WTF is a Googlebook?
Summary
This episode of Waveform covers a viewflation update, impressions of the new iPhone 18 Pro, and speculation about Google's mysterious 'Google Book' laptop teaser. The hosts also dig into reviews of Valve's Steam Frame VR headset, a possible Meta headset leak, and the upcoming Tesla Roadster event, before wrapping up with a keyboard typing trivia challenge.
- Andrew shares viewflation data showing engaged (real) views often run around 50% of shown live views on MKBHD videos.
- Marques and David debate the iPhone 18 Pro's new burgundy color and discuss its 'S year' updates, including a re-engineered camera pipeline and new A20 Pro chip.
- The A20 Pro is a 2nm chip with a larger vapor chamber and relocated DRAM for improved sustained performance.
- Google is teasing a new premium laptop line called 'Google Book' at googlebook.google, with Gemini AI integration, phone-to-laptop connectivity, and OEM partners like Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo.
- The hosts praise new footage from the Ocarina of Time remake for its updated graphics while keeping the original art style.
- Valve's Steam Frame VR headset is discussed, noting its foveated streaming tech, $1,059 starting price, and short battery life.
- A Verge report suggests a leaked slim Meta mixed-reality headset ahead of Meta Connect.
- Tesla's October 1st Roadster event teaser reveals cold gas thrusters and a hidden Back to the Future reference, sparking speculation about legality and whether old referral-program Roadster promises will be honored.
- The episode closes with an 8VIM keyboard typing trivia challenge and a Chromebook retail store trivia question, with David finishing as the top scorer.
Key moments
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Did They Even Test This
The hosts discuss a Crunchyroll-in-YouTube glitch and other examples of poor product testing.
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Viewflation Update
Andrew presents data comparing live views to engaged views on recent MKBHD videos.
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iPhone 18 Pro Colors Debate
Marques and David argue over whether the new burgundy iPhone color is a good choice.
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iPhone 18 Pro Camera Deep Dive
David shares camera samples and discusses Apple's re-engineered image pipeline and variable aperture.
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New A20 Pro Chip
The hosts discuss the A20 Pro chip's benchmarks, 2nm process, and improved cooling design.
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8-Vim Keyboard Trivia Challenge
The hosts introduce a typing trivia challenge using the obscure 8-Vim swipe keyboard.
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Google Book Teaser Revealed
The hosts discuss Google's new 'Google Book' laptop teaser site and its Gemini-powered features.
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Ocarina of Time Remake Praise
Marques admits he was wrong to doubt the Ocarina of Time remake after seeing new footage.
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Steam Frame VR Headset Review
The hosts summarize reviews of Valve's new Steam Frame VR headset.
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Tesla Roadster Event Announced
Marques recounts the long history of Tesla's delayed Roadster ahead of its October 1st event.
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Tesla Roadster Thrusters Speculation
The hosts discuss the SpaceX-inspired cold gas thruster concept for the new Tesla Roadster.
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Comparisons to CyberCab Event
They compare expectations for the Roadster reveal to Tesla's underwhelming CyberCab unveiling.
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Tesla Referral Program Roadsters
Discussion of Tesla's old referral program that promised free or discounted Roadsters to top referrers.
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Trivia: 8VIM Keyboard Challenge
The hosts attempt to type 'like and subscribe' using the unconventional 8VIM keyboard.
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Trivia: Google Chromebook Stores
A trivia question about Google's early Chromebook retail stores, answered as 'Chromezone'.
Full transcript
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Let's just start with the thing that you got wrong. Me. Yeah. Yes, exactly. Start there. I'm having a hard time thinking of that. I noticed on Twitter you said that the burgundy was a good color. It's so good. I just want to be super crystal clear you got that one wrong.
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What are you talking about? You did get that one wrong. Okay, just because they made a matte black phone doesn't mean the other colors are bad. Yes, it does. It's a clear way. One thing being good does not make everything else bad. Uh-huh. Yo, what is up, people of the internet?
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Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marquez. I'm Andrew. And I'm David. And we've got Ellis and Adam over at the podcast desk. The Waveform, bro. We're finally back. And by back, I just mean back in our normal place that we record. It's nice.
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Audio listeners have no idea what's different. Maybe they do, but we're back. People are very upset last week that we were not in our normal configuration. Yeah, long story behind that. We did talk about that. We did. We debated where to sit. Yeah, there was a whole... I mean, it's too long of a story.
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I'm not going to try to tell a story. I don't even know what he's talking about. They were like, oh, where do you want to sit? And I was like, honestly, it doesn't matter. I'd probably sit on the right. And they were like, oh, we figured we'd put you on the left so you have an eyeline to the producer table. I was like, okay. Actually, that's so funny because you have the worst ey eline to the producer table.
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I typically have to do one of these to see you guys. It was very weird. Randomly, you would just look up and be staring into my eyes. And I was like, okay. Well, that's what I usually find out. I was trying to get a hint on the trivia answers just by looking at you guys the whole podcast. That was what I was trying to do. It is really nice to be able to make eyes at Adam and Ellis .
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Yeah, it's great. I enjoyed it. But we're back. So in today's episode, we've got our final thoughts on iPhone 18 Pro. Since the reviews are out, there's David's burgundy one. We'll talk about that color. Ew. Google Books pre-orders and some thoughts about the Steam frame and some more VR stuff and more Tech-tember as usual.
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But first, do we have a, did they even test this? Adam has one. Oh, do I? I heard Adam had one. Yeah. So I have been in a anime mood for the past like eight months. Name all the animes. Yeah, I got you. Oh, you like anime? Name every anime.
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Dime. That's all. That's all of them. Every anime. I've been in a binge watching this one anime called Freerin . Great, great anime. Freerin? Freerin. Sounds Norwegian. Marquez watches that one. Yeah, Marquez knows all about it. I've never watched that one. But I signed up to Crunchyroll via YouTube TV to watch this , right?
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So in my YouTube app, there's a little like, oh not YouTube TV, YouTube. I don't know, one of them. In my YouTube app, there's a little Crunchyroll icon. I click there. It shows like everything basically. As of a couple days ago, I started a rewatch with my fiance e, Jess. And she's super into it now.
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So we just finished both seasons that are out. We're like, let's run it back. We go through the whole first season again. We're up to the second season. And it's just not there. And I'm like, I'm paying for this service. Why is this not here? And we're like, okay, maybe it's a weird glitch, whatever. Like second season is like, it jumps from the last episode of the first season to like episode six of the second season.
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And I was like, okay, we'll check again tomorrow. Let's watch something else. I'm like, whatever, weird bug. Two or three days later, I go back and I'm like, oh, the second season is here. But it's not there. It's only the first and second episode. It skips three. It shows the fourth and the fifth and the sixth. And then it skips the rest of them. And I'm like, what is happening?
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Like, who is deciding which episodes get added? So there's Crunchyroll inside of YouTube? Crunchyroll inside YouTube. And I know that there's like all these like deals that show what shows are allowed on certain streaming platforms and all that. So I was like, maybe they just don't have the rights of the second season.
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But then for random episodes to be popping up is like strange to me. And then I go to try to buy the second season because I'm like, okay, whatever. I'm a huge fan of the show. I'll just buy it so I can watch it. I can't find anywhere to buy this thing. It is like impossible to buy. Can. Does the Crunchyroll app have it?
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I have not checked the Crunchyroll app. I have only checked Crunchyroll inside of YouTube. I would check the app. And see then if there's a discrepancy of like YouTube pulling data. That's that'd be my first guess. Yeah. Unless you just like happen to hit the weirdest time where they like lost rights to certain episodes.
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My instinct and I this is completely just based on solely the information you gave me is that it has something to do with music rights because those are some of the only rights that would be in that show that aren't owned by whoever owns like the rest of the rights to the show.
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And music also has like weird international distribution rights or it's the same music guy though. Evan Call. He's like the composer. So but all of season one and season two. But he might not own all of the rights to the music if he licensed the music or he he hired some composers.
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There's a bunch of things. But I was going to say or it could be like a Pokemon situation where those three episodes gave a bunch of people seizures and they're just like. Oh, yeah. Well, I don't know if those three episodes were crazy, but it's probably some insane licensing thing. It's always a weird licensing thing.
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Yeah, I'm going to check Crunchyroll right now and I will report back. For example, we have a time on Spotify. The Shrek soundtrack, like half the songs are just not on there, which is. Are they really? Horrible. Yeah. Which is funny because isn't it all just Smash Mouth? No. No.
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Oh, wait. Maybe it's the Shrek 2 soundtrack. I don't know. I had something like this on Spotify where I was listening to this awful version of the audio book Animal Farm and it like the audio sounded like I was listening to like a 1950s radio, which fit the vibe so well.
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And I get halfway through it. It's not a very long audio book. And then it just disappears from Spotify. I was like, was I the one person who listened to that? And they went, wait, we don't have the rights to that anymore. And just got rid of it. Can confirm. Crunchyroll has all the episodes. That's so it is. It's a weird way to YouTube. Yeah.
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OK. Yeah. Because in the Shrek 2 soundtrack. Look. holding out for a hero. Live in the Vida Loca. Fairy Godmother song. And you're so true. Are all not on Spotify. Oh, it's the fairy godmother song is kind of amazing.
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And the live in the Vida Loca is the Eddie Murphy version. Right. So it's probably some weird licensing thing. Yeah. With the donkey. We. With the donkey. Donkey. I bet the donkey probably took it off. When we did our secret history of the internet episode, we had to cut a segment because we included an infomercial in the middle of it, an infomercial for a company that doesn't exist anymore.
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It was so old. It was an early MCI pre-email like electronic messaging service. Yeah. And obviously the company is out of business. We were like, we can use this. The music in the background of that video was not owned by the company. It was owned by the original rights holder.
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And they flagged us. Just so crazy. It was infuriating. Yeah. So licensing, my friends, licensing. Yeah, but that's the fact that it's random episodes. That is really weird. It sounds like a YouTube ingestion. I have episodes one, two, four, five, and seven out of 10.
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One, two, four, five, and seven. I was going to say prime numbers, but four is not prime. They're just filler. One, two, no, three. They're probably filler episodes. This thing feels like a riddle to solve. This might be a riddle. I'm just going to go back to watching One Piece. Fair enough.
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Episode 750. One other update on did they even test this is 9to5Google just posted an article that they are rolling out speed limits and speedometer readings on Google Maps in Android Auto when you're not navigating somewhere.
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So somebody at Google listens to the pod. There's no other explanation. That's exactly what we talked about. We are taking full credit. No further questions. So you're welcome on behalf of Google. That was us. Another thing. A couple weeks ago, we talked about how Google messages, when it imports your like, the way it does pinned messages in Google messages is terrible.
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I saw an article later that day that said that they are adopting bubbles. Take it out. Take it out. The same thing. Which I'm not even sure our episode was out yet by the time that article went out. But I'm just going to say that we put it into the ether.
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We put it into the ether. That update came to the Pixel phones via the Pixel update for September. Oh, which just rolled out. Just not in messages. It's the contacts app. I'm going to kill myself. Are you serious? Yeah. Well, hopefully soon they also. How often do you open the contacts app?
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Never. Once every six months, probably. Oh my God, guys. That's funny. All right. Well, we have some updates on Viewflation, specifically because we have a bunch of Apple videos that we just put out. This is our best sample size. Probably the best sample size. We just went to Apple Park.
