Instagram Wants to be YouTube Now?

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Instagram, not having a chronological feed be the default and having an explore page to find new people and new things from people you don't know is most of the point of Instagram. And to say that it's not about entertainment and it's only about connecting with your friends, that was Instagram like 15 years ago maybe.

Yes, I agree. But it's clearly not that anymore. It's not that. Yo, what is up people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marquez. I'm Andrew. I'm David. And over at the producer desk, I see Ellis and...

Oh, wait, what's that? Do you hear that, guys? What's going on? Whoa. He's back. He's better than ever. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Here he is. Back from Japan and Thailand. We've waited so long for this. Adam Molina.

You went to Thailand? Thank you. Thank you. Yes, I was in Thailand. Yeah. I only knew about Japan. That's crazy. I know. I'm back. Welcome back. Thank you. It's good to be back. Missed you guys. Just in time for Techvember. Boy, do we have a lot going on. I feel like there was a lot that happened that I was... Brother. Brother. Yeah.

You missed Tech H2. Yeah. Basically. You said it was like the craziest one since like 2018 or something. And I was like, wow, what a month for me to be gone. It was, but it was like 90% because of Apple. So... Yeah. A lot of spread out events. That makes sense. Anyway, we are at the tail end of that. And so we do have stuff to talk about like Google not allowing schools to use Google.

Reddit requiring people to log in. All sorts of other... Something about Instagram. Yeah. Instagram long form. I heard they're trying a thing. I kind of forgot what this podcast was about when there's no Apple stories. Yeah. Oh, don't worry. We have an Apple story. Hold on. Let me just turn this. Oh.

Yeah. Wait, did you just touch your screen? Yeah. I just turned the brightness of the backlight of the Apple will go on. Why would you touch your MacBook screen? That's weird. Because a touchscreen MacBook Pro. What? It's a thing. That's crazy. So yeah, we got a whole lot going on. But first slash second since Adam's back now, but also Mar iah's here.

Yeah, we're going to ask Adam to leave just briefly, even though we just got here. Welcome back. Get the f*** out of here. Mariah Zegg, everybody. But also Mariah's back. You have a specific, did they even test this? Did they even test this? Okay.

I'm here just to rant. Sorry, Adam. I need your chair. Does anyone else have anything more important than what I have to say? Okay, great. Absolutely not. Rocket money. Go off. Rocket money. What are you doing? At them. Rocket money. I am ready to leave.

It's almost over if you don't fix this for me. Specifically, I have complaints about adding manual transactions. Why do you have features locked to mobile? Why aren't they on desktop too? That would be really great. I want to make manual transactions not only on my phone.

That would be amazing. And subgroup tags for expenses. Say you have a restaurant budget category, eating out category. Why can't I only make a subgroup for coffee on my phone? Why can't I make another subgroup on my computer?

It's so funny because the stuff it sounds like you want to do is like kind of power user-esque stuff. But to lock it on mobile feels crazy. Why are we locking things to mobile? Now, did they lock it to mobile? Or did they just build it first for mobile and maybe they 'll add it to the desktop?

They're never going to add it. Weird. Is Rocket Mobile desktop an app or in browser? I use it in browser. I don't know if there's an application. And if there is, cut this. No, I mean, I think that's fair. Instagram definitely does this right now where like in browser makes it impossible to do anything.

and they want you to use the app, but I think that's crazy. Maybe Rocket Money has that, but I agree with you. Like the things you're asking to do are very simple. Where like in browser posting stories is probably a pain in the neck. Rocket Money's Mac app is an iPhone app.

It is an iPhone app, but that's terrible. Interesting. Well, if they don't fix it, somebody please post better budgeting apps. I'm ready to leave. I can recommend one right now. I use one called Copilot. Wait. All right. Adam, it's your turn to come back. Microsoft Copilot?

No, it's a totally separate app. This is my turn. My turn. This is a question on Reddit the other day. What's that? Copilot is iPhone only. Oh, right. Yeah. You need it to be Android and Mac. So, me and my IR pixel ads. Oh, no, you're Samsung now. So, yeah. Why don't you just use your bank app? A Samsung Sue.

To like know how much money you have. The app aggregates several sources. So, you could have your bank account and your credit card and your like. Doesn't your bank do that too? If you have stocks or something, like you could have all of the stuff in one place.

And if all of your cards and stuff are from the same bank, then your banking app will do it. But like I can't put in like a Bank of America credit card on my Chase app, you know? Yeah. Or the Apple credit card, whatever. Like you have several places. You try to put them all in one place. Devs, fix this. Wait. I'm leaving forever.

I also have a, did they even test this? Is that okay that I bring this up today? You can bring it up today. Thank you, Mariah. Thank you, Mariah. Thank you, Mariah. Hi, Mariah. This went. You're stuck with me now. This went live this morning, which is why I want to bring this up. Okay, yeah, let's do it. So, last week I complained that Fitbod, which is my workout app, had not updated for the iPhone Duo.

I think it did, right? It did this morning. Yeah. I feel that they wrote down what they think it should do and just told like Claude to make it do that. Dude, that's all the apps. But they don't have an iPhone Duo to like test it on.

Because when you open it, it added like sidebar support, but. Can you screen record? Sort of sidebar support. Yeah, I'll screen record for you. Sort of sidebar support. It's got the replace function, which is generally like in a submenu, but it's under the controls.

Oh. And then like you should be able to swipe to the right because there's a delete button that you see like an eighth of, but you can't and it doesn't do anything. Also, they broke the calendar. So, it's like all the settings are hidden under all of the other settings now.

And the app is just worse in every way. I can't expand the calendar like I used to expand it. I used to be able to expand it. Even when you open it up, it's like identical, but the calendar is like omega broken now. It's. Yeah. So, updating to Duo made it worse. It made it a lot worse.

And I'm wondering if it's like, because I know that there's that weird thing where you can be updated for iOS 27. Yeah. But you can also be updated for iOS 27.2. That looks like a rushed attempt to update to 27.2 in Duo when they probably have more work to do.

I can't even open the calendar view now. That's so bad. Half of the app is actually broken now. It's possible they didn't test it. Or they just, like the emulator on the Mac is not long. It's very possible they use the emulator on the Mac, but they don't have a Duo to actually test it on. This Duo sidebar thing seems like it's, like Apple developers are getting a taste of what it's like to have to do a bunch of different things for Android.

Where, like, this sidebar seems like it's causing a lot of issues. Yeah. Because most of the times when I see an app, it either looks bad with a black sidebar, or if you don't nail it, it looks somehow even worse because so many things are overlapping and essentially impossible to press.

I mean, this is Instagram's problem, too. Instagram optimized for Duo for the inner display, but the outer display is broken as hell. It's pretty bad. Yeah, I remember that. There's everything floating over everything else. When you go to post an Instagram story on Instagram on the Duo, the back button that's, like, the liquid glass back button is on top of the done button.

Right. So you have to, like... Overlapping elements. That's how you know, yeah. It's so... Yeah, anyway. This is why I said it would take a couple months. Like, obviously, people are going to... I think I talked about it in the last week or maybe the week before where, like, there's this mad dash to be, like, the ones that first support the Duo so you can be featured in the App Store section, which is, you know, for Duo.

And you get all the press of being optimized for the Duo. But there is also probably some more time to be spent, like , figuring out how you want to really take advantage of the extra space that the Duo gives you. Obviously, putting the buttons on the side is a part of that, but maybe you want to, like, do a two-column layout instead of stretching something.

Maybe you want to do more unique things with the open layout. Yeah. They're going to figure that out over time. Yeah. So Duo will get better, but it's getting slightly worse before it gets better. I just... It'll get better. I hope that this was an intentional thing that FitBod did so that they can be like, oh, it's really broken. We'll fix it. And it wasn't just sort of an automatic thing that happened because they optimized for iOS 27, but not for 27.2.

Yeah. FitBod people, if you can hear me, I will test this for you . Like, send me a beta version. Please send me a test flight. I will send you screenshots. I will send you everything you need. I just... I can't even use it now. It's, like, very bad. So... It's weird because it's, like, the most basic things also.

It's not like you're in a specific menu or anything. You're just in the homepage. Well, this is the other weird thing is that with the Duo, because they have the sidebar thing now, a lot of apps updated to have this sort of floating card style thing, which Instagram also now has with DMs.

Like, DMs just float above other content. Yeah. It seems weird. It just seems very strange, and it doesn't need to be there because it's not actually floating above anything else. Yeah. I don't know. It's really broken. So, they definitely did not test this, or if they did, it was just in the emulator. I can't even imagine how it would get out of the emulator and look like that.

It's just straight up the sidebar buttons are overlapping. Yeah. I can't even click on anything. It's just... Yeah, it's really broken. That's pretty terrible. You're going to make me go back to the 18 Pro Max, I swear to God. So, write an article about it. Adam, do you want to give us a TLDR of where you've been?

Because there were some rumors flying around. What were the rumors? Oh, God. My favorite one was you were on paternity leave because you just disappeared for six weeks. Okay. Not on paternity leave. Okay. No, yeah. No. That wasn't it. I just got married. So, I am a taken man.

Sorry, David. We get it. You've got a girlfriend. Not anymore. Not anymore. Now it's a wife. So, I went on my honeymoon and I went to Thailand. I visited Chiang Mai, Bangkok, Kosumai, which I'm sure I'm mispronouncing.

I visited Japan, Osaka, Kyoto, Tokyo. Amazing. Trip of a lifetime. It was amazing. But I am glad to be back. It was a long month. I unplugged completely from all tech news. So, on the flight back, which was like 20 hours or something, I just like binged this podcast.

I binged Techtober in one flight. I binged Techtober in one sitting. Better projected into my veins. Dude, it was nuts. I was sitting there like, oh my God. So much happened. You got an entire year of Apple news. iPhones fold now? The touchscreen MacBook Pro, the folding iPhone.

The home view. The Tesla car. Like the flying freaking car. You guys forgot about that. I was like, what is happening? I forgot how insane Techtober was this year. It was nuts. You got literally an entire year of tech news in like four hours of wave. It was amazing.

That's great. I can remember one of the only messages you put in Slack the entire time you were gone was in the thread where we were all like watching the Tesla event from home and someone was like, that thing just flew. And you just went, what? Damn. That's got to be, that must have been the most surprising.

It was up there. Yeah. I think social media kind of spoiled it for me because I like saw the gifs and everything like that. But I was like waiting for the, the actual, what the hell happened from the pod. So I had no context going into it outside of like the gifs. Wow. And yeah, it was, it was insane. That is sick.

What's it like to be married? Um, so far nothing changed, but you went to Japan for six weeks. I don't think it doesn't stay like that. I've been married for real in my real life for like four days. So like it just went through. Uh, no, no, no.

