Do You Really Need to Spend More Than $400 on a Phone?

This week we discuss the growing trend of mid-range smartphones, why they’re good, and why they’re bad.
google pixel 4a
Photograph: Google 

Used to be that if you wanted a new phone, you had to choose between something cheap and something good. But a recent slate of smartphones like the new Google Pixel 4A and the Apple iPhone SE offer an appealing compromise: most of the features and processing power of a $1,000 phone for somewhere around $400. These devices come with some trade-offs, of course. The cameras aren't quite as fast, and the screen might not be buttery smooth or blisteringly bright. But the growing market for budget phones shows that premium features aren’t everything, especially at a time when people are less and less likely to splurge on fancy gadgets.

This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior associate editor Julian Chokkattu joins us to talk about the Pixel 4A possibilities and limitations of cheap phones.

Show Notes

Read Julian’s review of the Pixel 4A here. Read Adrienne So’s story about the duffel bag from The Expanse here.

Recommendations

Julian recommends the Herman Miller Embody chair (but don’t pay full price for it). Mike recommends the sci-fi show The Expanse. Lauren recommends Nice White Parents, a new podcast from NYT and Serial.

Julian Chokkattu can be found on Twitter @JulianChokkattu. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our executive producer is Alex Kapelman (@alexkapelman). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

If you have feedback about the show, or just want to enter to win a $50 gift card, take our brief listener survey here.

How to Listen

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Transcript

Lauren Goode: Mike.

Michael Calore: Hey Lauren.

LG: Mike, how much did you spend on the last phone that you bought?

MC: Oh God, I can't even remember. The last phone I bought with my own money, it was probably the Pixel 2 that I got for my wife.

LG: That was probably, what, several hundred dollars at the time?

MC: Yeah, it was like 600 bucks or something.

LG: Would you spend that again?

MC: No.

LG: Why not?

MC: Cheap phones are awesome now!

LG: Well they are, and that's actually what we're going to talk about this week on Gadget Lab.

[Intro theme music]

LG: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Goode, a senior writer at WIRED, and I'm joined remotely by my cohost ,WIRED senior editor Michael Calore.

MC: Hello, hello.

LG: Hello, hello. We're also joined by WIRED senior associate editor Julian Chokkattu. Hey Julian.

Julian Chokkattu: Hello.

LG: Welcome back to the show. It's great to have you back.

JC: Thanks for having me.

LG: Earlier this week, Google launched its latest Pixel smartphone, the Pixel 4a. The 4a is the budget model in Google's lineup with a base price of just $350. That's less than half the price of the top iPhone models, the Samsung Galaxy S20, and it's even about half the price of Google's other Pixel phone. And yet, this so-called budget phone still has a lot of the things most people want in a smartphone. It has a really nice screen, a good camera, a fingerprint sensor, and a headphone jack.

What we're really seeing happen here is this rise of the midrange smartphone, because the Pixel 4a isn't alone. Back in April, Apple launched the iPhone SE for just $399. Samsung sells the Samsung Galaxy A51 for around $400. Last week, OnePlus showed off a new phone that you can get for just over $400. Considering the way the economy is going, fewer people, frankly, are going to want to spend much more than that.

Julian, we brought you on because you wrote the WIRED review of the Google Pixel 4a this week and you've been testing it for a while. Tell us what kind of phone people can expect to get for $400 these days, based on your review of the Pixel.

JC: You can actually get a phone that really does everything you'll need. With the Pixel 4a, especially, that includes nice-looking screens and ones that even look modern, with the edges slimmed around for a full-screen experience, and you can also get surprisingly good cameras. The Pixel 4a stands out here more than other cheap phones. Often what you'll see is longer battery life as well, because the components inside aren't as power hungry as some of the flagship models. But perhaps in the past few years or so, performance has really started to get more than enough on the lower end of the smartphone market. Chips are becoming more and more capable, to the point where all the apps that you run on a flagship more or less run the same on these cheaper phones. It also helps that these phones are no longer using those yucky, bloated manufacturers' interfaces, like back in the day. A lot of them run a pretty simple, clean, stock version of Android, which obviously will help performance.

But the nice thing about these cheap phones is also that the software that's developed for the flagships often trickles down quickly, so there's a lot of those features that Samsung or Google will announce for their flagships, and eventually, it's actually easy to port those over for the cheaper phones, because it's just software. Unless it needs some specific hardware to run it, you're actually going to get access to those features much quicker than before.