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We put out a ton of videos. We did main channel impressions on both the Fold and the Pro, although it was mostly about the Fold. We got the Duo Revisited, which is like a second Duo video we put out. We have the main podcast episode. We have the Man on the Street episode that we put out, and we have a studio video.
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A few of those are a little bit newer, but we have a lot of data on true views versus inflated views. Our inflated views for the podcast did surpass a million. So even though it's inflated, I'm just going to say- I want to be happy because obviously the podcast did well, but the million milestone like doesn't hit the same.
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It's not even close. It's not the same. And I don't know how happy I should get yet. Yeah. Okay. So we're going to- Don't take this away from you, Mark. I know. I'm like pumped. Like a million view podcast. Like, that's great. We're going to not. Show you guys the difference between the actual engaged views versus the inflated views because some people are asking about that.
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So Andrew, do you want to take that? Do you want to start with that one right there? Let's start it with the podcast. Yeah. Did Apple actually duo it? Great title. Good. By the way. Good job, Adam. Great title. 1,070,000. No. 1,070,000. Yeah. Views live.
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641,000 views engaged. Still a great podcast. Still a like top 20 podcast we've ever done. Yeah. Probably. Yeah. But still not quite double, but pretty close to double. And then your reactions to iPhone duo, which just came out yesterday.
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The man on the street bonus episode. Live, 203,000. Engaged, 93,000. So it's 2x. So over 2x. Yeah. Yeah. And on the main channel, it's kind of felt like slightly over 2x as well. So the main impressions video on the duo is now the second most viewed MKBHD video of all time.
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What? Oh, wait. Second most. Are you including? So I don't include RetroTech. RetroTech, I do not count. Okay. Vision Pro had 28 million views. This video is now showing 26.7 million views. Jesus. Obviously, those are not all real views because the engaged views is 13.6.
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So exactly half or roughly half. It's still 13.6 million views, but 25, that's a completely different ballpark. Yeah. It makes the engaged view feel so much worse. We should all be like, 13 million, let's go. That's an awesome video.
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Yeah. Instead, we're like, there. Well, only 13. Yeah. Yeah. It is crazy. Yeah. Engaged view is still, I mean, it's still a great video, but that's something to note. So 2x. And then there's two other videos. There's a second iPhone duo video I published on with a little bit more breaking down like the distribution between like iPad buyers and this.
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et cetera. The analytics are showing that has 11 million views. It has 5.5 million engaged views. So it's exactly half. Wow. And then just today we published, as of recording this on Wednesday, the iPhone 18 Pro review. It's been a couple hours. It's showing 3.1 million views and 1.4 million engaged views.
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So less than half. It seems like overall it trends towards 50%. Something like that. Yeah. Which is really bad. It's terrible. I've yet to find a reason why I should like this. Do you know how we always say under promise, over deliver?
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Yeah. Yeah. YouTube's doing the exact. They're over promising, under delivering. I saw a couple of. This is terrible. I saw a few other videos about this and one interesting thing I hadn't considered is that, actually I did consider this accidentally. I think in the last episode I was talking about how I can't tell what a good video is anymore because I see a video, it has a ton of views and then I open it up and I have no idea how many dislikes it has.
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So I really am totally thrown off and I can't tell if it's a bad video or not at first glance. That's still true and I think a lot of these videos now, I go on my homepage and I'm like, oh wow, look, there's a ton of views on this, let me click it. And then every single time I realize that it has a ton of views because of the viewflation. Yeah. So I don't know what to click anymore.
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Yeah. Like everything has a lot of views. And there's no dislike button anymore. Yeah. Is it a hot take to say that maybe they shouldn't have even given us access to engaged view statistics? No. Because. They have to. I mean, I don't know. It just makes it always feel bad.
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And none of the other platforms give you engaged view statistics. So like. Your CPMs would be like a third and you would just be like, what happened? Are we not getting paid? If you didn't get the engaged views to compare because you need engaged views to compare to your CPM. And then. Yeah.
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You're just like, why is every video making getting. Yeah. You'd be like, why is it getting the same amount of money I always make, but a third also? It's definitely better to have more information. It's just like, I don't know. Eventually, I feel like if they're trying to get people used to the new view counts over time.
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That's a good point. Showing you the true views is not going to help you get used to it. You know what I mean? Yeah. But they did bury it a little bit. Yeah. Fair enough. So people are just going to be. And you don't see it on anyone's channel other than your own. So for most people, they never look at engaged views. They just look at other people's public view counts.
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Yeah. If you're not a creator, that's just something you'll just get used to over time. Yeah. Also, studio video, 948,000 live, 454,000. So almost half. 50% again. Still another great video. 50%. Yeah. But half. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
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So we have a lot of thoughts about the new iPhone Pros. The reviews went out this morning. So you should watch that video on the MKBHD channel if you have that. I have a bunch of camera thoughts. And I have also brought up a little thing that I can show you guys on the screen.
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So I can show you guys some camera stuff. Let's just start with the thing that you got wrong. Me. Yeah. Yes, exactly. Start there. I'm having a hard time thinking of that. Yeah. I noticed on Twitter you said that the burgundy was a good color. I just want to be very clear. I just want to be super crystal clear you got that one wrong.
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What are you talking about? You did get that one wrong. Okay. Just because they made a matte black phone doesn't mean the other colors are bad. Yes, it does. It's a clue. One thing being good does not make everything else bad. Uh-huh. No. What's funny about these colors, okay, they have four new colors, the silver, the light blue, the burgundy, and the black.
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Glacier. The darker ones, which include the matte black and the burg undy, show a lot of fingerprints this year. It's like a different finish. And so it's a little bit annoying how many fingerprints they show. Yeah. I still personally love the matte black and shooting video of it, it's clear how much it absorbs light and doesn't reflect.
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It's awesome. Nice to see it again. I happen to really like it. The burgundy is weird because it's hard to show on camera. It, if you look on Apple's website, that can look one way. If you look at footage people have gotten of it, that can look one way. It's generally kind of like a dark plum, uh, I don't know, purple.
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It's like a burgundy color. Yeah. I mean, I think initially my thought of burgundy was wrong. I thought there was a little more red. I guess I was thinking more of like a maroonish, but it's far more like brown purple than I thought it was going to be.
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It's a, it's a Cabernet. It does look like wine. Cabernet. In the sun though, in the bright lights, there is like a, a metallic reflective fleck in it. There is in the, especially on the like back clasp. So it has like a shiny shimmer to it, which is interesting.
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I don't love this matte black. I'm not going to lie. I can't believe how wrong you are. I feel like. You've got the tube right in front of you. Yeah. I feel like it kind of reflects the white balance of the room and I can see some like green in it right now. Are you trying to say something about our white balance? It's like a video tool? Uh. Talk about my Kelvin.
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How can you call this a bad color? I don't understand how you could call this a bad color. Okay. It's a confusing color. It's not that it's a bad color. I would say that it is the worst color Apple has ever made. You are so insane. It's true. That is so insane. There are so many better colors. Just above that bandaid iPhone 8.
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Their worst color. Audio listeners are like, what are we talking about right now? I don't know. I have a hard time because every time I look at it in a different light, it looks different. I'm like, oh, that's purple. Oh, that's brown. Oh, that's really dark. Oh, that's kind of light. I'm and every time I try and take a picture of what color I want it to look like, it turns out the other color.
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Yeah. It's extremely confusing. Nothing has ever been that color before. Guys, it's a. Nothing's usually see-through. I'm going to jump off a cliff. Just wanted to get that out the way. Okay. Sure. All right. We can talk about the other things in the phone. Obviously, this is not the biggest update iPhone this year in terms of like giant hardware update upgrades.
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It was an improvement year. In your review, you called it an S year. A lot of people don't remember the S years, but they used to do that. Oh, I feel old. I know. Yeah. I know. The Reddit thread totally agreed with you. They said calling this the S update is the most apt like TL DR of this entire year.
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The Redditors will remember like the 3GS versus the 3G, the 4S versus the 4, the 5S versus the 5. 6S. You would get this like design increase, this new design, some new interesting things in the big number. And then when you get the S, it would be the faster one and maybe like one camera feature.
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It's the Intel TikTok cycle. Yes. Tick and talk, right? Yeah, that's what he said too. So this iPhone 18 Pro design wise, when visually people see the same design, they go, oh, it's not a big update. Fine. It's the same design, but the updates are a slightly new camera feature. And new performance and new battery.
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That's something. And better cooling, better cooling. Yeah. And better cooling. That being said, those three things did get really interesting updates. I think the chip update is underrated. I think the variable aperture is a little overhyped from Apple, but it is interesting potentially for the future. Yes.
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And then the battery, everyone loves a good battery and it 's a great battery. Yeah. So here we are with those three new things. Talk about the camera a little bit. Okay. Because I know it's the same sensors as the last year's phone. Yeah. But they're doing different things with the primary cameras . Yeah. So I talked to the camera team a little bit because I went to Arizona for a week and tested these cameras.
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I was very impressed because I was taking photos both in just the HEIC modes and then also in ProRAW. I don't usually shoot in ProRAW because traditionally I found that ProRAW does the same artifacting that just straight out of the camera photos do where it over sharpens a little too much.
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It has that sort of plasticky smartphone look. So I was shooting a little bit of RAW through like Moment Camera 2 and then I just started using the main camera and shooting ProRAW and regular photos and I was like, oh, a lot of that artifacting went away. Nice. The plasticky skin texture stuff is kind of gone and you don't get as much of a smartphone camera look in a lot of these images anymore.
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So I talked to the camera team and I was like, did you do something? And they said, oh yeah, we thought that the signal to noise ratio got good enough this year that we decided to pull. We re-engineered the image pipeline and we're doing way less sharpening now than we used to do. They also said because we added the texture modes in photographic styles that gives you access to, you know, more texture stuff, sharpening, soft ening, whatever.
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We don't need to do as much of that straight out of the camera. So we like re-engineered the pipeline. And in my opinion, it's way better. I really wonder if they're going to pull this onto the iPhone 17 Pro or before or if it's just with this. I have a feeling the wider aperture, the F1.48 max aperture is partially responsible for that better signal to noise ratio, which made them more comfortable with it just on 18 Pros.
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But we'll see. I think that's probably true. But specifically the color and the texture I found much better. So here's some samples. This is almost straight out of camera. It was ProRAW and I brought down the highlight in the sky a little bit. And that was basically it. I mean, the gradient from like shadow into highlight is very impressive.
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Something I've really noticed in all of these photos is that they kind of let the shadows lie where they are instead of like jacking them up as much as they used to. Really? And it adds more contour to the photos in general. I mean, here's another one. What's kind of crazy that I noticed was that a lot of the photos that I was taking felt like they could have been in the keynote because there's generally a huge distinction between the keynote photos and the actual photos that you get out of the camera.
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Yeah, the keynote photos, they go to like a desert and take outside pictures. Partially, you're in like an extremely beautiful place. Yeah. Some things are very interesting. Some things are just super well lit. So I understand. But like, I mean, the kind of like texture and quality and the color is way more natural than I found.
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Is that a national park bathroom? Yeah. All right. Well, no, not a national. I get to an event anywhere. It was not a national park. Like a state park? It was a. That brown. Navajo park. I don't think that those are either. Yeah, probably. But yeah, if you just like this one impressed me the most.
