Galaxy S24 Ultra brings power and AI
There are two stories to tell about the latest iteration of Samsung’s biggest smartphone, the Galaxy S24 Ultra, the flagship for its 2024 line of top-tier handsets.
First, there’s the hardware: It’s beautiful, refined, fast and bright, with possibly the best cameras of any phone. As far as the thing you hold in your hand goes, this is the best of the best.
Then there’s the software: Samsung has loaded it up with AI, but it feels like it’s in service of being able to say “Hey look, we have AI!” There is a race to cram AI into phones, and Samsung has now leapt into that fray.
At this writing, I’ve been using the S24 Ultra for almost two weeks, and it’s the first time this hardcore iPhone user ever tried a successor to Samsung’s beloved Note line and said, “You know, I could switch to this.” That’s based on both the beauty and the power of the design and its internals, and the knowledge that Samsung will further refine the software over the seven years it is now providing Android updates and security patches.
As with all Ultras, this is a big phone. It boasts a 6.8-inch, 3,088-by-1,440 pixel display. Samsung has aped Apple and given the Ultra a titanium frame, with flat edges and a flat screen. Its signature stylus, the S-Pen, comes tucked inside the phone’s body, and includes an onscreen nag if you leave it out of the slot too long.
It comes in seven colors, which may vary between region and carrier. The phone Samsung sent me to try is Titanium Gray. Frankly, I think this is a nicer rendering of the titanium look than on my iPhone 15 Pro
Max, and also frankly, as a fan of iPhone design, I’m astounded to be typing that. But here we are.
Inside is the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, 12 gigabytes of memory and storage that starts at 256 GB up to 1 terabyte. For now, Samsung is selling the phone with 512GB of storage at the 256GB list price for $1,300, which is $100 more than last year’s Ultra. That 1TB version? It’s got a list of a whopping $1,660. Discounts are already available, but nevertheless expect a dent in your budget.
It goes without saying that this is a fast phone, though I did find some exceptions. The underscreen fingerprint reader was balky, as was face recognition, for unlocking the phone. I frequently had to place my thumb on the glass a few times before it was recognized. But gaming, app switching, scrolling and other activities all happened smoothly and instantly.
Battery life is decent, lasting about a day and a half with my moderate use. It supports 45 watts wired charging, so it tops off quickly, as well as 15 watts wireless charging.
The display is excellent, with new glareresistant Corning Gorilla Glass Armor and maximum brightness of 2,600 nits, making it easy to see even under the brightest Texas sun. There have been some complaints in user forums about the Ultra’s Vivid mode — in which the screen’s brightness and saturation are boosted — not working as it should, but this was not my experience. (Samsung is reportedly working on a fix.)
The cameras are, of course, stellar. There are four: a 200-megapixel main camera; two telephoto cameras at 50 and 10MP; and a 12MP ultrawide. The front selfie camera is also 12MP. The Ultra is capable of capturing 4K video at 60 frames per second.
As with Samsung’s flagship phone cameras, the images are superb but do have the boosted saturation they are known for. It seems unnatural in simple indoor photos, but with Samsung’s low-light photography in urban settings, it looks spectacular.
The camera and Gallery software have lots of AI features, many of which are similar to those in Google’s Pixel phones. You can move or remove objects in photos with ease, fill in a background or even convert any standard video to slow-motion. In many cases, there will be artifacts. In a recent column about AI and photography, I mentioned that that Google’s Magic Eraser feature left behind a few disembodied legs when I tried to clean up a photo with several people in the background (see houstonchronicle.com/AIphotos). The same thing happens on the Ultra, although the results are fewer stray limbs left in the scene.
There are instances where Samsung’s AI features work as they should, and others where they feel clunky. For example, a Googlebased feature called Circle to Search is a great way to search within an image, video or text. Just long-press on the home button (or where the button would be if you prefer gestures to control your phone) and then use your finger to circle what you want searched. I found it works best with photos. I had several shots from the Eastern Glades in Houston’s Memorial Park and when I circled areas in the photos, the results included more images from the park and details about it. This feature is also coming soon to Google’s Pixel 8 lineup.
But then there are features like Live Translate, which is cool in concept but often annoying in execution.
Built into the S24 Ultra’s phone app, it lets you have a conversation with someone who speaks a different language. For example, I called a friend of mine who’s from Spain and asked her to talk to me in Spanish. I set up the feature so it knew which person was speaking which language, and we began.
The feature works by first turning the speaker’s voice into text, and that text is what is translated and spoken back to the recipient in her language via an AI voice.
It’s slow going, because you have to wait for the voice-to-text part on both ends of the conversation. And the translation is not always accurate, sometimes hysterically so.
At one point early in our connection, my friend said something that the Ultra translated to English as “in what sex meh.”
