Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Android 12 and the M1 iMac!

Episode Date: May 28, 2021

This week, we take a deep dive into the many announcements from Google I/O, before we welcome David Imel to the episode, who brings us an interview with Liam Spradlin, a designer with Google and someone who worked on Material You. Finally, we discuss the M1 Apple lineup and the new specs from the all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning. Links: Subscribe to the pod & share with friends: http://bit.ly/WaveformMKBHD Subscribe to the pod on YouTube for full videos: https://bit.ly/WVFRMPodcastYouTube https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://twitter.com/AdamLukas17 https://twitter.com/DurvidImel https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ shop.mkbhd.com Music by KamrenB: https://spoti.fi/2WRJOFh Liam Spradlin: https://twitter.com/LiamSpradlin Ford F-150: https://bit.ly/3bZfjET Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Having someone to talk to is truly a gift, especially during the holidays. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more and save 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com. help H ELP calm all right welcome back to waveform we're your hosts I'm Marques and I'm Andrew and we've got a lot to talk about today because we've got a lot of catching up to do and there's just been a bunch of news and stuff happening that we've got our reactions to and maybe a couple hot takes. So there's some good stuff. Yeah.

A lot of Google and Apple. That's a big focus. I'm just going to start with Google I.O. because we had Google I.O. last week. A lot of AI and software announcements and a lot of Android stuff. And I want to go through each of like some of these bigger bullet points and get your reactions, maybe give my reactions to them. Yeah, I think real quick before we do that, the reason we had our right to repair one last week

is because we were in California interviewing Sundar. That's on the channel. So check that out. But I'm sure a lot of people were wondering our thoughts on IO. So sorry, we're a week late, but yeah, yeah, like IO happened. So sorry we're a week late, but we're coming out. Yeah, yeah, like IO happened. And usually I will cover IO in a video or just sort of make a wrap-up or if there's some interesting stuff, I'll do a video about it.

But I didn't this year because as IO was happening, we were packing up all our stuff to go interview Sundar, the CEO of Google and Alphabet, in Mountain View. So we flew out there, and that was a whole thing. So I didn't make a video about a lot of the stuff, but we'll talk about a lot of it. And you should watch that interview with Sundar, which is just a fun little behind the curtain of the guy

that has been running this stuff for the past couple of years. And it's kind of cool. What smartphone do you have in your pocket and why? You know, it changes a lot. It depends on the day of the week. probably not as many as you play around with yeah and we found out that we were wondering if it was really live or not and it was oh that was live it was pretty cool them explaining that was one of the things yeah we were wondering if io was really live like they put the little live counter in the corner and they just said it was live

But it was so like well produced and well cut that I be convinced and it was quiet And we're like, I don't know if there's any way for us to prove it. This is not live But one thing I've noticed is there hasn't been a single noise in the background. No helicopters. No airplanes flying overhead They're shooting it outdoors. How is that possible? Before we were interviewing, I just asked Sundar about it. I was like, was it? It was live, right? And he was like, yeah, yeah. It was nerve-wracking for me.

It was definitely live. And I was like, how were there no airplanes or noises overhead? And he said they literally got a permit to restrict the airspace over their campus during the couple hours that they were shooting that. Wild.

Where do we get those permits? If we got that permit, it would shut down all of Newark Airport. Yeah, we're way too close to a major airport. Yeah, we're a little too small. But that's Google for you. Let's get into stuff they talked about. Yeah, let's do it. So first up, a couple of maps enhancements, more bike lane stuff, obviously the sort of

general improvements to Google Maps you expect. But one of them was eco-friendly routes. So now you can choose the fastest route or the route with no tolls or whatever other fast best route you want. This new one is eco-friendly route, which is cool. I don't know if I'm ever going to select that intentionally. That was my first thought of the eco-friendly route is like I'm always glad anyone's doing anything

that makes things more eco-friendly, but I'm trying to think of like the number you would see on your Google Maps where you get this will take 40 minutes and then the eco route takes 45 minutes. I think even five minutes, people are going to pick the just faster route. Yeah.

Like, it always sounds good to do eco. Like, you feel good about yourself, but most of the times when you're driving, you just want to get there as fast as possible. And I don't know what number people are going to not choose eco on. You know what's funny? I use Waze now almost all the time for any navigation. And Waze, even though Google owns Waze,

Waze is a little bit more hyper, like aggressive about saving you like 30 seconds to a minute and a half. So like if there's even a sniff of traffic on your usual route, it'll go a bunch of back routes to get you like, you know, around that one block of traffic. And it's like fine sometimes, but I've noticed it gets a little bit crazy. I don't know if you use ways but um no but i first of all ways the ui itself i just like google maps feels way more clean ways is very ugly yeah but claire and i actually have this like little conspiracy that do you know when you're on google maps and if you're driving it'll say like similar eta or uh usually is either ETA or it'll be like five minutes faster, five minutes slower. We're convinced that the first any five minute difference they don't add because then you might be like wondering if you should click on the new route or not.

If it's just a one minute difference. Oh, yeah. And if like that is turning into a safety issue of like somebody trying to decide whether they should take this turn to save one minute i believe so negligible yeah now yeah so google will do that ways will just take ways will be like you better get off now or you're gonna lose 30 seconds it'll it'll actively reroute me i'll be coming up to an exit and to be like now you know what take this exit and i'll be able to i bet that's just gonna jersey slide right now it'll do it and you know what? Take this exit. And I bet that's just going to save you one minute. Jersey slide right now. It'll do it.

And you know what? I'm fine with that. That's ways for you. Okay, one of the interesting things I asked Sundar about was Project Lambda. So this is weird. They went on stage and they demonstrated a little bit more. Every year they get a little better with understanding context and conversation with AI and Assistant gets better as a result.

Yeah. But they literally used information from the internet to create a character that you can then speak to and have a conversation with. So it's kind of like deep fake with audio and information. So basically you go and they use Pluto and a paper airplane. So you could walk up, walk up. You could just go, hey, Project Lambda,

let me talk to Pluto. And Pluto goes, I sense your excitement. Ask me anything. Tell me what I would see if I visited. You would get to see a massive canyon, some frozen icebergs, geysers, and some craters. It sounds beautiful.

I assure you it is worth the trip. However, you need to bring your coat because it gets really cold. Pluto, what's it like being so far from the sun pluto goes oh i'm just an ice ball and it just it knows everything about pluto and now it was really interesting to see that and the first place my brain went was like all right this reminds me of deep fakes what how far are they going to push this what are you going to be doing with project lambda in the future am i going to be able to talk to Elvis?

Because they know everything about Elvis. Can I ask about Elvis's controversial past and it'll give me an answer from something that Google knows about Elvis? Just a regular conversation everyone has with their friends. I don't know. And maybe there's living people you want to like have conversations with even though you can't. But then also it's going to give answers that that living person might not give.

So I don't know i felt like it was a it was a really as sundar put it they gave the most benign examples which is like what's it like to be a paper airplane i'm sure like a nine-year-old would want to have that conversation but project lambda to me immediately goes to like all right you can simulate a conversation with anything. What's it like being, I don't know, some crazy person? He was very adamant about saying how it's still just research and it's not necessarily a final product. But like you said, I wonder what is going to be that final product. And maybe we look back to something like, what was the name of the assistant that could make you a dinner reservation?

Or Google Assistant. Was it just Assistant or wasn't that? It was just inside of the like assistant that could make you a dinner reservation or google assistant it was just inside of the assistant it would let you like it would call a restaurant for you and reserve a table if it couldn't do it through open table or or whatever other reservation didn't the project have like a name uh duplex there you go do okay duplex and they they've made adjustments to duplex since yeah but uh yeah sundar said it's just to make conversation better with assistant and also for better context of understanding things inside of the rest of the web for example if i ask about and youtube kind of does this but if you search a tutorial on youtube like how to change the filter in your sink or something or your refrigerator youtube google will pull up a youtube video for you and then it will pull up little brackets

for a section inside the video that's most relevant to your search. I've missed this completely. It's really useful sometimes. Like I'll, because you know how this tutorial will open with, hi, my name is, please subscribe, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And by the time you get to two and a half minutes, you're like, I didn't need to watch any of this. I just needed the thing. So it'll tell you, watch from a minute and a, blah. And by the time you get to two and a half minutes, you're like, I didn't need to watch any of this. I just needed the thing.