He's saying he like was married and, and lived a different life on his honeymoon for six weeks. Yeah. I was basically married on vacation, which is different from married with like rent and you know, that's good to know for my future. Yeah. Yeah. It is. Yeah. All right. Well, I want to open first news of this week.

I want to open with a banger because a couple of weeks ago, David said the duo is awesome because it's a gadget and we don't really get gadgets anymore. Good. Well, we got a gadget boys. Feast your eyes. If you want to click this link on this, but it says don't click, you can click it now. This is the butterball.

What? Thanksgiving gadget. Butterball, the turkey company. Um, it is like a little, maybe slightly larger than Tamagot chi size. Um, blue turkey. Like, like, not turkey, like the animal turkey, like what you're about to cook, which is obviously still the animal, but it has a screen.

It's called the butterball buddy and it is dropping on November 9th. Um, and essentially what it is, is it's a small gadget where after Thanksgiving dinner, you pass it around like hot potato and it can give you chores to do for cleaning up after Thanksgiving. What? So it's like how to pick who does the dishes.

You can monetize anything these days. You can pass it around and whoever it lands on gets a little, uh, screen that says you have to do the dishes or one that says, um, you have to hope, help host prep the food. Wait, so it dishes out Thanksgiving chores or responsibilities.

It's like this gadget that makes you do work. Yeah. No, I hate this dude. What? I thought you were going to love this. It's butterball. This requires you to talk to your family, bro. No, it doesn't. I can just have Gemini generate me a podcast about who has to do what chores after. We can all just sit in silence while we eat our box stuffing.

This is easy because then you don't have to ask Ellis to help me with the dishes. You can just be like, sorry dog, butterball buddy. By the way, you guys, uh, you guys do anything on Thanksgiving that I might be able to come to? So we want to do podcast Thanksgiving? This week, this, this Thanksgiving.

Yeah. I mean, uh, I'm teaching a frisbee clinic on the weekend after. If you want to come teach some kids to throw. I can't throw, bro. Also, that's the weekend after. Wait, like the weekend. Well, I'm talking about the day of. Oh, the day of Thanksgiving? Yeah. I just don't really know what it's like to have a family. So I'm kind of. I'm going to be in Long Island.

You're more than welcome to drive out with me if you want. I mean, I live on Long Island, so it's fine. That's true. All right. What? What? Yeah. Brooklyn is on Long Island. Technically, yes. Oh, really? You live under Long Island because you live in a. No, it's technically part of Long Island. Never mind. I meant like because you're.

Oh, yeah. Because I used your joke and you didn't even. Thanks. Anyway, we can continue. Got it. I missed you guys. I'm sorry. We're so off topic. I don't know what I'm doing yet, but. I was just. If you want to come. That's nice of you. I appreciate it. No problem. That sounded like a polite decline. Nicely played.

I had to offer. I knew it was coming, but we had to offer. No, Andrew, in all seriousness, this. I thought it was fun. This is a cute little thing. It's silly. I'm just being facetious. So this isn't like a gag thing that doesn't actually exist. I think it. I think it's one of those marketing ploys that exists extremely limited and is much more for the the clicks online.

And yeah, because it says it's out of stock, which I can't imagine people have been buying this. How much stock was there? I wonder if they did it last year and I missed it, but it says make sure to stop by November 9th for the next drop. So maybe they just release it around Thanksgiving. That's my guess. But this is very clearly something that like probably a thousand exist and it sells out immediately.

Is that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, this could be an app. Would you rather have this or the iPhone duo? I mean, honestly, this. Standalone device. I mean, it's I guess this is supposed to be fun. Yeah. The little blue turkey that tells me to do work is real fun .

It's supposed to be. It's very. It's all real fun. People don't do their chores on Thanksgiving. Yeah. That is like a real thing. Also, you could probably get clawed to hack into this and make sure it lands on the specific person you want to do the dishes. And then we're riding free on Thanksgiving. I wonder if I could play Doom on this.

Probably. If you're hosting Thanksgiving, you should have the power to just point at people and yell chores. That's actually how it works with my family. Same. I do think it's fair on Thanksgiving. If you're the one hosting and you got all the food on the table and everyone had a good job, you are done for the night. You don't leave the table.

Everyone else clears everything, throws it in the dishwasher or whatever. Dessert comes out. You haven't moved. You eat and then you fall asleep at that chair. Are you hosting this year? Is this you telling your family how to treat you this year? This is my typical Thanksgiving thing is tell everyone I want to host and then don't actually make any real plans and then just absolutely suffer towards the end of it.

So we'll see. I'll probably be at the bar across the street. Do they serve turkey? I don't know. Probably. Probably got like turkey beer or something. Ew. All right. Speaking of beer.

Instagram long form videos. We've got Instagram long form videos next. Did you guys see this? Yes. I saw the headlines of it. I actually wish I was able to follow this more because I know that Adam Masseri is like posted about it and like explained it in his video. I haven't seen that yet, but I did see the headline that is , oh yeah, you can post like long form widescreen videos on Instagram now.

And I think I even went to my Explorer page recently and there was one sitting at the top. So it's happening. Yeah. See, like at the top, there's a widescreen video. Oh. Wait, if you click it, whose is that? It's just Lexus. It's a collab post.

Okay. But yeah, it's two different people. Am I crazy for thinking this is going to work? Hmm. It's going to work. The history of Instagram trying long form videos is actually kind of long. Yes. Do you remember IGTV?

Oh God. Oh, do I. So they tried IGTV, which was a separate app at first. Yeah. And then they eventually folded it in. It was reels. But they always wanted a place for people to put videos because Instagram was always just photos. Eventually, we got a whole bunch of short form vertical and that seems to be working, but they want to compete with YouTube and offer widescreen long form.

Which, as we all know on YouTube, like we are here, is a great way to do longer videos and build community and all that other fun stuff. But Instagram has still a void of that. People don't really post that type of stuff on Instagram. So they're trying to support it better. That being said, YouTube has a bunch of other stuff like a monetization program that make a big difference as far as wanting to post on YouTube.

You're cruising through my notes here. Sorry, sorry. I didn't mean it like that. Yeah, I guess I... I'm just saying, you're coming to the same conclusion. Without reading the articles yet or seeing what Adam has said yet, this is what's going through my head, which is like, okay, you plan on supporting long form. Do you plan on changing anything other than just injecting the video format into Explore?

Yeah, let's... That's the question. Let's go through. I watched the video and I can explain it to you a little bit. It's fairly short. I'll give you a little bit of an advocate on this. Sure. So continue. We'll get there. They're launching long form horizontal videos and a couple things that have changed there.

We have a new tab in Instagram now. I'm going to be performatively scrolling the entire time on my... Keep going. On your touchscreen. We get it. We get it. The video was like six minutes of him and the VP of products kind of talking, first of all, about how much Adam Azeri said he's never wanted this and that how she convinced him that they do want it.

Great. It was a pretty boring video, but a big reason they kept saying, which I was very confused about, they kept saying the main reason for making these long form videos is because Instagram is not about entertainment, but with connecting with friends. And over the last decade, we've all seen Instagram changing .

This is in my eyes as a place that's not actively about caring about or keeping in touch with your friends at all. And this feels like the exact opposite of that. I mean, they said connecting with friends, both of them, like four or five times in a six minute video.

If it was about connection... That's why I'm on B-Real. I don't know if I want to inject now or just wait for the end, but like Instagram not having a chronological feed be the default and having an explore page to find new people and new things from people you don't know is most of the point of Instagram.

And to say that it's not about entertainment and it's only about connecting with your friends, that was Instagram like 15 years ago. Yes, I agree. But it's clearly not that anymore. It's not that anymore. That was their main thing that they kept regurgitating to make it sound like this is like good for you. But then they also made one other point in there about how a lot of reels have turned into clipping out of long form videos and being posted on Instagram.

And when they said that, that's when I was like, cool. Now we know why we're doing this because they understand that they're missing. They're not getting a piece of the pie. Like stop. They don't want things clipping and moving into Instagram without them hosting the full suite of whatever.

I think that's the pretty obvious thing here. Yeah. Sorry. Well, there's that. And there's the fact that they recently made the Instagram TV apps last year, which I had no idea. It was very well. But then recently they launched like new versions of it, I believe. Was it? Apparently it launched last year.

Okay. But yes. And that then they start talking about how these things they wanted to be on TV because of their Instagram TV app. And that previously was mostly just watching reels, which we all know watching vertical content on TV is horrible.

Yes. You have that. What was that Samsung TV that rotated? Well, there's an Apple TV app that launched this month. So, but I feel like all of this was just made for trying to compete with YouTube. You know, all of these, all of these platforms are just trying to be each other.

You know, like YouTube is trying to be Netflix. So they like have the shows and stuff in the YouTube feed. Now Netflix wants to be YouTube by like putting pod video podcasts on Netflix. Now, and now Instagram is just like, we see the growth of content viewing on TV because YouTube's TV view viewership has just gone like this.

And so they're just like, well, if we have all of this video content that people are watching all the time, why don't we get in on that? No, they're so clearly like Instagram realizes so much of their stuff is the same content as on other platforms.

Like, you know, they stole stories from Snapchat. They're stealing all this short form stuff from TikTok. Now they're doing long form for YouTube. They want everything to be in the same place. They know that the stuff on Instagram is essentially not always made just for Instagram. It's really easy for all of us to post vertical content on Instagram because we can post it on four other websites and have this so much less effort put into it.

But now they're missing the long form thing, which sucks on a phone. But they have the TV app. They they want it to be one of the features they mentioned is like you could be scrolling a reel. And if it's just a clip of something, it can now link to the long form video, which you can watch on your TV, which is what YouTube does. And it gets us like 0.01 percent of views because those are two different audiences.

That's a human problem, not a YouTube problem. But yeah, they do offer the link between the short form and the long form. Just people don't click it. And I do think they understand that people are sharing long form videos with friends. Also, Instagram knows one of the best ways that they keep people on the site is, you know, because they have lots of very easy way to share content that's on the site and not leaving it.

This is one step further to not leave their site. Even if you're leaving it for your TV. Now your TV is an app. That's the same. Also now Meta is getting access to your TV, which we all learned last week has plenty of ways to track you. I'm sure. But yeah, I just hated the whole like this is to make better connections with your friends and stay in touch with that.

I thought that was weird. But then what you mentioned before in terms of payment, like Instagram does not pay their influencers. It does seem like there's going to be some sort of bonus program coming out where they're offering some select people a bonus payout between 50,000 to like 500,000, depending on who you are.

But this seems to be the way they always get people to start posting is like, here's this random bonus thing for three months or whatever. And we're just going to sunset it. And then just completely give up. It's like you did the thing to start, but keep going and we 're just not going to pay you anymore. They had that with threads when it first launched.