Neither of us could figure out what she said that yielded that unfortunate phrase.
The feature, which does all this on the device and doesn’t rely on an internet connection, has promise, though it may work better for professional conversations than casual ones.
And “has promise” is a good way to frame what Samsung has done with AI on the Ultra. (Many of these features are also on the other phones in the line, the S24 and S24+).
I’m curious to see where the company takes it, both on future phones and in updates to the Galaxy S24 Ultra.
shelves of virtually every supermarket in the country, including Kroger, Target, Aldi and Whole Foods. And some goods are exported, including to countries that have had products blocked from entering the U.S. for using forced or prison labor.
Many of the companies buying directly from prisons are violating their own policies against the use of such labor. But it’s completely legal, dating back largely to the need for labor to help rebuild the South’s shattered economy after the Civil War. Enshrined in the Constitution by the 13th Amendment, slavery and involuntary servitude are banned — except as punishment for a crime.
That clause is currently being challenged on the federal level, and efforts to remove similar language from state constitutions are expected to reach the ballot in about a dozen states this year.
Some prisoners work on the same plantation soil where slaves harvested cotton, tobacco and sugarcane more than 150 years ago, with some present-day images looking eerily similar to the past. In Louisiana, which has one of the country’s highest incarceration rates, men working on the “farm line” still stoop over crops stretching far into the distance.
Willie Ingram picked everything from cotton to okra during his 51 years in the state penitentiary, better known as Angola.
During his time in the fields, he was overseen by armed guards on horseback and recalled seeing men, working with little or no water, passing out in triple-digit heat.
“They’d come, maybe four in the truck, shields over their face, billy clubs, and they’d beat you right there in the field. They beat you, handcuff you and beat you again,” said Ingram, who received a life sentence after pleading guilty to a crime he said he didn’t commit. He was told he would serve 10 ½ years and avoid a possible death penalty, but it wasn’t until 2021 that a sympathetic judge finally released him. He was 73.
The number of people behind bars in the United States started to soar in the 1970s just as Ingram entered the system, disproportionately hitting people of color. Now, with about 2 million people locked up, U.S. prison labor from all sectors has morphed into a multibillion-dollar empire, extending far beyond the classic images of prisoners stamping license plates, working on road crews or battling wildfires.
Though almost every state has some kind of farming program, agriculture represents only a small fraction of the overall prison workforce. Still, an analysis of data amassed by the AP from correctional facilities nationwide traced nearly $200 million worth of sales of farmed goods and livestock to businesses over the past six years — a conservative figure that does not include tens of millions more in sales to state and government entities. Much of the data provided was incomplete, though it was clear that the biggest revenues came from sprawling operations in the South and leasing out prisoners to companies.
Not all work forced
Corrections officials and other proponents note that not all work is forced and that prison jobs save taxpayers money. For example, in some cases, the food produced is served in prison kitchens or donated to those in need outside. They also say workers are learning skills that can be used when they’re released and given a sense of purpose, which could help ward off repeat offenses. In some places, it allows prisoners to also shave time off their sentences. And the jobs provide a way to repay a debt to society, they say.
While most critics don’t believe all jobs should be eliminated, they say incarcerated people should be paid fairly, treated humanely and that all work should be voluntary. Some note that even when people get specialized training, like firefighting, their criminal records can make it almost impossible to get hired on the outside.
“They are largely uncompensated, they are being forced to work, and it’s unsafe. They also aren’t learning skills that will help them when they are released,” said law professor Andrea Armstrong, an expert on prison labor at Loyola University New Orleans.
In addition to tapping a cheap, reliable workforce, companies sometimes get tax credits and other financial incentives. Incarcerated workers also typically aren’t covered by the most basic protections, including workers’ compensation and federal safety standards. In many cases, they cannot file official complaints about poor working conditions.
These prisoners often work in industries with severe labor shortages, doing some of the country’s dirtiest and most dangerous jobs.
The AP sifted through thousands of pages of documents and spoke to more than 80 current or formerly incarcerated people, including men and women convicted of crimes that ranged from murder to shoplifting, writing bad checks, theft or other illegal acts linked to drug use. Some were given long sentences for nonviolent offenses because they had previous convictions, while others were released after proving their innocence.
Reporters found people who were hurt or maimed on the job, and also interviewed women who were sexually harassed or abused, sometimes by their civilian supervisors or the correctional officers overseeing them. While it’s often nearly impossible for those involved in workplace accidents to sue, the AP examined dozens of cases that managed to make their way into the court system. Reporters also spoke to family members of prisoners who were killed.
