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I remember when they were like 3/30, then they were the following for that. It sounds like a bad thing, and it's like a bad thing. The internet welcomed back to another episode of The Waveform podcast. We're hosts. I'm Arkez.
I'm Andrew. David. And welcome to TechTembre. Everything is happening. Wait a second.
Hold on. It's Tarch. Hold on. It's March. It's not.
It's Tarch. It's been Tarch. It's Tarch. It's Tarch. We don't claim Tarch.
I don't know what you're talking about.
Mac? Mac.
“It's like Christmas in July, but TechTembre in March.”
Yeah. It's a lot. We've got, so we're working on the S26 Ultra Review and then Apple Drop 6 new products. Nothing drops. Three new products, and suddenly we just have a lot on our plate.
And also we've got to talk a little bit more about AI and how it's affecting reviews. So this might be a 6 hour episode. We're just trying to say. And we're just running it. Because it's Thursday.
Yeah. We're shooting it on Thursday. Thank you. Don't worry. We're shooting it on Thursday.
Don't worry. Don't worry. Yeah.
Make sure you get subscribed because we have a lot to talk about.
So if we don't get to all of it this week, we'll probably get to more of it next week. Yeah. But first. It's like waiting. We're going to take it in.
Did they even test this? Oh, apparently this is already gone outside of this room. And Olivia has something she wanted to add. Yeah, Olivia and Michael were doing graphics for us because we asked for specific graphics for the channel.
You might actually be seeing them on this episode. So YouTube viewers, let me know how you liked them. Is this the thing that happened yesterday? Yes. It's.
So they've been working with an app called Apple Motion, which is their version of After Effects. Because they were like, you know, the team kind of works in Final Cut. Yeah. Marquette. They're doing this for our benefit because we work in Final Cut mostly.
And they're like, you know what? All our graphics we make in After Effects. Let's see if we can like learn this other program. It'll be easy to drop drag and drop into Final Cut. Like, it'll be simple.
Olivia ran into this weird problem where she had this template that it was popping like a speck up on the screen. And then she would go do other things. Come back and it would just be like slightly off to the right. And she's like, this is so weird.
She's like, if working on this for like the past week and every time, she has to keep moving it back. She's like, why does this keep happening? Then she like talks to Michael about it and Michael's like, I figured out what happens is every time she hits save, it increments the exposition by one.
What? Yeah. So she has a set of zero in a graphic. So the solution they came up with is she just has to remember every time she hits command S to move that asset to negative one on the x-axis.
And then when it saves, it reverts to see what that's real. That's so fun. That makes me not trust computers. That would be like if in Microsoft were to every time you hit save, it added a dash to wherever you're doing it.
It makes me a free to save, which is the one thing I should do.
“Is motion does motion have an auto save like Final Cut?”
I do not know. I should because that might be a habit you can drop by switching to motion. I remember when I had I was in premiere, I would automatically save every time I could because if it crashed, it would just forget everything I did for the last 12 minutes. But when I switched to Final Cut Pro, it could crash and I would bring it back and it would
remember it would actually start trying to do the thing that made it crash again. Like it was that recent of a memory.
I wonder if the move is to stop command S and just stop saving.
Maybe I'll ask her.
I'll see if that's a little life hacks super weird or I just talk cloud to one shot
this up. We don't shot Apple motion. We don't need that software. We can just make it. I wonder if it's a weird shortcut thing that's happening. I don't know that maybe.
“That's what I can't really Michael found it out.”
That's really impressive. But well, he's an after-fact. So he's command S all. That one she does want to move it one. She'll just be like, man, SSS.
That's not that easy. That's easy. 10 pieces of it. At least she's saving it. And she can share it doesn't crash.
I have a great segue because the video that Apple played for the beginning of their event, and that's now on our YouTube channel, was really, really good, which is why I'm so sure they didn't use motion. So it's really good. It's really good.
So Apple dropped a little, we'd had a week long event. Oh, yes, we haven't talked about any of this.
So we had Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.
Yeah. Monday, we got iPhone 17e. If I remember correctly, Tuesday, we got MacBook Pro M5 Pro M5 Max. Oh, Tuesday, yeah. And studio display and studio display XDR Monday.
We also got iPad. Yeah, with them. I forgot about it. Yeah, I mean, it's been a week. Yeah.
“And there's new crossbody strap colors to them.”
Yeah. Yeah. And then we also got the suits. And then Wednesday, we got the, and then Wednesday, we got Macbooking. Oh, wait.
Tuesday. We also got the M5 MacBook Air. Oh, did we? Yes. I know.
Yeah. The things that just got spec bumps are obviously less interesting. Yeah. Do it. You can skip those pretty quick.
M5 MacBook Air. It's the MacBook Air, but with M5. Yeah. And Wi-Fi 7. Okay.
We're not supposed to go inside the things. Oh. I mean, it's mostly just like they started at 512 gigs of base storage now. Sure. That's pretty awesome.
And it goes up to four terabytes instead of two 2x faster, read and write speed, which is pretty awesome, supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. $100 more expensive than the base M4 Air. So that's not great. Yes, but at least it starts to double the storage.
Can I? Well, sorry. And you may have kind of answered that, but I missed it. Okay. It's 512 base storage, but the price has gone up.
Yes. Is it the same price as the old 512 base storage? It's 100 or so. So it is more expensive than the base line M4, but for the same storage tier, it's actually $100 cheaper than they could have gotten on the M4 MacBook Air.
Good. So it is like a better deal. And for a lot of people, the MacBook Air is going to be the better option anyway, which we will get to the Neo and a bit. But yeah.
And then like you said, M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros, that's kind of a big deal, because we didn't have M5 Pro or M5 Max of anything yet, right? So those are going to be way better for AI tasks, et cetera. They also have video editing, they have way better GPU, 4x, peak GPU compared to M4 Max, which is pretty insane.
Where's the M5 Ultra, man? Hi, now, even though they don't love the Ultra, they've only released a couple of those. Only three Ultra, so yeah.
Up to 614 gigabytes per second, up to 128 gigabytes of unified memory in the M5 Max.
Pretty crazy stuff. It's ironic that they're releasing these now, because people, again, were saying that in November or so, they're going to release the M6 series because of the touchscreen MacBooks that are going to come out. Yeah.
But it was funny how everyone was speculating that these were going to be the touchscreen MacBooks, because of the animation that they released, which is like the pinching of the Apple logo. That was funny. Yeah.
And I just went on a tirade on Twitter being like, no, it's the cheap one. Yeah. Also, they started a terabyte now, which makes me feel kind of old, because a laptop starting at a terabyte storage is that used to be the touch here model. Yeah, that used to be like, you could get a terabyte.
“Now it's, you have to start at a terabyte, that's wild to me.”
You want to talk about the displays on the M5's? No. Oh, that's the display. Oh, that's the display. Oh, that's the display.
Yeah. Okay. So, two new displays. They have a new studio display and a new studio display XDR, which is a fancy and has sparkles around it.
So, no. The new studio display is a little underwhelming. It's still like $1,600, it's still 60 Hertz. I think essentially what they did is add a Thunderbolt port and it's, yeah, I didn't really do a whole lot else to it.
But yeah. The studio display XDR replaces the Pro display XDR. Yeah. And it's small. Significantly cheaper.
And here's the difference. So I've had a really nice way of putting, it's $30,000 or $3200. Yeah. Yeah. That's $5,000.
No, this is a true. Okay. So this is a thing that happens with Apple a lot, which is, we go, look how much better it is than last time, because last time was a horrible, overpriced, which something.
What we're going to do with the $17,000. Yeah, exactly. So it's like, the Pro display was $5,000 plus a $1,000 in a $1,000 in a texture. So yeah, this is significantly cheaper.
But this is also a better display in just about every single way. The only thing that I will miss when I inevitably get two of these is six
K and 32 inch, because these are both now five K, 27 inch displays.
But they are, I think now, 2000 is peak brightness. There are many LED instead of the backlight and the Pro display, which I think is just a bunch of backlight zones instead of many LED. So yeah, 5K, 27 inch, 120 Hertz and very exciting, and also you can daisy chain them, because they have a Thunderbolt extra Thunderbolt port, which is sick.
Yeah. So I think I have to get these. I'm excited for what the mini LED ends up looking like. There's 234 dimming zones, which are supposed to have even better contrast levels, which is very nice.
And 120 Hertz is pretty crazy to be able to do that on these displays now. Obviously, we've had gaming displays for a long time. And there's like, Pro are just, there's like all these high end displays.
But the reason people always end up buying these, even though they're a bad deal, is just
because of the seamless integration where you can just plug it in and it just works and all that stuff. That is probably the top of the list. The second thing on the list is probably color accuracy. And being able to depend, there's a ton of reference modes in here, like this is actually
still going to be a very good display. I kind of wonder how it'll look next to a Pro display or how comfortable they will be. I do think they're very, very similar, but yeah, I think these are actually a really good display. And the fact that they're $2,000 cheaper makes it look good compared to a Pro display,
“which is obviously why you should never buy a Pro display again.”
And they're just continuing. That's going to be a pretty significant lack of real estate. You're going to lose when you're too exing this, now putting them next to each other. You're losing a lot of space. I do.
I do way easier to have made your replica desk if I could have done 27 inch to 5K monitors. Well, maybe now on the replica desk, you can just buy used Pro display. Because it's just going to be cheaper.
You don't have to buy the XDR.
You should just buy the studio display. Well, but the Pro display XDR might be like the same price and the use now, you know? Oh, you think you use the price? You don't think it could be that low, but you don't think they go up for people who want now.
Still sick. The 6K Apple display is now going to be like no more production. It's limited edition. I think people are interested in the mini LED. I totally agree with that.
And the refresh rate. Now, the only 6K 32 inch cheese grater monitor you can get is that weirdo knockoff. Though we got for the replica video, if you have some brown studio video. Yeah. Also, the XDR model, the 27 inch does charge at 140 watts so you can plug in the full 16 inch
“MacBook Pro, the other one that is not the XDR model, charges at 96, which is, I believe,”
the charging speed of the 14 inch MacBook Pro, right? Yeah. Or something like that. Yeah.
I mean, that kind of shows what Apple, like, who Apple thinks is going to buy these.
They think the mini LED ones, they're going to be the hardcore workstation MacBook Pro, whereas the smaller, well, not smaller. The cheaper one is going to be, you know, the lighter MacBook Pro. Yeah. But, you know, my summary is the regular, the regular studio display is not that great of
a deal. Please crush up a bunch of stuff. The studio display XDR is kind of one of one again. Yeah. Really, it's not going to be adding much to people who are, like, the people who bought
Pro display XDR previously. Oh, no. Now, this is just what you buy instead, and it's not going to be like, just because it's cheap, right? I don't think it's going to gain that many more users.
Yeah. I think it's, if you today were thinking about buying in Pro display XDR, and then this comes out, it's like, oh, thank God, I don't have to buy a Pro display, because that
“is going to be way more expensive for essentially two extra inches of screen or five or”
whatever. But this is way cheaper and a better display on 20 hertz is pretty nice though. That's really what I'm most excited about to be honest. Yeah. Yeah.
