Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Apple Really Loves Cameras and EV Startups Want Your Money

Episode Date: March 18, 2022

Marques and Andrew discuss the latest moves by Vimeo, Apple events becoming more and more focused on the cameras, and EV startups doing whatever it takes to get investments. If you want a nice mix of everything that makes a classic Waveform episode, this one is for you! Links: Verge article about Vimeo: https://bit.ly/vimeoep107 Jason Cammisa video about Lucid: https://bit.ly/Lucidep107 Twitters: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://twitter.com/adamlukas17 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ Shop the merch: shop.mkbhd.com 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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We're your hosts. I'm Marques. And I'm Andrew. And today we've got a bunch of stuff to talk about from this week. First of all, we want to talk about some new EV stuff and how a bunch of these new EV startups like to move and maneuver. And maybe it's a nice way of putting a little bit of a rant probably in there. But also we have a bit of a fun segment talking about cameras in smartphone presentations and how that's evolved over time because that's been super fun but first one of the most common questions that i actually get from people when they ask about my job like it's a it's a common interview question an onstage question is what would you do if youtube disappeared what would you do if youtube died

tomorrow so like if youtube died what would you do it like where would you move if YouTube died tomorrow? So like if YouTube died, what would you do? Like where would you move your stuff or would you do a different job or all encompassing? It's always about like how much dependence we have on this platform. And maybe someday YouTube's just they change a rule that screws us over or they disappear or something happens like that. And my answer is always YouTube is far too stable to be like overly focusing on that i get it it's an it's a great economic question but youtube i have a lot of trust in them right now yeah uh and the answer always comes from looking at youtube's competition which is like what are the alternatives to youtube like if i'm gonna go watch a video on the internet i want to know what the the new iphone se looks like i'm just gonna go watch a video on the internet i want to know what the

the new iphone se looks like i'm just gonna go on youtube.com and search iphone se i'm just gonna go to google.com and search iphone se and it's gonna show me a bunch of youtube videos or articles with embedded youtube videos exactly yeah and so the biggest competition really right now is vimeo yeah that's the biggest competition to youtube sort of at least i feel like it used to feel like it i mean there's the there's the netflix's and other stuff but i'm just talking about like user-generated content like regular people uploading videos online uh vimeo does a platform yeah exactly and the reason that we bring up vimeo is there was an a headline or an article this week uh i just i'm just read the headline, and maybe you can break this down a bit,

because I thought this was crazy. Vimeo is telling creators to suddenly pay thousands of dollars or leave the platform. Yeah. What? I know that there's a pro account you can have on Vimeo. Yeah, yeah, there's business and pro accounts. And actually, even the creators have accounts,

and this is kind of news to me because of this article, but the prices there aren't too, too bad. I think the two main kind of like creator, not business charges are like $7 a month to $20 a month. So I have one. Do you? Yeah. Do you upload anything on Vimeo?

No, but I want to know what features you get for that. And you can like replace videos at the same URL on Vimeo. And I was like, that's a cool feature. It is. And then I never use it. Yeah. Well, do you use use you don't use vimeo at all not actively so like before we go into this i just want to vimeo did used to be kind of that uh it was like kind of what the p the non mainstream people wanted to use instead of youtube and i was always one of those people do you remember google videos yes Yes. I was,

me and my friend uploaded everything to Google Vimeos or videos, not YouTube because, you know, I was that cool little rebel kid. I wanted to do everything different. That bit me in the butt. And do you remember Vimeo had its biggest heyday in my memory as like the filmmakers YouTube basically. Everything I did in film school was uploaded to Vimeo. All the compression looked better

all the just the videos in general playing back on Vimeo looked better and that's where you'd find most people's like short film type projects and stuff. And then I also kind of felt like as just like an internet user you go a little step further than that when YouTube was

really cracking down on copyrighted music when they used to not switch it they just take all like the amount of ultimate videos i've created that all the music's gotten taken off of on youtube was a lot so you would upload to vimeo vimeo became like the the place to upload copyrighted all of all of the stevens ultimate highlight reels that all feature, I think, Taylor Swift songs are all on Vimeo. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. To me, back then, Vimeo was the less popular YouTube, but copyrighted music and generally, like you said, better compression, just better looking videos.

So for like film students, it worked really, really well. So that's still, I think, what Vimeo is to me now because it hasn't been that relevant in my mind. Since then, I still go back and try and watch old videos because some of the best old Callahan videos used to be on Vimeo. That's exactly right. So going through this article, by the way, it's an article on The Verge. We'll put it in the show notes if you want everything. But there are two main examples in here that I wanted to bring up

that really interest me and was kind of outstanding. It seems like Vimeo also do business accounts, which are ranging from around, I think, $50 to $75 a month. So I think they're pushing towards business stuff a lot. towards business stuff a lot. But the last time though I really heard Vimeo at all, really in like the last decade, in terms of non-business but more creative side, was Jack Conte did an interview.

