Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - New Surface Laptops and a Day Without Facebook

Episode Date: October 8, 2021

This week Marques and Andrew talk about Facebook being down for almost an entire day. They go over what happened and why the memes were hilarious. Then David Imel comes on to discuss the new Microsoft Surface laptops for a bit before spending the remainder of the episode dunking on a new Intel commercial. Much fun was had. Links mentioned: Why Facebook went down (explanation): https://bit.ly/3AmlKv2 Twitters: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://twitter.com/DurvidImel 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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BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques.

And I'm Andrew. And today we've got a couple pretty big stories. We've got the adventures of the waveform podcast we're your hosts i'm marquez and i'm andrew and today we've got a couple pretty big stories we've got the adventures of the day without facebook all the stuff that happened and and why and what went down which was a monday of course and then we've got the new surface products which is a whole new lineup and we made a video about them and then we've got one single new cringy intel ad that i just want to go over just to rant about yeah so we've got one single new cringy Intel ad that I just want to go over for a little bit. Just to rant about, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we've got you here with me.

We'll have David on in the second half of the podcast as well to talk Surface stuff. But I say we start with Facebook. Yeah, let's do it. That was the big story of the internet this week is on a Monday, bright and early. I'm sure in California time it was probably like 7, 8 a.m. when all this started. Yeah, it was 1 p.m eastern so okay so 11 10 11 12 something like that facebook goes down and you probably kind of noticed the the series of things that happen which is you try to go on facebook you realize it's not loading you check

your wi-fi you're like why is my wi-fi not working but your wi-fi is working so you're like oh it's facebook down so then you go to i don know, Instagram just to see if it works. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Instagram's also down. And then you go start figuring out, connecting the dots. Most of us are like, we're on Twitter and we're seeing everybody else say that Facebook is down and Instagram's down and all that. Yeah, I don't check Facebook that often. So I found out because it was trending on Twitter, and I hadn't checked Instagram yet that day, so it was all sort of trending on Twitter at once that a bunch of stuff that Facebook runs and owns is down at the same time.

They're all connected. Yeah, I think that's what, it didn't hit me what the magnitude of that was at first, because I saw Facebook down on Twitter, thought, cool, I don't use it that much, just like you. I mean, I use it to communicate with my family sometimes. That's down. Who cares? Then you realize instagram's connected and that's the first pretty big one it's like okay i like instagram way more than facebook yeah that one kind of hurts a little bit and then it just keeps going like you don't realize what is and then whatsapp's down which right facebook also owns whatsapp and we don't use it that much we use sms mostly i mean we still have like slack and some other messaging apps but whatsapp is gigantic internationally it's massive yeah millions and millions of't use it that much. We use SMS mostly. I mean, we still have like Slack and some other messaging apps, but WhatsApp is gigantic.

Internationally, it's massive. Millions and millions of people use WhatsApp and we'll go over that in a second. Yeah. But like we've seen outages like this in the past, like when Amazon's web services go down, when AWS goes down, you realize how many sites on the internet

depend on AWS and they're all done at once. And usually it's brief, but you'll notice like, wow, there's a lot that's actually all connected here. So yeah, we, we saw the, the sort of small world of the internet as facebook.com and all of those services, Facebook messenger, Instagram, all of that. WhatsApp, even Oculus. Yeah. Oculus was kind of funny to me. Cause it's just like, Oh, like just the last thing I'd ever imagined to be hit by facebook being down is like i can't play vr now that's but it makes total sense yeah you have to log in through oculus which brings me to

my next thing where when we first start seeing it kind of outside of the general facebook realm because you know like facebook instagram whatsapp they're all directly owned by facebook so it all makes sense yeah then i saw like michael fisher tweeting about how he couldn't even go on his to-do list because he had to, he logged in through Facebook on his to-do list app. Yeah. So imagine all this, I mean, the second order, the majority of times when I download some new app that I'm not that excited about, but I just want to have it. Cause maybe it does one nice thing. If it gives me the option to log in through Facebook or Google, I'll do it because it's so much quicker than just, um, making a new account every time. Yeah. There's different philosophies with that. I never, ever log in through Facebook. That's been my, that's been

my mentality. I do log in through Google with some things and then Apple now will let you literally make a new fake email address to sign in. So if you sign in through Apple, you can just bypass all of that sort of tracking. But I want to go over the explanation for exactly what happened first, and then we can go over the experience and the effects, because there were a lot of them. So a lot of people were asking, like, Marques, are you going to make a video about what happened?

And when are we going to figure out why everything was down for several hours, which is a while? we finally did get an explanation i'm not probably going to make a video about it but it is interesting to read and we'll link it below but we kind of have the cliff notes here i have a it's a very brief too long didn't read but the briefness of this is still fairly long because it was a huge explanation of what happened highly suggest reading it'll be in the show notes like you said um so essentially i'm going to try and break this down here and this is very very brief i'm there is way more nuance to all of this scientific i i don't know if i can get i'm not an engineer i don't fully understand everything so this is what i gathered so essentially facebook has a

bunch of physical data centers globally yep makes sense some of them are gigantic but what they do have is they have a bunch of smaller ones that generally connect to all of these together. So, you know, we have all our physical facilities that are around the world and those are all connected and they kind of call that the backbone network of kind of the broader Facebook and everything that Facebook owns is all connected through this backbone network. Now, when you use an app or go to Facebook or anything, it generally sends a request to one of these smaller facilities before then going into all the data centers to request permissions or wherever, send it back to your phone. That's pretty much how general internet

usage gets processed, at least through Facebook here. Now, between those facilities, it's all managed by different routers and everything because, you know, you're sending information into a smaller facility. Then it has to get sent out to one of the bigger data centers. So in a general maintenance of some of these routers, which they have to go down all the time because, you know, different things need to get worked on. Maybe there's some physical lines that have to be worked. Maybe they need to do some configuration on something different. Can't have 100% uptime. Yeah, exactly. worked maybe they need to do some configuration on something different can't have 100% up yeah exactly so they're used to doing this in like small portions where you and I the user would

never notice that they were doing it or never noticed there was any downtime apparently when they did one of these they accidentally issued a command that unintentionally took down all of these routers and all of these connections between these smaller facilities into these larger data centers. So basically no one could connect to these larger data centers. It's like a DNS issue. Like DNS is basically like they call it the phone book of the internet. It's certain numbers that send you to a URL to yeah, to them and then they send it back to you. So essentially the DNS was all messed up and nobody could find these data centers that store all of the information and everything that Facebook owns globally. Yeah. Now that becomes kind of a problem, not just because you can't connect to that, but because

of how much Facebook themselves are on here, internal messaging apps, internal emails, just like internal communication in general start going down. Yeah. I saw an email that, or a tweet that I saw most of this on Twitter, uh, that yeah, literally Facebook employees could not communicate with each other because they were using Facebook tools and Facebook email addresses and all of those also didn't work. So I believe some of them who were already logged into their outlook were okay because it was already connected. But if you were not logged into that, if you're not logged into Messenger, if you had to log in or basically anything, you were out.