That's pretty good. You're going to rock in CS2. I'm going to edit it. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
PS videos. And it's going to be great. Yeah. Okay. We got to talk about iPhone 17e.
Yeah. So obviously last year, review was called, like, who is this for something like that, because it just didn't make any sense at all. It was a $600 iPhone with a 60 hertz display with no mags safe. One can with the single camera, which is the worst of all worlds.
Yeah. And also last year was the year that they started making the base iPhone, like, really good. So it just made even less sense. I reviewed a $900 iPhone 16e.
Well, I went to give you the top model of $100. Nobody is going to buy the top model. You can get all of the phone for $900. That's insane. Okay.
Now we have the 17e. One year later. And what do they change? This could have gone either. It stays exactly the same as horrible, or it's best is we get what the 16e should
have been. I think that's what we got. I think that's what we got. It has mags safe now. Yeah.
It has one more color. So it was black and white. And now there's black, white, and pink. I don't know if anyone doesn't have pink, but they're doing pink this year, I swear. Yeah.
And it has the newest chip, and it doubles up to $256 a storage again. And it's still the same $5.99 price. And ceramics is shielded too. And ceramics shielded too, which a lot of people are very excited about.
Yeah.
So, C1X chip may be underrated, but it's in there too.
It's their newest, highest, and modem cellular wireless chip. Yeah. So that may end up being like the most high end thing in here alongside the processor. Yeah.
“But I think what's really interesting is they stuck with a single camera and they stuck”
with the same exact design and the 60Hz display on the front. Yeah. So now, the question is just how much do you care about a single camera and the 60Hz display? Lots of people don't care.
Clearly. And lots of people will just buy the phone. I find it still a little crazy that if you crush up a little bit for 600 bucks, you get 120Hz OLED, you could get dual, probably triple cameras, but a lot of people don't want the Android thing.
I'd rather buy a standard 16 refurbished for probably cheaper than this than the 17. Yeah.
I wonder if there's refurbished 17's already that a cheaper that are like 600 bucks.
Probably not that cheap yet. But 16's definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of these things that we're going to talk about today, it's like if you're
willing to buy used refurbished, the better one from last year is a better deal. And I think that people should get into the habit of looking at used and refurbished things before they buy the new thing, especially because we're getting such incremental upgrades every year. Yeah.
“I was going to say, I don't even, everything we talk about today, every phone.”
Almost. It doesn't matter. Don't only talk about it because a lot of people are talking about the refurbished MacBook Air from last year. Well, I was going to say that going off of how Mark has started his video is like,
if you're listening to this, if you're like one of techs. Like if you're subscribed to tech channels, you just, this isn't for you. Just like get the regular iPhone 17 or an old, like, air or like refurbished, like do do that because this is not for the people that are aware of of this. This is like you walk into a store and you're like, give me the cheap one.
I don't care, whatever. Like those people, they're going to get, but it's got a high, high message because my needs is actually used. I don't, the same thing with the, with the new computer, like I don't care, what's the cheap one.
That's, that's where this is for at least this year, they get a decent phone, like a phone that makes sense in the lineup. We're last year, I felt like they were getting scammed. Not having Max A, if was like a big L and then like they're kind of mugging Google with this edge right now.
I'm going to, I don't know what mugging means, but get mocked. Payman. It's a loose set, it's a, it's a storage mugging. Yeah. So a couple of frame marks with Google in Miami Club.
So Google with a massive cortisol spike, Google's 10A has 120 gigs of storage again. So yeah. So yeah, if the 11 comes out, I'm assuming that'll be 256 base. It's got to be. This just has to be right.
Because now they did the, it's got to be the 17 over the pixel 10 double storage. Same price. And now they did it for the cheap versions on both of the 17. This just feels like they're picking on Google at this point. You can have to get on the surface.
Yeah. They deserve to get picked. Yeah, Apple's getting to the point where they're like not releasing anything with 120 gigs of storage anymore, because when we get to the Neo, start to 256 as well. Like there's not a lot of 128s left in the Apple ecosystem.
Google's got to catch up. Otherwise, they're going to have a lot of cortisol this summer. I know you're watching. I know you are, I know you've heard us. You do that comment and just get to work on the phone.
All right. There's one more thing that Apple announced, then it was the final thing that they saved for Wednesday, which is a MacBook Neo, new name, cool name.
We've never heard that word from Apple before.
We thought it would just be the MacBook. So MacBook Neo is a $599 MacBook. It's a 13th display. It's powered by an A18 Pro chip, so not quite episode, an M series chip. But that was a chip that was in the iPhone 16 Pro, and it seems to be right around the level
of performance of M1, probably a little better in single core, a little worse in multi-core. But anyway, A18 Pro inside, a gigs of RAM, 256s of storage, and four colors. It's incredibly inexpensive, and so they've done all the things I have to do to get a MacBook, which is still made of metal all the way down, like the keyboards not back with anymore.
Only two ports, both are USB Type-C, one of them is USB-3, one of them is USB-2, and they're not labeled. And they're not labeled. The back one is USB-3, the front one is USB-2. You probably figure that out sooner or later.
I don't know. I don't think they are. I don't think they are. Or are you still care?
“If you figured it out, you need to be buying.”
I think most people are just using these ports to charge, and not using them four. One to charge one's a plug, something in a mouse, a keyboard, some random. But you just read it. I don't know everything is wireless. It's true.
Because this is for people that are doing ever-- you guys both said this, the Safari book. People are using online services almost exclusively with this computer, so why not plug anything in, except for charging in. That's totally true. What else is true?
Oh, so the keyboard yet, not back with it, and the trackpad is not a four-sub-trackpad.
It's an actual clicking trackpad, and it's a little bit smaller.
You said it felt good though?
It felt good. It felt totally fine. No issues with that at all. The last thing I noticed is the keyboards were white, and they had-- So on the side, they had, like, move the speakers to the side of the laptop, side-firing.
Like, side-firing. I got a couple demos to listen to them. They do not sound good. Yeah. That's OK.
They're just baseline at laptops because at this point. Keep waiting for you, Evan. This is something I want to clarify on here, because I asked you this question. I was reading in the review before you even got back, or what you were writing, and you say all the keyboards are white.
But like, on the picture, they were tinted. They're tinted, but like, on Apple.com. They look colorful. Colorful. Very colorful.
And then I did see some of your footage. You said the lighting wasn't great, but like, it seems like they're closer to white. Yes.
“So to be fair, I think Apple.com pumps the color a little bit.”
I think they look light-entended. So on the Indigo laptop, for example, the keyboard looks light-light-light-light-light-light-light-light-light-blue. Close to white. Not quite white.
On the website, it looks like dark purple, almost.
It looks dark. Yeah, it's not quite that. It's probably a cry-blue. A breath of, exactly. Yeah, just a tiny bit.
A truck passed by with a blue and it's somebody whispered blue at the factory. Yeah. Yeah. So slightly matching keyboards, and even like matching wallpapers and UI elements by default at Oax.
So like, on the yellow laptop, the menu items are yellow, and the keyboards are yellow, and it's like, "Okay, you got the citrus, the--" I love the citrus one. So ugly. Are you in a citrus?
I was thinking about that. They asked me what's your favorite color? They're citrus. That's the yellow one. There's Indigo, which is the blue dark blue one.
Then there's the pink one, which I think is called blush, and then there's silver. And you will hear something. You will hear something. It's colored tape. What?
Yellow. I do like yellow. It's pissed. Yeah, they got him on the other side. Yellow is good.
Also, I just thought, "Where's Project Red?" Oh, yeah. That would call the "Bred" would be sick. Yeah, right? I don't want Product Red.
Product Red. Yeah. In all the videos I know the lighting was kind of sh*t, yep. The piss one looks like, kind of, it looks like neon green. Yeah.
Because it's lighting. It's so tough. In person, it's giving lemon lime. It's giving lime. Yeah.
Like the Gatorade? Yeah. That's like the best Gatorade flavor. So like a tiny bit of green, but not really other morning. It's mostly yellow.
Yellow haters. It's mostly yellow. It's my favorite flavor. Gatorade. I don't want to hear that.
You crushed my favorite flavor while he's saying. Yeah. Wait, lemon lime is your favorite Gatorade. I like orange. Yellow, yeah.
“It's such a boring pick, but I think I agree with yellow.”
It's so good. A Gatorade? Yeah. And then glaze your cherry. What's your favorite flavor Gatorade?
Like the red one. That's okay. You can't go as boring and then go fruit punch. I agree with that. That's a default.
That's an important gatorade. No, the blue one. Yeah. But the blue one. Oh, God.
I hit that one. Light blue. No. If I went to blue one and the yellow one is that they make my cell, like saliva glands fire.
They all do that. The red one, though. So full of sugar. Really? So I'm talking because they're a little bit sour.
Background. Anyway, that's just a flavor of the Gatorade here. Yeah. The silver is the absolute best color because it looks just like the old 12-inch back book.
It looks very clean. Everyone buying the silver is why we don't get fun colors on things anymore. Because they're giving us fun colors and y'all are like, oh, I want to see this distribution here because there's a silver one. You can get the boring one or a colorful one and I want to know what the spread ends
up being for different colors. Everyone people will buy a color. Schools will buy a thousand of the silver ones. Yeah, that's it. Everyone I know the period one period the piss color.
“But I think it's just because they like how I taste.”
Who do you know the pre-order to back book Neo three people? It's what do they know? They're all I don't. It's a f***. Well, it's really.
I mean, it's fun. It's Linda. It's a phone. No. Think about this.
The A18 Pro is about the M4 single thread performance. Multi-thread. It's not. Single-threaded tasks. Yeah, we should talk about what this computer is going to be capable of.
Okay. Everyone sees it's the the the smartphone ship and to be fair, it will be not as good, especially with the eight gigs of memory. I think that's actually the real bottleneck, but it will not be good for has video editing. It won't be good for gaming.
They were bold enough to do a gaming demo for me on this on a 60Hz display. Was it my phone game line?
It was basically an iPhone gaming.
It didn't look that great, but this is not for that. But if you think about who's going to be buying this, it's a lot of schools. It's a lot of students. It's a lot of young people's first computer who you're getting on the mac and instead of a tablet or something or like a cheap, a random HP or a Chromebook.
Yes. This for those people is a web browser and it's a spreadsheets word processing, texting, basic stuff like that email. It's going to kill it all that. It's super good.
And most of these things are single-core tasks that this chip is going to be totally fine for. When you ask more of it, that's when you're going to feel like the edges of performance
Of like, "Oh, wow, I can't play Fortnite on this laptop.
You can play Fortnite. You can play Fortnite. Maybe you can't to buy this great. You can play it on a phone.
“You can do a lot of stuff at 60Hz on this laptop, but I think us like looking at it, like”
thinking, "Oh, no, it's not Thunderbolt. Oh, no, it's not like higher fresh rate." This isn't going to be for that anyway. I think it's actually a perfectly reasonable performance envelope. I think the eight gigs of memory is going to be like a time thing, like how long before
apps are just using too much memory for this eight. I had an eight gigabyte M1 MacBook Air when it came out. And it's great up until your storage starts filling up because it uses the swap memory. Yeah. And the memory is very fast.