So it'll tell you, watch from a minute and a half to two minutes for the thing you searched for, which is pretty useful already. Wait, wait, wait. When did they start doing this? This was years ago for me. Every time I search,

I look up a lot of tutorials and how-tos and things like that. And it auto-plays in that bracket? Yep, yep. You hit the play button and it starts right from the beginning of the bracket. So if you search for just the right thing, which is sort of a how-to, it will get really good at that. Do you think that's ever affected any of your videos on like searching for iPhone 12 camera

and like it would bring up your iPhone video and then just bracket the camera section? I don't think my videos are specific enough to that, but I wouldn't be surprised if something like Lambda would watch the video and be able to deliver that sort of information. Because I give chapters in my videos now, which I'm sure they can already look at, but I think this is something they could do better. I'm learning more from this than I am.

So, yeah, that was cool to see. I think it'll get better. So we'll just wonder what they're going to let us use and have conversations with. And hopefully it doesn't get too creepy. Yeah. There's a lot of creep potential on it. I've accepted that my deepfake ability is extremely high

and there's nothing I can do about it. Yeah, you've already had videos of you singing songs and stuff like that. And while we thoroughly enjoy them in the office, they are kind of weird. Just if you just think about like what types of people will be the the easiest to deep fake uh people who have a lot of high resolution videos of them online like the president because he's photographed and videoed from every angle or people who voluntarily upload 8k videos of themselves from here to here on the internet. Didn't Dave do a video where he did you and Lou?

Yeah, yeah, he deep faked himself as you and Lou from Unbox. I barely remember that. But just as deep fake technology gets better and better, they're just going to have more and more information to pull from. Like you have a decade of videos of the front of my face and high resolution audio of me talking, saying like thousands and thousands of words. And this podcast is just even more of that.

So yeah, that's, I've just accepted that, I think. All right, one more thing from, a couple more things from IO. Google and Samsung merging Wear OS and Tizen on a new smartwatch software experience. It's cool. It looked really good. Yeah. But there's no no hardware yet no i really want to see the hardware i think like the the main one of the main questions i get asked by people who know i work here is like is there going to be a new google watch like when

are we getting a google watch and you know this isn't necessarily a google watch but we're seeing samsung who a lot of people really really enjoy their watches and them coming together, which hopefully means something's coming in the future. And it has potential as well. They're saying it's going to have improved battery life, faster loading times for apps, smoother animations. It also makes developers' lives way easier because now you just have one platform to develop on between two of them. That's important um and then there's also the other thing they mentioned was standalone google maps without the need of a cell phone which is awesome and then spotify's got offline downloads for music so this like sounds like really really good things if you have use your watch for fitness and you're going

for runs and you don't you know have your phone with you to stay connected to. But yeah, like you said, no hardware. I mean, Samsung has been doing great with hardware. I think there's some talk of maybe a new Google watch, but when is there not talk of a new Google watch coming out?

Yeah, but they've been rumbling for a while and I feel like this is the year for them to do it. Especially if pixel happens the way we think Pixel is going to happen, which is they have their own silicon and they're starting to vertically integrate more and they launch a watch alongside it. That would all sort of make sense this year. I guess every year it doesn't happen.

It makes even more sense for them to do it that year. But I'm just saying, I think this is a good year for that. I also, every time I review the Apple Watch, like to look on the other side of the fence and see if there's anything anywhere close. And I reviewed the OnePlus Watch lately and it's not close. So seriously, yeah, I'm excited for this. Cameras being aware of different skin tones. I really was interested in this one.

So photography. How far back do I go with this? How deep do I go? Photography in standard cameras is pretty straightforward. There's not a whole lot of computation happening. Smartphone cameras with computational photography make a lot of adjustments and smart decisions based on the data that the sensor gathers. So they'll take a bunch of exposures and do different merging of different areas based

on the exposure. So highlights will use part of the exposure and shadows will come from a different shot and faces. And then they start to get even more intense where they'll take the frame where you're smiling where the background is empty because there's no lady walking blurred in the background. So they're starting to merge realities into one frame.

So the photos that come out of our smartphones are actually representative of the development that goes into them. And something we've always, at least I've always noticed is a lot of smartphones have trouble, especially on the selfie camera with darker skin tones, especially when there's a lot of bright objects around, you'll just sort of become a shadow um and so specifically on google on stage they they decided and announced that they would be uh adjusting for darker skin tones and and trying to make those more accurate specifically because people with darker skin didn't feel correctly represented in their photos and this is weird because it's just something i like accepted for a while i was like smartphone cameras are just going to do the best they can for the average skin

tone, which is much lighter. And that's just the way it is. And if my skin tone is darker than that, I'm just going to look like not quite right in photos. And that's just something I've just accepted. And so Google making that conscious adjustment and I hope to see it actually in action pretty soon. It was really cool.

Yeah. A couple of things I'm interested in is like one, how well it does when then there are multiple skin tones. I can only assume they're not doing this to just be like, recognize one person in the photo has darker skin and then adjust everything around it. I'm assuming they're just going to be able to adjust parts of photos in order to correctly expose everything. I'm really excited, especially if this comes out this year. My favorite video every year is the smartphone bracket. The blind smartphone camera test.

Exactly. And one of the first shots we always do is a photo of you. And it's generally in a pretty well-lit, could consider bright space. And it's always the most wildly different because phones from all over the place just completely have their own a mind of their own and in terms of how they're going to expose things i mean yeah it gets to the point where i think iphone last year two years ago just like blew everything that's where you see computational photography at work it's like the iphone has decided that it wants to turn a certain thing

white or it needs to turn a certain thing neutral. And once it's decided that the whole rest of the frame just sort of falls in step with that decision. Yeah. And yeah, I feel like a lot of the ones that were taking the best photos were just the ones not getting thrown off by too many different stimuli in the photo. So, yeah, one of the earliest photos we always take is was one of the most telling so yeah maybe this uh we'll see how it rolls out in the google photos update sometime soon this is the other thing about io is almost every single thing they announced on stage was like coming later this year coming early next year coming in the upcoming months like we didn't really get dates for any of these things, which is a little worrying. Some of them you just feel like you'll never see this again for the rest of your life.

We keep referencing the Chainlink fence, which was a software Google Photos feature. 2017, I think. It was announced on stage and it had a big wow moment on stage and then it just straight up never happened. Never. I have photos of chain link fences on my phone still. Saving them for when it comes out. Someday they'll get rid of the fence, but it was announced and never happened. So I guess that's the nature of software,

but that's interesting to me to see how that goes. Another one, do you want to talk about this one? Google Photos animating? Before we get to Android 12, I just threw this in. They had that small section one? Google Photos animating? Before we get to Android 12, I just threw this in. They had that small section of animated Google Photos where it would take your photos and pretty much animate them. And I just want to say it was really weird and creepy. Just to paint a picture, it's another just like blurring of reality.

Is it taking like a live photo and kind of doing, or is it doing the thing where it like, you know, you can take a singular photo and kind of like distort the perspective a little bit and it looks like somebody's moving. Is that. Yeah. So this is basically taking advantage of the fact that most people actually take a bunch of photos of a single scene. And that's kind of the way it goes. Like a bunch of people get in front of a wall and you just fire, fire, fire, fire, fire and you take like eight, nine, 10 photos

and you only really need one of them. But Google's noticed people don't really use the rest and if they look at all of those photos, there might be like a pattern of something. Someone flips their hair, someone walks into the photo, something cool happens and then they'll just make an animation out of that and they've kind of been doing that in Google Photos.

I think I have a video or a slideshow of Mac doing something. Because I take like 12 photos of Mac trying to get him to look at the camera. And then he looks at the camera. And then you have this like 20 photo long sequence of him not looking at the camera. Now I'm just going to have an automatic Google animation of Mac just looking at the camera like that'm just gonna have an automatic google animation of mac just looking at the camera like that which is a little creepy it's gonna be really funny when those ones like bug out and it's like five pictures but the fifth one or like one in the middle is mac like whipping his head to the wrong side and just like the animation is back turning his head and then it

just like completely the wrong direction man yeah that yeah. That'll be, if that ever happens, it's just going to have a lot of meme potential, I feel like. True. And some people are going to think it's really cool and then show their friends once and never use it again. I think I would chalk that in that category. Seems likely. But one of the biggest parts that we were interested in is Android 12.

We finally got our look at Android 12, which is not named after a suite again it's just android 12 it's the newest version but it is i think we can safely say the biggest overhaul in the visual style and the look of android since the beginning which is really interesting um there's also a bunch of new features added in. But I just generally, I feel like we really haven't seen Android make big visual steps for a while. And every time I talk about this in videos, it's always like, all right, here's my top five new features of Android, 10 dot whatever, 11 dot whatever. Keep in mind, it's very mature and there's not a whole lot to change here. Because earlier versions of Android would just go hollow.