You just weren't able. Is it true that Facebook employees were locked out of the building because of some server issues? It sounds like they didn't fully explain that. It did see like there was issues maybe getting into some of the data centers. And I'm not 100% sure if that meant like, they definitely couldn't remote into some of the data centers um and i'm not 100 sure if that meant like they definitely

couldn't remote into some of them they were having issues with that um so they did have to physically send people to these data centers around globally to get into them to physically and these facilities with the routing issues to to reset everything what a stressful car ride that probably was i can't even imagine like you're one of the biggest companies in the world and just you're down completely and there's nothing you can do except physically go to i mean this would be a great opportunity for like spot or something maybe who's remote on location and could potentially get in but um the end of this is pretty much they they finally get to the physical data centers because they had to actually go to them, start getting everything going up.

They couldn't just throw everything up at one time. They had to slow roll it out a little bit, but that's why we slowly started seeing some people gaining access to Instagram, some people gaining access to Facebook. Finally, all came back up. All of this ending up taking around five hours, which for all of us on the internet

probably sounds like a lifetime. It's just weird. That is a long time. I remember I've seen some stats about, there's an occasional tweet about how much money each one of these companies makes per hour or something ridiculous like that. So I just Googled it. Looks like those couple hours resulted in about $60 million of lost revenue. Because Facebook's selling ads all the time.

Facebook's running constant ads alongside videos and this is helping i would argue more i wonder if that's like literally just facebook and probably just facebook ads like the facebook website not not instagram not i feel like it would be more fun but if you think about it five hours for everything that happened for physically having to go to these data centers and fix it, that's pretty quick. I mean, I'm sure it's an absolute mess for them and they would wish that would never happen ever again. But you got to give a little credit. Five hours to physically go to all these different places

and fix the largest mess. I think someone said the biggest internet outage since 2018, which is probably the AWS services, right? Okay, yeah. so there was a like we said there's like a first order effects second order effects too the first order effects were okay we can't go to facebook we can't use facebook messenger we can't use instagram or any of their services we can't use whatsapp we can't communicate through that second order effect i would i would i would actually loop oculus Oculus into second order effects because you wouldn't expect it to go down.

But because you need to log into your Oculus library through Facebook, people were saying, and again, most of this is seen on Twitter because Twitter was up the whole time, most of the time, that they were unable to access games in their Oculus library. Some people's libraries vanished in front of their VR eyes because Facebook services weren't working and they couldn't validate that they actually owned any of the games, which is crazy. I love referencing a site called isitdownrightnow.com. That site was hit so hard during this outage that it also went down.

So is it down right now? Also is down. It was basically replicating like a DDoS attack, which is the way that works is sending so much information to a single website that it can't handle the load. Well, this wasn't an attack. This was just something went down that is so big that so many people wanted to check that it went down.

And then also I kind of asked, sort of passively wondering, but also kind of really wanting to know how hard does like Twitter usage spike during the outage of other services comparable to Twitter? So like, this would be a perfect example. Facebook's gone. You know, where do you go to talk about Facebook and Instagram being down at once? You go to Twitter usually. And we did see Twitter start to struggle with maybe their highest load ever, which is really crazy.

And also we saw what Telegram saw some really impressive numbers because WhatsApp was down for so long that apparently about 70 million new people signed up for Telegram during that outage, which is well played. Now, I got to say, brand Twitter was pretty on point during all of this.

I think Telegram was tweeting at people like, hey, we're still up, join us now. Twitter was just kind of like, what's up, everybody? What's up, literally everybody. What's up, everyone on the internet. And a lot of brands chimed in that they weren't down while Facebook was. I thought there was a healthy

amount of like actually fun brand engagement on there was some fun brand engagement there's also just some great memes dunking on facebook which i think is the ultimate the the ultimate upside to everything that happened is for people who aren't super into facebook or maybe even don't check instagram for us twitter users we had we had a field day. It was a good time. I think there was a couple that I think were my personal favorites, and I think we just have to go over them. They're too good. My absolute favorite one,

someone tweeted a picture of the Facebook HQ sign, and then they put one of those Spirit of Halloween banners over it. It went out of business. If you're outside of the US, essentially we have this store that pops up every fall that sells like purely Halloween decorations and Halloween costumes and seems to just immediately take over

any semi out of business spot. It's a phenomenon. Like this business is only relevant two months of the year. Yeah. One and a half months maybe. And there's one every mile. And they appear like every,

like the second you start seeing pumpkin spice lattes, you start seeing this store everywhere for Halloween related stuff. And they just find a way to swarm in. They're kind of like lantern flies. They're like an invasive species and they just find everyone going out of business and just buy all those buildings

and make all of their money for a month and then they're just gone. Yep. It's beautiful. So they took over Facebook. Perfect timing too. Yeah. That's shiny new spirit of Halloween headquarters, you know, over there.

We also had our fellow coworker, David tweeting, guys, I can't log into my Ray-Bans in reference to the new Facebook Ray-Ban glasses, which I find hilarious. Like, what do you think those again we're probably a little too new into those but if anyone using them we're using them as facebook went down in case you just have really expensive sunglasses i feel like yeah they were they're probably bricked they're probably bricked nice okay well done uh there's a lot of just twitter dancing on facebook yeah i enjoyed that tons Twitter dancing on Facebook's grave. I enjoyed that. Tons of dancing on Facebook. It was fantastic. But that's the thing about like, okay,

we always see the monthly active users for people who go on Facebook. And those numbers are huge because it's monthly. And over the course of a month, I feel like every human I know will check Facebook once. It's like everyone has an account. But the spike is so much higher for sites like, if TikTok were to go down that spike

of how many people are typically on tiktok at once would be so much higher that it would it would probably have even more of an effect i think yeah but you know instagram is another one instagram is has a lot of people on every day instead of just casually passively checking a couple every few weeks yeah so i don't know it was it was kind of the perfect storm of like a lot of things happening at once twitter seeing all of these people flooding in telegram seeing all these people flooding in it was uh it was a nice like small world type story for it was kind of fun to just see everyone on one site for a little bit yeah i'd like to say i think one thing i took out of this and this is something you mentioned earlier that you do already but i will probably from now on not create new accounts

through facebook or through google or something like that because heaven forbid it was something that i really needed to get into and one of these sites went down we can see it takes a while to get these back up if it's hard enough so i'll stop being lazy and make my own accounts. Yeah. I used to be terrified that if I ever logged into anything on Facebook or through Facebook, that it would post something from my account or something. And even if this was never true, because it never did, I would just never give anything access to my Facebook account because it could see anything about me.