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It was a telephoto 4x photo. That is a ProRAW image straight out of camera. That's nice. With like zero changes. And I understand that like in super bright environments, when you're saturating those pixels, it's going to look good no matter what. But like the texture and the color, like the color is so natural.
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That's what I was really surprised at. For audio listeners, just imagine super beautiful Arizona desert photos. Red rocks. Red. Yeah. Very warm blue sky. This is an H. This is a not even ProRAW. This is like H-E-I-C telephoto straight out of camera.
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No edits. Yeah. And I'm just like overall, I was just like, this is crazy. The Sunstars are fine. I don't. Yeah. You know. So the Sunstars, you typically. OK. I've come from a long history of camera lenses, like a lot of fun, different camera lenses.
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And the thing that people always try to get from like a cinematic lens flare is like the perfect like Sunstar or like lens flare. And whenever you watch lens reviews from back in the day, they always say the number of blades in the aperture. Yeah. And then show the types of sunbursts you can get from that number of blades.
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Oh, there's nine blades aperture. Oh, there's an 11 blade aperture. Yeah. So you can kind of get some of the same effects here. If you stop down while you have a point light as you're in your source, you can get one of these nice six blade. Yeah. Sunstars. I can add that in Photoshop. You can also add that by asking Siri to add it.
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But yeah, that is that is one of the unique things about this one. It's not wide open. I do wish they had more than four aperture or six aperture blades because I don't know, a six aperture sunstar is just kind of kind of mid. Yeah. In my opinion. Give me like a 12. Yeah. Low light was still a weak point for it, in my opinion.
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Like you can get a decent photo, but it's definitely got more of the artifacting and sort of the compression in the lower light images. And I didn't put it in here, I don't think. But there was a I tried to do an astrophoto handheld and the pixel still just like far and away.
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Really? Far and away. Yeah. I think that first photo was the most impressive to me just because of like the shadow. Yeah. Like, yeah, it's not just trying to make this hello bright see everything. It's just like. I mean, I felt that way about this too. True.
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Yeah. The dark areas are really dark and I didn't do anything to that, which I thought was which I thought was awesome. It's nice to actually see some shadows. Yeah. The telephoto again, really cool. It adds some natural depth of field. I just think the color, straight-up camera color is like really nice.
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Yeah. So, yeah, I was pretty impressed with this. You can. We're three for three with we said something and they listened, bro. We asked for shadows. Yeah. We got shadows. Sometimes, yeah. I took a bunch of stuff. I still am not, I mean, these are more subtle differences we're pointing out.
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I still think in general it has a habit of seeing faces and lifting shadows. I think when you turn, I mess with tone sometimes to just force it to give me more shadows. Yeah. But, yeah, the photos were pretty great. I was not, you know, shocked at the difference between wide open and F4, but I was like, okay, this is one of the subtle things you can now add to your things you can change in a photo.
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Yeah. Cool. As I mentioned in the review, I think this gives me more confidence that when they continue to go to larger sensors, like give me like that one-inch type sensor on an iPhone now and variable aperture. 100%. I think that will make a bigger difference and will be more useful.
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It's funny because Sony themselves, who are using 1.0 type sensors, their biggest problem on those smartphone cameras is that they have no variable aperture and everything's always out of focus. Yeah. It's tough. And blown out. They don't do that well either. That's just Sony.
-
Yeah. I like the pro controls that they added to be able to like change the shutter speed and things like that. You can only do one second though. I wish you could do a little bit longer. So you can do things like kind of like whip pans and like adding different effects and stuff like that. I think the variable aperture is going to be semi more useful in video because it'll allow you to have a little bit more creative control there.
-
But overall, I kind of feel like people are not clamoring for a wider field of focus in their smartphone camera. Like that is usually. Yeah. Usually the opposite because the thing that separates a smartphone from a dedicated camera has traditionally been depth of field.
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And so I don't think people are like, I want a less professional looking thing, which it's not always less professional. Anyway, it's a whole thing. I'm going to yell that by the photo community for this. But anyway. Yeah. I would just I was really surprised by the camera quality, the color and the texture. I think we're really awesome. So then there was a new chip.
-
There's the A20 Pro and a couple interesting facts about it . One, it benchmarks the highest single core score ever in an Apple chip that we've ever tested. That's exciting. Two, in multi-threaded CPU tests, it's like M1 level. That's pretty exciting.
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And three, it's a two nanometer chip now. And so they did a couple interesting things to get a little bit more performance and efficiencies out of this chip. Obviously, two nanometer makes it easier for that. They moved the DRAM off of the CPU, like we said last episode, and put it next to it.
-
So now you can cool the CPU more effectively. So it has better peak performance and better longevity because of the better cooling, bigger vapor chamber and all that. Will a regular person notice any of this when just using it like a regular phone? No. And that's why they probably shouldn't get this phone.
-
They should get the base phone whenever it comes out next year. But for the pros, if there are things that you are doing with like a longer processing time, you're exporting videos, you're gaming, you're doing stuff, this gives you more headroom. And it's just a flat out impressive chip. Made me happy and excited for the MacBook Neo to get this chip.
-
Yes, yes. And all the compatible components. And all the compatible. I will also say like the bigger vapor chamber that I think is like 40% bigger or something. It's quite a bit. I thought it was the surface area. Surface area. Okay. 300. I mean, I was in Arizona in like 112 degree heat and the phone was not overheating and it was not getting super hot and I was taking a lot of photos and stuff like that.
-
And that's a pretty big deal. Yeah. It's interesting the way that this is sort of panned out because I think a lot of people have started thermally measuring the outside of the phone. Yeah. When, and Mr. Who's the Boss did a good job explaining this in his video. That actually isn't the best, like isn't the most indicative of how well it's cooling the chip.
-
If it's cooling the chip inside the phone really well, it's evacuating the heat to the outside of the phone. Right. So it can feel warmer in your hand and it can actually read warmer from the outside from a thermal camera, but that's because it's cooling the CPU inside better and moving the heat out. It's also less like concentrated heat in one area and it's that heat is spread across the entire phone.
-
Yeah. So it's less hot, but it's across the entire phone instead of just being on one little area. Yeah. The whole mid frame, the whole back of the display. So it'll feel, I did a bunch of benchmarks and that phone gets plenty hot in my hand. Yeah. It feels warm in my hand, but it is scoring 25% better on every single run because it's evacuating heat from the chip.
-
Yeah. It's a more powerful chip. One thing that I found to be just colloquially, wait, is this not the right way to say this? One thing that I found to be slightly worse, but I think I would like to see some official testing because it could just be my experience was when they moved the face ID sensor to underneath the display on the top left of the phone.
-
Yeah. And it's similar to the iPhone Duo under display inner camera where they sort of like, they lower the resolution of that little area. And then in between those pixels, they put the face ID sensor, which is infrared cameras. And I have sort of noticed in my day to day that it's not grabbing my face as quickly and easily as I felt like it was on the 17 Pro.
-
Like on the 17 Pro, it felt like the phone could be sitting on its face or it could be like face up on the table and it would notice my face from like here. It was like really wide. Apple told us that it was the same field of view and that should be able to capture the same thing.
-
But I have had to input my password into my phone more often because it doesn't read my face at certain angles. I have not had any difference, but okay. So that's just it is the same field of view, but it is shifted to the side of the phone now.
-
Is it right? Are you just used to I'm not saying this is this is still a problem of it changing and people have to get used to it. But like you nailed the perfect angle of what you're used to capturing and now that angle. Although yeah, depending on what side it's on. I don't know. We did a yeah, we took like a microscope photo of those pixels and it's pretty cool.
-
It's like right where the one starts on the the time. Yeah. And like the left and right difference. You could see them. Also, you're welcome to everyone on Twitter who stole that image. And I didn't even know that was that's our video. I saw it all over Twitter. I didn't know that was ours. That's funny. Yeah. So I don't know.
-
I would like to wait to see some official testing on that for now. I'm not sure. I have the regular pro and I've had the max in previous years. Apple says that the battery life on the regular pro is as good as the max from last year. Confirmed. I was I was making sure this is just my own testing.
-
I was making sure to have a couple of days where it's like not indexing, not benchmarking, not doing anything crazy and just using the phone like regular. And on those days, I was like, oh, wow, this is really good . OK. 52 percent at the end of the day type stuff. I'm at 80 something right now. Oh. And I'm just my normal usage, like a bunch of car play. Yeah.
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A bunch of photos, a bunch of scrolling emails, stuff like that. Yeah. It's been excellent for me. So the pro max, I'm sure, is really good, too. Yeah. If you were true reviewers, you would have an 18 pro and a 17 pro max and do the exact same thing.
-
Every single input you put into the phone for a whole day. I think that is what Joanna Stern did in her video. That sounds like something Joanna Stern would do. And that's why she's the greatest. It had to do with a pickle, too, though. And that's exactly what Joanna Stern would do. Yeah. We love her. Yeah. So I know you're all waiting for the iPhone Duo.
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Hopefully we'll have review units of that in like a while. I don't know. But we're all very excited for that. We're wondering how the battery life is going to be. We're wondering how the experience is going to be. Cameras. I want to see it. October is going to go crazy. Yeah. I'm so interested in it. I want to see the animation.
-
I think it's so funny. All the people replicating animations would be like, it wasn't that hard. And every single one of them, they open the phone and it's just black, black, black, black, black on. And then animation. It's like the reason this animation works well is because it looks like it's instantly on. Yeah. Maybe that's not the case.
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Yeah. I do. Also, the charging. Sorry. I want to just bring this up. It's faster. I couldn't say this on podcast because we were not allowed to say we had the phones yet. But I have a power brick that tells you how much power is going through the phone. And it hit 40 watts, which is pretty awesome.
-
So I plugged it into like a super high wattage charger, my MacBook Pro charger, and it was pulling 43. And then Rich brought in his specifically his new 40 watt charger that will volt up to 60. Right. For Apple devices or whatever. Yeah. And it charged at like 54 watts.
-
Really? Yeah. Wow. For the first like third of the battery, it was plenty fast . It's kind of crazy. I feel like because Apple never talks about specific numbers, right? They don't talk about capacities. Not at all. They don't talk about wattage. They don't have any of that. I feel like they should when it's impressive.
-
Because, you know, it's obviously not impressive against a OnePlus phone or an Oppo phone. But against like the Pixel, which is still charging at a way lower speed, like they should be doing that. I should be talking about that. I wish. Yeah. Yeah. One of my requests specifically for this new iPhone, 8K video. It's time.
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It's time. What? You're ready. Everyone is ready for 8K video for an iPhone. Why? Because. Why? So you have the sensor. It's capable of it. Yeah. You have the 820 Pro chip. You're capable of it and processing and all that.
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And there's a new feature that they added, which lets you set a hard limit to how much storage your ProRes video takes up on your phone. Oh. So you'll never. I assume the reason they don't want to enable 8K video is because, oh, you know, it's not that big of a difference and it's going to fill up people's phones too fast and they 'll get mad. It's going to destroy their battery.
-
Well, now when you turn that on, just pop up that feature and let people set like a 100 gig limit or something. And it'll say, oh, this is only five minutes of 8K video. Fine. As long as I know. Let me turn it on. I'm a pro. I'm using a pro iPhone. I'm a pro. Let me take 8K pro video on the iPhone, please. Wasn't there a feature a few generations ago where like you could only get it on the Pro 1 storage up?
