Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Much Ado About Nothing and Mac Studio

Episode Date: March 25, 2022

Marques and Andrew go over the Nothing Phone 1 announcement (if you can call it that) and give some final thoughts on the new Apple Mac Studio and Studio Display. They wrap it up by going over the results of our Twitter poll where you all guessed what phone Andrew ended up getting to replace his old Pixel 4xl! Links: Mac Studio review: https://bit.ly/MacStudioReview Studio Display review: https://bit.ly/StudioDisplayReview Apple iPad Air M1 review: https://bit.ly/iPadAirM1Review 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'm andrew and today's episode i'm already predicting i'm gonna get a little bit ranty but i'll try not to get too crazy we're gonna talk about the nothing event but we also have the reviews of the mac studio and the studio display we'll talk about that a little bit and we're also going to reveal what phone andrew finally picked up the results of the poll were interesting and i'm looking at it over here but we're gonna reveal that during this episode but first andrew you have a little thing like kind of like an apple watch pro tip yeah um so we're doing the uh the challenge app right now this killed me this was yeah so we do this every once in a while i haven't participated in a little bit but um we like to do the challenges group app,

whatever you, it's just called challenges, right? It's a group fitness competition with the Apple Watch. Yeah, if you're on Apple Watch and you ever think, I really wish there was group fitness challenges,

there's an app called challenges that actually lets you do it. We really like it. And so this weekend, it was my really good friend's wedding. Congrats, Matt and Beth. It was so much fun. And I have physical proof of how fun it was my really good friend's wedding. Congrats, Matt and Beth. It was so much fun. And I have physical proof of how fun it was

because I didn't want to lose my points that day. But, you know, I'm known to get down on the dance floor at weddings. I see. So I realized there was a dancing exercise on the app. So, you know, wedding rolls around, not doing much all day in terms of exercising at least, got my stand hours plenty because we're doing stuff all morning. And then dinner rolls out after the reception and it's dancing time. So I decided to throw on that dance exercise. And I looked the next morning and I just want to read off some of the stats from this

because I think they're kind of crazy. Yeah. So let's see. I started at 10 o'clock p.m. and went to 1139 p.m. Total time, an hour and 30 minutes. Active calories burned 895. Total calories, 1067. Average heart rate for an hour and a half was 147 beats per minute.

That's kind of incredible. And I'm looking at the graph because it gives you a graph yeah of how your heart rate went up and down during the workout with like most workouts they'll do like some sort of a graph yeah and i'm trying to figure out what songs are playing during certain spikes i'm pretty sure i can get spike in the middle see the one in the middle that's 100 dance with Dance With Somebody by Whitney Houston. Okay, there you go. That's best wedding song ever, and if you disagree with that, I don't think we can be friends.

There's a short spike that's very tall near the end, too. Towards the end. Somewhere between the middle and the end, there's this 170 BPM spike. That's what I'm talking about. I think that's Dance With Somebody. Okay. This little earlier in here, that's what I'm talking about. I think that's okay. This little, um, earlier in here,

um, there's a more prolonged spike. They did like a stride of the like early two thousands, like pop punk, like blink one 82 and lit and all that. And that's a very nostalgic for me. So I think I went pretty hard there as well. So songs in a row.

So yeah, but I'm, I'm pretty pumped. This is hands down calorie, like cardio wise, the best workout I've done this whole month. I think so. This is funny because we're,

yeah, we've been sort of trying to encourage ourselves to stay active, blah, blah, blah. Like everybody has their thing that they'll do. Some people, Vin will go one wheeling and there is no one wheel workout,

but it's pretty similar mechanically to snowboarding. Yeah, for sure's pretty similar mechanically to snowboarding. Yeah, for sure. So I'll get a snowboarding workout notification. Vin completed a snowboarding workout. I'm like, whoa. It's like 70 degrees outside. Yeah, I'm like, how is he?

Oh, right, it's the one-wheel. A lot of people walk to the train or walk in their morning commute. They'll do an outdoor walk workout. The other day, I sat down on the couch and I opened up Gran Turismo and I noticed that there is a fitness gaming workout. I didn't turn it on.

Okay. I didn't turn it on. But you can do a gaming workout if you play an intense enough game. Oh, my God. I've lost out on so many points. Yeah, you can track your heart rate the whole time. You get a nice little graph at the end. And that counts towards exercise goal?

I believe so, yeah. Oh, man. So that's a fun one. But, yeah, the dance one makes a lot of sense. I've done a lot of indoor bike. I've done a lot of golf ones lately, and I have practice tonight, and there is a disc sports.

Is there really? There's a disc sports workout that Apple Watch will track. Now, it's just like, it's an Apple Watch. It's on your wrist. It's not the most scientific thing in the world, but it is kind of cool that it's basically just going to tell you your heart rate the whole time.

I love it. It's simple. It pushes you a little bit more. Um, right now you having practice is pushing me really hard. Cause I am somehow in the lead with like a week and a half left. And now that it's getting nice out and you're practicing is really hard, especially when it's like the end of the day. And I'm like, I don't have to max out points. And then you're like practice workout comes in on my watch. I was like, sorry,

Claire, I gotta get on the bike. Yeah. We always finish practice late too. So like we have empire practices and pony practices at night now. So you'll get, you'll get that notification at like 10, 11 PM probably.

Yeah. I've hopped on the bike at 11 PM a couple of times. Also one more tip. I love the braided loops for the solo braided loops for the bike at 11 p.m. a couple times also one more tip I love the braided loops for the solo braided loops for the Apple watch yeah but they're a hundred bucks I got this one on Etsy for nine nine dollars nine dollars I mean is there a quality difference you can feel I can show you the one main quality difference and that's in it's probably very hard to see this but it's plastic on the connector on

this versus metal but like feel these two and see if you see if you feel a 90 difference between them absolutely not i'm already yeah it's already the same and you can just get like you can get literally nine or ten for the same price exactly colors yeah that's the way to get to me it's just like this was starting to uh it stretched out a bit and wasn't fitting me quite as well. So I was like, oh, I just want this for the challenge because it's my favorite band for climbing. But I'm not going to spend $100 just because we're doing a challenge for a month on that. But yeah. Nice.

