The 2026 Smartphone Awards Discussion Episode

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Support For The Show Comes From Jira By Atlassian AI Is Only As Useful As The Context It Has To Work From But When That Context Is Scattered Across Tools Threads And DMs That Means Your Team And Your Agents End Up Flying Blind That's The Problem That Jira Solves What's The Goal Tied To Your Project What Got Decided Last Week In Slack Atlassian Teamwork Graph Pulls All These Pieces Together From Jira Confluence Slack GitHub And More So Nothing Falls Through The Cracks With Jira You

Can Share That Context With The Agents You Already Use Like Claude Cursor And GitHub Copilot Assign Them Work Directly Or Connect Your Agents Through MCP Spend Less Time Digging Through Endless Links And DMs Less Time Chasing Down What Got Decided And By

Time To Focus On The Work That Matters This Is Amex Corporate One Intelligent Platform For Company Spending With Smart Expense Management To Help Capture Details Categorize Spend And Streamline Expense Submission And Approval There's Less Manual Work For Your Team And Greater Visibility And Control For You Built To Simplify Designed To Scale Get Started At Go Amex Slash Amex Corporate Terms Apply

To Try New Things At Least With The iPhone Twice So They Tried The Mini The 12 Mini And Then You Have Your Hand On That Fun Yeah What is Up People Of The Internet Welcome Back To Another Episode Of The Waveform Podcast We're Your Host I'm Marquez And I'm Andrew No David Today But Over At The Producer Desk We Have Ellis And Mariah Is Back And

It's Mid Techtober As You Listen To This And As We Record This Which Means Of Course There's A Little Bit To Talk About It's Kind Of Crazy There's Like One Week Lull It's The Break Between Techtober Or Tech Timber And Techtober Yeah Like Tech Timber Kind Spills Into The Beginning Of Techtober And Techtober Is About To Kick Off Again But We Have A Little Rest Period But In This Episode We Still Have A Couple Other Things We've Got To Talk About Some Price Increases Of Some Phones That Also Have Already Come Out Apple With An Unusual Partner To Release

Some New Products Potentially We're Also Going To Have Our Preliminary Discussions Our

Phones Coming Out But Early Enough That It's Fun To Talk About We Have Some Thoughts And Of Course We'll End By Talking About Some MMOs I Know What That Stands For But I Don't Know What We're Talking About So It'll Be Good Don't Forget Subscribe Of Course We Have Found That Asking You To Subscribe Does Way More Towards Getting You

This Week On Our Bonus Episode That Came On Tuesday You May Have Missed If You Weren't Subscribed But That Was Super Fun Episode We Talked All About Podcasting The Old Days Of Podcasting What It's Like Starting One Today Whether It Should Be On YouTube We Talked About Asking Your Audience To Subscribe Or Be A Premium Member And How Excruciating It Is And How We Feel Bad

Give The Dishes A Wash You Know What We Meant Give The Dishes Wash But First Did They Even Test This I Have Potentially The Most Niche One Possible And This Is One I Know You Have Not Seen Before So I'm Excited To Show It To You And That Is In Megaphone Which Is The Piece Of Software That We Use To Upload The Podcast The Audio Version

Is In The Publish Section We Have Publishing Details Draft Scheduled Publish Now When We Do Scheduled We Have A Drop Down For The Time Right Now It Says 12 A.M. What Time Variations Do You Think It's Going To Down When I Drop This Menu Down I First I Expected One Hour Increments But Now I'm Thinking Maybe 30 Minute Increments I'm Drop This Down You Tell

One Minute Increments There's A Drop Down That Starts At 12 And Goes To 12 01 12 02 12 03 And You're Scrolling And It's 12 12 12 13 12 14 132 133 134 That Is A Long Drop Down It's I Mean It Could Because It Goes To Midnight You Can't Type It You Have To Scroll I When You Click In The Cursor Doesn't Move At All So I Can't Like Just Change The Two Oh For Sure You Can Type It Though You Can Just Start Typing I Think Yeah So You Have To Make Sure Though You're Very

And Doing 06 Colon 00 And Then You Get The Ones You Can Do That's Crazy I Think The Fact That The Singular Minutes In The Dropdown On Top Of The Fact When You Click Into The Box Nothing Deletes Or The Cursor Doesn't Move Yeah It Should At Least Show That Like Hey You're Typing Now You Are Allowed To Not Scroll Minute By Minute It's One of Those Weird Feels Like It's Vibe Coded Where You You Want To Give People A Dropdown But You You Can Only Select The

How many Minutes In A Day Pop Quiz I Have No Idea Hold On Let Me Count One Two Three There's 3600 In An Hour Right 60 Minutes Sorry 3600 In What's That Seconds In An Hour Yeah What's The Song Rent Chicago One How many Minutes Are In A Day So 60 Minutes Times 24 What's 6 Times 24 2400

Plus This is that Mental math Times 4 24 Times Three Is 36 Times 2 Is 7200 When people Ask us how we Retain viewership This is why we Should be the people I just want to say I'm proud of us Not a single one One of us here Opened up a calculator I didn't I just gave up Off the start And let you guys Figure it out I think it's 7200 And I'm not gonna Double check Do you wanna know Sure Oh You did it Is that trivia

What do you think What do you think it is Andrew I just want to Appreciate the fact That Generally what we've Learned about Marquez In the am I the Asshole episode Is he would just Search this immediately Why we're all having The fun time of Figuring it out And he didn't do that I know That's growth Growth Yeah That's growth Most improved But now I wanna know If I'm right That's okay Cause I googled it Immediately Cause I wanted to know And it is 1440 minutes In one day Minutes in a day Is that AI overview Maybe

60 times I'm trying It also 60 times There's so little We trust It's 1440 1440 Well now we know There's 1440 things In that dropdown That's crazy Fun All right Also we wanna shout Out the studio Deskmat real quick So I Showed it in the Last MKBHD video But if you haven't Already seen it We are finally And I say that Because we've Had a long Behind the scenes Process But we are Finally Launching And sharing This studio Themed Themed Themed Deskmat With the world You have

Two of them Andrew You wanna say Why you have Two of them I have two of them I have two of them Because we partnered With a company Named Omnitype Who has been in the Mechanical keyboard market For a long time It makes very high Quality Deskmats And something they Actually introduced to me Which you've been using For far longer Than I have Is the It's called like The rough Or controlled texture Of Deskmat Yeah So you use an Artisan mouse pad Because you don't use A full desk mat And it kind of has This like I don't wanna call it Stitched feeling But almost like

Raised Yeah When you describe it And don't feel it It sounds bad You want a mouse To like glide Right Sure yeah But to me It actually It feels better I think it actually Feels like a higher Quality than the Smooth ones But it's just Not your normal Desk mat For our audio Listeners What does the Mat look like I've held it up Already For the audio Listeners Oh for the audio Listeners What did They didn't see Okay so Studio vibes Studio colors Lots of different Colors and shapes That are overlapping

With each other To create Other colors And then we have This kind of Really nice Fade On a lot of it I just think Overall It's one of those Things that will Match with a lot Of desks Because it has So many colors Unless your desk Is just like Matte black Everything In which case It stands out It stands out A lot David when he Used to work Here Originally Started the Idea He's left And then Tim kind of Brought it all Together To finally Make this Push Wait What You're talking About

David Our former Yes Sorry David David Who is not Not the other David As the chair Is empty Next to you Sorry I'm obviously I'm so excited About this desk Mat that I'm All over the Place right now Because we have Been working on This for a while And I'm so Pumped for it To come out We made it The exact Actually We made sure It was the same Price as Omnitype sells It so people Didn't think We have like A youtuber Tax on it We accidentally Put it at $29 When they sell For $30 So we're Actually cheaper Than Omnitype

By a dollar So no one Can blame us For that And not only That but Garrett at Omnitype Is big on Packaging I feel like Companies that Focus a lot On packaging And user Experience Generally are Pretty high Quality And he let Tim and Olivia kind Of go wild With this Box Everyone worked Really hard On it Everyone worked Really hard We had a Massive Studio wide Discussion On if we Should launch It in only The rough Texture Or just the Smooth texture Since people Are used to That You could say We A B Tested it

Yeah we did I mean we Did launch Both We were worried About launching Both but we Did and I Think the sales Right off the Rift were Within 10 Of each other Basically 50-50 And I you know I made it clear That if you're Not like up On game You could probably Just safely Order the smooth And it's gonna Feel like what You're used to But if you do Know ball Then it's cool To know you Have the option Of a control Texture surface So yeah That is uh That's where We're at They're out They're available Go check them out MKBHD.com Uh okay

Now speaking of Things that are Not so cheap Galaxy S26 Prices did go up Um roughly by 100 bucks Across the board So we talked About this when Apple did it They raised a lot Of prices that Were not the iPhone and then They launched New iPhones Obviously that are More pricey Galaxy S26 Galaxy S26 Has been out Since January But are now Getting a price Increase Uh near the End of this Year Well and Apple In their launch Also increased The prices of The previous Generation So it did Finally hit the

Entire Apple Store basically Um so basically Everything's about 100 bucks more Expensive That's kind of Right in line With what we Seem to be Expecting from Everyone So like the Galaxy S26 256 gig Instead of Starting at 900 It's a Thousand dollar Phone now And then you go Up from there So if you want An S26 plus That's a $1200 phone If you want An Ultra That's a $1400 phone To start And they go Up from there I think the Max price One terabyte Ultra Is a $2000 phone That's wild The Ultra Is a $2000 A non-folding Phone Is a

$2000 Phone Now Yeah Is that Actually Is that The first Time we've Seen it That can't Be the First $1000 Non-folding Phone But it Is Definitely Like You're Get Like Obviously The Duo Is going To be $2000 To start So You are Approaching Foldable Territory Real quick At the top Of that Lineup If you Get a Terabyte Phone By the Way Let us Know What you Do With that Terabyte Because The only Thing I've Ever Upgraded My Storage For Is A lot Of Video Shooting I know I'm Doing

A lot Of Photos And Videos So I get The More Storage Everything Else I do On my Phone Is Like A Tiny Fraction Of The Amount Of Photos And Videos All

Here I'll Just Pull It Up On This One Plus Fifteen But Like I would Be Curious If Anyone Does Anything Other Than Media To fill Up Their Storage Let's See What I Actually Have There Is A Two Thousand dollar iPhone Spec That You Can Buy Yeah And A Pro Max Yeah A Pro Max What A Regular Pro In Two Terabytes Is Twenty There's A Two Terabyte I Did Not Wow I Missed That Terabyte Two Terabytes Twenty Four Hundred Dollars That's Jesus

That's Crazy I Did Not Know That All Right I Have A 512 Gig One Plus Fifteen Here All Of My Apps Combined Are 145 Gigs And That's Including Everything I've Downloaded From Spotify Which Is All Of My Libraries And Lossless So It's It's Not That Much Loss 62 Gigs Of It Is Spotify So I Have Like 80 Gigs Of Apps All My Apps Is This Not As We're Talking About This Is This Not The Perfect Time For Phones To Start Bringing Back The Micro SD Card