-
Yeah, it was like ProRes RAW video. Yeah, it was like not available on the base storage. Yeah, you had to get like the 512 or the. Yeah. So that makes it clear to me that it's at least partially a storage question. I think it's ready. It's ready. Give me 8K. Also give me Rec. 709 preview while shooting log.
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You know, at first I was surprised that you cared about 8K, but I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Yeah, when he said that, it's like, do you know when like in a movie they say the title of the movie and you're like, they did the thing. Like when Marquez is saying 8K, why is anyone surprised?
-
It's the title of the. It's crazy that I want my matte black phone to shoot 8K video. Black is ugly. I have a question I kept seeing, which a question I'm kind of surprised about. I guess in a short, Linus had mentioned with the passport style short phone that using the exterior screen when you have a keyboard and like a URL board up, how do you have any space for, you know, what's the typing experience?
-
How do you have any space for things in between that? And I guess and then everyone I saw in the comments, not everyone, but a lot of comments. The Duo, sorry. Yes, on the Duo. So we don't have it yet. No. But you guys experienced this. Yeah. Lots of people were like, why didn't any reviewers show the typing experience on it?
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And my thought was because everyone's used to it already. We've had like 12 different passport style phones on Android that all would have the exact same issue. Do you remember typing on the exterior screen? I actually do. I might have a shot of it I can give you guys. I'll look for it. But when it's wide open and you're typing in widescreen, it 's a big keyboard, but it can do a split keyboard because if you partially fold it, it kind of separates the UI.
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That's interior though. What about exterior screen? Oh, it's just a normal keyboard. It's just wider. That's what I thought. I don't think it's bad that it's wider. And actually, when you're using the exterior screen, when it's closed, it's more comfortable to use that phone with two hands. Did I really not show the keyboard? I feel like I probably at some point. I don't know. It sounded like you guys had pretty minimal time on getting videos of it.
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And I just, to me, it felt we have a million passport style phones already. We've seen what a keyboard and an address bar looks like on this. So I don't know if that was a one person mentions it. Everyone jumps on top of it. But yeah, I was surprised by that. The other funny thing I saw.
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Did anyone see John Ternus at the Emmys showing off his duo ? I did see that. And then later showing that he was taking a selfie with the iPhone 18 Pro. Sideways. Sideways. When it doesn't need to be sideways because of center stage . Mm-hmm. Everyone, I don't know. It's totally a nut story.
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It's just very funny that he brought both. And obviously, he doesn't seem to trust the selfie. I think that was intentional. I think Apple needs to position the Pros as the camera phone and the Duo as the Pro. Really? I agree 100%. I 100% think that. There's no way that wasn't planned. Uh-huh. And if he had... Well, because they need to post that selfie.
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Well... And it very clearly is going to be posted better from the Pro than the... I think they clearly gave it to Ternus and said, when you do the selfie, use this one. They need to sell both phones. And they especially need to sell the Pro right now while it 's available to sell. True. True. And I... Yeah, they had to show both of them off.
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It was a marketing opportunity. I think that's a sick marketing, besides the fact that only one is available, of the Duo being flipped around and him holding a giant... Yeah. Taking the photo. That would have been a nice demo. Yeah. Like, that's a sick photo because you're seeing it from behind also, but... As long as he's not taking it with the interior camera.
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Yeah. It's just really bad. That picture will come out next month when the Duo is present. Yeah. I am only ever calling that the FaceTime camera like they did. because I refuse to call that a selfie camera because it looks terrible. It's pretty bad. It's fine. It won't be there in the next one, so... Yeah. We should take bets on it. Do we take bets on that?
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On if it'll be there in the next one? How long do they do... That's... Okay, two things. I don't know how long they'll last. One is the underscreen selfie camera. Two is the variable aperture lens. We've seen companies... I think they're both staying. We've seen companies have the variable aperture lens and then kill it after a couple generations, but we're getting these bigger sensors now.
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Does that mean Apple's is going to stick around? Not sure. I hope it sticks around. Variable aperture. Yeah. I think they'll stick around. It's definitely their next... I think both of these are clearly their next year. I think it gives them the green light next year to do a way bigger sensor. Yeah. Possibly. I agree.
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And there's a bigger difference. I agree. I just don't know how much further out from that it stays. Same. I don't know. They don't... I mean, what are things that they've gotten rid of besides like Touch ID? They do everything twice. At least. They do everything twice. But like what other things have they gotten rid of? 3D Touch. 3D Touch. 3D Touch.
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We had at least two years of that. The action button on the Duo. Well, on the Duo. I'll never not be mad about that. Yeah. Yeah. They will have another Air. They always have two things. They had a mini twice. They had a plus twice. Yeah. Before killing it off, they always do it at least two times . Yeah. I feel like...
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They're probably already making it right now. I was kind of... I'm surprised they haven't gotten rid of... Camera control. Camera control. I thought it was so funny that they showed all these pro camera options and didn't mention how any of them could connect to camera control at all. They don't. Like they don't even mention it anymore.
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I love using camera control to open the camera. But I had so many instances while I was testing this camera where I was accidentally slightly upping the exposure. I hate that. And I have mine set to tone and I was doing that as well. Also... Yeah. Yeah. So camera control doesn't change variable aperture, but it can be mapped to the fake bokeh.
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So you can have like... You can accidentally change camera control in portrait mode to switch you to the fake depth of field instead of the actual variable aperture that they added to this phone. So weird. That's so weird. There's also... There's four stops of variable aperture on this phone, but third-party apps will have access to a super granular control of it.
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Why not camera control? It's... Yeah. Why not camera control? Because it's going to be gone next year. Well, maybe. Maybe. It's a conspiracy theory. Yeah. So I don't know. Variable aperture. Okay. All right. Well, I think that's about it. You should go watch the review if you haven't watched it already.
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We got to take an ad break because we are bad at taking ad breaks. So we're going to do trivia first. All right. We're back in the studio. We're back to trivia, but we're trying something new.
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Instead of a trivia question, we're going to do a trivia challenge. That's kind of what this is. Because we discussed very briefly, not for very long, but very briefly, what the typing experience is like on the iPhone Duo.
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And it made me think back to the early, early Android days when pioneers and their covered wagons were still heading west in search of gold. Avoiding disinterested. That was me. We were flashing bootloaders and stuff. And no one quite knew how typing was going to work on a slab touchscreen.
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And all sorts of various ideas were thrown forth. And one of my favorite ideas is called the 8-pen keyboard. Are any of you familiar? Don't Google it. Don't Google it. No one Google it. No, sorry. I was Googling something else. It was not that. I do remember that. We were just talking about something similar to this the other day.
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It's called the 8-pen keyboard. It was modernized by an app called the 8-Vim keyboard. Disclaimer, if you ever are going to install any third- party keyboards on a device, know that they can sneak trackers in there really easily. It's probably not the best idea, which is why on this air-g apped burner account logged in, nothing phone three, I have installed the 8-Vim keyboard.
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And when it comes time for trivia answers, I'm going to have each of you type like and subscribe on that keyboard. And I'm not going to explain how that keyboard works. I have a screenshot of the keyboard. So if you'll draw your attention to the screen.
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I've always wanted to do a T9 typing challenge. Maybe that could be a studio short. I remember this. I remember this. I had this. Jesus. I had this. What phone did I have this on? I tried this. I'm going to try and explain this. Galaxy S1. It kind of looks like the crosshair of a fighter pilot turned 45 degrees.
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So it kind of makes an X with a circle. And then around it are letters. Yeah. This is when- Not all of the letters. A lot of the letters. It is all the letters. Is it all the letters? It is all the letters. This is when swipe keyboards were getting really big. Yeah. That's a little hint. But remember swipe when that first dropped?
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Yeah. It was like a revolutionary thing that you could swipe. And obviously now all the keyboards have swipe abilities now. But that was really interesting. And then this was like a- What was that other keyboard that Microsoft bought that was really good? I think you're thinking of SwiftKey. SwiftKey. Yeah. SwiftKey was like a competitor to swipe. Wow.
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So I have to assume this is like the letters more commonly next to each other go in some sort of pattern. I'm not giving you any information. You're just going to get a phone in your hand, 60 seconds on the clock, and you will have to type like and subscribe. Whoever makes it through the most letters will get the point.
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And we have to swipe everything we can. I'm not telling you how to use it. Yeah. You're just going to get a phone in your hand. The photo we get to see does have a red mark across it that does kind of look like swiping. So whether that is a hint or a way to screw with us. It was an unfortunate hint. I could not find any screenshots on the keyboard.
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Oh, I kind of remember this. Yeah. You like swipe around it. Don't say anything. What I was looking up was we were talking about old when we were first doing touchscreens. Do you guys remember the BlackBerry Storm where it was a touchscreen, but the whole screen was a button and you had to like press the whole screen.
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That was terrible. It was so bad. Yeah. Early touchscreens were something. Yeah, it was something. Okay. Well, we will type at the end. We'll be right back. Support for Wayform comes from Framer.
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It's Framer.com slash wave for 30% off. Framer.com slash wave. Rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from Shopify. Starting a new business is so daunting that most people quit before they even start. But you don't need to be like most people. And you don't have to anymore.
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So sales teams spend up to 50% of their time on admin work rather than selling, building relationships, and closing deals. They could really use a tool that covers all of the admin stuff. That way, sales teams can actually focus on the work they were hired to do. That's where Pipe Drive comes in. It's an intelligent, AI-powered sales CRM loved by growing sales teams.
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Then it turns those notes into accurate, auto-drafted CRM updates ready for you to review and approve. The end result? Less admin, more selling. So switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies already using Pipe Drive.
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Our link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14-day trial. No credit card or payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com slash wave form to get started. That's pipedrive.com slash wave form, and you can be up and running in minutes. All right. Welcome back. Google Book.
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Yeah. Yeah. Chromebook with Gemini. Chromebook with Gemini. Not far off. We ain't got Chromebooks anymore. We got... It was kind of talked about at the Android show, I think, earlier this year. And now we got the announcement that the pre-order is coming up.
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My favorite way of announcing a product. Pre-orders for what? The Google Book. The Google Books. What Google Books? Many different Google Books. Lots of ones. So, first of all, big win. You have to go to googlebook.google. Great URL. Already my favorite part of the story.
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Nice. What? Pre-orders are starting Monday, September 21st, and google book.google has a lot of fun teasers and information. So I wrote them all down, and I will explain what Google Book is to the best of my abilities. Because we are looking at this with the teaser page at googlebook.google before pre-orders that come out Monday.
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Guys. Yes. Dot book is a TLD. Google.book. They could have done that. They don't have enough money. They're Google. Google.book would have popped off. Is that taken? Google.book is good, but googlebook.google is way better. I highly doubt it's taken. Google.book is not occupied.
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What? Can you buy it? Google.book. Can you buy it? That's where the actual pre-order page is. I already bought it. This is the teaser. That's crazy. Yo, Siri, buy that URL. All right. So when you go to the page, we're greeted with a tagline called Google Book Design for Gemini Intelligence. That just seems to be the tagline we're getting for everything now, right?
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Sure. The X product designed for XAI of X company. But there is a specific design feature that it has to have to be a Google Book. Which is? The light bar. The light bar. Are you sure? It seems like they're making such a big deal about the light bar that this is a required design element.