He's the CEO of Patreon. And he was talking about, which I didn't realize, all the videos uploaded on Patreon are actually through Vimeo. Vimeo is just the default video hosting platform for Patreon. Right. And for some reason you don't know what Patreon is, a website where you can pay monthly to support a creator, and a lot of times they wind up giving you exclusive access to something,

whether that's extra videos or Q&As that they make on the channel, whether they upload stuff early. But pretty much it's a way smaller amount of people watching, but you're paying to watch it. So it's a great way to support creators. And it's like a really nice, like you can pass or protect individual videos. Like you can make it much more locked down

than a YouTube video. So it's like, it made sense. Yeah, they built that really well. Yeah, it works. So the partnership there, when I heard about that seemed amazing to me because Patreon is awesome, but it focuses more on how to support the creators

and then vimeo does have all the upload capabilities but not a lot of people use it so this felt like the perfect mesh to me yeah um but because of this mesh is where we're seeing now this story develop which is essentially i guess vimeo is getting to the point where to them these creators are using a lot more bandwidth they expected and they're charging the money. Problem is, is they're just kind of coming out of nowhere with these charges. So the first example, um, so there's a user on Patreon who said they were paying $200 a year and, um, they were okay with that. It's a pretty, it's a good quality platform. It works perfectly with Patreon. with patreon obviously um they had 117 subscriber

only videos each of them averaging around 150 views and their most viewed video was 815 on march 11th vimeo sent her an invoice that said her bandwidth was within the top one percent of vimeo users and that they wanted if she wanted to keep hosting her content on the site she'd need to upgrade to a custom plan quoted at $3,500 a year, and she was given one week to upgrade, decrease her bandwidth, or leave Vimeo. Okay. There's lots on fact there, I think,

or a couple things really stick out. So to end up in the top 1% of Vimeo users, 100 videos averaging 150 views, put you in the top one. What? Really? That's all you have to do? I don't even, I kind of don't believe. I know Vimeo is small, but that seems insane.

Yeah, that seems off. That seems like she's like watching billions of hours of videos from one account. Like someone else has a login to her account and is just watching a million things. Well, this is just, this is people watching her stuff. Like she's getting charged based on how many people watch her content so that 3500 for i mean i doubt the 117 videos were all in one year but 3500 a year 150 views average she's

never broken a thousand which yeah for patreon those are great numbers like if you're thinking about somebody paying five bucks a pop for each of those like right and then getting the cut that's fantastic um but the fact that they just give her one week thirty five hundred dollars a year or she can just leave yeah that that's pretty bad look and that's another one of those decisions we've talked about on the podcast before where you're like as you are vimeo writing out this email you're like yeah this is gonna suck this is gonna this is gonna make a lot of people really mad and there's gonna be a lot of articles written about how heartless this is but we gotta do what we gotta do that's crazy three thousand dollars a year top one percent though just really it can't mean that vimeo is doing great at least on the

creative side i know nothing about their business side and i just want to make that super clear here if they've been around for this long something over there is obviously doing okay but the creative side of this that's brutal yeah i actually i feel like i get the b2b part of vimeo better now than this weird attempt at charging creators that's crazy yeah so i mean and they were charging a bit but she said she was paying 200 a year now going up to 3500 a year which is probably more than you made from the patreon videos that you were creating in the first place possibly i don't know exactly how the math checks out or what their levels of everything were um but then there's the

other kind of bigger um example of this was, do you know the YouTube channel, Channel 5? It used to be, or it's the guy from All Gas, No Brakes, I believe. Oh, no. He's kind of like goes to a lot of big events, a lot of them political and kind of has like a funny news report interview style. I guarantee you've seen some of the interviews he's done. His name's Andrew and his stuff's really really funny and his youtube channel is huge he's got like it's a new channel ever

since he split and getting over a million subscribers probably one to two million views apiece but he releases everything on patreon early um to a pretty big patreon uh audience so he the other day what i guess logged on to patreon saw had 200 messages and lost 500 patrons and all of them were complaining that none of their content was there anymore so vimeo took hostage essentially essentially, of all of his videos and then told him for a two-year plan he's going to have to pay $16,000 to get his stuff. Now, his stuff, these are a lot more users, a lot more people watching. His videos are generally like 30 to 40 minutes, so it clearly is way, way more bandwidth. Yeah. But $16,000, it's not even pay it now or you'll lose it it's it's gone

i've already basically pissed off all of your patrons and if you want it back what kind of weird backwards policy is that that's the strangest the thing is like when you're when you're signing up for patreon you just think you're uploading to patreon's video player like you don't i'm so glad you said that he when this happened he first contacted patreon and then when they told him vimeo is the one who did it he said i don't know what that is he's just been default right uploading to patreon the whole time exactly didn't know it was embedded yeah that's how well they've plugged in is like it's it's really well integrated and that's why they went with Vimeo. But now, yeah, people, when Vimeo makes a crazy change like this,

Patreon looks terrible. Patreon looks really bad in this. Unfortunately, which it's a shame. Patreon's all, I really, we don't have a Patreon, but I really, really like what they're doing and a way to help creators. So essentially, luckily, he has all of the videos already. They're also all mostly on his YouTube channel now

because he was just releasing things early. The problem is he said his favorite part about Patreon is having the more exclusive comments and reactions, stuff he can read a little easier. And if he gets rid of all these, he loses all of that. If he has to re-upload everything, he loses all the comments on old videos and stuff like that and everyone gets spammed on his patrons and he's lost over 500 paying patrons right patrons so this is one of those this is another one of those head-scratching decisions do you think vimeo did the math and they were like yeah some people are gonna pay and this will be worth

it oh sixteen thousand dollars for what a two-year plan so eight thousand dollars a year god for what i mean what are you getting extra out of uploading to vimeo other than maybe a couple special like obviously it's branded videos and certain privacy protections that vimeo offers and still maybe copyright music protection. But eight thousand dollars. I don't even know what they do with copyright stuff anymore because that was old Vimeo. I'm sure they're they're getting hit with that because Twitch is getting hit really hard with that as well. It basically feels like the password protection and YouTube can embed into things just as easily. It feels like if YouTube added password protection in that

because you can't just unlist a video and put it on Patreon because then people can share that link and it'll go everywhere. So it makes it much harder. I mean, I didn't even think of this, but yeah, it feels like YouTube could kind of squash this if they did a password protected or account specific linked. So this is the thing this is why youtube doesn't have to evolve as quickly is because they don't have to do anything now

vimeo is killing it all by themselves by deciding to now charge people eight thousand dollars a year for a couple thousand views or whatever they're generating which is like yet obviously the question of will youtube ever die will come from like a competitor that comes up doesn't make those type of mistakes and eats youtube lunch in some type of way and does like probably something better than what youtube does in order to actually convince people to switch because if you just built another youtube today even if it's feature for feature for feature the same thing there's still no reason to switch. It kind of reminds me of trying to get people to switch cell phone carriers.