Slot And Just Being Like You Guys Can Figure Storage Out Because It's Costing Us A Damn Fortune Right Now It's Funny Because I Think They Would Use The Opposite Argument The Storage

They Charge You For Extra Storage Is Definitely Recouping More Than They're Paying Yeah So They Would Love To Keep Charging You For Storage And Not Giving You The Micro SD Card Slot Well But That's Not The Excuse They're Saying Out loud Because That's Basically Yeah Well Yeah I mean They're All The Prices Go up Because All These Phones Still Have A Bunch Of Ram In Them But They

Cloud Storage Is Subscription So Why Would They Give You Something That You Can Pay Someone Else One Time For How Much Do You Think You Can Get A 2 Terabyte SD Card For Micro SD Which Kind A Cheat Slow One 2 Terabyte I Have Two Micro SD Cards Both With 2 Terabytes Of Storage In Front Of Me They're Both Sandisk Extreme SD XCs One Of Them Has The V30 A2 With The Three In The Bucket

Rating And The Other One Does Not Have The Three In The Bucket What Are The A2 V31 A2 One Of The Three In The Bucket Sorry I Mean Like 300 Like The Read Right Megabytes Per Second Oh Really It Usually It Says Right On The Card Yeah I Think XCXC Is They Have A Minimum Speed To Qualify For That Yeah So I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I have A guess Already I should Have Said What Colors Is Is It The Sandisk Gold One It Is The Sandisk Gold Okay That's That's a good A knife Um

What's Two terabyte Wait let me Think of a guess So I'm not going Off of you Right speed 150 megabytes Second

90 230 Big difference 90 dollars Yeah Brother Yeah no It's way too expensive Now See that's one terabyte The one I'm looking right now Is 400 400 For two terabytes For two terabytes When you go down to like 512 Is that like 60 bucks I'd say that's probably Around 90 No It's still 140 How much is it 256 But if you get Is that Gengar Is it a brand name That's another 20 bucks Oh my god Wait I think it might be It's a Gengar Oh oh

Didn't the Switch Do a bunch of Micro SD cards Yeah That one's only 120 Speaking of things With memory There's some Some interesting stories Popping up That are like A combo of like Leaks and reporting About Apple's New I guess Home devices And this This Latest one was interesting It's basically that Apple's going to be Partnering with LG On launching a bunch of Uh Like doorbell And thermostat And temperature sensor Type things

And I saw that And I was like Oh interesting Partnering with LG So that kind of Implies that Apple is not Building them But if they're Partnering with them So they'll be Apple branded maybe Or maybe it's Kind of like a Beats partnership Scenario I'm not really sure So I click on it And there's some Leaked images From this 9to5Mac Article And they are just Straight up Not branded At all Actually it just says LG There's no Apple Branding at all on them So one of them's a doorbell Uh Sort of a deadbolt On one side And a touchpad

On the other side Which I don't love I think those are Two different things No? The doorbell And the I think No no That's the deadbolt Yeah Which And then There's a doorbell I don't think the doorbell's In the leaked images But it is a rumored thing To be coming out Okay so just the deadbolt Sorry with the passcode On the other side With the passcode On the other side Yeah And uh Yeah it just says LG on it There's no Apple Branding here The other is a Smart thermostat Again it looks like a Nest They all kind of look The same at this point It's a circle With very thin bezels With a big temperature

And you probably rotate it Or press the button On either side To raise and lower the temperature And then a temperature sensor But the fact that None of them say Apple on it Kind of Makes me think This is kind of Getting blown out of proportion Like what What kind of partnership Is this exactly If it's just being In the Apple store Or getting announced As a compatible accessory But it's not made by Apple Then this doesn't Really make it as interesting Well here's the other thing If you look up LG Home Like I don't think LG was making

These home devices Beforehand Sure Um And I think Because two weeks ago When we talked about This potential Or maybe it was last week Um Cause next Next week we're having The Apple Like We think there's gonna be It's the rumored event The home event The home hub event That's what I Geez I keep getting Like confused Not home pad Home hub Which we might get The home pad at And we specifically said We were not going to see Um A security camera Yeah And now we're seeing

All this that we are Going to see Doorbell Deadbolt Thermostat Indoor Outdoor And floodlight camera But all made In partnership Or Yeah Co-made With LG And that's coming From German The same person Who said It's not coming Which makes me think Like you said LG is just going To make these products And maybe At this launch We're just getting The first view Of like Compatible With Apple's New home hub Yeah These are the products That are going To work with that Maybe there's gonna be Some sort of Like branding To mark them

As officially compatible I don't really know Cause right now If you want to buy Something that works With HomeKit I guess is what it's called You just look for That logo on the box And it says HomeKit compatible And you're like Great If I buy this It'll be able to Plug into the ecosystem It'll show up In my home Maybe this is some Like higher level Of this is optimized For and passes Any number of Requirements For not sharing data Or whatever it is And it'll be In partnership with And they'll get The like plug And they'll show

Them off alongside The new home stuff I can see that Kind of not Super interesting But it's there No I It makes sense To launch it Around this time Because they're gonna Need to show off Home Hub And that's They're gonna want Products that they You know Feel like they have Some control over And so Partnering with LG Yeah then they can Endorse it And they don't have To be like Cause this is so Clearly A shot directly At Amazon and Google With Nest and Ring Like they basically Just went Go to the Nest Website

And make all of The things on that Website Yeah we need The equivalent Stuff in our Ecosystem And these are Easily the most Like I own One of all of These products In some sort Of home I have all Three of these In my Google Home I have temperature Sensors I have the Deadbolt lock And I have a I even have a The camera stuff Like they're all Sort of talking to Each other In the Doorbell I have the Doorbell Exactly So yeah If Apple's gonna Have this brand New fancy Display that can Show the feed From a doorbell And a security

Camera And open and Close the locks And all that Stuff You might as Well have some First party Ish locks and Doorbells and Security cameras To point to That this will Work with Yeah And in their Marketing material They don't want it To say ring And nest All over the Cameras that They're switching To I'm sure And I doubt These are gonna Say LG If they made it In collaboration With Apple However They'll have to Name it They'll have to Name it Something It's interesting Because it already Looks like LG Has their own Like home app For all of their

Devices for like Your fridge Or whatever So I wonder if It'll still be Available on that App as well That's the thing I'm confused Though is like It doesn't seem And I haven't Looked up everything But like they Didn't have a Doorbell Or a Smart lock So it is Funny that you Think of LG As like You can create Your whole home With LG appliances And like everything LG Yeah But they didn't Have all the Connection things So maybe this is Just a good place To find the Partnership of Apple ecosystem Software LG product

I know Ellis Loves LG Software Cut his mic right now And this This is it You love Apple And you love LG This is a perfect Partnership He's just Face-pawming over there I had my final Freaking straw With my LG TV This week Because remember A few weeks ago And I was like Yeah You know Like LG Always asks me To sign this Crazy privacy I just decline And then it Let's mute the TV Last week man It was finally like If you don't Accept this I will not Connect to your Wi-Fi network

And I'm working On a few Different solutions And maybe I'll Bring it up later But my time With webOS Has come to an end I'm done with you That TV is getting Air gapped The second I Figure it out One other thing There is There was an Article at least About the duo Potentially hitting Some production Difficulties already A quote From someone Close to Production lines In a Chinese news Article Then posted by MacRumors Which is the way We seem to get All this stuff Said

Final assembly Yields for Apple's first Foldable iPhone Were only Slightly above 60% as of September 17th Source said that Under Apple's Current quality standards It could take Another six months To a year For the assembly Line to reach A mature yield Which is I don't know What to make of that I My take on this Is Mature yield I have a hard time Believing some Parts of it Like I think it Makes a great Headline And a really Interesting headline Like oh wow That must be so Difficult to make The duos And they might not Be able to make As many as they Need

But I also Tend to think That with a Supply chain Mastery giant Like Apple By the time They announce A new product Like the iPhone Duo It's very rare That they Aren't ready To make it Like remember The wireless Charger What was it Called The AirPower That's like The only example I can think of Of Apple Like getting To the finish Line of Announcing a Product But not Really having The finished Product ready When we got iPhone Duo Like announced I'm pretty sure They had

For weeks And weeks And months And months Been done Deciding How they're Going to Made it And they've Started making Thousands And thousands Of thousands Of them And the Month Between Announcement And pre-order Is to give Developers A bunch Of extra Time To start Making their Apps compatible With Duo And to get It ready To ship And to give A little Gap After 18 Pro And I Don't think That this New Information I don't think That this Crazy Yield Is new Information I'm I'm willing To believe That it is Difficult To make

These But I Don't think That there's Suddenly Some snag Of like Oh we Announced it And now Suddenly We're not Sure we can Make enough I feel Like they've Made as Many as They thought They were Going to Make And it's Going to Be hard To get But not In any Sort of Drastic Way I could See there Being some Sort of Issue Developed Along the Way Like we've Had things Where What was The pixel Where Some of The screens Were made In one Factory And had Like x Issue And like When you When the Scale is So big

Even when You're Producing and Producing and Producing and Getting up To it Like there Is potential For a scale Issue To come Out Which Yeah I remember That I forgot What phone It was I want to Remember But even That I Remember Different Reviewers Would have Different Panels In their Review Units So it was Like even Before the Whole like Mass Shipping Situation Like they Had already Decided that That's how They were Going to Satisfy How many Units They had To make They were Like all Right We got To get Panels From two Different Factories And it Just Happened And that's How And then People

Discovered It And then It was A big Deal But I Think yeah There's Probably a lot Of things That have Already been Decided about The duo That we're Now discovering Because they're Just coming out This headline Also is Kind of Interesting Because it Says like Under Apple's Current quality Standards Which This is one Of those Things where A bad Headline Can kind Of make You look Good By being Like Well We're Apple We have Such high Standards That you Know Like we Might be Reaching Some delay But we're Always going To get You the Best thing It kind Of reminds Me of How

Every single Week We see Like AI Company Delaying Launch of Blah blah Blah Because it's Just too Strong For you Guys Which Oh my god I have to Get the Strongest AI Ever And then They've Released It a Week Anyways I don't Know I feel Like we're Getting more Into these Like semi Negative Headlines Where we All just Turn it Into No that Actually Means They're Fantastic Yeah I mean This is You know Probably Not a Headline Apple Wants To be Out There But We I think What's Going to Happen Is The Duo Is Going to Come out It's

Going to Be Limited In Quantity

Apple

Get one And almost Everyone was Like no And now I think If you Went around You might Get a Few More Yeses I know Alex is Probably In Olivia said Maybe Because she Wants to Watch YouTube While she Does Stuff On her Phone People's Imaginations Are slowly Like making The Duo Really Interesting To people And this Delay Is maybe Serving As like A bit Of Marketing And people Like Thinking About The Duo A little More But it Is Also Expensive 2k For A first Gen Product I don't Know Yeah This is Going to Be fun For the Review Like I Think we