And I just never wanted to connect it that closely. Google still knows probably more about me and I have a bad habit of logging in through Google, so I'll take this opportunity to stop doing that as well. But yeah, I think we're on the same page that we've realized it's all very connected. You brought up accidentally sharing things. Have you ever had those moments where like your finger slips and you hit some random button and it does something and you think

it's shared somewhere and then you're just like scrambling through all your share button yeah i was on tiktok and it i don't know if i hit i think i hit download and i just like i got this really quick loading bar status come up not saying what and then just went back to playing videos i was like what did i just do where did that just go i was scrolling through my text messages i was on twitter on instagram i was like where did this share to and it just downloaded to my phone so a little panic attack but nice all right well we'll take a quick break we'll come back hopefully we'll talk about Surface, and we'll have David here. Tis the season to treat your family to the great taste of Popeyes. The Festive Family Box is here to

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You just appeared here in the chair. I blacked out. I'm glad you're here. Is it still Monday? No, it's not Monday. Your Ray-Bans definitely took you offline for a minute there. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Well, I was offline for more than six hours, but... Yeah, welcome to the podcast. Thank you. Thank you for bringing me on here. All right. All right.

We've got a Microsoft event. We're also expecting some more events coming this year, but this one was kind of fun. And of course, we had Panos delivering in his typical way

a bunch of new Microsoft products, some expected, some a little unexpected. Yeah. I want to talk about Surface Duo 2 first, and then we'll talk

about the laptop stuff. Okay. So, we got the new Surface Duo finally. Yep. First Surface Duo, not so hot. You know, I reviewed it.

It was a very expensive, beautifully folding, but incredibly dysfunctional piece of hardware. It ran Android. It was, what was it, $1,500, $1,600? It was $1,500. $1,500, very expensive. Awful cameras, awful battery life, awful software. Great.

It was a situation. Yeah. So what happened was they they stuck with it and they made a new one which i'm glad i'm glad they didn't just give up right away so we have service duo 2 now it's running the latest chip nice snapdragon triple eight yep eight gigs of ram it has a 90 hertz display yeah repair of displays a little better and these displays kind of curve over the inside edge in a way that when you close it, you can still read some edge display. Yeah. So this is kind of neat.

We saw something like this with the Galaxy Note Edge when it first came out, like tickers on the side of the display. Now, the camera on the back is really interesting. I haven't watched enough hands-on videos, but I remember with the first Surface Duo, it would fold over completely flat, and it was really nice that it could do that.

Now that it has a camera bump on the back, I don't believe you can fold it perfectly flat anymore. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is, you know, maybe that won't be as satisfying. They are trying to mitigate it slightly, though, because if you imagine that the camera bump was flat the camera bump was flat when you try to fold it over itself it would like it would like push against the corner of the camera bump so what they did was they angled the camera bump oh really so it's smart it's angled now and the camera bump itself has magnets in it now

so when it closes when it folds over itself itself, it actually like snaps to the camera bump. Nice. So it's not like on a corner or anything. Yeah. It's still going to cause like wobbling issues when you have it closed, which is not great. And it is ugly. It's very ugly.

I remember when we first actually saw, I think it's still in our video, when we first saw the Surface Duo 1, we got a preview of it with Panos, and he showed us these hardware prototypes, and they ended up being the final version, but he also showed us some software on his personal one, and his personal one had a camera bump on the back,

and he never talked about it. He just showed us some software on it and put it away, but it made it into the video, and people were wondering, wait, this one has a hardware camera bump, and it's matte black, and the others are just white with no camera bump. So they've been thinking about it.

They finally did it. Is this new set of things gonna save the Surface Pro? Okay, so there's like a wider thing with Microsoft products that I'll probably get into more later where, look, this is, again, it's like $1,500, $1,600. It's still expensive. It's more expensive.

Yeah, I think it's $100 more than it was last year, which is like... Bold. Yeah, it's very bold considering it was that much. Personally, I like the additions they made. I think the ticker display is a good idea because I think the reason people are okay with buying foldable phones right now is that you can still use basic information while they're folded, right? You still have that ambient clock, that ambient information. The problem with the Surface Duo, the original one, was like you couldn't do anything with that thing while it was closed. It was just a brick.

Yeah, that's a fundamental piece of why foldables are all different is because they all have different levels of usability when they're closed. When they're closed, yeah. Like the Galaxy Fold has a really usable outside screen. Yeah.

The Z Flip has like a small but kind of usable outside screen. It's bigger now. The Razr, we really like that bigger outside screen. Huge display. Nothing on the Surface. Nothing on the original Surface Duo.

So this is like a ticker now. Notifications, time. You're not really interacting with it, but it's better than nothing. Yeah, it's still like if you're at dinner and you need to glance at the time and it's sitting there. You don't have to open it. Right. Okay, yeah. All right.

And I've always been a proponent of technology that is only used when it needs to be used. But there's some information that you get from your technology that always needs only used when it needs to be used but there's some information that you get from your technology that always needs to be available it's like a smart watch also always needs to be able to be a watch right so having that time there all the time is very useful um i like the curved display for that reason and i think it makes the gap in between seem less big, especially when the thing is open. Right. The new cameras are good and bad. Yeah.

I haven't seen any sample photos yet. But yeah, when I say good and bad, it's like bad because of the bump and it's ugly and it's, you know, it's had some issues. You can't fold it flat. Yeah. Good in that the technology that they were using last year was they had the one camera on the inside you would fold it over itself and when it detected you turning it i guess it would make the viewfinder the side that you were using and then it would theoretically activate and

and it would switch the screens but it never worked exactly and i was gonna say in my experience this was one of the least often working things in my entire tech experience last year is i want to just take a picture and this thing is really hard to take a picture with yeah it was crazy hard to take a picture with and look i i just still feel like a dual screened this like device is not as functional as a foldable device and i know that microsoft like remember last year when they were like they were beating this drum of the surface duo is not a phone it's a device but it's like right you're not going to carry a duo and another phone that was a that was a thought i kept seeing is this was marketed or at least described as a companion device.