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It's almost like we've been fooled before. It only lights up when you get a call from a certain content. We have absolutely been fooled. I have in my notes that the optimist in me wants to believe that this is a multifunctional bar with different colors because you see it as the gradient of red, blue, yellow, green, the Google colors.
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Yeah. And all we ever see it do is light up in this teaser page. So I want to believe that I can do all sorts of different things like talking to Gemini or different colors for different customizable things or when you're charging with it closed. At least. Battery indicator. At least. So it would be so sweet. Yeah. The realist in me that's been burned by a highlight assumes that it's just a color film over top of a bar with a white light behind.
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Here's the other thing that's giving me a little bit of hope. When I go to the bottom of the website in the FAQ section, there's three FAQs. Yes. One of them is what's the difference between a Google Book and a Chromebook. I have that. And it's sort of genuinely, so it says Google Books are a brand new category of flagship laptop bringing together the best of Chrome OS and Android.
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They come from high quality materials, powerful performance , intelligence features, and seamless connectivity with your Android phone. So kind of an emphasis on the premium part. And then they say Chromebooks, on the other hand, run Chrome OS and are built to prioritize simplicity, speed, and efficiency, which makes them great for everyday use.
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So I think that because they're leaning into the premium part and because of how prominently these glowing bars are on all the teasers, it seems like that's one of the required premium things. It probably has to be metal. It probably has to have the bar.
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It probably has to have a good screen. They all have to have the light bar. They mentioned that. Okay, good. Okay. Great. But none of us have confirmed what the light bar does. Because in this, when I read seamless connectivity with your Android phone, I think my light bar lights up five different colors when someone calls me on WhatsApp.
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That is fair. That's where my hope ends. I do not know what they will do with the light bar, but it will at least have a cool light bar. Yeah. It also says featherweight design, heavyweight power. I mean, it's very clear we're looking at here with like actual specced laptops versus Chromebooks with, like Marques mentioned, their simplicity.
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They're the perfect thing for a long time to buy your parents, your kids, people who just need to browse the internet, students in classroom, cheap, lower specced, worse material, but still durable laptops, quoting laptops using Chrome OS.
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That's what they were for. There has always been a really weird friction where every few years Google tries to make the Chromebook premium and they just make the hardware incredible and they add a bunch of RAM and they add a fast CPU and then you're just like, it's just a pleasure. For Chrome? Pixelbook. Remember that?
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Yeah. I mean, there have been multiple iterations. It was so sick and so bad. And I would argue that maybe the Pixelbook Go, which was the like cheap one that they released with the Pixel 4, was possibly like the best Chromebook ever made. Nah, Pixel is the best one. Chromebook Pixel. I mean, Chromebook Pixel and then also the, yeah, the Chromebook Pixel, the one that flipped around that was really thin.
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Oh, I can't figure. Or are you talking about the first one? Talking about the first one, the $1,000 Chromebook Pixel with the light bar. Yeah, yeah. And the touchscreen. Yeah. That one was awesome. Pixelbook. There was the, yeah. Yeah. There was the Pixelbook. That was great. It was so thin. It was like the Panda laptop. Yeah. It was, that was pretty awesome.
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I really liked that computer, but the Pixelbook Go was like their affordable version of it. And it was really great. If this one doesn't work, they're fresh out of names. Yeah. So. Speaking of names, I'm so sorry. Yeah. I have an update on this. Okay. You cannot register .book.
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I just, sorry. I was going to. It is solely owned by Amazon and reserved for their book services. Oh. Really? Yes. Oh. Yeah. That is. It is not a generic top level domain. Okay. So you can't have Google. That was bugging me since you said it. And I was like, why are there no .book websites?
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Yeah. Why can I not buy? Well, there's a website you can go to where you can like try to reserve a .book domain. Yeah. They all list it, but you can't. Yeah. It's accessible. I'm so sorry. Please. No, no, no. That's good. What if Google released a book called Google and then published it.
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On Amazon? On Amazon. And then just redirected to the landing page. I did think it was funny. GoDaddy. I was like, can I buy Google.book? And GoDaddy goes, no. But you can buy Facebookbookbook.com. Jeez. Yeah.
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Also, Google.kids was available, which I feel like Google should own. But I don't know. It was $10 a year. Anyway. Interesting. I didn't. No, it suggested it to me. It suggested it to me. Okay. All right. Totally normal thing to say. It said it to me.
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I didn't. So with Chromebooks being the, you know, lower spec, cheaper version, Pixel. No. Why do I keep. Now I'm calling it a Pixelbook and I'm going to make them a thing again. Googlebook. Googlebook. You know, if it's built for Gemini, it's obviously going to , they need all the compute for LLM.
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So we're going to see. Yeah. You know, they even say like intelligence is the new spec, which sounds like the easiest way to say this is going to be expensive. Don't worry about the specs. Don't worry about the specs, but it's going to cost a lot. So, hey, we've got our more powerful Chrome OS.
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There are some other interesting things about it. Like you said, in the FAQ, they say brand new category of flagship laptops, high quality materials, powerful performance. It is different than Chromebook other than the fact that they both run Chrome OS. They also have some partners they've lined up for this, which is the part I'm the most confused about here.
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Because in the teaser image, the really nice laptop that they're showing, it says Google book on the interior under the keyboard, but nowhere else does it have a company name. And it says some of the partners they have lined up for the launch during the fall, Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo.
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Kind of all the usual suspects we think of in Windows laptops. Yeah. And even in Chromebooks, they've been making Chromebooks for a while. Yeah. But I don't know which one this is. I don't know what pre-orders it sounds like. I don't know if the Monday pre-order is just going to be one of these. I don't know if we're getting a Google version, a Google hardware version.
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I don't think we are, which is surprising. I feel like we would. Is this a fake picture of just like the most vague laptop possible? My guess is this is the Asus one, because Asus generally makes the better hardware. I think, yeah, I think this is one of them. And I also think the Google book text branding is another one of the things that they've required to be a Google book.
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Well, one of the interesting things about that is there is also, instead of the alt key, there is a Google logo, which at first I'm like, obviously a Gem ini button, but then why wouldn't it be the Gemini logo if it's the Gemini button? So now I'm confused by that because also in the list of features, one of the things you can do is wiggle the mouse to activate Gemini to use on screen.
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Leave it, leave it. I'll take it. On screen references to different things. So you can like shake the mouse and you can circle a bunch of clothes and hit what would I look like in these. Magic pointer. Is that what they're calling it? Magic pointer? Yeah. Select anything to ask, compare or create with Gemini.
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Which is cool. But then what is the Google button for? I am not sure. Is it just like no one even looks at the alt key? Let's just change it and have branding there. Yeah. I'm not really sure about that. There's a create my widget feature where you can like create your own widgets by it's vibe coding your own widgets basically, but on the laptop.
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I think creating your own widgets on phones and laptops are going to be the new thing that we all think about when we think about like the old Android is the most customizable version. Like creating your own widgets on things is going to be the new version of that. Yeah. And I think it's kind of awesome, even though I have not used it at all.
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Yeah. There are some really interesting ideas in this. One is that you can just open phone apps on your laptop without having to install them on the laptop because Chrome OS you had to install them from the Play Store and they were sort of separate from the ones on your laptop. You can access files from your phone directly on your computer just instantaneously.
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And specifically in the taskbar on the bottom, you have two separate buttons. One is the Google logo, which is the normal settings on your laptop, like on desktop. And one next to it is your phone, which then just pops up a little floating menu. That's the apps on your phone to go into. I think an example they use is like Duolingo said, don't forget your streak and pops up Duolingo and they do it real well.
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That just shows how simultaneously it is. You're welcome, Duolingo. There's your shout out. Stop bugging David. We're good. But it is cool that it's just right there seamlessly do everything with your phone. We've been talking about ecosystem for so long. Yeah. This feels like finally the Android ecosystem play people want.
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Yeah. It is a really interesting idea because I think everyone's thought about like, well, Google cannot really make an Android equivalent of the MacBook because Google doesn't. make an OS for computers that is like a dedicated hardware OS.
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Yeah. But it makes more sense to just be like, this is an extension of your phone. If you're a person who like lives off your phone, if you've got a Galaxy S26 Ultra and it's a very powerful fast phone, you do a lot of things on your phone anyway. Instead of like docking your phone to a computer or something like that, just having a laptop, but all of your phone's files are there.
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Yeah. All of the things that you can do through your phone are there. You can cast your apps directly to the computer. That is a really interesting idea. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds nice. I guess my last question is just what do we expect the difference in a buyer of a regular Chromebook versus a Google book to be?
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Obviously, they're more expensive. It's like a power user. They have more features. But then, yeah, it's a power user that still only really needs Chrome and doesn't need Windows or Mac OS. Yeah. doesn't game, doesn't have video editing.
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Yeah. And AI stuff. Is that a distinct enough group? I guess so. I think they should either only sell Chromebooks to schools going forward or just kill off Chromebooks in general. I don't know.
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It's like a lower price thing they have to keep around to be a lower price thing. Yeah. It's so good to just like convince your parents that this is the only laptop they need and spend. I mean, I don't know what they are anymore. A Google book or a Chromebook? A Chromebook. Oh, yeah. Like they're so cheap and they just are looking at Facebook on that instead of their phone.
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That's like it's it would be bad, I think, if we took that away from anyone outside of a classroom. Yeah. I think it's like too too good. This like a lot of school districts that are getting rid of Chromebooks, though. Yeah. Who knows? A lot of school districts.
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Yeah. And they're also there's a lot of this is maybe like last year we started hearing a lot about this, like the MacBook Neo type stuff, like Apple's trying to get into schools because they know that that's a that's valuable real estate . And if they can get into schools and make lower price stuff , then they have themselves customers for life.
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So school boards are valuable customers. We will see how long Google can hold on to that. Yeah. I think you're right, though, on who who wants this and what is that level of like market cap and then immediately take that potentially niche segment and now split it between five different companies all making the different ones.
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And it's like, yeah, you wonder how much it's worth these companies to make something like this. And I wonder why Google doesn't just make the hardware on it. But maybe since Google is not making the hardware on it, it 'll have more than five colors on the bar. Yeah. Google is notably bad at making hardware. I'm sure they'll love you saying that one.
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New phones are really, really well made. Yeah. No, they've gotten with enough generations of Pixel. They've gotten to a good enough Pixel. Tensor is still Tensor. And it's not amazing. But we know how Pixel phones started and how Nexus phones went. And yeah. It surprises me that they're not making their own Pixel book as a reference laptop.
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Yeah. I agree. Especially when we're this far into the Pixel phone being like their thing. Seems like a very different strategy. I think you either have a first party one or you have partners making them. Probably not both. Like we'll see the Surface event.
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We'll talk about that maybe in a second. But the Surface event in October, I expect to only see Surface presented as a product that you can buy. And then no other partners will be talked about. Yeah. But the difference is Windows is on a bunch of computers from partners. Right? Yeah. Surface is the first party one.
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Right. So if you have Chrome OS or whatever we're going to call this. Google OS or whatever. And you have Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo all making these. I would expect either that or a Google one, but not both. It is strange because I mean like Google makes their own phones.