Let's get into the nothing event, though, because that was, I'll be honest, when I wrote the outline for this week's podcast, I was like, oh, there's the nothing event on Wednesday. We'll just record right after. We're going to have a ton of information. I've never been so mistaken before. This event was the definition of could have been an email. Oh, yeah. It was great. So first of all, it was 15 minutes late.

I blocked off an hour on the calendar for it. I was like, all right, it's going to be 10 a.m. to probably 11 a.m. They're finally going to announce their next thing, right? 15 minutes in, nothing yet. Okay, there's going to be a lot of nothing funds. Yeah, well, let's get it out of the way. Yeah, not a lot happened during this event. Big nothing burger.

But it finally does start, and the whole thing's like 12 minutes long, and they basically just announced that they're going to make a phone, asked for investment money and then dipped. But the event itself, it was very bizarre because there are a lot of things that happened that to me felt like it felt like the most 2022, like crypto, like not really promising anything that concrete type of event.

There were a couple of small things that were interesting. They're going to have a launcher. So if you like what you've seen, we'll be releasing the Nothing OS launcher in April. And a Nothing OS that will launch on the phone. So if you have a different phone, you can potentially download the Nothing OS launcher on your phone before the phone comes out.

Maybe that'll tempt you into buying their phone. But we didn't see the phone. We don't know what it will look like. We just know that they're going to make a phone. It's going to come out in summer and it's called the Nothing Phone One. Which I thought was also funny because the Essential Phone was basically,

the Essential PH1, which is just Essential Phone. Now we just have the Nothing Phone One. So I guess at least they're getting ready to make multiples of them, which Essential never did. I think there's something about startups and having to call their first phone the one. I mean, the OnePlus was the OnePlus One,

PH1, the earphones that nothing made are the Ear One. So, you know, welcome to another smartphone company. Okay, so here's all the, I want to just go over all the weird things about it. First, they mentioned Apple.

I want to do like a word count maybe and find out how many times they said Apple versus how want to do like a word count maybe and find out how many times they said Apple versus how many times they said their own name. The iPod, the iPhone, Apple. The first iPod to Apple, Apple. The MacBook, the iPhone, the iPad, AirPods, AirPods, Apple. Remember that first iPhone launch to Apple? Yeah. Because they felt the need to constantly compare themselves to Apple, but then also constantly talk about how Apple is the only choice and that's bad because they don't plug in nicely with other things. So you don't want to be like Apple.

Yet as soon as you leave that ecosystem for a Windows PC or an Android phone, it breaks down. There is no alternative to Apple. This means that consumers don't have a choice and innovation slows down. And that's not right. But also our first year of sales were just like Apple. This means that consumers don't have a choice and innovation slows down. And that's not right. But also, our first year of sales were just like Apple. See, here's Apple.

So they're kind of a little bit conflicted on how they want to, they just bring up Apple any chance. You know what, I'll count it and we'll tweet it because it's pretty easy because the event was only 13 minutes long. So I'm pretty sure I can count. How many times they said Apple

versus how many times they said nothing. Yeah, I bet it's slightly more in favor of nothing, but it's pretty close. I can tell you it's more times than Apple mentions any other brand in any of their. That's 100% true because Apple pretends no other company exists. Okay, so we got the name.

Basically, the only concrete information we got was they're going to use a Qualcomm chip. Also funny because they brought that in with, like, we are nothing. We feel like we are here to cause change to the smartphone industry. And we're using a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip, which everyone else is using.

Which is like, that's more just funny timing on it. But yeah, Qualcomm chip, it's obviously Android. I think we all knew that. I think that the nothing OS is clearly, it's still Android, it's just a skin on it. But they talked a lot about how it's going. It almost feels like they're creating, and this is kind of similar to what OnePlus did originally

with all the CyanogenMod stuff on their original phones, which feels like they're doing what the enthusiast would want to do on Android phones, which is way quicker animations and just things, widgets looking better. I did like how it goes from the lock screen clock and then into the regular clock is perfectly matched with each other.

So it looks seamless. That was a nice touch, yeah. Yeah, I hate that on, I almost just said what phone I had. Every phone does that. They move the clock around all the time. It's very annoying. Yeah, I kind of got the vibe that like Carl and the team at OnePlus had a thing going

where like they'd started with this enthusiast grade thing, the fast and smooth the nicely considered small touches and animations and then they realized that they were building it all for oppo and like underneath the company and they were like we want to do it ourselves so they all left oneplus oneplus soul has left its body and it's basically just another shell of a company underneath that oppo megacorp but now a lot of those same people are working for this new company called nothing and they have the same idea same big talk same we're going to change the world stuff but they're starting with the

enthusiast level uh appeal yeah and they went a little so it one plus was flagship killer this feels almost more pinpointed at Apple killer. Like that's kind of what the nothing year ones were like, right? They were supposed to be the AirPods Pro at less than half the price. Yeah, which is funny because they started off by like name dropping like seven of Apple's products in a row and saying like they made all this great ecosystem,

but as soon as you want to leave the ecosystem, things get worse and there are no like alternative ecosystems so apple big bad apple is the only option so now we're going to make our own ecosystem just like apple okay great so that's happening um but they didn't show the phone that the only thing they showed was like this weird cryptic symbol yeah which i was trying to understand i want to pull do you have a picture of that symbol i can probably pull that up it's on nothing.tech right it's basically just this like yeah it looks like the letter c with a small letter c above it and then some dots and dashes it kind of looks like a sim card very yeah tray remover it's like if um a sim card tray remover was like a tech crop circle like yeah it looks like a g with an upside down lowercase i

underneath it a c as if like you're imagining actually if you're imagining the android um alien yeah it looks like the top of that where the left antenna is a c and the right antenna is just a detached antenna yeah i don't know what it means it they didn't tell us what it meant i mean i'm guessing this is some sort of a symbol for like all of the products that will be in their eventual ecosystem, maybe. Maybe they're going to fill it out and add dots and dashes.