And then, you know, material design, they would just change up all the time until they figured out their thing. So we've kind of been in a groove for a while. So this is a big change for Android. I think what we'll do is take a quick break. We'll come back. We'll bring David on. And David actually got to talk to Google about some of these changes they made and some of the new features. So we'll go over all that right in a minute. Soon time, shortly.

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You never know. Ambition is on the inside. So that thing you love, keep doing it. Drive your ambition. Mitsubishi Motors. So let's go ahead. We actually have David sitting over here right off camera. If you want to slide in here. Hello, boys. Hello. Welcome to the table. I'm here. I don't know how you got here so fast. Have you been there the table I'm here I don't know how you got here so you've been there the whole time I don't really know how I got here either I was actually in the studio and now suddenly I'm here it's a teleporting machine yeah I knew it yes all right David tell us about these conversations you had and what you find out because obviously Android 12 looks

really different I'm not sure if they have reasons why do they even talk about that or does it just happen? Yes. There are reasons why. There is so much to go over here. Real quick, I want to give people like, do you guys know like why material design existed in the first place? No. I feel like I have

my general thought on it, which is it's material. It's supposed to feel like part of reality. Like if you, almost like the skeuomorphic theory where, yeah, the materials that overlap in real life feel like the materials that overlap in a digital space and it tactically makes sense to you. Right. Yeah.

So like back in 2014, when they made material design, it was kind of supposed to be this guideline for developers to understand how to make digital interfaces that felt like materials. Right. Because the definition of making something intuitive is that you already know how to use it. And if you already know how to use paper, so why shouldn't you know how to use a digital interface? So that's why if you look in like Google Keep or like any other Google app that uses a material kind of interface, Google Keep or like any other Google app that uses a material kind of interface. It's all these like floating things that are over the top of each other and they have hamburger menus and they move over each other. But at this point, material design, it's a little bit outdated just because like you mentioned specifically, skeuomorphism, right? That was a thing that was very popular for

a long time in kind of like building technological interfaces. But over time, we've kind of gotten to this point where like people are feeling a little bit disconnected from their technology, right? Everything feels a little bit industrial. You look at our iMac Pros and our Mac Pros and like everything is just very like metal box, right? very like metal box right um so anyway like you mentioned i talked to uh liam spra spredlin who is a design advocate at google for material design uh he's been working on the material design team for a long time and i kind of talked to him about like okay what was the like motivation

towards this move towards material you what are you guys trying to really get out of it and what like what should people be excited about for it? So right now, I'm going to play a little game with you guys, if you're down. I'm going to play three clips from the conversation that I had with Liam. And there's three pillars of Material You that they really made in order to kind of be the foundations of what they want

this to be so we're gonna play the clips and then i want you guys to guess what these pillars are okay three pillars does winter get anything uh i'll make a meme of you sweet that's gonna happen anyways yeah okay all right adam if you can take that away. Sure. I think, I mean, I think that happens constantly throughout the process and there's a lot of stuff like that from previous iterations of material as well. I think like something that comes to mind is doing explorations with a few folks of like what, what one interface might look like across a range

of scenarios and pushing for instance like the layout of controls on a screen or like the placement or the size and like pushing those as far as you possibly can until it's like very obviously broken yeah and then like figuring out why it's very obviously broken and trying to bring it back to a place that's still like um doing something new but completely functional are we guessing now what that theme is uh yeah let's guess now let's guess now so based on everything he said um there's a lot of you know it's a lot of words yeah but what what do you think that theme was? It sounded just like responsiveness between mobile and tablet and desktop. Having this understandable flow between different sizes, continuity.

So you said sizes. Sizes is one of the big pillars that I grabbed from this conversation. So we're going to play the next one okay something that i realized recently was something that matias said in the presentation was this thing about like form follows feeling and i had to like think about that for a while and to like understand how that works with the system. And I, and I think like, you know, we're probably familiar with like the rhetorical device of form follows function or,

you know, debating the relationship between form and function. Like the form has to accommodate the function and is therefore always informed by the function. But then after you've formed it, the function can change so okay yeah I know I know it's a lot

it's a lot what would you guys say this pillar is form function I mean function was the word he said the most form shape versus function form following function yeah so form shape form over function yeah function of form function of x okay yes okay

uh so that one that one's shape i know this is this is all yeah i've tried to this okay it's a mini game size we're playing sizes and shapes all right we got size shape and then there's one more that we're gonna play and then we're going to really dive into this. Sure. I think from a color perspective, color expression is something that we've always been trying to build on in material. And I think that like, as we approached this from the mindset of creating something that's adaptive and something that changes for every user, like that seemed like a huge potential component of that.

Sure. So typically, when you're designing an experience, there are accessibility guidelines for the contrast that two colors should have against each other. And these guidelines change based on whether it's body size text or large text, or even if it's something like an icon or a decorative element or something like that. And what we found is that extracting colors and generating tonal palettes for them based on the hue values and yeah based on the hue values was not consistent enough to allow us to get this universal approach to extracting colors from pretty much anything and applying that to a UI.

But we did find that measuring the luminosity of that got us to a place where we could reliably generate how many ever tonal palettes it is and select certain spots within those palettes that would work together in an interface. I think, I think like behind the scenes, when when the colors are being generated, there's dozens of colors. So it could be 40, 50, 60, because we're extracting like a certain type of color from the image, like the colors that are salient to the image and then also ones that might be accents or secondary kind of a secondary level of saliency i guess and then from there extrapolating those into each their own tonal palettes and drawing from those in various ways so um their color the color this one was the easier one this one's the easier easier one. I'm so smart. Yeah.

So, okay. That's a lot. Yeah. That's a lot. But based on our conversation, these are the three pillars that I kind of pulled out about Material You, right? We've got size, shape, and color as like the main reasons that Google wanted to like, the main things Google wanted to bring to Android, right?

So, a big part of Android 12 is, if you've seen it, everything's big. Yeah. You know, it's like... Huge. Huge. Yeah, huge even. And Liam told me that, like, you know, the settings menu,

the quick settings menu, there's the clock on the front of the phone when the display's off. It's massive. Massive. But it feels good, right? I would say it's the number one thing in our discord that people were talking about. Yeah.

When it got announced was like oh everything is so big. I don't know how I feel about that. And it's very different. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very forward facing thing. And what Liam told me is that like they decided they wanted to kind of like mess with things until they broke and then understand why they were broken and then kind of pull it back.

And so they were messing with size and they were like, this still feels fine. This still feels fine. Yeah, this is this is interesting to me because I saw that that is also we can probably talk more about color in a bit. number one thing I noticed was with the size of like the buttons and the spacing of how far apart things were, is I always feel like there was this subtle, maybe it was even said before this subtle mission to get rid of unnecessary empty space. And the more they had like blank white space in between buttons or in between text, the more it felt like things were wasted. So they wanted to like put an icon there or, or tighten things up just a little bit so you could see more, get more information

out of this big screen phone you have. And so this pretty radical flip of that switch to like, whatever, we don't need to maximize all this space. We want to give you big touch targets, big understandable information. And if you got to scroll, then you got to scroll is really fascinating.

I wonder if it has to do with just the fact that our phones are bigger than they used to be and you don't need To maximize the amount of stuff on that screen, but also it doesn't look terrible Yeah, I think it's a combination of things right like there's that almost aspect of digital well-being where What we've always wanted to do with screens is just maximize Information density, right? That's always been kind of the goal is just like, how do we get as much information on a screen as possible,

especially on something that's in our pocket? It's like, for some reason, there's this like linear idea that the more information you have, the more productive you can be. But now we're kind of scaling these things back to like, what if we just want to focus on doing one thing? Right. And so the quick settings menu is a good example. It's massive. Yep. You have six options instead of 20. But you generally only need to use like, one of those six anyway. Yeah, that is a good point. When I open quick settings,

it's not because I'm here to go flip five different settings i'm here to swipe down and hit note like airplane mode and leave or i'm here to swipe down and hit the flashlight button for like five seconds and turn it back off and leave so having a huge easily findable icon and touch point is theoretically better form and function yeah than having nine of them clustered next to each other just for the sake of information density. So I guess I get that. The way you explained it kind of made, because as I'm looking at this, I'm thinking about how I generally set up my computer or my phone, and I'm the kind of person who drags everything to the smallest size possible. And I think like my phone, the whole front of it's completely blank basically and just has a couple apps on it.

But when I look at these new designs for material, I like them despite them being so big. And the more I think about that, you mentioning focusing on something, I think the reason I dislike having my whole page filled with apps on my phone or maybe big icons on my desktop is like it's too much. It's too cluttered. There's too many things that are distracting. And when I make things very small, I can almost ignore it. If I only have four icons on my phone, I'm focused on those things.

