Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Apple Forced to Pull Apple Watches from Shelves!

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

This week, Marques, Andrew, and David were hoping for a nice, easy week of news. But they were wrong! A lot is happening, including Apple not being allowed to sell certain Apple Watches anymore, Googl...e paying $700 million after being sued by all 50 states, Threads joining the Fediverse, and a ton of EV news as well! Plus, they talk about the 2023 smartphone awards video that just dropped over on the main MKBHD YouTube channel! Links to stories: Apple stops selling Apple Watches: https://bit.ly/4auPtVU History of Apple Watch lawsuit: https://bit.ly/3THh4NA Google to Pay $700 Million: https://bit.ly/474g5ud 30% of Google's Profits stat: https://bit.ly/3Rsw8fs User choice Billing: https://bit.ly/3GSgHs1 Threads & ActivityPub: https://bit.ly/3GR83Ke Flipboard Federates: https://bit.ly/4aJyL5B Tesla Inductive Charging: https://bit.ly/3NEKc4l MKBHD Smartphone Awards: https://bit.ly/3TA4Vdh New EV Companies Sign On to NACS: https://bit.ly/3TA4u2D NACS Certification: https://bit.ly/3RBde6l Mercedes Self-Driving Blue Light: https://bit.ly/3Hd5O4t Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Shop products mentioned: Samsung S23 Ultra at https://geni.us/JiXWof  ASUS Zenfone 10 at https://geni.us/AUTNv Samsung Z Flip 5 at https://geni.us/4V6L  Apple iPhone 15 Pro at https://geni.us/FJ6qT6X Google Pixel 8 Pro at https://geni.us/QZDJa  Google Pixel 7a at https://geni.us/4MAxB  Samsung Galaxy A54 at https://geni.us/RQxUT  Apple iPhone 15 Plus at https://geni.us/QPrD  Honor Magic V2 at https://geni.us/ShB9j4  OnePlus Open at https://geni.us/i8eq5  Nothing Phone 2 at https://geni.us/CTUnyq  Google Pixel 8 at https://geni.us/qLeWM7 Instagram/Threads/Twitter: Waveform: https://twitter.com/WVFRM Waveform: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David Imel: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin TikTok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:01:52 So this is another even more festive episode. Okay. It's good. It's great. Anyway, we're your hosts. I'm Marques. I'm Andrew. And I'm David. This week, we've got a bunch of stuff for you. Google is the subject of another lawsuit. Fun times. Thread is federating. I promise that means something. And we've got the smartphone awards and the blind smartphone camera test recaps and some fun EV news. Plenty to jump into.
Starting point is 00:02:13 Plenty of places we could start. I feel like we could do the lawsuit stuff first. Well, first, Apple is halting Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 sale in the U.S. this week. It is a lawsuit thing, but it's like a lot bigger of a deal in a lot of ways. So I read the headline and I kind of knew that there was some background lawsuit stuff brewing, but I didn't know it actually get to the point where Apple would have to stop selling it in order to resolve this. Can you explain what happened and how it got to this point?
Starting point is 00:02:43 Yeah. Okay. So a little bit of history um long time ago apple reached out to this medical tech company called massimo and it wanted to collaborate with them about using their blood oxygen sensors potentially in the apple watch down the line um but pretty soon after they had that initial call where they were like yeah we would love to like collaborate on your technology and it would be great apple started hiring all of their employees they ended up hiring 30 of their employees including their lead chief medical officer and they offered they were like we'll
Starting point is 00:03:16 double your salary and give you millions of dollars in apple shares so you know hard bargain yes hard bargain um and then in 2019 apple published patents for blood oxygen sensors in their watches under the name of one of the former employees which is a bad look yeah yeah and it just seems so obvious yeah it seems it seems pretty obvious and then launched uh the blood oxygen sensor in the Apple Watch Series 6, which had the feature. In 2020, Massimo was like, this is a problem. So they sued Apple in federal district court for gaining access to proprietary information by hiring those employees. And that lawsuit was taking way too long and it was not going anywhere and just kind of stalling in court. So in 2021, they filed a patent with uh the international not a patent they filed a complaint
Starting point is 00:04:10 with the international trade commission that tried to get trying to get apple to stop being able to sell the product basically that's how you go through if you're like we need you to stop being able to import products and all of this kind of stuff so massimo actually won that in january of this year but nobody really thought much of it because apple gets sued all the time i want an exact example locally here at least one time i think either adam or ellis brought it up they were like at the end we were done recording and we're like is there anything else we want to talk about it was me it was you right and you were like do we want to talk about apple not being able to sell the Apple Watch
Starting point is 00:04:45 because of this? And I like- You all laughed. Explicitly remembered saying, I don't think we should cover it. I just don't. I said, I don't see Apple like getting punished at all.
Starting point is 00:04:56 I don't see anything coming of this. Apple is too big. And here I am meeting my words. We're talking about it now. I mean, they get sued constantly. And there's always these headlines that just say like apple might have to stop selling this if this company you know abc i think history was on my side in that assumption but yeah ellis wanted to talk about this months ago so i think
Starting point is 00:05:15 the reason ellis brought this up was because in october the international trade commission issued an import ban on the apple watch series 9 and ultra 2 um or yeah ultra 2 right yep the newest ultra yeah yeah uh that was going to stop them from being able to import the watches into the country because they're you know parts are made in all the other countries and stuff uh but there is a 60-day presidential review period on international trade commission bans that allows the president of the United States to veto something like this. Famously, this happened with Apple before with the iPhone 4, because Samsung sued Apple for using a cellular radio technology that it had a patent for. But Obama
Starting point is 00:06:00 decided that that technology that was being used in the iPhone 4 was an essential technology for basically all cellular radios and all smartphones. So it wouldn't make sense to ban that part because then Samsung would be the only phone company in existence. So they vetoed that. But this one is much less likely to get that veto. Yeah, it's just a blood oxygen sensor technology of one of the features. And I mean, the history kind of like talks for itself that they reached out to them to work with them and then immediately after talking to them just poached all the employees and then yeah filed the patent with the name of the employee that they poach yeah yeah so straightforward yeah
Starting point is 00:06:40 so the uh the thing that's going to happen here, at least as of recording Wednesday, December 20th, if this does not change, is that Apple has to halt the sales of the Series 9 and the Ultra 2 in the U.S. after 3 p.m. Thursday, December 21st, which as of recording is tomorrow. And it will have to stop making inventory available in the stores after December 24 24th so it has to stop online sales first oh man okay yeah so if you're trying to get a christmas gift and you were thinking about getting so on an apple watch it just became a way better gift did you say though that it is um it can be still sold in like a best buy or something like that so they have to have inventory already or can now they buy up in well theoretically they can still be they can still buy inventory from apple except that apple can't import more inventory after yeah so there's 24 there's a giant shipping container on its way here right now with as many apple watches possible
Starting point is 00:07:36 yeah best buy is buying as much stock as they can afford right um so uh yeah the order will ban imports of the devices after christmas day which Apple will be prohibited from selling to other app outlets as well. It's a pretty big deal. I feel like people that get Apple gift cards for Christmas are going to be really disappointed. And apparently Apple has already started going to employees and like telling them about how this is working and they're changing all the signage in their shops. So they still have Apple Watch as signage, but it's just like the text and it shows the SE, but they're not like showing the Ultra 2 in the Series 9. That's fascinating.
Starting point is 00:08:15 Yeah. That is fascinating. I guess my like ultimate question here, I saw something about how like Apple's trying to figure out ways around this and how they can do it. Does everyone care about the blood oxygen that much that they can't just be like, screw it? No more blood oxygen.
Starting point is 00:08:32 That's a good point. How often do you use that feature? Or how accurate is it even really? Yeah. So I remember when it got announced and it was pretty cool. And you remember the David Blaine Ascension project where that was around the same time the feature got announced.
Starting point is 00:08:45 He was like, should I use a dedicated blood oxygen monitor or should I use my Apple Watch? And I was like, dude, use the dedicated. 10,000 feet in the air. Through the back of your wrist. There's no way it's that good. Just use the thing you have. But it was pretty interesting
Starting point is 00:08:57 that you could just check on it. And 99% of the time you check on it, it's going to be 90 something percent because you're just walking around. Yeah. But if you're hiking or you're doing some high-altitude workout or something like that, then it may be a little lower. And it'll be interesting to see roughly what it is.
Starting point is 00:09:12 But I don't know that this is a thing that is essential to the Apple Watch. I don't think it'll be a disaster if it disappears. It's one of those things like I don't want to come out here and be like, hey, Apple, just take away something you promised a lot of people because that sucks. That always sucks in that scenario. And they'll probably get sued by people for that. Yeah. But if Apple were to theoretically just disable it on every single watch
Starting point is 00:09:34 and continue to sale, I think the amount of people that would notice that is extremely minimal. It's kind of widely known that all of these sensors are not very accurate on smart watches but what's important about these sensors is the trend data right if you have like a pretty stable vo2 max and then one day it drops significantly that tells you something and it doesn't matter whether it's like five percent accurate or not yeah we had a really good episode
Starting point is 00:10:00 with dr mike kind of like going over that like these things are all fun there might be a little bit to it if you track trends and stuff like that but ultimately like think of it as like entertainment that is helping your health and i would probably argue that blood oxygen level is one of the least important yeah out of a lot of them and the series plummets the series six launched like right around covid. So a lot of people were using it to try to figure out if they had COVID or not. Yeah, we won't be able to tell you. Is that?
Starting point is 00:10:30 Yeah. Yeah. That's what we need around a worldwide influenza is a watch making us more or less panicked about things. The trend thing they said is, you just reminded me
Starting point is 00:10:41 of the temperature sensor. There's like a body temperature sensor now, which is literally just measuring the surface temperature of the skin on the back of your wrist, which is like not useful at all. How is that useful? Nine times out of 10, it doesn't even tell you the temperature,
Starting point is 00:10:52 but it does tell you when you're sleeping the trend. I do think though that is more important for women's health based on- Ovulation cycle. I think it's obvious. I don't, I'm not 100% sure because I am a man and I don't, but I do think that's where-
Starting point is 00:11:03 That's what they added the temperature sensor for Yeah, they added it for and they said there was a lot of benefits. That and sleep. But even so, they're not telling you the temperature. They're just telling you if it went up or down. Right. Which is because that's what's most important. Yeah, the trend data.
Starting point is 00:11:14 The trend data. So apparently Apple is rushing to issue a software update that basically changes the algorithm on how it measures the blood oxygen in a way that they think the international trade commission will find would find different enough um but massimo is sticking to their guns and says that it will would require a hardware change so it's going to be dependent on what the international trade commission says if it requires a hardware change like especially because this is all health data, Apple needs to get all this stuff like approved
Starting point is 00:11:47 and like do multiple rounds of testing. So it's not going to be easy to just switch out a piece of hardware and then just start shipping them again. If they actually cannot start selling these, they're probably just going to nix the Ultra 2 and the Series 9 until the next generation. Do you know if they just which we disable
Starting point is 00:12:05 functionality of the hardware would they still not be able to sell it because the hardware is there like if theoretically they did what i said and just said like there is no more of this it's not even using that sensor that sensor is just a spare part now yeah i don't know i'm not sure because i don't even think that that's something they could do without like updating your apple watch software which would they count that as a as a fix i don't know it's like people are supposed to do it depends on how the lawsuit is written which i don't know yeah that would be kind of like easy it seems like if they're going to halt sales then it's not something that they can do if they have to literally halt sales where all they if
Starting point is 00:12:39 all they had to do is push yourself if they just have to air power it and just never talk about it again yes then i think they would do that immediately right exactly i will say for apple if this of this happening it is the best time for it to happen because they probably have all of their q4 sales before christmas already so like this is stopping at christmas which is notably the time where most people are like okay i spent enough i'm gonna like chill for a couple months i feel like a lot of people are going to get like Apple gift cards for Christmas. Actually, that's a good point.