Yeah, I mean, he literally said, you might not get it just yet. Yeah, of course we don't know what it means. He literally said, you probably don't get this yet. And I looked at him like, yeah, I don't. What is it? We also learned nothing about that. I mean, I'll be interested to see what these all mean and how many of them are at him like, yeah, I don't. What is it? We also learned nothing about that. I mean, I'll be interested to see what these all mean

and how many of them are more just like, it's just marketing hype that just, because remember OnePlus when they tried to sell us that they purposely put the S on the back of the phone in the reflection? This feels like one of those things. Like the 60, yeah. So I have two main questions.

One is I wonder if they can really pull off a transparent looking phone because i really like the way the nothing ear one earbuds turned out they look pretty good i love them they're my favorite earbuds i think they're my favorite looking for sure maybe not my favorite overall pair but i really like what they did aesthetically with them i like them for some weird reasons mostly just because they fit really well in my ears that's a perfectly legit reason and i think they look fantastic like yeah to me it's um i like them because of why a lot of people like beats i don't love how beats look or the beats logo but i totally respect the fact that like as long as you're happy with the sound quality and how they work looking good is nice

i love how the ear ones look yeah so my question is can they replicate that with a phone can they pull that off we've seen a couple uh transparent ish phones like maybe a sliver of the phone is transparent or like translucent u12 one of my favorites some like stickers have made an appearance i think real me and you know i think shout me did the fake sticker right yeah i don't want to you know speculate too much i'm sure that's exactly what nothing wants is just for us to go i wonder how good it'll be yeah but the other thing is like they are the most 2022 company ever just asking for money please invest in us please invest in us this kind of reminds me actually of what we were talking about the other week with all the evs unfortunately where we parade around this idea and if you like the idea enough invest in the company because the

future is bright for this idea and so the idea that they paraded around for 12 minutes in a live stream today was we're going to change the world with a smartphone and an ecosystem and look how similar we are to apple yeah by the way is nothing. They're bad, but we're going to change the world, like Apple. So that's how they get people to invest, and they've asked for $10 million from the public this time. Yeah, and so I just saw something that was really funny, as you were saying that, about the investments. So you know how they already collected investments off the beginning, right?

And then this is their second round. I think they said they're open to up to $10 million. So when you go to nothing.tech, it says community investment and then in parentheses two as in the second community investment but following the one pattern of parentheses inside it. So they're literally naming their investments like they are their products. Yeah, I don't. I guess you could

just keep giving them money and getting nothing in return i think that's the perfect way to end this segment yeah pun start on a pun end on a pun end with a pun yeah this event could have been an email all right yeah for sure we'll take a quick break let's come back and talk about some actual real products. Be right back. With Uber Reserve, good things come to those who plan ahead. Family vacay? Reserve your ride as soon as you book your flights.

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Popeyes $25 festive family box deal will be over before you know it. Love that chicken from Popeyes. All right, welcome back. I know I said I was going to talk about real products for a second, but I just want to open real quick because I got distracted by Twitter. You know how randomly you'll get trending Twitter topics that are just a random word because there's just the perfect storm of things about it?

Apple products trend all the time for no reason because people are just talking about Apple products. I have Tiger on my trending right now. And it's under sports. And there are three separate stories as reasons why Tiger is trending right now. Is one of them that new Netflix show with Barack Obama? No.

That's what I would immediately jump to. No, but... Just because that's been trending a lot. My hint is that it's under sports, even though that's only one of the stories. All of them? All three are under sports? Only one of them are... So them? All three are under sports. Only one of them are.

So the word Tiger is trending under sports. And that's because the Masters is coming up. And the other week, the PGA Tour put out a list of, so if you win the Masters, you're invited back for life. Okay. And Tiger Woods has not played in a while, ever since he had that car accident. And the PGA Tour put out a list of previous champions

who will not be playing this year, and Tiger's not on that list. And everyone went, is Tiger, is he back? Is he going to play in the Masters? And so the entire golf universe is waiting for the announcement of whether he'll play or not. That might be out by the time this episode comes out. And then I just clicked on that,

expecting to see a bunch of Tiger tweets. And I also see a tweet of there's a random tiger at a zoo fan cam that just reached a million views and there's a BBC article about an escaped tiger from a zoo that turned out to just be a plush toy.

So all of those things combined on my timeline today to trend the word tiger. Twitter is a magical place. Love me some tweets. Anyway, let's talk about mac studio and studio display real products our real reviews are out yeah i'm very happy with uh those reviews and like the time we put into them and the final results which one you want to talk about first let's just go i i like the studio display talk more but let's just start off with studio mac because i think that's like the powerhouse but the the display has just

like a ton surrounding it besides just the product and these are just kind of like our final thoughts on this obviously go check out both videos if you're interested in it um definitely also like studio mac we made a really killer robot intro, which I'm sure everyone loves, even if you hate Apple. It's totally worth watching. Great videos. In my opinion. I am a little biased. A little tad biased. I think they're good. Okay, so the computer. So it turns out it's a good

computer. Wow. There's not a lot to hate on because a lot of people typically will find a reason to say, there's nothing really new here with this computer, right? A lot of the classic Apple-hating community will just say, oh, it's just a rebranded blah, blah, blah. It's just a bigger Mac mini, whatever.