Those are what I want. And like Marques said, he said like when you bring down quick settings, you only are generally going to do one thing. If on your home screen you only have four apps, maybe those are the four apps you generally use anyway. Did you ever have a phase where you had no icons on your home screen at all? You mean my life right now?

Do you currently? Are you a zero app person right now? Yeah. I had this. Okay, I'm going to just describe this. I don't know if I can find a video where I did this because I don't even know if it's on my own channel, but I had a setup on my phone where it was just a clock, right? And there were obviously you could swipe up and you knew that certain gestures would like do certain

things like open the app drawer so I could get to apps. But then I went so far as like mapping certain blank widgets to do different things. So I would touch the clock, it would open the clock. I would touch the top corner because I knew that would open the weather. I didn't want to have to see it. It would just be blank, but I would just go up there to the weather where I could swipe over and get to my contacts.

So yeah, I had that setup for a while, and it felt really good. It was really clean and minimal. And then I think I got a new phone, and I was like like this whole setup was a little over the top and then i just went back to just putting icons it's like a chore to keep things clean i i like i feel like every time i set up a new computer i hope i'm not the only one that does this but like completely blank yeah desktop completely blank and then you slowly

just start saving things in there and then it gets really messy and you're like okay and then you make a folder called desktop and then you drag everything into that so i only have one one icon there and then six months later yeah messy new new desktop and drag all that including the old desktop folder into that and it's just spirals out of control yeah i haven't done i haven't done the desktop everything folder but I do consciously decide time to clean this up and I will delete a bunch of stuff and make it cleaner. No, it's like real quick. It's funny, like you mentioned, like making your home screen as basic as possible

and then like adding complexity to systems in order to like quick launch something with three taps of a button or like hitting a space on the, you know, just like. Yeah. It's this weird obsession that we have. And so if that's the case, if we're gonna be doing that, why not just make things bigger?

Because then it looks cleaner. It does look cleaner. And you still have the same functionality. So I don't wanna spend too much time on shape, or on size, but I think that's a big thing. And then also, Material You is supposed to be kind of a universal design language that works across devices.

So across tablets, phones, watch, all that stuff? Watch, yeah. Possibly. But the Nest Hub, obviously. Okay. If you look at Nest Hub right now, it almost has a Material you-ish look. Yeah, a lot of big icons.

A lot of big icons. And it's the same idea of like when you walk up to the Nest Hub, generally you're going to be using Google Assistant with your voice, but like just big things so you can see it across the room. You can turn a light on.

You can do this. A light switch is a big thing on the wall, right? It's not like it's this little tiny thing you've got at um so yeah so it's it's it's just this way to like just kind of like stretch things to the biggest they can make them and if they feel uncomfortable scale it back but surprisingly people are okay with things feeling big yeah um anyway so second pillar shape shapes this is one that I find really interesting I feel like shapes are very subjective yes you either you don't yep yeah that's just me yeah yeah you know but but you had mentioned earlier the

skeu morphism right yep so when Google made material design design has kind of always been about like keeping similar in design is basically if you have a design language, it means that everything should kind of fit into that language. Everything should feel cohesive. And the easiest way to do that is to make things skeuomorphic. So if you look at like widgets in old Android before they redesign the widgets, they're like rectangles with some more rectangles inside. They're super basic squared off i remember the leather notebook days of like you'd open the notebook app and it would just be like a leather notebook on the top and you could write on the lines of the paper yeah

yeah sometimes so like this obsession with skeuomorphism but this is another thing that kind of i think plays into the like our tech no longer like it doesn't feel human it feels industrial right and we you know especially in the last year with like the pandemic and everything everyone started to feel like very disconnected from their tech they feel like it's almost creating like a negative headspace for them and like a good way to like make tech feel more natural to you is to try to make it feel more human. And what are humans? We're really freaking messy. We are not perfect.

We have stuff on the floor in our rooms, you know, our desks or whatever. So like if you look at the new widgets, for example, that Google is adding to material you, I think is one of the coolest updates because they are taking this skeuomorphic idea and they're just throwing it in the garbage can. Basically, yeah. Completely. If you look at some of these animations, Andrew's got his computer here.

The clock, the home screen clock widget that they added is, I think, one of my favorite things. It looks really nice. It's like... This is... Okay. Marcus did say shape is you know it's got a little

Ikea feel to it I feel like this is definitely something that's gonna no it's I'm gonna it's gonna take me some time to get used to this

I feel like Brandon would be big into this I'm this feels very Brandon I'm big big into it I like if you think of like

this is like the form follows function follows feeling thing that they were talking about that Matias was talking about. So like obviously, OK, if you have you need a function, you say I need a clock. The form of the clock, the most basic form of making a clock is making it a circle. Right. Because that is literally how you need you need a circle so that you can measure things against degrees.

But the form of a circle is not super human. It's very schemorphic. So then if you say, okay, let's take that form and kind of add a human element into it, this is the kind of perfect example of that, of like adding kind of this weird sun shape. Yeah. Marques looks like he has some opinions on this.

It almost feels like a toy, like snow. So, okay, the point you made earlier about tech being more industrial, I actually really like the clean, minimal hardware aesthetic. Robot. You're a robot. No, I mean, like you look at, maybe it's just because it's a work thing, but

this desk being perfectly rectangular or being very thin, I refused to get a certain standing desk, even though it was probably just as good, because the front of it was like this sloping curve that you would be in the curve and it would curve around you and it's this human natural shape.

I was like, no, just give me a rectangle. Was that one of those gaming desks? No, it was like an up desk or something and like the protos play xdr being this perfect rectangle with like the solid straight back edges like i just i like my ui and my interface to be a certain level of clean and so this android 12 aesthetic definitely deviates from the typical clean aesthetic that i'm used to it is still pretty flat here's a question for you yeah here's a question for you though like clean could work for anybody right but weird shapes that you get to like dictate yourself and decide like maybe i want this oval, maybe I want this to be a star, maybe I want this to be this.

Would you say that that adds a level of personal touch to it? I mean, I totally get what you mean, because I also love the way the Pro Display XDR looks, and I do like industrial-looking things. But for things that we use every single day, like our smartphone, like I'm of the opinion that like adding as much personal touch to that as possible. And I think that's why people customize their home screen so much. I agree.

I just do all of that personal touch with color. Okay. And so I really like the color part, which we're about to get into. But I would much rather have a bunch of rectangles with the exact same radius and let me change the colors of each of the things so I can identify function yeah rather than just squiggling all sorts of random different radii and shapes in there yeah okay before we get to color I do want to say that they did mention that like while the shapes are weird and kind of like feel sort of random they still they're quirky

uh they still do follow design principles so like i would call this super clean it's just uh yeah it's like work you're clean yeah it's that it's that in between of stretching to something to where it almost feels uncomfortable but then still using like the same radii the same you know that clock widget has the same curve it's not the same radii that that clock widget has the same curve. But it's not the same radii. That's the thing. It's flat but not clean. I'm just looking at these.

Are we looking at different? Yeah, that's exactly what I'm looking at. So these icons, circles. This weather widget, not quite a circle. This circle widget, also squiggly. So these are all fundamentally different shapes and different radii. This is a different radii rectangle.

Everything on the entire screen should be. Okay, so you're saying the cohesiveness between all the different widgets. Yeah. I think you have the ability to do that if you want though. Okay. Right? So that's kind of the. They're just introducing a lot of different things.

And also like the widgets, they're adding so much functionality. We just thank God like Android widgets have been, they haven't been updated for so long. The stock Google ones. Yeah, the stock. Because the third party ones, I always go straight to the third party ones and there's tons. So I'm happy to see Google update theirs. But I think Google was very pressured by Apple because now that Apple added widgets and they're actually pretty good. How about that?

Yeah, right? How about Apple doing widgets? I know. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they added a lot of cool things to the widgets. Like, there's so many different elements they added, like these radio boxes and just, like, you can do so many crazy things.

And Google is trying to update. We'll see if it actually happens. They're trying to update the widgets for all of their core apps and kind of use them as examples of the different things that you can do now with all the new widget APIs they're adding, which is cool. So, okay. Nice. That's good.

Last one, and I think the one that probably sticks out the most, if not the second most, to people is color, right? I think the core fundamental part of Android 12 that I think is going to make it feel very personal is this new color palette thing that the system is building for you. And if you think about it, your wallpaper is like the first thing that you do to personalize your phone and the most personal thing that you do to personalize your phone, right?