A lot of people just don't want to switch. They're like, I don't know, I like my phone number. My phone works fine. You're offering me the same data plan but on a different carrier. You have to be better than what exists to get people to switch. Yeah, something has to be better.

And should that thing ever arrive, it will be so incredibly obvious that we'll have time to react to switch. Yeah, something has to be better. And should that thing ever arrive, it will be so incredibly obvious that we'll have time to react to it. And clearly Vimeo ain't it? Yeah. I hate to, because Vimeo does hold that old nostalgic special place in my heart.

When I think of Vimeo, I think of like the Will Neff Callahan video, like one of my favorites ever, if you're an ultimate nerd. I think the Nick Lance one. Oh, that's YouTube still. I think he was YouTube, yeah. It was like just a couple years before him

back in the like Mama Bird, Michigan, Glory Days. I mean, not that they're not Glory Days. I think a lot of Oregon videos were on there. Yeah, so sorry. A little ultimate nerding here, but yeah, seems pretty brutal. Some of those prices were insane, but I still think the most crazy part to me

is averaging 150 views puts you in the top 1% of users. That is the craziest part of that to me. I mean, if that's true, if averaging 100 to 150 views or whatever it is puts you in the top 1%, imagine what the top 1% of YouTube channels generate and what kind of bandwidth that is that YouTube's supporting. That is a massive difference.

It's crazy. And that's also the reason why I'm really interested to see where Patreon goes in this step because Vimeo doesn't seem to be that. Because if you're charging that much, you kind of need those amount of views on Patreon to really be a full-time creator it helps a whole lot yeah but that means patreon's also going to realize like wow we do have like you still do have to hold that bandwidth and pay for

that bandwidth someone has to how are you making this split now and then how is this going to benefit creators on patreon are you going to start cutting into their resources really hard or i don't know what's gonna happen yeah we'll see we'll keep an eye on this we'll see what what patreon does over time i'm sure we'll link any update articles we find them in the show notes but we have to take a quick break and come back because we want to talk about cameras for a little bit You know what's great about ambition? You can't see it. Some things look ambitious, but looks can be deceiving.

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Family vacay? Reserve your ride as soon as you book your flights. To all the planners planners now you can reserve your uber ride up to 90 days in advance see uber app for details all right i have a new favorite tweet i need to share this with you this is great i i was i pinned this for waveform because i want to talk about it and there's just so much here i i tweeted actually probably like two three weeks ago and a lot of people were like roasting me about it but I'm fine with it which is just that it seems like 75% of new smartphone presentations

these days are just camera camera camera camera camera and then I had a bunch of people going well all you ever talk about is a camera I wasn't complaining I was just saying that's true that's one of the most they spent they'll they'll go battery, spec, screen, camera feature, camera feature, camera feature, camera feature, camera feature. It's always at the end and they usually seem to end on it. So much time on camera. And it didn't always used to be this way. So I just kind of tweeted that thought out there and then that was that.

So sure enough, last week, a tweet from a user named Lee94Josh showed up on my timeline where he actually went back and watched every single iPhone keynote since the first one and spent out and he actually counted how much time was spent

talking about the phone and how much of that time was specifically spent talking about the cameras. And he graphed it all out. And now I want to go through this because this is now real evidence that more and more time has been spent

talking about the cameras. So I guess we can just start with the first Apple event, right? The first Apple event was in 2007. It was kind of one of those iconic, massive things. But I don't know if you remember when we reviewed every single iPhone, the camera wasn't really a big feature on the iPhone

in the first few. Yeah. So they didn't have much to talk about. Well, because if you think about it, while smartphones were revolutionary and the iPhone kind of revolutionized smartphones, there were cameras in phones before that. I had flip phones with cameras,

and they were rough, and they were rough to look at. Yeah, just like a basic three megapixel webcam, like nothing too crazy. Like you could send a picture of like where you were to see. Or you just like, you know, have a couple of things to scroll through on your little flip phone. But like they were there

and the iPhone didn't upgrade that at all. That wasn't the focus on the first iPhone for sure. For sure. So the first iPhone, 2007, they spent 79 minutes talking about this new revolutionary product. To me, that seems about right. Like they could spend an hour plus.

I'm honestly surprised not more if it's your first product, the first big product like that you're talking about. It was good, it was good. And for those 79 minutes, they spent 10 seconds talking about the camera. Let's look at the back. On the back, the biggest thing of note

is we got a two megapixel camera built right in the other side and we're back on the front sounds about right hey it has again it has a camera on the back you can do x y and z with it it's a good time moving on um that was 0.2 percent of the presentation if you move up all the way now to iPhone 13 in 2021, they spent 33% of the entire presentation on the camera. That was a 42 minute presentation for the iPhone, which, you know, that's the 13 mini, the 13 max 13, whatever. And yeah, 14 of those minutes were spent talking about the camera. That's not actually the highest. The highest was in 2019, about the camera. That's not actually the highest. The highest was in 2019, iPhone 11 spent 35%,

but you can see clearly the last three years have been more than ever on the camera. You kind of see like the little brackets of 0%, then a bunch of teen percents, and then a bunch of 20%, and now the last three years are 30%. But even inside of this, there's so many interesting ones. Yeah. If you're listening for audio right now, I just, I beg you come watch the video version

of just this part. Find the tweet at least. Yeah. So you can look at this graph. It's fascinating. Okay. My favorite one is probably the iPhone 3GS because it's, it's the longest ever that they, sorry, the iPhone 3g yeah longest they've ever

spent in a presentation talking just iphone it's the first iphone upgrade ever it's the 3g one you know they did a bunch of new stuff 100 minutes on presentation on presentation on the new iphone can you imagine 100 minutes on a on a new phone today and they spent three seconds? And that's one phone, not four phones. We're at four phones now and they're spending 40 minutes. Yeah, there was no mini plus to explain. It's just one new phone, 100 minutes of talking about a new upgrade. Three seconds on the camera. My favorite part, we have a clip of those three seconds and we're going to play it right now. It's a generous three seconds. Very.