So it's generally fine, but as soon as your storage starts filling up, it starts getting slow. Yeah. So I don't know. I go back to the story with my sister.
How she bought the Mac Mini and the next day, the double storage model was the same price. So I told her to return it. She was like, "Why would I do that?" I don't know you storage.
I just browse the web. That's exactly what she said. What am I going to do with storage? Yeah. And I was like, "Yeah."
Yes. Regular people. We have so many things on our desktop and locally on our computer because it's video files and it's big photos and it's all this stuff. Regular people just do everything on the web browser.
I know, but that web browser is usually Google Chrome, which demands people to get it right out. That's like the format. This is the Safari version. Safari version.
You know how I feel about Safari. I'm like the biggest Safari evangelist of all time. But I don't know, yeah, I love Safari. I don't know that.
I'll never use anything else.
Here's an interesting spec about what might make this a Safari book. The battery size on this laptop is significantly smaller than a Macbook Air. Macbook Air has something like a 55 watt hour battery. This has a 36.5 watt hour battery. But they're quoting almost the same battery life as a Macbook Air.
I guarantee that's mostly like video playback and using Safari because the second e-throw Chrome on this thing is going to tank through that hat size battery. So this is specifically like you're using Apple's apps or using Safari using IMS or using Apple Music, and that's going to be great. It's also lower TDE because it's a literally the phone processor.
Yeah. The processor is just a big phone processor, they're pretty much the same architecture.
“I think it also comes with like a 20 watt charger because it's such a small battery.”
It doesn't really make a big charger. And that's wow, total lower power envelope. Wow. It is so crazy that you can run Mac OS on an 18. Yeah, man.
What's also crazy is we've been running iPad OS on an M4. That is also crazy. I'm not an M5, right? I'm sorry. I'm 4 iPad. What else can we be doing? So I run Linux on a toaster. Are we? Yes. I mean, absolutely. I'm doing an A19 Pro in the studio display XD. Yeah, they just print the device. Yeah, they put the iPhone in that display just for the camera.
This chip is so cheap from the make. It's unbelievable. Yeah, this is point though. That was the one takeaway that I had from this MacBook Neo thing was like, Oh, so you can run Mac OS on these phone chips. They just choose not to for sure. So you think I can plug in the iPhone fold and have a Mac OS experience because it's possible clearly. They might do that. I don't know, especially if Google's doing it.
How do you freaking? I think that's a philosophical thing. Because you're what you're saying makes perfect logical sense. And we are the consumer. And so we're thinking logically about this. But if you're Apple, I thought a lot about this recently.
Like the super super powerful iPad is still not good enough to be your full time.
That's a $2,000 M4 powered iPad. Yeah, and it's still not your full time laptop for some people. It could be for a lot of people.
“If I don't remember a people iPad and have Mac OS. I think it depends on what you do.”
There's some evangelists and there's a small fraction of people who are like iPad sickos that are like, yes. I got rid of my laptop. Yes, this is the thing. And you can do that if you're really dedicated. Yeah. But I think for most people, they're specifically designing these products to live alongside each other. Apple's like, please buy a Mac book and an iPad by everything.
Use Sidecar. Use continuity. Use the sync across the devices. They are perfect for each other. Michael, our graphics guy, he uses an iPad. He said just for the pencil and to draw things and then for Sidecar. Yeah, he also uses a magic mouse, so like, I mean, if I like a used iPad air for pretty cheap,
having an external display that you can just have at any time is pretty awesome too. Yeah, for your Mac for your Mac. So they're like, please buy both. Yeah. And so for as powerful as they're willing to make the iPad pro,
they are not willing to make it powerful enough philosophically to be your full-time computer.
But that's what you're going to use in alongside. It's an artificial limitation. It is a hundred percent. Yeah. Some Apple specialties. I know. But they also let you plug it into the display and they talk about how with the new display. I loved it. Yeah, they talk about how with the new display.
Like, you can plug the iPad Pro into the 120 Hertz display. And I'm like, run it 120 Hertz and you can do all the things.
I think if they're letting you plug the iPad into that display with the Thund...
and like run iPad OS on this way, they will probably let you do that with the fold. That's my guess. You ever notice the shadows though that they run? Whenever they do that, I pay very close attention to the demos that Apple constructs to demo their products, right? And whenever they do the like iPad plugged into the
studio display, they immediately open pro-create and they just start like doing the artist thing.
Yeah. They never do file management. Now they never do multi-tasking.
They're doing like the very simple like, oh, here's the big display so you can view your work thing. That's on purpose. I think if they wanted you to do all that like computer stuff. Yeah. They'll be selling you computer. I will say really quick with the new display, the really good one, the XDR one.
“They have the camera in it now. So they could just get, you should, you guys should get rid of”
content new in a camera. Because every there's many times like it on a video call and my feed is just black and I don't understand why. And then I realize it automatically connected to my phone. And this is in my pocket. And I'm like, this is just a little bit pleased to actually because you don't have to get rid of it. I'm just saying it's like when I'm in the audio, I need to take a call. There's no webcam in that room, right? And I have so peripheraled up in that
setup, like I really don't want to add another one. But I recently added my iPad as a third monitor
with sidecar. You can use that camera. No, but I just close the the sidecar window and take the call on the iPad. Oh, yeah, that's cool. It's cool. Yeah. So yeah, I guess you could get rid of it. Marcus, I want to know because you actually played with these laptops. People were talking about the thickness. Yeah, can you talk about that? Sure. So yeah, I think a lot of people will be totally fine with it. So technically, it is a little bit smaller than the iPad, uh, than the
MacBook Air. It is a 13 inch display, I'm said a 13.6, right? But it is basically the exact same weight and it is actually slightly thicker because of the lack of wedge shape. And that's not to hold more battery. It's not even like a bigger battery. It's just like this is a not engineered for maximum thinness air. So it feels like an air to me when I'm holding it. It does. I didn't
“worry about like extra weight or thickness. It's I think technically on paper, a tenth of an inch”
thicker than the MacBook Air. Yeah. So like not a big deal. Yeah. Is it, um, assuming it's not wedge shape because now the speakers are down here, right? Yeah. It's not wedged all the way down to there. You can't have the speakers in the right bottom. And also the headphone jack there looks really strange. Yeah. It is weird. It is really low. Yeah. It makes more sense to be honest. I was wondering why we were just more sense. Because it's just closer to you when you have actual
headphones you're plugging in the further, I mean, it's like three inches closer. Eight inches. It would probably be. Yeah. The difference. But yeah. I will say, uh, the refurbished 13 inch MacBook Air right now on Apple's website is $750. This is how I think I need to review this computer. Yeah. Is if you are thinking about buying a MacBook Neo and you want to be a little bit like you want to like look into it a little bit. There's actually two other things you could do for $600.
Is you could get an M1 MacBook Air M1, right? That'd be really cheap. That would be a potentially just as good computer for you. But it's an M chip. Um, you get more software support from buying a Neo today because you're starting today at day zero and have years of software. But, you know, maybe you think an M1 Air will have a better display and more multi-threaded whatever. That's a choice you could make. And the other is you could still buy like a $5600
Windows computer or a Chromebook for that price. Yeah. And I think it's, we all have this reaction because we're like, well, why would you do that if you could get macOS? But I think that's the comparison that I need to put it all. I need to put these things online and see like what's the advantage? What's the best Windows laptop I can get for $5.99 for students for $9.99? That's going to be tough. But I want to actually figure that out. I think it's like, if you're watching
or listening to this podcast right now, that might be something you look into. Most people buying this. And those people might find your regular channel review going to buy it. They just like, to me, the MacBook Neo is it's a laptop. All of us don't have laptops anymore. We have full-blown workstations that have happened to be in a laptop now because we got to that point. Maybe workstation is not the right word. But like, these are insanely powerful for this. When when you think about
what we just used to do with laptops, we would never set out a desk with them and like plugged it
“into something. We would sit on the couch or chair or a coffee shop and like, that's what the”
Neo is. Just a laptop. That's a world I've never known. Like, my first laptop was like a plug-in
to a, a workstation desk and like, and do it. And I remember being like, yo, why are laptops not as powerful as computers until MM series? Yeah. And it's just like, why would we go like, Claire has a laptop? It's never, she's never sat at a desk with it. She uses it on the couch or maybe at
The dining room table or like, and like, when she uses it at work, sometimes ...
desk. But like, those are laptop things to just do laptop things or we need to do like a studio video that's like a competition between a MacBook Air, a Neo Windows PC and an iPad. Because I'm so curious where the edge case is that one category one of those cannot do. I think this is that point though, where if you're watching a video of like a competition between a Neo and something else, you're out of the Neo range already. No, but like, even for like, like genuinely,
what just one where you not do on an iPad. You can get a keyboard. You can Bluetooth any keyboard to an iPad. I know, but here, so that might be one thing to add to my discussion because the base iPads 329, the keyboard and trackpad that make for it are $250. So that's 600 right there. Sure. So you could get one. You could get that. And you can do file management and multi-window
“in minutes. It's modular at that point too. And you have a touch screen if you want to. Yeah,”
and you could pop it off. Yeah, so it's maybe that's one more option. And I would. Well, that's very true. I will argue that the people, the, the market for the Neo is more likely to use cloud storage. Oh, yes. Yes, just a little closer. Oh, my management doesn't matter. Really on the iPad. I don't know, man. I think I just like integrated laptops more than two and one touch screens with detachable keyboards. I also think we're overthinking this. You, I think if a parent
walks into the best by NC's three laptops and an iPad that are all $600, they're buying the Neo. Yes, they're familiar with Apple. It looks like it's going to sell. Yeah. Look, also education discount is $100 off. So it's $500 with education discount. Can I ask
a question if any of you guys might know, I asked this to my kids. And I was like, when I always
think of getting an educational discount, it's usually with a.edu email address, which is college, but like very clearly, this is great for high school and it might work if you have like out school ID, I'm not sure. Yeah, I guess a high school ID, but it's harder to prove you are a student. I, and if you don't have to, then I'm just going to walk into an Apple store with a kid and be like, look, this student over here, it's been a long time since I was in that world. But I believe Apple
partners with a company called Unidays to do educational status verification. Like for the past, ever since I was in college, like even my freshman year of college to get any Apple, E.D.U. discounts, you needed to first go through the Unidays verification. And that's like high school
“students. No, that's why I'm saying, like, I don't know how you would do it as a high school student.”
Oh, yeah, you need to like, you need to like, you need to give them a bunch of documents, like your, your transcripts and like your E.D.U.D.U.D.I guess. I'm like, but also I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of high schoolers are getting E.D.U. emails now. Yeah. Possibly. I feel like also a lot of little small high schools are the ones supplying the computers for the classroom, at least in the U.S. from what I've seen, but I'm sure there's plenty of how do schools work in 26. I don't really
know how. I think you want to plug in your open claw teacher. How do you some lies about George Washington? And then you go home and like play Fortnite. That's a great caffeine all night, right?