Starting point is 00:13:08 And new year generally means people starting to take their health a little more seriously. So Apple, okay, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm the exact opposite. Well, so Apple's wearables business made $13.48 billion in the Q1 2023 holiday quarter. And that's going to get nixed pretty significantly if they start. Is this just Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Series 9?
Starting point is 00:13:31 Yes. So they could sell Series 8 and Ultra 1? They currently sell refurbished Series 8s on their website, but they will not be able to sell those if this goes into effect. So it's all the way back to the beginning of this sensor in Series 6? Yeah, but they don't sell Series 6 or Series 7 anymore. So they sell Series 8 and Series 9.
Starting point is 00:13:48 They'll have to halt both of those. And I assume the first and second Apple Watch Ultra have that blood oxygen sensor. Theoretically, but I don't think they sell them. Ultra Watch 1?
Starting point is 00:13:58 Yeah, I don't think they sell Ultra 1s. And the SE does not have it, right? The SE doesn't have it. So they can still sell the SE? Yeah, they can still sell the SE. Wow. Can I ask a stupid question?
Starting point is 00:14:06 Sure, it's probably not stupid. I think it is. We just said wearables. Is that only watches or like AirPods included in that? I'm not totally sure. Because I don't, I guess I'm thinking too much accessories and like a wearable is a smart device acting as something that was previously something you wear
Starting point is 00:14:25 like in the like when it says like apple's wearables include this much in sales airpods are not included in that right i believe that's just watches airpod is the only wearable or the sorry watch is the only wearable thing yeah i think that's right i think even though technically you are wearing the headphones i think yeah yeah yeah i think like it's replicating a watch where air headphones are just headphones they're not something you wear without them doing what they're supposed to right okay so yeah apparently this this like holiday quarter is the biggest quarter for the wearables division um in the third quarter of this year they made a little over eight billion dollars but
Starting point is 00:14:58 the first quarter of last of this year they made almost 14 billion that's almost double because of the holiday quarter so yeah dollars man this goes a little bit deeper because apple is countersuing massimo because they came out with a smart watch like right after the apple watch series 6 came out that kind of looks like an apple watch and uses all the same sensors nice um i don't think it looks enough like an apple watch for their yeah it's that one right there i don't think it looks enough like an apple watch for their yeah it's that one right there i don't think it looks enough like an apple watch for their lawsuit to go through uh it just kind of looks like a general fitness tracker yeah this looks like every amazon it's six hundred dollars i guess because it's by a it's also approved yeah yeah okay like fda cleared that actually makes way more sense speaking of fda approval this is totally off topic but remember how google was gonna put a temperature sensor for your skin and they were
Starting point is 00:15:49 like the phone trust me that'll be later just measure pots and pans for now it's still not there yeah your sensor still just does stuff you know what i need to do we need to do a long-form episode about is like investigating why the temperature center exists on the Pixel 8 Pro. I have a feeling you're going to reach. It's probably because somebody thought it was a good idea and then it started working on it and they were like oh we also in the background got to get FDA approval and then they started working on that and then it came up to time to launch the phone and the FDA was like
Starting point is 00:16:18 oh you wanted us to work on that? And they're still working on it while they have to ship this feature and explain why it's there. I someone came up with it during covid and would was like oh this would be great because you can check tracker yeah but that's that's google timing you know really i mean that's something for like a lot of a lot of companies yeah a lot of companies but google famously needs to get 20 layers of approval before they can do anything so so in 2020 somebody was like it'll be a good idea and then in in 2023, they were like, it's time to launch. Did you get FDA approval?
Starting point is 00:16:47 And they were like, oh no, it's not here. Trust me, it'll be there soon. Yeah. Brutal. So yeah, we'll see how this goes. But I mean, this is actually like probably one of the biggest hits to Apple in a very long time. I'm super surprised it happened.
Starting point is 00:17:01 Yeah. And man, maybe some of these companies aren't as completely untouchable as we thought yeah well speaking of giant hits to companies we didn't think would get them google to pay 700 million dollars to settle the anti-competitive play store lawsuit lawsuit yeah so this is another lawsuit that google lost this is not the epic one not one. This is a different anti-competitive Google Play Store lawsuit. The Epic one that they just lost, we don't even know yet what the repercussions are going to be. That's going to be
Starting point is 00:17:32 decided in January. But this one, they got sued by all 50 states' attorneys general over its illegal monopoly with the Play Store, which is basically exactly what the Epic lawsuit was about. To get all 50 states to agree to something is wild. That was like wow you got texas and new hampshire to agree wow big tech is pretty much the only thing that both sides of the aisle will agree that's fair i think that's that was
Starting point is 00:17:57 super fair yeah so this is a very very long lawsuit document um the verge had a really really great recap of all the important things that are actually going to happen because of this lawsuit so i'm quoting them like fairly directly here uh okay this is a long list so they have to pay 700 million dollars um apparently that is roughly 21 days of google's operating profit from the Play Store alone. That's actually not that much. 721 days? So, like, less than a month of profit? I think Marques is saying that's not that much of, like, their total profit.
Starting point is 00:18:33 Oh, no. But it is wild that they make $700 million in less than a month. Yeah, no, don't get me wrong. That's a ton of money. And wherever they're paying it to, that's a ton of money. But it's only 21 days of not even revenue.
Starting point is 00:18:48 Profit. Yeah. Yeah. 21 days of profit. Well, it says operating. Oh, yeah. Operating profit. That means they paid all their operating expenses and they have that left over in 21 days.
Starting point is 00:18:59 That's insane. That's insane. That's like nothing. Yeah. That's crazy. That's crazy. Okay. Wow. insane that's that's that's like nothing yeah that's crazy that's crazy okay wow so 629 million
Starting point is 00:19:06 of that 700 million is going to go to consumers who may have overpaid for apps or in-app purchases via google play after taxes lawyers fees and so on whoa i am wondering yeah i'm wondering if like everyone that's paid for anything in google play will just get like a refund of some sort or what differentiates overpaying versus not overpaying are we what is that is it like they might get like a 30 refund yeah are we saying all apps are overpaid because of the 30 the 30 yeah or are they talking about just i don't think they're talking about the google tax here they're right about like actual taxes but yeah but says what does that mean overpaid for apps or in-app purchases which is gonna be like you have to fill out a form and be like yeah i did overpay for this app i don't i don't know it's gonna work i don't know i would wager that it has way more to do with
Starting point is 00:19:55 in-app purchases just because like that feels like the thing that something would go wrong with yeah more so than just like two dollars for an app you pay one time yeah uh 70 million will go to the state's attorneys attorneys general to see to use how they see fit which is super strange yeah why are the i don't know why are the attorneys general getting paid for i don't really know okay i don't maybe they're going to use it to implement law or something. I guess they did spend their hard-earned time bringing this lawsuit from all 50 states to the Supreme Court. No, I don't think they keep it as
Starting point is 00:20:31 profit. I don't think they keep it as profit. They allocate it to various government programs that are going to... The Superyacht Program. The North Dakota Superyacht Program. So it's like $1.4 million per Attorney General, which is kind of a lot. And then $1 million will go to the settlement administration, which basically just means like paying for lawyer fees.
Starting point is 00:20:53 Yeah. For seven years, Google will continue to technically enable Android to allow the installation of third party apps on mobile devices through means other than Google Play, which they have already done. So that doesn't really do anything. They've already already been doing that like they allowed you to sideload you can sideload yeah is yeah is it that they can't um i thought i saw something a couple weeks ago about how the warning when you side that is gonna come up okay okay sorry yeah no you're good uh for five years google will allow developers to offer alternative in-app billing system next to google play why is it only for a limited time i don't know so they can sue them for 700 million dollars it seems like it but okay yeah okay five years yeah use alternative in-app billing so now
Starting point is 00:21:38 basically if you're if you're paying for something in google play instead of having uh check out with google be like the only way you can pay, they'll be like pay us directly with PayPal or something like that. Get your V-Bucks straight from Fortnite. Right. Sick. For five years, Google won't make developers offer their best prices to consumers
Starting point is 00:21:54 who pick Google Play and Google Play billing, which I didn't know was a thing and is kind of insane. Offering your best. It basically means you can, if you're going to sell this app on like any app store you have to have the best price you have it available anywhere on google play oh which is pretty aggressive that amazon has done that too that is that sounds similar sorry i don't know remember when apple and epic were doing that where the way epic did around it was like if you buy
Starting point is 00:22:23 skins in the apple store it's we're attacking on the 30 thing where if you buy it online or on xbox or whatever it's less so they're trying to make it so companies can't be less money on their website i think it sounds weird because it's like what if it goes on sale then does it have to on sale i think it's trying it's preventing a circumvention well yeah amazon had done this thing i read this story about how some small retailer that was like hand making things had like a holiday sale on their website but amazon basically threatened to take them off of amazon because they weren't allowed to have the holiday sale on the website but not on amazon wow yeah this reminds have any of you guys watched nathan for you yeah did you see the one where he does the like it's like a small tv store and it's like if you can beat it's like if you can
Starting point is 00:23:13 beat the price of a tv you can use some coupon and so like people come in to get this coupon for a dollar tv but it's in this back room with like an alligator in front of it sorry we can skip that okay uh let's see for four years google won't make developers ship titles on google play at the same time as other stores and with feature parody so they basically said if you launch on google play you have to come out when they come out on other stores and they're not allowed to do that and they're not allowed to do that the exact same version everywhere yeah now for four years yeah this is very weird mix it up i agree with marquez that it's like x amount of years when it it feels like they should just be doing this forever and all of a lot of them are different years seven five four we'll do that
Starting point is 00:23:57 four years for this one's not quite as bad as the other one so you can do that again in three years yeah right yeah for five years google won't make companies exclusively put google play on the phone or its home screen so that's a big deal because i believe samsung phones used to ship with galaxy store on the home screen and now they're not allowed to like if you use google play or you have to have google play to be the only app store on the on your home screen oh it was the it made it be the only app store on the on your home screen oh it was the it made it be the only app yeah yeah yeah uh that sounds bad that sounds bad that that 100 feels anti-competitive yeah for sure it's so minor but it does yeah for four years google won't stop oems from granting installer rights to pre-loaded apps um not sure what that means 100% me neither yeah won't stop oems from i'm wondering if there were some
Starting point is 00:24:46 other companies trying to be a pre-loaded app and google didn't want it as a competitive nature and installer rights though so like a pre-loaded app could be the the samsung app store right yeah so installer rights being like the right to install apps through that app store yeah oh so google won't stop stop others that's yeah that's yeah i'm a little that's weird yeah i feel like i get the gist of it but can't set an example or yeah these are all kind of along the same theme which is you can't be the overly anti-competitive only app store available or visible it's like focus on your own not other people's yeah yeah that makes perfect sense right uh for five years google won't require its consent before an oem preloads a third-party app
Starting point is 00:25:39 store which is just ridiculous uh for four years google will let third-party app stores update apps without requiring user approval which it's crazy that they didn't allow that before for four years google will let side loaded app stores use its apis and feature splits to help install apps so i guess that means that the google play store has like special apis that only it can access through android uh for five years, Google will turn its two sideloading scare screens, this is what you were talking about before, into a single
Starting point is 00:26:12 user prompt, which will read the equivalent of disagreed-upon language. Your phone currently isn't configured to install apps from this source, granting this source permission to install apps could place your phone and data at risk. It still seems it's just one versus two it's part of this is so funny to me because i know there's so many people who are less tech savvy
Starting point is 00:26:31 that would see that and totally freak out yeah and then are the same people i guess that makes sense they're the same people get scammed by the fake website that says like we have all 100 that's that's super scary i agree yeah i i think that google kind of has a right to its users and a they should show screens that say like just so you know this is not we can't control this so whatever happens to your phone is like not controlled and it's 100 like a legality thing like they they're covering their own but at the same time, them covering themselves there is also beneficial to them because it's going to push more people. And this is always Apple's argument too, is like, if we can't control the pipeline,
Starting point is 00:27:12 then we can't make sure that our devices are secure for our users. What I ultimately see here, maybe we can talk about it as the end is like, when all this goes through, I'm very interested to see like, are things going to crash and burn? Like they've made it seem like it's going to happen or are things going to crash and burn like they've made it seem like it's going to happen or is everything going to be fine and we're going to be like wow we got scared out of this for a long time because some of those arguments are totally reasonable yeah but you can also tell are even more beneficial to the bottom line of google and apple yeah making money off right right for five years google will let user choice billing participating developers let their users know about better pricing elsewhere and complete transactions using the developer's existing web-based billing solution in an embedded web view within the app.