The same gorgeous 3.5 inch display. Camera. That was it. That was the whole three. That was the entire three seconds. I think the context of it is they're pretty much just going through like what's on the camera. Yeah.

Or sorry, what's on the iPhone. Yeah. Um, but yeah, very generous. I, I think some of my favorite things to look at here are looking at the differences between two years adjacent to each other. So like there's kind of some big jumps and then usually in those jumps you can find the thing, like what the upgrade was and why they were so impressed and like wanted to talk that much more about it so like you went from the 3g to the 3gs um which was three seconds to four minutes and 30 seconds like that is a huge jump you went from 0.05 to 25 percent yeah of the entire although the 3gs was only an 18 minuteminute presentation, I believe. Was that WWDC that year? Yeah, yeah.

So 3GS was the first ever S upgrade. So you can imagine, all right, it's only an 18-minute presentation. Like we don't have a ton to say because it's the same design. But there's a few key things in this new design that are upgraded. One of them was this was the first ever camera upgrade. I think it went from 2 megapixels to five uh something like that i think yeah it looks like most of them were at five because then the first big jump was from the four to the four s which we did a graph we have a graph of this when i reviewed every iphone

oh did we no i did not have that oh let me pull up that graph too so we reviewed every iphone and at the end we had all these great charts. And if you've seen that video, then you've seen those charts. One of them was iPhone megapixel count over the years. Oh, yeah. And let me just see if I can fast forward. Yeah, found it. And they had a, yep, two megapixel camera for the first two iPhones.

And then the 3GS was the first ever upgrade. And it went to a three megapixel camera for the first two iPhones and then the 3GS was the first ever upgrade and it went to a three megapixel camera. Boom. That one megapixel warranted an extra four minutes of talking about the camera. Exactly. But it's the one like it's an S update so there's not a lot new. Yeah. So yeah only things

they changed I think were speed. It was a new processor. Camera. It was an upgraded camera. So you have to talk about that for 25 of the presentation yeah um there's a it seems like megapixel bumps seem to be where we see a lot of these spikes so from the 4 to the 4s they doubled the time they talked about the cameras from four minutes to eight minutes and they also happened to bump the camera up to eight megapixels that year then they did another bump from the six to the 6x um that was 8 to 12 but the selfie camera went from 1.2 megapixel to 5 megapixels so that was the thing i was going to mention about 4s that was

the first ever selfie camera yes so they had to spend time talking about face time and like what you can do with a front-facing camera but But 3GS to 4, they spent less time. They went down in time talking about the camera. So maybe they focused more on talking about... Well, that was the new design. Was it FaceTime? New design, okay. Yeah, 4 was like, okay, now we're up to 52 minutes again

talking about all this new... This is the biggest like new looking iPhone. Yeah, so percentage-wise wise they talked way less about it but even in just pure time spoken and the 3gs 4 minutes 30 seconds in the iphone 4 with a whole new camera selfie camera first time yeah they spent 30 less seconds talking about it i think that's the most fascinating yeah decrease and then while adding something so that that just seems to stand out to me a lot and then yeah the the longest ever was iphone 11 20 minutes talking about just camera which is yeah massive 20 minutes just about a camera so do you remember what 11 was though um 11 so we got the ultra wide

for the first time yes but there is also that's deep fusion too right oh and remember how long they talked about that for it to not even come out yeah to be a small update yeah later in a software there was a very long there's there's two main big camera like features i remember them talking about that took way longer in the explanation than i feel like warranted and that was deep fusion and cinematic mode both of Both of those had insanely long extra pieces to the camera. With examples and low light shots and focus racking. And I can't tell you a single person that I know, even in the tech world right now,

that is like, oh, I love Deep Fusion or I love Cinematic Mode. For how much time they spend with it, it doesn't seem like people care. world right now that is like, oh, I love deep fusion or I love cinematic mode or it's for how much time they spend with it. It doesn't seem like people care. I'm just happy somebody actually went through and charted all this stuff because I had the thought and actually I had the thought because I was watching, I think I was in a briefing or some meeting where they were going over a phone and I think this ratio is even higher with some other companies. I think it might have been either a OnePlus or a Xiaomi phone or something like that, where I think it was over half.

I think clearly easily over half of the presentation was camera because they didn't have a whole lot of new stuff. It was like, here's a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. It's fast. It cools. We have a higher refresh rate screen and fast charging again. Camera feature, camera feature camera feature low light camera

video camera high res mode cinematic mode portrait mode like they wanted to go over all the AI stuff all the color

they've been doing tons and tons of camera features and I was like this is it at least was 75% of the slides I'll put it that way

so yeah this is this is what differentiates smartphones at the highest level. They're all pretty fast. They all have pretty good screens. I would love to see

with all the phones taken into account, all the presentations taken into account, who was the longest? Who spent the most time? Who was the longest? And then who spent the most percentage-wise on one? Because I do feel like I remember somewhere

it feels like they're only I don't think it's OnePlus because OnePlus also likes to focus on charging so much I just remember when they did the