I remember when like eighth grade when we got a smart board and the thing just never works,
so they just use the whiteboard instead. And we were like, and look at this technology, more important eighth grade. It was called this never worked. It never worked. We just watch movies on the CRT, baby. The smart board wound up just being a projector white screen essentially and they never use the fake markers on 70 pounds. The overhead projector. Not a much old. This might be I might be at the end of people who have these transparencies. This is like maybe my end of
school. I have transparencies in middle school. Okay. Yeah. So that's like the projector with the
“transparent. The overhead projector. That's what I just said. Yeah. The overhead, no overhead. It's on a”
cart. Yeah. But it's for some reason. It's called the overhead projector because I think the mirror, whatever that's above it is over. So you could write on it into it. Yeah. Yeah. That thing.
That was always funny when they raised and just wiped stuff all over the place. That is an
evolution of slide film, by the way, which was used specifically for slides like that. They could draw on it. Anyway, stay tuned for the Neo review. Yeah. I do think this is yeah. I do think this is potentially one of the most disruptive products of the last couple of years. I think a lot of Chromebook sellers and Windows laptop OEMs who have been feasting in that price segment are very worried about that one. Yeah. But we'll see, Katherine, one other like pro of this out here,
which is the pro to all Apple products in the US, at least is like not a pro. It's a new. That's okay. I'm going to make the joke in the night that it was. No, just like when we're looking at cheaper products that are specifically not for tech people, the biggest pro of me suggesting this is when it breaks on you, I can tell you to go to an Apple story and get it fixed. And I don't have to diagnose everything over the phone. It's so much easier to just be like, hey, you can get the
help here. I was thinking that because I've bought my mom computers before, I bought her a Chromebook
Before I think it's Chrome.
ways. You know, she could just go to a store and I don't have to be her son. Then I guess the,
you know, it's great. Anyway, I want to make one more thing. The closest like analogy to this is
“the Surface Go. Do you guys remember that computer? I think they tried to snap dragon one. It was”
not snap dragon. It was Intel Pentium Gold 4415. Wow. Bless you. Thanks. And if you remember, Dave 2D just shut all over this computer because it was so bad. And it, it started at 400 bucks just for the tablet. And then you still had to buy the keyboard and the pen, which were more expensive. I believe all together was probably about the same price as this Neo device. And it sucked. It really did. It was seven years. It's seven years old now, obviously. And they made a better one
that made it better, but it was still expensive and bad. So I'm just saying that, look, all the, all the tech PC channels, it's Linus Tech Tips. Linus is, is slowly, like, has been making videos being like, oh, no. Oh, no. Mac is better value than Windows. And like, almost every way now. Like, there is no, it's very hard unless you're a gamer at this point to recommend yourself a Windows computer. Also, like, also everyone's mad at Windows. So that helps. Yeah, because Microsoft
is a legacy corporation that doesn't, anyway, I'm going to get so yelled at, but I'm just saying, it's okay. I'm just saying this effort. The surface go. If you look at it from the side, just looks like a bad math problem. There's so many angles going on. The keyboard is like, slightly. Oh, yeah. That's a lot. I don't know. Again, it was set. It's seven years old. I get that. But there just hasn't really been anything except for, like, a Chromebook that is this price
and can do this many things. And a lot of people, especially in the United States, when I found some integration and all that stuff. Yeah, I mean, this is a pretty, this is a pretty serious computer for Marvel. I'm still, I'm very interested to get it in and have us, like, test it and play with it and see what it ends up being like. But being M4 single thread performance when that's what everyone wants most of the time, single thread performance is like, you know, it's just yellow,
too. It's sick. It's piss, and it's so good. Silver is the best. I want the yellow keyboard so bad.
“I'm happy for you. I think we have to take it to trivia. Yeah. Stay tuned.”
But first, I messed up. I was so diligently researching when the galaxy buds actually came out because it was a more difficult thing to research than you would expect. I mean, the galaxy here,
icon X. No. Try it. Yeah, I would never try it. I would never do it. Okay. I always messed me up for this
week, too. I spent way too much of, if you saw me on my phone and on my computer and the computer, I'll, anyway, Mark has you stated yesterday that the buds came out before the fold or I don't know what you stated last week. Lastly, but you said the opposite of the other two boys and you were actually correct and I was wrong. Who, I just want, whoever put the comment, correcting them, please, I'm subscribed. That was the first point David and I got in what felt like weeks. Hey,
man, I got another point last week. Wow, that's a huge, some one point up. Angio are both one point down. That's, no, I'm not, I'm not for the program. I got the other question correct though, so it's okay. And now that you both have minus one point and I have plus that point now. So I have two point, two point spread. I just want to say should I going to make the galaxy what Dell who sent the galaxy. I'm blue sky. I'm blue sky. I'm blue sky. So you can admit, we need to new blue sky. You can admit
there's value to blue sky. Make a way for me to make a way. Make a way for me to make a way for me to yeah, okay. So care. The, the trivia question for this week is one that I hopefully cannot get wrong.
“So I wrote a crazy question that honestly, let's go for it. I will give each of you one point”
for every tech product that you can name that has the word neo in it. Okay. Assuming MacBook neo does not count. MacBook neo does not count. And and then it doesn't need to have the words like a space between the neo and another. This has to have NEO and it's so hard. Okay. Yeah, sure. Honestly, I don't, yeah, it just has the letters NEO consecutively in the product name. The reason I was going to say ay over it must be up is because I was just making sure that there
were enough tech products with the word neo in the name of the iPad product. Yeah, I see the tech product. And tech product can be really broad. Like uses electricity, broad. Oh, I don't even
own Euro. Never mind. I don't even know that doesn't count. There's an R. Damn. But it was really funny
is that when the MacBook neo got announced a bunch of AI slot videos came out that were fake
Samsung product announcements for a phone called the Samsung S26 Ultra neo th...
just because as people would Google MacBook neo, this this would also get served back in my course.
AI overview does not know that those are that's AI slot videos. So when you Google Samsung neo to see if that ever existed, you get this really in-depth overview with specs of the Samsung S26 Ultra neo of phone that does not exist. Slop now back in our day. It was just small channels, making the pixelal trims. All right, well, we will learn or we will know the answers. There'll be at the end like usual. We'll get it back.
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Nothing phone for a pro and nothing phone headphones. Nothing phone. Nothing headphones. Hey, nothing A headphones headphones. Headphones A headphones parentheses. Yeah. God. They're naming. It's still kind of tough. Not going to lie. Nothing's a weird name for a company. It is anyway. So the 4A is the the one that most of us are interested in. It's a 350 pound aka. That's really heavy. I know. They're in a 50 dollarish phone coming out in a bunch
“of markets. I think this is the one that's going global. The new design. Wait, which one?”
The 4A is UK Europe India. Okay. So the 4A Pro is a global one. Got it. 4A is in those markets. I guess. Um, blue and black. Yes. It's a slight spec bump. It's got a couple new interesting things. Uh, I think people in this room have called it the best looking nothing phone ever. We're talking a lot of a little design. It's got pink. Do you still feel that way? I need to look at it again. All go. It's hard to say compared to the pro. The Pro looks really nice. But not in the
colors. Just the regular silver pro looks really nice. Okay. Um, I think 4A is still nicer looking. 4A I think is a more general nice looking phone. The 4A Pro is really cool and kind of almost gamery but in like a subtle way. Well, I don't I think it to that soon. Yeah, I think. Yeah. True. I guess such jump into the specs. Well, for real quick though. But last week we only talked about the pink and the white. There's also a blue and black black. So there's four colors for better.
The blue looks good too. The blue looks really nice. Yeah. So this is running a Snapdragon 7S Gen 4. It has a 5,080 milliamp hour battery with 50 watt charging. Uh, I'd be 64. A pretty bright display.
It says 4500 nits peak brightness. I almost never know what to make of that. I kind of want to
notice what the regular 40 500. Yeah. Like the peak HDR, like one pixel will be at 4500 nits and then you can put that normal. One of the gliff LG's on the back. Yeah. Yeah. Gorilla Glass 7i has got triple cameras. It's got 5,000. Pretty good looking set of specs for a phone. Yeah. That is this cheap. I have a question for the audience that maybe you guys can answer. People still seem to care about processors. Yes. Hardstop. And I understand the gaming aspect of it.
I suppose, although I'm not really sure what mobile optimized games don't run at high frame ransom anymore, maybe like Genshin Impact or something. That seems to be the benchmark. But I still see people caring about the processors. And I'm like, if the processor is lowered to your quote unquote, but it enables things like super bright 120 Hertz 50 watt charging,
“like all the stuff. Why do you care? This is my question. Yeah. Great question. I think this is”
another thing where in the bubble that we're in of people overanalyzing every little detail about
A phone, like the enthusiasts.
when I slightly better available part is out there, they want that one instead of the one they got.
“But I think for most people, a lot of people, especially even sometimes watching these with”
where just more casually shopping, they are not thinking about the difference between the Snapdragon 8 elite or the Snapdragon 8 elite, Gen 5 or the Snapdragon 8 elite, Gen 5, 4 Galaxy, like they're all a good chip and the phone performs well. Therefore, I'm not getting ripped off. I agree with you. I use a tensor chip. So clearly, I don't give a shit about performance. But I think like when we're tested in like this more range of things, when you're probably cross shopping,
if I'm just looking at two phones at the same price and one chip is better, then I'm probably going to go that short longevity route. Sure. That's when I, I'm hoping that's when people care about it more so here. But I also, as much as I love speaking for the audience, I'm probably wrong when I do it. No, there's no audiences. I think it's less like the people that care about the frame rates on the newest game. It's more so how long would this phone last me? I'm spending like $500, $600
after taxes. Like, I wanted to last a while. Well, Apple would say that running in a lower clock speed actually makes the phone last longer, which is why they force lower clock speeds,
“but they can't really do anything. I think that's a perfect example of the two different”
audiences. Yeah. There's what an audience who's like, how dare you? I want the highest clock speed. So I have every single frame, talk about the maximum performance. And then there's the other audience. Then there's the other audience who wants just the phone. Hey, it works. So make
it last as long as possible. So if you were in the first bucket, who's like, I want to maximize
and get the best possible performance, especially when you're buying a higher-end phone, I think it makes way more sense to pixel-peep and to really want the most out of your phone than that makes sense. But if you're buying a $350 phone and it just works, and especially with, I think, nothing software is pretty good. Like, it's smooth enough. I don't think it would even feel that different on a Snapdragon 8 Elite versus a 7S Gen 4. Yeah. So it's like, yeah, as long as it last
me a couple of years and doesn't fall apart, seems like it's a good enough chip. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I mean, so that's the regular 3 the 4A and we also got the 4A Pro, which I have to say, like, got announced this morning. Surprise. You probably got some really stuff about it. But I did
not know anything about it. It didn't leak online. This has got to be one of the first
tech launches that hasn't leaked. Stay played us a very long time. I feel like they, the design video last week was to be, like, look over here. Yeah. They literally, like, slight advantage. Yeah. And they did a good job at it. Yeah. This morning, I came and I was like, well, I talk about the pot. I have a lot to write this morning because we also had to shoot S26 review. And then I sit down and there's two new nothing products that didn't know. And I was like, oh, my God. We didn't know
about it technically. Mark has told us last week. Mark has did not tell me about it. I asked earlier the podcast. I left it in the edit. He did ask, is there a 4A Pro? And I was like, yeah, probably. Yeah. He said, yeah, but I thought you were just speculating. Yeah. Why are you hiding from us, Mark? Yeah. Well, I only say what I'm allowed to say. Earlier this week, I said, hey, I'm writing podcasts. Can you send me the 4A specs so I can write it down. You're like,
sure, then didn't send the Pro or that. Well, I didn't get the 4A Pro info. That was a thing. So, so the invent was in London. The literal hours after the Apple then in New York. So I couldn't physically be at both. So I made the decision to see the six Apple devices in New York and I wasn't able to teleport to London fast enough to also see the 4A Pro. Do you know what's wrong with you? Yeah. I couldn't. I actually looked. I was like, is there a flight that takes off and gets me there
at like three o'clock in the morning? So I can just show up and make a video. But no, there were one of the flights I could make that. That's not real. We talked about it, though.