Did they? They had it with reels for a while as well? Yeah. They're paying people like $500 a month to like post enough threads per month. And then they did for like three months and then they just gave up on it. And then they just stopped paying. The way I see it, there's like two ways that you can incentivize creators to post on your platform. One is through like paying them like there is a potential for income.

And then the other is like social growth. So like people post on TikTok and they don't really make that much money, but they have the potential for tremendous social growth. Yeah. And that's also true about YouTube Shorts. There's channels getting a million subs in a year just for posting shorts. So if you, if you're Instagram and you're like, okay, we've got this new thing.

We want to be competitive. We want to offer long form videos. If they're not going to do the revenue share thing, if they 're not going to have the monetary part, the other thing they could do is just turn it up in the algorithm and make it, frankly, changes the reputation of Instagram.

But it's like, oh, this is the place where long form videos go viral all the time. Then that'll make people want to post long form videos. Yeah. But that's another like big shift for them. Like Instagram was just photos for forever and they have to change their reputation really substantially to get to the point now where it's like photos and mostly reels at this point that you see.

So they'd have to turn that knob again and like make people see them a lot and they're doing well and you want to be a part of that. That's the other way they could do it. You all kind of said my points as to why I think this is going to work because they took stories from Snapchat and I don't go to Snapchat anymore for stories.

I go to Instagram for stories. Snapchat screwed up a lot of it. Well, yeah, but I'm just saying then they took reels from TikTok and I was just telling oh, my wife. I was just telling her yesterday about how I don't really go to TikTok to like go down rabbit holes or something like when I'm bored and I have 10 minutes.

I go to Instagram. I just open up Instagram and there's reels. Reels is winning. And then in the way that they don't pay any creators for long form video, they don't do that for reels either. And reels is still everywhere. And that is like the memes that I get sent like in my friend group are all on reels.

I don't get sent TikToks anymore. It's because of the sharing. The sharing is really good. As far as advertising, which they have a whole apparatus that they can plug in play to this new long form video thing. I think also it'll work because, you know, what's a lot easier to monetize than short form vertical videos is widescreen regular videos that are on your TVs and on your laptops and all the things like it's easier to put ads in a 10 minute video that people will sit through and you can just run the YouTube playbook and

directly and directly compensate creators. So I think this might work. But who knows? The thing is, though, is if you're a long form creator and you're looking to post on this, I can't see how you would have any trust in Instagram paying you like they haven't announced that they're paying people.

They have for years been like, oh, yeah, we're trying. We're trying. But we just can't figure out how to do this. It's like y'all are big enough and could have figured this out. I don't think Instagram creators are vying for Instagram to pay them. I think they I mean, I mean, everyone is vying.

No one's going to say no to more money, but like they're making their money from brand deals. They're making their money from other things like people have figured out how to monetize Instagram without Instagram. So if Instagram also throws money on top of the table, why not? The reason getting paid from AdSense, though, is it's more consistent, like brand deals come and go.

You could have a month where you have a bunch of them. You could have a month where you can't get any of them. Like having that security there is a little nicer. I like. I don't know. I also here's my kind of tinfoil hat thing. Did YouTube know this was coming? Is that a part of the reason why we're changing YouTube views?

Because we know Instagram is going to do totally inflated views for this. I think that was just because every other like I use those kind of views. My take is that you really need to change user expectations of what an app is for.

I don't I don't see this working very well for them. I don't think that podcasts on Netflix are working very well. All right. So I'm messing with it now. I have the app right now. It kind of looks like YouTube and Instagram hybrid, basically. But like when you watch a long form video on YouTube, that 's what it looks like.

Right. You have related videos down here and then you can pull up the comments if you want. You can turn it sideways, watch a full screen, big controls , scrub through. It's built correctly like to watch long form videos. But like you said, it's a it's a matter of discovery. And it is it is more well integrated now.

So I can just share this and DM it with someone like I could a short or a real or whatever. But do I want to? Is that what people are expecting? Are they going to be mid rolls? Are they going to build all the same features that YouTube has? Yeah, that's interesting. Eventually, for sure. My. Yeah, sorry. I was just saying I don't think they've announced it yet, but we all know it's going to get an ad at some.

Yeah. My big take is like people go to specific platforms for specific types of content, especially if they're on their TV. They're not just going to be like opening the Instagram app on their TV like they know their expectation is that they do that on their phone. Yeah. And the reason that Spotify was able to get really big into podcasts is because podcasts were still in their explosive growth phase when Spotify added podcasts.

Now, most normal people that I ask if they listen to podcasts and if they say I do now, I say what? Where do you listen? And they say Spotify, which is crazy to me because I've never listened to podcasts on Spotify, but it is most people's like default podcast player. But that's because podcasts were just getting into the mainstream.

But I feel like right now there are sort of cemented content platforms that people go to these platforms for. And you have to change user behavior significantly in order to actually make them start. I don't think this requires any like significant user behavior because I think I think this is all about people using two screens at the same time, like always having a phone or a tablet out while they're on their TV.

And I think Instagram slash meta sees a world where they know people are scrolling on Instagram while they're watching TV. And if they can keep an Instagram client on both devices, they'll never have a user leave and they can serve twice as many ads. Yeah. And so like you're watching something on TV, Instagram, you find something interesting on Reels, Instagram, you hit the play on TV button and the long form just goes to the TV.

And then you're just in this endless feedback loop of nightmares. I'd be really curious what sort of long form content people actually show up to watch on Instagram. Because when I think of what I want to sit back and watch on a TV, it's like shows. It is the really long form types of we've made 30, 40 minute videos like those types of things, those videos I could see.

But like the stuff that I typically see uploaded to Instagram, it's not that. So I'm curious. Yeah. It depends on how they put it in the app. Like my comment was mostly about Instagram on the TV in general. But I could see, you know, if you're just scrolling through Instagram and you click a video and it just happens to be 10 minutes.

Yeah. That doesn't really require user behavior change. That's also a bit of friction. People usually leave. When you click on an Instagram reel and you get 30 seconds in and you're like, wait, what's going, this isn't actually interesting. You just move on usually at this point. So that's another thing for like behavior.

And you don't think people do that as much on YouTube. I think when you're on YouTube and you're expecting to watch a longer video, if you're in shorts, like it's the shorts fast scrolling stuff. Right. But if you're watching long videos on YouTube, you're ready for the next long video on YouTube. True. I think in the like kind of the social media landscape right now, you use Instagram a lot different than a lot of other social media video makers use where like you still use your Instagram as mostly a way to just like post some personal things or something.

You're having fun. You use it as something completely different than YouTube where I think so many people who have larger channels, it is continuing the view game. Like how many clips can I make this video into to go to Instagram to try and bring people here? True. So they're using it as a.

Why are you talking to bro? Yeah. Ellis specifically. So I think. I like how you're using Instagram. Marquez is actually trying to connect with friends. But yeah, like you still use. It's a thing that happens a lot of times when like we get people asking to do ads on Instagram. Like we say no to even more for Instagram and Twitter than we do for other things.

Yeah. Because you're like, I mostly like to use this. We'll do one every month maybe. But yeah, you usually use it more as a. Yeah. Philosophically, I've. So it is funny that things are going in opposite directions . I've always philosophically treated each different social media site as a completely different siloed place, a different audience, a different user expectation and behavior and different content.

Right. And I think the best way to be on Instagram is to speak the language of Instagram and be on Instagram a lot and know that people are watching things quickly and like seeing some photos or carousels or whatever. And then to go to YouTube, you don't post the same stuff on YouTube. You are speaking the language of YouTube and you do the YouTube stuff on YouTube.

Yeah. But what we're also saying is it seems like a lot of these apps are like, what's the carcinization thing where they're all sort of becoming the same thing. For sure. You could do stories everywhere. Yeah. You can do long form everywhere. You can do the same content on TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and like all the same stuff could be everywhere.

Yeah. Which is probably the way some people play the game when they're just trying to maximize clicks. Yeah. But I think that's actually less efficient. Yeah. I think you want to speak the language of each place that you are. Can I make a really bad analogy to that? Yeah. Sure. Really quick. Please. Apps used to feel like we would pick our restaurant.

Like, I want to have steak tonight. I want to go get a burger. You're going to talk about the wonder thing? No. Now everyone just wants to be Golden Corral where it's everything in one spot except all of it sucks. I think it's like a McDonald's. I love Golden Corral, by the way. Oh, I love it. It's awesome.

I also like Golden Corral. The reason I say McDonald's is because it's like, it's fast food. It's the thing that's successful. So it's the thing that gets numbers. So you just, you might as well do it because it's the thing that everyone's consuming. I guess I use buffet with a lot of things because it used to be, I want a long form video YouTube. I want to look at pictures that my friends are posting Instagram.

I want to just see people with really funny quick takes Twitter. Now Twitter has short form. Yeah. Now every single place has a way to post text, a way to post a short form video, a way to post a long form video. Doesn't TikTok have you post long form? You might as well see a podcast on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify, like everywhere.

YouTube did this weird thing recently that I've noticed where they've now ingested long form videos into their short form stuff where like if they just run out of shorts to give you, they give you a in vertical feed, horizontal video.

Oh yeah. And all it is, is actually just a snippet from a long form video that AI or something pulled out and is like, do you want to watch this whole thing and go there? Yeah. They're like going, is that even full circle? Can a circle be inside out? That feels like a figure eight or something.

Yeah. I have no idea. So everything is just trying to be the same thing. I mean, this is just proof that we're like in the late stage of, of technology oriented capitalism because the only way to have infinite growth is to keep adding more verticals. Yeah. And you can't just stay to one lane.

Fun fact. You can just stop growing and be totally fine. Your shareholders will hate it. I get it. I know you're a public company, but I'm like, and I'm, I'm maybe YouTube's biggest fan, but like YouTube has been so rock solid stable that frankly , I ignore a lot of the extra stuff they add.

Like, Oh, we're going to do short form. Oh, we're going to do whatever they're going to do next stories or AS. I'm like mostly ignoring that because I think the core of what makes YouTube YouTube is so strong that you don't have to do all the rest. I mostly agree, but I just think that investors don't.

Oh, no, no, no. They just want to see more time on app. Stop investing in mega companies then and invest in small ones to make them bigger. The ones that need your money. Well, I also think YouTube is like the basis of what we love YouTube about is still seems to be the main feature, whether searching for those things has changed a lot, but they're adding things on that are what I think of a smaller where like Instagram has just turned is changed from what it started as Snapchat has changed from what it started as Twitter

has changed from what they started. They've lost their like soul where YouTube still feels like long form is the soul of it. And they're adding all the fun things on the side. Yeah. Yeah. Once that starts harming long form, then I'll be mad, which viewflation and some of this garbage they've been adding lately might be doing that.

Meta just like evolves its products to fit the moment. Like Facebook. I logged into Facebook recently. I didn't know that people can just follow you on Facebook like a Twitter account. Oh, really? That's been there for a while. Yeah. And I haven't been on there for a while. Yeah. When I was a wee lad, you had to manually friend each other .