Starting point is 00:27:55 This basically just means that you're allowed to say, hey, if you buy through us directly, then it's cheaper and you can purchase through that directly. That feels like a tack-on to the one we talked about before of allowing prices being different right for six years google will continue to allow developers to use contact information obtained outside of outside the app or in app with user consent to communicate with users out of app um vague contact information obtained outsider that that i don't i don't fully understand that one maybe it's like you can't only google is not the only one that's going to auto fill your contact information like you're able to i guess if you can do inside the app then inside the app itself like email phone number edge right i don't know for six years google will let consumption only
Starting point is 00:28:50 apps like netflix which doesn't let you pay on device tell users about better prices elsewhere without linking to an app outside website example this is available on our website for 9.99 yeah this is a big one yeah these are the this is. I think the last two here are the ones that actually matter the most because that would be pretty classic. Netflix would really, really want you to sign up for Netflix on Netflix.com or in the Netflix
Starting point is 00:29:16 service somewhere. It's the only way they allow it right now. Yeah, because if you signed up through a different service like the Play Store, they would require you to have the same price because that's one of their rules, and then they would take 30% of that. So instead of offering it for a higher price to still make the same amount, they would just go, nevermind, you can't sign up in the Netflix app. At least now they're going to be able for six years to tell you that you can sign up online. Yeah. And on top of that for consumption based stuff like this is generally subscription so this is not 30 of 9.99 this is 30 of 9.99 every month for years most people yeah um this also the
Starting point is 00:29:54 sorry it's a good um most people sign up through their phone anyway because yeah so a lot of people are probably overpaying for stuff and not realizing it what what's interesting about this is this feels similar to two steps above here that says are allowed to complete transactions using existing web-based billing solution similar to that but also embed it inside the app except that's only for the next five years and for the next six years they can you can do that but i guess not embedded in a website inside the app people it's just tell them go to the website just pop-ups yeah and specifically it says like that you can say what price it is through their website because before netflix just said you can't sign up for netflix through this app but now you can say you can't sign up for
Starting point is 00:30:35 that please do it on the website also it's cheaper on the website yeah yeah uh and then last one promise for six years google shall not prohibit developers from disclosing to users any service or other fees associated with the google play or google play's billing system so for six years they're going to be like hey guess what there's a 30 cut that's why it costs right yeah yeah help help me small developer come by on website yeah google's taking all my money yeah i feel like i'm making fun of that but like that is a totally reasonable thing if i found a small app like of course i'm gonna pick apollo which is an iphone app which makes no sense but like i would want to support like i stuff like that i want to support the people that i know are smaller and that actually would change me from
Starting point is 00:31:20 going a bit out of my way to pay for that outside of the google store being like oh i would like to support this person so i actually think that's really big for sure me from going a bit out of my way to pay for that outside of the Google store being like, oh, I would like to support this person. So I actually think that's really big. For sure. I think a lot of this stuff kind of wrapped up kind of just shows that Google works very, very hard to keep people in their Play Store ecosystem because it makes them so much money. And this kind of shows how far they'll go, like not allowing developers to say specific things, needing to launch at the exact same time as every other platform if they launch on google play at all like they really kind of have control of the way that you launch apps yeah like a lot of control i mean this is
Starting point is 00:31:56 not even everything right this is just like the big kind of things and man i knew it was like 30 and some stuff but this almost feels like they're uh like an extra chairman on the board of every single app that's in the store and telling them exactly what they can and can't do they were able to do so many of these things because what was the alternative going i guess we won't have the place to run our phone it's like no you you need that phone or your phone won't sell so yeah they're able to pull those levers and it goes outside of it too because a lot of this stuff is based on side loading when it's like right danger danger maybe you don't want to do that come pay my 30 fee that they're not allowed to tell you we're taking right yeah i think theoretically what the government wants to see is just that
Starting point is 00:32:39 google is open to having like choice so yeah yeah and theoretically the best option would be people still use the play store because it's the best place to buy apps it has lower prices because google takes less of a cut it has better features whereas like third-party app developers and app stores could exist but if google actually wants to make all the money they need to be the best product whereas right now they're just not allowing other products. Yeah, I think that. And I think ultimately, if you look at the number, Google is going to lose a ton of money in a number.
Starting point is 00:33:12 But if you look at percent of profit lost, I think it's going to be super minimal because the Play Store is the easier way of doing a lot of this. But, and most people are going to do that because not everyone's tech savvy and that's the easiest way of doing it. So like, this isn't going to do that because not everyone's tech savvy. Right. And that's the easiest way of doing it. So like this isn't going to make that much of a difference.
Starting point is 00:33:28 But. Right. The choice is better. People like using defaults and like unless you're Samsung, you're probably don't want to host your own app store anyway. You know, so Oppo hosts their own app store and like some some companies do, but it's a lot of infrastructure to host your own app store. Yeah. So anyway, lawsuit trivia is over. Now you know.
Starting point is 00:33:51 Now you know. Now you know. You got all that, right? Everyone out there driving right now? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that is a lot of information. Hopefully you got all that. We got to take a quick break, but when we come back, we got a bunch more stuff to talk
Starting point is 00:34:01 about, including the smartphone awards. So before we take that break trivia what timing always on the ball over there beautiful so you thought you were done with lawsuit trivia oh guess again oh as part of all of the verge's awesome coverage of this google lawsuit chaim gartenberg covered a secret Google program that was intended to butter up and keep developers in the Play Store. Do
Starting point is 00:34:32 any of you know what this program was called? It was a secret. Well, not anymore because the search reported it. Yes, I do know what that was called. And I will accept either the official Google title or the name that Google informally referred to it as in private communications. And David, if you
Starting point is 00:34:48 potentially know both from researching this story, maybe I'll give you two points. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I just want to say I'm upset there's no multiple choice because I just want Ellis to make up a bunch of names of company or like projects that are buttering up
Starting point is 00:35:02 developers to try. Project Butter. Project Crisco. or like projects that are buttering up developers. Project Butter. Project Crisco. Maybe I will. Maybe that's what I'll do later. Anyway, after the break. This episode is brought to you by HelloFresh. Be honest.
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Starting point is 00:36:37 or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Welcome back. So we slightly missed this news last week because I believe that it started happening on like Thursday and we record these episodes on Wednesday.
Starting point is 00:37:00 So pretty classic, pretty classic. But Threads officially started testing Federation through activity pub. Those are words that mean things I promise. It's a little complex. Effectively, what this means is that there is this idea of the decentralized internet where you can post on any platform and it shows up on other platforms and people can like and comment and not subscribe, but they can like and comment. They can do all this stuff. And all of this activity through activity pub will show up on whatever platform that you're using. Surprisingly, Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are pro the Fediverse pro activity pub which i'm not sure if that's real or if they're just trying to do that to make it seem like they're more open and more for the open web uh but this is a pretty big deal because as of now they are testing it with some big accounts on instagram threads so adam mars what is his last name yeah he's one of the first people that is feda versed through
Starting point is 00:38:07 activity pub so you can actually see his threads posts on mastodon right now oh yeah and so uh there are other apps that are federating through activity pub like flipboard is now federating so you should be able to see flipboard comments and posts right Mastodon. So it's this interoperability, interplay of like the same content and engagement working across different clients and different sites. It's inter-networking. Here we go again. I've got some thoughts. Okay.
Starting point is 00:38:41 I mean, my thoughts have always been like a little high level, like zoomed out i'll give two one is look i've always been a fan of of cheeses of of jack cheese and and cheddar and all these others but i just can't get behind feta having its own universe damn i'm the dad i really wasn't expecting that okay here marcus okay my shoes way out of my field like uh that's so that's one that's a david joke and you just you just went for it i was so interested in the analogy i thought i was finally gonna understand activity pub based on cheeses. But okay. But number two, though, seriously, I've always felt like one of the biggest skills of navigating the internet or being a creator on the internet is creating different things
Starting point is 00:39:34 for different places and sort of being able to natively speak the language of different platforms. So if I'm on Instagram, there is a way that you can do Instagram that is inherently different from the way that you do Twitter and the way that you do threads. So if you give me the ability to log into one client and post the same thing everywhere, I don't think that's better for me. Can I potentially answer this and you can tell me how wrong I am? Sure. Sure. It seems like the majority of these things linking together are still similar content-wise. Like Mastodon threads and stuff are more like these like singular posts. So like anything you would post on Twitter seems that it is not necessarily connecting Instagram into this, right?
Starting point is 00:40:21 Or YouTube yet. We could have our 4chan posts on LinkedIn. Oh, jeez. I mean, again, nightmare blunt rotation of social media. I look at it from the creator's perspective. I think the other end of that coin is when you do post in these different universes, the Instagram universe, the Threads universe, the Macedon universe,
Starting point is 00:40:42 you don't own your audience as you move between each of these different places. Right. So if I post and I'm going to abide by the rules of and I am posting in the native language of Mastodon and I suddenly go, you know what, I would like to take my audience over here to threads, it is when they're separate very difficult and when they are connected, they feel like you already own your audience
Starting point is 00:41:07 and you can just move them from place to place and they can move and they can use whatever place they want. They can be a threads person. They can be a Mastodon person. They'll still be subscribed to you. So that's the bright side of that. I think it is, in your sense, for creators and influencers,
Starting point is 00:41:22 potentially a negative in that way. But I would argue 99 of the people using it are like people following you would rather be like i want to choose the platform and wish i can follow you and that's more user base than the people who are more worried about like where are all my followers splitting off into? I guess I wonder how much of people's decision to use each of these platforms is based on the people there or the platform itself. Like when I go to Instagram, I'm there for Instagram stuff.