Have to Remember As we Review This That it Is It is A first Gen Product That's so Hard As the Review Because it's Like It's Apple's First Gen Product But they've Gotten to Watch Eight years Of people Doing this Right So Apple Specifically Sat back And waited For many Many Many Others To do Many Other Multiple Generations Of their Products Before they Make Their First Generation So The Standard For this As a First Generation Product Is not The same As the Standard For Samsung Being the First One

To ship A foldable Phone In the U.S. But it Is still The first Version For them And I Do find Often The second Generation Is where You learn The most About what This is Who it's For What it's Good at And like What they're Doubling Down on And I Think the Second Generation Will probably Be the One That is More likely To be Easy To recommend To people But we Have to First Gen Foldables First Gen Pixel It was A passport Size First Gen Like Oppo Find Like X Or Find N Was

Passport Size And then The second Generation They all Started Leaving That shape So what Does Apple Do with The second Gen I don't Know But yeah I'm still Thinking about It as a First Gen Foldable At least Through that Lens I'm most Intrigued If they're Going to Keep The Under Display Selfie Camera For the Second Gen Yes And I Have to Assume They are Because They're Stubborn Whether It will Be the Right Move Or not I think Is another Question Yeah And it's Also funny Because Apple Always Seems To try New Things At least With the iPhone Twice

So They tried The mini The 12 Mini And then They Yeah And then You know How did you have Your hand On that Fun They tried The 12 Mini And a lot Of people Liked it But it Really Did not Sell Very Well But that Did not Stop And then Yeah It didn't Sell enough And it Was over They switched To the Plus That You're bringing Up the Like the This weird Section of iPhones Where like They do Something for Two years

Kill it Do something For two Years So Yeah Mini Plus Air We got an Air We got our New Air Let's see what Happens next year We're expecting a second generation Air I don't think there's any doubt There's gonna be a second gen Air Probably in January February Whatever Then what Will a third one Will it stay around I don't know But I would bet anything There's gonna be a second gen Air So there will be another Generation of You know Duo Obviously Will they keep all the things From the first generation We'll have to see Alright Speaking of Apple Yeah

Android Central Closing down Speaking of Apple I just wanted to throw this out here It's always a bummer When we see other publications Kind of Die out Especially in the Age of AI Which You kind of have to assume Is part of the reason Why this happened But um Yeah that's the thing Is it's not Shutting down Well yeah They got rid of all of their writers It's not shutting down But they fired all of their writers Yeah And Yeah so Apparently So future They're owned by future Um

They've owned Android Central For a while But after this last week All six writers Got let go Um Total bummer All remaining staff All remaining staff So what happened Is there have been articles Launched since this happened And they do have A freelance contributor section And all of those posts Have been made By freelance contributors So it's this weird thing Of like Are they just going to Ride The freelance contributors And to Like try and stay relevant And probably Overwork them Or I don't know what the deal Is there

On how Those people get paid I don't even know who Right Yeah So that's a really tough thing They I think they claim They're not going to use AI But I think we're all Under the assumption That this is just going to Unfortunately turn into AI Slop Yeah Which is kind of like The Dead It's like Yeah It's not kind of It's like the death rattle Of like a company like this Like we've All uh All publications Have some sort of A life cycle I guess Well that life cycle Is Getting choked out

Real hard right now With AI Yeah Cause like we saw Verge Didn't Verge post those numbers Of like Weekly visitors And how Bad they got hit In like the last year Because of Overviews and stuff In the search engine Exactly Yeah This is why I think Verge had like a 90% Reduction or something Right Which is uh This is like What tied into my whole Like question about The ask YouTube feature From the made on YouTube thing Because if you You know If you ask Most publishers Like what happened To your traffic When AI overview Started like

Learning from your stuff And then just Telling people the answer Before they ever get to your site Well of course Your traffic basically disappears Your ad revenue Basically disappears And you have to Completely rethink How you exist Uh If this YouTube feature Does the same thing Or a similar thing What does that look like For traffic Like do people use the feature To talk to it And never watch a YouTube video Or do they use the feature To jump into the middle Of a YouTube video And so they still get the traffic And then the one second Of play time Still equals a view Not really sure How this works Equals a view

Not a view that pays us Not an engaged view Not an engaged view But yeah It's weird on YouTube Because we always say The number one thing The algorithm wants Is get your Stay on YouTube As long as possible Like do not leave Come here Stay here Watch around Have a good time So how does that fit In the ethos of I don't want to watch this video I just want to know the answer Now I'm not watching videos Is that Is that Do they assume that person Is not someone Who's going to stay on anyways They're just looking for the answer Yeah So YouTube

Has slowly evolved Over the years How they Measure success Of like a viewer session I guess And I think Viewer satisfaction Has always come up And like How long you spend On the site Was a more Rudimentary way Of measuring that But maybe There is a higher Satisfaction rate Of Getting the answer From a video Quickly Instead of Trying to find it And failing And leaving

And so they think That that's a better experience Which YouTube If you're listening to this And you want to deliver A better experience Perhaps Some sort of Glanceable information To quickly understand The quality of a video Would be useful So people don't waste time On bad videos Maybe if there's Some sort of like I don't know Like a ratio Of People who liked it Versus didn't like it Then you could see that And go Oh A lot of people Didn't like this one I'll move on

Just an idea I don't know If you're like Thinking about that stuff But yeah Just a thought But yeah That is That is just a Long tangent Which is to say RIP Android Central RIP You'll be missed I've read a lot Of Android Central Articles over the years Especially in my Rooting and modding And bootloading days And I don't want to Take away from the people Who are the freelance Contributors over there I'm sure they're still Writing some good stuff I just hope that If you are one of those People that Future's treating you well

Which I doubt they are And like You think he made enough Money off of Mask Off To pay six people Future That's a future joke Well you know what else We'll find out in the future Yeah The answers to this trivia That's good That was smooth You were somehow Faster on the ding For the iPhone mini Than you were for The trivia thing That we just set up For 25 seconds Yeah Diamonds from Africa It's another future song Apple is partnering With LG But it is not

The first time They've worked together And I'm not talking About the ultra fine 4k That was like In Apple stores That's the one I remember That one was Is that the one that Blocked Wi-Fi That was the one That kept flickering When you were using it In your Yeah People forget People remember that But they forget That it was actually A pretty solid deal Yeah Unfortunately This question is Slightly muddled By the fact That for some reason LG and LG Displays Are like separate companies But not separate companies But like not the same company Whatever

LG Displays Which is not LG So I guess they haven't Collabbed But just roll with it You know Suspense and disbelief For the sake of this Trivia question Has made the displays In a lot of Apple products I was able to confirm Two Apple products That they were either The exclusive Or main supplier Of panels for What Two Apple products Do you want like Specific series number Nope Just like in general Just product Just product One of them I will give you A little hint One of them Is a product line

That has had generations One of them There is only one Air power There's only one That doesn't actually Narrow it down Because you know There's a couple things That still only have One generation Thinking about like HomePod Has a display HomePod mini Has a display Just a little glowing It's probably not the answer But that's something Something to think about Well we'll get the answers Like we've said In the future At the end

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Which means It's starting to get to that time Where we start thinking about Who's going to win awards For the smartphone awards Every year We give out awards For the best And worst smartphones That came out During the calendar year We have a bunch of categories And I think we can just Sort of step through these And start thinking about Storylines and thoughts And this is also A great fun time To sort of pull Like what our audience thinks Because people People have Hard reactions On what they think

Should definitely win Certain awards And we will hear From those people as well But Can I do a Fun fact Of the process of this Yeah I'm bringing it up now Well one Because not a lot Happened this week So it's a bummer That David's not here To talk about this But we actually have A date for end of October For when we're going To have a meeting To kind of like Discuss this And I thought it was funny Because obviously When the video comes out In early December All the time we take To discuss it We have to order trophies

Because that's the thing We started doing A few years ago There's this gap Of when a phone Might come out So I'm sure people Are going to be like What happens if X phone comes out In that process And I believe It may have been Last year or the year Before is the first Time we've done it But we've done Where we know A phone is coming out That we don't have That we think Could Like legitimately Fight for an award And we've ordered The trophy for that phone Just in case I think what it was Last year was The best camera Right And we had like

Two or three That we were juggling Between And we also were Waiting to get Like the Vivo X300 Pro or Ultra I'm pretty sure Samsung Tri-fold Was something We were debating For best foldable As well But we couldn't have it Super super late In the year And it's obviously A triple folding phone Yeah You have to think about it Just the like Maybe this is good enough So let's just leave room For it to maybe win as well Yeah And then obviously Decide at the very end Okay this one wins This one wins Yeah So yeah There's some phones That haven't come out yet

Obviously the iPhone Duo We know what it is But it's not out yet I think the Vivo Like X500 series Is around the corner If things hold Like that's usually What happens Is it's around This time of year But yeah This is what We're working with What we have And what's out And we definitely Already have some thoughts We can kind of go in order You want to go in order Okay I'll go in order So we start with best big phone And this is funny Because when we first started The smartphone awards There was distinctly huge phones Yeah Like phablet

Like Galaxy Note Galaxy What do they call it Galaxy Mega Remember that No You don't remember that No It used to have like A regular sized phone Is it British No It was just Galaxy Mega And it was a phablet Freakishly big phone Which to us today Is a regular sized phone Remember Guess how big It was like a 5.3 inch phone Probably Oh it was bigger than that But it's still 5.8 6.3 Okay So like But back then Phones were all 4.75 Are any phones under 6.3 now That would be a small phone Yeah

Which is crazy Galaxy Mega Would be a small phone Today But yeah We used to have Like distinctly huge phones And small phones So I would give an award For best big phone Yeah Nowadays All these slab phones Are kind of the same size Like we have the ultras That are really big And then we have All the other phones That are just big Yeah So it's hard to pick one That's like Clear cut Best big phone I don't know if I have any Thoughts yet

I tend to Not do the ones That are like Super super safe With design Someone who did Something interesting Last year Was Xiaomi 17 Pro Which had the screen On the back Yeah Like they really Use the space Well Huge battery Great specs Great cameras They did that again With the 18 Pro This year So that's interesting I did find a comment Last year On a Reddit thread That I found interesting Because we last year I think it was the first time Had a small phone

Be a flip phone Yeah And they said If a small phone That can flip To a normal size phone Is allowed to be A best small phone Why isn't a folding phone Allowed to be Best big phone And I think it's Along the lines of It's not that It's not allowed It's that the criteria Between these two Are generally The big phone Should have The absolute Packed amount Of features Because it is using Is utilizing All the space best Where smart Small phone Is like We know there Have to be sacrifices Made for it to be small