Yeah. So you have your phone, but in your other pocket, I guess, you also have a Surface Duo that you usually use for most stuff. I don't know that I'd want to carry that much hardware. I mean, I'm guilty of carrying two phones all the time, but I would want to spend that much money on one device and have it just be my only device. So the fact that phone calls are kind of tough

because it's a weird shape and the aspect ratio is kind of weird and I want a different shape for watching videos, it's a little bit of a compromise. I wonder if there are people who, I mean, I don't know, there's got to be groups of people who don't care that much about the outside display

and will be fine with like, all right, productivity is my only goal with this device. I'll get one yeah i don't know how many of those people there are it's just like i think the way i think about it is the magic and beauty of the smartphone is that every year when smartphones were coming out it seemed like every year it would replace another thing that we had right slowly the smartphone ate up all our other appliances to where we didn't have to carry a ton of stuff with us and we could just carry one thing. Why would you want to go the opposite direction? And the other thing is that like it is a phone at the end of the day. It is a phone. It makes phone calls. It has a data connection. It is just redundant.

I put a SIM card in it. Yeah. And the whole dual display thing versus versus like singular display like android has had multitasking features for years where you can like put chrome on this side and another app on this side like that is built into android now and i don't panos like really wanted to tout like oh like it's magical to like have information on one display one app open on one display and another app open on the other display. Galaxy Fold, you can do that with like three or four apps. Right. I did feel a little bit sometimes what he was talking about,

which is like I use dual displays on my desktop. Yeah, totally. It's fundamentally different from having an ultra wide. Just because I divide things differently. I have like things up against the left bezel on the right monitor on the right bezel the left left monitor and like i i organize things around two displays differently than i do around one huge display yeah but like the software has to really facilitate that and that was a bit of a challenge i don't know i just i look at this device and i'm like can we save this like i want this to keep going

and get better but the the amount of things that I want this to keep going and get better. But the amount of things that I would have to change in order to save it in my own view is so long that I don't know that it's worth going. I would want it to have an outside display. I'd want it to have better cameras, better battery life. All this makes the thing way thicker. Suddenly it's like this huge, chunky dual screen thing. Is it even sleek anymore? Right.

I don't know. A factor that I think will trickle down into the other devices as well that we talk about today is that as much as microsoft makes products that sells them to consumers i think a primary focus for it has always been enterprise and in its mind it's like it doesn't really matter if these are sixteen hundred dollars fifteen hundred dollars because if a business buys them in bulk and gives them to their employees and they can do microsoft teams you know it's like and you can use excel then it like it doesn't matter how expensive they are and you should actually make them more expensive because you'll make more money on that and bigger businesses don't care about that because it's a tax write-off because they're using them as devices so it's like that's something that has always sort of like conflicted with me and all of Microsoft's Surface products is that it seems like they focus so much on the enterprise side. They do.

That the consumers tend to suffer on the feature end. Yeah, I do find myself reviewing a lot of things where i know it's not for me yeah and this is another one where i'm like i'm i open the thing up and it's like sign into microsoft teams here's excel here's the things like a whole bunch of things that i know work decently well that i just don't use yeah i'm like all right well it's not gonna be easy to recommend this to almost any regular person but does that mean it shouldn't exist? I guess not. It could still exist, but it's tough. It's definitely tough. I don't,

it's like one, the OS last year on the Surface Duo one was just so, it was the, it was probably the glitchiest phone I've ever used in my entire life. Ooh, top, top five for me. I don't know.

What was glitchier for you? I got to think about, I mean, of the year, it was definitely tops up there. The Royal FlexPi was a disaster, but it, it didn't know. What was glitchier for you? I got to think about, I mean, of the year, it was definitely tops up there. The Royal FlexPi was a disaster, but it didn't really ever have any promise of being anything better than a disaster.

Sure. Where this was like a $1,500 Microsoft product, I thought it would be better. FlexPi was never trying to be anything other than it was trying to be lately. Yeah, so yeah, I agree. It had its problems. But, you know, we'll see.

I'm going to get my hands on it still. I mean, it's going to come out. People will be able to buy it. It's going to exist. So stay tuned for the review. I like, as someone who wears shirts with shirt pockets all the time, like the dream of like keeping your phone in your shirt pocket and have it be that thin.

And like, if you've seen the movie Her. It's like a passport size. Yeah, in the movie Her, phones are like the duo where they're little they're little pocket books that look like passports in a way and they have a little camera bump on the on the back and you only like you open it up like a clutch when you want to use it okay and they're actually pretty cool but uh and he and the main character keeps it in his shirt pocket and then he can like stream to his AI assistant with video because it's peeking out of his

shirt pocket. Anyway. Interesting. It's a very it's yeah. Yeah. Great movie if you haven't seen it but. We'll get our hands on the second one. Yes. I'm excited to play with it. We'll see if they can fix the software issues. Yeah. So then we had some other things come out. We had Surface Pro 8 and Surface Laptop Studio.

Those are the two other main ones. Surface Pro 8, I feel like we can go through pretty briefly unless we have crazy thoughts. I mean, it's $1,099 starting. It is their tablet with a, it's this guy. It's this guy, yeah.

But it is, for our audio listeners, it's a tablet with a kickstand with an attachable keyboard. Yes. And it's got Core i5 and Core i7 options. It's got up to a terabyte of storage.

Two USB-C ports. They're Thunderbolt 4 ports now, which is great. Yes, which is huge. It's got a headphone jack. It's got Surface Connect, fast charging. You can spend up to $2,600 on this thing, and that can be your machine. Yeah. How are we feeling about this refresh? Yeah, I mean, they made the bezels

on the left and right sides smaller, which was huge because when the Surface Pro X came out, which was the ARM laptop they made, they worked with Qualcomm to make the SQ1. I wanted it to be good so bad. I know. It was tough. I know.

Windows on ARM is still not good, and emulation is not good, and just too many companies haven't ported their apps over, and battery life suck and and for some reason that that computer of course because it had the x name got like the latest and greatest hardware features so it had the thinner bezels yeah they finally brought those thinner bezels to the eight which i like a lot um they're still generally thick ish bezels on the top and bottom but it doesn't really matter as much because the keyboard actually like lifts up right and it covers the bottom bezels so it doesn't really that's where you hide the pen and that's where you hide the pen which is cool yeah as i will show

the camera real quick for those uh on audio only just imagine the keyboard on a laptop popping down a little bit hiding with a little bit of magnets, the new Surface. What's it called? The Slim Pen 2? Slim Pen 2. Yeah. Now, one thing that is like a little bit of a travesty is they sell this computer as a tablet. And I think that Microsoft is a little confused as to what it wants its Surfaces be because they they lean into the fact that like

it's a full windows machine it's not like an ipad it's not a tablet but then they also sell it like a tablet in that they don't include the keyboard with it optional 180 accessory 280 280 yes the cheapest keyboard you can get is 180 but it doesn't include the pen. Oh, right. If you want it with the pen, it's $280 and then it's $180 as well is very expensive, right? So if you just want to be able to use this

as a laptop at all, unless you buy your own Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, you have to buy this, which is actually ridiculous. Plus 30%. And that's the interesting thing, right? Is that like this starts at $1,100 without the keyboard. If you get the cheapest keyboard, it's still $1,400. You can get a MacBook Air M1 for like $900.