It's not that big of a deal. That's a rough thought, I think. Right, but it is a really good computer, and Apple Silicon is doing its thing. It has IO. It's got great cooling. It's got great performance. And they genuinely did something really new and really good,

which is in M1 Ultra, which is fusing two chips together with a high enough bandwidth that the system sees it as one chip. Like the more articles and talking about this that I see, like that's what SLI was trying to be. That's what, was it Crossfire? AMD Crossfire, whatever it was called? Like you would get two GPUs

and you'd get a little bridge card and you'd connect them and you'd have twice the power, but they weren't really acting like twice the GPU. Your system would have to see that there's two GPUs and then decide to split up the tasks between the GPUs. And Apple's given us twice the GPU cores. It's twice the everything.

That's the theme of the review. But yeah, the system sees it as one powerful chip and that translates really well for performance. And the benefit here is because Apple's doing it and with what we see with a lot of Apple products are when you make all of the components, they're insanely compatible with each other and the efficiency between them is really really good so you're just like sli would have to be probably connected to you know nvidia gpus connecting to an intel chip or an amd chip

this is just all of apple's stuff on to more apple things connected by all sharing memory bandwidth super high between all the parts. It's awesome. It's great. Yeah. My question at the end of the day for me is, all right, they made a computer called the Mac Studio. Guess what? We run a video studio. Is this the new computer that I'll be editing on at my desk?

That's kind of the question at the beginning when they announced it. It's like, is this the new Mac Pro? Yeah. Or is this just a really powerful small mac on the desktop and as soon as it was announced i i immediately ordered the highest end spec mac studio anticipating that it would end up replacing my mac pro and i think technically it can i'm just not sure that I'm going to yet. I'm not sure. Do you have- There's a couple of reasons. Yeah, yeah.

One, we're still waiting for the new Mac Pro. But I don't know how soon we're going to get that new Mac Pro. Not that there's any like problem with my current Mac Pro aging. I'm just obsessed with performance and getting the last couple bit of gains out of it that I can. Like the iPad Air review, it was chugging. When I was editing that at the beginning, I had too many plugins and it was just like,

I'd move something across the screen and it would just bleep beach ball for 30 seconds and I'd have to wait for stuff. I'm just ready for better performance, right? So the Mac Pro, I'm convinced, will for sure offer that. But we don't know when it's coming out. Maybe announced at WWDC and shipping in later in the year that's the optimistic view is what i'm leaving that at not sure when that's coming out so we saw this machine and early apple charts indicated it would

outperform the mac pro yeah and i looked at all the io and i said okay i've got these two thunderbolt monitors i've got thunderbolt raid array i've got the Thunderbolt RAID array, I've got the DAC and all this stuff, and the Mac Studio supports all of it and it can be on top of my desk so I don't have cables hanging behind it. And it seems like this is a good replacement. But when we got the machine into test,

it did not beat the Mac Pro that I've been using at a lot of the things I was expecting slash hoping it to. Specifically editing. Like there's something about having 768 gigs of RAM that just lets me load audio waveforms

in faster and like keep the timeline going a little longer. And the export was faster on the Intel Mac Pro. Again, 28 cores just turned through. I think the export was... They were very close. It was like a minute faster or something. They're both fast.

But I was just noticing it's not actually crushing. But then I'm still tempted because it's Apple Silicon and I just want to get our workflow on Apple Silicon ahead of time. All the apps that I use now at this point, I think Discord just got updated. All of this stuff is now optimized for Apple Silicon.

This is going to be a better, more efficient workflow. So I'm just kind of torn. I still have the machine coming in, but I don't know if I need to switch to it. Maybe that can be an editor's computer. Maybe that can be something else. But I think I'm still going to keep Intel Mac Pro for now. So while you're still keeping that, I think what is really, really cool about this

is how much did you pay for the maxed out version? That's a good point. It was about 45 grand. For the Mac Pro. For the Mac Studio, it was eight grand. Yeah, eight grand. Okay, so those of you out there who did not want to spend 40 000 could not spend 40 000 on a

mac pro but still are doing big resolution files doing a lot of editing like more than enough look at that you're at a fifth of the price at this point so like those people should be super super happy and really really excited for this and i mean form factor comparison like is it's huge that in itself that was the conclusion basically i got to is like this is more computer than you probably think you need yeah like if you're like they showed it in studios with like photography studios where people were like editing a raw file from the r5 and pixelmator it's like you don't need this much computer to do that this is gonna crush that i mean you could be future proofing and you're future proofing at way less money at this point. That's absolutely true. Yeah, absolutely

true. But you know, the M1 Mac mini will do that exact workflow really well. So yeah, you're, you're headroom for days if you get this computer. Just SLI two Mac minis. Oh God. That's kind of what just happened. It's just M1, M1 ultra. Uh, so yeah, nothing but good things really to say about that computer, even though I might not be swapping it out for my main. You're not swapping, but for people out there looking, the price to performance ratio versus the Mac Pro is destroying it.

And also size to performance, if you're someone who likes a neat desk, because I would say the one way to potentially get you to switch to it is if you keep looking at your desk and seeing all the wires that have to run to the ground and just be like, it's a lot, I'm finally sick of this and I'm tired of people commenting about it.

So I want to actually have everything. I'm tired of getting my cables roasted. Yeah. It would fit right under both of your XDR displays perfectly. And you could make things look real nice and clean on there. But yeah, that little tiny bit, I mean,

when you're playing with variables like plugins and all different audio and like all the stuff that we're doing at the same time um you really appreciate that little bit of power you get out of out of the old one yeah so so far the 28 core dual vega 2 duo 768 gig Mac Pro is hanging on over the brand new small Mac Studio. But yeah, that's, you know, good computer. They also announced a display with it. Less positive things with the display. Now, I was really happy with the way I was able to put together this review.