Yes. And no one could just look at your stuff. And now people can just follow anything that I mean, I don 't I haven't posted on there since 2013. But like I made a I made a Facebook marketplace listing the other day. And like people can publicly see that just that follow me.

That's I don't like that. Facebook marketplace might be the best social media app out there. But well, that's why they want to make it an individual. It's not. It's not a separate app because it's the only way that they have. Monthly active users on Facebook. Have you ever watched Reels on Facebook? The app?

Yeah. Yeah. It's also slightly confusing because it's like mixed in because there's Facebook videos separately. But there's also Reels which get posted to Facebook. But like the Reels tab. So like you start scrolling like it's it is ones on Facebook, but like Reels short speed.

Yeah. There is a pop up banner ad on every single one that takes up a third of the screen. And I've had mid roll ads in short form content. I use it for 10 minutes. Wow. The amount of ads are insufferable.

It's crazy. But yeah, I mean, all Meta's products are just they just morph into whatever is popular at the moment. Like they added stories when Snapchat was popular. They added video when YouTube was popular. They now have, you know, now Instagram is trying to be you like other things.

I'm sure there's a podcast player over there somewhere. Yeah. It's just it just morphs into whatever the moment requires. I feel like Meta hasn't had an original thought in. No, dude. A decade now. It's kind of pathetic. But just to go back a little bit, if you're a creator and you get offered 50 to $500,000 to post long form on Meta, take your bag and then just afterwards.

And then just go back to YouTube. Stop posting. Yeah. I don't know. I wouldn't trust until you start seeing people actually making money on Instagram for posting your long form stuff. It is surprising to me that these platforms are not just offering the same thing that YouTube offers. Like, why are they not doing an ad sense? Just 55, 45 split.

Yeah, just a permanent thing. I think this could be an opportunity because like, I love YouTube. Yeah. We're on it. But like, we need more YouTubes. There's only one YouTube. That's true. There does need to be competition because, you know, the 45 , 55 split is like great and it's like the best for the industry.

But if Meta offered like 60, 40. And it's crazy that we have to turn to good guy Meta. But like, we need something. Wasn't that the argument for Twitter a couple months ago where they were like, oh yeah, we're going to offer like a better, like a 60, 40. I don't know what it was. And then all of us here were like, well, would you rather have 55% of your YouTube views or 60% of like no views on Twitter?

Well, we all knew Twitter was lying. So like you don't expect videos on Twitter. People don't watch a ton of videos on Twitter that are monetizable. So it doesn't really shift it. Even though you do 60, 40, it doesn't actually push the bar .

Yeah. I mean, I think something we've thought about a lot is like , we don't want to put our content on, you know, people ask us to put our, put waveform on Apple podcasts and stuff. And we think a lot about, well, YouTube is our home. So they asked me to put MKBHD videos on Twitter or X all the time. Right. And I'm like, okay, I have an audience on X.

What they're thinking is it makes sense because we'll, we 'll get some audience for it there and we'll be paid for it. But what I'm thinking is YouTube is still the best place for all of it. So I'll just talk to you guys and point at the YouTube video and then you'll go watch it on YouTube. And they'll suppress that link. The question becomes like, how much audience are you actually losing by posting in a new place?

You know what I mean? Because we, you know, we often post the waveform. We post links to waveform on Twitter and that's like 0.0000 1%. Yeah. So ultimately like maybe we're not even losing that much traffic. And I have seen a number of creators like Cleo Abram is posting her full videos on Twitter now.

The argument would be that there are some new, unique, like net positive number of people you can reach by posting the whole thing somewhere else. And that overrides the amount of people you're losing on YouTube. Yeah. So the people who would be on like, let's say Twitter, for example, like let's say there's a thousand people who follow you on Twitter and you post it on Twitter.

10 of those people click the link and go watch it on YouTube. But if you just post the whole thing on Twitter, maybe 40 people watch it and the 10 that we're going to go watch on YouTube don't. Right. But now you have 40 people on Twitter. Yeah. So you could consider that a net, let's just more people total.

And especially if you were being paid the same amount on both platforms. Yeah. Right now it's like you're not. So maybe those 10 people are worth more than the 40 people that you would get on Twitter. Yeah. But yeah, can I rant about something really fast based on this Twitter? That's what a podcast is, my guy. Yeah. Well, Twitter people lately, especially last week, love to clip out the clip of Marquez saying he switched from iPhone Duo to iPhone 18 Pro.

There's clippers. The people that are clipping that with zero sourcing at all that I know are people who watch Waveform. Yeah, I know they're watching it right now. Come on. I want to say to those people who watch this, they're watching this podcast and they're like, which section of the podcast am I going to slice out and put on Twitter with zero attribution with some spicy reductive headline that kind of removes the context of what of the rest of what we were talking about?

That's just kind of a behavior. That's kind of like a leech behavior that's on every social media. Like there is streamers, for example. People watch streamers when there's a viral moment inside of a streamer, inside of a live stream on Twitch or something, they chop it out and they put it on YouTube and they have a whole channel where they monetize their own action, which is chopping it out.

That's like a behavior. Don't do that. I'm not shocked that that happens everywhere. It's just like the thing that you do when you see something that's going to get clicks, you just make your own clicks out of it. But it would be nice if they were to attribute or to link the full source of where they got them.

They almost never do. Yeah. They very, very rarely ever do. It would be nice if there was like a universal content ID that would just always trace to where the origin is. Cross platform? Yeah. That would be nice. Because they're clipping from Twitch and putting it on YouTube. They're clipping from YouTube and putting it on Twitter.

Yeah. It would be nice if it was like the whole. It would be nice if you had like a protocol. Oh, gosh. That it doesn't matter. Now we know Adam's back. It would just work on every platform. Hold on. Let him cook. Let him cook. And then it would trace back to the origin because all of these platforms can communicate with each other.

Where's that? XKCD? When you need it? I'm just saying. The Dixerto. Is that how you pronounce that? That's one of them. Right? They're the worst. And I expect it from them because everyone who works there is a pathetic fool. Like they don't, they just post a, they just post a picture with a really terrible headline.

And then their source is at a link to their article, which just talks about our content. Oh, yeah, yeah. Which is crazy. They're just spinning you in their clicks farm until they eventually, all right, I guess I have to give you back to YouTube. That's the lamest job in the world. The other people I'm talking about are people on Twitter who clipped it out.

No source that I know are just in the tech space and listen to Waveform. And that's where I'm a little more upset about this. And also writing source WVFRM in just text with no link doesn't count. It's the easiest, least useful way to do it. It's really sleazy.

Yeah. A link would be nice. A tag would be even better than no link. A tag would be great. I know links they don't do because it's going to get suppressed, but it's like, are you only posting all of our content because you want more engagement on Twitter? I mean, I know the answer is yes, but like at least tag us.

Yeah. A link would be great. And that's why I downloaded the new Ocarina of Time remake. Um, it's a bug. I actually didn't. Thank you for getting us out of it. I didn't, but it is getting really good reviews and I might . So we'll see. But you know what else has links in it? Google search.

Chain fences. Not Google search. What the fuck? Because, no, because my school disabled AI and also I'm a child. Thank you. That one picture I took. That's good. Through a fence. With links. Oh. Chain fence. Oh, yeah. A golf course has links, right? No, that was a great one.

A golf course is a link. Oh. What do you mean? It's one link. What is that? A links. Okay. What is a link? What is that? No, a links is like a big cat. It's a style of golf course. That's a link. Oh. Links golf is a style of golf course. Yeah. Interesting. What is that? What kind of style? Also, while we're talking about links. Separated. Shout out Philadelphia Eagles.

Their stadium's called the link. Oh. Haven't they not won a game this season? I think they won one. Also, shout out to the Navigator and the MKX and the- They got links on them. Oh. No, those are- Lincolns.

Lincolns. Thank you. Oh, my God. I'm glad you got it. Lincoln Tunnel. And then- So, Google- Greatest segue ever. Yeah. Talk to me about this Google headline. Okay. Okay. So, in August, Google turned on AI features as a default option inside of its classroom app for K-12 schools, which finally allowed- Well, I guess not finally, but default allowed students to access Gemini.

Schools are notoriously, in the last few years, like having a really hard time trying to figure out what the hell to do with AI and their students because of a thousand different things. A lot of it has to do with cheating and not actually learning anything. So, obviously, this made a bunch of school districts pretty upset because now all this AI stuff is just defaulted on.

We've talked a million times about how Chromebooks are like the number one computer in schools and most K-8, K-12 schools are using Chromebooks in multiple classrooms at a time. So, they got pretty mad, asked Google to turn off AI features in Google Classroom, and Google just announced that they are going to give people next year the ability to turn off artificial intelligence tools inside their students' software unless the school admins choose to make the tools available.

So, it sounds like they got a response. Except that Google then also stated that schools that choose to restrict AI access entirely in the software will lose Google Search on those computers. Yeah. Which feels- How do you lose Google Search? That's what I am also wondering.

That's a question I have. Yeah. Because Google Search is a website. Yeah. Versus- But I believe it has to do with- Because all these students are logged in with- Yeah. Google accounts- On their Chromebook. Google school accounts on the Chromebooks. Yeah. Inside. And through the admin process of controlling all of those Google school accounts, I guess somehow they can- Yeah.

Diminish search results. So, from the New York Times article, there's a quote from Chris Phillips, the vice president for education at Google. And he says, Search and AI are deeply integrated. If a school has banned AI, they will not have access to search and they'll see a message from their school that indicates it's not available.

And part of me feels like this is like a little bit of a malicious compliance thing where- Sounds like textbook malicious compliance. Because New York just passed a law that bans AI in schools from a certain age group. And so, I feel like Google is coming in and being like, well, all right then, don't use Google.

But the question then becomes, are schools just going to like use DuckDuckGo? Maybe they can't use- Maybe, like, can you even use a Chromebook if you can't use Google search? That's the other question. I mean, you can use Chrome so you could go to Chrome and then go to DuckDuckGo or Yahoo or Bing.

Sorry, kids. Welcome to Bing. But it is a little weird because they said, turn off AI entirely. What levels of this is turning off AI? I mean, Google seems pretty specific on that. Google search relies on AI.

It's Ellis' favorite feature of Google search. There's lots that has to do there. But it sounds like if they're turning off AI as an entirety and all of these other different- I've never used Google Classrooms. I'm not a teacher. I would love to know more from them about the struggles they're finding with this.

But if you just turn off some of the features, can you still have Google search? It also seems like Google is specifically trying to give educators two options for search, which is one that has AI overviews and AI chat, and another one that they have a feature called guided learning, which is supposed to be able to use AI to search things, except that it specifically is not going to just end result.

an answer is going to be a step-by-step process on how to get to that answer, which in theory sounds great. But there's also a consumer version of guided learning out already, and lots of people have tried it. And I think they've- one person even found ways to make it essentially write an entire essay for somebody.

