
Yeah, I think that's right. And I think that's a mistake, honestly. Like you look at this and the things that you just said, right? This is for enthusiasts. Like God, you know who might care about the Geekbench results for the Pixel and all of these different devices? Enthusiasts. There was a whole mini kerfuffle around the last run of phones because the last version of the Tensor processor did horribly in benchmarks. The overwhelming feeling was that actually it doesn't really matter. You basically can't find a game on Android that uses all of the available CPU and GPU anyway, so who really cares? But we're also at a moment where it's like, okay, we're imagining all of the new things that your phone can do for you. Local AI is the future of everything according to everybody, including Google in many cases. Shouldn't you be investing in making my hardware as fast and capable as possible at this moment in time?
Oh, I can make an even stronger argument. You made the price go up. This thing should last a long time. Very true. Right. If you're going to charge more money, then I should expect this thing to last longer than usual. Now, it's not a huge jump the way that we've seen laptops take huge jumps and other phones take huge jumps. It's 100 bucks and you need to get more storage. But I would say value for dollar is expressed now in time.
Right. If you spend a lot of money, you don't want it to just last two years. You want it to last four or five. And I don't know if this hardware has that longevity in it. I think your point about AI is interesting, but all of Google's AI is in the cloud. Like the real action here is the camera and like being for creators and like making a lot of things more automatic in like interesting ways in terms of content creation. I don't think there's another big set of ideas here that you're not going to get on another phone.
Yeah, I think that's right. V, you're less like CPU than some of our phone people. You also, you know, just saw the new Samsung devices. Were you disappointed by the hardware here at all?
Uh, not really. Well, you know, I usually am pretty far down on the list of getting a phone, so I'm just enjoying opening.
That color is very pretty.
It's a very pretty color. And I was like, 'Ooh, I get to play with foldable and pretend to be Allison today.'
Is that the pistachio fold?
This is the pistachio fold. Yes. Or olive or you know the green color. It's lovely. It's really nice.
Lovely. It's very pretty. I've been like, it matches my nails. I love it. It's a good little fold.
See, that's... What else do you need to know? Trevor Noah, take notes.
No, but it's nice. Like I actually, you know, as the premier color obsessive on the staff, I was looking at the colors very intently at...
Do you need us to make space for you to have a 10-minute crash out about the name of one of these colors as you want to do on this show?
Listen, that was only about the Fitbit Air and it made a lasting impact. Okay. We had... I had many discussions with various Google people about colors and what we...
Happy to hear that. But no, they're great. I really love the hibiscus color, which is a very bright bright pink.
That's the magenta one. That is clearly the best color, right? I feel like in every one of these lineups, there is a color that is just obviously clearly the best. And in this case, it is the magenta color, which I think is gorgeous.
I fully agree with that, though. David Al does not. We had... he was like, 'Are your eyes not bleeding looking at this?' And I was like, 'No, they're crying tears of joy because it's a saturated color, which some tech companies don't love.'
Yeah, even Google, even this color is kind of a muted army green.
Yeah, it's a very muted green, but you know, like I like that there's options. You can have the aggressively pink phone or you could have the muted green phone. And they're both beautiful colors. Wonderful palette this year. It was really funny because when we were at the content capture for the regular 11 phone, I had like a Google guy run up to me. He's like, 'If you put the case on, it'll lie flat on the table.' And he's like, 'Put the case on.' So, I put the case on. He's like, 'Doesn't it lie flat? Do it on both sides. Does it lie flat?'
This is because there's a viral video of somebody cutting the camera bump off a Z Fold with a razor.
They're just letting you know that you can spend more money to make the phone lie flat.
Yeah. Basically sure and it was like look it's flat and I was like...
He was so excited and I was like...
You know what's not true about this phone though and...
It's expensive. I think the fold is what, $1,900?
Is yeah, I think it's about...
This... we're in the time of no creases, right? Samsung really got that crease to go away. All the rumors are Apple's going to get that crease to go away. This is one of the creasiest crease phones in quite a while and I think it's because of the durability, right? Google's like really very proud of how durable this is. You can't crack it. All this stuff. And I think there's at least one hardware compromise here.
It's funny because $1,900 is not cheap. It's not like...
Now the Z Fold 8 Ultra is $2,100. Like I think I can see $300 here.
Yeah. No, I went home and I was like, I finally got my hands on a foldable because Allison is out until next week. And my husband went... he went like, 'Oh, yoink.' Opened it and he's like, 'There's a crease.' Yoink, passed it back to me. So, I was like, 'Okay, well, I'm still having fun.' So...
Yeah. So I think we can dispense with the specs of this phone fairly quickly, but I do think there's one thing that Neil, as the resident display enthusiast, I have a genuine question, which is that one of the big upgrades on the Pro is that it has a brighter screen that this time instead of being 3,300 nits of max brightness is 3,600 nits of max brightness. I mean this absolutely sincerely. Does that matter? Like is that a real upgrade that you will notice?