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Yeah. Androids on them. Yeah. And other companies. And they've done this weirdly. And this is not the best example of them succeeding. But like Assistant has been on stuff. They used to launch Google Home. But there also was like the Lenovo version and like all those other weird screened versions that came out.
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Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. I'm not sure. The laptop they show here, a couple other quick things. It does have this one, which we don't know which company is making it, has a fingerprint scanner in the top right corner. We've got HDMI, USB-C headphone jack on one side, one singular USB-C port on the other.
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Not a ton of I.O., but probably still all you really need. It does look really thin. It looks sleek. The color bar is the most obvious thing. And I'm really excited to see it. Although, is it mirrored? Is like this picture on the left looked like a very textured laptop top and the one on the right is smooth.
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Are these different laptops? Funny enough, the one on the left looks like the bottom of the trackpad, doesn't it? I think you're right. We're going to find out a lot more about these in like a week or so. So I'm very curious. I think it's an interesting idea. I think Chrome OS was an interesting idea. This feels like another kind of big leap.
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But we'll see if it makes any sense or not. Really quick before we throw it to another trivia slash ad break. I just wanted to address the Ocarina of Time situation. Yeah. Go ahead. I know that you don't care. But when they originally announced the Ocarina of Time remake, I was very skeptical because they only showed like one image of Link sleeping and it looked kind of bad.
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And it looked kind of like an Unreal Engine kind of situation. Since then, Nintendo has done a direct and they've shown a bunch of footage of the redone Ocarina of Time and it looks really good. And it's not just like one of those Unreal Engine 5 like we what if Zelda was an Unreal 5.
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They like have kept the very cartoony style while also making it feel more sort of high quality. Updated modern. Yeah. They have also changed some of the puzzles so that if you played Ocarina of Time before, you get a relatively fresh experience for some of that.
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They have expanded some of the areas so that there's more to explore for people that have played it before. There is way more dialogue from all of the characters so that you can have more experience. I think this is the way that you do a remake, especially with, you know, the graphics difference and things like that and like making more stuff like that.
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I don't know. I just I want to say I was wrong. I jumped the gun and I'm sorry. Marcus, do you know what the Ocarina is? It is a game, right? It's the instrument that wakes up Snorlax when he's moving. That's the poke flute. That's a flute. An Ocarina is a type of flute. Ocarina, it's the pasta that kind of looks like little ears .
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I was pretty sure it was a dance, but I'm going to stand. That was going to be my joke. I'm going to jump off. Trivia. Oh my God. Hey, Ocarina. Oh my gosh. All right. Trivia. So when Google launched Chromebooks in 2011, there were a bunch of small Chrome booths inside like electronic stores and stuff.
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Chrome booths. They were called blank zones. Do you remember what that blank is? No flex. No flex zone. There's a Chrome booth. The Chrome zone. At a Chrome. I was like, okay, so this would be like in a store, like a Best Buy or something.
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Yeah, yeah, exactly. If it's named anything other than the Chrome zone, I will be upset. I have that. What else could it be called? Dude, I would have so much more respect for Google if they called it the Chrome zone. Chrome zone. Welcome to the Chrome zone. I bet chrome.zone is available for URLs. If zone is a TLD, I'm not sure.
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Okay. Wow. That's a great question. I do not know this one. I can't wait to learn what it's called. Yeah. That will be at the end, like usual. We'll be right back. Welcome to the Chrome zone. Welcome to the Chrome zone. At T-Mobile, the new iPhone 18 Pro is here with a big leap in battery life, and you can get it on us.
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This episode is brought to you by PayPal. You know how a mom's bag has everything? Sunscreen. Snacks. A stapler? The new PayPal app is like that, but for your money. Shop, pay, manage your account, and earn rewards all in one place.
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And with purchase protection on eligible items, biometric security, and pass keys, you're protected at every step. Download the new PayPal app to get started. See paypal.com slash protection terms. All right, welcome back. Steam Frame. Steam Frame. We know very little about this.
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Prefacing this. I put it in because it's new. There's some good reviews out. You should go watch Dave2D or Linus' reviews on it. I was going to say, I saw that there is a Dave2D and Linus review of something called the Steam Frame. It looked like a headset. I haven't watched them yet.
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Have you watched them? I watched Linus'. Tell me everything. I cannot tell you everything. For some context, months ago when Valve announced the Steam Machine, which is the hardware box that can play Steam games, they also announced something called the Steam Frame. It's their newest version of their VR headset.
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Valve, we were just speaking about first-party options versus third-party options. Valve has often made a first-party version of hardware. They have had the Valve Index was another VR headset that they released like eight years ago or so.
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Before that, they partnered with HTC on the original Vive. That was sort of a co-brand type thing. Now they have the Steam Frame, which is yet again sort of their example to the industry of the advancements that they 've made in VR technology. Because like Meta, sort of, Valve does do a bunch of R&D on virtual reality technology.
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And they have advanced the industry in some ways with the Steam Frame. So that's what we're going to talk about now. Yeah, and I don't have much more to say outside that. Except for, so like, prefacing is, we haven't tried it. We're not really VR people. I think we got roasted pretty hard.
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I don't think you were in the episode when David and I talked about the Steam Machine and the frame coming out. Yeah. We were like, we're not really that excited for the Steam Frame because we don't really play VR stuff. And a lot of people were like, how could you not be excited about that? So I'm sorry. Yeah. To you, you will not like this. But...
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All seven of you. We apologize. His name is Adam. Stop messing up both of our names. That's when you want to go at him. It is not Andrew. That is Adam. Adam. At Adam. At Adam. Can I ask the basic questions? How much does it cost? Yeah, how much does it cost? $1,059 starting. Okay. Okay.
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Pricey. What does it work with? Is it any PC you can plug into it? It's standalone. Standalone. But also can stream from your PC, which seems to be the very, very good thing. Because it does something called foveated streaming, which can make a standalone, not extremely powerful headset produce very good.
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Quality stuff coming from your machine. Because what it's doing is it's streaming where you're looking at in the highest definition and then slowly fading out your peripherals. It's like foveated rendering. Yeah. It is. Yeah. And Linus said, extremely impressive.
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Like this seems like the big wow moment of this is the fove ated streaming. It reminded me of when everyone talked about like with the Vision Pro and how well the eye controls were. Yeah. That it's just very good at sensing where your eyes are looking.
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Yeah. And Linus said he was like jolting his eyes around all over the place trying to get it to like glitch up and it would not do it. Okay. So that's I think that's pretty cool because the thing that we keep seeing and this is just my understanding of these headsets is as you try to take make them lighter and thinner and all this stuff. You are you're still trying to give them a lot of compute.
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Mm-hmm. And so there's different solutions to that. You can like have a wire off your head to like a box in your pocket or you can try to put them all on the frames or whatever. And so streaming from a PC but obviously streaming exactly the right stuff to minimize how much processing you have to do on device strikes me as really smart.
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And I did the same thing as Linus when I was testing the Vision Pro twitching my eyes all over the place trying to see if it works well. Just trying. Yeah. You could you could if you went really fast you could get it to really quickly like catch up to you. Be confused. Yeah. But it's still pretty good. I think probably the biggest feature well one of the biggest features on this as well is that they have a six gigahertz dongle that you can plug into your PC.
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And that will like stream your games directly from your PC to the Steam frame. And apparently it is super super super super high quality. It's really quick. It doesn't drop frames that much or anything like that. You can also do a thing where some of the packets get transferred over that.
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Some of them get transferred over Wi-Fi. So you have two different channels where the data is being passed through and it'll take the quickest route depending on the packets that are moving through. So they've done a lot of networking advancements in this headset. Yeah. And they've also optimized certain games and also sort of like ported different games.
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So Half-Life Alyx can run directly on the headset now without needing a computer. Which is a fairly big deal because that means you can just walk around your apartment playing this game. Yeah. And you don't have to do the thing where you're like hopping different places. That's cool. Which can make you kind of feel dizzy.
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I have a couple other questions. Maybe you don't have all the answers yet. But how far from your PC can you be with that like dongle? I mean as long as you're in the same room I think it's fine . Yeah. Pretty close. It's six gigahertz. So I don't think it's going to go to like the other side of your house. Yeah. And one thing they said is if you are like trying to do the walk around like Vision Pro pass-throughs, the pass-through cameras seem very bad and annoying.
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Yeah. Which is kind of black and white too. They looked, I don't know if they were exactly black and white, but they were definitely like a gray scale or like a , I thought, I'm remembering like purple for some reason. It looked blue in the review video, but I thought they mentioned it was black and white. Okay. Yeah. I feel like you can kind of quickly tell like what they imagine the primary purpose is based on how good the pass-through cameras are.
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Like if it's stereo versus mono, if it's black and white versus color, like it seems like this is mostly VR and less mixed reality. This is, I think, I'm not going to say 100%, but it seems like the, like this is the VR set to like stream from your PC and play like really tough games that you would normally not be able to play on like a standalone device or something.
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This is the gamers. Yeah. Headset. I know there are probably a bunch of other ones that aren't in the mainstream that I'm not thinking about, but like this seems like if you really, really like steam and valve, this is the thing you're going to buy. The price has so many mixed opinions that I think it is going to, the people who were excited from this are probably like, that is a price.
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It is not an awful price. It is not a good price. No, I don't think anyone is going to see this and not be, and not know what the frame is and be like, wow, that's such a good price. I'm going to hop on it. I think it's going to be like, wow, that's too expensive. A thousand dollars starting is tough. Also, Linus mentioned that like the accessory pack that gives you the grips for the control, not the grips, the straps for the controller and the vertical head strap because the battery's on the back of it.
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Yeah. But they all said that while the weight distribution is very good for that, it needs the top strap. I think we've figured that out now. Every reviewer has realized that a top strap should be on a VR headset and why we continue to not include that in packages seems wild to me.
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But that's another 60 bucks in order to buy that. And they said it's essentially a necessity. It's a couple of different straps for a couple of different things. Okay. But it is an accessory pack that does not come with the frame itself. My last question, and I'm going to watch the review after this, but do we have a battery life claim?
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It's like an hour if you're playing a high fidelity game. It's not great. It sounded not very good. I think one of the things they mentioned, what game were they playing? One of the games they played being a more high fidelity one , I think running on the standalone device and not the streaming was like 45 minutes.
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And that's terrible. But they are apparently, Valve has said that they are working on a way to hot swap batteries while you're playing the game so that it doesn't die and you don't have to turn it off. Yeah. And I do think there was a way to connect to a USB-C battery bank.
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Yeah. You can connect to a battery bank, so it'll last longer. Okay. Anyway, we're not really VR people, but I'm going to watch those reviews. Those are the guys I trust. And I'm saying this without watching those videos, but I'm going to watch Dave and minus his reviews later. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of, I don't even want, headsets, not VR headsets, Meta Connect is next week and we may have gotten our first leak of possibly what they're going to launch.
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Tech-tember. And it seems like some sort of slim VR AR headset, mixed reality headset. I don't know what to call it. This one's more mixed reality. It reminds me of Vive Flow where they were like, we make Vive the full headset and now let's make one that's a little less intrusive, but definitely still not something you're going to go wear in public.
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Right. Yeah. More glasses type, what do you call it? Stems? What do you call the things on the side of glasses? Yeah, I think so. Stems? Arms. Arms. Arms. Yeah. More glasses like arms, but still a very thick set of glass and lenses in front of you.