Right. So your question would be like, all right, the buyer that's picking this over that wants a couple things that this offers that that doesn't. One would be Windows. Two would be touchscreen. Yeah. all right, the buyer that's picking this over that wants a couple things that this offers that that doesn't. One would be Windows. Two would be touchscreen. Yeah.

Three would be the ability to disconnect the screen with the keyboard for some reason. For some reason. And there are some reasons. There's real reasons. Every time I do this, I get into this like, oh, why would you ever want to do that? And then everyone who does it every day is like, I do this every day because here's the things

that I want to do with it. Artists do actually really like these and the kickstand can go back really dang far not bad tried to do that with the macbook air exactly exactly so yeah look into that um but yeah i mean uh 120 hertz display is amazing thunderbolt 4 is amazing uh and that is like going to be a bigger a bigger little rant that i have um still got volume buttons still got volume buttons yeah yeah so that's nice and two usbc ports so yeah it's a nice little device uh i think for most people it'll be a good option it a lot of college students have surfaces yeah uh for similar reasons i think it's going to be up to the surface pro 8 or like a macbook m1 um either an air or a pro probably an air yeah

as to what they get for college um i have many thoughts about this thunderbolt thing and we can either save that for the laptop studio or we can talk about it now yeah let's go right to the laptop studio and then talk about that so the laptop studio is unknown if this at the moment if this replaces the surface book or not but it's a laptop yeah and this laptop has an interesting i should have it with me but i don't it's got a hinge feature when we made a whole video about it pops the bottom half of the laptop screen off yeah and can dock at 45 degrees as right above the trackpad yeah so the sir the surface studio right we have the desktop version which which tilted down as well now you have this ability in your laptop it's also 120 hertz touchscreen yep and it's running

windows 11 it's got the whole it's got a it's an i5 or an i7 it It's up to, I think, 32 gigs of RAM. Yeah. It's a 3050 Ti. Yeah. It's also only got two USB-C ports. Yeah. And it's a little bit pricier to get this to work. It starts at $1599 without the integrated GPU, 2100 with it. Right. So, okay.

I mean, laptops are fine. I like laptops. I really like the other Surface Books of past. I like the Surface Book 3. They made an all matte black version, so I really like the Surface Book 3, and now the 4 has that too. But this hinge thing, I would never use that.

Just personally, I would never use that. Microsoft has a history of making really weird wonky products just to test the waters, right? And just like with the Duo, they actually have a very rich history of like really messing up the first generation product and then fixing it in the second okay i don't think the second will be fixed because i think the use case is fundamentally flawed however um you know the surface book was a really interesting idea uh if for listeners that like don't know about what the Surface Book is really, it is a tablet as well. Pretty much all the Surfaces are tablets except for the laptop.

Yeah, they're like convertible. Yeah. And it was cool because if you got the 15 inch version, especially, it was like one of the biggest tablets you could buy. It's a 15 inch fully Windows 10 like tablet. And then you would dock it into this base that had a GPU in it. It had an extra battery in it, had a really good keyboard in it. So it was kind of like and then you could flip it over. And it was similar to the easel where you could like flip the screen around,

dock it and then put it down. And that way you could do your drafting on it. Yeah. This, I think, I'll just say, I think this Surface Laptop Studio has the form factor advantage just because obviously you can't take the screen off of the keyboard anymore. But that means now you don't have to have the entire computer in this screen, which means it's much thinner.

It's still a little thicker than normal, but it's fine. And then you get the weight at the bottom, and it's much better it's still a little thicker than normal but it's fine and then you get the weight at the bottom and it's much better as a laptop in my opinion yeah uh kind of like the surface laptops in the past really like those but is it better than a normal laptop for having the hinge this is a question whenever manufacturers make two-in-ones the question is always is the two-in-one better than is it is it better at either of those things or is it as good at either of those things right it's always i think fundamentally going to have to be slightly worse at both at both but which will it lean towards being good yeah like this one's better as a laptop than it is as a tablet yeah you can't disconnect the

keyboard so you can do this like screen flip down thing and they've got the full computer in your arms it's like honestly it's not a great tablet yeah but you can put it down and draw on it and that's that's cool so it is a tablet in that way yeah um but yeah i i as a as a very firm believer that you do have to sacrifice a little bit i find that the overall user experience maybe it doesn't matter to some people because you can only buy one device but the overall user experience of having both devices is typically better but you don't want to carry both yeah you don't want to carry both and the surface books were big um i've had every surface book since

they released i had the one two and three and i thought it was an incredibly innovative design when it first came out it was really cool the hinge was amazing but they just kind of kept that design for a very long time and can sit like the tablet it was so cool they had a 15 inch tablet but like you said before because the entire computer had to be in like most of the computer except for the gpu and the extra battery had to be in the screen itself it was was so heavy that like the use cases you would use a tablet for of like watching a movie in bed, your arms would get tired immediately. Like it was so hard to drop it on your face.

It wasn't a great situation. This one's really interesting. And I think I am wondering how many people will use the easel mode and how often they'll use it. All the marketing was around gaming yeah so controller tilted screen which i mean you could do that without tilting it exactly and it's a very microsoft thing to be like oh yeah gaming means xbox controller right which is like whatever but i was kind of hoping that if microsoft finally made a surface book that was not completely self-contained in the screen itself and had a base and had wires attaching itself, that they would be able to make it very high-powered.

And I still think that Microsoft could really benefit by making an Xbox gaming laptop or something of that nature. Like a Razer competitor type thing? Yes, because there is no Razer competitor in terms of that nature. Like a Razer competitor type thing? Yes, because there is no Razer competitor in terms of build quality. Now, they obviously have a lot of issues, their batteries swell and all these problems, but the materials they use, the thinness, there isn't competition right now, really.