Almost every single person has a different wallpaper. Change your wallpaper, change your life. That's exactly. I saw your tweet the other day. Exactly. If you think about it, like we were other day. I was all on board. Exactly. If you think about it, like we were just talking before about minimalism on desktops and stuff, and that's probably because all of us really enjoy the wallpaper that we're posting on that and want less clutter taking over that wallpaper.

Yeah. Yeah. So what Google is doing here is they're basically, they derived this algorithm that takes the base colors from your wallpaper and then it derives a palette from that. Yeah. So it's like looking at a wallpaper, finding what the color palette is of that wallpaper, and then making your system theme that color palette. Super cool.

Yeah. Would love to see it work on different images and wallpapers. Like I want to take a picture of the studio and see what it decides the color palette is. Super interesting to me. So something really cool about it too is they were messing with this, right? They wanted to make this universal algorithm that could work for any photo.

And at first they were like, okay, when we're developing this algorithm that creates this palette, how do we decide what colors are based on the palette? Like, okay, you can take like a color that's almost exactly the same as the primary color in the wallpaper. You can take a, uh, complimentary color cause it pops against it. And they're still, they're still doing that, but they don't want to just have like two colors for the theme. Right. And by the way, this, um um color palette gets applied to your entire system theme

which is awesome and you can change it you can change it manually but it's like an automatic thing so your quick settings will change color like uh that clock on the front will change color so the cool thing is that they're taking like a complementary color like something like orange if you have a blue wallpaper and that will be sort of an accent but the way that they're creating like the main color palette is they're using luminosity so instead of changing hues because hues if you were to like that's physically shifting the color right that doesn't always work universally across like every single image right but changing the luminosity of a color just making something brighter or something darker automatically adds contrast so that's something that ended up working for the and they

they were stretching this like forever they finally came across this luminosity thing if you look at this animation of like showing the clock on the front of the display and you think like how do they always make sure that the clock looks good on this photo? It's got a contrast. Because it takes the primary color and then it adds a little bit of luminosity. So if you add brightness or darkness to a color, it adds contrast naturally, which is really cool. Yeah, so it matches, but you can still read it without it getting lost. Exactly.

Yeah, it's really smart. And it just like applies it to the system theme. And I think this idea of like making your device feel more personal to you, color is such a good way to do that because your wallpaper is like the first and most important personal touch that you can add. Yeah. Can I ask a personal question? Sure.

What? I didn't know it was that kind of podcast. Two-part question. How often do you change your wallpaper? I wanted to ask this also. And what is your wallpaper? Is it an abstract? Is it a photo of a thing or a person?

I knew this was going to come out eventually today. I'm just, I'm curious. I have a bunch of like hard rules for my own wallpapers. I change my wallpaper maybe once every three months on my phone, something like that. Yeah. And it is always abstract. Yeah.

It is always abstract. It's never a photo. I've always found those too busy and something like that. Yeah. And it is always abstract. Yeah. It is always abstract. It's never a photo. I've always found those too busy and too contrasty. Interesting. And I always like to roast my sister for having, in the past, she's had a photo of herself as her wallpaper. And I like roasting her for that because I think you should just not do that. But I'm curious what you guys do.

Yeah. Okay. So obviously when I was reviewing a new phone every single week, I changed my wallpaper every time I would set up a new phone just because people in the comment sections always want to know what your wallpaper is, and it's just fun. I tend to use photos that I find on Reddit,

the film photography subreddit, and then also photos that some of my friends take that are great photographers photos so photos so like right now i am using this photo um from my friend brian who just took this i don't know you probably don't know we can screenshot it i could take a screen recording but it's like it's just a photo of like a desert and now on an iphone since all the icons have to be at the top half do you think about about that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I freaking hate it. It's part of my reason I can't do iPhones.

I can't. I really, really, really hate iOS. A lot. That's one of the biggest problems with wallpapers and iOS is 90% of photos don't work because the most important part of the photo is at the top behind all your icons. Yeah. So if you do a photo of a person, their face is somewhere in the icons. It just doesn't work. So you do a photo of a person, their face is somewhere in the icons. It just doesn't work. So you do something else.

There's also one that I found that specifically adds a blur to the image. So it's not just a straight photo, but you import it into this app, adds like a slight blur. You can adjust it. So just it makes it a little more. Make that your wallpaper. Then the icons pop a little bit. It's a little more flat, and it looks like more of a render,

but it's still your photo. That could be cool. Yeah. What was your? Let's do it photo. Yeah. That could be cool. Yeah. What was your... Let's do a way for audio listeners. We'll have one other person describe the other person's...

Oh, yeah. That's fine. I'll describe David's here real quick. Okay. Sure. Sure. I'm gonna go lock screen first because that's the cleanest on iPhone. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. All right. So desert foreground with a lot of really cool lines coming towards you at the camera and then in the background some mountains and you have a skyline and a moon the moon like really cool the moon is important to me because you can uh in between the icons it fits in between the icons so you can still see it yeah but what i really like pretty frequently what i like about the front or the lock screen is the when the time comes up it's perfectly like on the horizon yeah and looks really clean then again my issue with iphone is once you go into the icons you lose everything you it's still

nice that you still get these lines on the bottom and the sand coming at you but yeah then it goes to ruins the whole photo okay all those notifications too right i will describe marquez's this is i've used this one for a while. Which Mac OS wallpaper is this? Or iOS. I don't even know. I think it was Mac OS. iOS on your OnePlus? That was Mac OS right before the current one.

Yeah, I think it's a Big Sur wallpaper. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great wallpaper to me because it separates my highs and lows. It's abstract, so it's not too crazy. Here's my lock screen. Got my time up there in the blue. Easy. Got the red, which matches the red. It's just a bunch of stripes. It's not too crazy. Here's my lock screen. Got my time up there in the blue. Easy. Got the red which matches the red.

It's just a bunch of stripes. It's easy. I think you've actually become quite known for the style of wallpapers. Yeah, colorful, hard line, very contrasty lines. Yeah, but I'm totally cool with adding a blur to this or having something sort of of clean and like simple. Because as soon as I start going like a photo

there will be like a tree in it that's like too busy and then the icon over the tree doesn't quite overlap the tree the right way and it's just all off and I can't do it. Can I say that Google search bar drives me insane. It does a little bit. I've got the tiny Google search bar. I want to search by hitting the G which doesn't bring up

the search thing so I would have to have a bigger search bar, I want to search by hitting the G, which doesn't bring up the search thing, so I would have to have a bigger search bar to actually hit the search thing to open the keyboard straight away, so that does annoy me sometimes, but I do like keeping it. Yeah, not a fan of that. Okay, I'm going to describe Andrew's wallpaper and I think this is hilarious because I used this as my Windows 10 desktop

wallpaper for like four years. Is that a Firewatch wallpaper? It's like Firewatch style. It's Firewatch style. This one and the one that has the deer in it are like yeah but I that might actually be the one with the deer it's just cuz it might be but it's I think my desktop at home has the same so you know it's funny about this this is almost a combination between like the extreme cleanness and colorfulness of Marquez's and then a little bit more detail that is in mind. It frames the time.

It frames the time very well. The time could be like the moon. Does it bother you that you can't get rid of the Google widget at the very top? Or do you use that date and weather? I actually really like how it looks there to be honest. It's like nice white contrast on the darker sky and then I mean weather right there. I'm

totally fine with that. Anyway, a little off topic. Wait, guess how long I've had this wallpaper for? Since you got the phone. I've had this since I got my Pixel 3 and I just transferred it. Same wallpaper. I have attempted

to change it and I look at it once after. I'm like, oh, this is really nice. I set it all up and then I like turn my phone on and I'm like, whose phone is this? And then I just change it and I look at it once after I'm like oh this is really nice I set it all up and then I like turn my phone on and I'm like whose phone is this and then I just change it. Change your wallpaper change your light. That's exactly I change my wallpaper so infrequently that like it feels

so good when I change my wallpaper I feel like I got a new phone basically for one image. I don't even change the layout that much but when I do change my wallpaper it changes the whole mood of when I use the phone. If'll do like a darker like simpler wallpaper I'll be like it's all business like my screen on time is getting cut in half I'm gonna use my phone to yeah those people they just have the black OLED wallpapers and nothing else one of my friends is like That he's a maximalist and he just has icons everywhere and he's just a black OLED wall

and it's just a black OLED wallpaper. I'm just like, holy, look at Adam right now, Adam. Oh, I'd pass out. Okay, and then something I want to bring up too is like, what I think is kind of cool about Material You is that if you look at Google's product stack, right, they've kind of always, they developed a hardware look over the last few years. And it started with the original Google Home. Looks like an air freshener.