One of those was Frank Dwayne Ellington, who was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after stealing a man’s wallet at gunpoint — a result of Alabama’s habitual offenders act. In 2017, Ellington, 33, was cleaning a machine near the chicken “kill line” in Ashland at Koch Foods — one of the country’s biggest poultry-processing companies — when its whirling teeth caught his arm and sucked him inside, crushing his skull. He died instantly.
During a yearslong legal battle, Koch Foods at first argued Ellington wasn’t technically an employee, and later said his family should be barred from filing for wrongful death because the company had paid his funeral expenses. The case eventually was settled under undisclosed terms. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined the company $19,500, saying workers had not been given proper training and that its machines had inadequate safety guards.
The AP found that U.S. prison labor is in the supply chains of goods being shipped all over the world via multinational companies, including to countries that have been slapped with import bans by Washington in recent years. For instance, the U.S. has blocked shipments of cotton coming from China, a top manufacturer of popular clothing brands, because it was produced by forced or prison labor. But crops harvested by U.S. prisoners have entered the supply chains of companies that export to China.
While prison labor seeps into the supply chains of some companies through third-party suppliers without them knowing, others buy direct. Mammoth commodity traders that are essential to feeding the globe like Cargill, Bunge, Louis Dreyfus, Archer Daniels Midland and Consolidated Grain and Barge — which together post annual revenues of more than $400 billion — have in recent years scooped up millions of dollars’ worth of soy, corn and wheat straight from prisons, which compete with local farmers.
The AP reached out for comment to the companies it identified as having connections to prison labor, but most did not respond.
Cargill acknowledged buying goods from prison farms in Tennessee, Arkansas and Ohio, saying they constituted only a small fraction of the company’s overall volume. It added that “we are now in the process of determining the appropriate remedial action.”
McDonald’s said it would investigate links to any such labor, while Archer Daniels Midland and General Mills, which produces Gold Medal flour, pointed to their policies in place restricting suppliers from using forced labor. Whole Foods responded flatly: “Whole Foods Market does not allow the use of prison labor in products sold at our stores.”
Bunge said it sold all facilities that were sourcing from correction departments in 2021, so they are “no longer part of Bunge’s footprint.”
Dairy Farmers of America, a cooperative that bills itself as the top supplier of raw milk worldwide, said that while it has been buying from correctional facilities, it now only has one “member dairy” at a prison, with most of that milk used inside.
To understand the business of prison labor and the complex movement of agricultural goods, the AP collected information from all 50 states, through public records requests and inquiries to corrections departments. A lack of transparency and, at times, baffling losses exposed in audits, added to the challenges of fully tracking the money.
Big-ticket items like row crops and livestock are sold on the open market, with profits fed back into agriculture programs. For instance, about a dozen state prison farms, including operations in Texas, Virginia, Kentucky and Montana, have sold more than $60 million worth of cattle since 2018.
As with other sales, the custody of cows can take a serpentine route. Because they often are sold online at auction houses or to stockyards, it can be almost impossible to determine where the beef eventually ends up.
Sometimes there’s only one way to know for sure.
In Louisiana, an AP reporter watched as three long trailers loaded with more than 80 cattle left the state penitentiary. The cows raised by prisoners traveled for about an hour before being unloaded for sale at Dominique’s Livestock Market in Baton Rouge.
As they were shoved through a gate into a viewing pen, the auctioneer jokingly warned buyers “Watch out!” The cows, he said, had just broken out of prison.
Within minutes, the Angola lot was snapped up by a local livestock dealer, who then sold the cattle to a Texas beef processor that also buys cows directly from prisons in that state. Meat from the slaughterhouse winds up in the supply chains of some of the country’s biggest fast-food chains, supermarkets and meat exporters, including Burger King, Sam’s Club and Tyson Foods.
“It’s a real slap in the face, to hear where all those cattle are going,” said Jermaine Hudson, who served 22 years at Angola on a robbery conviction before he was exonerated.
He said it’s especially galling because the food served in prison tasted like slop.
“Those were some of the most disrespectful meals,” Hudson said, “that I ever, in my life, had to endure.”
Rise of prison labor Angola is imposing in its sheer scale. The so-called “Alcatraz of the South” is tucked far away, surrounded by alligator-infested swamps in a bend of the Mississippi River. It spans 18,000 acres — an area bigger than the island of Manhattan — and has its own ZIP code.
The former 19th-century antebellum plantation once was owned by one of the largest slave traders in the U.S. Today, it houses some 3,800 men behind its razor-wire walls, about 65 percent of them Black. Within days of arrival, they typically head to the fields, sometimes using hoes and shovels or picking crops by hand. They initially work for free, but then can earn between 2 cents and 40 cents an hour.
Calvin Thomas, who spent more than 17 years at Angola, said anyone who refused to work, didn’t produce enough or just stepped outside the long straight rows knew there would be consequences.