Yeah, it's been a couple of years since I've legitimately felt like I could compare any other laptop to a Razer Blade, just because they've been nailing that for so many years like there's way faster laptops that are about as thin but the build quality is not the same right um so i feel like and like microsoft really has the xbox brand and xboxes are becoming more of pcs now so it's like you should really lean into that true um but either way i mean if you have now that you have thunderbolt at least it gives you the option to use a e-gpu yeah which is a big deal before we get into thunderbolt yes my favorite thing about the surface studio laptop

surface laptop studio what is it called again it's one of those service laptop service laptop studio yeah is the double decker design i saw it at first and I thought it was like, oh, this is kind of weird. Why is it double-deckered? No, it's nice, right? So all of the bottom, the top half looks like a thin MacBook Pro essentially. Yeah, yeah. And then underneath it,

there's like a platform where you get like another quarter inch of laptop. Yeah. That's where all the ventilation is. So it's like blowing air out the sides, which is like a little different than usual. It's like blowing on your hands, whatever. but then when you look at it from the top it still looks like a thin laptop because you don't see the bottom part yeah so you only see like a thin

laptop like kind of with the shadow underneath like hovering like it's floating it looks like a thin laptop hovering like that trick that we all used to do when we did smartphone reviews of like putting the phone on top of something to give it kind of that like 3d depth look yeah like for a laptop i i was super into that i saw it at first in like the renders and the videos i was like that's an odd version of a laptop yeah architecture and then i got in person i was like oh yeah great yeah it is also a smart way to like only get rid of a little bit of internal component space while still making it look thinner. Yeah. Because if they had rounded that out for the whole base, it would be a chunky boy.

Yep. Facts. Chunky boy. Facts. So we got two ports on the side. Both of them are USB Type-C Thunderbolt 4. I was hoping for more ports. Maybe some people were hoping a laptop like this would have USB-A even,

but I'm just kind of bummed that there's only two ports and there's no SD card. Every laptop marketing themselves to creative professionals should have an SD card slot. Yeah.

Just saying. There's so few. It's like even Razer, you have to get the creator one, which has like a some crazy GPU that is used for only 3D modeling, like the Studio Edition or whatever. Give me that card slot.

I know. So would you go eGPU with this or no? Yeah, so the 3050 Ti is fine. I think it could run a lot of modern games at 1080p. But the Surface Laptop Studio is like a 3k display like they've had this really amazing 3k display that they've used actually since the surface book one and it's a great display so they don't really need to change it now it's 100 but now it's 120 hertz right and if you want to run games at 120 hertz i don't even know if you you could probably could not run most modern titles at 1080 120 right and so eGPU is a great option

and for those that don't know there's Thunderbolt 4 and there's USB 4 and they're a little bit different USB 4 is much more similar to Thunderbolt 3 Intel owns Thunderbolt yep and because of that normally you would have to pay a licensing fee to Intel to be able to use this. Laptops before, the reason you only saw high-end laptops having Thunderbolt 3 was because it required a separate module that you'd have to put in the computer.

But now they built that into Tiger Lake. So the Intel processors now, they basically just have Thunderbolt 3 built in. And Surfaces have never had Thunderbolt, and it's always been incredibly frustrating for me because every year when I would upgrade from the Surface Book 1 to the 2 to the 3, I would be hoping like, oh my gosh.

I think that was my only complaint about the Surface laptop too. Yeah, and when I saw leaks they were adding usbc a usbc port i was like that's gonna be a thunderbolt port and it wasn't and there were these conspiracies that the surface book 2 didn't add it because there were not enough pcie lanes because the surface connect port like requires two pcie lanes and the cpu only has 12 and so all this stuff um and they just never added it and And then there was a leaked internal memo about why they didn't add it to the 3.

They got confirmed. And they said the reasoning was that it was a direct connection to the memory because you can put 40 gigabits per second through there, straight to the memory. And this is another example of Microsoft just thinking about the business use cases of things there straight to the memory. And they were like, this is another example of Microsoft just like thinking about the business use cases of things much more than they think about like the consumer use case. And they were like, it's going to be easier to hack into something that has that much

data throughput through a single port. Which is like, sure. I think it's because they wanted to sell more surface connect docs, which are these really expensive docks that connect to the Surface Connect port. They add a bunch of ports. You get extra ports. Lots of ports. Still no card slot. Still no SD card slot. You get more ports.

Yeah. And when I was at Intel, I remember they only issued us these Lenovo laptops that did the same thing. They had these giant port things that would connect into the side of the computer. For some reason, this is a very enterprise thing. I think the idea is because when you have people in cubicles, they have multiple monitors. And to connect to multiple monitors easily with a laptop,

the easiest way to do that is with a dock of some kind. So they would issue us a dock, they would issue us the laptop and like two 4k displays um but now but now microsoft can't really say no because it's built into tiger lake right yeah so they would have to like turn it off and i think they'd get a lot more backlash for that just just just roll it now okay but it's fantastic because like eGPUs, like one of my friends has always loved Surface Pro devices and every couple years

he buys the new one and he can sort of play his games on them okay and then as games get harder to play, he can't anymore, but he can't just get an eGPU. So that has always sucked. I love this. So that's great. Yep. That's what I ran about.

I guess we have a perfect tangent. As soon as we come back from this break, we'll talk more about Intel and the incredible ad they put out this week. We'll be right back. This is an ad from BetterHelp. This holiday season, do something for a special person in your life. You.

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and how to best seize this new opportunity. So you can download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash waveform. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash waveform. netsuite.com slash waveform. All right, but that's a perfect segue though because we got to talk about Intel. Yes.

We got to talk about Intel because Intel, Intel, Intel put out an advertisement. It's on their YouTube channel. Have you ever seen those like social experiment videos? Like you've seen the Febreze commercials where they'll be like, they'll blindfold somebody and bring them in a room and be like, where do you think you are right now? I'm in a forest.

And they'll be like, I'm in a clean room. And then they take the blindfold off and they're in a dumpster. It's like that's what Intel tries. They'm in a forest. And they'll be like, I'm in a clean room. And then they take the blindfold off and they're in a dumpster. It's like, that's what Intel tries. They just keep doing this. And they've had a long history of really cringy,

insecure ads. Yeah. Especially targeting Apple with, I mean, they're getting attacked from every direction, but for some reason they just keep going at Apple.

Yeah. And they put out their latest one this week. I feel like we'll just cut to maybe a brief audio clip of it so you can get a sense of the cringe uh it's pretty bad the music starting off is already just corporate you know it's coming you know it's corporate cringy so they're setting the scene going right for Apple. Right for Apple. Right for Apple. Oh, gosh.

Who just sits like that in a room just kneeling? I don't know. Hi there. How are you? Good, you? I'm great, thank you. I'm Kevin. I'm going to be your moderator today.

Okay, pause. So they're setting the scene already with like, this cannot go well from here on out. They're setting the stage with, we're going to tell these people about products that are presumably Apple products, but they're going to be surprised when we tell them they're not Apple products.

This cannot go well. This cannot be enjoyable for anyone to watch. This cannot be a good commercial. You've already lost, but go ahead and tell. Let's play it. Are you a big Apple fan? I am. Yeah, yeah, all Apple.