So clearly that's not working that good, and cheating is still plenty on the table. So we'll see how the Google student version of Gemini with guided learning is specifically. But I agree with David. This feels like a, cool, if you don't want my AI, you don't get any of me.

Yeah, which is annoying because the whole guided learning thing is great in concept, but that's making schools give a lot of power over to Google over how students learn, right? Like, they have this pilot program, they're like, oh, we're going to help you learn through these tools on whatever.

But then that's basically making the schools be like, yeah, Google is the one that's deciding how we teach kids. And so the fact that they're cutting it off at the head and just not letting you use anything Google-related is definitely malicious compliance. Yeah. So.

I'm really interested on, I mean, in terms of teachers, we all grew up with the don't use Wikipedia, don't use this. Like, it doesn't matter to the teachers if they can use search or not. It's because they're not the ones who have to be affected by it. So I wouldn't be surprised if they're like, okay, cool.

Just don't use Google search. Have fun on Bing or DuckDuckGo or whatever resource. What was that resource program we all were supposed to use that was impossible instead of Wikipedia? Resource program? I remember we were supposed to learn some very specific program.

Oh, oh, oh. Grokipedia. Yeah, yeah, that's it. You know what I did? I went to Wikipedia and then I just went to the cited link. Yeah. And then I used those. I think that was our default behavior. Yeah. Oh, you can't use Wikipedia as a source. All right, fine. Use Wikipedia as a source. Wikipedia as a source. Wikipedia as a source. That was my malicious compliance.

Yeah. So funny because they're like, no, you have to properly source things. It's like, so what the website you're telling me not to use does? Sources? Yeah. I guess it's almost like Wikipedia is an aggregate that is probably your next best thing, even though if it's not a primary source.

Yeah. But they were trying to teach us. Now I'm like going into teacher defense mode. They're like trying to teach us to like drill down to the source of who actually said it. Wikipedia is sourcing someone else. I think we were doing it right when we sourced Wikipedia sources. Yeah. That's where you're getting information. It did work well.

The reason they didn't want it is because like Wikipedia can be edited, which is like the big boogeyman of Wikipedia. Just like, oh, your kid's candy is going to have pot in it. Yeah. Or like a razor blade. It's like the big scary monster that rarely ever happens kind of thing. Yeah.

But yeah, this just seems kind of wild. And I'm super wondering if it's going to backfire at all. I, we, Ellis and I were talking about this in the car today on the right end. And I have a feeling that Google is going to issue a statement about this within like the next day or two. And basically say, that's not what we meant.

I'm probably going to say, of course they can still use Google search. We meant this, even though they did give a direct quote that says that they can't do it to the New York Times. And it'll definitely happen on a Thursday tomorrow. Yeah. Well, you can just edit it into the edit, I guess.

Yeah. Do we think Bing and Yahoo and DuckDuckGo are like. Not Bing. Not Bing. Maybe DuckDuckGo. Bing books. I don't know. I think DuckDuckGo is an us thing. I don't think there's a lot of teachers out there who are like, oh, use DuckDuckGo instead. Yeah. I think they're going to be like, what's a default? Yeah. Well, there is no other default, but what's the next best thing?

Next best Bing. You just gave them their quote, their motto for. Remember when we had that one week where we thought Bing could be the next Google? Nope. Well, we didn't think that, but Microsoft thought that. The week that Microsoft thought that. Yeah. The week that Bing was like, I think, I think, I think I did it.

I think I have it. Yeah. And Satya Nadella said they're going to make a Google dance . Yeah. Which did not. In his defense, I think he kind of did. That quote went hard. And they actually fully just made the AI search results like fully a thing.

Well, it's funny because at the time, OpenAI kind of was Microsoft and now they're very separate. But this brings up another story that I just want to slide in here. OpenAI released statistics this morning that say that their search volume through ChatGPT is 20% of Google's total search volume.

I just want to make sure I understand because I was still a little confused from our conversation this morning. Like, do you mean 20% of all just like general queries are on ChatGPT or 20% of Google's traffic is coming from a ChatGPT agent? Oh, I didn't read it. The way David just said it, I just thought it meant like if you took the total number of Google searches.

Yeah. And then the total number of ChatGPT searches, it's around 20% of what a Google. Total queries. Yeah. Total queries. Total queries. Like somebody types something in the box and hits enter. It's a fifth of the times people type into the box in Google and hit enter. That's way less than I would have thought. A fifth?

Yeah. Of Google. Yeah. Google, I mean, that is a lot. Google is the largest. It's still the biggest thing. Do you know what counts as a query in Google? Typing Google in the bar without .com and then it Googles Google. That's how easy it is to query Google. Also, quarter over quarter, Google search volume has still been going up.

It hasn't been going down. Yeah. Google's huge. So that means overall queries in general are just accelerating like crazy. But here's a direct quote. This is from 9to5Google. Speaking at an OpenAI press event chat yesterday, ChatGPT consumer product lead Adam Fry confirmed that search volume in ChatGPT is roughly one-fifth or 20% of the volume of queries of Google.

Which is, it's crazy. I mean, like, it's Google. That's the closest thing we've ever had. Yeah. You know, to a competitor. This is like when we're talking about, like, Pixel market share is at 8%. That's so sick. It's really getting up there. Yeah. It's just like, at a certain point when one thing is the dominant feature.

Right. You're pretty, you're cheering other things. It's like a big deal. I'm not cheering for scam altman. I mean, and here's another, like, now is OpenAI, I'm not advocating for this to happen. But this is OpenAI's opportunity to be like, oh, schools, Google doesn't want to help you learn.

Google is not going to allow you to do this. We'll give you free ChatGPT accounts for education. David, what are you doing? Don't give them any ideas. I'm just saying this is what they probably will do. And it's an open opportunity. I don't think Sam would help out schools because there are too many school computers sitting there with RAM in it.

That's not being used at full capacity. And it's pathetic that anybody gets RAM except for data servers. Well, Sam Allman addresses RAM comments. People should put as much RAM as they want in their computers. That's what I would do if I was getting enormous levels of backlash about something stupid I said.

Yeah. That's okay. Yeah. Do you know that famous drill tweet? Do you know the drill account on Twitter? Of course we know drill. I have no idea what you're talking about. Yeah, you do. It's a meme account. Yeah. Well, there's this famous tweet where it's like, this is your lawyer. I am encouraging you to keep posting this shit.

And people have just like put Sam in front of it. So every time Sam Allman says something stupid like that, people just post that photo. It says, Sam, this is your lawyer. I'm encouraging you to keep posting this shit. Anyway, we got to move on to trivia. This is the most chaotic episode because Apple is not guiding us.

I think the rest of the episodes of the year are going to be kind of like this. We're probably pretty close to the end of product launches. We're like slowing down. Thank God. Guys, I opened Chrome for the first time in quite a while. Uh-oh. I went to Google.com.

And I want you to tell me how many buttons there are on the Google homepage that take me to Gemini. Is it close to the start going over? No, I'll do Delta. Delta, like one button click and you're in Gemini? Yes. Some form of Gemini.

Yes. Some form of Gemini. The fact that I have to click at all means they're not doing a very good job of getting me into Gemini. No. They could do better. Okay. That is a good, yeah, it's a good question. We'll think about that. Answers will be at the end. Like usual with trivia, we'll be right back. Support for Waveform comes from Shopify.

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We might as well talk a little bit about some of the new stuff that came out in the past week and a half, which is this MacBook Pro with Touch, ProLED, XDR, et cetera, et cetera. And iPad Mini also came out. Which should we do first? I vote iPad Mini.

Yeah, I vote iPad Mini. Because we're going to talk about the MacBook for longer. All right. You've been teasing it this whole episode, so people can wait a little longer. All right, iPad Mini. Here we go. iPad Mini, I did a video about it. It is incredibly Apple. This is what I said last week. It is price laddered to all hell.

The whole thing is 60 hertz, which is already part of this massive price ladder because the iPad Air is also 60 hertz. And if you give the iPad Mini 120 hertz, then people will upgrade in the wrong direction on the price ladder to get higher fresh rate. So iPad Air will get 120 hertz before iPad Mini.

It's just part of how the ladder works. But there's also this A20 Pro chip in there. And it's this beautiful, super thin, awesome new piece of hardware. And it's just impossibly thin, awesome thing to hold and watch videos on and read on. Then they do this thing where it's 128 gigs of base storage and it's $700.

And that's kind of a bummer. And they also bin you down half the neural engine and one CPU core. So if you want the whole thing, you got to get the half ter abyte one, which is like $900. Then you get the extra hundred bucks for the nanotexturing. It's expensive.

It's a really nice portable tablet and it's really expensive. I feel like it's not a great launch when you say, hey, what do you think of the iPad Mini? And you go in a five minute rant about price laddering and haven't mentioned really anything about the actual. I'll be honest. It's a really nice. This is what I said in the first half of the video.

It's a really nice upgrade. Like it's a great tablet. I would love it so much more if it was 120 hertz. But it's a nice OLED. It's what people want to read on on the go. I feel like it needed to be 120 hertz or it needed to be $ 500 like it used to be. Both of those things, a $200 price increase and not getting like the most obvious upgrade to it possible.

They did all the other great things. They redesigned it. That is awesome. They gave it the A20 Pro, the most powerful mobile chip they have underneath the M chips. That's awesome. Yeah. They gave it an OLED. That's awesome. Why kneecap it and give it 60 hertz?

And there's like obviously we talked about the reasons with the latter. And there is an Apple quote for I think somebody directly asked why it's still 60 hertz. And they go, no, no, no. It's not about the refresh rate. It's about the pixel response time of an OLED. And then they go into obviously there being less blur and a faster pixel response time.

And that's all true. But I use the tablet and to my eye it is so obviously 60 hertz that it would have just been totally fine if they just sent it at 120. It would have been better. Everyone knows it would have been better. So it's very Apple wave. Didn't they have a response like that for a while for the base iPhone not getting it?

And then they gave it to the base iPhone. Did they? I don't know if they have such a direct. It's not about that. It's about the like touch response and that what was the frequency of the response to it was like so high that it's so good. You don't need a higher refresh rate. I guess it was just so clear with this one because it's a brand new display that's an OLED.

And it's like, well, this not only could have but should have been 120 hertz. So they kind of had to answer. And so this was like their way of answering. Yeah. Do you guys remember when SpongeBob got smooth? Yeah. That's what this iPad mini reminds me of. It is pretty clean.

It's pretty smooth. Yeah. No speaker grills anywhere. The speakers are actually great. Really? There's no speaker grills. Oh. They face you from inside the tablet and there's these little slots on the side. And if you cover them, they still face you and boom through the display. So they are always like stereo and front facing, which is better than from before.