But what can they Pack into the Smallness of it To make the size Of it beneficial So like Yeah A folding phone Is like You get a normal Size phone But it gets to be Little for like Putting it in a purse Or like Women's pockets Sucks So like Maybe they can Actually fit it But you still Get a lot of stuff Where it feels Like a lot of Folding phones Actually do have Sacrifices compared To the slab phones That those companies Make Totally But I also think That's valid If you want You want a huge screen You would say I want the

I want the folding phone That's the best Big phone for me I think the bummer Is we still see Like lack of Flagship Not flagship cameras But like Totally In the lineup They're never The best of the best Yeah The best They are the biggest And most expensive phones But not necessarily The most capable Because they don't have The biggest You know Internal space For the heat shield They don't have The biggest Internal space For the cameras So they don't have The most flagship specs Which is probably Why you lean again Towards Yeah The big slab phone

With the big slab specs It used to Like ROG phone Used to run away With this Because they were Just like Throw all the cool features That other phones Don't have in here And a vapor chamber And like All of these crazy Like flashy External pieces Of hardware Like external Attachable fans And stuff Yeah They went super hard Now there's a lot Of those things Honestly Big phone And small phone Writing this Is the ones I had the absolute Hardest time I'm thinking These categories Are almost I think they're

Still beneficial But they're becoming The least Competitive You know what it is You know what it feels like It's like when there's An MVP award But there's also An offensive player Of the year award And you're like Isn't the best Offensive player Probably gonna win MVP Yeah usually But if there's Like an extremely Interesting example Of like super Heavily weighted offense And no defense You're like alright That's the offensive Player of the year But the MVP Is a little more Well rounded That's kind of What best big phone Is to me So I don't really Have a front runner

For that yet But that's how I'm thinking About that one So yeah Best small phone You didn't really Get any small phones They don't exist anymore Yeah It probably has to be A folding phone One of those flips In which case You have a couple I guess we did get Smaller folding phones Yeah And you have like Z Fold We have like Razors We have a couple Of those Huawei Like there's a bunch That are all kind of The same size and shape That we can That we can look at those But yeah

We don't have like Small slabs anymore I remember when the Zen phone Was just like Such an easy pick It was so good It was such a good phone In general It was so good We might 2026 7 2027 smartphone awards We may have Some small phones Depending on The successful release Because Clix Communicator Would be a small phone Oh Is that coming out They're running out of time That might Yeah That's another one That we might I forgot about that We might want to see If that comes out this year I don't know Actually I should Also I don't know When minimal phone ships But I would call that

A small phone too Yeah They are technically small That's interesting Yeah Some of those are going to be Like thoughtful Small phone executions So we'll have to think about those It is hard Because in the sense of Like we want the small phone To be the most capable thing In a small form factor When those you could argue Are like Trying to be Less capable Yeah And therefore Is the size to capable Capability Ratio Not really that good I think they're worse And arguably Big Yeah

Like big for what it can do Yeah you know It is technically The best compact award Not the most capable Compact award So I'm like If we just really like it Then we can give it the award Vague awards means We can change our mind Every year Exactly It's our award I think I opened The last three years Being like It's my awards guys I can decide Whatever I want to win And I will be able To justify it Okay wait If that's the case Can I Can I lobby For a nomination Of course There's a few Comparable Products and projects The one I'm looking at

Is called TinyPod Are you familiar with this No It's that Apple Watch And Apple Watch Ultra case That hooks up The crown To a scroll wheel Oh my god So if you have A cellular enabled one You can use it As a standalone Handheld device I'm looking at it right now Technically You can make a phone call On that This is It is You're right It is small And it's technically Cellular enabled And you can connect AirPods directly to it So it Kinda

That's like what you When we give kids Their first phone That's what they should have Yeah yeah yeah Wow I will add this To the consideration I doubt it will win That would be a wild card To just But I will add Yeah The winner The Apple Watch Like I said There's a few Different companies That are making Pretty similar products This is just the first one I can remember the name of Here's a controversial one Should thinness Be small?

I mean like In the In the area Of where we're at If all phones If all phones are small If all phones are big No phones are big Right So every phone is the same size So what else makes it small If it's thin and light No Here's the issue That sounds like a cop out I feel like You think They're actually Are genuinely small phones They're just the weird Little freaky phones Yeah But then the question is Are the weird little Freaky small phones The best small phones?

But it's still subjective So it's just Yeah It is true It's whatever you want Is the iPhone Air It's a compact phone So I guess it technically Well the iPhone Air And the S25 Edge Came out last year So it doesn't even matter That's true Ah And there is no S26 Edge Yeah Yeah So they're both Not going to qualify So why am I even Saying any of this?

Well I Honestly I thought you were going to Come at me with Someone that I just missed No no That's I mean there are Thin phones But they're all Folding phones now So yeah Interesting Yeah I'd like to hear That's going to be a fun one Yeah Alright so next one Is best camera Okay And so there's lots Of good cameras At this point And I almost talked About this I'm trying to think Of which one I think it might have Been the Pixel 11 Pro review Where I almost And I think I cut it From the video But I almost went on

This like diatribe Of like I don't know They're all kind of The same thing But like playing A different character And it's just How much do you like The character that they play Do you like the Contrasty confident one? Do you like the Super super flat one That always has light On your face? Do you like the Really really sharp one?

Because they all just Do their own thing And whichever one is best I don't know Do you just want The sharpest one? Do you want the one That looks the least processed? What is the best camera anymore? There are ones that have Clearly the best specs Yeah Like the biggest sensors And the most advanced hardware And the most customization Most sharpening That is a character That you can get But is that the best?

Maybe David is fuming somewhere Listen to this Well To bring up what David would probably say And this is potentially I have a couple Different things written down On some things I think should be considered Some things that I wonder If we should consider Probably not But I do have Pixel 11 Because of camera looks Like camera looks Is actually a really cool feature They added And arguably The shining spot Of the Pixel 11 series Which didn't shine Very bright overall But camera looks Is a really cool New thing That kind of defaults And does the thing

We've been asking For a long time Which is like Stop processing The absolute hell Out of my photos And you get to default Them in the camera app Correct And change things up Like I actually think That's awesome And Pixel's Always been a camera That can hang But having that feature I think is nice Yeah And that's kind of The story of a lot Of the most high-end Smartphone cameras Is they are very high On processing too Yes And it's an interesting story If the one that is the best Is the one that turns down

A lot of that over processing And gives you some options As well Yeah So like you said You were just saying Do you want the most contrast Do you want this and that The Pixel 11 gives you some options And lets you lock in On your option Yeah And I think that's a I think that's a good thing I still like the look Of the Pixel cameras I think for a couple years now Many years actually They've been On the contrast to your side A lot of the smartphones Kind of just opt to like Put light on your face No matter what But it's on the contrast to your side Skin tones are sort of Realistic in a lot of situations So

I value that In a smartphone camera But I also just took A lot of pictures With like the The Xiaomi 18 Pro Max And Really really good Set of cameras They kind of just Stopped caring about The ultra wide I think I feel like everyone Stopped caring about The ultra wide Unfortunately feels like It's turning into like The The what 10 megapixel macro Or whatever The 1 megapixel macro I I wouldn't quite go that far Not quite I think those macros Were just like

Use Like Zero value add I think the ultra wide At least give you like The option to like Zoom out or take like a wide I've also I've taken This is something I noticed In the last year specifically I've had a lot of people Like take selfies with me And a lot of times It's like the selfie camera And like just holding it out Or whatever And There's this Maybe not Gen Z But there's this young person thing Where they will Use the regular camera They'll flip it around To the ultra wide And they'll take it from up high

And that's a specific thing You need an ultra wide camera To do that But I see that a lot more And I'm curious if If Neglecting the ultra wide Is a mistake For people who like that stuff It feels like every camera Is always Every time we review a camera There's always Just Oh this is good This is good Ultra wide Not as good Or we'll be like The ultra wide Finally matches the megapixels Of everything else So maybe they care about it Yeah But that's the

Yeah The megapixels thing That doesn't necessarily mean it But yeah Yeah Yeah Because people see the 200 megapixel Number now And they go Ah Selfie Or like flagship Like 200 megapixels Equals flagship But then you look at the size Of the sensor And you're like Oh it's just kidding They packed the sensor With pixels But that doesn't mean It's actually great Sometimes it means it's worse Because the pixels Are individually smaller And it's noisier Blah blah blah We're getting into the weeds You mentioned Xiaomi before This felt like the year Of really harping On the legacy camera Collaborations

Because we got Oh yeah The Leica phone Which is This is the Xiaomi 17 That is a phone Ah Got it But yeah The Leica This is a Xiaomi 17 Pro Ultra I forget the name of it Leica edition Leica edition Technically this released in China December 25th 2025 But globally It was February 28th I think this should count The This is just one of those things Where like It has the The zoom ring On the outside

It has this Incredible knurling I think it's called Right Yeah Knurling Yeah Knurring Knurling Knurling It feels like a Oh Yeah It's the side of the phone Yeah It's a nice phone To hold and take It is Speaking of another one The Oppo X9 Ultra Hasselblad edition Yes That's a good one And then I think Vivo's also been doing Zeiss stuff And like There We think the X500's coming out soon We've been doing All these things

Where this Hasselblad one And Vivo in the past Have had all these Extra lenses Do we add extra lenses That X9 Ultra I thought was Incredible That's what That won last year Right I No this came out this year Okay X9 Pro Right X9 Pro won last year X9 Ultra I used that phone I used that phone For a while For a couple Yeah no It came out this year I think Okay Now you're making I'm almost I looked at so many Camera collabs things And sometimes The Chinese phones Are hard to tell It is hard to remember Sometimes I use it for a bit This year Because I remember I had it in that

When we shot the Luce I had that as my phone Okay fun fact For those of you Who don't remember Yeah this came out this year Yeah we went to Italy To shoot the Ferrari Luce At least I did I Forgot my charger No I didn't I forgot my adapter For Italian outlets So I had to make My phones And everything That I was using Last for two days Without charging it Luckily I had an iPhone Air And this phone So the iPhone Air Died really fast And this phone

Lasted forever For like two straight days And I took a lot of photos And videos on it And it was excellent And yeah I remember that being Really really good That's definitely A candidate for Camera of the year Do you remember if this Orange like Hasselblad Colored camera button Has like haptics Because it's not Turned on right now And it feels awful I think it's I have to assume It's haptics Just a shortcut I think some of them Have also copied The like swiping Back and forth To like change Yeah camera control stuff I don't think that's one of them This one does not have

A rotating bezel Around the camera No But this is a good looking phone Yeah Really really capable Camera system That's definitely A candidate right there And then the last thing Which I don't think We should count But we have to bring up Is we just kind of got The first looks at this Huawei Mate 90 Pro Max That has a $900 They're calling it The Z10 camera Attachment Okay this should be This should not count No Okay I'm glad we're on the same page Yeah so they made a This has actually happened before

Yeah I think it's happened A couple times actually They made a lens That you attach to the phone But it has its own sensor in it So it's like a 24 to 200 millimeter lens Or something It's a one inch sensor And I know it has 10x optical zoom Yeah so what happens is You screw it onto the back of the phone And it uses your phone As a viewfinder But it's not using the cameras On your phone It has its own camera built in So you're connecting to it And then you take pictures With this It's a whole camera It just doesn't look like one

Because it's sort of closed off Yeah I think it actually is like a Is it magnetically hooks onto the back And then you screw the lens on It's like Something like that I'm sure Yeah But yeah I It is not part of the Huawei phone Yes It actually only works with like Some special edition version of this I think it's like the collector's edition Or something Yeah But that is a really funny concept Because we've seen this before I'm trying to remember Was it Sony that did this?