Apple. Apple. I'm an Apple girl in the Apple world. I am 100% loyal to Apple. This is all about getting your opinion. Pause. That didn't sound like manufactured whatsoever. I love that they always have to say,

these aren't actors. I don't think I saw that in the fine print for this one, but who talks like that? Yeah, I am 100% loyal to Apple. Never heard anyone say that in real life. I'm sure someone would say it sarcastically. Oh my goodness. But yeah, okay.

Yeah, let's go. Ready to get started? I'd love to have the freedom to customize. That'd be amazing if you could. I hate that you can't add more RAM after you make the wrong decision and get the computer. Once you're committed to that thing, there's no easy way in to change that out. Well, I want to show you something regarding customization then. Pause.

This has come up before because they've done other ads against apple in the past yeah but there's still several laptops powered by intel that apple makes oh yeah where you are locked into the amount of ram you have it's a perfectly legitimate complaint like oh you can't change your ram after you buy it but also you can't change your ram in every windows laptop either actually it's also very true you that you can change your RAM in. This is very true. It is like a feature. So the fact that they're so specifically calling out this really narrow complaint is kind of odd. It's not like that's an Intel thing where now that you've got an Intel laptop, you can change your RAM. It's like that's not really true. I think the reason is because it always used to be the Apple, i'm a pc i'm a mac commercials because it's

apple versus microsoft what they're angling but now that apple is the one that's like apple didn't want to yell it into intel didn't want to yell at apple and like make fun of apple because they had a partnership where they made the chips in their laptops but now that there's this two-year transition to m1 everything yeah we must go at apple and all of their laptops. But now that there's this two-year transition to M1 everything. Yeah, we must go at Apple and all of their laptops. Yeah, they get too much good press and now they're like, okay, but please still buy our stuff.

It's just such a desperate move. Okay, let's continue. Well, I want to show you something regarding customization then. Oh, more corporate core. Confused face. Laptops you can upgrade. What?

I can't. Pause right there. Okay. So that frame was just a bunch of black boxes sliding into place. Everyone in the commercial was like. Everyone went, yeah, I want that in my laptop. That didn't show anything. That's all I had to say there.

Oh my goodness. Okay. All right. Yes, please. As to being able to get back to doing those things myself. That's very exciting to me. What is? What did you just show?

Oh, numbers. Oh Hey, that's a big number That's probably how I'd react to it. If you could play all of these games effortlessly on one device, that would be amazing. Oh, we'd be stoked. My kids would be ecstatic. Well, I recognize a bunch of those games that definitely can't be played on my computer so Pause Okay Well, I recognize a bunch of those games that definitely can't be played on my computer. Pause.

Okay. All right. All right. So common trope, Macs can't game. Sure. That is not because of the chip. That is because of the software. Yeah.

And this is another thing where we talk about like the reason people buy a laptop is not because it has Intel inside. As much as people who work for Intel would like to think, nice, somebody buying an Intel laptop, they must like Intel. It's not because of Intel. It's about the laptop. It's not because of Intel. Yes, there are other things like the Windows 11 that might be running on it

or maybe some other hardware features. It's got a nice keyboard and a screen and a battery and a build quality. In fact, most people now buy AMD laptops because it's AMD. Exactly right. If you want to bring up the gaming point, I'm sure AMD laptops because it's AMD. Exactly right. If you want to bring up the gaming point, I'm sure AMD would have a lot to say about that.

Yeah, which that was the last point I wanted to make about this stuff. But the Microsoft stuff is like, I wish they went with AMD. But Intel has very weird, tight relationships. Yeah, but they could put USB 4 in it. It wouldn't be 32 gigabytes. But anyway, it would be a minimum of 10 gigabytes per second instead of a minimum of 32 gigabytes per second but i digress let's continue with the oh one other thing that guy who was he was like you can play all of these games seamlessly it's

like they can run yeah but if you have like a 300 dollar like yeah on some of our chips also also it's gp that's mostly gpu bound anyway that's yeah this is not the intel chip running the game yeah okay like a little bit sure okay a touch screen touch screen touch screen will be great pause i like that is that a real thing prop i wonder i don't know most Mac users who I talk to are like I don't really care I love touchscreens and I use them for Photoshop I like I feel like that's a legit that's saying it's a legit thing but I also wonder like you started at the top of people going like I love Apple Apple is my I I'm a sheep I only want Apple stuff. I am an Apple sheep.

None of these people would ever think about a touchscreen Mac OS experience, would they? They have an iPad, right? I mean, I would. Okay, look, I came from a Windows background. I use Windows and Mac now. I do wish, like everyone always says, like, I wish that the iPad could be more of a laptop. And everyone says, I wish that the iPad could be a more of a laptop. And everyone says, I wish that my laptop could be more of an iPad.

So ultimately I think just having the option of a touchscreen is a good thing. Yeah. I'm just imagining like if I asked a Mac person, what is your laptop missing? I would have a hard time saying they would go straight. Yeah. Especially if they don't really know the benefits of it.

Cause they haven't used it before. Yeah. They would go, I want iPad on, on it. I don't know. We'll see. Anyway. Okay. What about two? Oh, here we go. I have a touch bar on my laptop as we go into this next point.

Go ahead. Is that possible? I don't know. Let me know if you see what's happening. Wow. This is a screen. This is another screen. They are both 4K touchscreen displays. You like that idea?

Yeah, I like that idea because I know that I would end up loving it. That doesn't make any sense. Interesting. If there is something to travel with everything all together, yeah, that'd be amazing. I would like to have my iPad and my laptop combined. See, that's real. That's real.

Okay, yeah, that's real. They showed the Asus ZenBook Pro Duo. I love that laptop. Yeah. It's a risk for most people to take because it's expensive as heck. Very expensive. It does have that 4K matte angled second touchscreen,

which is good. It's like a touch bar on steroids yeah it's a lot yeah um you have to use a separate wrist rest with it yeah because otherwise you're touching the trackpad it's just weird it has a great keyboard it's it's a weird device that i think very few people will buy but once they do buy it they actually end up loving it is that possible is that possible okay right, go for it. I'm going to show you something, if that's okay. Okay.

We're right back. This is a 2-in-1 laptop. That's awesome. 2009. Welcome to 2009. That kind of eliminates the need of an iPad. It actually folds all the way back. It folds all the way back.

Go for it. My computer would probably snap if I tried that. If I had this option. I don't know if I could put it down. Yeah, I love this. Welcome to 2009. Don't try that on your MacBook. Again, I'm picturing the Apple guy walks into Best Buy.

He walks right past all those two-in-ones every time. They've been there for years. It's not like you've never seen it. Is this possible? Yes, it's been. So they've been there for years for years it's not like you've never seen it is this possible yes it's been okay okay so they've been out there yeah does does the apple person like wonder because they're thinking these are apple products are they going oh apple's finally done it yeah or are they thinking like oh another pc that i don't i can't imagine that these people legit think that these are real Apple products that are coming out.