Starting point is 00:41:55 And when I go to Twitter. I agree with that totally. I do think there's a totally different version, like how you post on Instagram versus Twitter. I mean, Instagram is where Travis Kelsey can post instagram versus twitter i mean instagram is where travis kelsey can post winning a super bowl twitter is where he can post about a squirrel eating bread um they're like totally different things but like i think in the sense of if people want to follow your twitter i don't want to call persona but you're the type of content you're
Starting point is 00:42:19 doing on twitter then somebody might be like well i, I like the layout of Mastodon better, but I still want to follow Marquez even though he likes posting from Twitter. So then am I right in that? It's more like the users and the followers sounds like such a stupid term, but like the people keeping up, yeah, giving them, it's like, am I going to watch hockey on a Samsung? If hockey was only on Samsung TVs, do I want to be able to get the choice of watching it on an LG TV and right sure it also you know it leads to like a world where like and this is all hypotheticals right but like Mark has you review cars so let's say like the guy hypothetically who owns your favorite social network also owns an electric car company that you gave like an unfavorable review and then he's like wait I don't want you on my social network anymore
Starting point is 00:43:02 you can still reach all the same followers who are on sites not controlled by this hypothetical person yeah theoretically this actually feeds into what we were talking about with a lot of uh competition because in the previous landscape where all of these companies could make twitter apps twitter clients like falcon and all these twitter apps that we used to be able to use before the API took its inspiration. That was sort of like everyone's making an app because they have an open API, but it's all feeding into this one server base that Twitter operates. And Twitter makes the rules and Twitter makes the features and controls it. Exactly. So now it's like you don't have like right now, if you want to make a social networking company, it's probably the hardest thing you can possibly do because you have to gain a social graph, which is why Instagram threads was like the easiest one to do because you just unloaded everyone from Instagram.
Starting point is 00:43:55 And which is why buying one of the most popular social media platforms and renaming it was kind of a dumb move. Yeah. Yeah. But that's why like t2 didn't work because they weren't able to get enough people on it that's why uh blue sky is having trouble because they're having trouble getting people on it but theoretically if you just had this protocol you could make a social networking app and you already have everybody on it yeah you already have all the content so if it's just an app that has different features or a different layout or you wanted to have an api that like or not maybe if you wanted to have a feature that only showed you um hiking threads or hiking posts you know it automatically
Starting point is 00:44:37 uses ai to like only show you hiking stuff or only show you this yeah then you can you can have a lot more competition because you can just build an app and plug it directly into the fediverse and you don't have to build your own social graph it just already exists i'm cool with that i think that's a it's a great idea because i'm going to inevitably want to use certain apps but with different features of a it's like having third party clients again like that i love that world right i would have used third party clients for everything but yeah that the hypothetical like fast forward into the future where every single social media company is plugged into the fediverse and i just post one thing and it's my linkedin and my instagram and my twitter like i don't like it yeah yeah there was that meme that was going around a couple of years ago that was like me on linkedin me on... Oh, I posted, I did one of those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was always like me on LinkedIn, me on Tinder,
Starting point is 00:45:27 me on Twitter. And it was like completely different personas. And there's a reason it's different. Yeah. And I think that's why it's so hard to have like new social media apps is because, yeah, we are in the age of like mature social media.
Starting point is 00:45:38 Like all the ideas have been taken. Like TikTok came along and it was like, oh, that's actually new and different. Here comes 20 billion people. Like short form, short form vertical all right we're doing it it's going to be genuinely really hard to come up with a new one because we have all these great ideas already but also there's there's like a reason why i post some things on one place and some things on the other place yeah you could probably still do that they're probably settings you could probably easily set up settings to say like i don't want posts that i make on this
Starting point is 00:46:05 app to show up on other apps in the fediverse or like that i don't want to see other people's posts from other apps you could probably do that too yeah yeah yeah it's just like that's sorry that my my number one like sign of a talented content creator is they're able to speak the language of a native platform totally and i think to go on to a question I have in terms of people who are content creators using social media and what this could entail, this might be another dumb question, but I know nothing about ActivityPub. Let's say you post something on Twitter
Starting point is 00:46:37 and somebody follows you, or on threads because it is gonna get linked, but somebody who uses Mastodon follows you. Would you see numbers reflected on the app that maybe Marques posts from? I actually don't know. I believe so. I would kind of assume so,
Starting point is 00:46:52 but I just keep thinking about how, I don't know how marketing agencies are still so bad at working with creators and understanding engagement and metrics that now we're going to add potentially dozens of different platforms that can connect to one thing. They're just're going to add potentially dozens of different platforms that can connect to one thing like they're just not going to have any idea how to like gauge an audience of a content creator instead of being we would like one instagram and one twitter they're
Starting point is 00:47:15 just like we would like one post right just the post the post that goes to all your people i mean how many people are following you how many people interact if it's on different websites does it leak into all other ones this is just proof that i have no idea what activity pub is no i think that's a fair question like how if there are unlimited if if it's truly open and anyone can build anything that plugs in and they're not all tracked across everything a thousand people follow you for are they tracked yeah why wouldn't they be a track well it that's why i said it's like how will i know from my point of view let's say i'm a creator who posts something how do i know from this post that i just put out into the world how many people total are engaging with it and from where i guess that's my question is would it if you posted on threads and i replied on mastodon
Starting point is 00:48:00 it would still be in the thread replies right so i just looked this up um ademissary on threads and on mastodon has the same amount of followers 658 000 and if you like click on that first post is it the same replies on both uh let's see yeah it should be it's got 14 replies on mastodon and there's like 300 and it's got 138 replies so i mean they haven't built it out completely yet they said they're like adding features and working through it and they said it's going 138 replies so i mean they haven't built it out completely yet they said they're like adding features and working through it and they said it's going to take uh upwards of a year to actually get the full functionality built out so theoretically everything could when it's built out get synced across everything all of the comments are supposed to get synced all the lights are
Starting point is 00:48:41 supposed to get synced but i think right now all that's happening is the posts get like cross-posted but they will they will eventually all be integrating that makes so yeah the fact that they have the same amount of follower he has the same amount of followers on both platforms is actually i think good because i think that a lot of influencers will actually like push their numbers up a ton because they'll go to someone who wants to make a like do a youtube ad and they have no followers on youtube but they have a ton on instagram they'll say i have 800 million followers across all my platforms but that's all instagram but they can tell someone who wants to make a youtube thing that they have a lot of followers you know it's easier to track if you can just say these are all of the people that follow me because the problem too is that
Starting point is 00:49:24 like a lot of people follow me on youtube and instagram and i can't just say, these are all of the people that follow me. Because the problem too is that like, a lot of people follow me on YouTube and Instagram. And I can't just say, I have double the total followers because- Oh, you can. There's so much overlap. And people do. People do all the time. This is the problem though.
Starting point is 00:49:34 People do all the time. And that is such a fake number. There's so much overlap. Whereas if there's just one universal number and you say, I have 1 million people that follow me total at all across all platforms. Yeah. Which is like, so that's great because it's for you.
Starting point is 00:49:48 You're able to have a big number. But if I am the advertiser, now think about it. I want specifically the people who look at the images you post. I don't have a video. I want you to post an image. Well, it's like, okay, 95% of those people are just there for the videos. See what I mean? But you can probably have statistics for each site, right?
Starting point is 00:50:04 You could say like Instagram, I have these people are engaging with this information like instagram will probably give you statistics of like the people that engage on instagram yeah there's gonna have to be some amazing fediverse local statistics analytics hub yeah somewhere it doesn't matter because marketing agencies are still 20 years behind understanding any of this so they have no idea what's going on there's's going to be a lot of interesting, like local versus global analytics. That's going to happen. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:50:29 So that cottage cheese verse or something. Here we go again. All right. So yeah, hopefully that happens pretty soon, but it's good to see it finally start happening because when they launched threads, they said that it was going to be federated and everyone got really excited.
Starting point is 00:50:44 It's been quite a while since they launched threads and now they're actually starting to work on it it they're actually following through with this promise which feels really good yeah i wish adam was here too not missouri adam molina oh yeah because he would have been really about this what he's the he's the he's the guy activity pub guy yeah yeah adam is very into activity pub so it's a bummer that he's sick today but everyone wish adam well f in the chat no no that is what we want we do want f's like f's is like to pay respect they died yeah yeah but adam is alive and well he just doesn't want to get us but are you saying he deserves disrespect no no never i would never disrespect adam in any way shape or that's so fs in the chat, guys.
Starting point is 00:51:25 That's true. Adam Mazzeri, on the other hand. Hey. Instagram for iPad. Come on. You can Fediverse, but you can't Instagram on iPad? So real. Just kidding.
Starting point is 00:51:35 I actually think he's pretty awesome. Yeah, he's a cool guy. Okay. Let's talk smartphone awards. Let's talk that. Yeah. Spoiler. We're going to talk about the winners. If somehow you are listening to the podcast before the video, thanks.
Starting point is 00:51:48 That's pretty awesome. But we're going to talk about winners. We're you are listening to the podcast before the video thanks that's pretty awesome but we're going to talk about we're going to ruin the video yeah yeah that's fine not a single hot take in here none not at all every single one perfect pick globally accepted are we allowed to universal are we allowed to kind of like say if we had different picks i was good yes yes you are allowed to have of like say if we had different picks? I was going to say yes. Yes, you are allowed to have your own opinion on this show. Despite the Google lawsuit said you couldn't, but now you are allowed to. I'm free. I'm free. All right, let's go down the list.
Starting point is 00:52:15 Okay. Let's go down the list, see if you guys agree. Wait, is the Wikipedia page updated already? Oh, I haven't checked. Let me check. Whoever does this is incredible how quickly they have this. There's a new category. Yeah, it's updated.
Starting point is 00:52:27 2023. Oh, and the new category too. That's so cool. All right. So this is a spoiler. This is the first year we have a new category. So we have an extra trophy, an extra award now to give out. So we'll go through these and let us know your thoughts.
Starting point is 00:52:39 This is fun. I'm actually excited to see if you guys have other thoughts because I'll chime in too if you have any. All right. Oh, yeah, baby. First, best big phone. I feel like this was the one. This wasn't necessarily a super easy one or hard one, but it's S23 Ultra for me. This is just a boring phone that does everything well at being big.
Starting point is 00:52:58 Phones are like roughly all the same size as far as big phones now. Like 6.8 inches is like the size of a big phone. And this has an incredible screen. It has all like the size of a big phone and this has a incredible screen it has all of the cameras it has two telephoto cameras it has a 5 000 milliamp battery it has multitasking features it has a stylus built in the stylus that's what i was just looking at yeah yeah so i i gave a runner up to the one plus open and honorable mentions to the find x6 pro on the rog phone 7 but I do stand by S23 Ultra best big phone. I kind of agree with that. This one was a little bit difficult because it's like,
Starting point is 00:53:29 how do you define big when you have folding phones that exist? I agree. I think this was an argument I used to make with best small phone because I thought the flip in terms of like pocket size was small. Okay, let's jump right to that. Well, I don't want to cut David off. I was cutting David off. I want to say something I really like about that Galaxy S23 Ultra that makes it feel like a truly big phone is the bezels are insanely small on that phone. You look at that screen and it's just like you can barely see any bezel.
Starting point is 00:53:57 It's like all screen. So from screen to body ratio on that thing is crazy, and it's not even like curved over the sides or anything to try to make it seem even more screen than it actually is so would you say i think samsung's the king at screen to body ratio i there are probably they've been doing it for a long time they always seem to have the high numbers screen to body ratio companies from in like china yeah but it feels the best i would say yeah yeah and it's also like it's a 1440p like LTPO high brightness, high accuracy.
Starting point is 00:54:27 It's a great screen. It feels boring to give it to Samsung because one, their products now come out in January so it's been so much time since it came out. That's also impressive though that they can pull off a win when they're arguably 10 months behind. One year old phone. They're actually a processor behind now.
Starting point is 00:54:44 They're already a processor behind. Yeah, I thought about giving it to the OnePlus Open, which is a phone we'll talk about later. But yeah, Find X6 Pro is like, it's really close. It just didn't have the extra zoom. ROG Phone 7 doesn't have wireless charging. It does have much better speakers though.