“It's true. That's not coming out. Are you kidding? I thought we could take it. That's why we couldn't”
fly out. That's true. Yeah. So anyway, this stuff was sort of held in London for us to see from those who are actually there with cameras. Yeah. And it looks pretty good. The specs also look pretty good. So the 4A Pro, again, it's a 4A Pro. Not a full flagship. It's not a 4. So because it's a 4A Pro, it's got a Snapdragon 7Gen 4 chip. I think this is just them coping that it's like, hey, if you want to put a mid-range chip in this, you can't call it a flagship. If this is a Snapdragon
8 elite, then they could call it a flagship. But since it's not, all right, we have to call it the A Pro instead of the flagship. So Snapdragon 7Gen 4, 6.83 inch, AMOLED. It's 120Hz display, but it will sometimes get 244Hz depending on the app. Kind of similar to some of the gaming phones have. 5,000 nit peak brightness, which means nothing to me. 5,000 mAh battery, 50 watt charging, triple cameras, again, better cameras, though than the 4A. And better looking. It's got the glyph on
The back.
seen it yet, it is an all-metal body, which is awesome. It's beautiful. Except for a wireless charging because it doesn't have that because it can't. Oh, I didn't even think of that. Yeah. Pupu. It has like a large camera bump, similar to an iPhone in terms of footprint, but this is proof that you can do that like everyone else and make it unique because this is actually sweet. Essentially one main camera top left corner dual camera load. Are we calling them again? Pills? Is that
us the pill? The bean. The bean. We got a bean, a double camera bean under that horizontally,
“then to the right of that a large circle glyph interface, which I believe has 137 mini LEDs.”
It's 57% larger and twice as bright compared to the phone three glyph interface. Wow. Yeah. And we still have the red recording LED on it because that should be on every single phone ever. Yes. But then encased in that is a full metal silver pink or black body. Yeah. It looks great. It also has the light looking over there. It looks like it has the little circular like indent on the bottom that matches the new pixel buds. I'm sorry. Not pixel nuts. Nothing,
but it feels like that. It just like spin. Yeah. Matches all together really well. Although the pink, I will say okay. So like in the camera bar, it is color matched on the silver and it's color matched on the black, but the pink is still silver. So it looks really weird. Actually, I kind of wish that they made that pink. Here's my problem is, look at this picture on the verge. That looks this is the black phone. But it looks like a silver camera bump and the black
metal looks like it got like plastic dipped instead of like silver version. This phone is the best look. It's 100% it looks great. Yeah. I will say like I miss the HTC full metal body phones. And if you're not going to have wireless charging, which I still really love wireless charging, all metal is pretty awesome. I'm curious about heat and how that ends up working out. Maybe because this chip set is a little bit lower performance. It's not going to get as hot.
They're vapor chamber in there. Probably. I don't actually know. I don't know. The renders
might look better than the first person. I'm very curious to see them in person. It's definitely
more gamery than their other devices. I don't know. I'm not getting gamery as much as I'm getting a cyborg. R2D2. Yeah. It's like a little playful pill morphing. It feels like a phone that they took the nothing buds and just put it in the camera bump. Like that's where all the nothing design aesthetic is. The clear and kind of like red accent and whatever. And then there is a little bit at the bottom. But I kind of dig it because it's not trying too hard while also trying too hard.
Yeah. Which is a hard thing to do. Do I say the price yet? 499. 499. So not flagship price. No. Pretty good price actually. It's cheaper than the Pixel. It is interesting though because it's 5499 USD, 499 pounds and 499 euros. Which if you do the they've done this before, where they match the price. But when you do conversion rates on that, it's wildly different.
“Yeah. It's a better. It's the same price as the Pixel 10A, right?”
499. Yeah. Why you guys are looking? My favorite thing about the video was it says world's first
140x zoom, asterisk and that says claims are based on publicly available data at launch. Which I am think is to claim that it's the world's first 140x zoom. Which I can't just, which is just really bad. If you zoom into 140x, what are you doing? Have you watched the video? No. Even when it's zoom's in on the like Perfectly rendered video of everything. This looks terrible. Yeah. I mean, yeah.
It was the honest real quick. It's $499 for the 8 gigs of RAM, 128 store. Yes. Another $100 for the 12 gigs of RAM, 256 store. How many else do these two options? Just do a 1000x and just make it look really bad. Yeah. What's stopping you from going to 2000?
Yeah, exactly. You can just brand it that way. 2000x zoom. World's first. Yeah.
“Yeah. I think it looks pretty good. I think that nothing design team has been really cooking recently.”
I think they also did the thing where they kind of made the previous stuff worse so that we'd go, wow, they cooked this time. Look at the improvement. Probably not. I made it worse. Like how the iPhone 16E was so bad that when the 17E was what it should have been, we were like, wow, they really cooked. Is that, can you do that with design? Or is it just they tried on it? It depends how quickly you have turn around. Like we had to do the three. We hated the three,
but not the three A. So I guess that depends on there's like, I mean the analogy I'm making for the 17E is to to the 16E is the iPhone 12 mini to the 13 mini because the primary problem was the battery and that's the primary thing they addressed in the next one. Yeah. And with this one, the primary problem was the lack of wireless charging and the storage for the price versus the
Three A Pro.
I think this is more analogous to the three than the three than the three A because it uses the same
kind of glyph interface even though it's bigger and better now apparently. The three still had a chipset that people were not that happy with. It was also super expensive. It was also super expensive. Yeah. Like I don't see a reason anyone would buy the three when the three A Pro exists, which is kind of funny. I feel like maybe they should have just called this the three Pro. But I guess they couldn't because the chipset is technically... Exactly. I just hate, this is the thing. This is my thing.
What is everything rotate around the freaking chipset? It is because of the super super, like the nerds among us will be like, are you seriously making a new flagship with a worse chip? Yeah, but like, we've all said it and we've all done it. Also, so it's like they can't, they cannot name this a flagship because everyone will say that about them. So they have to leverage this naming scheme of like, okay, it's not the A because the A was the 4A, but it is better than the
“4A, but it's not a flagship chip. So we'll call it the 4A Pro. That's how they get away with this”
specific set of specs and this price. And when they inevitably try a flagship sometime later, all of us nerds will go, well, you better put a flagship chip in it. Otherwise, I'll spend my money on something else with a flagship chip. And a way for the CMF phone three Pro light that is better than nothing Pro for A. Yeah, it would be tough. Yeah, yeah. I think they did a great design job this phone. Yeah, I didn't even think of no wireless charging though that makes it. Yeah, it makes me
sad, but I don't know. If you're not going to, I mean, I want it for sure. I always want it. But
if you, if you're not going to do it, metal body is sick. True. Because I missed my HTC Thunderbolt even though it burned by hand. What about, there's so many better metal phones you could, the HTC Thunderbolt, the Thunderbolt was the worst one. What are you talking about? Thunderbolt was the worst battery life of any phone. Yes. I agree. They were like, let's do 4G. And then burn it to the ground. What about the HTC one or the HTC one MC. Yeah. Okay. I guess, yeah, those are more like
great. I know. Those phones were Nexus 6P. Yeah. We had good. No, Nexus 6P. Good metal phones
“did exist. Yeah, I guess, yeah. I only made that. It was my first smartphone. So I guess that's why.”
Yeah. You didn't know better. Yeah. I didn't. Well, they didn't have anything better at the time. Yeah. So they also made headphones. Nothing headphones. A. Yeah. So now they have two tiers of headphones
again. We can assume based on the name that the headphones A. I can't have a test of them.
I'm seeing the design and the hundred dollar lower price. We assume that this is a slightly lower-end set of headphones. But it still has all the nothing design philosophy. There's some colors as well. Yeah. They still have some of those clever buttons to that the original nothing headphones had. I think a lot of people forgot how interesting and nothing headphones were. They had like a. I use them every day. Yeah. Okay. So, you know, they have the paddle. They have
the roller as well. And the software that talks to them. So these headphones still have a lot of that stuff. And they have, uh, seems like a pretty decent, well, eight hours of playback. Oh, in five minutes of charging. Sorry. We don't know what the battery life is total. It's five day, battery lasts for five days. That's doesn't. I don't know how many hours of playback. This is the one thing that matters. And it's like that. After five days, and can't I use it? I can't try to.
Yeah. I guess that's a mixed-use stat. But like with headphones, you can just be like, I turn them on. I hit play when did they die? Yeah. That would be a useful number. These in my opinion
“look significantly worse than the really headphones. I think I kind of like them. I like these”
all. Then the regular nothing headphones. I think I just like the clear part on the outs. So it's if you remember the other nothing headphones. Yeah. They're square and circle. Square outside circle bump on the inside. This time is too. Yeah. But the circle part on the nothing ones, the headphone ones is where the clearness is. And then on this, the circle part on top of the square is where the color is and the clear parts the square. I just think it looks like opposite.
Um, I think it's just trying to do less. Yeah. But it looks way cheaper in my opinion. I mean, I think both them look pretty cheap. I don't really love either of them. I love my nothing ear, but I will say I wear. I use the nothing headphone ones pretty much every day because I've been using them as ear muffs. Well, you just use them because the stranger things guys use them. Yeah. Fashionable. No, but I get stopped by a lot of people asking me what they are and people are like,
oh, it's cool. It looks like a cassette tape inside. It looks like a holiday. And then they put their AirPods back in and walk the black looks bad because it's glossy. I disagree. The black is the way to go because there's so minimal. You can see the fingerprints so much more. Yeah, but no one knows you're wearing a crazy pair of headphones. The white ones are like, whoa, I'm here. The same way with all these colorful ones. It's like, they start to pick me energy. The black ones are the ones. You are all
idiots. Just the color doesn't change the pick me energy on these headphones. I disagree. I think it totally does. I don't know. I think we're all contributing to phone companies only releasing black and white at the moment. But these are four different colors. Look at you're telling me. No,
It looks beautiful.
takes. Like people are going to look at you and then look away and then be like, wait, what are those?