They were like facing out the sides through the grills. So that gives you the IP67 water resistance, which is nice. It's the only iPad ever with water resistance officially. Oh, really? Yeah. So that's interesting. But yeah, it is also no speaker grills. And I said in the video, I wouldn't be surprised if they did this in an upcoming iPhone.

I can't like be sure of like when they'll do this, but no speaker grills front facing through the display speakers sounds like a nice thing to keep going with. It's funny. I feel like the argument last week that was really good was why do they need to do no speaker grills when we're IP rating phones already?

Yeah. So why go that route with a phone? I think it might've been a little bit of misdirection on Apple's part. I think the upgrade to the speakers is that they are now front facing and stereo. Like obviously there were stereo before, but they are now front facing no matter what for the user.

And they'll play through these little slots or from behind the displays. That also conveniently means they can get rid of the speaker holes. And I think that they would have been able to do IP67 anyway without that, but they get to conveniently point to it also being IP67. Wait, do we have one here right now?

I do. Not in this room, but I can go get one if you want. I would like to see it. I want to hear this thing. I would like to see it. Yeah. I don't think I've wiped it yet. So I think it's on my desk right now. Okay. I'll be right back. Let's bring it in. I want to have, yeah, we should do like a first impressions touching. Yeah. You should play some high volume music so you can feel it vibrating your hands because that is a little side effect of the behind the no speaker grills thing.

Interesting. But anyway, yeah. Expensive mini iPad. Nice new features. Missing one very important one to me anyway. Frustrating because of Apple ladder. Yeah. That's the summary of iPad mini. Okay. Then there's a MacBook Pro. Okay. By the time you see this, the embargo's up and we'll be able to say more about it.

I have to start a lot of my testing today and benchmarking. But essentially all this is, is it's the same M5 Pro or M5 Max MacBook Pros we already had, 14 inch or 16 inch, but with an OLED touchscreen and a slight thermal redesign so that it is thinner and lighter.

I care more about the thinner and lighter part because the displays on the mini LED MacBook Pros are already really good. Yeah. Obviously OLED is going to have its advantages with less blooming, higher contrast, even slightly higher brightness. Also, it glows on the back.

I've already mentioned this, but the Apple logo is brighter based on your screen brightness. Can you go all the way down real fast? Yeah. So this is, when you turn it all the way off, it does an impressive job of looking just like the old reflective. When it's all the way off, but do one brightness.

One brightness level up, it looks the worst. That looks almost like the glow in the dark plastic when it 's light outside. Like it's that kind of yellowy green color. That looks terrible. That's its worst angle. That's so impressive. You can also just turn it off. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder how they did it.

In the old MacBook Pros, they had backlights so they could just cut a hole in the back and like use the backlight to light this logo. OLEDs don't have backlights. So they had to spend some extra effort adding a light on the back facing out the back of the laptop.

Yeah. And I respect that. Yeah. I respect that. Look, the touchscreen experience is fine. I honestly rarely touch the display. I didn't think I would. The hinge is like 10% stiffer. Like it is. It's still going to wobble a little bit, but MacBook Pro hinges in general are pretty solid.

So like. Yeah. Yeah. Am I allowed to touch the screen? Yeah. You can scroll around and fingerprint it up. I would never let anyone else typically touch my touchscreen. It is really weird that I can do it on a Mac finally. Yeah. See that wobble? It's a lot of wobble. It's. Yeah. Every laptop wobble.

Like they all do. They didn't fix anything with that. They didn't erase the wobble, but it's a touchscreen now. There are certain elements of Mac OS like up here that require two taps because it's a small touch target. But like swiping down from here is fine. It's it's a.

Yeah. Sorry. I'm stealing your laptop. I don't want to try this. Here's the way I'm framing this laptop. It's just an option. It's like the MacBook Pro we've already known. And the touchscreen and slightly thinner redesign is an option that you can pay more for. And it's basically $400 more per spec.

So if you expect out the same exact laptop from not touchscreen or with the touchscreen, you'll pay 400 bucks more for this design with the touchscreen. What about can you get the OLED without the touchscreen? No. OK. You can turn the touchscreen off in the settings. But if you pay for the OLED, you get it touch because that 's how it comes from the factory.

Yeah. And you get the slightly thinner and lighter thing. I mean, the OLED is much more important to me than the touchscreen. So I would pay the $400. I think a lot of people are really into the OLED. Yeah. I want to do some extensive thermal testing to figure out if this new thinner one is actually better thermally than the old one.

Interesting. It'll be cool if it is better because then it's lighter. It would be cool. Thinner. Yeah, it would be cool. It would be lighter, thinner, and better thermally. And that would be amazing for editing on the go. Yeah. And that might cause me to want to upgrade. Yeah. But as of right now, I am perfectly, perfectly happy with mine.

And a lot of other people who have Apple Silicon Macs from the past couple of years are also perfectly happy with theirs. The displays on the MacBook Pros were already really, really good. Yeah. I mean, yes, it's better with the blooming. Yes, it's better with the contrast. Yes, OLED is better. But like these displays are already amazing. Yeah. So.

I'm a little annoyed that they didn't fix the hinge issue. I feel like in the back of my head this whole time that we 've been having the rumors for like a touchscreen Mac, I'm like, okay, but you know, it's Apple. They'll probably do something to make it like less. I don't know. Wobbly? Wobbly. And it's not.

I have to assume. It's still super wobbly. It might not be a fixable issue. I think the only way to potentially do it is to have like the old Surface where the bottom half of the screen kicks out and you have something that's physically acting against you. I almost would have preferred that. Like the wobble is what makes me not want to use it at all.

I think Apple would never do that. It would look, it looks too bad. Well, if you're picturing the Surface one, if it's like an Apple stand, maybe it can make it better. Maybe it can charge you a thousand dollars for it. Exactly. I think what's interesting about it is a lot of people have had a lot of really interesting ideas of what they wish they had done to accommodate the touchscreen more.

Obviously, Apple Pencil support would have been interesting . A lot of people also wanted the hinge to like open more, maybe be able to flip around, do a two-in-one thing, like all this other stuff so that it would be easier to draw on. Yeah. They didn't do any of that. Yeah. I think it's because this was an afterthought. Like the touch thing just happens to come with the hardware and they're like, yeah, f*** it, we'll turn it on.

And we'll like add a couple of like slight enhancements to the menu bar and things so you can actually touch the small touch targets. But it's really just an option. And if they wanted to make it like really lean into the touch part, that would be a different direction philosophically.

Because they have iPad already for people who want to do lots of touch things. So I'm not surprised that they didn't do any of that stuff. They're just kind of like, we checked a box, you can touch the screen. But if you want a touch first experience, that's still an iPad. Yeah. There are a few things in there when I was just trying it that I agree what you mean very quickly and like how it feels like an afterthought because it does feel like it's just letting you do the couple of things like move a window, double tap the window to kind of make it bigger.

But when I was in the document, I tried to like click on a piece of text and then I was a little off. So I just scroll over to it and it doesn't scroll. You just keep clicking. It doesn't have that like zoom in like on an iPhone and then scroll between the letters and stuff like that.

That's not, maybe that's because it's Google Docs. Maybe. I think that's all things with text. I jump in Safari and I like try to, let's, let's try to type and like scroll around here. Yeah. There isn't any sort of special text highlighting. There is no, um, yeah, there's no onscreen keyboard either, obviously.

Yeah. It's just, it's not made for touch. Are there gestures? Yeah. So any trackpad gesture you could do, check this out. Okay. That's cool. Oh, it didn't work. It didn't work. Sorry. Let me add some spaces. It's way more dramatic when it works. All right. Is that not sick?

All right. Yeah. That's kind of cool. You're just like swiping between different desks. I'm just swiping. I'm just pulling things across. I mean, I can do it. You can do it on the trackpad already. Yeah. But then you can do it up here. Yeah. Is it different than? I turned off natural scrolling.

So it's. This just highlights to me that it's an option. Yeah. The other nice thing that they did add was they rounded the bottom of the screen and they got rid of this like metal bar that was on the previous MacBooks. Yeah. Slight thermal redesign. So it definitely looks a lot sleeker because the top of the screen is already rounded, but now they render the bottom.

So now it's kind of more uniform. Yeah. And the bezels are like a tiny bit. Tiny bit. Am I the only one that thinks like making it touch screen is kind of a big deal? Like for them to treat it like an option like this seems weird to me. It is. Like it's rubbing me the wrong way. It's for sure weird. I think in the purest way where people really want Apple to have like an opinion about how computers should work.

it feels like a big deal because this was not supposed to happen. Right. But in this new world of Ternus is Apple just kind of trying things and adding to the menu of what Apple offers. Yeah. I think they're less opinionated about like these very specific things and they're just kind of like, yeah, we'll offer a touch screen.

Yeah. And it's not as big of a deal anymore. Okay. Random follow up. Does Ternus get credit for this or is this a Tim Cook? I think he gets partial credit. I think there were a lot of things because Ternus was head of hardware before and obviously Tim Cook still steered the ship. But from what I hear and from lots of reporting, he's not in the design studio like chefing up products.

Like he's just kind of green lighting things and steering the ship. And I think Ternus should get at least partial credit for a lot of the new stuff happening. And he gets to be on stage now as the CEO unveiling some of the stuff that's been in the works for a while. I'm sure they've also known he's going to be CEO for a while.

Way before we learned. If you read a lot of the Mark Gurman reporting, it's like this was perfectly orchestrated like as a very intentional signal. Like we will transfer from Ternus or from Tim Cook to Tern us right at iPhone Duo at the beginning of a wave of new products that like symbolizes all this new Apple stuff.

Interesting. So if you really want to read into that, it's like, yeah, this Ternus gets credit for this intention. Yeah. Symbolically, that makes a lot of sense whether or not Apple like plan that. I don't know. Yeah. So. So. Yeah. I think shareholders want to see like a smooth transfer, you know, like this is a big stock, big deal for them, whatever.

They want to see things go smoothly so that you see the new guy doing stuff. You feel good about it. Do you think that this, that the changes in this new MacBook are going to push people towards buying them and upgrading their M1s? I actually think that was in Apple's head. They were like, wow, M1 and M2 were so damn good that we really need to actively give people a reason to upgrade.

And it can't just be more performance because those are so performant. Yeah. So I think that is one of the things that they're dangling is like, okay, yeah, OLED. That might be a reason. Touchscreen. That might be a reason. They're just giving people things. What's the report also that I think the entire lineup is eventually going to be OLED touchscreens or touchscreens in some capacity?

I think they're starting at the top. like bringing it through the whole lineup. Eventually that might. I think that would make the most sense because we didn't see a new name. The fact that this is still MacBook Pro. Yeah. With ProLED or whatever. Yeah, it's not like MacBook Ultra or something. I think all of them would eventually do it.