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Some people are comparing it to maybe like Xreal and what they've launched recently. I was wondering if this could be more like the updated version of Quest Pro where the point of it is to be like in an office scenario with pass- through, extended monitors, 3D modeling, stuff like that where you use it in an environment like that, but you're not going to go walk around and get lunch.
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Yeah. That kind of thing. Like I remember when Ellis used to be locked in with the Quest Pro at his desk, but he basically had like a dumbbell attached to his forehead and that looked awful where this would be a less neck hurting version of that. Not just a dumbbell, a really hot dumbbell.
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Yeah. That's my guess for this. I have to assume this is a productivity thing where like use this in your office and get those benefits without just absolutely feeling cooked all day. Interesting. Yeah. This strikes me as something that'll be connected to a PC a lot and that would be cool.
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Yeah. I'd be interested in that. But Meta Connect is in a week, so we're going to know a lot more. Yeah. We'll know all of it next week. Yeah. The last thing we got to talk about, and I'm just going to let Marques handle this. I'll take that thumbs off. You got this one. Tesla has announced a Roadster event for October 1st.
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October 1st, Tesla is having a Roadster event. So we should talk about this. Some of you may not be old enough to remember that in 2000, I believe, 2017, Tesla had a semi event.
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So they were talking about this truck, which is a whole not her story. And at the very, very end, they pulled the equivalent of a one more thing. And out the back of that truck, they rolled a brand new 2020 Tesla Roadster. At the time, that's what they were calling it. And this was the unveiling event for the truck, but also now for the Roadster.
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They gave a bunch of crazy specs, 200 kilowatt hour battery , 600 plus mile range, eight and a half second quarter mile, 200 plus mile an hour top speed . Insane specs. We'd never seen specs like this in an electric car before ever.
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Zero 60 in two seconds flat. Never seen this before. All right. They promised that they would be selling it in 2020 and they started taking people's money. $50,000 if you wanted one, or if you wanted one of the first thousand, give us the whole quarter million dollars right up front. How do you know those numbers, Mekaz?
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You know, I was at home. I remember watching the event and I thought, this is crazy. I don't know if I'm going to get one, but I am impressed by the numbers. I'm going to keep my eye on this. And then the next day I was like, I'll get one. And I did give them $50,000 in 2017.
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Cue all the jokes about how much money you could have made if you bought Tesla stock instead, blah, blah, blah. So fast forward. Millions. There have been many, many people attempting to follow up from that. Like 2020 comes and goes, right? 2021 comes around. You know, Franz goes on a podcast and someone asks him all about the new Model 3 and the new this and that.
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And then at the end they go, so what about that Roadster, huh? And he always goes, you know, it's the dessert. It's the icing. It's the cherry on top of the icing on top of the cake. It's not necessary for the company, but when it comes out, it will be good. It'll be even better than we announced. And then people go, all the Tesla people eat it up.
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And then another year goes by and no Roadster. And then another year goes by and no Roadster. And then they keep teasing it. There was like an event where you got to then another time go and drive in it, correct? No. So I got to- You've driven in one. No. I've never ridden, sat in, or driven the Roadster.
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I went to the Peterson Museum and got to see it sitting there in a museum. The new one. The new one. Yeah. Before it even comes out. In a museum. Yes. Which are usually designated for things from the past. Yeah.
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Interestingly. The museum of the future. Now, since that 2020 has come and gone, there started to be more rumors about a collaboration with SpaceX. So obviously Elon being the connector between Tesla and SpaceX, this would be a product collaboration between Tesla and SpaceX.
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You mean SpaceX AI cursor. Well, SpaceX at the time was just the rocket company. Right. And if you remember, there was lots of chatter on Twitter about cold gas thrusters. You know how when the capsule does re-entry and has to sort of reorient itself and like change orientation in space? Or even at the ISS when the astronauts are like moving around, doing spacewalks.
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They're using cold gas thrusters, which has compressed air that'll shoot out and help you turn and move in space. That's a rocket technology that apparently you could put on a car. And so the idea was that this electric car would be bolster ed by cold gas thrusters.
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There would be like a four-seater version of this car or a SpaceX version where the back seats would just be taken up by the compressors and the cold air that all just get sat in the back of the car. And you could put the thrusters on the bottom of the car, on the back of the car, on the front of the car.
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And it would have this crazy agility that it could do moves we've never seen cars do before because of these thrusters because of the SpaceX collab. This was the idea. If you ask people on Twitter, this is what they're excited about. But many, many, many, many, many years have come and gone since the original announcement of the Roadster.
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And no one has seen anything about it. So now... Sorry, I just want to interject. Yeah. A lot of these things, I don't know if it's fair to call them rumors because Elon just said that. Right. So this is the thing about Tesla is a lot of this is just things Elon tweeted once.
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And so we don't... This isn't things Tesla has ever confirmed. This isn't things anyone other than Franz and Elon going on podcasts and tweeting have ever like... It's never popped up anywhere. But we finally have this new thing about the Roadster, which all it is really is this website and this announcement of an event.
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Is it a website? Yeah. Tesla.com slash Roadster. Tesla Roadster dot Tesla. Tesla dot com. slash Roadster. If you go to that, you can see essentially just a teaser, which is what appears to be cold gas thrusters and the word Roadster and some like bar light on the back and a countdown.
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And what it also... If you actually brighten this up, there's some text hidden in there that says where we're going, which is, I think, a Back to the Future reference, where we 're going, we don't need roads type stuff. Yeah. So I don't know. I still... I famously canceled the...
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I got my $50,000 back like a year or two ago from the one that I was going to buy. But there is still one in my account from the referral award program or whatever that is, if they choose to honor that. And I'm getting a free Roadster, allegedly. I'm still not sure how practical or legal many of these things are on the road.
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So the idea, if you're a Tesla person, you're really excited. Oh, yeah. Put the cold gas thrusters facing backwards so that the car gets this burst. Pushes. This push forward from the cold gas. And essentially, it just goes zero to 60 in under one second. Just ridiculously fast. I can't wait to see that in bumper to bumper traffic.
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Yeah. Just, I mean, okay. Sports cars are not practical. We get that. But this would be like some crazy thing. Here's the other thing I forgot to mention is lots of other EV supercars have come out since the Roadster announcement, which have like specs similar to what they announced. Like the Lucid Air Sapphire is a 200 mile an hour EV that does zero to 60 in one and a half seconds and is a nine second quarter mile.
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Just a crazy car. So this cold gas thruster thing is supposed to be what separates the Roadster from the pack. This makes it their amazing car. If you put the thrusters at the bottom of the car, it could jump over stuff.
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No, Marcus, that would be a silly thing to say. That would be a pretty crazy thing to say. Doesn't like Xiaomi's car do that? Xiaomi, okay, you're thinking of the Yang Wang. Yang Wang. U9, I think is what it's called. That jumps over stuff. Which is just through purely, I think, hydraulic suspension will do small hops.
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So if you're driving forward, it'll jump a little bit and it can go over a pothole. Okay. But yeah, the idea is wherever you choose to put the cold gas thrusters on the car, that can give you some superpower basically that you couldn't pull off with just the friction of the rubber on the road.
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On the front. If you put it on the front, I don't know, three Gs of braking maybe. I don't know. If a small child jumps in front, he'll just blow them away and then you won't hit them. Yeah. This is, I mean, sports cars, like I said, are not practical. They are insane. Flagship cars that cost this much have insane features already.
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I've just, we've never seen a rocket company collab with a sports car before. A rocket social media AI coding platform. Now, of course, yes. They do many more things, allegedly. It's weirder to call it a collab when he owns both of them. Yeah. I mean, they're theoretically, SpaceX doesn't make cars.
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So hold on, hold on, hold on. Give Saab credit where it's due. Saab? Saab also made airplanes. Oh. While they were making cars. Okay. But they didn't do cold gas thrusters. No. Okay. Not yet. That's dumb. That's like a rocket.
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Well, it's really good for rockets, but it's obviously never been on other products before. But we've seen compressors on other products before. We've seen all sorts of other stuff. So yeah, it's a crazy invitation. I guess it's just another unveiling event. So that was my question to you, because to me, following CyberCab event, which was- Yeah.
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The second one. The second one, where they put it out there and everything blew up. Like, this is going to be a huge event, blah, blah, blah. And it was like four engineers sitting on a stage for like 10 minutes, not live streamed. Is the potential, without Elon, is the potential of this just like four engineers, a bunch of influencers invited, one drive each.
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Okay. I was guessing. No live stream. This is just another like- Well, there's one- We're still thinking about it. So that one, I think that CyberCab event was a bit- Even Tesla people would admit that was a bit of a weird event for them. This one has its own website. It's, you know, public, whatever.
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I think there will be people already invited, et cetera. I'm not invited, but fine. I think, if I was guessing, it's been so long since the original Tesla Roadster 2020 unveiling event that they can do another unveiling event showing that it's different now.
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And they don't have to- Like a totally different car? I mean, based on this teaser- This looks different. Yeah. This looks different. I've never seen any element like that on the Roadster, which I've seen plenty of images of. It kind of looks like the N74. It kind of has like a retro future taillight bar type of vibe.
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Maybe that's a diffuser. I don't know. But I think they'll just come out and roll a new Roadster out and go, this is it. And it's still not shipping. And it's still not ready, but we'll do some demo rides in the parking lot again. And it's going to have jumping ability or something.
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That'll be crazy. And I'm going to have your timeline again. Yeah. I think that's what's going to happen. And I still don't know when they're going to ship this thing. And I still don't know if they're going to honor the free ones that they promised to many people. Yeah. But yeah, maybe they'll show it jumping over stuff.
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Yeah. Okay. How legal is that? I don't know. Dude, does it matter anymore? I mean, it's not a real shipping product. It's not coming out. So it doesn't matter. Yeah. Like the amount of things that have been promised.
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Like I saw a lot of people being like, oh, if you referred a certain number of Teslas, you got guaranteed like 17% off a Roadster when it comes out. But I have no idea who to talk to about the fact that I technically have this ability.
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Yeah. Yeah. I guess I've probably talked about this like years and years ago in a video. But like there was an old referral program where if you had like a link that people clicked and bought a car, then there were some rewards that the referrer would get. Yeah.
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Like a bag or a t-shirt or whatever. Or a free Roadster. Yeah. Well, no. So once you pass a certain level, every additional referral that you made was 2% off of the Roadster. So if you got three referrals, then each one of those was 2 % off.
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So you could pay for the Roadster, put your 50 grand down, but then you get 6% off at the end. And then some people got 20% off and then 50% off. And if you got 50 extra referrals, that was 100% off, which my link was used that many times. I have just a Roadster free paid sitting in my account.
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And many people have multiple Roadsters sitting in their accounts right now. Many people have done the math on how much capital this would cost Tesla to ship all these free cars. It's like $20 million of cars that they owe people. And I think that they could wiggle their way out of it by claiming that this is an entirely new car.
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That is a funny way of wiggling it. Which is crazy. So insane. But if people, if the people that are just like ride or die Tesla are not mad about this, if they actually do try to wiggle their way out of it. It's a different car, David. It makes complete sense. Yeah. They'll, they, the ride or die Tesla people are mostly shareholders who are kind of just happy about anything that makes Tesla more money.