Because I have right there. The black ones are just headphones. People will look at you and be like, oh, he's wearing a hat. But you really think that the A looks better? Yeah, it'll look like nothing. I kind of digs a yellow one. Oh, my god. They're websites. Oh, God. Oh, god. Okay, what I didn't even know was that there's four colors. Oh, my god. What is that? Holy moly show at them. Okay.
“So did you see you haven't seen the yellow and pink are just in this. So that's what's saying”
they're just yellow. The yellow and the pink ones, I think I like the colors, but I do not like the headphones. It looks so bad. The white and black ones are fine. They're unbelievably ugly. Also, I just want to say I just went to the PC mag website where they have an article about these headphones. And they're seeing the five day battery life is 135 hour straight of playtime. That's what it says on the verge too. So just for some contact with ANC and 5 days. Just for context,
a normal, does this have ANC is the other question? Yes, it does. So a normal ANC set of headphones, flagships are getting 30, 40, the really good ones, 50. And in some insane cases, 70 to 80, like I think that Dyson headphones had a crazy big battery and did 80. A 135 is on the heart of fray ANC headphones. I need to investigate. That's only with the AAC code, though, if you soon as you switch to Elback or any other lossless thing that has built in, you're going to
cut that out. Yeah. Oh, so they cherry picked 135 hours with the lesser code I can ANC off. That's how they got this number. If you do Elback and ANC on, it's 62. Oh, that's for, okay, that sees how the context. Yeah, and we're okay, that's okay. Got it. Yeah. So if you're willing to have it sound like asked, then you can get a lot of them. Hot to eat. No, you can't. No, you can't. David, I guarantee you, you cannot. I know. Okay. I've been pumping AAC into your headphones. You have no clue. Yeah,
you sound like asked. You're listening to AAC in your headphones right now, David. I almost brought this and I wish I did. I'm kidding. Fender released a bunch of new stuff recently. They, I don't know if you remember this. You're in a half ago. You had me take a Fender briefing for you. These guys. Yeah. Okay. And they released. My crush is the arrogant talk. I've heard of Fender. They were announcing new headphones and some new speakers, like wireless speakers that are also
amps. And they got bought by by like a Chinese company or something. And they decided to make the brand like way better. And they set a year and a half ago is when I had this briefing. And then yesterday on my front porch arrives in an enormous box, enormous, like huge. And I was like,
“what the hell is this? And what of them was a pair of headphones, wireless headphones from Fender?”
And inside of the left ear cup, they have a dongle, a USB-C dongle that you plug into any device. And it allows you to do a, allows you to do lossless audio. When you say inside the ear cup, you mean like, like you take the, you take the ear plush thing off. And then there's a dongle inside that you can take out. And you can put it in your laptop or in your phone. Okay. And it allows you to listen to lossless audio. Oh. And there's three modes. There's like, there's like AAC,
there's lossless. And then there's, um, or a cast, which allows you to basically transmit the same signal,
like audio sickness and multiple headphones. It's actually kind of interesting. It's interesting. And then they, they're also insanely repairable. Like the other side has a, you can take this off and replace the battery. Like they're sort of trying to be like the, fair phone headphones, the Fair Buds XL in a lot of ways. Um, what do I bring this up? I brought this up related to these
“headphones for a reason because they're lossless, wireless battery. Like is it the audio codec?”
Like is why you talked about it? I just want to flex on us. No, I, yeah, how about some possible embargo? Well, for me, because he's wearing the white headphones all the time. So I had a reason for this. Well, anyway, that it was interesting. I'll bring in it next week. I'll show you. Sure. Yeah. That's cool. That's kind of like, yeah, you can do Bluetooth on that. I'm extra for us, or you can plug in a dongle and get like, yeah, connection. Right.
Right. Right. So it's interesting. I got something to say. Say it. Last time we talked about the nothing headphones, like when they came out and I wore them on the podcast and I was just sort of like, come on, guys, who cares? You know, I started a game. I have revised that opinion. Because I personally feel that the wireless over-ear ANC headphones space since that conversation has turned into such garbage that actually I find myself recommending the nothing over your headphones
more than most other things. They're 300 bucks. Oh, yeah. And that's, that's the first reason.
Is that most things in this space are like crazy overpriced? The headphones that I use every
Day, the folk help a tease?
the dog is in the house. He's in Wilkins like PX 8 whatever. Those are like, yeah, way overpriced. They
“do not sound significantly better than these. Yeah. I think every single year, the Sony WHX,”
whatever sound progressively worse and worse. And like the newest ones, whatever number we're on, I just think are like borderline on listenable. They sound so bad. Whoa, you think they're taking. That's a hundred take. That's a hot take. They've been whining. I consistently choose them over AirPods Max, despite the worst connectivity because I think they say, I think if you're looking, you think they sound better than AirPods, especially for flying. I think, um, whoa, we got to talk
about that because to me, the, the, the Sony's are so mid forward and they have so much distortion in the mids that if you're trying to use them for like any sort of clinical listening, they're like, it's, it's the equivalent of like rubbing Vaseline on a lens like, yeah, is that your problem? Like a doctor podcast? No, no, no, no, no, no, like if you were trying to like, if you were trying to like listen to something and be like, does this sound right? You know what I mean?
For any sort of like, obviously like, I'm coming at this from a different thing, but like, I don't, I don't, I don't enjoy listening to them. I did you enjoy listening to music differently,
“then people. Sure, I think the Sony's probably sound exciting. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is like,”
for the money, yeah, the inexpensive too. For the for the money and the feature set, I think that nothing's actually like some one of the most competitive offerings and you know something really funny, because I obviously get asked way too often like what headphones should I buy? And so I've been recommending that nothing's more and more and more, and I have not gotten a single person to buy them. Oh, interesting. Because of the aesthetic look, every single person I've been like,
I think this is the best bang for like, also because like Bose quality, like the, obviously the noise canceling Bose offers is still like really, really terrific like sound quality. I can't really say the quiet comforts are super competitive anymore. So it's like, yeah, like this is kind of the kind of the jam and no one wants the nothing. There's two thing I
hate about the nothing headphones is that the ANC basically does not exist. Like is it is a feature
that I don't have it almost at all. The the powers and Wilkins are the same way and the folk house are the same way and those are both twice the price. Okay, so it's like the I don't love the audio quality on the nothing headphones either. It kind of, it feels like everything is like a very, it's like it feels like it's trying to force like a spatial audio thing all the time. Okay, and you can't turn it off. If there is a sometimes they do, if there's nothing
that's on, and maybe it's in the nothing. It's probably. I feel like with the nothings, it's like you get clear highs that are not piercing. You get clear mids that are not like blurring everything else in the sound, the sonic field and then you get good decent enough lows and the transient response is good and music sounds like the way it mostly should on those things. Show me a graph right. I don't believe you. No, no, no, no, no. Right. And, and uh, I wish I brought in
these fenties. Yeah, these uh, I was going to say the other headphones that I was listening. I haven't tried, but I people I trust say are like pretty decent are the the Marshall headphones, the the monitor threes, which are about the same price as these. Anyway, this is all to say that I'm excited to try these headphones A's just because the longer I've like observed the space, the more I've been like damn, I was really not fair to the original nothing. I'm going to really
are a cool offering. Yeah. I'm never going to fender next week for you to try because they look
very normal and they also cost $300 and they have lostless audio and/or okay. And they see cool stuff. The and see is way better than the the the Sony's. Yeah. The Sony's are sound so bad
“that that when I I finally confronted rich and I was like you have to stop editing on these”
because you're you're because you're missing you're missing so much like you're missing you're not hearing so much stuff and I gave them the powers and Wilkins, which are not that much better headphones. Like they sound pretty bad in my opinion, too. And he it was literally like oh my god, like I can hear the room. I can hear these qualities in their voices like the Sony's literally are unable to recreate these sounds. Yeah. Yeah. I would definitely not edit on them.
I usually think of like the types of headphones. I think of like the the list music listening fun headphones. V-shaped graph all that fun stuff and then like the more reference headphones. And I've I firmly put the Sony ones in the like music listening fun headphones. Yeah. I guess my more front is different because like what if like picture me telling you the video equipment of this market. Like picture me being like dude, I have this display. The blacks are
bright as hell. The whites are not bright. There's no color accuracy. But it's just so much fun to
watch movie. But that's actually how TV's are. Touch movies. That's how I will never edit on a TV.
I would never edit on a TV.
everyone thinks this looks bad. There's entire subreddit that are like here. That's your like
“how here's how you turn off all the stuff on your TV. But if you want to listen to a story and”
they all have all those settings turned on. You buy the one that has all them turned on because it looks better. Yeah, the punch you on. Yeah. They're like that's why they turn it on. That's what people do. That's why it's turned on. It's like so off base here though. Yeah. You're too close. Yeah, listen to that. No, this is classic. No, you're too close. Yeah. Yeah. You can play the chorus. You fair too much. When you've listened to 30 prison headphones and you know the new
on differences between them, it's easy to listen to. I know what I like. You know, there's there's that too. Yeah, there's some personal. But I think there's I think there's a lot of people shopping for
headphones that are just like, alright, I'm going to fly with these. So I need a step one good build,
step two good battery, step three good noise cancellation. And then as long as I'm pretty good. Yeah, and that is kind of the Saudis. You're right. And it's like five or six hundred. Yeah. They've gone up if they're not that high. I think they're under forever still. I think they're under four. I still think getting the older versions is a better deal. But I agree with that. But they stopped folding for some reason for the last gen and I forced it. I remember they went up, they went up. They went up and
price this year. Yeah. Four, six. Yeah. They're hell expensive. For the headphones that sound like the music is coming out of a B's. I remember when they were like 330, then they were on the phone for that. That was a sound like that. It's like that. Yeah. Next up. Yeah. That's where the Saudis sound. They just ran. They did not sound that bad. They sound pretty good. Someone I guarantee someone is listening to this podcast Audit Parasone. He's like, I can't hear the difference. That's just what
I'm waiting. That just sounds like what it sounds like all the time. Oh my god, you're so hard on these. I did forget that there were four, six. Yeah. I thought there were more. Because yeah, they raised their AirPods Max. They're like 550 and they don't lose their price. And then all the others start to creep up in price because they're all competing and the Apple comes out and seems to enable $500 at phones. Now the 350 ones are 450. So it's all creeping up, which is valid that the
nothing headphones are only 300. That's really nice. But yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the headphones are one 99. And they got the sound. It's hard for me to tell exactly from the website, but it seems like you can bypass a bunch of the digital stuff with the 3.5 millimeter connection,
“which is a lot of headphones actually. You can't do it anymore. I just want to say if you want to”
yell at Ellis Rowvan on X. I'm so sorry. I'm like genuinely so sorry if I offended you and you like the Sony's like, I do really believe like the best headphones are the ones that you like. They're the one that's so true for headphones and earbuds. It's like the best camera. Don't let anyone tell you that the ones that you like are bad. You just did. I personally just see life is going to you're missing. However, we're not on a ramp
about this. A sound like a bee. Whoa. But if they sold them for a hundred dollars, I'd be like, that's amazing. But you have to go buy these. But it's like, I go on. I will say I'm on a lot of flights. And I tend to like look around and notice all the headphones people are wearing. And there's first of all tons and tons of AirPods. And I know they're five hundred overhead phones.