Starting point is 00:54:58 So I was just kind of like, yeah, this is the boring one. It just wins. Fair enough. Okay. All right. Best compact phone. Best small phone this
Starting point is 00:55:05 is a funny one too because phones have been stratifying and all the small perfect all the small ones have gotten down to like a 6.1 inch screen like the smallest uh like the pixel 7a is 6.1 inch the smallest s23 6.1 yeah smallest uh iphone i believe 6.1. The smallest iPhone, I believe, is 6.1, corner to corner. So they're all not that small. And the Zenfone X, which I'm giving the clear head and shoulders win for best small phone, is 5.9. 9, baby. It's actually reachable.
Starting point is 00:55:37 Yeah. And it has a ton of features. And it happens to also be an incredible phone. It's so good. It's like a physics-defying flagship. In every way. Surprisingly good cameras. flagship surprisingly good cameras really surprisingly good battery life yeah like like very very the battery on this is
Starting point is 00:55:50 wild it's an excellent all-around phone and it happens to be the only reachable one and it has something that the best big phone doesn't have which is a headphone jack it does i still think that's crazy 599 it's got an insanely fast processor it's insanely good battery life it's got wireless charging it's tiny it's i honestly think it's nearly flawless that was my yeah and by the way they're probably not going to make another small one all the rumors are pointing to the zen phone 11 ultra i'm really nervous zen phone 11 so my i mean i've been using it since it came out so so several months yeah i love it my biggest gripe the ultra wide camera is not the best yeah um it's soft which i've just like been realizing
Starting point is 00:56:32 more lately because i'll be holding lane in my arms and trying to take a picture and i'm like oh that's not that great but yeah um but no i love it i i yeah i have like nothing bad to really say about it it's so good it's great can you show the magsafe thing on the back here it's just like this magsafe sticker so you can buy these things now i recommend this to everybody on their android phone because then you can use magsafe accessories uh snaps on yeah it just it 3ms on yeah um the only my only gripe with it is it comes with this really great little thing that plugs into the USB-C and then has a guide to exactly where. But it's only for like popular phones.
Starting point is 00:57:10 So like you'll do it on like all the Samsung phones. You can line it up perfectly. I had to place it on a MagSafe wireless charger and then like gently put the phone above it to let it charge and then like press down on the phone. Oh, wow. You know what you need? Magnet paper. Oh, true. It would just look exactly like the sticker that's on it oh exactly that would have been helpful and then you could see exactly it does come in a pack of two of it over they're like eight bucks also really on amazon uh i'll have yeah maybe we can put a link i first
Starting point is 00:57:39 saw this uh dan seifert from the verge added it to his pixel fold and then now alex has it on his pixel fold too it's great it's great it's great i gave an honorable mention for the best small I guess Dan Seifert from The Verge added it to his Pixel Fold, and then now Alex has it on his Pixel Fold, too. It's great. It's great. It's great. I gave an honorable mention for the best small phone to the Z Flip 5 for the reason you were talking about. It is able to fold down smaller,
Starting point is 00:57:52 and it has a tiny screen on the outside that is usable. So when you open it, it's still a 6.7-inch screen. It's a big phone, again. But it has the ability to be small, so I gave it that. My counterargument against that is that I really like the Razr really i think the razor feels a little bit cheaper but i think it has a lot more character samsung phones to me feel like they have zero character so i agree but it's again kind of in that boring light where like i think the razor has worse cameras worse battery worse software yep well i like the software better on the razor and i don't
Starting point is 00:58:25 know about i didn't use battery long enough to know if it's a worse battery life but it's got a terrible camera the razor and low light is one of the worst cameras i've ever seen so i gave i think like as far as flipping phones like samsung leads the pack and again we're going to talk about foldables later but like just build quality and just the ability to be the best and have all the features seem like that was that's head and shoulders above the rest like there's a couple folding up flipping oppos and flipping yeah huawei's but this was this is the one yeah so that makes sense all right next category best camera iphone 15 pro it is the best overall camera in a smartphone for me and you And this is coming from a person who
Starting point is 00:59:05 shoots a lot of videos on smartphones and takes a lot of photos. And I think when you just look at photos, you can easily sway me off of this. Like there are others that take better photos. You could sway me to my honorable mention, which was the S23 Ultra with that 10X zoom, crushes the iPhone zoom. 15 Pro Max even had a little bit of an extra zoom but there are things that like yeah there are there are others that do better low light that just have better photo features pixel you could argue for all the ai features but then video is a huge part of smartphone cameras too and this always solidifies the iphone for me because the video coming out of the iphone is still so much better than all the rest. They added log this year.
Starting point is 00:59:45 They added the ability to shoot to an external SSD this year. You can genuinely shoot excellent video on an iPhone in a massive variety of situations, which makes it the head and shoulders camera king for me. I think that all of the features they added for like log recording and all of the professional features, their USB-C recording to an external hard drive, all that stuff. I think that definitely, definitely like makes it a lot better. I will say though, that I think that the dual exposure pixel thing they added to the Pixel 8 Pro this year made the video capabilities way better.
Starting point is 01:00:15 You shot an autofocus episode on the Pixel 8 Pro. I did. And everyone was commenting like, this looks really freaking good. Loved the colors out of it. The stabilization was a little bit shifty at times um but it was very sharp and had awesome color and i loved that about it yeah so and and the mics were pretty good too i mean i shoot more in i need to shoot more in like less windy places to like really get a good idea of the mics but i was using the the background wind
Starting point is 01:00:40 removal feature and it was pretty good so yeah it's good right it was good but and again both of them need more manual controls but if you ask me if i could only use one smartphone camera for the next couple years i'm doing iphone 15 yeah pixelate pro did add all the manual controls for the photo mode which was really dope love that so yeah i do have a question here before you move on to honorable mentions um and i saw it on reddit people are wondering when you say iphone 15 pro and now looking at some old things here, sometimes you said like the Pro and the Pro Max in 2020, you only said Pro Max.
Starting point is 01:01:11 Last couple of years, you've only said Pro. Are you kind of lumping them together? Because there is a distinction this year. Yeah, there is. Minimal, but the telephoto. Three to five X lenses, that's it. Correct me if I'm, the log stuff wasn't, is on both?
Starting point is 01:01:24 It's on both of both yeah and this one i'm lumping them together the you're right there is a different telephoto and i think they both are the head and shoulders above the rest so they get lumped together in that way um if there was a bigger difference between the two i would pick the one that's better which i think because of the extra zoom on the 5x on the pro max you could argue that that's better i think some people who just use 3x zoom would be totally you could argue that's just's just preference at that point. Yeah, it's a small difference. Honestly, having shot with both, it's not a giant difference. Samsung has a 10x, like that's a big difference. These two, I'm just putting iPhone 15 and 15 Pro together at the top. Okay, so if
Starting point is 01:01:55 anyone wondering, you're talking about both. Or 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max. Yes, Pro and Pro Max. Yes. Yeah. I gave the honorable mention to S23 Ultra for the photo stuff. And if you want to know the winners of the blind smartphone camera test after a few million votes. Yeah. Let's talk about that. We've got them. So in standard mode, which was just a photo of me in front of the window in daylight,
Starting point is 01:02:16 the winner for all of the masses was Pixel 7a. Let's go. Second place. The iPhones always win. I love it the a phone went last year too yeah it won last year as well yeah the the second place was the pixel fold and the third place was the one plus open so am i am i correct the pixel fold has the same sensor as the pixel 7 i don't think so i think they told me it was new sensors new but it's the same size same megapixel okay same 50 megapixels my theory which has been true since the pixel 6 in my opinion is that google updated they keep updating the sensor size but that algorithm is still made
Starting point is 01:02:57 for the smaller sensors and they have not updated the algorithm and so it's made for this small sensor world where you have to like do a bunch of noise reduction and all this other stuff so the algorithm like isn't very necessary for the larger sensors now which is why the smaller sensor pixels keep winning because it works better on the the smaller sensor pixels whereas the new ones i've noticed that like pixels can overexpose really easily now and like there's a lot of get a little hdre yeah a process yeah a little over process sometimes They don't really know how to handle all the extra light you're getting from the bigger sensor It got a little more interesting in the other categories as well
Starting point is 01:03:31 But yeah, I was I was interested to see like pixel one two Yeah, not 8 Pro though. Just 7a and pixel fold which again smaller sensors interesting So then we got to low light and the winner for the low light was iphone 15 pro for the masses that's kind of surprising that made a lot of sense to me yeah um again these are all full auto uh the second place was pixel 8 pro and the third place was pixel 7a wow again pixel dominating so pixels showing up as 2 3 but iphone 15 pro having the best light photo it these for whatever reason i mean we took this on the roof with me in front of like the city background i am dimly lit a lot of hdr going on you can see like a halo around my head and some
Starting point is 01:04:14 of them and they brightened me up which was cool but they looked a little weird there was a reddit post that somebody the haloing was so bad that somebody was like what's happening did this get messed up it's like those some phones just are not great at doing yeah when i imported them looking at them all side by side i'm convinced like two of them darkened the sky and brightened my face to make it more like poppy yeah i just it looked cool in the moment but it was like that's not a natural looking yeah that's not what i look like in that moment. Wait, David, why did iPhone surprise you? Because the low light performance is like not generally something that Apple like hyper focuses on. But I think that their color in low light was better than almost everybody else. It had the most natural color. We only did three photos. So there's a ton of other variables that
Starting point is 01:05:02 were not tested. I think if you had a moving subject this would have been very different because some of them automatically did a long exposure for low light some didn't the iphone i think did a two second exposure for this particular shot some of them were just like bam single shot blast the hdr and if you're like moving that would work because i would be like frozen but the iphone would have me blurred so there's a bunch of variables that weren't tested here but for this me sitting still outside in the dark, pretty good. Last one, portrait mode, which is just me cut out from a background,
Starting point is 01:05:34 normal looking shot. The winner was the Pixel 8 Pro. Second place was actually the Samsung Z Fold 5, interestingly. And third place was the iPhone 15 Pro. The portrait mode shots had the biggest variance between them all. Different focal lengths, different cutout strengths, different color characteristics, lots of stuff going on. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:05:56 I think I also ended up with my winner being Pixel 8 Pro here. But yeah, Pixel podiumed on every single type of test. That's crazy. Which is interesting. You know what's wild is that we tested 20 different phones tons of different manufacturers and the only three manufacturers that landed were google apple and samsung and the one plus open grab the third place open right grabbed a bronze medal in there yeah yeah it's like watching the olympics where they're like dang it's the same five countries well the funny thing is like these are the three companies that
Starting point is 01:06:24 everyone that like everyone says, like, oh, their cameras are not actually as good as they say they are. Actually, these other companies are better. But then they win the blind test. This is as voted by you guys. Right. This is not me and my winners. This is I put them all up blind and you guys voted millions of times.
Starting point is 01:06:39 And these are the ones that had the highest ELO ratings at the end for each category. I picked the Vivo for the portrait mode. Yeah, there's a lot of time. My Vivo sneaks in there a lot. My winners were a little different from this list. Yeah, mine were really different from this list. I think my highest standard was the OnePlus 11. Oh.
Starting point is 01:06:55 Weirdly. I had the Fairphone 5. You did. Wow. I remember that. That was a surprising one, actually. Yeah, that's funny. Also, for anyone wondering why we didn't do a full video on this this year is just like camera improvements are pretty minimal
Starting point is 01:07:12 every year so like we found when we used to do the bracket style the video each year kind of was very similar but we still wanted to play the game because it's fun for the audience so that's why this year the website was up you just straight up got your results there's no waiting till the end and then we just tacked it into the smartphone awards we do plan on doing a video either the next time we see a significant big interesting thing or probably like every couple years where we feel like the camera improvements are getting exponentially when there's some big changes, big learnings, definitely. Yeah. Yeah. All right. A couple more.