Yeah It was Sony like QX10 or something like that I don't remember Let me get it But it was Sony So last time I saw this It latched onto the phone And it again Had its own sensors in it And you could connect it You'd pair it with your phone Your phone became the viewfinder And that was supposed to be a better sensor You could take pictures with I do think Xiaomi did this A couple years ago Yeah yeah yeah Xiaomi did this last year actually At CES I think It was bad last time Yeah it looks much different

This one looks way nicer In the sense of How it physically looks But who really cares about that Unless it takes a nice picture But Marquez that was a crazy pull It was the Sony QX10 Yeah 12 years ago Because I reviewed this And I was like hoping it would be great And it was a real pain It did not connect very smoothly To the phone It didn't take much better pictures Than the phone It was It was a cool idea But it did not work very well But you looked cool using it Did you do it?

Yeah Yeah Yeah You felt cool Sometimes Because you thought you were going to take a sweet photo With that big zoom lens But yeah Anyway That will not qualify I think cameras got the most fun Distinctions this year Really good stuff Competition Then there's a value award So we changed it Because it used to be best budget phone Now it's value award Because what is budget anyway?

You know 200, 300, 400 Whatever Best value award We have lots of players in this space every year And it almost ends up just being like Most interesting good value phone I mean This is a year where it's the hardest to pick it Because everything Things have literally gotten more expensive since they launched We just talked about it So you know This is usually something where we talk about MSRP

But MSRP at launch isn't even how much they cost anymore So it's such a hard thing in Ramageddon To think about Of a good value right now Because not a lot of things are a great value Yeah I kind of think that We have all the usual players in this space Like we always get Moto G's at $225 or whatever We always get Now we always get CMF phones We always get nothing phones We always get like Galaxy A series phones And a lot of them are pretty predictable

And I don't want to fall into the trap of just being like Well this one has the best specs So it just wins Because I think The experience of using a budget phone sometimes Is more than just the specs Well CMF's not releasing a phone in 2026 That's fine I mean there's going to be You get like Like the A series is very predictable They're just paring down What you know from a Galaxy S26 And it's just going to be the A50 Whatever they do Like that's a That's a very predictable Safe budget phone But that's almost like

The most boring possible option And I'm curious I'm going to sort of What I usually end up doing Is digging back through the whole year of phones Under a certain number And seeing like Which ones actually were good Which ones were interesting Did something unique at that price That's more likely to win an award For best budget phone Or best value phone I think it's the one we're going to have to do The most research on Because we didn't cover a lot of You know More budget things this year And we'll probably have to go find What people are enjoying Yeah Under X amount of dollars S26 Ultra

Best budget phone Best value What price If you had to guess off the top of your head Mariah Don't open this can of worms What price should win? Oh no I was going to say Like if you were considering a budget phone Like what price would you start at Or like you know Go under So the law of diminishing returns I think the I think the Your phone isn't going to get much better Bar Is at like $800 I think once you get to $800 You can't really Your phone's not going to get much better

Than the phones you get for $800 But if you're looking for value And you're looking to get significantly less Than $800 I think I think $500 and under There's some Good value Down there I think $500 is the number for a long time That I've thought of With Price increases Like Those phones we were used to being at $500 Are probably closer to $600 right now Yeah The problem with The can of worms I'm talking about Is no matter what we say People are going to say That's not budget

Budget is under $350 Budget is under $200 So yeah That's why we kind of changed value And like Defining a number Bites us in Bites us in So like tiny pod Might win two awards This year $79 It is a It is a case Technically That makes it hard to win Yeah I don't know I'm But yeah It is interesting Like And again We're in the United States Where An MSRP of a phone Doesn't Matter as much That's also true Because especially the people

Looking for Just give me whatever works Are definitely going to a carrier And not And paying monthly Like No one In the US Is really buying phones Straight up Unless you're probably Listening to this podcast Yeah The people listening Are like What do you mean I do But yeah Yeah Well then Okay Best battery category Wow There's so many good ones For this year I have a question Yeah We still should consider OnePlus 16 In everything Yeah It'll just make you

Even more sad When it wins a bunch of awards For all the things it's getting Yeah But So best battery Is Obviously you want it to have Phenomenal battery life But then also include Some of the other things That make a good battery experience It lasts all day It doesn't kill background apps In doing so It charges fast Ideally Maybe it has wireless charging It's just super convenient To charge all the time Maybe it has Magnets in the back So it's super easy to charge Stuff like that I want to include all of that In my best battery award But yeah The OnePlus 16 has a

Is it 9,000 Milliampire battery now? I think 9,000 Or 8,800 or something Like we've got a lot of phones With ridiculously big batteries now That X9 Ultra Like I said Lasted me two straight days Plus traveling Like it was a It was a dog It lasted a long time And I think that's a 7,500 or something That dog in the award It's got that dog in it And then this OnePlus 15 Which I've been using Since last year Is still

Like a phenomenal battery And we've gotten phones That are like Running laps around it It's crazy I gotta pick which one Is legitimately Just like a Two day long Heavy use Do you know what Probably would get two days? What? A tiny phone Tiny pod No the Apple Watch battery Is noticeably less Yeah but it's not doing Heart rate sensing Oh if it's in your pocket That's it Does it?

If it's sitting in your pocket What is it doing? The other one is called The Mini Phone Ultra That's the one that's Specifically Great name Great name That's the one that's Specifically for the Apple Watch Ultra And I think Yeah Oh Damn that's kind of sick Not gonna lie So you put your Apple Watch in a case It's got a flat screen This is so Adam Core I can't even Wow He's Although this could not Go for best deal Because it does It is $800 The case is $800?

No no no The Apple Watch Ultra Inside Oh the case is $38 But you need an Apple Watch Ultra Yeah that's fair enough That's funny Yeah there will be Some interesting ones For best battery Okay Next up Best design Best design Best design I have one in terms Of just like Honestly Coolest looking Solid materials The nothing phone 4A Pro Yes The funny thing is In neither of the colors

I'm holding up Because the silver color Is the best This is pink And this is black Yeah But the silver color Is the best looking I think the Keeping the Transparency To just the Camera plateau And then making The rest of it Metal for a Fairly decent price I think this is Designed great My biggest gripe That one button Is rounded And the rest of them Are flat But I think that Actually does serve A purpose of Well they say It's the easier To find the AI button Except it's the Only button On that side So I don't think I need it to be round

I just know It's on the left But I think These are really Nice designed phones I agree Now here's Here's the Complication with this Yes This has always been The most subjective And most complicated Award for me This one's changed Names more than once It used to be The like Best built phone Yeah Like durability award And then like build quality And now it's design And design includes So many things It includes functionality It includes durability

Potentially repairability And aesthetics The metal on the bottom Of that phone Means no wireless charging If it has a design Compromise Can it win? Yes But makes it harder To justify So I love the way That phone looks Aesthetically it wins But that's one of the Compromises it has There's other things That are just like We have these crazy thin Like folding phones now That could win a design award Because they've done Great there We have Well there's no new

Thin thin thin phones Like the iPhone Air That won this last year There's no new S26 Edge Or iPhone Air 2 But yeah Design award is That is I'm all over the place With this one Design's always tough There's a feature I can think of Which is I think one day Especially with Big and small phone Category Getting a little more Boring and it's hard Like I think in the future A potential new category Could just be The best feature That launches in a year Of like what actually

Is like a really cool Thing people added And I do think The S26 privacy display Is really cool The reason I don't think It can win best design Is because it actively Makes something else Worse on the phone Which is Hurting the resolution And quality a little bit But I especially Like the S26 one Over the Xiaomi 18 Pro Max one I just didn't Think that worked Quite as well When I saw it But the I was like genuinely Impressed with how Well the S26 It's only in the ultra Right Only ultra Yeah That privacy

Just was really cool When I was editing That video I was like I want this On my phone now Yeah It's been a long time Since I've seen Like a feature And I'm like Wow That's like That's really great I think they could Have so easily done Just hardware wise What every privacy Like screen protector Could do But the fact that They're making They're localizing it To like notifications And certain things Or even just certain Programs I think that was A really smart idea Yeah That was a really good Feature I don't know if We're Yeah Is it a separate Like best feature S26 can't win

Because it's the Exact same phone As it is For four years Yeah It's Yeah That is the other thing I think a feature A feature award Would be pretty cool Yeah Yeah We'll have to I'll play with this one Best design is I'm also going to Listen to comments But that's one That I don't have A front runner for yet Best design I think peaked With the essential phone What a well built phone A lot of phones Are like kind of The same design Like look at the Big circle on the Back of the And then a big circle On the back Of the Xiaomi Yes And I

Accidentally Pulled out the Well the And the other phone I talked about In terms of Legacy camera Collaborations Is the Vivo Which looks just Circle I mean they're all Supposed to be cameras So I guess that makes sense But yeah Big old circle It's the Minions phone The Minions Alright Best foldable Is another award This is There's a lot of options This year Finally Because it's different We arguably have Three I guess we've always Had Passport But like we really Got the more like Squat Passport style

Comeback Along with Regular And along with Flips Yeah I I mean I think It's between Duo And Xiaomi 18 fold Okay They just seem to You know be the Newer thing Which Maybe that's Recency bias But they're just The more fun thing Foldables are fun Well don't forget About Fold 8 I was gonna say bro Fold 8 Yeah I remember Fold 8 But Fold 8 My issue with Fold 8 It was like two months ago Fold 8 though

Is worse than the other Thing that came out with it Which is Fold 8 Ultra Fold 8 Ultra That's why I don't Yeah I think if Fold 8 Was same specs As Fold 8 Ultra And like hammered home I'm still like You know like Flagship level As my older brother But I'm just You get to pick your Form factor I would like it A lot more Interesting Yeah There's also the Huawei Pura X Max Which is another Like exact same shape As the Duo And the Passport stuff

I don't know I think the Fold 8 Had a lot going And you said Worse specs But like it has I think one less camera And less battery Than the big screen But I think that Sacrifice Was Worth it To make a phone That's like Funner to hold And use And has like This great aspect ratio When it's open I think it looks nicer Looks nicer Than the Duo And the Cheaper Oh Cheaper than the Ultra Price probably is super Are you considering Just hardware