Maybe they do. The funny thing is when they showed the tent mode, and I remember when the first Lenovo yoga books came out that did that, and it's kind of just like the Surface laptop studio where they have to come up with as many modes as possible just to make it seem like you have all these options yeah and the tent mode was like i could watch a video but it's closer to the

ground now instead of like having a keyboard i don't have a keyboard you could also watch a video with your laptop in laptop mode so i don't know yeah don't know. Yeah, it's an odd. It's a thing. It's an odd feature. Okay, let's go. What if I told you that everything we've been talking about today is available now? Where do I sign up? But this was not Apple.

This sounds great. That is a PC powered by Intel. What? Yeah. Really? I was like, oh, I don't actually want it now. Ah! Whoa! What? Yeah. Really? He's like, oh, I don't actually want it now. Whoa. Is this real life right now?

What? Wow. That is the device you were just holding. Wow. I think these guys are more interested in the RGB than they are in the laptops. That's beautiful. It looks like a piece of artwork.

Oh, you guys have to sign me up. I brought my debit card. me up i said all the right things you did i would say there's a lot more options than with mac i am surprised yeah everything i know i'm gonna have to upgrade what i know in my mind okay oh my so that last section like reminds me of like when i when i shot retro tech we do a lot of interviews with people, and we had a story that we wanted to tell because we'd done our research, and we knew how the story went.

And so we wanted to get people to say certain things, but we didn't want to tell them to say the thing. So we'd prompt them in different ways around that thing to get them to fill in the blanks for us. Okay. And I can already tell that when they went in that room there was a producer like so how does this compare to max oh so what is what would this make you say about comparing it directly to apple like they definitely prompted them over and over and over again to get some of those lines out of those people yeah pretty cringe if you ask me.

Yep. But that's the commercial. That's what they uploaded today and thought, yeah, we've done it. Yeah. We've really done it this time. It just feels like a desperation move. I know they've been doing this for years and multiple companies have been doing this for years.

It's true. It's a common style. It's such a desperation move. I mean, to be fair, like Intel is getting hit from all sides right now. That's the thing. Yeah. Like,

okay, you're firing an Apple with this ad. Yeah. Which is like, they're eating some of your lunch, but also like, what about AMD over here? I haven't seen any AMD targeted ads yet.

I don't know if they're working on any, but that's another angle they're getting attacked from. I don't understand how they, do they, you're saying desperation mode but it's like do they think these ads are the answer to changing public opinion about intel again i don't think most people are buying their laptop because it's intel powered yeah i think there are a long list of things before that that are the reason they're getting this laptop i think that intel likes to ride on the innovation of their like actual laptop manufacturers like all of the features the

upgradeability the yeah the swiveling all the hardware oems come up with all this cool stuff yeah that's all asus and acer and so if you can fire at apple maybe you you plant this seed in people's heads of like apple doesn't have all these options. Right. Look at all these Intel powered options. Right. But it's not Intel that's doing that innovation. I know.

So that's a little bit awkward. You should just say like we have so much more choice on the PC side. We power all this choice. We power all this crazy choice. Which is like congrats. Yeah. Well done. Keep getting better at, congrats. Well done. Keep getting better at that.

Yeah. But yeah. I mean, yeah. It's great that in the laptop space you do have a crazy amount of choice for your use case. That choice also includes the choice to not use Intel and use AMD.

It's facts. And I get why they're freaking out. AMD is gaining a lot more market share. Their latest chips are insane. They're now trying to make GPUs because they're trying to get in the GPU game because they're a little bit afraid that like they're not innovating as fast

as everybody else in the CPU space. And honestly, everyone who has been the traditional CPU manufacturer should be a little worried right now. Qualcomm should be worried because Google's making their own chip. Samsung makes their own chips. Apple makes their own chips. There's rumors that

Oppo Group is going to start making their own chips. So even in the mobile space. And I think Intel's feeling the heat too, but this stuff is like a cycle. Like sometimes AMD stuff is really great and then they are really bad. And then they're really great and really bad. Yeah. And you got to have respect for the engineering that goes into all of this competition. Yeah. I're really great and really bad. Yeah. And you got to have respect for the engineering that goes into all

of this competition. Yeah. I just think the ads are so easy to make fun of and so cringy at the same time. Here's my question. Yeah.

Let's bet. Let's place a bet. From today's date, Okay. how long do you think they'll keep doing this style of Apple targeted ads?

Will they do another one a year from now? Probably. Probably. Two years from now? Will they do another one? Maybe. Maybe when M1X comes out, they might do another one. I think they're going to keep doing, yeah, at least, yeah.

M1X MacBook Pros are around the corner. I think they do this at least a year from now. I think in October 2022, there's another Intel ad. And it's like, I don't want that. I don't know why they think this is the answer.

How do these keep getting approved? How does this cringy idea keep happening with all these different companies, the Chevy ads, the Febreze ads? I don't know. But you know what?

It's content. We're talking about it. Do they win a little bit because we're talking about it? No. No. bit because we're talking about it no no i don't know i this is the thing right like is is this ad supposed to like remind people that intel exists because like do people not know that intel exists like that's the thing like it that's why it feels desperate because i feel like everyone already knows that intel exists because they did an incredible marketing campaign in the 80s where they would sell you their chips for cheaper in bulk if you put the intel inside sticker on your laptop and it was one of the best gorilla marketing campaigns that has ever existed a lot

of people don't know that yeah but yeah that for those who don't know yeah the sticker on the laptop that like would say intel inside that you'd be like, who cares? Intel's inside. Great. But that's a reason why they put it there. Yeah. It was a great tactic. Yeah. So yeah, I don't know. I.

We'll keep seeing it. I think they're going to keep making these commercials. I don't know if they're going to stop, but I think that they get through so many corporate like layers that they're just go, Oh yeah, let's make an ad just to convince people we're better. I don't know. Yeah.

They're going to keep you in it. I think that's, that's probably what we're ended. I appreciate the lighthearted note that we can end this on because there was a lot happening this week. And we'll definitely, we'll get our hands on Surface Duo 2.

We've already done a video on the Surface laptop studio, which was a fun one. This is not it. I'm just holding my laptop here. In the studio. Yes, and we have the Surface Pro 8 as well. But much more to come.

It's Techtober. There's always stuff happening. So stay tuned for that as well. Yeah. But that's been it. All right. Thanks for listening. Catch you later.

Peace. Waveform is produced by Adam Molina. We are partnered with Vox Media and our intro outro music is by Vain Syl.