Starting point is 01:07:51 Big, my value award, this was just a bloodbath. It could have been any one of like five phones. I ended up going with the one that, again, almost feels like it's too easy of a pick. It's just a bland, middle, everything you need, nothing you don't, A54. It's, I think it launched at 400 bucks. I think it's like close to 330, 320 bucks now. Samsung Galaxy A54 for those that don't a54 it's i think it launched at 400 bucks i think it's like close to 330 320 bucks now samsung galaxy a54 for those samsung sorry samsung galaxy a54 yeah awesome 54
Starting point is 01:08:12 is what they want to call it um awesome magenta yeah literally uh my analogy in the video was like you know how someone asks you how your day is and you're like it's fine it's fine how's the screen it's fine how's the cameras how is fine fingerprint reader it's fine yeah yeah battery life it's fine it's the default skin of yeah of like it's the generic phone that you get and it's fine because like that's all you need yeah and it's everything you need. So it's a totally reasonable pick for most people to just live with that phone. So I like it. I gave my runner-up to the Moto G Play,
Starting point is 01:08:51 which impressed me at $169. Crazy. And an honorable mention to the Pixel 7a, which is $500 now, but did actually get noticeable improvements and is a really good phone. Yeah. I think the Zenfone 10 is a great value.
Starting point is 01:09:04 That's a very good point. I do think value generally should stray less but 600 bucks for a phone that i switch from like very good pixels and yeah very happy with that's a that's a great flagship specs too yeah a little stand over here yeah but you could buy three moto g plays i'd rather have one zenfone it's not that good like the the g is impressive because you are getting like a pretty big screen it's 90 hertz and it's like very usable because when you test i've tested some really cheap phones and when you go down in price they get slow and they get real bad software support and that one was at least decent at everything so i was happy about that um but you're right i don't know if i
Starting point is 01:09:45 felt like there was like a cap to what i could give it no for sure i agree i agree like i wanted i don't know can i get well we did we gave pixels six and pixel seven twice best value because those were this year it went up 100 bucks on both of them but previously those values were really they were up higher but they were super super worth it yeah for sure okay best battery award iphone 15 plus two-day phone there's not a lot of phones i can say that about and it's a 60 hertz phone and the other two phones that i mentioned if you set them to 60 hertz are also two-day phones yeah which are the rog phone 7 which had a 6 000 milliamp hour battery i believe and the zen phone 10 which if you set it 60, is going to be a two-day phone.
Starting point is 01:10:27 ROG Phone 7 does not have wireless charging. No. Zenfone 10 does not have particularly fast charging, but it's still good. I think it's 30 watts. Yeah, it's decent. This is the largest battery ever in an iPhone, and I just couldn't kill it,
Starting point is 01:10:39 and I just had to give it the award. It's that good. Yeah. Real quick, looking at this list on Wikipedia, in 2014, your first year, you did not do a Best Battery award. I've never noticed that. You also didn't do Best Foldable that year.
Starting point is 01:10:53 That's true. Weird. That's weird. But no, no, I like... Flip phone. Best Battery feels like one... Actually, funny enough, the categories have been exactly the same since 2014
Starting point is 01:11:04 except for that first year, no Best battery, which seems kind of like. Yeah. And I changed the design award. The design award started off as like best build quality. And then I just changed it to craziest design. And now it's just something design award related. Yeah. Something that was a little outside of the box.
Starting point is 01:11:21 Which we're about to get into. Or noteworthy design. So let's do that one. Design award. This was actually, it started off being the hardest one to give and then it turned out being the easiest one. Because I can't, it's always like I can't give this to like a plastic phone. I can't give this to a phone that doesn't have a headphone jack. I can't give this to a phone that doesn't have like flats display and like all the things that we need a phone to have.
Starting point is 01:11:41 So it's going to end up being the boring one. It's going to end up being like the s23 ultra or something i'll argue a plastic phone that could have been mentioned the fair i've got an argument for this one because the fair phone like design wise is designed to be replaced and stuff like that i'm not saying it should have won but that is a plastic one that does have a different design choice that should be applauded definitely a notable design and in that particular way it's it's interesting it's still a thicker phone it's still is it water i think it is water resistant but it's still compromised a little bit okay i'm not saying it should have went i'm just saying
Starting point is 01:12:16 that like plastic shouldn't immediately you can do good things with plastic plastic revolutionary i did disqualify glass what else is crumple phone oh best design award no it's 2021's iphone 12 mini baby listen okay listen listen listen listen listen okay i had to get the back glass repaired on this guy a little bit ago and i went to the apple store with my apple care you know um and it took forever. It took like six hours for them to do this. And so I finally came to pick up my phone and naturally I was like, what was going on? Right. And the technician was like, I'm so excited that I get to sit down with you and talk to
Starting point is 01:12:57 you about this. He said, first of all, you have, and this is a quote, the collector's iPhone. He described this as the best iphone one could own and he said specifically it's because it is the strongest iphone apple has made since the x that is the word from the technician he said i just like that it's so hard not only is it so hard to break these things which i can attest to because i know case and i drop it every single day you didn't break it i know you were you were at a repair appointment. That's what I was trying to, like, that's so funny.
Starting point is 01:13:28 But he was explaining that the railing and front glass of the 12 mini is so strong, it's almost impossible for even a technician to take them apart without completely breaking the entire phone. You know what's funny is that's why they changed the way that the iPhone 14 was made that to make it easier to take the back off because it was too hard to repair and it was costing them too much i think that was this year it was all one piece anyway this is all to say greatest iphone ever made in my hands
Starting point is 01:13:57 i would argue that the 13 mini is better because it has much better battery life well if it's just the design award. But it doesn't come in purple. I have to disqualify them both because they didn't come out this year. Also, fact check, that was 2020, not 2021. Either way, this phone is pretty much brand new, so I think it's eligible. Ellis's iPhone
Starting point is 01:14:18 12. Refurbished. One best design. No, I gave it to the Honor Magic V2. Right. Oh, I forgot we didn't even get there that phone was dope yeah it was incredibly it was just a physics defying phone again 9.9
Starting point is 01:14:32 millimeters biggest battery in a foldable just that by itself was like wait hold on 5,000 million powers it's crazy it has the full triple camera array it has like all the folding phone stuff corner corner outside screen great aspect ratio really really good design yeah so yeah shout out to them and it's a folding phone which is crazy because next category is the first ever best folding phone
Starting point is 01:14:56 trophy new new award for 2023 did you guys get tagged on twitter a bunch because apparently like six months ago we said, oh, we're gonna do the new folding phone category. When it happens, say you can tell people you knew about this because of the podcast. And I forgot we said that. I just got a bunch of tweets at me. I was like, what happened?
Starting point is 01:15:17 We also said we'd pin the comment of whoever tweeted at us first. Good luck, Adam. Someone did say you know what to do. And I was like, I do not. So thank you. We need to find the first person that tweeted that at us first. Oh, good luck, Adam. Someone did say, you know what to do, and I was like, I do not. We need to find the first person that tweeted at us, and we will pin the comment. Let me try and find the first person who tweeted
Starting point is 01:15:32 while you go through. Well, it's the OnePlus Open this year. It's the best folding phone that came out this year. It's the most complete. It is a full flagship, a total banger. The screens are awesome, super bright, super responsive, super high-end specs, great battery, full--on cameras you saw it get that bronze metal it had really good cameras um and the software was actually really good a little bit of interesting new multitasking features
Starting point is 01:15:55 with the way they organize the the different windows around the panels so if you made me pick a foldable to daily that's the one i would. I would pick it by a slim margin personally over the Pixel Fold, which I gave my runner up because that, for whatever reason, well, I know why. It's because it's the aspect ratio and size, the passport stuff. It's awesome to use it closed. Yeah. Which is awesome. Yeah. But it's a folding phone, so I got to open it sometimes and it's not as good open.
Starting point is 01:16:19 So that was my runner up and honorable mention to the Z Flip 5, both because it's the best flipping phone and also because it feels like Samsung's were the only ones that didn't have some sort of build issues, whether it's the screen or the hinge or something like that. Samsung's been at it the longest and they're doing the safest design, which is why they didn't win awards, but honorable mention for being durable. Yeah. I'll say the Pixel Fold's interior to screen is pretty bad. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:16:43 The bezels are pretty big. It's just, it's just like, it doesn't look like it's kind of oily. It just doesn't look nearly as good as something like the OnePlus Open or the Honor Magic V2. The OnePlus Open has almost no crease, too. Yeah, it's very good. It's basically the same exact hardware as the Oppo Find N3 Fold or whatever it's called. It is the exact same hardware. Yeah, same hardware. it's good man i really wish that oppo kept making the small passport foldables
Starting point is 01:17:09 that they stopped with the find n two fold oh they stopped yeah i didn't realize that at least so far because they switched to a much bigger phone that's part of the reason i really like the pixel fold is because it's shorter yeah yeah so also alert slider didn't even mention that all right all right i also did a most improved award i kind of like this one just like what let's acknowledge the biggest delta between last year and this year and i ended up giving this one to the nothing phone 2 uh yes the hardware is slightly improved and it has like a new curved back and better leds and more control over the glyph and stuff like that but also a big software jump in the whole rewrite they did with nothing os
Starting point is 01:17:44 and now it's on android did with nothing os and now it's on android 14 with nothing os 2.5 and it has a lot of character and it has iMessage and it's got the blue oh wait no no wait sorry no no it doesn't no they don't have that anymore close but the phone itself deep cut yeah i mean that would have locked them into the spot for sure if they'd gotten that through but it doesn't have blue bubbles. But it is still really good. And I gave my runner up to the iPhone 15 because they've had lightning for a decade. And it has USB-C this year. That's crazy.
Starting point is 01:18:14 So there you go. That is a big improvement. Must improve. A lot of other phones are like almost the same as last year, basically. Yeah. And like Zenfone 10, I'm glad it's almost the same as last year. I'm not mad. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:18:22 I'm just saying. It's just slightly better. Yeah. In every way. Bust of the year the solana saga crypto phone now listen listen i hear you i'm not ignoring you i hear you there are a lot of people mainly on twitter mainly with crypto in their bio who have a lot of thoughts about how the resale price of this phone has gone up so much because you have to you got to spend like two grand to get one on ebay now did you know that yeah they're like reselling five hundred dollars because all the
Starting point is 01:18:55 bonk and and all the what is the crypto clanosaurian asaur is. And the free honeybee toy or whatever. No, no, no. It's called Beamium. Get it right. All of the stuff that you get with the phone at the moment is very valuable. All of the limited edition NFTs and stuff that you get with the phone are actually quite valuable at this point. So if you didn't buy the phone, you missed out on a bag. You could have sold it for a thousand dollars on ebay generational wealth here's the thing that doesn't make it a good phone also yeah it doesn't also on top of that we have always said that we judge these phones for this based on release msrp and
Starting point is 01:19:38 things that happened at release right like yeah because there's a lot of times by the time we're into this people are like no the samsung phone's so much cheaper now the value should be this or my t-mobile gives me buy one get one free and those are great deals and bonk is cool that it's bonking off or whatever but like it did not happen when the phone came out and when we first looked at the phone solano and we don't get to if anything did we shoot the smartphone awards already before this spike happened? We did actually. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the other thing is like, okay, this was a, it was a thousand dollars when it came out, whatever. Then it was 600 bucks when I reviewed it, but the actual phone itself isn't good. So this was, let's, let's just say it's a normal $600 phone. It had a pretty
Starting point is 01:20:20 solid build quality. This was a thing. This was made by the same team that made the essential phone one and it was made of ceramic and it was heavy and it had the colored buttons and it had like a nice design it was like a fair phone but made of ceramic it was cool yeah true fingerprint reader on the back that's a throwback i liked it throwback design but then from that point on you got a worse soc you got a pretty bland uh display you got a 4100 milliamp hour battery which in a phone this big is not enough. Cameras were not good. Just straight up not good. And then the software was basically
Starting point is 01:20:50 stock. They didn't add anything to the software experience other than the Solana features. The Dapp Store. The Dapp Store, exactly. With the developers of the Dapp Store. So I will add this asterisk for you. If you are a really invested Solana holder already
Starting point is 01:21:08 or even into crypto no no but it's like not even but you have to be like into the solana chain yeah yes the thing about the app store too is that you can't only use the apps on the sound like you're hiccuping while saying app store it's not like you can only use the apps on the Salonisaga. You sound like you're hiccuping while saying App Store. It's not like you can only use the apps on the Salonisaga. You can use them on any Android phone. It's just a curated list of apps. I mean, you get the Seed Vault. There were a couple things that were built into the phone that were unique. The Seed Vault is cool.