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Yeah. And so if they can wiggle their way out of 20 grand of $20 million of owed something, but oh, these entitled influencers don't need their cars, then whatever. They'll be happy. Chances are the people who have all the referrals also want Tesla to do well. So they're not going to make as big of a stink out of it because that would be bad.
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Yeah. So insane. But it is October 1st. And so at some point on that day, we'll, we'll see what happens. If any other company lied this much, they would be destroyed. I, I will push back on that slightly. There are lots of concept cars at CES every year that are just lies.
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Yeah, but they. They just have worse marketing. They're not collecting $50,000 from people. They would if they could. No, it's a fair day. The Sony Afila took money. Did they take pre-orders? I don't remember that. Faraday took money, right? Faraday. Oh God. The whole, yeah. Faraday took a lot of money as well. And what happened?
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They got destroyed. Yeah. Legally, they got, they got crime and punishment. They're just worse at marketing. Well, it's the difference between a company that's never shipped anything versus a company that has shipped some stuff before. Yeah. So trust has to be earned.
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Tesla has earned a lot of trust from a lot of people from the other stuff they've shipped, which has sort of masked how massive of a miss the Roadster was a decade ago. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So yeah, October 1st. October, Techtober is probably like a nice continuation of Techember.
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Guys. I think we don't even get a live stream for this. No. I think it's like the CyberCap event. There's a literal countdown on their website. There's definitely going to be a something. You think? Yeah. Yeah. But remember what happened? I feel like CyberCap felt like it was posted everywhere. Like, we can't wait till the CyberCap event. And that wasn't... They didn't have a website. I would bet anything this is live streamed.
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They haven't said like explicitly we're doing a live stream , but... Having a website with a countdown kind of implies that something happened this year. I don't remember if there was. And God King Elon said that... I'm glad... He said something along the lines of like being glad that people will be there in person because everyone who's watching online will think it's AI.
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Oh. Not real. So I said that. It's like sort of implied people will be able to watch it live. But also like who knows, you know, here I am believing something Elon Musk is saying. So it's like yeah. I just can't think of anything else that would happen at zero on a dedicated website with a countdown timer.
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A YouTube premiere. Of a video of a... It'll still be a video. I don't even... Like my thought was, is it even going to be that? Because CyberCap was just nothing. It happened. Like, do you remember Marquez was like, I'm going to watch it and then take notes. And then he just wrote, it's not here.
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It's nowhere. And all... And like half of Twitter was like, I wanted to see this. I... It's just nothing. Yeah. And weren't the people like NDA'd? Like we can't know anything. The people there had to wait a couple hours to post anything. Oh, okay. Yeah. What a freaking... Do you guys think... Hmm.
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How do I phrase this? Do you guys think it will have weapons? What do you mean by weapons? I mean... One of the only things we know about the Tesla Roadster is ... And this isn't an exact quote, but something along the lines of, if you took all the technology in every single James Bond car and combined them, it would not be as cool as this vehicle.
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Did they say that? Elon said that on Joe Rogan last year. That's just... Don't know what that means. It's a stupid comparison because yeah, half the stuff on James Bond is like our weapons. Yeah. Yeah, it's... Yeah. I don't think it'll have weapons. I think it'll be an electric sports car.
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It'll probably be like a smaller plaid with like the similar specs and then like this crazy SpaceX thing. And... It's just a plaid with gold paint on the wheels. SpaceX thing can't be legal on the road, right? Like that has to be a track only version.
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It seems... That is another possible thing is track only or whatever. I think it'll be like one of those... It's like there's no legislation that specifically says you can't do this. No, there has to be somewhere. There's no way. There's just like no legislation. Some sort of like propulsion outside of...
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Tech goes beyond what legislation is ready for all the time . So I'm not sure. Okay. I would look for it. But I'm not sure there's no rockets allowed on your car. Even if it's not no rockets, it's like... It's unsafe. There's noise ordinances. There's emission standards.
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There's rules. How could this work? Like what if you do it too close to someone and you freeze their bumper? What if you get lightly bumped and this hyper-pressurized gas container in your car... There are lots of things like that with regular cars now that seem just as crazy.
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Like most gas cars are like... If you stand right behind a Corvette and rev it, like you 're going to burn your legs. Oh, I know. There's a video of me getting blasted in the face by the Ferrari Puro Sangue. Yeah. Well, NOS is not legal on streets.
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Am I because of the explosive part? What is NOS? Nitrous oxide. Oh. Like you know in Fast and the Furious when they like hit the NOS. And then the Redbugs, yeah. I feel like actively changing your fuel mix. It's like a little more explosive. But yeah, like there are rules.
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I just don't know how many of them pertain directly to compressed air. We need like a space lawyer or a... Car lawyer. We need the NTSB. There is no space law. Remember that. Yeah. We had a whole episode about that. If you work for NTSB and already know of what law prevents some of this, I already know that there's like a render of like the license plate flipping down.
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I know that that's illegal. So that one, it won't be behind the license plate. But if you work in national highway transportation, whatever, please tell me what other laws that we should know about. There are laws. There's got to be laws.
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Wow. And with that... We're ready to type trivia. Oh, it's so hot in here. I'm just kidding. It's actually... It's very nice in here. Do I get to watch other people type before I type? That would be nice. Oh. Tin type. No. Oh, no.
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Okay. Marques Brownlee, you have in front of you a Google Notes app. I'm not sure which one. I didn't even know how to open it. Marques Brownlee, you have in front of you an instance of Google Keep and the 8VIM keyboard. I would like you to type like and subscribe before the trivia music ends.
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I believe that gives you 90 seconds. So however far I get, I should stop at the end. Yes. Has ever... Yeah, yeah. Stop at the end of the music. If you make it all the way through... Okay. I'm ready. I'm holding the phone. Ready? Yeah. Set. Go.
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I'm trying to not look at his fingers so it doesn't feel like I'm cheating. But I do want to look at his face. He's locked in. Again, we're looking for like and subscribe. You know someone's having a hard time when their eyes are flickering like up and down, up and down, up and down.
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It's like when Adam types on a keyboard. No commentary for Marques. He has locked in. I have not gotten a single letter. Okay. All right. Marques. Yep. How far did you get? I have typed absolutely nothing.
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Okay. Oh. I did several times close and open the keyboard by accident though. Okay. So that's something. I didn't make zero progress. Andrew, are you ready? I need to make sure that I'm able to type. Okay. I see the cursor. I just want to make sure Marques wasn't on like some...
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No, yeah. I definitely did something. Ready to go? Yes. All right. I'm starting the clock. Three. Or excuse me. Ready. Set. Go. No. No.
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No. Yes. Yes. I lost it. What do you mean you lost it? I have a different thing. Okay. There we go. I'm back. All you need is one letter to put you in the lead. Can you input a character on the 8-bomb keyboard? I say we all tie it.
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Zero. I got absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. Okay. David. I felt like I got some... If you can tie the letter L on this keyboard, you will get the trivia point this week. No other letter. I felt some haptic feedback and I thought I was cooking right off the bat. And then it just was like...
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Yeah. I lifted my thumb and I'll put this there. Okay. Ready? This could have been how we all typed, but we decided not to. I don't know how to use this, but let me know when I start. Perfect. Ready. Set. Go. Oh. That didn't work. Oh. Oh. Okay.
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Oh. Oh. What? Why didn't it... How's it going there, David? Why didn't it add it? This needs to be in the... I don't know how this works out. For audio listeners, L-I-K-E are all in the same stem. Oh. So it seems very obvious. Mm-hmm. I... Yet none of us have gotten a single character.
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50. Oh. Oh, that's because you just accidentally brought up the number keyboard. Oh. And typed 50. Well... Did that count? No. No. I was looking for the letter L, David. All right. Who would like to get...
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Be the phone holder when I teach you how to use this? I'll try it. I want to try it. Do it to Marquez. Yeah. Let's... So how does this work? Okay. Can I say... I... I... We all assume swipe just between it like regular swipe, right? We all tried to do that? Yes. There's this circle in the middle, so I was like, oh, maybe I end the word at the circle as like a enter.
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Yeah. Didn't work. I'll try that. Yeah. Okay. You're close, though. So the way this works is you have the circle in the center and then four quadrants around, right? Yeah. So you can see each quadrant has four letters on its left edge and four letters on its right edge. Yeah. You start with your thumb in the center circle.
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Oh. You swipe into the quadrant that you would like, that the letter of your choice is, and then you go around the circle the number of times for that letter. So if the second letter is L, up one, two quadrants, and then you go back to the circle and that inputs the character.
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Oh. Not like... Not two full times around in a circle. Excuse me. Two sections. Yeah. Two sections. Can I try? Do you see... Was this just like an experiment to see if they could and not something that people actually thought would be... What I'm looking for is innovation.
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Was this fun? It was awful. Everyone let me know in the comments if you had fun. Oh, I see. If we should do more trivia challenges. I got any points. I hate that. This is the worst experience I've ever had in my entire life. Yay. And that will only be changed on October 1st.
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All right. Yeah. No points. Second question. No points awarded on that challenge. Thank God. So, when Google launched Chromebooks in 2011, there were some small Chrome booths and stores inside of electronic stores. Quick clarification. The ones that were in the Best Buys were not these.
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These were in a couple stores in London. But it doesn't matter. What's the name of these stores? But it was Zone, right? Yeah. It was Blank Zone. Was it just Chromebooks or other stuff? It was Chromebooks. It was... Wait one second. Let me pull it up. Are you going to start the trivia music over when you say the new things?
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No, they were only Chromebooks. Only Chromebooks. Only Chromebooks. Okay. Oh. I can't think of anything. Yes, you can. We're all guessing, right? We're all guessing. Everyone's guessing. Flip them and read. What do you got? I wrote Chromezone.
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I also wrote Chromezone. Oh, boy. What'd you write, Marcos? G-Zone. That's... Please don't be Chromezone. Please don't. It was Chromezone. Let's go! I can tell Adam's like, I'm laughing to play a long face.
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And that's what he was doing the entire time we were joking about Chromezone. I would have seen it. Dude. We used to have... On the Apple campus. We used to have direct sight line. We used to have whimsy. Chromezone's awesome. Whoever named that is a king. Yeah. Well, no trivia points for me once again.
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But that's okay. I'm not that far behind. You have two. You did double your points that one. David has 11. Oh, my God. He has 11? Andrew has six. Oh, my goodness. David! This might be the farthest spread we've ever had. Yeah, I'll just get railed in f***ing trivia extravaganza again.
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Can we get tech trivia, please? I'm out of questions. I was Chromezone. I tried. I liked the 8-Vim thing. It was just very hard. Chromezone is... I'm sorry, Marcos. I've been doing the podcast for almost four years now. I genuinely feel like I'm running out of questions about phones.
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Just ask me about, like, old YouTube features or something. Or, like, it's so many points. The store that Google used to sell Chromebooks in. The Google store. Fast buy. The Chromezone. The Chromezone. Damn it. That was wrong again. That was a layup.
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That was a layup. I should have got that. But anyway, thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. And, of course, it's only halfway through TechTember, so get subscribed if you haven't already to see and be a part of the rest of this very exciting month and also TechTober. See you soon. Peace. Waveform was produced by Adam and Lena and Elis.
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We're a part of the Fox Me Up Podcast Network and intro to our music. We're here by Vance Hill. Bingo! Bingo! Let's go! Let's go!
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Wake me up when TechTember ends. Bingo! Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable.
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