Google does this really well with the Pixel 4a. You're getting things like Astrophotography mode and Call Screen. Call Screen scans your phone calls to prevent robocalls and spam, and Astrophotography mode, as the name suggests, lets you take pictures of the stars if you're in a dark enough area. Those are all features that came with the flagships. Now you can get them on the cheaper phones. And then you get extras like fingerprint sensors, expandable storage, and, as you said, the headphone jacks and plastic bodies, which is honestly better than getting a glass-backed phone, because you don't have to worry about getting a shattered back or scratches on the back.

LG: Right. And with the fingerprint sensor, now it's really handy because we're all wearing masks.

JC: That too.

MC: I have the unpopular opinion that I love plastic phones. Do you remember the Nexus 5X, I think it was called, which was like one of the last phones of the Nexus program, which was the partner program that Google had with manufacturers, where they would make phones for pure Google experiences under the Nexus brand. And it was a cheap phone. I mean, it was like around $330, and it was entirely plastic. And I loved it, because with a plastic phone, you can carry it in your front pocket and it doesn't weigh your whole leg down the way that big glass slab does. And also, with a glass phone, you kind of have to get a case, even though I don't like cases, because you're guaranteed to drop it. I think maybe that's why I like plastic phones better, because you don't need to add an accessory just to make it not break.

LG: Yeah, I think that the whole stigma of what a cheap phone used to be, like you bring up Nexus, and it was definitely considered pretty cheap and fairly low powered, has changed because now these midrange phones, as Julian's pointing out, actually have some pretty great features. One of the things that I appreciate with Google's approach to making the Pixel, even though, as far as we know, they don't necessarily sell them in huge volumes, is that they do seem intent on figuring out what customers want and prioritizing what actually matters to people when they make a less expensive phone, versus kind of the Apple way, where Apple has this longstanding tradition of telling customers what they want. Even when they presented something like the iPhone SE for $400 back in the spring, it's kind of like, "This is one of the best phones ever made."

Google's like, "No. We're going to make some sacrifices here with this phone, but we've done some careful analysis around what we think this segment of phone customers want, and it turns out they want is a good camera, but also they want the headphone jack, and we can skip out on things like wireless charging because that doesn't matter as much." I think that for the most part, they tend to be right about that. Julian, here's a question for you. How is battery life on the Pixel 4a? Because that's something people have complained about before with past cheap Pixels.

JC: Pixels in general have been very conservative with their battery life capacities, but the Pixel 3a has been pretty good in terms of battery life, and the Pixel 4a is—well, generally, it'll get you through a full day, if not a little bit more if you're not heavy user, but it's nothing remarkable. There are definitely other cheap phones that have big batteries inside them that can last two to three days. Google is still a bit more on the conservative end here as well, but it's definitely better than the Pixel 4.

MC: I'm also interested in learning a little bit about the processing power, because from what I've seen, these cheap phones we're talking about have sort of reached the status of being good enough for just about everything, like you had mentioned. For a long time, it was the processor and the camera that were the big setbacks for people, the roadblocks toward people going down to a cheaper phone. The camera was not very good, and the processor was sluggish enough to make it frustrating to use. But it seems like both of those things have been solved, not by making them as good as the cameras and processors you get in expensive phones, but just good enough where you don't worry about it anymore.

JC: I think yes and no. In performance, yes. You're totally getting more than enough performance in this low range. At the moment, with a lot of phones, you're still going to experience some stutters and lag every now and then. For the most part, though, you can run all your apps with no issues, even play pretty intensive games without really experiencing that much lag.

But on the camera front, a lot of cheap phones will do really well with photos that you have to capture during the daytime. When there's lots of light, you'll get pretty nice-looking photos. But when it comes to nighttime, they're all still pretty bad, and that's something that a lot of the expensive phones have, these night modes that let you take really nice-looking low-light shots.

But the Pixel 4a actually stands out here. It's one of the few cheap phones that has this dedicated night mode that lets you take really great low-light pictures, and that's something that I also wish Apple, for example, could have added to their iPhone SE. They introduced a night mode in their camera last year for the iPhone 11, but they didn't bring that down to this $400 iPhone.

It's one of those things where they decided people who don't want to pay that much for a phone apparently don't want to take low-light pictures. But Google says, "Well, this should be something that everyone can access." That's one thing that I think really puts the Pixel 4a above a lot of the other cheap phones when it comes to the camera.