Or like also Are developers making Like actual apps That utilize These spaces Everything That's definitely A part of it Android's had Folding stuff For so long That that world Is kind of A little bit more Evolved But also messy iPhone Duo Is going to come out And we expect To see a big response From developers And we kind of Hope to see A bunch of Really good iPhone Duo apps That could push us In that direction That animation though That animation though It's pretty nice They're also

Capability wise All pretty similar To each other Like iPhone Duo Dual cameras Fold 8 Dual cameras Yeah I guess When you compare Fold 8 to Duo Very similar And like I think it looks Way better Than both of them Which one do you think Is better? The Fold 8 I think the Two vertical cameras Look so much nicer Than the horizontal Cameras on Duo And Xiaomi Xiaomi Yeah And I like The symmetrical Front versus Asymmetrical front True

It looks I haven't held it In a while But I also haven't Holded the Duo At all It's really light The Fold 8 Is way lighter Than the others Yeah I think you may Have convinced me Fold 8 probably is I think it's my Favorite that I've Used this year And I haven't Spent much time With the Duo So we have to Obviously reserve Judgment there But I think A lot of the Things I like About the Fold 8 Are a little bit More unique to it How light it is The dual camera Layout Stuff like that And Samsung Has years of Experience of Making the Software Functionality I just wish They could have

Gotten the No crease Down the way Apple did Because god That screen On the inside Of the Duo It's the best Inside screen It's so funny That they focus So much Of being like Can't see the Crease But you are Going to see This dot For the Under display Selfie camera They had such An opportunity To be like Don't see Anything But they're Like I'm Going to Make something Else Also pop up In certain Bits of light Yeah It's not Not noticeable But it is Less noticeable

Than maybe The worst Creases That are out There Creases are Generally getting Really good Across the board So I'm not Really mad About the Creases But yeah What Apple Did with their Screens and Anti-reflective Coding And just Using it Really liked That screen On the inside So yeah I'm gonna We'll use it More obviously Later in the Month But that is I'm so Interested To see How much You like The right Aligns Menu system In the front Screen And I think That could be It's either Gonna be like This is a Great idea Or you

Should have Just put The selfie Camera in the Middle And called It a day And to see What sort Of experiences App developers Come up with For iPhone Duo Because I Use There's a Bunch of Interesting iPhone apps That I'm Curious If they're Gonna do Like fun Stuff on The Duo Or if It's Just Gonna Look Like An iPhone App Or An iPad App We'll see Okay so there's Three more awards There's Most Improved Bust of the Year And MVP I've got one down already I think these are my Most important ones You got one for Most Improved No Bust of the Year Oh Bust of the Year Go ahead and Pixel 11 Pro

Don't even debate it The Pro? Pixel 11 Highlight was the Biggest failure of the Year by far And the Pro is Such a waste of Money compared to The 11 And the 11 Already is more Expensive and Still stupid And this is coming From Pixel Pixel user You make a lot of Good points It is definitely This was the year Of Pixel And Pro Pixel Being the Least differentiated And Highlight Yeah Nothing good there So I I feel that

Is it the Bust of the Whole year Considering all The other phones I gotta actually Think about that I mean that's What Bust is becoming Harder because Less phones are Taking big risks And Yeah So you have to Just actually nail The things that You're doing When you want Calling Highlighter Risk Is wild They've It's been a thing Phones have had For Over a decade Ago Like they could Have just Done it right The first time And we probably Would have been Like damn

That was one of The best features Of the year The lowest bar Possible And they still Slam their Forehead on it Yeah It's tough The bluey phone If you get Bluey phone Bust of the year It didn't come out This year actually That's funny You have to Consider that one For all the categories Yeah the bluey phone Has to be in the race Or just like It should be on the Side of the table And just never Mentioned Virtue phone Virtue Virtue phone Oh my god Wow Yeah It's been a long year Yeah I'm willing to say That the Pixel 11 Pro

Is on the front page Of things I'm considering For bust of the year The Trump phone Was this year right The Trump phone Was this year Damn That's a That probably doesn't Count because the phone On the base of it Is probably seven years old Yeah Unfortunately That makes it worse That it came out This year Well then there's Most improved So most improved Is another one Where it's like Alright Who actually did Something like Really different The privacy display On the X26 Ultra Might be enough By itself To make it most improved

Or at least be On the front running For most improved Because people Don't do that much Different from year To year With their phones Yeah What did the iPhone 18 Pro add A variable aperture And a 2 nanometer chip Is that Bigger vapor chamber Most improved Yeah Bigger vapor chamber Which is great Like that's three things Three things That's true We don't often see Three things Like 20 minutes ago You were like The X26 We can't even talk about it Design award for it Because they haven't Changed it in five years Well the base S26

Is there's nothing New about that design S26 Plus Nothing new about the design S26 Ultra Barely new design New screen feature New chip That's basically The three things That are new with it You look at a lot Of the budget phones Like the nothing phone Where they play around With the design more They changed more things Well they Their issue is Is last year The nothing phone 3 Their fan base Hated And then they Didn't release A flagship this year So there is No nothing phone 4 I don't think We can consider For a pro

The same phone Being improved So they were ready You know A lot of times The people who win Most improved Are the people Who essentially Won a bust The year before Or were in Runner up for bust And then they Made a change Nothing was like Nah Yeah So on that note The bust of the year Last year Was the iPhone 16e Well The 17e Is A better phone But not Good enough To be like A most improved winner I wouldn't say

Not a celebrated Yeah Not exactly A trophy winner So yeah Another one that We'll have to do Some digging for It might be Improved One plus 16 Is so sad Not coming to the US I mean Well It's hard to improve Over the phone That you're literally Still using So it obviously Was great True But they somehow did I mean they could win that They got the 2 nanometer Chip in there They got the 9000 milliampere Battery in there They got the Screen on the back For some reason

Don't know what that does But it looks cool 15 won Oh no 15 didn't win anything It's just the phone That I used the most I was gonna say I thought it won Phone of the year Last year But that was It was pretty close To battery Oh it won battery award It won battery Yeah it was great For battery If iPhone Or sorry If OnePlus 15 or 16 Wins most improved I don't see how it Doesn't win phone of the year Fair enough Yeah So phone of the year Is like the MVP award I know How can you give your most Most valuable phone To a phone

That's not even coming To the US Or you can really use In the US That would be a real bummer What would win phone of the year Okay there's a couple Storylines iPhone Duo Is a storyline Because folding phones Have been around For a long time But then when Apple jumps in It kind of brings That category To the forefront Of people's attention Even though it's been Around for forever Now suddenly We may get a bunch More people Interimfoldables Good folding apps Etc So that's a storyline The OnePlus

Is kind of a storyline But it's like In the opposite direction Like it's not Like OnePlus Is kind of shrinking Their footprint And not shipping To the US anymore And like They made it On a really Really good phone But I'll never Be able to use it And that's really sad There's also The Xiaomi 18 Pro Max Which was just like Hey everyone Who did something cool We're gonna put them All on the same phone And just make a behemoth Of a feature Set phone Yeah Yeah They doubled down On just one-upping Everything And did a really good job

So that's a good storyline And then yeah Phones that sort of Get forgotten about From earlier in the year Like the S26 Ultra With the privacy screen Or the Find X9 Ultra With the Hasselblad collab And the incredible battery life Or the great design Of our nothing phones That we've seen For the past couple Yeah It's a good design It's not a MVP level design But it's interesting Yeah I don't have a front runner For this either But I'm I'm keeping an eye Carl's ears just perked up When you said nothing In the MVP

I really consider everything For MVP Because I know It's not I always say this It's not the best Phone of the year award It's not the Most capable Best specs You win Here's the trophy It's the It's the phone Of the year And that's like All the things That come with Like what happened This year The stories Of the year Maybe it was just like They finally did the thing We were asking them to do For years Like the iPhone 17 Last year So things like that All factor in So I have to think

About that too But yeah I'm fascinated For what the comments Will be on this episode Because I think people Always feel strongly About things that they think Should win certain awards For sure Definitely And we'll see a bunch Of people disagreeing On what they think Those things should be It's also okay If the phone you own Doesn't win an award It's still a good phone If you're enjoying it Yeah Congrats There's lots of Really really good We could ABC test Phone of the year Oh no That would be That would be terrible AB test the video

I think that what happens Is a lot of the best Most boring phones Don't win any awards Because they're already Really good And they take no risks And they change nothing They're not most improved They're not the bust They're not the phone of the year They're not the design award They're just boring Like I just won an S26 All right fine That's a solid phone Nothing boring Like next Like phones like that Like the iPhone 18 We don't have one yet But the 18 Pro Hey good phone Design award No Best battery No Best specs Best cameras No But like

Pretty good at a lot of stuff So it's not gonna win awards For that The issue is Is like The goal of almost Every major phone company Is They want to eventually Be the boring phone Because that means They're selling so much That they can just Continue to be a default Yeah And like boring Probably means A ton of money So like if you're doing All these crazy features It's usually because You're trying to catch up In market share So Samsung is just Dominating the Android market They get to just be The same S23 plus plus plus

Yeah Yeah Yeah You gotta take risks To get to the top And then once you get to the top You don't wanna take any risk To lose your spot And then someone else Is gonna take risks To get to the top So Yeah Playing with the lead Yeah Yeah Alright well Let us know in the comments How you feel Of course We will be reading those And in a few short weeks We'll be starting to pick them out But of course We have a little bit more To talk about So let's take a quick break And do a trivia question Do you guys want

They're both tech questions The way you said it like that Makes me think One's not really Okay I want the less tech question You want the less tech question Never mind Marquez is gonna have The more tech question Well here's the thing The less tech question Has more points Available for it More points on a No David week I think we have to assume I need More points Okay Alright Yeah After the break We're gonna talk about MMOs And every single person Who works here Asked me to do an MMO question But here

On the Waveform Podcast We believe in Fairness And so I went on A bunch of forums Looking for the Original 2004 Minimum specs Required to run World of Warcraft Oh boy I need you guys to tell me Closest delta This is not Price is right rules These are delta How much Video memory Do you need How much Hard drive space Do you need And how much RAM

Do you need To play World of Warcraft On the minimum specs In 2004 Fun fact In the minimum specs From that year They specify That you need At least A 56k modem Hilarious Hilarious That you could get Half a megabyte Per second I'm pretty sure And still play World of Warcraft Wow came on Three or four discs As well If that helps Wow Hint But yeah I remember Putting multiple CDs in my computer To download it See I'm at a huge

Disadvantage already Because you have Installed and played This game before Yeah but I This was on like A family computer Which means you've got The minimum requirements Right there I'm just looking for Contest Oh I don't remember The minimum requirements Also Actually This was a surprisingly Difficult thing to find Online and so I'd like To give a shout out To the Blizzard forums user Krooge Krooge Thank you Krooge Thanks Krooge You couldn't find like Did it have it on the box Man I remember that box The It was in the manual The intro

The like Intro sequence When you first booted up Wow The like cinematic intro Of OG World of Warcraft Chills Can I guess for David This week Because I don't know The answer Yeah I You could However I Think I know What David is doing Right now And I kind of want to Just call him out of the blue On the podcast And see if he knows Yeah Or just text him And be like You have five minutes To respond to this text message Alright

Well we'll have those answers At the end as well Like usual We'll be right back

Support for the show Comes from Google Gemini You know that moment When curiosity strikes You're exploring a new city With the family And a sculpture Catches your daughter's eye What is that?