Starting point is 01:21:36 Which is why I will say, if you are all in to that ecosystem, then that feature may push it over the edge for you to want to still spend $600 or I guess go to eBay now and spend $2,000 on a phone with a subpar display, subpar battery life, subpar cameras,
Starting point is 01:21:51 and subpar software because you have that feature working for you. In which case, the runner up is the bust of the year, which is all of the concept phones that didn't come out this year. You know who you are. The Solana phone came with a really cool usb cable that had a little switch that allowed you to do only charging or charging plus
Starting point is 01:22:11 data still use that cable and they were selling it on amazon for like 30 but i can't find it now oh so oh so that makes it a good just kidding mvp yeah okay also if you thought marquez who doesn't talk about crypto at all was going to think this was like the greatest phone ever for someone who doesn't use crypto i just don't know what to say i try to give it a chance i tried to like actually review it as a person who didn't have to spend the money i bought the phone no i didn't i got the phone sent to me and then i gave it a chance which i didn't have to and i really like started to use the phone for a while uh so that is my that is my l of the year uh and now we get to the w of the year which is the phone of the year the mvp i there's a bunch of ways to just to find this one i could just say it's my favorite phone of the year the most impactful the most well-rounded
Starting point is 01:23:01 whatever but my phone of the year is the Pixel 8, Google Pixel 8. And it's just, it's a nice graduation to finally, like, I think starting to hit the stride of what they intended when they started making Pixel, which it took a couple years. We're on Tensor G3 now, we're on like this new third generation of this thing that they started doing, but awesome screen, much brighter, 120 hertz LTPO. Well, for Pro. No, the Pixel 8 as well. Really? 120 hertz, yeah.
Starting point is 01:23:31 It's not quite as bright, but it's still 2000 plus nits. It's an awesome screen. It's a really, really good camera, as we already know. Tons and tons of clever software features. The only thing I don't like about it is the artificial gating of features from the pro phone. Which is almost like not its fault. Like if that pro phone didn't exist,
Starting point is 01:23:51 then all these features would be on this phone too. But honestly, seven years of software updates kind of sealed it in for me. I think that's an awesome promise. And if they deliver, I have no regrets about this being phone of the year. There were some gates that were a little bit more legitimate. Like I did a lot of research into how video boost works and you actually do need a lot
Starting point is 01:24:09 of RAM to make that work. So I think the 12 gigs of RAM versus the eight actually did help it. But I think that a lot of the features were artificially. So yeah, but seven years of software updates is crazy. Yeah. I did have some a runner up, which is the Zenfone 10. Yeah. The nearly flawless Zenfone 10.
Starting point is 01:24:29 I think that's my phone of the year is the Zenfone 10. It's really good. Personally. It's really good. Yeah. And then it's missing a few software features for me,
Starting point is 01:24:36 which I still keep coming back to the Pixel 4. Yeah. And then honorable mentions to the iPhone 15 Pro, which is just a rock solid phone that finally has USB Type-C. The S23 ultra being
Starting point is 01:24:46 the boring one generation of chip old flagship that's still incredibly good and the one plus open that's foldable of the year yeah so that's my smartphone awards and the salon of him and yeah not a single hot take in here i like i like the awards if you guys want to watch the full video and all the breakdowns and even though you already know the winners you can still sort of enjoy the lead up and the descriptions of each phone you can watch the smartphone awards we'll link it below but you know we should insert right now trivia i just want to say if this is not cheese trivia based on marquez's cheese answer before i'm going to be a little upset monterey jack it better be in what state a gouda question oh it is all right activity pub everyone's favorite decentralized social media network protocol blue sky would
Starting point is 01:25:34 like a word the app protocol but anyway oh right because they don't use they don't use it they have their own at protocol but anyway continue i wonder how that's going. But go on, go on. It's actually an iteration on an earlier protocol with a very similar name. Was that similar name A, Activity Pup? B, Activity Pump? C, Shactivity Pub? Or D, Activity Plum Is Shacktivity like Shaq the basketball player? Like Shaquille O'Neal, yeah.
Starting point is 01:26:10 I have explanations for all these. I figure we'll save them for the end. I have my own explanation for the first one already. For Activity Pub, is it about Dogecoin? Because if so, you'd be right. It's about Woof. Oh, like the farm thing? No, like the fake app in the office where you send a wolf and it sends
Starting point is 01:26:27 like to every single device that you have no unfortunately it's about dogecoin okay but we'll get to that after the break after the break are bonk and dogecoin connected uh no No. You've always wanted to be part of something bigger than yourself. You live for experience and lead by example. You want the most out of life and realize what you're looking for is already in you. This is for you. The Canadian Armed Forces, a message from the government of Canada.
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Starting point is 01:28:18 netsuite.com slash waveform. All right, welcome back to the final section of Waveform. We got a couple quick car stories because cars are tech and there's some pretty good stories. First of all, Tesla says they are testing a wireless charging mat for your car. I don't believe you.
Starting point is 01:28:32 Just kidding. I believe you. I just don't think this is shipping anytime soon. So basically what happened is Franz, the designer at Tesla, head designer, went on the Jay Leno show, showing him the Cybertruck. And at some point,
Starting point is 01:28:47 I think Jay Leno asked him about wireless charging and Fran said, oh yeah, we're working on that. We're working on that. Yeah, you just drive your car over like a mat in your driveway and then don't even have to plug anything in. It'll charge your car. I believe that you're working on it
Starting point is 01:28:59 just like you're working on the Roadster, which just means it's not likely to come out anytime soon. Here's why. Wireless charging is not efficient. And no matter how much you work on the tech, obviously there are some physical limitations. The one other car, this should answer any questions you might have
Starting point is 01:29:16 about how soon it could come out. The one other car that has actually tried and shipped this exact feature is the $3.5 million dollar mclaren speedtail the mclaren speedtail is not an electric car the mclaren speedtail has a wireless charging puck that you can drive over or like slide underneath the car that is basically a slow charging like trickle charge tender for the battery in that gas car like the little car battery in there yeah because this is a car that's basically,
Starting point is 01:29:46 let's be honest, sitting in mostly garages and not being driven much. And people who own three and a half million dollar cars like that have a ton of other cars that they drive a lot. And so this is a car that's just gonna sit in your driveway. So a lot of these cars come with slow trickle chargers and they thought,
Starting point is 01:29:59 this is a small enough battery that even if you get it slightly off center or don't drive quite to the center, this is a trickle charger you know that also makes sense because how expensive is that car millions of millions of dollars but then you don't have to have like the wire rubbing up on it all the time when you have to keep it plugged in in the garage now it's just free but yeah the thing about wireless chargers is and, and you can observe this with any phone, we love the MagSafe because it snaps it into place to get the exact alignment for ideal charging efficiency. But if you're driving your car onto it, you could be to the left a little, to the right
Starting point is 01:30:36 a little, you could go too far forward, you could go not enough forward, you could have your suspension too high, something. It just might not be in the exact ideal position. And so you could draw hundreds of extra watts of power from your wall that don't go into the car. Yeah. If you're just not quite on the right spot. Also, that supercar that you were talking about, it's very low to the ground, which
Starting point is 01:30:52 means it's going to be a lot closer contact to the inductive charger. And I mean, maybe the Roadster could do this if it's close enough to the ground. But most of Tesla's cars are at least raised a little bit. So you're going gonna lose more energy if you have it's a cool idea i love the like futurism of thinking about it but with today's tech it's an insane idea it's that's all like the biggest gripe about electric cars is how long it takes to charge in the most like at the absolute best charging rate right now plugged in at a tesla supercharger is still takes a long time
Starting point is 01:31:25 comparison to gas cars so now before we've even really gotten that to like the best of its capabilities at least this is home charging right true but even home charging if you're using how long does it take to go about full out of 240 volt it's like an upgraded outlet let's give it the like yeah i have a 240 it charges at 11 kilowatts so a couple hours overnight after a daily commute and you're fine it charges about 30 miles an hour in my battery pack so that's plugged in at 11 kilowatts if i i don't know the exact percentage efficiency i'm not even gonna try to guess it but on a wireless that's probably that would be pretty good but you're still gonna pull the full power from your wall. You're just losing a lot of energy.
Starting point is 01:32:05 Yeah, you're just wasting energy. So that's tough. And the grid can't really do that. They are definitely working on this. They purchased this German wireless car charging company, Wiferion in July. Strange name. Dude, super weird name.
Starting point is 01:32:18 Super weird name. Wiferion. It sounds like an... Never mind. Yeah. Good point. But they sold the company, but they ended up keeping the engineers. So they obviously are working on the technology.
Starting point is 01:32:31 They're probably just want a proprietary version. Yeah. Um, but yeah, I would love to see what they end up with, but I, I don't doubt if it's going to take quite a while. I'd bet anything. The roadster comes out before this. Yeah. Wait, so you talk about your bet with Sawyer Merritt on Twitter.
Starting point is 01:32:46 I just bet him that exact bet. Oh, okay. He said, this is, like, why do you not think it's coming out? I'm like, this is so far from today's tech, so. Anyway. He said, never mind. This is just a stupid thing to say online. What do you think this isn't coming out?
Starting point is 01:33:00 No, I just don't think it's coming out any f***ing time soon. Yeah, it's going to be a long time. You know what would be pretty cool? No, I just don't think it's coming out any f***ing time soon. Yeah, it's going to be a long time. You know what would be pretty cool? If your Tesla had brushes that could come out from the bottom or the top and make contact with electrical wires so that you could charge while you drive.
Starting point is 01:33:16 You're talking about a bus? Yeah, then you could make the Tesla big enough for you and all your friends. And then it comes at a pre-planned time and route so you can drink oh so self-driving a bus self-driving okay wait what here's a question what do you think comes first uh-huh good wireless charging pad public infrastructure that can fit in your garage or a tesla bot that can just plug your car in for you well remember the early stages where they were testing that um the snake arm that would like look for the and then simone simone built one didn't she she did yeah really that's another thing where i feel like there were too many variables
Starting point is 01:33:57 plugging it by itself yeah the snake arm to plug into your car because i'm saying tesla bot people are lazy tesla bot can definitely deadlift uh wire which one do you think will ship to real people first yeah i think tesla would ship the wireless car charger before tesla bot is that that's a whole nother take a whole nother take i mean tesla bot's supposed to do mundane things at your home that you don't want to do so you can just meet me in the garage and plug my car in while I walk inside and slam the door in its face. And then it can break down all my cardboard boxes that I throw in the garage. You can't be mean to TeslaBot. Everyone knows how that movie goes, Andrew.