LG: You put a slide show in your review of some of the photos you took, and it was pretty remarkable how well the Pixel 4a did with some night shots.

JC: Yeah. It would even beat a $1,200 Samsung Galaxy S20. I had a comparison shot in there of that $1,200 phone against this $350 phone, and I liked the Pixel 4a shot more. It did better detail and better color temperature, and that's all because of Google's software tuning. It doesn't really even mean that when you buy an expensive phone, you're going to get the best camera experience nowadays.

LG: So camera included, how does the Pixel 4a stack up to phones like Motorola's midrange phones or the new OnePlus Nord? Let's assume for a moment that someone's not doing the Pixel 4a versus Apple SE comparison, that they're committed to living in the Android universe, and so they're looking at the other Android phones.

JC: Motorola is a typical picture of the average cheap Android phone. You'll get pretty decent performance, probably a little more stutters and lag. The camera is one of those that's really good at daytime shots but at nighttime, they're not really that usable. Thankfully, they do have a pretty clean version of Android, but the problem with Motorola is that they only give you one year of software updates. You'll get Android 11, which is coming out at the end of August probably, and that's it. You're probably not going to get any other software updates from them. It's just not something that you can maybe rely on for two to three years of use, whereas the Google Pixel phones will get three years of software updates. That's three full years of you knowing that you'll get reliable security and software upgrades. That makes it just easier to hold onto that phone for a longer period of time.

As for the OnePlus Nord, that phone's not coming to the US, but if you translate the price, it's around the $500 range. At that point, it's a little hard to compare it to the Pixel 4a, mostly because the price gap is a little more. But I will say that the OnePlus Nord does beat the Pixel 4a in a lot of areas. You're getting a much better build quality, metal and glass. You're getting a lot more cameras, but I still think the Pixel 4a does beat out overall in camera experience. But you're also getting much better performance. You're getting things like a really high-quality screen with a high refresh rate. There's a lot of things that OnePlus does really well in the overall phone experience that I think definitely puts it a little bit ahead of the Pixel 4a in that regard. But then again, it is also a cheaper phone, and we'll have to wait and see if they do end up selling a phone in the US and whether it'll be comparatively priced with the 4a.

LG: Julian, this has been really helpful. We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to stop being polite and start getting real about cheap phones.

[Break]

LG: As we've been learning, you can get a lot of phone for $400. So why, then, would anyone want to pay $650 or $1,000 or even $1,400 for a phone? What am I missing if I go cheap on a smartphone? Julian, what are the things that you really miss with a $400 phone that might make you want to spend more on a fancy phone?

JC: I talked about performance earlier. Well, for power users that are quickly hopping between lots of apps, and maybe you're playing all the latest games that you can get on your phone, well, that's where you might want to spend a little more for something with slightly better performance. Now, again, the Pixel 4a does do a lot of what I need, and even so much that I can totally switch to it without any issues, but looking at other cheaper phones, some of them still aren't quite there yet.

When you're paying for a phone that costs a lot more, you're going to get more powerful performance and just an overall more streamlined experience. Then, it's more fun to use your phone, because you don't really want to use a phone that keeps stuttering and lagging all the time. That's the big thing, but the next is camera. You get far more cameras often. You get three, four, even five cameras, and that gives you just a lot more versatility when you're taking photos. The quality is often a lot better, particularly in low light with some of these cameras, because they have night mode, which takes multiple photos at different exposures and blends them all together for a better looking low-light photo.

MC: The thing about cameras on phones that don't have good performance like we've been talking about ... A camera these days is mostly software, and it's mostly the user experience that makes a camera good versus bad. With a phone that doesn't have great performance, you get shutter lag. You try to take two or three pictures in quick succession and you can't, because the phone is still sort of chugging away on the last two or three shots you took.

JC: A lot of the times when I'm using those Motorola cheap phones, for example, they do have a bit of a lag. What we'll give as advice when you're taking photos with these phones is, you want to press the shutter button, make sure you don't move at all for the next two to three seconds, and then let the phone take the photo. But that's just one of those things that, having bought lots of cheap phones back in the day, I just got used to that kind of experience. But obviously, that's something you're paying for on a lot of these more expensive phones. You pay for the ability to not have to wait and get a blurry shot, potentially.

LG: Julian, I'm curious about software. You mentioned earlier that there are features on the premiere Pixel that have trickled down now to the Pixel 4a. But are there other elements of the software that people should be considering when it comes to an expensive phone versus a cheap one?