It's a very unusual product, I think is where this all started. It's called the studio and i think the main problem with its positioning is it is well this has happened before with apple products but it doesn't really match up to anything if they want to call it the studio then it should be a high-end panel with a background back backlight zone dimming it should have different it should have mini led probably maybe it'll have pro promotion it's got to do something in the high end if it's going to be a

studio monitor funny enough though i based on their other naming schemes and products i actually think it fits perfectly where it is. Okay, I want to hear that. So my reason basically is, is I think the monitor for the Mac Pro right now is the Pro Display XDR. I don't know if Studio is their full Pro thing because they say they're coming out with another Mac Pro. That's true. Studio feels like the slightly smaller version,

but still like prosumer, cheaper commercial. I'll clarify. I think you're right. It has to be underneath the Pro product, which is the Pro Display XDR. It doesn't get low enough. Okay. So it's $1,600 with non-height adjustable stand. You add the height adjust, now it's $2,000.

Yeah. You add nanotexture, and now it's two thousand dollars yeah um you add nano texture and now it's twenty three hundred dollars exactly this monitor isn't necessarily a better panel for a lot of people's uses but it does certain things really well that certain people are going to love no matter what the price is and that was a challenge for the review. Can I say the one thing it does the best, which you said this morning, that I loved? The naming. And at first I was like, oh, it's just Studio Display.

But look at every other monitor's name out there. Please, everybody else, follow a factor like this. I cannot tell you the name of both of the monitors on my desk at home because they're both like asus tough vs 248 qg pros or something like that and i have absolutely no idea and whenever anybody asks me it takes me 10 minutes to find my past order and think of what it was the the two that i compared it to in the video were the LG UltraFine 5K, not bad. Then the Dell UltraSharp U2820Q, not a great name. Bad, bad, bad, bad. So studio display is very easy to remember.

Rolls off the tongue. But yeah, I guess my challenge was like, yo, this is not a great deal for most people who are cross-shopping. But the thing that this is designed for is for people who are not cross-shopping. They were just looking for a better Mac monitor. It just works with plug and play. It has a webcam and speakers built in. The speakers happen to be very good, in my opinion.

If you're into built-in speakers, you don't want to have extras. That's great. You don't even have to think about it. The webcam, not that great, but whatever. It's a webcam. Most people don't have a huge investment in how good the built-in webcam quality is even though i was expecting better um and there's a huge world of

monitors out there that just don't work that well with the mac i reviewed the the lg ultra fine 5k i had to look back it was five years ago and the thing that was its own it had it was made of plastic it had these weird shielding issues of wi-fi which i've never seen hilarious very strange but then also just like plug and play sometimes it would just not wake up when i'd wake the mac up the the mac mini i plugged it into would wake up and then lg ultrafine would stay asleep and i'd have to restart the mac mini to get the monitor to light up like all these weird little quirks that people have been dealing with with monitors for a long time. And you get one from Apple,

you know, it's just like, all right, plug and play. It's just going to be fine. Yeah. And there isn't really a price for that unless you're Apple in which you say, okay, that's worth $1,600. And so the way I reviewed it was, I mean, you can watch the video, but to summarize, it was like, all right, is this a good deal? It's 5K, 27 inch, 600 nits, P3 color, 60 Hertz LCD. If you want to do like a comp of like, let's say you're a real estate agent and you're like, how much is this house worth?

All right, I'm going to find another house with the same number of bedrooms and square feet and in the same location. And then the price of that with the same finishes is probably the same as the other, the other house. So I'll find another monitor with the same specs. The closest one is the LG ultra fine 5k. That's like, yeah, you get really close on paper, but i don't want that monitor yeah like it's not as good of an experience so uh at the end of the video i said look is the rolls royce ghost a good deal because it's the only four-door sedan with suicide doors with a 6.7 liter V12 that's under 400 grand. There's two, by the way, just like the monitors.

There's one that's 400 grand and one is 300 grand. The nanotextured Rolls Royce. Exactly. Is that a good deal? No. But if that's what you want, then it doesn't really matter that like a Chrysler 300 is a better deal because I want the one with the thing. And I did the same thing with the shoes like all right is the i think adam had this idea like are the nike hyper adapts a good deal i want self-lacing shoes that's that's all i really care about yeah well okay but the

jordan ones are a better deal they're only 130 bucks yeah but i want to do the thing yeah and they're 300 bucks it doesn't make it a good deal. Apple will notoriously find a way to charge more for something like they did with this. The conclusion is it's not a great deal, but it's a good monitor for a lot of people and they're gonna get it

and they're gonna like it. Yeah, you're allowed to like things that aren't good deals. It happens all of the time. A 3090 is not a good deal but like sometimes you want that i mean maybe that's performance wise you know you are you can perfectly compare it to something lower than that but like in this sense if you want this if you see the studio display monitor and are like i i love everything about that. I love how it looks. I love how the build quality is on it.

I love the compatibility with my Apple products. Like everything on this, I really want 5K over 4K for some reason. I mean, that's- The reason is actually kind of substantial. I might've downplayed it a bit in the review. Works really well with- The scaling, so it's exactly twice the resolution

of 2560 by 1440. So the scaling doesn't have to do anything wonky. Okay. And 5K is almost double the pixel count of 4K. So 3120 by 14, whatever. The actual number of pixels you get, so you can edit a native 4K video and have UI around it. A lot of stuff like that.

There's not that many 5K monitors, but that is pretty nice as a pixel lover. Comparability-wise. So if that is your thing, if this all comparability wise it's but let's so like if that is your thing if this if this all fits in it you can buy that and you can love it and it doesn't matter that it's a bad if it's not like a good deal like there's not a single person the biggest person who loves that thing i don't think is sitting there and being like man i really pulled one over on apple and like i really got a good deal here.

