At first we thought this was going to be a slow news week. Now, it’s Friday and we have published two Vergecast episodes back-to-back to cover everything you need to know in the world of tech.
To sum it up: We’ve got another new Apple product to talk about, an interview with the president of Qualcomm, and a discussion on the antitrust lawsuits against Facebook put forward by the Federal Trade Commission and 48 state attorneys general. (I hope you understand now why we separated these into different episodes.)
In the first half of the first episode this week of The Vergecast, Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, and Chris Welch discuss the announcement of Apple’s new noise-canceling headphones, the AirPods Max. Nilay was able to try them out for a brief period of time and gives his first impressions on the show.
In the second half, Nilay and Dieter chat with Qualcomm president Cristiano Amon about Qualcomm’s new flagship processor, the Snapdragon 888, the potential of 5G, and what he thinks about Apple’s new M1 processor.
Here’s a little snippet from that conversation:
Dieter Bohn: What lessons could Qualcomm and Microsoft take from what Apple did with the M1?
Cristiano Amon: One of the great things about the M1, the way we look at it, we’re super happy with that announcement. Very happy. And kudos to Apple because it validates our belief. It basically validates our beliefs that, you know, that the mobile user is defining what they expect out of the PC experience.
And when adding Apple to that conversation, you started to see that the ecosystem is moving. Great example: I believe it was probably this week, if not the week before that Adobe announced a bunch of applications, that are all ARM native. And once you make it ARM native, performance increases as you have now app compatibility.
So that overall is a very good sign. The ecosystem is going to move and it showed that Microsoft and Qualcomm were in the right trajectory. It’s about battery life, it’s about connected, it’s about a whole different multimedia experience.
Even though an interview with the president of a dominant chip maker company was enough to call it a day, we also decided to put out a separate episode of The Vergecast to explain some rather important tech policy news.
In our second episode, Nilay talks with The Verge policy editor Russell Brandom, senior reporter Adi Robertson, and contributing editor Casey Newton about why the FTC and 48 state attorneys general are suing Facebook, what antitrust remedies they are proposing, and how possible it is to separate Instagram from Facebook.
You can listen here or subscribe on your preferred podcast player to hear the full discussions.