Who made it? With Gemini You can snap a picture And get a fully interactive Breakdown of its history Architecture And even hidden secrets Gemini is built For moments like that Whether you're learning Something new Solving a problem Or looking for your next Favorite thing Google Gemini Is here to help Download Gemini Google's AI app Or visit Gemini.google.com To learn more Hi everyone I'm Kara Swisher And I'm Sky Galloway

Twice a week We get together on Pivot To sort through The biggest stories In tech business And politics And we're taking the show Back on the road For a live tour In November So we'll bring hot takes I'll bring the insight And the dick jokes And Kara will try Keyword is try To keep me in check You'll get to see her Hit me in person Live I'll do it If someone has to do it We'll cover AI Whatever chaos Washington has cooked up That week And every billionaire Misbehaving That's all of them

And you'll also get to Participate in audience Q&A So bring your best questions Scott will probably answer Ones you didn't ask We also have secret Special guests Which you'll enjoy For every city Get tickets at PivotTour.com That's PivotTour.com We are selling out So don't wait And we look forward To seeing you Positivity We're just about One month out From the midterm elections In these United States And despite all the Gerrymandering And voting restrictions Legal challenges

And personnel shakeups It looks like the Democrats Are going to flip The House of Representatives The vibes of U.S. Democrats Are incredibly strong It's mostly Democrats Trying to tell each other Like don't oversell How amazing of a night We're going to have So on today's Explain from Vox How are the Democrats Going to mess this up?

Nah, JK, JK, JK Let's enjoy it While we can The question isn't Any more like Will Democrats Flip the House majority? It's how big Is that majority Going to be?

Can they hear the sound? So on today's Explain from Vox We're going to talk About the new sheriff In town If all of this goes As Democrats Think it's going to go Hakeem's house On today's Explained Monday through Friday Afternoons In your feeds What we're after All right, welcome back This next part of the podcast Will probably mostly be dominated By Mariah and myself Because we're going to talk About MMOs But you did say You know what MMO stands for Massive Multiplayer Online Yes

Almost always Essentially also means MMORPG Which is the Role-playing game Correct Yes So Oh man I'm going to have to I'm going to have to Condense this And the hardest part About condensing One of the most Convoluted Video game types Possible Is I'm going to get Flamed Is this a new story?

Sort of Or a new thing That's happening? It's It's a mix of A bunch of new things With your absolute Favorite category possible Which is nostalgia Oh Yes So let's go See if you follow me At the end I'll kind of see What you think But In the last couple months We've gotten A new World of Warcraft Game announcement And we also Just got At RuneFest RuneFest A new RuneScape Announcement Of course RuneFest Is something that Mariah and I Will be finding a way

For convincing you To send us to it For studio or something For business For business Purely business It is in London That part will be A little tough Anyway World of Warcraft And RuneScape Are kind of like Two of the bigger MMORPGs Out there And both of them You know Have a great player base And a lot of them Are focused on nostalgia But With these two announcements In my eyes It feels like World of Warcraft Is trying to be RuneScape And RuneScape Is trying to be

World of Warcraft And I will explain why Alright Let me bring you Let me re-evaluate Paint me Paint me Okay yeah So RuneScape is a game That launched in 2007 It was a browser-based MMO It was really popular Because a lot of it Was free It was actually You could It was linked on Miniclip So a lot of people Found it through Miniclip It was browser-based So you could play it At school Which is probably A huge plus Almost zero Computer requirements Because it's browser-based

And even when you Did pay for the subscription It was like Five dollars a month So fairly cheap Lots of stuff to do World of Warcraft On the other hand Like Ella said In the trivia question Launched in 2004 Backed by I mean Made by Blizzard So we're talking about Massive gaming Company here Also made on Existing IP Yes Correct From the Warcraft RTS games And you know This was inexpensive You had to pay For the actual game

And it was Fifteen dollars a month But this is like More modernized Of that time Because we had Actual graphics We had incredible Scaling open worlds It was first player Or third person But roaming a lot more Where RuneScape Is click-based You know A much more Lax combat style And everything Okay And both of these games You know Kind of have had Their heydays And then have all Both went astray A bit RuneScape Kept trying

To modernize It changed The way Combat handled It changed The way Graphics handled It turned into What we now know As RuneScape 3 In 2013 Jagex launched Something Jagex makes RuneScape Called Old School RuneScape Which essentially Was Thank you Mariah Bringing back The 2007 RuneScape That we all knew And loved Yeah they said Do you like Nostalgia?

Yes Do you have money? I'll sell you some Come back And one thing They've done Great since then That game is still Running Is they just Kept what was Good and what Everyone liked About old RuneScape But still added Updates to it There's still Progression And what they Call permanent Progression Where like You grind really Hard to try and Get something And that thing Stays relevant Even though They're gonna Release new Items New bosses New raids All new things To do Can I ask a Dumb question?

Yes I'm gonna get Flamed I already know It's okay You're not gonna Get flamed Because you're Saying you don't Know what's Going on Yeah Can you win? No I mean I mean Depends It's to say In RuneScape You can totally win Yeah There's a game over section Because the way You're describing it Because when I picture A game I'm like Alright it's competitive People are trying to win And then you win But as you describe The game It sounds like Oh yeah You're just kind of Roaming around Doing stuff And then you buy The expansion pack And you can roam Around more

And then do more Stuff Then you can scam 12 year olds Free gilded armor So like RuneScape The ultimate goal Is you have What is it Like 26 different Skills That you can all Get to 99 Which takes A metric Pissload of time I mean You can basically Max out Everything All skills Do every quest In the game For some people They don't consider That being done But I would say That's more than enough Yeah there's more to do Because then there's like There's collection logs

Of different types of gear Some of the gear Is just for show Essentially There's a notorious Like meme going around That it's a game You never quit Because like the game Really never ends So it's like people Come crawling back Years later I'm in RuneScape Recovery right now So You only take breaks RuneScape does such A good job though Of keeping the old style Releasing updates That are still To what all the players Want And not making All the work you did Totally useless World of Warcraft On the other hand

They're the ones Or they re-released Something called WoW Classic In 2019 I got really into it Again Because it was Literally just Re-released the old game That everyone loved Max level 60 Slowly roll out The old raids Everything you used to do The issue is Then they made The same mistake Of they continued To launch All of the old Expansion packs They did in the past And now we lost This You know All the stuff You worked for Again to get in 60 So now both of these

Have launched new things World of Warcraft Is launching something Called WoW Forever Which is essentially Bring back The old World of Warcraft That launched in 2004 But they're going to Actually update the thing While guaranteeing A level 60 cap Which is what The original one was So they're focused On this like Permanent progression Horizontal progression Whatever you want To call it Where you work And work And you It's beneficial To do all these things You don't lose everything So in my eyes World of Warcraft Is like

What did RuneScape Do really well I want to launch The new game So they're adding In professions There's all these new Items You can get from Only grinding professions They're opening up That part of the game More They're adding Different skills To characters That have been around For a while A new race New things That still are part Of the old game The nostalgia game That everyone likes Because they keep Ruining their games And now they're Relaunching that Where RuneScape Decided to just launch

A new game Called RuneScape 4 That's currently In development Won't be launched For a new year But it's made On the Unreal Engine It's going to be The same world And characters And general storyline In a different time But we're finally Going to get The modernized graphics So when someone Decides Hey I want to play RuneScape If you don't know About it Or have the nostalgia For it If you went into Old school RuneScape You'd probably be like What the What is this Low poly ass Like Yeah so Basically like Most of the demographic

Is familiar And has the nostalgia For the super low poly And can you imagine Jumping from that To Unreal Engine New game This vibe This low poly vibe Into a modernized Version of it On Unreal Engine So I'm really excited For both of these I have two questions Okay I rambled So much there My two questions And there might not Be real answers to this But one Is there Because you know Kids growing up These days Playing games Didn't play

Old school RuneScape Do those kids Clamor for the Old RuneScape Or do you think They are just On the new RuneScape Like if If you were To start playing RuneScape today And you played The newest one Do you think They go Ew this sucks Give me the like New one that looks Like the old one Or do you think They wouldn't Care for that at all I think I think actually Right now Old school RuneScape Is more popular Even if you're A new player Because there seems To be this Back and forth With at least Streamers

Which streamers Kind of Essentially Help control A lot of Popularity Of games Right So like Wow and RuneScape Keep hitting These lulls Of content And a lot Of the streamers Play both of them There's this one You're not gonna Watch him But if anyone Out there Is interested In this A YouTuber Named Jimmy J1MMY Plays both of These a lot And does really Great content Just discussing The changes Between both of them But we'll see A lot of things Happen where World of Warcraft

Launched hardcore mode Which is If you die You lose Your character There's a lot Of dying In MMO So all These streamers And YouTubers Got together And made a guild In this hardcore Mode And made a bunch Of content And then Once that started Getting stale A bunch of them Went over to RuneScape And started playing RuneScape And RuneScape Had this huge surge So they're kind of Going between Both of them And I think Old school is already Just more popular This new game I do think If you discover RuneScape

Especially if they Mariah do you think There'll be a free A free to play World in RS4 Dude there better be I don't know That's the thing If you You can hook people With free And when I say Like there's free And membership Membership unlocks A bunch But there's still So much to do In the free version It's like But if you're asking Marquez if The young folk Are playing these games Yeah I don't know There's definitely I don't really Like but RuneScape and stuff Like there's surely I don't know Other things

I would argue All they need to do Is see a streamer Watching it And then be like Oh I want to play I'd say they're more Likely to be influenced By someone on Twitch Playing RuneScape And Yeah unless you have Like an older sibling Who played it And then told you about it You probably wouldn't Really know what it is RuneScape came out In 2004 At this point Or 2007 At this point Parents might be Showing their kids Here's my other question I'm going to Describe to you A game that I used To play

When I was in high school Okay And you can tell me If it's closer to RuneScape Or World of Warcraft Okay So the mechanics Of this game This is This game is called Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2007 And here's what happened I I Obviously played golf Growing up And I had like a Not that powerful PC that I installed This game This game came on Three discs Three CDs Nice

And I installed the game And basically it let me Build my own character And then go play Any number of like Kind of photorealistic Golf courses But it also let me Play the game As Tiger Woods Or as Davis Love III Or as Vijay Singh Or any number of Those characters That had different Sort of attributes And you could Swing their swing And like play the Golf course as them So if you played As your amateur character You'd probably not Hit the ball as far As not as fun You play as Tiger You're like wow I'm a god When I first got That game