Yeah. That would make sense. So I think it's designed to be that. Me personally, I, it's, the old ones are still so good. When you say whole lineup though, do you mean all laptops or only MacBook Pro? All MacBook Pros. Okay. Because it's ProLED. It can't go in a, it can't go in an error.

It's a Pro. It's a Pro feature. Yeah, exactly. I mean, this, this is an incredible tandem OLED. I wouldn't be surprised if they just enable touchscreens in the rest of them, even if they're not OLED. So like many LED ones get touchscreens, regular LCD ones get touchscreens. They just move it through the whole lineup. Yeah.

But I'm not upgrading for the touchscreen. Yeah. I am barely considering upgrading for the thinner and lighter and OLED all combined. Yeah. Yeah. Well, what, you have an M4 Max right now. So I have a, this is my situation is I am, it's a luxury to have this position, but I am incredibly torn between a 14 inch or 16 inch.

That's my only dilemma. I know I want to use a MacBook Pro. I know I want to edit on a MacBook Pro. So it'll be a high end machine. I just can't decide between 14 and 16. This was your same issue last time. This was my dilemma last time. And if you remember last time, my dilemma with the 16 is like, okay, I go edit.

I need the bigger screen. It's wonderful. But God, it's such a pain to carry around this big, heavy 16 inch laptop all the time. Now the new 16 inch is specifically almost a pound lighter. Yeah. And so that's renewed this exact same dilemma where I love the 14. There is no problem with the 14.

But when I go edit on the 14, I wish I had the 16. Yeah. So maybe I'm going to become a 16 person again. I just did this a couple of months ago. I mean, how long did you use the 14 for? It's an M4 Max. So like a year and a half. I would say you should do the 16 just to like see what's on the other side of the pond.

So this is what I did. Just rotate. For the past like four months or so, I've been using the 16 inch M5 Max review unit laptop. Oh. And from that, I learned that it's great to have one machine everywhere still. It's great to, I use it on my desktop to edit with it.

And then I would take it on the go and I edited that the Apple videos on the go. It was amazing. Yeah. It's just five. It's a heavy laptop. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, this weird niche position that I'm in is deciding between the two. And because they made it lighter, I'm like, maybe I can do the 16 again.

We'll see. I don't know if, I feel like they've probably fixed this, but for the first like two, maybe three generations of Apple Silicon, a lot of people were finding in benchmarks that the 14 inch Max series and the 16 inch Pro series had comparable video performance because the Max chips in the smaller chassis would get thermal throttle .

Yeah. Yes. So there is some legitimacy to that, which is why. I don't know if it's still a thing though. Well, okay. Yeah. I mean, smaller body thermal performance, obviously intuitively will be some limiting factor, but I do think that the, the headroom difference was like at the end of like longer sessions.

So in most bursty performance and stuff you're doing, you won't notice, but if you're someone going for the Max, you are probably thinking about doing renders or some bigger projects. Yeah. And I don't think that the difference now thermally between the 14 inch and 16 inch is enough of a reason to get the 16, but it is enough of a reason that you'll choose between the Pro and the Max chip.

So if you need the Max, get the Max, both the 14 and 16 will be great. This is all pending my thermal testing. I have the 16 inch Max and I will be testing it, but yeah, I think as of right now, it's just about the thinner and lighter in OLED. Yeah.

Do you think that the light is going to actually sway anybody? On the back? The back light. If you read the comment section on YouTube, it's the only thing. I know, but I wonder, I really wonder if those are like legitimate thoughts or if they're just memeing. I don't think sway, but I think the people who are trying are going to be really happy that they have a way to indicate that they have the newest Apple thing, but those people were going to buy the newest Apple thing anyways.

Or the really old one. The nostalgia. Do people really, I don't know. I've always heard like people are very obsessed with being able to show off that they have the new thing. Yeah. I've never, ever thought about that. I think Apple is obsessed with people being obsessed with it. I don't think people are obsessed with it.

I think, well, I think you have the new expensive thing all the time. Yeah. There's some level of memeing every time. When the orange iPhone came out, everyone was like, oh, the orange one, that's the new one. And then when the iPhone 18s, 18 pros came out, everyone went, oh, the orange one, that's the old one.

For Apple, it is free marketing for them. Yeah. But that's like everyone in our circles. But think about everyone in your life. They just get the new thing when they need the new thing. Yeah, no, but I do, I do think that there is specifically an element of Apple playing with color to make sure that there is a new color so that you know you have the new one.

Yeah. And I don't know how much that actually affects sales. Like midnight black. Yeah. I paid attention to it for a long time because there's been years where they'll have, and I wish they'd bring back red, but like the orange shows up and that, that whole thing happens. I'm like, I noticed that. I saw oranges everywhere. When you see burgundy, like I, would you normally buy a burgundy phone?

No, I would. But if you have, if you want people to know you have the new one, this is the burgundy. I don't care about that at all. I don't know. But I love the color. I don't know. I think it's easy to- Oxblood. Wine red. I think flaunting, I mean, it's showing off that you have the new thing that's expensive.

It's status symbol. That's not just in tech. That's in everything. And Apple in the US is the easiest way to do big expensive. I can cognitively agree that people do that. I just can't understand it from myself. It's in the back of people's heads. I don't think they would ever admit it. I think it's in the front of some people's heads. It is.

And I think some people will admit it also. On Twitter. It is in the front of people's heads, for sure. That's why it's a meme. But yeah, it is a new MacBook Pro. What do you think of, you're holding that iPad over there. Yeah, yeah. So first, I just assumed it would be in mono. So like when you said that this is in stereo, I was like, what?

So I'm about to do a stereo test because I really want to hear it. Yeah. It should be left right. You should be hearing this out of only the left side. Yeah. Yeah. You should be hearing this out of only the right side. Well, so there's two speakers behind the display on the left and two on the right.

Yeah. And they're significantly far enough apart that if you only play out of one, it feels like it's there. That's crazy. LG did this with a TV a while ago where it was like, quote, surround sound. Just through the display. Through display vibration or whatever only.

Yeah. Should we test some music? Some royalty-free music. Let's play some royalty-free. And if you turn it up, you feel it vibrating in your hands? Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like an iPad. It doesn't sound that different. Can I see the frequency charts of this? Marques, I want to know, have you listened to a lot of music or video?

Sorry, I'll redo that. This sounds like it would be in an Apple commercial. It's like, just a bunch of zoom-ins of people walking down the street with their new iPad.

You guys want to try? I would like to touch it. I trust you. But I just want to like touch it. Yeah. What were you asking? You were going to say something. I was going to say about the MacBook, but I can get to that right after this, I guess. Yeah. Oh, wow. It definitely is noticeably thinner. It's a smooth SpongeBob. Dude, I can't unsee.

It looks like smooth SpongeBob. It's crazy. Oh, the nanotexture looks nice. Yeah. But you need the 256 gig. It does get. So there's that. So it's like, what is like. So that's a $900. $900. Yeah, $900 iPad mini. That nanotexture looks amazing. Wait, hold on.

Sorry. I blacked out. This was, you can only get the 256 gig with the nanotexture ? You can only get the nanotexture. Hey, you can get the 512 gig with nanotexture. Okay. But does it. So that means it starts at 128? It starts at 128. Oh. And you cannot get nanotexture on 128.

I don't know why, other than the latter. Like, there's no way the display and the storage are connected in any way. So you must pay the $100 to get 256 to unlock the ability to pay another $100 for nanotexture. Just like how search and AI are deeply integrated.

Memory and glare are also somehow deeply integrated. I can't believe I forgot. Yeah. I mean, that's pretty cool, but also really expensive. Would you pay $900 for a 60 hertz iPad mini? No. In the year 2026? I still don't really even understand the iPad mini. I must be confused because I feel like I see speaker slits up here.

The slots, yeah. So there's like cabinet type openings on the corners. Where did you see speaker slots? I was looking around. One on both sides. All the way at the very edge next to the metal. It just looks like a phone thing on both sides. Oh, I totally missed that. It just slits on both sides. But I tested it in the video and I covered it with both my thumbs and you still hear almost like 95% of the audio.

Those might be microphones and not speakers. I mean, I just expected it to have like literally nothing except for a charging port. Yeah. Visually. Sorry, you want to pay for it? Okay, much. Yeah. Marques, I have a question about the MacBook. Just going back to the MacBook. Okay. I know we're flying around back and forth. Mm-hmm.

Someone mentioned that they felt that the bass got worse. Well, the bass improvement made the bass too much. And that it made the overall audio quality of the new MacBooks worse. Interesting. So I'm really curious about your opinion on this because that's just one person that said that to me.

I have not done back to back. So let me pull up. What I'm going to do right now is pull up an MKBHD video that I know what it sounds like. Because it's quoted as having 50% stronger bass, right? Right. So there are two things they talked about with the speakers , which is one, stronger bass. And two, better audio in clamshell mode specifically.

So if you were to plug it into a monitor and use it closed but still use the speakers, it should sound better. That's strange, but okay. First generation devices are always the most fun to review. That's boomy. And for the past month, everyone I've talked to has been asking me, what do you think of the iPhone Duo?

Like, should I get a foldable iPhone? Is that for me? Who is it even really for? You've been testing it for the past week, right? Yeah. Riveting experience.

Waiting for that bass to drop. So most new pieces of tech are... I mean, I can hear it in your voice. Your voice sounds bassier. I don't know how to edit this. I'll figure it out later. I think we leave it all in. I think we leave it all in. Audio listeners, we just did a live audio test.

No A-B testing, but we just listened to a video that we know how it should sound. What do you think, Ellis? It sounded pretty good. That was pretty cool, man. I don't know if it sounded that much bassier than I was expecting. I would A-B it against my M1, but the speakers are blown out. So it would just be like... We'll A-B test later with my mini LED MacBook Pro, but it sounds pretty great.

Yeah. I mean, MacBook Pro speakers have sounded good for a long time, so this might be another case of like the mini LED ones also had great speakers, and this is slightly better. Yeah. Kind of like the screen. Okay. Cool. There's also Dynamic Island. I don't know if we mentioned that. Yeah, right. The small pill Dynamic Island. I do really like that. I think that's great.

I think that's another... See? This is another purely visual thing. Nothing changed. The sensors are the same. The webcam and the ambient light sensor are up here. No face ID. Yeah. They just made it look different, so you know it's the new one. It's a lot of different little looks. Thinner, lighter, Dynamic Island, light on the back.

Yeah. Curved on the bottom. Yeah. Well played. You mentioned that they changed the... You mentioned that they changed the pads on the bottom to be more inset. Yeah, they're sort of inlaid a little bit in the metal.

Yeah, whereas this one's not. Yeah. So that's a strange change, but... Yeah. But they still stick out the bottom, and they feel a little less tacky for some reason, but they just sort of prop you off the desk so cooling works better. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Cool. What else props you off the desk and cools you a little bit better?