“You can’t call it anything else,” he said. “It’s just slavery.”
Louisiana corrections spokesman Ken Pastorick called that description “absurd.” He said the phrase “sentenced with hard labor” is a legal term referring to a prisoner with a felony conviction.
Pastorick said the department has transformed Angola from “the bloodiest prison in America” over the past several decades with “large-scale criminal justice reforms and reinvestment into the creation of rehabilitation, vocational and educational programs designed to help individuals better themselves and successfully return to communities.” He noted that pay rates are set by state statute.
Current and former prisoners in both Louisiana and Alabama have filed class-action lawsuits in the past four months saying they have been forced to provide cheap — or free — labor to those states and outside companies, a practice they also described as slavery.
Prisoners have been made to work since before emancipation, when slaves were at times imprisoned and then leased out by local authorities.
But after the Civil War, the 13th Amendment’s exception clause that allows for prison labor provided legal cover to round up thousands of mostly young Black men. Many were jailed for petty offenses like loitering and vagrancy. They then were leased out by states to plantations like Angola and some of the country’s biggest companies, including coal mines and railroads. They were routinely whipped for not meeting quotas while doing brutal and often deadly work.
The convict-leasing period, which officially ended in 1928, helped chart the path to America’s modern-day prison-industrial complex.
Incarceration was used not just for punishment or rehabilitation but for profit. A law passed a few years later made it illegal to knowingly transport or sell goods made by incarcerated workers across state lines, though an exception was made for agricultural products. Today, after years of efforts by lawmakers and businesses, corporations are setting up joint ventures with corrections agencies, enabling them to sell almost anything nationwide.
Civilian workers are guaranteed basic rights and protections by OSHA and laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act, but prisoners, who are often not legally considered employees, are denied many of those entitlements and cannot protest or form unions.
“They may be doing the exact same work as people who are not incarcerated, but they don’t have the training, they don’t have the experience, they don’t have the protective equipment,” said Jennifer Turner, lead author of a 2022 American Civil Liberties Union report on prison labor.
Almost all of the country’s state and federal adult prisons have some sort of work program, employing around 800,000 people, the report said. It noted the vast majority of those jobs are connected to tasks like maintaining prisons, laundry or kitchen work, which typically pay a few cents an hour if anything at all. And the few who land the highest-paying state industry jobs may earn only a dollar an hour.
Altogether, labor tied specifically to goods and services produced through state prison industries brought in more than $2 billion in 2021, the ACLU report said.
Some incarcerated workers with just a few months or years left on their sentences have been employed everywhere from popular restaurant chains like Burger King to major retail stores and meat-processing plants. Unlike work crews picking up litter in orange jumpsuits, they go largely unnoticed, often wearing the same uniforms as their civilian counterparts.
Outside jobs can be coveted because they typically pay more and some states deposit a small percentage earned into a savings account for prisoners’ eventual release. Though many companies pay minimum wage, some states garnish more than half their salaries for items such as room and board and court fees.
In Alabama, where prisoners are leased out by companies, AP reporters followed inmate transport vans to poultry plants run by Tyson Foods, which owns brands such as Hillshire Farms, Jimmy Dean and Sara Lee, along with a company that supplies beef, chicken and fish to McDonald’s. The vans also stopped at a chicken processor that’s part of a jointventure with Cargill, which is America’s largest private company. It brought in a record $177 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2023 and supplies conglomerates like PepsiCo.
Though Tyson did not respond to questions about direct links to prison farms, it said that its workrelease programs are voluntary and that incarcerated workers receive the same pay as their civilian colleagues.
Following the money
The business of prison labor is so vast and convoluted that tracing the money can be challenging. Some agricultural programs regularly go into the red, raising questions in state audits and prompting investigations into potential corruption, mismanagement or general inefficiency.
Nearly half the agricultural goods produced in Texas between 2014 and 2018 lost money, for example, and a similar report in Louisiana uncovered losses of around $3.8 million between fiscal years 2016 and 2018.
But for many states, it’s the work-release programs that have become the biggest cash generators, largely because of the low overhead. In Alabama, for instance, the state brought in more than $32 million in the past five fiscal years after garnishing 40 percent of prisoners’ wages.
In some states, work-release programs are run on the local level, with sheriffs frequently responsible for handling the books and awarding contracts. Even though the programs are widely praised — by the state, employers and often prisoners themselves — reports of abuse exist.
“Slavery has not been abolished,” said Curtis Davis, who spent more than 25 years at Angola and is now fighting to change state laws that allow for forced labor in prisons.
“It is still operating in present tense,” he said. “Nothing has changed.”
The Associated Press receives support from the Public Welfare Foundation for reporting focused on criminal justice. This story also was supported by Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org.