And started playing I didn't have Nearly a powerful Enough GPU So when I loaded That game up And installed it My character Was a A series of like Vectors And like Colorful lines On the screen But it didn't Actually load All the polygons To like see Their face And I still Could see the golf Course and the And the ball So I would Play the game As this bunch Of lions and rays And like I'd See the swing And I actually Went in and Customized their

Face and their Clothes and like Bought accessories To not even see it To not even see it And then one day I got enough Allowance money To get a new GPU for that Computer And I installed it And I loaded up The game for the First time And saw my Character for the First time He looked Nothing like What I thought He looked like But the general Tones and colors Were correct But like Everything else Was a surprise But then I went On to like Play the game With a new

Appreciation I would like Spend Earned money In the game To get like A new glove Or a new club Or a new ball And you could Play new courses You could never Win Like you could Compete and win A tournament And yay You won the Tournament And now there's Another tournament Next week So like You're not Winning the Game But you could Always play New courses You could Always buy New accessories For your Player You could Always upgrade Your GPU And see More There was also Future versions

Of the game That had more Microtransactions And higher quality Graphics And that Maybe Made people Crave the Nostalgia Of the 07 Version of the Game a little Bit So In the terms Of how you're Longing for it Nostalgia wise Yeah That's like The RuneScape Perk I guess It's like We all had That moment You know We wanted to I remember The first time I got my First dragon Weapon Was like The coolest Thing ever And that's

Yeah The rest of it Is more RPG Versus MMORPG Because there's No online So imagine You had You built Your character And now All of those Golf courses Other people Online Were all Also had All of their Characters At the golf Course So maybe You would Yeah Team up With four People on A card That would Be like Running a Dungeon Or like I think That was A thing In later Versions of The game And I And I

Needed to And I Needed to And the Most important Part of That Online game Would be You get Your You know Your really Sick New golf Clubs Clubs And stuff And it's Equipped To your Character The most Important Part is Then when You stand At the Clubhouse And everyone Just stands Around and You look at All the You like You stand There asserting Dominance by How much better Your gear is We call that Bank standing So much Of MMOs Are just

Standing in The popular Places to Show off The stuff You worked For and Doing Actually Nothing Yeah That's why MMOs Are so Great It takes So much Time to Play RuneScape I kind Of just Want to Be in The world Again And screw Around For a While And not Commit To Anything But that's Not going To be out For a few More years But you Know Maybe You'll Send Mariah And I To RuneFest And we'll Have a Good Time There Company Card We'll Make a Studio Video You know I'll I'll Spin that In my Head a Few Times I'll Think

About It I appreciate You Yeah Thank you Marquez Yeah Well you know What it's Time for Now I do The end Andrew you Said something Earlier that I Wanted to draw Attention to Okay I'm Scared You Made Sure To Specify That you Were Referring To A Metric Piss Load Oh Which Sort Of Implies The Existence Of Both Imperial Well I Was Gonna Say Like The Mega And Giga Piss Loads That's Part Of The Tiered System I Just Thought That Was Really Funny Oh I Don't Know Why I Use The Term Piss Load All The Time I Think It's My Way Of Trying Not To

Curse On The Podcast Which Probably Just Makes It More Offensive Everyone Is Like What Is That Guys LG Has Made Display Panels For Two Apple Products What Were They He's Thinking Someone Else Is Writing Also They

Probably Made Displays For More Apple Products But These Are Just The Two That I Could Find Like Industry Trade Journals Being Like LG Made These LG Display Made These And You know It's Just So Hard To Track Down Apple Suppliers Something Marquez Said Before Unless You're Ming-Chi Quo Alright I'm Going to Give One Point Per Correct Answer Who Wants To Read First I'll I'll Go First An iPhone At Some Point Okay I Think It was An iPad Damn And I Said

iMac But If Anyone Online Can Find Proof That Marquez Is Right I Will Award Him The Point In Retrospect This Is I Just Spent A lot Of Time And These The only Two I Could Really Confirm Andrew I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I

I don't know I don't know anymore Wait no Wasn't it the Oh it was the Pro display XDR Cause that was a 5 6k Well okay so I remember the LG Ultra Fine 5k came out And everyone was like Oh The same panel But

Smaller slice of it Were they referring to the Pro display I don't know Cause it doesn't have the same Specs but the idea was It had the same scaling Damn I missed I forgot that story There was a whole story about that Four Three more potential points To get Today I need you to tell me the Video memory Hard drive space And minimum RAM required To run 2004's World Of Warcraft Wait I feel like we gotta give up

Storage VRAM and And RAM And RAM They Wait Wait What Sorry we're having a Technicality issue Hello Marquez I'm trying to get you a point Alright

We're doing closest Delta I have 2 gigs of storage That's definitely too high 256 Of VRAM Megabytes And 512 Megabytes of RAM I think I'm too high on everything I wrote 1 gig of Storage 8 megabytes of VRAM And 64 megabytes of RAM You said 1 gigabyte of storage 1 gigabyte of storage Alright Let's see if David Is driving I'm on the Waveform podcast

Well that's crazy You're on the Waveform podcast David I need you to answer 2 trivia questions for me Are you ready? Okay I'm ready Can you name 2 products That LG 2 Apple products That LG made the display for? Studio Display XDR? No I'm Sorry He can in fact hear you I can't hear Marquez But I didn't hear him Just get it wrong Just get it wrong Just get it wrong

Apple products Alright I'm gonna have to cut you off I'm so sorry Time's up Wait I'm gonna say iPhone 4S Probably not But if it turns out to be right We'll give it to you Alright Question number 2 I need you The answers I was looking for Were Pro Display XDR And Apple Watch Didn't I say that?

No you said Studio Display XDR Did I really? You did I have it on tape Next question I was gonna be so confused By this question David I was thinking the Pro Display Okay whatever Are you familiar with the hit game World of Warcraft? I'm familiar Alright I need you To tell me The minimum Hard drive space VRAM And Regular RAM Memory Of the 2004 release Of World of Warcraft

Minimum hard drive space I'm gonna say 2 gigabytes 2 gigabytes Hard drive space RAM requirement 4 gigabytes RAM requirement 4 gigabytes Okay And then VRAM VRAM 2 gigabytes 2 gigabytes Alright Is everyone ready For the answers?

Yes The first one We're gonna do Hard drive space Andrew you said 2 gigabytes Marquez you said 1 gigabyte David you said 2 gigabytes Yep The correct answer Is 4 gigabytes Meaning that David and Andrew Tied And get the point How did they both Updating the score?

That's David and Andrew Get one point Next one Let's do VRAM Andrew you said 256 megabytes Marquez you said 8 megabytes David 4 gigabytes I said 4 gigabytes Oh sorry My bad Marquez Has gotten this point You need 32 megabytes Of VRAM To play Wow Jeez Okay That's it I'll take it Okay And finally RAM Andrew You said

512 megabytes Marquez You said 64 megabytes I think Marquez Is one of the money And David You said 2 gigabytes Of RAM Do I have that Correct? Yeah Marquez gets The point Wait Or I said I think I said 4 gigabytes Of RAM But I said 2 gigabytes Of VRAM Either way We need 256 megabytes Of RAM Meaning Marquez Is 64 megabytes Barely inches out We're both like One delta off

In terms of The actual number Yeah So I really said Studio Oh no actually You did I'll check the tape He said Studio I'll check the tape To make sure That none of your guesses Were accidentally correct You definitely I know he said Studio Because then Marquez Said into the mic Pro Display XDR And I was like If David then guesses That next I know here Marquez Because there's no reason To guess the Pro Display After saying Studio Alright quick update On the score While we have you David Oh Mariah is still Adding the points

We're gonna have to Put The score will be On the screen As we review the tape It should be respectable now Audio listeners Enjoy Yo Alright Next day Is here I'm editing the podcast It's Ellis If you're audio listening And don't reckon I have voice For some reason I did not award Those trivia points Correctly Because questions About Apple suppliers Are really really Hard to answer I did more research And I think I have At least some Conclusive answers So let's get into it Okay Marquez He said iMac G4

And Apple iPhone 4 I don't know why I said Apple It's an iPhone They're the only people That have ever made iPhones The G4 I was able to find A Macworld article From 2002 That cites Some sort of Industry Trade journaling Type publications Talking about How a second Display supplier Had been added To the G4's Supply chain So LG Was no longer The only one So I'm counting That as Proof It's sourced

LG did make Displays for the iMac G4 So Marquez gets One point for that iPhone 4 This one is a little Bit harder to track Town But I was able To find a Korean Trade journal Press report Type thing From 2010 That I had to Translate from Korean into English With the Safari Thing That talked about LG ramping up Their production Of the retina Display in that Phone So I think That's safe to Say LG Did produce the

Displays in both Those devices Next Andrew Andrew said The HomePod Mini There's an iFixit Teardown That I think Just shows That the iFixit It's not actually A screen It's like an LED controller By Texas Instruments Or something Like that So LG's Not involved There He does not Get that Point Andrew Also said MacBook And I wrote This question Really poorly I'm just going To accept That answer LG does Make the Displays In the Apple Silicon MacBook Or at least they Did for

A long Time I think They're No longer The primary Supplier But again This stuff Is really Hard To get Actual Answers To Which is Part of The reason Ming-Chi Kuo Is like So amazing On like I don't know How they Find out Anyway Whatever David David What did David say David said iPhone 4s Which would Be correct Because it's The same Retina Display As in The iPhone 4 They're Not the Exact Same Display Which explains Why I Could not Really find That much About the 4s But I Could find Stuff About the 4 I'm Just Going to Assume They're The same We're Just Going to Give David

That Point David's Other Answer Was The Studio Display XDR It's Too New I Just Couldn't Find Supplier

One Point And David Also Got One Point Thanks David Do you Have Anything You Want to Tell The People Before You Go Home Okay Do you Think World of Warcraft Is Turning Into RuneScape And Do you Think RuneScape Is Turning Into World Of Warcraft I've Never Played Either Of The Games I Really Couldn't Tell You And You Would agree Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2007 Is The Best Version Of Tiger Woods Franchise Right I'm Partial To The 2006 Version I'm Gonna Be Honest I Don't Think That Exists But Okay I'll I'll I buy It

I buy It We Didn't Have The Technology EA Sports How Many Gigs Did That Require I Don't Know It Was Three CDs So Something Huge Three CDs Yeah For Computer Game Yep It Was A lot Okay All Thanks For Picking Up The David We Really Appreciate It Bye David From Stowe Vermont I'm Out David Amell Everybody Wait Isn't that The crazy Trivia Music For Like The Big One I Use It So Anyway

Thanks For Watching Thanks For Listening Thanks For The Trivia Points It Is Of Course Mid Tectober Which Means We Have Much More To Talk About And Next Week Is Going To Be Lit And So Will The Next One So Will The Next One And So Will The Next One See You Soon Get Subscribed If You Haven't Already Get A desk Pad Wash Those Dishes And We'll Catch you In the Next Episode Peace I Really Hope David's Way Bingo Let's Go Let's Go Wave Form Is Produced By

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