Sits in your kitchen. It's white, so it blends into that white wall, kind of like the iMac, the bezel. And they kind of developed this friendly, they use a lot of materials, like these fibers. The mesh. Mesh fibers that are kind of like these bright, cheery colors.

And they developed this like hardware design look but the software design didn't really connect with that it didn't really like you know it was very different it was just kind of like android on top of that but now because luminosity like when you when you bring up luminosity you bring down luminosity it skews towards palette uh pastels and there's a lot of pastel in android 12 and a lot of the materials and fibers that they use in a lot of google's hardware are pastel you look at the new google tv pink pastel yeah blue pastel you look at their the nest hubs they the fibers they used are pastel colors apple's color scheme too they've got all these pastels yeah ipads this laptop all these like yeah light green light red and i think that might be just be a design trend in right now yeah you know um but it's kind of cool that google is finally starting to feel like their software

is becoming more cohesive with the hardware it lives on. And that's something that like obviously Apple has done really well for a long time. They kind of developed that. But Google's have kind of always had this like separate hardware team, separate software team. But now it's feeling more cohesive. And then if you want to really look into the future, it's like they're doing Whitechapel now.

So like to me, it looks like they're doing white chapel now so like they to me it looks like they have this master plan and i know i'm probably like just projecting here but like it feels like they have this master plan where they really want to create an ecosystem of products that feels cohesive because traditionally they've just made a ton of random stuff that sort of works together sometimes but now everything is kind of like merging. So it feels like they're moving towards kind of the Apple direction. But either way, I think, just kind of wrap up the Material You stuff,

I think that Material You is like, like you said, one of the biggest changes they've made in a very long time. I think that they're going to stick with this design for a while because they haven't really changed anything significantly since like after they got off Holo. You know, they moved off Holo.

Holo was a fun time. It was. Do you remember the Tron look of like a tablet, the zoom? Yeah. That was peak like Holo. Yeah, just like the light blue against black. Yeah, Tron days. It was great.

So, yeah. No, I mean, I think that's about it for Material You but I personally I'm a big fan. I think we'll have to see how it plays out once we actually get this and I should note also the Material You that we see that we're talking about right now specifically is

tailored to Pixel 6 or to Pixel. So when so just like Material Design was like a guideline to show developers how they could make their apps feel more natural, feel more intuitive on devices, Material You is also sort of like that. Obviously, the widgets are going to feel very Material You all the time. But the stuff like the universal color palette across Android, that's something that you have to add in as an API. So whether or not these OEMs decide to implement a lot of this stuff is very up to them.

It would be cool if we saw it more, but you know that if you get a pixel, you're going to get this. And also, I'm really curious to see how the third-party apps and widgets update, and will they fall in line with this sort of squiggly, quirky look. We'll see because I like my rectangular widgets right now. Awesome. Well, that's a perfect segue because we're going to talk a little more about Mac OS or we're going to talk more about M1 Mac and M1 iPad, which also have a little bit of a different visual. So we'll be right back.

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Clearly, I gave it a glowing review when it first was announced. I love the design style. White bezels are my absolute favorite. I have lightened up to it a little bit. I'll admit. It looks good in some scenarios. It is not for me, but you're really amped to talk about it. So I'll let you take this one.

You know, that is the key word here. It is not for us. No, exactly. That is such a such an underrated thing when we talk about products is like these are hyper not hyper targeted but a lot of these generalist seeming products are really for a certain demographic that does not include us it's funny because the demographic is probably more general but it's hyper focused on the general demographic right it's like when you watch like a children's video on YouTube, you're like, how does anyone watch

this? This is not, this isn't, it's not funny. It's not entertaining. But for the very large audience that it's for, it's great. Even for music, I feel like that's another. Anyway, so for this computer, the M1 iMac, it is, as Apple would probably describe it, The M1 iMac. It is, as Apple would probably describe it, a very basic, general, really capable and versatile all-in-one desktop computer.

Part of it, which is the part we're talking about the most, is the design. Because basically, when it comes down to it, it's the M1 again, just in a new dress, just in a new package. So we've talked about the M1 MacBook Pro, the M1 MacBook Air is the same chip, M1 Mac Mini is the same chip, and we'll talk about the M1 iPad in a minute. But ultimately, it's this same computer with a 24-inch 4.5K display and whatever design they wanted to make. So the design they chose was an 11.5 millimeter thin sliver of a metal desktop with a nice big chin white bezels and a not height adjustable stand but the whole thing is like 10 pounds so it's actually like it's great i moved it first of all moving the old imax despite how small they were sucked because of how it it like went down into a point it was actually sharp to like move those around and

they they weighed a good amount i mean it's a lot of computer in there for how small it is but i just moved this one out of the oh because we had to return our review unit it's pretty crazy it like really feels like you're just carrying a really big laptop yeah with a weird stand coming it's funny i actually think the i didn't say this in the video but i should have i think the the pads at the bottom aren't sticky enough because i feel like i bump the computer and it just just slides over and it's just too easy to slide like that thing is it's very light um our two most controversial observations about this iMac were the chin and the white bezel. Yeah. The white bezel, I feel like I at least understand. Yes.

I fully get what they're going for, which is, okay, this is going to be a nice friendly looking computer. It has a nice pastel look on the front, which is different from the dark color on the back. But if you're putting this in a room like a living room or a dining room or a kitchen or a bedroom or a random home office

or something like that, eight times out of 10, it's a white wall behind it. And it turns out that's typically the best way to look like not an industrial box, but like a nice, friendly, usable computer. Yeah, a piece of the house rather than a piece of tech. Exactly. So it's the same reason why the new Nest has white bezels.

It's the same reason why the new Nest Home Hub with the screen with the Google Assistant has white bezels. It's the same reason why the new Nest Home Hub with the screen with the Google Assistant has white bezels. It's just because it's just a little more friendly looking. I think that'll probably be the case for a while. I would still, again, I'm not in the target demographic for this, so I would still prefer a dark bezel,

but I am not getting this iMac for my house, so it doesn't matter what I think. It's not for me. The chin, on the other hand, have you seen the iFixit tear down? I have it open right now. It's really funny. It's great. So the chin.

So the iMac is sort of a legend for that chin. It's had that design of a screen at the top and a bit of a chin at the bottom since, I guess, since the original iMac, honestly, where it had the speakers underneath. at the bottom since, I guess, since the original iMac, honestly, where it had the speakers underneath. Every single one has had some sort of a chin, including this new one. And if you look at the iFixit teardown, most of the computer is in that chin. And then most of behind the display is kind of empty, actually, which leads me to believe, well, they intentionally kept the chin

they wanted the chin there they could have definitely definitely made it thicker and not had a chin and they made a choice to make it super thin and keep the chin i'm trying to find a way to argue with that but it's really hard because like literally this teardown is like it just looks like a bunch of ram sticks glued on into onto the back of a screen it's extremely well integrated yeah the whole thing is at the bottom it's like the uh the m1 is there all there's no upgradable you're not popping ram in and out or anything like the speakers are all down there almost everything's in the bottom uh the question is should they have and in my video i say i suggest like people buying this who already have a thicker computer

would have been totally fine with a 20 millimeter thick computer with no chin. And that would have looked way better and way less like a piece of tech than this new, like a extra chin on the bottom of the white bezel that now sticks out a little bit. You still have the, the pastel color of the stand it sits sits on that's nice friendly color and that's cool and everything yeah but i just i i wonder if that is if it's that pop of color like to add in there to be a little more friendly because you could almost argue looking at this the teardown like if you look at the wiring that's going up to the the webcam and a couple other components you you could argue that it being in the chin means more wires or longer wires to get to the places the different things are trying to get to so it it doesn't make much sense i would prefer no chin as well but yeah my guess is looking for

that that colorful friendly i'm almost calling it like a piece of furniture decoration at this point that that's functional and, but you're right. There is still the stand. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know.