JC: Really, a lot of the software features are things you probably don't necessarily need. A lot of them do just accentuate and improve your experience, like a lot of Samsung's new features that they announced with their newest Note 20. There's a lot of things that let you connect it to Windows for a better, more streamlined experience there.

But really, the big thing is what we talked about before: software updates. A lot of these phones that you pay more for will be supported for a longer period of time, whereas companies like Motorola, for their budget phones, they only do one year, sometimes even no updates at all for their Moto e, which is about $150. No updates at all, so you just buy that phone and you don't really expect much out of it in terms of software support. That's a big thing when it comes to software on that side.

MC: One of the big things that we see on thousand-dollar smartphones ... Advertised, anyway ... is that the screen is buttery smooth, and that it's easier to scroll on these phones. Could you talk us through screen refresh rate and the screen quality, and why that makes such a big difference to the user experience, why it's worth paying more for?

JC: The more expensive devices just have nicer-quality screens. You have much higher resolution, so things don't look too pixelated, although that's not so much of a problem these days on cheaper phones as well. The bigger problem with cheap phones is that they don't necessarily get bright enough when you're outside, say, walking your dog and looking at your phone. It just might be a bit too dim, so you might need to go under the shade of a tree and look at your phone then. That's been the big problem even now with a lot of these cheap phones, that they're just not bright enough. That's something you're paying for. You can get super-bright screens that are no problem at all. But the sun directly shining on it, you can see everything.

But another part of it is the screen refresh rate, which is a relatively new thing, I think, in the past three to four years that we've been seeing on some of these pricier phones. Traditionally a normal screen will refresh at 60 frames per second, or 60 times per second is how many times you'll see an image coming from that display. When you increase it to 90 or 120, you're increasing it by seeing more frames per second, like 90 frames per second or 120 frames per second, which basically just means that you're getting a much smoother and more responsive screen experience. So scrolling through Twitter, for example, it'll just look a lot more fluid than on a phone with a 60-Hz screen. Having these nicer screen refresh rates isn't really, again, something you need; it's just one of those things that makes using your phone feel and look a lot nicer and more responsive.

LG: No jelly screen. I can certainly appreciate that. I have two things about the Pixel 4a that might prevent me from getting it, Julian, and I want to hear your thoughts on this. The first is storage, base storage. As I understand it, Pixel 4a only has one option for storage. I think it's 128 gigabytes, if that's correct.

JC: Yup.

LG: And it also doesn't have a micro SD card slot, which is something that Android phones are known for having. Ultimately, it just feels like this pushes you further into Google's cloud services, because once you use up all that storage with your photos and videos and games, then it's like, start paying $3 a month or $10 a month for more Google Drive storage.

The second thing is that I am admittedly pretty hooked on iMessage. I mean, I use iMessage on my laptop all day, which is a Mac laptop, of course, and then it's on my iPhone and then also it's on the iPad that I'm using to watch videos at night or read at night. Maybe that's not a good thing. Maybe I shouldn't have iMessage activated on the device I'm trying to use to decompress with.

However, it's everywhere in my life at this point, and whenever I do switch to a Pixel phone or any other Android phone that I might be testing or reviewing, I really miss iMessage. I know that Google has been pushing and supporting a text messaging standard called RCS, that it's supposed to offer rich messaging, but it's still just not the same as what I think Apple has successfully done with encrypted messaging with iMessage.

JC: I mean, it's gotten a lot better. One thing that Google has done that I really appreciate is when you switch to a new phone nowadays, because of their new RCS implementation that you mentioned, a lot of those text messages are actually transferred over to your new device pretty seamlessly. There's no need to do this wonky thing that we used to do, which is find a weird third-party app and transfer all your texts from your old device to your new device. It's all there, which is nice. They've also done things like Android Messages for web, which is the default texting application. You can just open up a browser tab and sync your phone to the web browser, and you will see all your texts right there, so you can text directly from the browser on your computer, wherever, really.

They've made improvements like that, but I honestly don't think we will ever get anything like iMessage for Android—unless Apple decides to release iMessage for Android at some point. I think people who use iMessage are just so ingrained in that experience that they're just never going to have or enjoy the experience with people who are using Android phones. They're just never going to be compatible, I think.

I don't know if we'll ever really have a solution for that, because at the end of the day, the experience on Android has definitely been growing between the Android and Android users, but the experience between Android and iPhone users will be the same until Apple decides to do something about it.