I hate saying the word a million times, but that's totally fine. A lot of times products feature is the fact that it's really a good bargain for the money. This is the Apple specialty. That's just not what this one is, but it has everything else. So that's awesome.

Yeah, this is the Apple specialty. If you ever ask somebody who buys, actually probably the telltale sign to know if an Apple product is for you or not is the second you start cross shopping and seriously considering other products you probably know this one's not for you yeah like if you look into you're like you know what i think i need a new monitor i wonder which one i'm gonna get let's compare the studio display with x immediately you're gonna find like okay the fact i'm even considering these other monitors means i'm not sick of them which means i'll probably get a better deal and i'll just go

with the one that's a third of the price yeah but if you're just oh man i've had all these other monitors and apple just released this monitor that's just made for apple products i'm just going to get this one that's the type of person that apple's aiming for and i think they nailed that i do really think the real estate reference was probably the best analogy here. Because like I just remember looking for for houses. It's like you want this many bedrooms, like bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage. That's all super obvious. But then we were looking at things like fenced in yard over an acre of property under two acres of property, like very specific things.

And then the comparables get less, less, less. And then you're like, oh, here's two houses in these price ranges what but like they have totally different things in them and it's just like eventually you're like okay that's the one it's more money but it has every single thing that we want and we're just going to move into it we're gonna be really happy about it yeah yeah let's say even if this monitor was $1,300, let's say it's the same price as the LG UltraFine 5K. Yeah. There's still going to be people who would never consider the LG.

Yeah. So, fine. So Apple can charge a little bit for that. But yeah, those are the two products. They're both studio products. I think every time now that we've done the reviews, I'm still left in like, what will this Mac Pro be?

Can I say one more thing about it yeah my biggest gripe about it um like i know apple loves to do the thing of where vessa mount visa mount i i'm never quite sure if i'm pronouncing um is like extra or it's not extra but it's an ad you can't have the stand and then detach it and have that my biggest gripe about it is that it's not centered on the monitor so So a lot of people were talking about screen rotation. No, it's like down low like an iMac. It's probably on like the bottom quarter, bottom third. So the hinge is towards the bottom

where when it's best amount, I'm not sure how well that would hold up on like a rotating arm if you did it. I'm sure it would probably be fine, but there's always gonna be that little imbalance or like different center of gravity because you're pulling from like a third down it or now rotated a third to the side of it i mean that might be something you get used to the build quality is really good so i'm sure yeah but like if you took that plastic lg ultra fine and held it from like a bottom corner

of that i feel like that would be creaking and like really pulling on some parts of the frame that wouldn't hold up very well yeah that's even one of the things the the build quality of this monitor is its biggest pro and its biggest con it's so weird the hinge yeah like okay first of all everything is it's metal it's got these sharp corners. Like, most monitors are plastic. So right off the bat, it's, like, built really well. The hinge is incredibly well balanced. If you get the height adjustment, which is $400 extra, it height adjusts really stably.

It doesn't rotate, which actually makes it feel more stable than the Pro Display XDR, which is a $1,000 stand. But the downsides are, like, it's fixed, so whichever one you get, you can't user upgrade. You have to send it to Apple if you want to change it out. And two, the power cable, that whole debacle, it's not

designed to be removed. Even though you can pull really hard and rip it out the back. We had a review unit. You're not supposed to damage these things when you have review units. Linus has a video if you want to see. Lots of people bought them and like pulled really hard

and you can eventually rip it out the back. But that's how you can tell you're not supposed to. Like a normal monitor, what happens? You just pull it right out the back and it's fine. And so somebody found that there's a tool that you can use that you're supposed to use. I don't even know. Is this an Apple tool or something that people are supposed to buy i don't know i think it's probably an internal apple tool

but that literally like you wrap the cable around it and like twist and it pushes up against leverage yeah leverage to pull rip the cable out the back yeah it's it's weird you're not designed to upgrade it and that's like let's say you have a cat chewing on a cable. You have to now replace the entire monitor. I did see a lot of people saying, what difference does that make? And I agree and disagree. There are instances like that. You can fray a wire.

You can, I mean, especially if you have like, you know how sometimes when your desk is pushed up too close to the outlet, so you're like jamming a plug in there and now it's almost at a right angle and you're just gonna, the wire's gonna start fraying. Or if you're in a professional setting where like it has to move computers around a lot or move desks like moving a monitor where the cable's hanging or you have to like wrap it up is it's just more difficult it's so much easier when you just pull all the cables out

toss them in a box move the tower and monitor and then put all the cables back in. Yeah. And even if you never, even if you never have to deal with the cable again or damage it for a lot of people, it's still a man. And it's still a matter of principle. Like, yeah, really, you're going to make the monitor like you're going to lock it in and not let me replace it. If I want that, you know, made a lot of people disappointed, But yeah, to me personally, I'm like, all right, that's just another thing Apple can do, and that's a very thing that only Apple would do. But there it is. That's the studio display.

I would recommend not getting the nanotexture if you don't need it. It is incredibly hard to clean. That's the one thing I noticed. Yeah, my XDR makes me very we all we all got the nano textures because we live we we shoot in this very bright very well-lit studio and it really does a great job of getting rid of reflections but if you like drag a an eyelash across the thing it leaves a huge mark and it's pretty pretty hard cleaning supplies and the cloth you need the special cloth

it still doesn't always work mine looks like i sneeze on it every day it's not hard. You're not supposed to use cleaning supplies and the cloth. You need the special cloth. It still doesn't always work. Mine looks like I sneeze on it every day. It's not great. So if you're considering getting it, that's my little pro tip. All right, let's take a quick break. We've got a reveal to do of a little phone that's just out of frame here. So let's come right back and do that. That's just for my Apple Watch. Ah.