I'm always amazed at how many AirPods there are. I think that's because I'm flying out of Newark.
But then, too, there's a ton of bows and Sony. And I know they're not the bows, especially. It's like, no, they're not the best sounding. But they sell them in the airport vending machines and they're designed to be four flights. And they have tons of ANC. It's not going to have the adapter in the box and apparently they don't newest ones actually sound pretty good. Yeah, bows. Both of them has been wearing D company first. I know. I mean, like, they put a lot of effort into this.
But like, the old quiet conference had pretty ass audio quality with just really good ANC. Yeah, but were they b's ass audio quality? I don't know if I can co-sign that statement. You know, there's a, there's a funny thing in audio where like, you know, the like, the like Mimi bell curve with like, damn guy on one side and the angry genius guy on the other side. And like, it's with everything. Well, though, but with with headphones, it's like,
the, I don't know anything about audio use AirPods. And then you have everyone arguing in the middle about what's best. And then like, everyone, I don't know. It's like a super esteemed, knowledgeable audio engineer like super techy really knows their stuff. It's AirPods. Yeah, it's like, any of they wouldn't even consider using anything. No, it's it's the same and pretty much everything. And note taking apps. Same with can't with photos. I'll have people that are like,
oh, look at this awesome picture. And it's like the worst picture I've ever seen. Like, HDR is like, ah, did you shoot this from a B's? Oh, what is this?
“So he's, because it sounds like this out is coming out of a really skinny tube. That's what I was”
trying to, I was just saying, I might get away for the new merge. Bees, sorry. The, the area
Under the curve of people that really like asks, is high as, it is.
you should understand when you just said, because it's getting bleeply tired. I'm going to leave
“hole. So people, all the most, but you're right, every category, all the most mid products in”
the middle are all fighting each other. And then they're just like thoughtless product on each end is probably the one most people should get. Yeah. And that's fine. Do you don't want to think about it? Yes. Alice is just saying that that thoughtless product on each end should be the nothing headphones. I'm saying, I'm saying, I'm saying, Carl, you know, I got on, I got over there right where Andrew's sitting and did not give you a fair shot. And, and I apologize and I, and I have
sense, I still around. But, but it's an, it's a great, it, it fits into the, the product lineup
really well at a competitive price with competitive offerings. I don't know about all that. You
got to use the app stuff by the new nothing headphones A. It looks like you have a pair of air pods that are glued to the side of the square. It would be sick if you could pull a pair of ear buds
“out of that. That'd be cool. That's what they look like. Is it there? You don't. All this to say,”
we should get these here, we should listen to them. Yeah. Put them on Alice's head and have them live react to them. Yes. You should see if we can get 135 hours of listening. Yeah. I want to try them because I want to see how often people stare at me with them and then just take them off and don't want to be the person being stared at anymore. Yeah. They're 100 dollar cheaper. I don't know if we said that. Yeah. To it. Somewhere in, in there we did mention it. But yeah, probably got lost.
All right. All right. Well, we do a little bit more talk about after the break. So before that break, trivia. I feel like nothing's nothing's designed team. Simultaneously cooked and like
got cooked. Okay. Question two. Speaking of nothing. The first video ever uploaded to nothing's
YouTube channel was uploaded when close this without going over. Wasn't it just like a prank? It was a hype video. Yeah. Yeah. It was definitely a funny bug. It was like 8 to 12 months before they launched their first one. What it was irrelevant when it was relevant is this closest Delta or closest Delta. Yeah. Because it's like, oh no. For brains come in a little bit. It's a bug or a pack.
“Is it the first time you're in the store? Is this a schoolflashback?”
Just a little bit of a rat and then the head of this is stimped? No, not at all. How much of a store is so my taste base? Hmm. Do you have a, do you have anything to do with it? Yeah. Exactly. This store is so deep. It's just a little bit of a mess. It's a game studio, job or a joke. It's a joke. It feels like nothing's designed. Stoyer is really cool. Stoyer is really cool. Save. With this store. It's already a bit of a fair float. It's a bit of an anzeig. That's a lot of stuff.
Stop. It's the recruiting spirit. With Steps Down All Jobs, come in all the time for a year. In one package to a fixed price. So let's start. They are about 75% cost and they are all flexible. Now let's take a look at Steps Down The A/All Jobs. Steps Down. Actually, the real talent is for all jobs. All right. Welcome back. Really quick here because we've been a really long time talking about bees there.
I got bees. We've talked multiple times about how like AI overviews and whatever are going to really screw up page views and journalists getting paid and reviewers getting paid and we saw that happen this week with the website ratings or artings is how it's spelled out. But they had to kind of make a huge change to their website there. They're known for doing super in-depth reviews on a lot of things. Tech included like the largest, but like so in depth that when you're shopping for a printer,
you can compare printers by cost per page or like pages per hour or cost per hour at max flow, you know like like they're the ones. Yeah, it's deep and it's like they're doing it with different equipment on a lot of different things to be able to test these. So that obviously cost money. But previously it was free and now they had to make a pretty large change to make the full in-depth reviews of everything behind a paywall. It is now $10 a month or $45 a year. But the most
interesting thing about this announcement was a section of their release saying why we're making this change says ratings.com has historically relied heavily on organic search traffic from Google and affiliate links that model is becoming less reliable. Fewer people click through Google organic results than they used to. At the same time AI actively scrapes and reuses our test results
Often without attribution and without the context needed to interpret them co...
huge thing by itself interpreting things correctly. Yeah. Meanwhile performing lab-based and
M-depth testing is expensive. We buy every product ourselves like normal consumers, no-paid or sponsored reviews. Test them using standardized repeatable methods and publish the full test results transparently. A membership supported model reduces our dependency on Google limits unrestricted AI scraping for our test results and gives us incentives that are more sustainable and aligned with our customers. So this sucks but is necessary. I guess it's the easiest way
of putting it. It stinks for all the people who want to just go to their website and support them, but also like I don't know not many people are going to pay $10 to just go for a month or pay $45 a year for a reviewing website because you don't buy things that often. Lots of times you're just like in the pinch of comparing things and want to go check it. Yeah. So this is a tough look. This is part of the inevitable death of SEO and the web. I mean every website for the longest time, Adam
and I used to work at Android Authority and we were privy to a lot of the SEO bullshit that the
people would have to talk about all the time. And it basically equated to Google makes all of these
“changes constantly that you have to adapt to. Oftentimes when you're adapting to it, making these”
changes makes your website worse. But if you don't, then Google will derank your website because you are optimizing the way that you show up in Google search. Yeah. And with the speed of which this stuff is changing especially with AI overviews and all of this stuff. Now you have the additional factor of having to like adapt to what the AI overview shows. If it chooses your website to show in the AI overview, if it chooses you to show in Gemini, when Gemini gives
give sources and stuff like that. And I mean there's a reason a lot of websites are moving to pay the verge move to pay it about a year ago. That was a pretty major change. It made their web traffic really sync a lot. But they are making a lot more money on subscriptions. I just think the entire internet is moving more towards direct to creator payments because SEO is just kind of dying very rapidly. So I think I'm like thinking I love it. I think this is my real beef with AI
overviews. I know it's like it's the accuracy and there's a bunch of other things that are wrong about it. But I think it's because the like it it's so fundamentally removes the incentives to make good stuff. Right. So before and there's you know the ratings video kind of illustrates this perfectly. But like when you make good stuff and you optimize people to find that good stuff, Google and all the search engines when people are in the buying process will funnel you will funnel
those people to find your stuff. Yeah. And so you make this stuff because people find it and you get paid from the ads and the cycle continues. So you're incentivized to make good stuff so that more people find it. Now you make good stuff. That stuff gets scraped by AI overview and when people
start to go through that buying process, they find the AI overview and they never find your stuff.
“So the only incentive you have to make good stuff is to be the source for the AI overview to be”
good and you don't get any credit for that and you don't get paid for that. So the incentive is effectively gone. Yeah. So think about that. The effect the the incentive to make good stuff is gone. Now why would you make any more stuff? It's almost like we've decided all right the entire corpus of human knowledge is complete. We need nothing more to be new. We will just be trained on the old stuff. That is that is my that's a bummer. This is a concern that we talked about at the very
beginning of this. We literally said what happens when there is no incentive to go to a website because the answers are all on Google and like why would you make content if people are not going to go to your page and you can't get paid for it and then the AI has nothing to grab from. That is the question that we asked three years ago and now it's actually hitting websites really hard. Yeah. So we're seeing like the Virgin ratings and like adding membership programs because there are
still enthusiasts willing to support the creation of good stuff and the you know the membership program is maybe the most ideal way to do that. I subscribe to the verge. I read a lot of these things but it's often like like wire cutter for example I brought up earlier or off camera but like when I am about to buy a blender and I'm doing my six hours of way too much research to buy the
“perfect blender. That's what I'm deep in the ratings and the wire cutter and the virgin reading”
blender reviews. Yeah. And then once that's over I'm not going to read another blender review for years. That's right. I'm not going to do that. So it's hard to get people to support and to you know spend regularly on something when it seems like there's the incentive it's gone. This is specifically hard because I don't think a lot of people are reading ratings for fun like we don't we are part entertainment right so like people see our reviews but we're also entertainment so that's not getting
hit as hard but like this kind of stuff that is just like numbers and what prints per minute or barcases a smoothies per hour and as blender like this is not the stuff you read for fun this is the stuff you read for a purpose and when you don't have that purpose it's really hard to pay
Monthly or yearly on it even though yeah I don't know if you were like buying...