Hasselblad thing that was a lot they had to do so much camera stuff they talked about Hasselblad they talked about what the partnership

meant the helicopter and like everything all this camera camera camera even if they're not showing examples they're just talking

about Hasselblad and camera stuff. And then Samsung like 100X Space Zoom, they had, who were the two guys that were like up by the bridge in San Francisco? Yeah, the demo with the 100X. Yeah, like they do all those crazy demos and it seems like it's focusing almost more on all the, it's kind of a shame because it's focusing more

on these like collaborations they do to attempt to show it off but it just turns into more of like a commercial and less about actually the camera and how normal people are using it um yeah but there's a reason there's a people say this a lot to us too why do tech reviewers focus so much on the camera and because honestly it's it's the biggest gap you can see between a lot of phones and the biggest thing every single person who uses that phone whether you're a huge tech head or a completely average joe user like you're going to be like this camera looks better every time you buy a new phone you're like oh my goodness these pictures are so much better yeah that's my that's

that's really what it comes down to for me the biggest difference in phones in battery life will be like Either oh, yeah, I can kill this one in a day or yeah, this one has a pretty good battery life It'll last you longer than a day. Yeah, the biggest difference between Speaker quality is what like this one's not that loud. Oh, this one's nice and rich Okay, great But the difference in cameras is like that's one feature that is nice and rich. Okay, great.

But the difference in cameras is like, that's one feature that pretty much everyone uses at some point on their phone. A lot of people are like, I have kids. I want to be able to remember these moments. I need it to have a good camera. And if it has a bad camera, it's going to ruin my whole phone experience. And some just don't have good cameras.

Some are just not good for that type of thing. And some are better at it. Some are really good at it. And that's a really meaningful thing to a lot of people. I remember my five pillars of a great smartphone. For me as a reviewer, I narrowed it down to five. It was performance, battery, software, camera, and build quality, basically.

And like, even as a reviewer, if it's only five, I think for a normal person, they're like, I'm gonna get this new phone. I need it to have a good battery, good good camera it's just three and it probably has to be an iphone for most people but like that's software so three or four things so yeah if it narrows down three or four things then those things are gonna get the most air time and it turns out the camera is probably number one and i think the fact that we are reviewing dozens and dozens of of phones every single year and they're still seeing these big differences in cameras when you think of the

average person upgrading two or three years down the line that camera jump is going to be the biggest jump they encounter when they upgrade claire usually i upgrade her with a phone that's like two years old every year and every time she she's like, I can't believe how good this camera is. She takes pictures and she's like, this looks so good. Like, I'm so happy with this. And she's using like an S10e right now and is still amazed at the camera. That's one of the funny things about like the way phones have gotten better is if you look at a phone six years ago, it first came out we were all like does the battery last a whole day yeah good six years later does the battery last a whole day yeah okay good it's

like the battery capacity had to change massively inside the phone to achieve the same goal yeah and then same thing with like speakers like the screens are bigger and they look much better than six years ago. But if you show someone a photo from a camera from six years ago, from like an iPhone 6 versus a 13, it is a dramatic difference, especially video, all this stuff, that is consistently true about these things. I go back and watch our old videos all the time

and it's like, it'll be videos raving about the camera and I look at it and it's like, oh be videos raving about the camera and i look at it and it's like like it looks foggy dear lord yeah did you clean that lens off before you took that picture yeah exactly speaking you know before we switch to our next topic here of new phones i know it's turned into kind of a meme here with my pixel 4xl but i've finally bought a new phone i was really hoping it would get here before today's episode so I could show it off. Which one did you order? I'm not going to say that.

I'm going to let people guess. Because I have talked about wanting basically every single phone. Let's see. Guess in the comments. Guess on Twitter. I'd like to know what you guys think. Do you want to do... I've talked highly of a lot of people.

Do you want to leave it open-ended or do you want to do multiple choice? Give people... We could do a poll on Twitter. Yeah, we could do a poll. We could do a poll. I think there's a could do a poll. We could do a poll. I think there's a couple I've talked about that will narrow it down enough,

but I'd like to know what people think. I would be very interested if one phone wins by a lot and it's totally not the one you got. I'm very curious to see what people say. It's at the point where I feel like people just, whenever they tweet at me, they just have to mention that I'm still using a Pixel 4. And it's just be like, okay.

By the next episode, we'll know. By the next episode, we'll know. Hopefully, the FedEx tracking has moved to like one state in like four days. So I'm not that confident about it. But all right, let's take a quick break. When we come back, I'm just gonna rant about a new EV.

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All right, we're back. Welcome to the EV section of waveform yeah no look i so this is a video we've been sort of working on in the background for a while because i have a lot of thoughts on this but about like the ev car space and how uncertain and weird it is amplified by the chip shortage amplified by the fact that EVs are hard to make, and cars in general are just a crazy market to be in right now. But like, trying to order an EV today is crazy.

The actual experience of like, there's an announcement, is it real? Will I get it if I order it? Should I pre-order? It's 100 bucks to reserve my place in line will it ever have like there's so many weird questions the hundred dollar refundable thing is still baffling to me and you know we talked about rivian we've talked about the the f-150 lightning you can get in line the cyber truck like how long that's been on order and then you look as far back

as like i i technically ordered a tesla road in 2017, and that's still not out yet. And then there's the Faraday Futures of the world, and it's just like, I don't know what is even coming out anymore. It's confusing. It is. And then today, I opened up Instagram at like 9 in the morning. It was way too early for this. And I got an ad for this electric car company that I've never heard of, which is not uncommon,

but it was actually just straight up asking me to invest in the company in an Instagram ad. Yeah, can you read what it said on there? But it was just a picture of a pickup truck and it said, our Reg A-plus funding round is closing soon invest in atlas motor company atlas motor vehicles today and don't forget to check out bonus benefits and incentives yeah and also just to like paint the picture a little better it's a photo of a pickup truck with like if you know whenever cars are kind of testing new models they have like the white and black camo wrap on it so it's a black and white camo