It's, it's wild though to see how little is in this. Like this looks like, this looks like a, like Chromebook or something. It's literally just about the same computer as the M one Mac mini, which obviously is much smaller and has more ports, actually. But they just take those insides and put it in a much larger display and then it's

attached to it. And it's it's a really nice display. And if you watch the review, by the way, I want to give it as much credit as I can. Like the amount of display and computer you get for the money in that iMac is great. The most underrated thing about when people complain about how expensive iMacs are is how good of a screen you're getting and no one ever takes that into consideration when comparing it to building a PC. Yeah so that's a it's a really important like well integrated thing. It's also so thin that the headphone jack couldn't be on the back so they put it on the side but it's got two or four ports on the back depending on which version you get if you get the base model two ports and no ethernet no ethernet just two thunderbolt ports if you upgrade to the 1499 one i believe that's when you're getting two

more so you get four ports on the back and ethernet on the power brick still think ethernet on the power brick is genius and just a really really good idea it's a good idea i think it's easy to to get mad at it but i think it's a good idea because no one ever unplugs ethernet once you get mad at it i just don't i think people think it's an excuse of like oh apple didn't add it to the back where everything else could have gone i've seen weird arguments for it i don't believe those arguments it's a i think it's a good apple's helping me with my cable management oh those jerks yeah so i don't know unless there's a data transfer restriction that it's bottlenecking because of the new nope the power cord it's not right nope yeah full-on gigabit so good good on that it's just

funny that this is the first apple desktop in many, many years with external power brick because they've all had power built in. It's just too thin. I don't mind that the more I think about it, though. Yeah, it's fine. It's on the ground. As long as you can find a good place to put it. If you're one of those psychos that has a desk in the middle of your room that's not up against a wall, maybe it looks a little weird. But other than that, totally fine.

It works for me. it looks a little weird um but other than that totally fine it works for me but uh if i were to get one for my own home i probably would go with blue or silver probably blue or silver uh also shout out to super staff who did a really great photoshop job of a matte black version looks really good it was a great photoshop job we were all staring at it in the studio like debating if it was brand skin or did he get the D-brand skin? Or did he just make this look really good? He did Photoshop that. Did you confirm with him?

Yeah. Well, he did a breakdown on his Instagram. Oh, he did a breakdown? All right. I think the way we found out is the little tiny reflection on the table, you could tell, was silver. Yeah. My question is now, okay, we've got all the M1 stuff out the way. Great.

M1 Macs, M1 baseline stuff, M1 iPad, M1 iMac. Is the upgraded Pro version of an Apple Silicon iMac Pro going to get rid of the chin and will it have black bezels? I don't think so. Yes. No. No and yes is my answer to those questions. No to the chin.

Yes to the black bezels. Still has chin. Yes has black bezels. Interesting. I think so much of the Pro stuff in Apple's lineup is boxy and square when you look at Pro Display XDR, when you look at iPad Pro. I think if Apple is considering matching that Pro aesthetic with the new iMac Pro,

they should get rid of the chin on the iMac Pro and make a Pro Display XDR-shaped box. But I guess I could see them keeping the chin. I guess I would just argue is like the chin doesn't make it any less boxy. It's still extremely boxy. And the aspect ratio is different, obviously. Like, well, the screen aspect ratio is the same. The footprint aspect ratio is different, but it's still boxy i just think space gray seems to be who is i think it

was david saying how like it seems to be their lower range things generally are more colorful if you look at like yeah iphone 10r and even some other imax and stuff like that and then space gray is the pro version yeah so i could definitely see space gray black bezels, pro industrial, like professional looking. That's what I would do. Apple, if you're listening. That'd be my guess. If you're listening,

the pros don't care about how thin it is. I promise. None of us care about how thin it is. That's a good point, the thinness as well. But I bet they keep the chin just because it's the continuity between the two. So when they're putting them in like a

store, somebody's not looking like oh, this is so vastly different. I'm probably losing so much power versus pro in the bottom or something like that. Is the iMac Pro sitting in stores next to the iMac? I don't know. As an upsell? I'm just kind of guessing. I would kind of assume so. I wonder.

I don't think a lot of people are buying iMac Pros that don't need them. It's discontinued already, which leads me to believe most people weren't buying it. But I feel like if you can make a good visual argument for why this iMac is different other than just being black, then it gives people a reason to feel like they're getting more. And so my argument goes the opposite way against it as well. Yeah. Yeah. I just I think obviously I would want them to do it a certain way i'm just curious what apple's deciding motive will be do they want the continuity or do they want the upsell look if the pro was an pro display xdr that just happened to have the computer in the back of that that would be sick that would be amazing awesome that would be i would really like that um but we'll have to see we'll have to see but there's a

lot of great rumors about just like way more power way more gpu cores way more big high power cores and like obviously that we'll have to see when it happens maybe it's m2 maybe it's m1x we'll see that one seems to be the favorite so far so far far. But I'm very interested in that. But we also got M1 iPad Pro. This, to me, is an incredible spec bump, but it's still an iPad. And I feel like every review said this, basically, which is like... I'm going to be honest. You were really excited to talk about this, and I was like, I really thought we just decided it was going to be this.

No, I mean, So I did the review and you should watch the review it's 15 minutes long it's like everything you need to know about this. I'm just I would love to know what we're going to get at WWDC that's going to change the iPad. That's really what I am curious about now. We're going to see in like a month but

M1 iPad Pro is really crazy. We're going to see in like two weeks. Yeah it's like a first week of June. M1 iPad Pro is really crazy. We're going to see it in like two weeks. Yeah, it's like first week of June. By the time this comes out, yeah, yeah, yeah. M1 iPad Pro, though, currently it's iPadOS 14, so we've had the same software for a bit. But it is just immensely powerful and super impressive for what that chip did.

I mentioned in the beginning of the video, I didn't think it would be this much better than A15 Bionic or whatever it was already a 12z um and it's way better it benchmarks higher than the 16 inch macbook pro and you know at a certain point it's like what are you going to do with all that extra power you're still using ipad os you're still limited by the ports and the file management situation and the multi-window ability, kind of. And I can't wait for a little bit extra power. One comment I've seen a lot is,

why do you guys keep asking for like macOS on the iPad? Like, just get a Mac. That's not what I want. I don't want macOS on the iPad. I just want better iPadOS. It's a difference. I like the icons. I like the widgets widgets let us put widgets all over the screen give us free multi-window with touch support i'm not asking for that on the mac i don't want a mac that does that i'm personally not in

that camp um and then just the ability to do a little bit more multitasking and obviously the pencil is incredible already and that chip dominates ipad os It's great. So that's all I'm saying is that the M1 iPad Pro with the new with that chip and the performance you get out of it is way more powerful than anything you are able to take advantage of. There's no apps yet out there that are, you know, every visually intensive game that I tried was already fine and is still fine on the new one. Honestly, the biggest difference you'll notice is the new XDR display and is still fine on the new one. Honestly, the biggest difference you'll notice is the new XDR display, which is only on the larger 12.9 inch iPad Pro. I am personally a smaller 11 inch iPad Pro user. And so I will continue to use my 2018 11 inch

iPad Pro. I think a lot of people have that. Yeah, because it's just as good. It's still 120 hertz display and it's not getting the XDR update, which looks phenomenal with HDR content, but it's not on the small one, so don't need it yet. It doesn't matter. Yeah. So you're just saying the iPad, this new iPad basically is just, like, way, way too powerful for what it is.

You can't, like, fully grasp or benefit from it. Yeah, it's like that. If you were in charge of, like there's maybe three different things you can improve about the iPad. You can way improve the specs. You can way improve the software or you can way improve like the design. They've improved the specs and performance so much

that it's ahead of the other pieces of the iPad. Yeah. And you don't really get to enjoy all the benefits of the M1 because nothing gets there yet. So if you get a new iPad from last year, you're going to get the same experience. You're saying it's so powerful and something you –

almost like if you had a pickup truck that could go 0 to 60 in like 4.5 seconds, something like that. It would be like if you had a car that could go 0 to 60, but you needed a pickup truck. I was trying to segue into that. You were segwaying in at 150. Finish the segue. I like the segue. Go for it. Finish that one. I don't want it anymore.

Are there any pickup trucks that do 0-60 and 4.5 or are you just hypothetically making one up? I'm so sad right now. Are we leaving this part in? No, there is a pickup truck that goes there to 684.5. And we're trying to get our hands on it. It's made by Ford.

F-150 Lightning. It's official. Yeah, yeah. We finally got, I mean, we talked about it before. We just got some specs. Let's go over specs really quick. Sure. Still, I think this is, I think we've both talked about this.

I think this is, you've said this is going to be the most important EV of this year. I think this is the most important EV since model three is right. Like the model Y was great crossover, very popular, but like model three was like the first EV that really brought it to like more general consumer. So I consider that extremely important. This bringing it,

we're now getting something that's going to bring this to a whole new group of consumers and i think that that's why this is insanely insanely important yeah i just i just want to add one more thing to what you said is like evs for years and years were different in a way where like you had a nice on leaf and you had like sports cars like the the Roadster and so anytime anyone made or considered an electric car it was such a vast departure from what people were used to that they almost just didn't even worry about it now EVs are a better version of the car you already were thinking about getting yeah and that's where they need to. That's why this is important for this pickup truck, especially. Exactly.