MC: One of the things we talked about on the first half of the show was the fact that, since we're all wearing masks in public now, it's really screwed up face unlock for a lot of us who have fancier, more expensive phones. I know a couple of people, my neighbor is one and one of my friends back east is another, who are resistant to buying any phone that only has face unlock as the biometric authentication. They want a fingerprint sensor instead, not only for the mask but just because it's easier for them. They don't have to be actually looking at the phone in order to unlock it. It's easier to unlock when you're in a store and you want to pay for something at a contactless tap-to-pay kiosk if you just have a fingerprint sensor. These same people also don't care about wireless charging. They want to just plug in their headphones and not use a dongle.

I think there is a pretty large segment of the consumer population out there that is looking at all of these new features that are coming out, like when Apple comes out with the new iPhone, and they run through all the new features, or the new Pixel comes out and they run through all the new features. They look at it and they're like, "Yeah, but I don't care about any of that stuff. I don't want any of that stuff. I just want the phone that I used to have but better," and I think that's sort of the role that these phones are filling right now, weirdly.

JC: At a certain point, you're going to not be able to get some of those features anymore. For example, what comes to mind is the replaceable battery, something that a lot of people have clamored for but companies just were like, "Whatever, I'm just getting rid of this." It was almost something similar with the headphone jack, except now almost every single cheap phone has a headphone jack.

But I think at some point, yeah, these phones will always try to cater to that group of people, because there are a lot of people that want that kind of stuff and it's easy for a manufacturer to sort of take it out of their flagship and put it into some of these cheaper phones, because maybe that initial audience is the only people that really care about them that much. But yeah, I think that these features like the micro SD card slot, for example, the headphone jack, those things, are always going to have a little place with phones until some new standard comes along.

MC: Really, I think that because of that trickle-down effect we've been talking about, the things that people are resistant to now are going to make their way into these phones eventually. Face unlock will come to the next generation or maybe two generations down the road, but probably the next generation of cheap phones. Next year's $400 phones will have face unlock instead of fingerprint sensors. At some point, they're going to lose the headphone jack as well. At some point, they're going to get wireless charging. You're sort of setting yourself up when you buy one of these phones that you're going to be two years behind the latest cutting-edge thing.

JC: Yeah, and that sort of goes back to the point of something like replaceable batteries. At the moment, even with cheap phones, you can't replace their batteries. Yes, there are select strange, random phones, maybe ultra-cheap ones, that you can find that have a removable battery, but for the most part, most manufacturers don't really do that anymore. When we get features like face unlock, is there a chance that manufacturers might say, "Well, let's now get rid of the fingerprint sensor"? That is totally something that is possible, and I will definitely hate it when that comes around.

LG: Julian, this has been a really great conversation about all the strikes and gutters of cheap phones, but stick around because we're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we want you to join us for recommendations.

[Break]

LG: All right, Julian, what's your recommendation this week?

JC: This is going to sound a little crazy, but I recommend the Herman Miller Embody. This is a chair that runs for about 1,200 or $1,300. I definitely don't recommend you pay that much for it. First, I've been sitting a lot. I've always sat a lot at my desk for terrible amounts of hours during a day. That is something that only just got worse ever since the pandemic began. I've just been sitting in front of my computer, because what else am I going to do? I think I was having a lot of back issues earlier on, and so I upgraded my chair. I had a cheap gaming chair, and I upgraded to this one, and it has really helped my posture. It has also just made my back not hurt, which is very important. It's something that I definitely recommend people look into.

I'm actually working on a guide on how to improve and get a better chair, but basically, you want to look at something with lumbar support for your office chair, since we all need office chairs in our homes, and getting a Herman Miller Embody was something that definitely helped me. But the key thing is, don't pay full price, because, as sad as it is to say, a lot of businesses are closing, and they have a lot of these office chairs lying around that they're trying to get rid of it. The key thing to do is look on eBay, look on Craigslist, look for people selling this furniture. You can easily find them online somewhere. If not, just wait and try to set up some notifications or something like that. But you can definitely find them for a lot less than that, and they are definitely worth it. They will last you a very long time.

LG: Good recommendation. Thank you, Julian. Mike, what's yours this week? Is it perhaps some Swedish prog rock we might enjoy listening to?

MC: It's Swedish psych pop, Lauren, and no. I have a recommendation that is old. It's a TV show, and we're all watching way more television than we thought we would be this summer. It has proven to be a challenge to me to find something that I'm interested in watching that is different enough from the other stuff that I normally watch. We decided to start The Expanse.