equipping it for the next year maybe 45 bucks for the year wouldn't be bad but that's not a great business model to be like cool every time someone buys a house and we'll get one year of a yeah subscription so this I feel bad for ratings this is for sure absolutely probably tanky. It's very tough for stuff like this there's um there's an interesting graph and also a chart as Mark has like to call out yes that shows the decline of peak traffic on tech websites year over year and it's it's pretty nasty
like all of these numbers are really high and not only a one year graph to 2024 yet to now I guess
you're gonna have so March 2024 digital trends got 8.5 million peak traffic January 26 they got
264 thousand that's a decline of 97% that was a rounding error in our previous number this is the entire traffic is crazy yeah I mean this is gonna decimate websites on the internet because the same way that Facebook video when this it decided to not be a thing anymore like ruined a Buzzfeed basically yeah this is what Google SEO is doing to all the internet set of
“built businesses being the source of information well what's crazy is like I think a lot of these”
websites like well services like Google they just sort of think social media is free information and I think in their head if you take the average of all information about one topic you get closer to a source of truth right because they're signal to noise hopefully you have more signal than you have noise and if you take a billion sources hopefully you have the right data and I think all of these services and websites are just kind of like why do we have to pay websites when you know we
could social media is free like quote unquote journalism or information and you can just theoretically get closer to a source of truth but that really just it destroys the internet as we know it currently so it's not good we talk doesn't give good information for the most part yeah I mean there's a reason why there are certain trusted sources because they have processes
“in place that will take away the noise I agree with you but I think that they just think that on a”
number spaces if you have one billion people talking about a thing the average is always higher
to truth that that's exactly what polymarkets like you know all of these guys they say like oh we can predict what's going to happen because people are putting their money towards this thing because they this many people think it'll happen and that means it will probably happen I don't know if that's true or not there's a zillion problems with that but um either way the average number of arms per human is less than two that's taking all the data about all humans ever
the average number of arms just saying sometimes that logic can be flawed it's I just don't think that was a fire example I just they don't all just think hard enough about stuff like this because they just want to get their pro I don't agree I think they know I think they don't do good I think it's going to screw themselves when they're AI can't scrape things anymore because no one's making no one can get paid to make the they're everyone is making stuff all the time for free
on social media I guess but now that that level of what we get is worse and then oh yeah and then it just all turns into nothing when the free stuff is that's being made is doesn't mean that nothing
“was the last segment where I think we've talked I just remember we talked to somebody who made”
an AI product I won't name them but we brought this up to him and he said I don't think you guys should have any words you make really good stuff and I was like I'm not talking about us yeah talking about like these people the people who are doing the in-depth web text based
reviews and like that and it felt like he'd never heard that before yeah it's gone it's this stuff
is going to be gone this yeah this feels similar I went to clock on last night uh oh you know cloud bot we talked about cloud bot open cloud open cloud sorry remember I went to one where everyone dresses up as Santa and like old one so somehow worse somehow worse everybody did have lobster hats on okay but the people I talked to primarily were like oh yeah well you can just like create your own apps and blah blah blah and everything and I was like okay but what happens when
all the people don't need to use any services anymore because they can just spin up their own services and I'm like well that's fine it's like okay but then how do people make money like well you can sell your apps that you make and like but no one will buy it because they can all make people get money so they can pay for housing and food those are the primary things I think you're forgetting that people need yeah how similar to this how often did you run into that they're like
name of like usually track open cloud it's awesome cool what do you do it's really cool I use it every day oh yeah but what are you making you're gonna be able to look behind exactly why I went to the conference and I did find some pretty insane use cases that people were using with
For I did have to actually talk to people because the actual event where they...
that was going on they had a bunch of speakers all of them were just open cloud wrappers to try to
sell you like an easier way is it which is very ironic yeah I don't know they also did have a wrapper there they did have a row it was very Silicon Valley I will tell you anyway there were some use cases either way I'm sort of just equating that to this because it's like I understand the revenue generation angle but you're not thinking far enough into the future where it's like why would people buy use your service and buy your thing if you're taking away if you're giving everyone the
ability to have the service and the thing yeah you know what I mean I don't know democratization in a way is like good but also bad sometimes we uh this is not I guess it's sort of a unique situation but I do have sort of like faith that God forbid like we do lose things like ratings in
the verge and like these places that do give these like really important to honest reviews Tom
God I'd mashable that the pendulum will swing back in the other direction um I'm mostly
“thinking about consumer reports which I think is a little bit more safe because they're a non-profit”
and they get a lot of money through donations um and you know a big part of the founding of consumer reports in the late 20s early 30s was like this period of time where corporations could just we're literally killing people with their products and and there was like not really any like consumer protection ability and I'm not saying like we're gonna go all the way back there where like you don't know if you're the product if you that this blender you're gonna buy is gonna end your life or not
but you know we could get close to back there and and it'll necessitate like we'll need some
way to know I think Google would probably say enough people are truthful but I don't know but they're
not well no I'm saying like I'm saying what Google would say it's like if you know God for it did you guys watch the Hank Green video the hour long yeah yeah I like the thing that he said about how like there's a world where we we lose access to like all of Google and all of
“and all of our information is gained through some sort of like LLM interface and at that point”
there's literally no way to know what's true because you'll have three sources of truth you know anthropic open AI and Google and whatever they want you to believe there's the LLM literally no way to fact check it you know so when you're like is this the best blender you know Google will decide what the best blender is and tell you that open AI will serve you an ad yeah there was like a period of time remember we're like auto car companies we're genuinely
telling consumers like your car will be worse with seat belts in it like remember like that was like like we've been there before there's nothing stopping us from going back there for sure I do have faith that eventually like this is just the thing that we need in a developed society and somehow some way we as a as a populous will hopefully figure it out people still do value quality and this has been sort of the ultimate debate that people have been talking about like with AI slot will
that actually make quality more valuable and people will gravitate towards the quality we don't
“really know yet we're till too early in the stage I think that obviously people go towards the”
lowest friction generally so there will be a lot of slap that will be consumed but the big question is will people also seek out the quality stuff which will still find a way to exist either way it seems like most of these websites really are gonna start moving towards subscription models I see the value in the verge moving towards the subscription model I think a lot of people like to read news yeah it's like the money maker for them I don't know how artings the ratings
has the subscription model and uses that to exist do you know how farm co-ops work I feel like this is this is how we should figure this out we're like like let's say I'm not a farmer so please let me know if I get some of this wrong but my understanding is like if you live in like South Dakota right and you live in this place where like there's a bunch of independent farmers and you all grow corn you know you could try to set up business deals with corn distributors
and people are gonna use your corn or you could establish a co-op and all the farmers drop their corn off at this mutually owned place and then the co-op is the one that handles selling all the corn and you just get paid off you know you you with the co-op consortium decides of how much they're gonna sell the corn for and then you divide the things that'd be a cool way to do these sort of reviews right is like is like you have like one place you go for all of these sites independent
testing you know and you pay for that collectively we all pay for that and then that money can get distributed there was a cool service that Twitter owned before it got bought vine now well I don't I don't I don't know if that was cool or not I created it created the poll for others we're going to say that they had this service where you could pay like a five dollar fee
And it would allow you to if you clicked a link on Twitter for a website that...
it would let you like read it without the pay wall or like it would remove all the banner ads or whatever
“and it was a super cool idea and I don't know if it was working or not you had this scalable”
thing where it was like the more websites that gone on the more it would distribute the money so obviously the more websites the less money Apple news is another great yeah Apple news is a good example of that I don't know either of those services took advantage of these platforms but to me like instead of being like like with Mark has it's like do I don't I don't need to pay for a blender honesty 24/7 right but if I I do need to pay for product honesty 24/7 and so
if there was some sort of distortion here yeah yeah it's sad that we have to start thinking
about these things like this is what Sam Alman's always being like it's like in a world without money
how do we give people you be I or whatever it's like I don't like to do why are you forcing this
“world on us right now yeah it's sad anyway you should subscribe to I you should subscribe to”
news that you care about and websites that you care about I think that's kind of the crux of it if you're willing to subscribe to like Netflix or HBO Max like think about your like the the quality of your contact consumption and what actually matters to you in your regular life and it's important to give news we were we were a few days away from those be in the same company we were and yet something worse happened Oracle is now Oracle's son dad yeah son dad author one more
sad thing in here and the sad it part of let's get it but of if you own a meta-ray bands you should probably read the article that just give out about them and the video camera on it we definitely don't have time to talk about in fact the ratings thing I thought was going to be the
“least depressing thing definitely well true but yeah if you have these go read them maybe we'll”
talk about it next week but yeah just don't you probably cover the camera yeah yeah yeah but uh we probably should get to trivia because Adam and Ellis need to edit this very fast to come up by tomorrow like you need one privy yeah do you know my I've got a marker when the when the deathbots come for us I'm going to do a trivia question like the band on the Titanic going down with the ship that's going to be that's going to be my final gift to humanity guys the MacBook Neo is here none
of us knew was coming until it came and you know so how many other tech products can you guys name with the word Neo in it you get one point per product you guys got mad at me because I have made the questions too hard and you weren't scoring so this is literally a waterfall of points available for you guys you could literally bathe in the points just don't have one of it and I'm a thing so that doesn't matter I'm going to be really lenient hardware software if it uses electricity
in any way and it has the letters n e o consecutively in it I will be fine oh my god how many did you guys you guys were running pretty good you definitely don't have the same thing I have
right what a bit open read what do you got okay all right who wants to go first who wants to go first
I'll go I wrote Neo pets I'll accept that answer I wrote I didn't think about that the nothing headphone one n e o n e dude you know at this point whatever it puts yours bro clever enough to deserve that I wrote four things let's see it the surface Neo the points yours thank great all right I put anio that like phone company a o n e o or whatever this a y a anio a anio they make portable gaming console yeah yeah okay I'll give you that point even
they spell the rock um Neo win which is the tech website uh you got it uh and neon if you can tell me it's a technology can tell me what no it's a noble gas yeah it's a noble gas now I can't give you a god if you can tell me how many electrons are in its outer shell I'll give you that 0.47 no a need no you want to hear some of the ones that you missed sure you missed the one X Neo robot that's coming out oh yeah you missed the LG Neo chef a microwave the Samsung Neo which is a
Q led TV oh yeah the DJI Neo a pocket size drone the real me GT Neo a budget phone all right no smartphone the Motorola Edge 5 G Neo that's a budget phone the old Kia Serenio a flip phone the newbie a Neo a budget smartphone the xperia Neo from 2011 and the vivo i cool Neo 10 R the Vivo Neo wow I like it all right yeah so not neon though you're sure
Hey good if you can tell me how many electrons are in its outer shell I will ...
because it's a noble gas it is a noble gas which means it has less than 10 yeah it does but I'm not
“gonna give you that point anyway if you can tell me what neon smells like I'll give you the”
point sulfur now it's odorless damn yeah that was good yeah two chances all right Mark has got 16 points well he doesn't get he has 16 points and you're with 18 and David now in the lead with 20 that was a free frame oh baby all right next question
the first video ever uploaded to the nothing youtube channel was uploaded on what date
“closest without going over okay uh use your mats”
think think I guess this would be only this without going newer wait sorry right month just here I'll take any yeah I'll just take that one here all of it yeah like pick a date all right
all right flip them in read what do we got oh wow that's when yeah so oh wait
Mark has no I definitely wrote down incorrectly uh I wrote June 8th 2021 at 55 am London time okay answers you did not write London no what I mean I wrote March 2023 okay I wrote March 1st 2021 damn no one got the point we all went too new damn it's 20 actually like 2020 and then put three over it we got a good okay it was February 18th 2021 yeah that was close yeah I was close I know you guys got close but you went over yeah it's close it was just like one day off I started
“here February 1st 2021 and I remember it yeah soon after I started but I didn't know it was like”
within two weeks yeah well good game all right sure it's not Marie has so I was and I could start this at it dang hey long week it's tech timber slash march uh which means it's probably gonna be much stuff next week too so get subscribed if you haven't already hit that like button down below leave us a comment and comment I spurred lettuce if you made it this far on the episode thanks for watching catch you later also if you got it out by Southwest yeah see you there
next Friday yeah very charged miss please wait from her's produced by Adam and Lena and Elles River and part of her box media podcast network and our shot show of music was created by vein so bingo bingo should we grin like not a graph it's a chart okay a chart is there's a moving graph if I would like to see a graph there's a graph near the top