So the specs on the F-150 Lightning. So starting price, actually, I'll just start with that. $3,999. Really good. That is nuts. I saw a lot of comparisons to that price to base F-150s, and it's a completely unfair comparison because the base F-150 is a two-door, and the base Lightning is the SuperCrew, which is what Ford calls their four-door. So if you look at the cheapest SuperCrew F-150, it starts at $36,000. So we're talking about a

$3,000 price difference between pieces of of these and that is before the tax credit that you are still qualified for even if you throw that out the door like i mean we haven't really seen any one-to-one comparisons of evs to a specific gas car but like that is very very close yeah like i think almost anybody while buying a car would probably be okay with the 3k price difference now that's going to be the base model which gets 230 miles of range and there's also going to be an upgraded model that gets 300 miles of range and i think that's about 50 um and if we're just gonna compare that spec right off the bat we've got cyber truck coming in anywhere from 35 to 70k yeah there there is a higher i think there's one version you can get that goes all the way to like 90k so i think

yeah just like the f-150 there's gonna be multiple trim levels of this yep there's think there's one version you can get that goes all the way to like 90K. So I think just like the F-150, there's going to be multiple trim levels of this. Yep. There's a Hummer truck that's going to be over 100K. There's a Rivian R1T that's going to be like 60, 70, 80K. So this is a great starting price for F-150 Lightning. So now here's the other specs. And we're going down the spec sheet not just to read a spec sheet, but because specs are important to truck buyers.

That's a specific important thing, towing capacity, hauling capacity, the things it's capable of. Specs actually really matter here. So I'm not even going to talk about design. It looks like a normal F-150. But 0-60 in 4.5 seconds, honestly, who cares? But there's something about having one gear where you don't have 10 different speeds in a gas motor to go through. So if I just explain this, I watched a really good video on this. I'm going to try to condense it, but I'm also linking the show notes so you guys can watch the whole thing. But basically what's happening is when you're hauling a bunch of stuff, you need as much torque as you possibly can get so that you're effectively pulling it.

And gas engines have their peak torque at certain RPMs. So let's say that's 4000 RPM, just as an example. That means if you're way below 4000 RPM or way above 4000 RPM, you're not quite getting peak effectiveness out of that motor. Your torque band. Exactly. Your torque band. Yeah, exactly. Your torque band is pretty narrow. So when you shift gears, you are trying to stay in that ideal torque band.

So the way they got around this was like the F-150 now is a 10 speed. Yeah. So every time you shift gears, you're trying to stay in that ideal torque band for maximum efficiency as you shift gears over and over and over again. Big trucks have like 21 gears. This is so they can keep in their ideal torque band. Electric motors have a massive instantaneously available torque band, which is from zero RPM. From zero, yeah.

So that right away, even though like the zero to 60 doesn't really matter for a pickup truck, the number you should care about is torque, which is, I think I might've written it down, but it's something like 735 pound feet of torque. And it's available at that peak torque number all the time as you're driving it, instead of only in that small bit of your individual gears. That's the spec that matters for hauling. That's good for efficiency. That's just good for driving while hauling. So that's number one. matters for hauling that's good for efficiency that's just good for

driving while hauling so that's number one 775 pound feet of torque there you go just wanted to confirm that cool um and then the other one is you can max out at 10 000 pounds of towing capacity which i think is higher than the other maximum that's the other thing there's a couple different the standard rate version 5,000 or 7,700. And then the max is 10,000. I don't know what regular is, but I highly doubt it is more than that. Yeah. So 10,000 pounds of towing capacity is also awesome. Then there's just a couple other cool things that they're doing with the fact that it's electric. So again, you just have that. It's already a better truck now Now, because there is no engine in the front,

there is a massive, I think it's the biggest front trunk I've ever seen in any EV. You can fit two golf bags in the front trunk of an F-150. You were watching that video and you're like, he has a whole golf bag in there.

And then later in the video, he pulls it out and there's still another one in there. So yeah. That's amazing. So it's a huge front trunk that's great for pickup truck uh people because as they rightly point out typically pickup trucks don't have covered storage unless you have a cover for your bed so if you want a covered locked trunk in your pickup truck instead of throwing it in the back

seat you now have a real trunk yeah it's in the front um you also still have the bed they have a bunch of outlets i think it's six outlets in the front. You've got a 240 volt for like an air compressor. You can charge things, power huge power tools from the front or the back. All this is awesome. And then the cherry on top is you can get a power inverter for your house. It's optional. Yeah.

That will allow your truck's battery to be your house backup battery in case of power outage for up to like a couple days maybe a week i think the the guy in that video said that in order for his tesla power wall to equal what the truck would have done he would have had two of them right the max output of a single power wall isn't as much as the f-150 is able to output wild so which is also just great not for that but like you said uh you're on a construction site and you're working on a house that doesn't have electricity like without having to run a gas generator in the back of the truck around the ground that's what you're saying this truck is yeah yeah you now have a massive portable electric generator in the form

of your truck yeah the one thing i'm curious curious about is Ford hasn't given a number to anyone that I've seen yet for the size of the battery, kilowatt hour size. Just for context, like Model 3 or Model S right now has 100 kilowatt hour battery. That's about like industry standard type. I think Mach-E is at like 80 kilowatt hours. Porsche Taycan's at like 93 kilowatt hours. We're somewhere around 100. A truck like that with enough space

i would actually expect to be more maybe 100 to 150 but we don't have a number no and i'm very curious about a lot of the little variables about when you're hauling with that much battery how much does your range suffer they've already got an onboard scale in the back of the truck so it'll adjust how much your projected range is and tell you where to charge based on how much range you'll get with what you're hauling. But like, is that minus 50 miles? Is it minus 100? I don't really know. I haven't hauled stuff to 10,000 pounds of stuff in my car, so I don't know. What will charging be like with the couple of built-in? There's a FordPass app that will show you, you know, the Electify america charges and all the charges you're capable of charging at but what does that look like when

you pull up to a charger with a trailer i don't that actually is something so like i think the main thing this will not benefit is people who are like hauling long distances like this would make no sense to get and i think one of those main reasons is the majority of chargers on the road you would have to although i do think the charging port ports on the front of this it is it's the front logo by the front door right yes so i guess you could pull forward but like i'm just thinking of some of the chargers around us you would be blocking parking lot if you had your trailer still connected so like not only does charging take longer than gassing up you're now disconnecting your trailer potentially and then yeah that doesn't sound ideal but i do think the majority of people and i mean we live in new jersey

the densest populated state in all of america so maybe i'm just completely naive here but like i do think if you have the 300 mile range uh version if you're doing construction generally in a day i don't think you're driving more than 300 miles whether now you're pulling power from tools or you're pulling power uh losing range from towing yeah maybe that would start getting it but i still think huge benefit is every morning you're starting with the quote-unquote full tank yeah whereas when i used to do landscaping and we were towing stuff, we filled every day and we were definitely not driving 300 miles. It's just super inefficient and you're just filling all the time. Yeah. It's one of those stats where I think weirdly it could actually benefit from, uh, for not being efficient in the

drive train. Meaning if this is a 100 kilowatt hour battery, for example, and you're like powering a bunch of tools and plugging a bunch of things in, and then trying to get home on less range while towing stuff, that might be a concern. Where if this is 150 kilowatt hour battery, then all of those tools and things you're plugging in might not hit your range as

significantly as far as a percentage just just something to keep in mind I don't know this is where I was just thinking like if you're comparing it to the others the cyber truck is still the one where I'm like alright if you're really after the specs and the numbers the cyber truck with 520 miles of range and I think even more towing capacity is probably still on the radar but But other than that, F-150 Lightning, I'm excited for it. And I think by the time you guys see this podcast, there may already be a video on the channel of a hands-on with it because we're trying to work that out.

So that's planned, and that is, I think, a pretty important EV to keep an eye on. Keeping an eye on it for both the consumer buyer who buys trucks, but also the reason the F-150 is the most popular vehicle in America is there's also lots of fleets of businesses who will be looking at

buying this, saving money on cost per mile. And just glad to see that actually worked out. They got the specs, I think, pretty well. Yeah, I do. Sick.

All right. Well, that was a whole lot of waveform. I think you've probably either skipped around or heard enough, but thanks for sticking with us. And we'll be back next week with, of course, much more to talk about. Catch you guys in the next one. Waveform is produced by Adam Molina.

We are partnered with Studio 71 and our intro outro music was created by Cameron Barlow.