This is a show that was on Syfy. It premiered about five years ago, and it went, I think, three seasons and then switched to Amazon, which has continued the show. There are new episodes coming out again, so it is a bit relevant. But it's a science fiction show. It takes place in the future, I think 200 years from now, 300 years from now, and humans have taken over the other parts of our solar system and have broken off into factions, and they all dislike each other.

But it's a really fun show because first of all, it's just like good sci-fi. It's an action show, there's really fun science stuff in it. There's really good philosophical questions that it brings up. The characters are really good. The story, the world-building, the stories that happen within the social structures of all the different factions in the solar system are really interesting, but it's also just kind of corny and kind of noir-ish detective '80s feeling, which is something that you don't really get in science fiction, unless it's something that was made during that time and has now not aged well.

This is a show that looks like it was made maybe about 10 or 15 years ago, but in fact, it's contemporary. The Expanse is now streaming on Amazon. It used to be on Netflix. When Amazon bought it, it moved over to Amazon so you can find it there. This is a show that I've been hearing about for years and have always overlooked because it didn't feel like it was my kind of thing. I started watching it—totally my kind of thing. Maybe it's your kind of thing too.

LG: And Mike, tell everyone about the bag.

MC: Oh, yes. The whole reason I started watching the show is because our colleague Adrienne So reviewed a duffle bag, and the duffle bag is this bag that the property masters on the show bought a bunch of these bags because they're like, "Oh yeah, this is totally what the people in the show would use." Everybody on the show carries around this duffle bag, and you can just go to the website and buy the bag, so Adrienne wrote a review of it. It's called the Tarmac EPO duffle bag. They're made by a company called OnSight, which is a Canadian company.

Adrienne wrote this review of the bag, and I read the review, and I'm like, "There's all this stuff in here that I don't get so I need to watch the show so I can finally get it." We talked about this on the show a couple of weeks ago when Adrienne was on, and I said I was going to watch it and I never did. But I finally made good on that, and now I'm totally hooked and we're binging all of The Expanse. It's been delightful.

LG: That sounds great. Another thing you said when we were talking about recommendations earlier, Mike, is that you didn't want to recommend something that was quote-unquote old, but I said, "Well, unless production picks up anytime soon, a lot of us are going to be watching older series for a while, so we might as well enjoy them."

MC: That's right. This is your time to dip into the library.

LG: That's right.

MC: The endless library that is inside your television. But what's your recommendation, Lauren?

LG: My recommendation is a new podcast from The New York Times in partnership with Serial and This American Life. It's called Nice White Parents. It's produced and hosted by Chana Joffe-Walt. I hope I'm pronouncing her name correctly. She explores gentrification in New York City in the New York City public school system. She actually started, I mean, really recording audio and looking into this back in I think 2014, so this has been a long time coming, and she has a lot of really great audio. It started when she herself started to get involved in the school system as a parent. The first episode is just tremendous, where she takes a close look at an international school in Brooklyn that she says at the beginning was 90 percent students of color, and what happens when a group of white parents decide to collectively send their kids to this international school the next year, and also what happens when they start to get involved in the fund-raising process.

It's really riveting to hear what happens and also hear some people describe what's happening as diversification, some people describing it as gentrification. Ultimately, it's just a really interesting exploration into the New York City public schools. It's great. I mean, now I'm listening to episode 2. I'm totally hooked. I recommend that you take a listen. It's probably something that parents in particular will be very interested in it. But even if you are not a parent, I still think it's an incredibly well produced podcast and worth a listen.

MC: Awesome.

LG: All right. That's our show. Thank you so much, Julian, for joining us once again.

JC: Thank you for having me.

LG: And thanks to all of you for listening. If you have feedback, you can find all of us on the Twitter. Just check the show notes. We'll put our handles there. I also have to mention, we have another podcast now hosted by yours truly. It's called Get WIRED. You'll find the first episode of Get WIRED in the feed here for Gadget Lab if you're already subscribed to the Gadget Lab, but it also has its own podcast feed. If you get a chance, look for Get WIRED on your podcast app of choice and subscribe, and send us your feedback, because I'd love to hear your feedback for that as well.

This show is produced by Boone Ashworth. Our executive producer is Alex Kapelman. Goodbye for now. Stay safe, wear a mask, and we'll be back next week.

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