wrap but the car is as boxy and like simple as you can imagine it so you can tell every single line on it as well but yeah so like a camo wrapped truck asking you to invest in an instagram ad with like 90 likes on it yeah if you click on it or google the company you can go to their website where they say they make they're going to make an electric vehicle platform that you can put all sorts of vehicles on they're starting with a pickup truck called the xt 500 mile range blah blah blah right at the top there's a big red invest button hell yeah and this is just this is the perfect like summary of all the different ev like things that i've seen over the years here look they even show you here's how much money we've raised yeah how many investors we have

uh first of all you can make one where do i even Okay, let me just start with this. Tesla changed the game pretty seriously, okay? Like the dealership method where if you want to go buy a car, what did you do? You went to a dealership, you haggled a little bit, you bought the car from the dealership, not directly from the company. So Tesla changes the game a little bit. They go direct to consumer, they sell cars online.

And in order to have people buy cars online, but not necessarily just buy them willy nilly and then cancel they go okay there's a hundred dollar reservation fee then we'll build your car and then you can get it and pay full price when you pick it up that was like the old way of doing it it's still a hundred dollar reservation i think there's still i think it's a hundred dollars for a model three because i remember when the Cybertruck came out, it was like the $100 refundable reservation fee. And that's the first time I remember that.

I think even today it might be $1,000 or $500, just to know that people are serious. It's like a deposit, right? Exactly. You put a deposit in to get your spot in line. They will start building the car to your order. And then when it's done, you can pick it up and pay the full price there. And is that refundable or not?

It's not refundable. Okay. I think that's the difference. Some of them are. Some of them are. I think this one might be. The Cybertruck is refundable. Generally, a deposit is non-refundable.

Yeah, I don't know if this one's refundable or not, but it is just to keep people from just ordering tons of stuff for no reason, right? So then we got used to this online reservation of getting your spot in line for an EV and then Tesla kept doing it. They did it with Model S. They've done it with now trucks and cars that haven't shipped yet still years later. So they did it with, actually, here's the crazy one. The Roadster.

A lot of people don't know this, but the Tesla Roadster is going to be a base $250,000 car, right? But if you want to order a Tesla Roadster, you'd have to send them $5,000 reservation fee. And then within 10 days, send them $45,000 more to secure your place in line. So it's one fee just to get your name down and then another fee which is a part of the price of the car to get your name like locked in place not refundable and then you pay the rest when you get it even worse yeah even worse the founders edition which is one of the first thousand we don't really know too many other details about the Founders Edition Roadster, but the Founders Edition- The color's a different red, right?

Slightly different red, sure. Which is 250 grand, is $5,000 deposit to get your name down. And then within 10 days, the entire rest of the $250,000. So you pay $245,000 more to get your spot in line to be one of the first thousand Tesla Roadsters. Here's the fun fact. to get your spot in line to be one of the first 1,000 Tesla Roadsters. Here's the fun fact. That was in 2017 when they rolled it off the truck, and they've been selling those out ever since.

But let's say you ordered on day one. Within 10 days, you put down your quarter of a million dollars. If you put that same quarter million dollars anywhere else, you would have made money off of it. But instead, you just gave Tesla an interest-free loan of $250,000. If you'd put that money in Tesla stock, for example, I think we calculated that would be worth something like $3.5 million right now. I think. From being that long ago.

Yeah, it's. Unbelievable. It's a crazy amount of money. So, you know, there's all these companies that are seeing how well this pre-order method works. It's good for Cybertruck, for example. It's really good for showing interest, demonstrating interest in the product and for attracting investors in general. So when you get to say, hey, we made one really cool EV, paraded it around and attracted a thousand reservations. It's kind of like Shark Tank.

You're like, oh, so you just need the money to make it now, right? And then you'll go out and make the thing. But so many of these companies just haven't made the thing. They just don't make the thing. So they just take all the money, parade it around, make one really cool EV, which is the easiest part, parade it around, get as many reservations as possible from regular people, parade that number around, get as much investor money as possible from regular people parade that number around

get as much investor money as possible and then disappear faraday future lordstown motors maybe faraday is not gone but that's basically what happened it was like five years ago and it is very very rare that one actually makes enough money in that parading the car around stage to actually make the car. That's why it's so rare. We got like Rivian is new. We got Lucid is new. And then some others I checked out around the same time don't exist. Lucid took a long time. Lucid took a long time and they're just starting to ship.

Rivian took a long time. They're only shipping 25,000 cars next year. Like it's very hard to scale up a car company and ask Tesla. They're the last ones to do it at scale. But yeah, it's crazy how many of these we're starting to see. And I think knowing that is what made this specific Atlas vehicle very, very strange to us because it's like, we had never heard of this and we're pretty,

I mean, if you listen to Waveform, we talk about any EV news possible. Because it's interesting. And it's like, it's the big thing going on right now. It's what's changing in technology. And EVs are big. And I'd never heard of this company. And the first time we're seeing it

is in an Instagram ad to invest in it. Not even to buy the truck. They're just straight to like, all right, we're crowdfunding. Exactly. Like, you've never heard this. Invest in it. Not even to buy the truck. They're just straight to like, all right, we're crowdfunding. Exactly. You've never heard this, invest in us now. It says they've raised $5 million

with 3,500 investors. Interesting. But I've heard absolutely nothing from this. And actually, I just realized, do you see what the URL for this is? Atlasmotorvehicles.com. Oh, okay. I'm in a different part, I guess.