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how me upgrading my phone has turned almost into a meme on this on the channel. And I finally upgraded. So we posted a Twitter poll to see we're going to do the reveal in a minute. We posted a poll to see what everyone thought. And it was fascinating because it's the one of the closest polls I think I've ever seen on Twitter, at least in terms of one with four options. and it was fascinating because it's one of the closest polls I think I've ever seen on Twitter, at least in terms of one with four options. We gave four options. The lowest is 23.5%,

and the highest is 27.5%. That's crazy, with 2,200 votes too, so not just a couple votes. That's close. So no one knows what phone you've picked. They don't. They don't. Okay.

But we put a little thought into this poll. So the choices were the iPhone 13 got 23%, Pixel 6 got 28%, S22 Ultra, or we just put S22, got 25%, and S21 Ultra, 24%. So like, you know, Pixel I talk about all the time. I'm coming from a Pixel 4 XL. iPhone 13, I think I have constantly mentioned wanting to switch to iOS but I hate how many icons are on the home page

and that still is a thing yep s22 I was really digging and then the s21 ultra we talked about how good of a deal it was yep much unlike this studio display but we talked a lot about how going back a year flagship it was still such a good phone um and those choices yeah like we said really close 23 28 25 24 all right on top of each other so i got a lot of tags as to telling me why a lot of people saw the apple watch we mentioned earlier right this is for the fitnesses challenge. There is an iPhone 11 here, but this is just an old one. But that's strictly so you can use the Apple Watch

for the fitness challenge. Strictly so I can tell everybody that I'm winning the challenge. Okay. So it's not the iPhone 13 then. It is not. Okay. Are you ready?

I'm ready. You know what it is already. I have seen it already, but are they ready? There it is. Pixel 6. For our audio listeners. That is a Seafoam Green. Yeah, I went sort of Seafoam.

Sort of Seafoam Pixel 6. Sort of Seafoam. Okay. So you've had this for a couple days now. It's shiny. About a week, yeah. You had a case on it. It came.

Yeah, I do. I'm a case person. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It came the night after we recorded the last podcast, which is when I wanted to just talk about it, but this wound up being kind of fun. So I'm glad. Um, so how have you enjoyed it so far? Cause I, I actually, I'll just mention this right now.

I've been using the S21 ultra since January of last year. It's been like a year and change. And I just, again, put my SIM card back in the pixel six pro I'm using the March update so far. So good. It still has a little bit of hiccups compared to the S21 Ultra we'll see how long this lasts

but I'm curious how you're enjoying the Pixel 6 experience we're Pixel brothers now yeah same idea back at it again yeah yeah so I went regular 6 obviously a bit cheaper

to be fair biggest things I wanted were my Pixel 4 XL which is getting towards the end of its life. I think I had some screen damage, which was causing a bunch of accidental touches all the time. And I had things like just completely closing on me or like random buttons getting touched whenever. So I just needed to make the upgrade just for this needing to upgrade from an old phone. I think the two biggest things with me and why I picked it is I'm dying for an ultra wide camera.

I feel like the activities that I do, like climbing and outdoors, ultra wide is so much more fun. Super useful. And the Pixel 4 XL did not have that. And then for me and my laziness, I think the ease of just going from Pixel to Pixel, same operating system system same feature set

all like I was running Android 12 on my pixel 4 XL already it was the most seamless transition between the two of them um that coupled along with a good trade-in uh system did you get a better price than the s22 would have cost it's's weird because the S20, I think if I had the, like if you have a bunch of backup phones, Samsung lets you trade in two phones. Pixel only lets you trade in one, which is really awesome. I still, I just traded in one though.

And because of the things I mentioned, that's why. I think you probably, Samsung seems to always be the best deal you can get. They're trying to get you on board. They're so good at trying, at like saving you money on all that. But yeah, so a couple of thoughts so far.

Yeah, let's hear it. Did I get my review right? Did you get your review right? I want to see if there's anything. We loved the Pixel 6. Yeah, I gave it my, I got the regular one. One of my,

it was basically our quote budget phone of the year. Yeah. Maybe not budget, but value phone of the year. Screen I dig, 90 Hertz is fine. Yep. Totally fine with fine with that flat edges i think it looks good um i put it in a case i have the dbrand grip case because like i really like the icons show the icon on the back skin it's all black so it's probably really hard to see but um black on black was dbrand.com

slash icons come on, something like that. I should really know that. So while I've really liked it, I love the ultra wide. I love how that's just basically everything that I had already. It feels like I barely switched, which I love. I have two gripes so far. I want to guess what they are. Okay.

Fingerprint reader. Yes. Slow and slightly inconsistent. More just slow. So I can't compare it that way because I didn't have, I was using Face ID because the 4XL had Soli. Even though I disabled all the Soli stuff, Face ID would still work because I,

and I've said it on this, I hate Soli. I hated when my phone would wake up when my hand went near it. The amount of times my phone would just wake up all the time and then I would look at it and then it would unlock. And it's so frustrating

to accidentally swipe a song in your car when you're just like reaching into the passenger seat for something. I mean, like that's usually where my Taco Bell is. I want to listen to my songs and just eat my Taco Bell. Stop.

But anyways, this is my first in-display fingerprint reader. I really miss face unlock on my 4XL. I loved it. It felt really seamless. I know even with the masks, but like usually only wearing the mask at like the grocery store and when I'm out at home, it felt really easy. It does feel kind of slow because I'm only comparing it to my old like Pixel 3 back fingerprint

reader. It's slow compared to every phone. Okay. Yeah. And just like when I'm working out and sweaty, if I'm climbing and I have chalk on my hands, if I'm outside and there's dirt, if I'm doing yard work and stuff like that,

it's clearly going to affect that, which I don't love. So I don't like that that much. Okay, that's one. That is one. That's one. And I even, what was I going to say? Oh, yeah. When I was reviewing the iPad Air, I noticed,

I couldn't tell if it was me being spoiled or just really getting used to Face ID because I've used the iPad Pro a lot. And with the iPad Pro, you tap the screen, it lights up, and then you swipe up and it just already looks at your face. And with the iPad Air, it's got the fingerprint reader. And you can get really used to the fingerprint reader just like you'll get really used to this fingerprint reader.