It is hard to say without trying to get it to hit peak brightness in sunlight for more than five minutes because they can all hit their peak brightness...
And then they get hot and then they throttle...
And like... famously have.
Yeah. So who knows? I like it. Everybody wants more searing HDR content when they're watching a movie on a plane as Christopher Nolan intended on the back of their phone. But the real question is the point of that peak brightness is not HDR content. It's sunlight viewing and sometimes these phones can hit it and they pull back pretty aggressively and we just have to find out.
But it's great if they can do it. I mean, they're also claiming vastly improved battery life. These are ideas that are in total tension with one another, right?
Yeah. Yeah, I mean there's a lot here that is Google trying to convince buyers and users that raw specs don't matter because what they've done is actually make things more efficient, right? That Night Sight will run faster. They're not saying we have some shocking new low-light camera technology. They're just saying we can do this thing more quickly now. They're saying the thing is more efficient, which in theory should be good for battery life. It should mean it doesn't run as hot. There are a lot of upsides and downsides to Google's spec race here. But the thing we have to talk about, which I cannot believe we have to talk about before we get to the software, is the temperature sensor, which is gone. And I think the temperature sensor to me is like... I honestly could not have told you why it existed, but it turns out that in the what, couple of hours now since these phones have gotten launched, there has been an internet-wide mourning of the temperature sensor. I want to talk in a minute about what it's been replaced by. But V, I think this feature existed in theory to let you tell the temperature of things. Like this always struck me as a weird feature. Why are people worried about this feature?
To be quite frank, like I feel like it came... like sort of after the COVID era where, you know, you might want to take the temperature of things. I vaguely remember testing it and being like, 'Sure, okay.'
Wait, refresh me. This is an ambient temperature sensor or like a point and click infrared?
It was, as I understand it, it was a point and search temperature gauge that you could take the temperature of a thing by pointing.
Oh, sure. Like every single person who's like, 'I'm making a brisket and my Traeger grill is like pointing the thing.' I get it. I understand these people. You're my people. I love taking the temperature of things. What are you talking about? They're ruled. Instead, I got a notification light. Get out of here.
Okay, so this is the problem. They replaced it. There have been rumors about the Pixel for some time. This again in Google's infinite wisdom, it loves to just launch its own phones. Months before it launches its own phones, this thing has been leaked to death. And there was this feature, I think people were calling it Pixel Glow or the Glow Bar or some... there was this idea that there was going to be some cool new light feature. What it actually is is a feature called Highlight. Hi-Light. Hate that. It's a light that says hi.
No thank you. But anyway, what this thing is is it's a little light on the back on the camera bar that does precisely two things. It glows when you're talking to Gemini, and it will glow when you get calls, phone calls only, from favorite contacts. That is the least interesting feature you could possibly launch.
I don't know. I think it's kind of cute. I think it's cute. I don't really see the point of it lighting up while you're talking to Gemini because it's like... I feel like we're trying not, or at least some people are trying not to advertise that they're using AI as much or whatever, unless you like to have a robot book club.
To that point, actually, I think you just answered your own question, which is that the whole idea here is that you can do this stuff with your phone facing down. And I think you are going to get a lot of people who want the tiniest little indication that Gemini is working without actually having to look at their phone and talk to AI.
This is the same exact concept as any Echo Dot, any Sonos speaker with a voice light, like a HomePod, right? The phone's upside down on your table. You say, 'Hey, Big G.' I'm trying to be polite to our audience. Hey, Big G. And then it boops at you and now you're talking to your robot girlfriend.
Right. Right. Aaron Rodgers is going to talk to his wife...
There's a conspiracy theory that I'm hinting at here that I want everyone to latch on to. I want everyone to understand what I just said. But right, this is the idea that we're going to have a screen-free future and there's a class of devices that are totally natural language operated. And maybe your phone can be that if you just replace the extraordinarily useful temperature sensor with a little light and now you're going to have that thing and it's going to be... I guarantee you the 'put all of your meeting notes in a Notebook LM' happens in some way with this light.
Yes. The idea of being able to do things with your phone down and get some bit of information without looking at your phone. These are all good things, right? V, this is the stuff everybody's doing in wearables, right? How do we give you this like little bit of ambient information about what's going on without making you look at a screen or pull out your phone or do whatever?
Even if this was just a light that there was a settings menu for that you could be like, 'Make it this color when this happens. Make it this color when this happens. Make it blink Morse code at me.' Like you and Google sort of intimated to David that it's planning to do these things, but right now it basically does none of them. And this is just a useless feature in my... like what an weird incredible miss from Google on this to me.
I don't know if it's a miss. I just... even if all you did was have like it light up when a certain contact comes, I find that kind of useful. I keep my phone face down all the time anyway. But like if I know that a certain special person is calling that I've allowed, I will pick up the phone. Otherwise, I don't. So, I don't know. I find it kind of useful. Maybe I'm minority, but why are we measuring things?