It's investinalis.com. Oh, it does take you. Yeah. So here's the formula, right? So I've narrowed it down. This is the exact formula of making billions of dollars. Step one, make a nice drawing of an EV, something that would sell a lot.

A render, yeah, something. If you got to make up some features, if you have to, do it. Like a drone that flies out of the back. Yeah, drone that flies out of the back, something crazy, just make it look nice step two design a whole web page around that one really cool ev doesn't have to be real just make a nice looking web page for it step three get enough money this is the hard part to make one of them just one make a

really nice like you don't it doesn't matter how much you spend on it, just make one really nice EV. Parade that car around to as many people as possible. Put on an event. Send people to the webpage. And make sure you have a big red reserve button on that webpage. At some point, make people able to pay, don't know 100 bucks whatever just get people in get people in the door hitting the reserve button when you get a bunch of people that have seen wow

this one uv you made that's a great idea and it's totally real and then they go to the web page and they see look at all these other cool features it's gonna have it's totally real they'll totally reserve right step i don't know What are we on three or four? Feels like some like scam class. Yeah. No. Next step is take that number of reservations and parade it around to people with billions of dollars.

Look at what we just did. We have this great idea. They don't know if it's real or not. We have this great truck. We only made one, but it doesn't matter. And we're going to make so much money if we can just make like millions of these trucks, whatever EV, and get them to invest in your company so you can tell them that you're going to build a factory and scale up production and really make this thing for real. Tell as many of them as possible,

get as much money as possible. And step five is good luck with the rest which is if you can actually build the factory and the tools in the factory and the robots and everything and hire all these people and engineers and maybe even poach them from other failed companies and put them all together and stir hard enough maybe you can ship a couple more of these things um but yeah we've seen so many examples of this i mean lordstown basically followed this exact formula as far as i can tell yeah one thing i this is one thing i found really funny when we were uh like looking into this video is some of these websites just feel like they don't even care like the lordstown website it's weird the photography is atrocious the website is terrible

there's like 50 different fonts but they just have to make it look like a good product. It doesn't look like a good product. No, the product looks cool. The website doesn't look great, but the product, oh, if it was real, that'd be so sick. All the pictures are taken with like an iPhone SE in the dark and nothing is like level. It's just

brutal. Like you look at something like that as just somebody who, anyone who uses e-commerce shops and you look at it and that as just somebody who anyone who uses e-commerce shops and you look at it and just think there's no way this is how little they care about the presentation of it and if you've got a big reserve that's all you need i guess um i kind of want to talk about because one thing you mentioned was like give it a bunch of features and you need features to stand out yep and this atlas car has some wild claims i just promise the world and if you get enough money you can hire engineers who will figure it

out yeah but it doesn't have to be this is like more than probably how long does it take you if you wanted to charge your tesla right now from one to a hundred all the way to a hundred on the fastest charger possible 45 this claims it can do it in 15 minutes. Cool. Yeah. Great. For sure. That's just like at that point, you're just lying, I feel like. I just, I mean, sure. We're going to hire engineers though with all the money from your investment. Oh, man. Like, listen, I hope they can get to 15 minutes.

And what's crazy, 15 minutes is still four or five times longer than it takes to gas up a vehicle. So you're still not quite at that time, but this is claiming zero to 100, 15 minutes, any conditions, it should be fast, affordable, and consistent all the time. I bet it should be, but yeah. I just. Yeah, and everyone has a slightly different take on it.

Like Lordstown was gonna do trucks. This Atlas company, every time, by the way, anytime I ever talk about these companies, some one of them reaches out like, oh, can we talk more about it? on it like lordstown was going to do trucks this atlas company every time by the way anytime i ever talk about these companies some one of them reaches out like oh can we talk more about it i'm just telling you right now i'm not interested until you ship something so i'm just i'm not but this company says they're going to do an ev platform so they can build a bunch of different bodies on top that i think that's really interesting similar to what canoe was yeah trying to do and more in like a fleet version and this is fleet as well i kind of

like this they're taking the ev skateboard wheel design letting you build something on top of it because almost all evs have that similar design great idea um i think that part in itself is really cool but then like talking about 15 minute battery charging and and just like some of the things they're promising on here seem wild when at the same time you're buying instagram ads to invest into the company that just seems like such a reach i would love to see desperate move i would love to see one of these go on shark tank and try to explain themselves actually i would really love that because then you'd have to have- I would love to see how investors believe it. Yeah, you'd have to have the, like you'd roll out the one truck you made

and you'd be like, look at this product. It's gonna change the world. But wait, it's not just a product, Mr. Wonderful. It's a licensing deal because we make the platform and we can sell this platform to anyone who wants to electrify their cars. It's a great idea. And they go, oh, what's the market size for this?

It's cars. It's a bajillion dollar market. They've got, what's the market size for this? It's cars. It's a bajillion dollar market. They've got all this prep. They've got this beautiful website. And by the way, we've got 10,000 people who have already reserved one. We just need your money to invest to start making this thing right now.