What does? The Gobbler from Wawa. Which we have multiple of on the way, but... So ready. First, it's trivia. Very exciting. Trivia at an hour and a half-ish into this episode after... Don't worry. We'll speed run the last section. All right. Question number two.

We spoke about IGTV earlier, which launched in 2018. Did you know that on desktop, you were allowed to upload a 60-minute video, but how long were you allowed to upload videos on mobile? Are you sure it didn't launch in 2017? 2018.

Okay. July 2018 is when it was announced. So on mobile, how long of a video were you allowed to upload? Yep. On IGTV. On IGTV, specifically. Hmm. Okay. I guess it's not 60... How long was desktop? Desktop was 60 minutes.

Damn. Wow. I never did that. But they had a different upload time on mobile. They did. And different requirements and everything. But yeah. That's so dumb. Hmm. Okay. I don't know. Is this Delta? Could we please do Delta? United. Ellis, I've been out the game for so long.

You tell me. Let's do all Delta today. Okay. Oops, all Delta. Oops, all Delta. Closest Delta Airlines. All right. Well, we'll think about that. Answers at the end. We'll be right back.

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We've talked a lot. But I do have a fun little random mini story time. We were making the iPad mini review for last week. Or this week. What year is it? And for the little sponsored bit at the end with dbrand, we were talking about their new iPad accessories.

They have a bunch of cases now, and they also have a giant screen protector for the iPad. It's called the Prism. They've kept the same cool tech where you can slap it on easily. We had this whole thing where I was going to show all the accessories on the mini, but I also have an iPad Pro.

And so they were like, yeah, if it doesn't work on the mini , you can also show it on the iPad Pro. So they sent me accessories to the iPad Pro. So this is actually what happens sometimes is we have unre leased devices, and dbrand has accessories that they've built for the unreleased devices, but they're not exactly perfectly sure if it's 100% yet because they don't have the thing.

And we have the thing. So they sent us the case and the Prism for the iPad mini, and they were like, this should work. But just in case it doesn't, we'll also send you some stuff for your iPad Pro so you can still show it on video. And I was like, that's great. So they sent all that stuff. And so then I go to make the video.

I've got all my footage. I'm shooting the bit with the case and the Prism, and I go, ah, of course I want to install the Prism on this iPad mini . But I can't find it. I'm like, where is the Prism for the iPad mini? I go back to the dbrand package that we got.

I see the case for the iPad Pro. I see the Prism for the iPad Pro. I see the case for the iPad mini. I don't see the Prism for the iPad mini. I'm triggered already. I already know that it's... This is like 3 o'clock. Like the last B-roll stuff you needed for the embargo the next morning.

Yeah. I'm like, I just need this one shot. I don't remember where I put it. I started looking around for it. Maybe I put it in top-down because I did the unboxing. I did the case footage. No, it's not in top-down. Maybe I moved it. I don't know. Maybe I put it somewhere else while I was shooting B-roll. I start walking around, retracing my steps all over the studio for all the places that I've shot B-roll today, which is like 15 places all around the studio.

And you don't mention anything to anyone at this point. So it's just you wandering around the studio. At first. At first it is. And then I'm like, has anybody seen the box? Because I just described the box just in case somebody finds it. So now everybody's like on alert a little bit, starting to walk around for it. It's kind of the end of the day and we're like, Marquez needs this shot.

How about we all just start looking for it? Everybody starts looking for it. And we can't find it anywhere. And I'm like, I haven't really... I did go shoot outside a couple shots and I did go shoot in the car, but I don't think I brought the box out there. Like, why would I have it with me? I shot it on the roof, but I didn't bring it up there.

And we also were starting to clean the studio up. Right. Like, we were starting to get rid of stuff in the studio. So we had two points in that they had big trash bags that we were wandering around the studio, throwing stuff out, lots of garbage, lots of stuff we were finding. Yeah. And then that comes into play now.

We're like, did it get thrown out? Yeah. We should check the trash. It turns into like a site-wide manhunt for this prison protection. I don't know where it ended up, but it's not where we think it is. So let's just start digging through everything. There are people in every room, in every cabinet. We're looking outside. Marcus is looking at his bag.

I think I went through the trash in the trash room outside of ours three times to the point where Adam and I had trash bags laid out on the ground. Dumped out the trash. Like, with more trash bags to transfer things over, trying to find this thing. Nowhere.

We couldn't find it anywhere. Couldn't find it. I had emptied my trash. I went back through the trash that I emptied out. Couldn't find it in there. I was like, damn, I guess I just have to use the iPad Pro's prism or something like that. So I go back in my inbox and I just double check just to make sure because they actually came in two different packages, two different tracking numbers.

So I go back. I see that both were delivered. We have both of them. Okay, it got delivered. There's no way it's not here yet. And I thought I had it earlier today. And then I scroll up and there's Slack messages from dbrand where they're like, yeah, so we're sending the 13-inch pr ism, the 13-inch case, and the iPad mini case, but no prism.

You can just use the iPad Pro. Like, just show it on the iPad Pro because we don't have the prism for it. Yeah. So just totally. So this whole time I had, like, false memories of, like, I thought I took it out the box. Like, I put it next to the pile. Like, I could, I remembered moving it to the side for later .

And, yeah, none of those memories are real. That's the kind of month it's been. The way you told us is it's been an hour at this point of everybody in the whole studio looking. And you go, you sit down and he goes, oh, guys. We're like, what? He's like, there's the, he's like, there's the iPad Pro case, there's the iPad Pro prism, and there's the iPad mini case.

And then you turn around and go, and that's where I stopped reading. And they're all like, can you read the rest? He's like, there's no iPad mini prism. And all of us just collectively exhale, like, oh, my God. We've been searching for this for so long. So there still is, they still made an iPad mini prism, but they haven't sent it to me.

They just had me do all the videos with the Pro. So long story short, I made everybody look around and dig through the trash for 45 minutes for something that I thought existed and wasn't actually in the studio. That's my bad. I'll own that one. I was like starting to, I was like, who threw it out? Like, somebody, somebody misplaced.

Did I misplace it? I was mad at myself. I'll own that one. I think everybody at one point had a blame of someone else who was like, right, I was walking around with the trash bag before. Did she grab it? It's like, Marquez probably left this at home because he got it on Friday. We're like, who else did the trash bag on Friday? I stood there for like 10 minutes just staring at my desk like, do I have it?

I haven't even been here. But like, when I was gone on Monday, you all literally like Lord of the Flies here. Like, it took one day to turn on each other. It was crazy. It was crazy. But anyway, long story short, it was all a dream. That's what we're here for. Read Word of Megan.

That story's probably way more fun if you were part of it and not that interesting if you weren't, but a little deep dive into how. You're an hour 40 into the pod now. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, anyway, I think it's time I get some trivia points. You got some last week. Yeah, but I need, I want more.

Oh, Adam, you should probably check because the chance of Mariah and I screwing up trivia points over the last few edits is essentially 100%. I'm not going to save the points this time. I'm just going to fix it in the edit. So check the video. I'm probably missing a few. You could just add a few on there for mine. All right.

Yeah. Guys, I still have the same blank Google.com page loaded in the Google Chrome browser. And I need you to tell me how many buttons are present that will take me to Gemini. Closest without going over.

No, Delta. Remember, oops, all Delta. Oh, yeah. I didn't. I mean, I didn't. I mean, I didn't actually see it. I think we all know there's probably like I already finished writing too. Only so many that can fit on a page. I mean. There's a number I want to say and the number I think it is.

That's exactly where I'm at. Yep. I think. Yeah. Is the number we all want to say higher than the number we put down? By one. Oh, by one? Yeah. Mine's by two. All right. I tried it. I tried it. Whoa. Oh, God. All right. Everybody who would like to read their number first?

David would. David? That means I know what it means if you said who wants to read it first. Who wants to read it? Well, I'm going to reveal after everyone reads it. Well, that means we're all equally the same amount away, right? Why do you think that? Because normally when somebody's wrong, you say, hey, Mr. Wrong Guy, can you read first?

I do tend to do that. Okay. Oh, you're right. Someone read first. Seven. Okay. Three. Okay. Three. It's five. It's five, isn't it? There's no way it's five. No, it's six. David won. Let's go. Six? David gets the point.

Let's go. Damn. Congratulations, David. Tough look for me. All right. Question number two. On mobile, how long were you allowed to upload videos with IGTV back in the day? Phrase weird, but you get it.

I'm very intrigued if people go low or high. Based on... We're doing Delta, so... Yeah. I'm so wrong. Desktop with 60 minutes. 60 minutes. Before I think about this, I'm very wrong. So on desktop, you could upload for 60 minutes. 60 minutes. On mobile, you could upload how long of the video.

Exactly. Okay. Flip him and read. What do you got? What did you do right? Andrew, do you want to go first? We're back. I don't know. You're so back. I wrote four hours, but then I was like, who could fit a four-hour video on your phone?

That makes no sense. David and I have to tie and get both the points, right? Yeah. We wrote 10 minutes. Are we correct? You are not correct. Oh. But you got the points. All right. What was the answer? It was 15 minutes. Yeah. I figured it must be less than desktop because they didn't want to accidentally use all people's data and have them get mad at them.

Yeah. That was my guess. I was basing it based on how TikTok recently added the ability to do both 10 and 60 minutes. But that was recent. I remember this was 2018. I thought TikTok was responding to Instagram. Well, TikTok is on Instagram like 60 minutes. This is IGTV though, so you're way earlier. Did YouTube used to have a four-hour limit on videos?

Why do I have four? They had a file size limit. I'm an idiot. I don't think so because there's all those 10-hour videos. Yeah. I think it was a file size limit that recently got boosted to way higher. Oh. Also, thumbnails got a file size bump. Oh, yeah. They were like two megabytes forever. Yeah.

That's so awful. And now they're like real images. Tim was so excited. He's like, give me your highest quality files. Tim, I mean, Tim puts his heart and soul in the thumbnails and then it would be like, now compress it to like the tiniest two megabyte file you can imagine. And there's crazy banding on TVs and it looks horrible. But now we can upload real 15 megabyte thumbnails.

It's a good time. Thank God. Yeah. And they'll upload in zero seconds flat on our new internet. Yeah. God, I'm so excited for that. Eight gigabit. Anyway, thank you so much for watching the pod, for listening. leave a comment below encouraging me to get more studio, sorry, more trivia points next time if you made it this far.

Just for me. Just to, just to make sure I get more points. That'd be great. All right. Catch you guys next week. See you soon. Peace. Waveformer Spruce by Adam Malin and Ellis River. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. And our true outro music was created by Vane Still. Bingo. Let's go.

I got to close the memes. Scrum long form. This is like a grab bag episode. It's a fun one. Yeah.

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