But there's just something about it just like looking at your face and it doesn't matter what's on your hands. So that's one thing. Okay, the other thing. You have two things. I got really into, sorry, just like pulling my phone up, power button, and then just unlock. It's already open.

Yeah, yeah. I love that. Okay, that's fair. Second thing is? Is it your, I don't think it's your battery yet. You haven't had it long enough maybe. Cameras are, is it, is it the cameras being a little too processed HDRE? I don't mind that.

Okay. I'm fine with that. Okay, what is your? You were kind of right. So I'm going to preemptively say it was battery, but I figured out why it was battery and that problem has been fixed. So I, like I mentioned before,

I was at the wedding all weekend. So like not a lot of time to keep it on the charger, which I usually do. Um, and I came from a pixel four XL, which is not known for its battery life at all. So anything should have been an upgrade yet. I found myself over the weekend,

just being lower than I would like i mean i feel like there's people who are are like this battery life is great and when they go to bed and it's at 20 like hell yeah i made it the whole day probably it probably would have been that but if it's under 50 for me i'm like stressing usually like i do not like it to be down that low that's funny um but i also noticed 5g was on the whole time, despite not feeling any benefits of that. Yeah. I turned 5G off and it's been way better since then.

So I just feel like that should be something you should do. Unless you're somehow in a place where 5G is super beneficial, I would just turn that off. You know what's funny? I have this new thing. Like when I test a phone, I daily drive it, and I always have this thing where I put on Waze and I navigate to work

and have this half-hour, 40-minute drive. And there's a spot right when I'm getting on the parkway where I always lose service. And it's become like a game of how far down the highway will I get before service comes back so it'll be 5g and then i'll roll into over this hill and i always lose service right past this gas station i'll go past the light and i'll get onto the highway and with the pixel 6 well i had been using the s21 ultra and it would always indicate probably within about 300 yards it'll be back on lte and then eventually would find 5g again

this the pixel 6 pro this morning it dropped service like it usually does right where it's supposed to and then it took like an extra like thousand yards to pick up lte again and another like half a mile to pick 5g back up again and i just noticed noticed, I don't know if that's an indicator overall of the signal strength from the Pixel, but I feel like we did see signal strength complaints where like, if you have low signal, it's gonna hurt your battery. And the Pixel doesn't have a great like antenna.

And so if you turn 5G off and have it stop searching for 5G all the time, it'll probably help your battery a lot. Yeah, I think like I said, I mean, and there's plenty of cases where if you're on 5G, you're potentially getting worse speeds than LTE. Yeah, 5G is not great.

It's just trying to pump you off of the crowded LTE bands. What carrier are you on? T-Mobile. T-Mobile. Is there 5G like anywhere that you go on T-Mobile? I feel like they're maybe one of the, they have mid-band 5G. They were one of the first to do,

like, is it ultra-wide 5 5g i'm completely blanking right the blanket coverage or the millimeter yeah the blanket like no they do not do i don't think they do millimeter yeah we did the video about um t-mobile's mid-band 5g they're like pretty well rolled out yeah i think they were one of the first to do it so i and i was in a the wedding was in a town that was like pretty popular so like all wedding 5G and like I noticed it because it's not something

that's shown on my phone before so it's new to me and like I was always like oh 5G 5G oh 60%

50% it's like it's 2 o'clock in the afternoon like and you're not using data or like downloading anything I wasn't doing much yeah so

I mean like listen I'm sure I'm 100% positive it would have lasted the full day with no charge yeah but it was stressing me out downloading it wasn't doing much yeah so yeah just i mean like listen i'm sure i'm 100 positive it would have lasted the full day with no charge yeah but it was stressing me out fair yeah fair it's funny it reminds me of my dad who's um who's old iphone have i told this already i got him a new phone he uh he had like an iphone 6s plus or a success or something like that and uh i think it was thanksgiving he showed me his phone like plummet from like 17 to 8% battery in like three minutes.

And I was like, Jesus Christ, the guy on my iPhone 13 Pro Max, he ends the day with like 98% battery now. It's incredible. He doesn't have to do any work and it saves, you can probably go a week plus on a battery. You should ask him to not charge it and see how long it takes. Yeah. And just keep running it down. But he probably get, he doesn't get stressed at all. He's like 8% battery. Yeah, I'm good. Like I'll just keep how long it takes. Yeah, and just keep running it down. But he probably doesn't get stressed at all.

He's like, 8% battery? Yeah, I'm good. Like, I'll just keep running this phone down. That's awesome. That's great. I wish I had that. But super happy with it so far and really excited to keep it around. All right.

Pixel. There we have it. We're Pixel brothers now. That's it. For now, anyway. We'll see how long that goes. No more reviews. We'll see.

Team Pixel. I'm just kidding. Anyway, yeah, that's been it for this week. For sure, stay tuned for a bunch of new stuff. we'll see how long that goes forever no more reviews we'll see Team Pixel I'm just kidding anyway yeah that's been it for this week for sure stay tuned for a bunch of new stuff

like Apple Week has come and gone so we can get back to the other stuff that we were working on before that so stay tuned for those videos

make sure you subscribe to the Waveform channel if you haven't already that's a YouTube channel you should be on and yeah that's about it

for this week thanks for watching. Catch you guys later. Peace. Waveform is produced by Adam Molina. We are partnered with Vox Media, and our intro-outro music was created by Vane Silk. Thanks for watching!