And then Mr. Wonderful goes, all right, well, how many sales do you have? I'm like, well, we haven't actually made any yet, but we have a lot of reservations and a lot of interest. And then you go, all right, right well how much money do you need and they go uh 50 billion dollars and they go 0.1 percent in the cup yeah we need a lot more money than than you're willing to invest right now yeah and i just want to make it clear like all of these zv companies i hope succeed i would like all of them to succeed almost all of them yeah oh wow

okay so it's got a bit more of a gripe going then but like it just feels like it's hurting oh man i don't know if i even want to say that but just like no i don't know this website itself just feels kind of like a slap in the face to some of the other ones and i hope they're developing technology to make a 15 like you've got a couple really cool things here crazy fast charging battery you have a a platform that you can design different types of trucks on to meet the needs of the fleets you have and stuff like great idea all those ideas are really cool but like when you say all of them are coming together and just a giant button to just invest money in it without seeing much is yeah feels i think sketchy at best the reason i i'm like trying

to package all these thoughts into one video and like hey maybe it's a waveform clip right now but we'll figure this out yeah but like i do think it kind of does hurt the potential of a lot of the the industry in general like when it gets so sketchy to try to decide what to buy. We've had people come by at work, like when we have the Rivian out and we're shooting it, people are like, that's the thing. That's the Rivian. I want one. I actually already have an order in. I wonder when I'll get one. And I'm like, I can't tell you when you're going to get it. Maybe someday soon. And at least we have have one here but that situation is a lot worse for some other ones i made a video about the faraday future knowing what i know now i would definitely

have hesitated to make that video like we saw the lucid air five years ago and it's finally just starting to ship how many others are we going to point a camera at that never happened lucid air was like full basically almost fully working prototype that we drove in and to us we're like okay this is a step further because that was the year after faraday future i believe i started the ces after you saw the faraday future and i thought it was really cool and then we're like oh man we haven't seen much and there it was pretty bare bones oh but here's the lucid this has like we're gonna drive in it and the only thing didn't really work it was like the air conditioning or something yeah so we thought it was right around the corner i thought they were about to ship and that's the we're going to drive in it. And the only thing didn't really work. It was like the air conditioning or something. Yeah.

So we thought it was right around the corner. I thought they were about to ship. And that's the thing. Like, and I bet Elon said basically a version of this before, but like, yeah, making the first one is easy. So the fact that they had a really good single working prototype for us to

drive in, it's a good sign, which means how you can source parts, build motors, make a nice interior, fit and finish. It's like cool to see that type of stuff. Great. You hired the right people to make that one.

But the hard part is making a million of them. And the gap between making that one really good and mass producing in a way that can sustain a company is huge. It's gargantuan. is huge it's gargantuan so that's that would be my point of the video is trying to highlight like what this stuff does to people's minds when they start seeing so many of them that they don't know what's real anymore yeah it uh and just like to reiterate here these are just our opinions quickly like uh we don't know much about this company maybe they do great i'm sure they wouldn't be happy about saying all this please ship one but like this is just what we're seeing in our thoughts when we pay attention to this all the time and it's getting to the point where it

feels weird i guess and we just want to try and put our thoughts out on that um it's funny i see so many new ones this is the other thing i want to probably include is there's a difference between a new company promising an ev and an existing company promising an ev because at least that existing company is already mass producing cars yeah so we feel like we have some basis to go by like oh okay we know what their fit and finish will be like we know how many they'll be able to by like, oh, okay, we know what their fit and finish will be like. We know how many they'll be able to make. It seems like they've got a good head start

rather than trying to crowdfund from zero into Ford. Exactly. I mean, I know we've talked about this before, and I think both of us kind of wonder which side's the better option for this because you have Tesla who created a great product and all the super beneficial things of ev and smart car and driving and all that together but manufacturing is what they really had to learn and they're still really working on that where you have someone like ford

who has the mustang or the the maki and and stuff like that who has production down pat. I mean, it's like the pinnacle of production, but then they're used to gas power, the EV, smart stuff like that. They're not a software company. So which one of those is going to catch up to the other side first? Where are they going to cross paths and then kind of equalize?

But then starting from new is just a whole, when you don't have the experience on either end, it's a lot harder. And I get it. That's the fun thing. It's hard. Yeah, I mean, to sort of put a pin on this,

I made a video a while ago. I think it was called like Deere Tesla Competitors or something like that. I think it might've been around the Rivian. It might've just been like Deere EVs or something. Something like that. But basically what you just said, like, okay, Tesla's here,

poor manufacturing, great EV tech, and like ideas, trending's here poor manufacturing great ev tech and then and like ideas trending towards getting better manufacturing exactly and then you have the like fords of in mercedes of the world who can manufacture a car trying to get better at the ev thing and when do they meet in the middle and get better at the thing they're bad at and what does that look like do you think that mercedes and for Ford will get to be a really good software company, an EV company first? Or do you think Tesla will get to be

a really good manufacturing company first? I don't know what's harder. I don't know what's more or less realistic, but that's the thing that we're watching. That's the fascinating thing. So I want to actually recommend a piece of content to watch. I haven't done that in a while yeah it's a youtube video jason camisa he's one of my favorite car video hosts ever he does a really great job uh and he just reviewed the lucid air okay super oh that

was that really i've been tagged in that video so many times just haven't gotten a minute to watch it it's a great video he compares it to the Mercedes like S class obviously and we did get a chance to look at the EQS which is sort of a similar in class

but he's like look the Lucid is built by a startup redesigning EVs from the ground up like same dimensions of a car but it has a front trunk

because Mercedes just put stuff in the front and doesn't have a front trunk like watch that video not only is it super well done but it shines a light on the difference between the Lucids and startups of the front and doesn't have a front trunk. Like watch that video. Not only is it super well done, but it shines a light on the difference between the Lucids and startups of the world

and the Mercedeses of the world that we're talking about all the time. So it's a good one. I think this is just like, this rant turned into more of a rant than I was expecting, even though our document literally just has the website title and rant under it. But like, I think that's proof

we've been working on this video for a little bit. Hopefully it comes out pretty soon. But every time we seem to take one step deeper into learning about this, we just have more questions. It's like quicksand. Yeah, it really has been like that. So thanks everyone for listening. This was a pretty unscripted ending here that went all over the place.

So if you're confused, rightfully so. But I hope you stuck around for it yeah that's it video soon hopefully yeah look out for it catch you guys next week thanks waveform is produced by adam molina we are partnered with vox media and our intro music was created by vane sill please leave that in please leave that in you