Starting point is 01:34:35 You can't be mean to it. Wait, is this snake? Is that real, this snake charger? No. I don't think it ever happened. It's not a real thing. It was like a marketing. It was a marketing demo from 10 years ago, just like driving across the country was a
Starting point is 01:34:46 marketing demo from 10 years ago. Yeah. Okay. Anyway. Okay. It's crazy. Let's see your first of that. It's just like crazy that like, they're like, you know, Tesla, I think it's obvious.
Starting point is 01:34:56 We have a little bit of a PR problem. People assume we don't have morally the right ideas. Let's have our charger embody the metaphor from the Bible for evil, a serpent. It's like, who? But never mind. Continue. All right. Well, we can move on a couple other quick things. I think the last big domino has fallen with this NACS thing. The Volkswagen Group has finally committed to NACS in 2025. Volkswagen Group, meaning that includes Audi and Porsche. So, you know, Taycan, e-tron, all of those EVs. At this point, I feel like it's safe to say everyone who currently ships a battery-powered EV
Starting point is 01:35:34 has committed to NACS. All the dominoes have fallen. There's definitely one, and I can't wait to read the comment on the one we're missing. And if you say it's the Ram pickup truck, that doesn't ship for another year and a half. If it's something else I'm missing, feel free to let me know. But Lucid was like the second to last domino.
Starting point is 01:35:51 This is like, all right, Porsche, Audi, VW group is in. All right, the big dominoes are all in. And NACS is now the new North American charging standard, period. Yeah. So, I mean, to add on to that, the Society of Automotive Engineers actually officially announced NACS as a standard very recently last week, which we kind of missed last week after Tesla released the specifications in 2022. That is a big deal because now the government is reassessing how they're going to allocate their $7.5 billion EV fund, which previously allowed NACS chargers, but it had to also have the magic dock that allowed ccs as well now you don't tesla just did all this engineering to make the magic dock and now they kind of don't need to make it anymore considering all cars are switching by 2025 yeah and the
Starting point is 01:36:37 original thing was because to get the government subsidy it had to be able to charge more than one it had to be able to charge more than one type of car yeah yeah and who knows if that helps start this but also like tesla doing this i'm sure licensing it all out is probably making a boat load well now that it's a standard i don't know if they are licensing it out because they opened they uh they released the specifications in november 22 i think at this point they don't care about licensing the port they have the most um network oil gas stations they have the most gas stations right and if you use like the tesla app and whatever at the gas station that means that they're going to make the most money like they've they've kind of saturated the market in a lot of ways and now they're just like we already have the biggest network let's just make money as the as the gas station yeah so and they're still building more yeah lat one last headline uh mercedes i thought this was actually pretty clever i don't know why so
Starting point is 01:37:35 much i kind of like it mercedes is adding if i got approval to add a special new colored light to the car that indicates when that car is currently self-driving it's a turquoise colored light so there's all these rules i don't know exactly what uh countries this is going to be allowed in but basically you can only have certain like amber or red colored lights or white colored headlights on your car this is a new color they've gotten approval to add just for when the car is driving itself i kind of like it i kind of want to know why when someone else is i want to know when the car is driving itself and i don't know why i think i you know why you want to stay in an extra lane away from it no i want to just blow right past it not even think about it like i think
Starting point is 01:38:23 the the human driver is actually more likely to make a weird erratic to be aggressive yeah yeah yeah so if a car is like stopped at like a stop sign for way too long i'm not gonna beep because it's self-driving i'll just drive around because the car is clearly doing something dumb and i'm just gonna drive around it it's just nice to know when it's messing up due to being self-driving you know however mercedes does have a very good level four is it level four self-driving they have pretty decent self-driving i've tested i actually it was years ago that i tested it so i i don't i haven't used it a lot of people have said recently that the mercedes one is very good they do which is surprising i would like to try that so there's
Starting point is 01:38:57 going to be cars out there self-driving all the time when i see this i feel like it semi reminds me of stickers that say like student driver, which then makes, yeah. Well, if it's like the baby on board one, it's like, I wasn't going to crash into you anyways, but I'll be extra careful around your baby driver though.
Starting point is 01:39:13 Yeah. The student driver one might actually prompt people to like, I've seen, have you ever seen where it's like a student driver parked at a red light and they're just ready for the horn and the millisecond it hits green, they just lay the horn on and like, Oh man, people don't ever do this this is extremely dangerous but people mess with student drivers and i'm very scared of people messing with self-driving cars and accidentally committing
Starting point is 01:39:36 vehicular manslaughter driving by the mercedes with the blue light on throwing your coke at the cameras it's very scary do not do any of that but yeah i'm but maybe do it a little no i know there's a lot of people who mess with evs and i don't think i want to see people messing well the evs that are self-driving and that are obvious now they're like super there'll be like a waymo with like 12 sensors on it so like yeah people throw stuff on people literally put cones on the nose of the car just control it and it stops the car in its tracks like that's already a thing that happens so this isn't going to change that it's just this is an extra layer of you're in a neighborhood and you're about to cross the street
Starting point is 01:40:12 and you look to your left and you see a car coming and it's got the blue light on maybe i'll wait an extra second for that one and most people will not know what it means i would say just in case pro tip always wait the extra second when there's a car involved if you see a person in the front seat going like this a fair fair but if you see a person who looks like they're looking at you but they're clearly not controlling the car it's good to know that they're not controlling or they're asleep yeah so that's all that's that's a headline i thought was interesting i like being overly cautious have you ever seen like a car coming and it's going to make a turn where you are and it's blinkers on i always wait to make sure they make the turn because the chances that that
Starting point is 01:40:50 person might just have a blinker on and blow past the turn or decide oh wait i'm not turning here and then you start make yeah jersey we have the opposite problem usually there's no blinkers in jersey exactly by law they just make the turn they don ever indicate. And it has to be over two lanes every time. I was behind a person on the highway today on the way to the studio who drove. She drove in the left lane with her right blinker on for over a mile. And then when she finally changed lanes, she put her left blinker on to turn into the right lane. Her controls are inverted. And then I passed her and she was on her phone.
Starting point is 01:41:22 It was unbelievable. That's New jersey for you i lived in philadelphia for uh many years which is on the southern border of new jersey for those unfamiliar to geography and in philly west we refer to something as the jersey slide because when you have to drive into jersey to do something a jersey slide is when someone merges three or more lanes at once without their signal. Yeah. Nice. Because I need to be in the fast lane until the exit.
Starting point is 01:41:49 No, no. It's the opposite. It's always people going from the fast lane going, there's my exit. Yeah. That's what I mean. I want to be in the fast lane. I'm not going to lose time on this. All right.
Starting point is 01:41:58 Enough Jersey talk, guys. We went, that was a- I know this is in our bio. That was a stagger of good car tips and bad car tips. Pick the good ones. Anyway, let's do trivia. Let's do trivia. It's been a long episode.
Starting point is 01:42:11 Oh, yeah. Welcome back to Trivia, everybody. We've got two banger questions today, if I do say so myself. Question number one. As part of all The Verge's awesome coverage of this Google lawsuit, Chaim Gartenberg covered a secret Google program intended to butter up and keep developers in the Play Store. What was this program called? By the way, Chaim is at Google now, which is ironic. It's funny.
Starting point is 01:42:43 He reported on Google and they're like like did i read an old article and not yeah he probably yeah probably this is from 2021 he's probably covering it in 20 read it one more time i forgot the question oh you know what this is actually this is part of the epic lawsuit no this is the same lawsuit i forgot that i don't it's part of the epic lawsuit yeah okay i was right play store so wait sorry i got i'm got i'm worried that's down i know come on don't know the question we were yelling at each other yeah okay that is going to stay in the episode because that is useful context i should have looked at the date when i was writing this trivia question i'm a great person but yeah what's the question uh okay google had a secret program
Starting point is 01:43:22 and the goal of this program was to keep developers using the Play Store instead of letting them pull an epic. So, what was this program called? Marques, I'm giving you... Till right now. Now. Right now. I'm wrong anyway, it doesn't matter. I know.
Starting point is 01:43:42 All right. All right, let's flip them and read anyone project hug so i said project hug which is the correct answer correct i said operation grilled cheese no but that's pretty that's pretty good buttered up oh oh mine doesn't even make that much sense. It's probably less. Operation Sweet Tooth. I like that, too. That's a good answer. All of those.
Starting point is 01:44:08 Those could be real Google programs, too. But yes, Project Hug was what it was referred to around the house. I believe the official name was the Apps and Games Velocity Program. Wow. Yes. Very stealthy. Question two about Activity Pub. Everyone's favorite decentralized social networking protocol, except Blue Sky, apparently.
Starting point is 01:44:28 It's actually an iteration on an earlier protocol with a very similar name. Is it A, ActivityPub, a decentralized proof-of-stake protocol that mined the cryptocurrency meme coin, Dogecoin? that mined the cryptocurrency meme coin, Dogecoin. B, Activity Pump, a reference to a decentralized protocol being an activity pump, which feeds an activity stream. C, Shactivity Pump, excuse me, Shactivity Pub, an early investment venture of Shaquille O'Neal started off the hot 2010s hype of Facebook. Or D, Activity Plum, a full social network platform which used purple as a visual distinction from its main competitor, Twitter.
Starting point is 01:45:30 Do we need time to think about this? I feel like we all wrote our answer yeah we all ready i did are we all confident oh wait no i need to add another thing bartez is taking a artistic license i did some art on mine all right well uh why don't we flip and read them? Who wants to go first? We all said something different. No, I did the same as you. No. No? Yep.
Starting point is 01:45:53 I said... Wait. Sorry. For those, Marquez wrote the letter B, but it's a dog woofing the letter B, which is A. Activity pump. Right, but I wrote B. Okay, I also wrote B, activity pump.
Starting point is 01:46:10 Yes. I'm so good at being wrong. It's like when you write brown, but you write it in purple. Or shake your head yes and say no. It's like when you wrote C yesterday, but you spelled it S-I-E or something. I did plump. I like that idea. Alas, that would have been cute. But no, it was activity pump from pump.io.
Starting point is 01:46:29 I wrote, I did a guy pumping his hand. Oh. A lot of fingers. That's five. It's just five. So that brings our scores to Marquez with 19 points. David also with 19 points. Oh, here we go again.
Starting point is 01:46:50 And Andrew also with one, two. He was gone for parental leave. Give him a break. Give him a break. Nine. Oh, sorry. I read that wrong. 13.
Starting point is 01:47:02 You carried too many ones. Six extra ones specifically. Isn't this what happened last season is that Marques and I were tied and then I just totally got destroyed. The points mean nothing. Or maybe I was above. The final score was like 400 points. Yeah, I know.
Starting point is 01:47:17 It's all about multiplication, baby. Yeah. Well, that's been it. Thanks for listening with us. Thanks for tuning in. And I hope you have a happy holidays. We got more stuff coming for you, but obviously it's a,
Starting point is 01:47:27 it's all holiday themed and related or actually end of the year themed and related. So stay tuned for that until the next one. Catch you later. Peace. Way of Form is produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Roven. We're partnered with the Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro outro music was created by vane sill Yo, I...
Starting point is 01:48:09 Where are we going with this? I had my music on shuffle yesterday. Uh-oh. And Hey Ya from Outkast came up. Uh-huh. And that's the first time I really listened to the lyrics of this song. It's depressing. Wow.
Starting point is 01:48:22 Yeah. Wow. I don't think I know those. This song is sad.

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