Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - New Year, New Decade, & Bold Predictions: CES Part 1

Episode Date: January 8, 2020

In the spirit of CES and the new year, we hunker down in a hotel room to share our predictions for the near future in the tech world, talk about our first day at CES 2020, and wrap it up with a discussion about what we're looking forward to seeing at the remainder of the Consumer Electronics Show. Links: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli OnePlus Concept Phone: https://bit.ly/35yNMnQ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thumbtack presents the ins and outs of caring for your home. Out. Procrastination, putting it off, kicking the can down the road. In. Plans and guides that make it easy to get home projects done. Out. Carpet in the bathroom. Like, why? In. Knowing what to do, when to do it, and who to hire. Start caring for your home with confidence. Download Thumbtack today. Hey, what is up everyone? Welcome back to Waveform. We got a bonus episode. This is a little out of schedule, but we felt the need to start bright and early for 2020. So the start of the new year, the start of the new decade, we'll go ahead and kick out a podcast and talk about it a little

bit. So we're your hosts. I'm Marques Brownlee. And I'm Andrew Manganielli. And we are currently, bit so we're your hosts i'm marquez brownlee and i'm andrew manganelli and we are currently as you're listening to this we are already out at ces 2020 bringing you episode two already like getting really into the nitty-gritty um but we're shooting this we're in a hotel room with uh you could call it a jerry-rigged setup yeah the setups the setup is uh we just have a kind of like a table and then this is this is my favorite part we're traveling right now and marquez is reading his script off of an imac pro in las vegas guilty but it's not like i'm not like depending on it like you could turn it around and i'd be like literally any i'm reading it off of like a 13 inch laptop and this almost seems like overkill like i could probably use my phone and you have an imac pro this imac is lighting up my face in

this hotel room but that's totally fine there's it's also great the soundproofing we have right the audio might not sound great because it's not in the best setup in the world but vin found this really furry blanket that we put over the table to help soundproof and then there's literally a cot standing upright next to me so i will tweet a photo from my waveform twitter so you can see the setup it's fantastic but you know what this is the this is the length we go to to bring a bonus episode um excuse any lapses in audio quality if there are any but let's get right into it 2020 is uh i don't know about you but a little bit of hype for a new decade of tech uh so i just felt like we could talk about what what we're expecting for next couple years, maybe the next one year, but also the next 10 years of really looking forward.

Yeah, kind of in the spirit of CES because we're here, obviously. This is how we start every one of our years. But CES is more of a showcase of what we think is going to come out in the future, not so much of what we're going to see in a couple of months. That's the beauty of it. CES is we start every year. It's always in January, first week or two of January. And you head out to Las Vegas, you set up shop, you bring your cameras, you walk into the show floor with 150,000 of your closest friends, and you just get to take in what the companies around us think will shape

the future for at least the next year and the next little bit. And possibly the flu. And probably the flu, probably some kind of sickness. How should we structure this? What do you want to do? I think we should just call this kind of like our, this is the waveform CES that you're listening to. It's the during CES, waveform CES. So let's make it a tradition that the first episode of every year

is a sort of a look forward and a look back. Because you also sort of have to build it off of the past and the tech that's come from the last year or two. Cool. So I think this one's going to be a little more fun because we're at the start of a decade. So I think we should do some. Let's see what we think is going to come out in the future. Like predictions? Yeah, predictions.

Predictions. All right. I'll put on my predictions Nostradamus hat. Okay. Actually, I've thought about this a little bit. I have a not-so-bold prediction for this year. Okay. And then I have a bold prediction for this decade.

All right, let's do it. We'll see how it goes. Yeah, let's do short-term first. Let's see what we're thinking this year. Okay, short-term. I have a 2020 smartphone prediction, which is every single flagship will have a higher refresh rate screen.

That's my not so bold, but bold prediction. Because someone could leave behind, Apple could do 60 hertz again. Someone could drop it off. So it seems there's already a rumor that all the Samsungs are 120. There's a pretty strong rumor that all the Samsung phones will be 120 hertz.

Not all of them, but all the flagships, your Galaxy S10, your Galaxy Note 10, all the big ones this year um i do love that that they're just like hey we were behind let's just go straight to leapfrog it they make the panels already they can do it um you know you already have one plus on board you'll probably get uh the pixels already on board you just gotta get the iphone on board really and by that time you're most of the flagships so that's my that's my not so bold but like that seems totally reasonable uh prediction and then i got some well let's hear your short term you want to go big long-term stuff later so okay uh mine's not phone related but i kind of think this is going to be the year non-apple smart watches are going to actually whoa be more

we're going to see them in the wild way more than we expect. Is there a reason why you're predicting this? That's an interesting prediction. I think it's not even like a great prediction because I kind of think at the end of 2018, we started seeing a little more uptick in the, maybe not so much an uptick in people wearing them, but I think the biggest thing to me is Apple's main con

is that the Apple Watch doesn't look like a watch at all. And I think like you talked to Kevin O'Leary recently, like people want watches to look like watches because they're not just time pieces or now smartwatches that help you. It's a fashion piece as well. I'll push back on that a little bit. I think there's two different audiences for a smartwatch. I think there's the teenager or the younger audience,

maybe our age and younger, who never really cared about a watch until they got a smartwatch and it's just an accessory and they don't really care that it doesn't look like a watch. And then there are the slightly older, slightly smaller group that are still going to buy smartwatches, but that have worn a watch before. Yeah.

And that are maybe a little put off by the fact that it looks weird. I think if you've worn a watch, you probably want something that looks like a watch before yeah and that are maybe a little put off by the fact that it looks weird i think if you've worn a watch you probably want something that looks like a watch because even even if you're not like super into fashion like there are a lot of people who just want to wear a watch because it it goes well with a suit or something like that business people i'm sure would much rather have a watch that looks like a watch rather than an apple watch um and i guess my prediction kind of lies in not the sense that I've seen anything great with where OS coming out, but that watch companies are kind of not only doing their hybrid stuff,

but it seems like a lot of them are starting to do full on smart watches. Yeah. And when you see companies like fossil and I don't know if I'm pronouncing this right, but tag here, yeah. Uh, like big watch companies are coming out

with stuff like this they're gonna be good looking watches because they know how to make watches that look good and then you just have to have the pretty simple steps i mean none of them are ever gonna be at the point of what an apple watch can do in terms of just reliability and like being in that ecosystem because fossil's not making a smartphone that i mean i know you have galaxy watch that right all that but i do think because of the fact that they look like watches i still think though biggest my biggest issue with smart watches is the thickness of them well yeah the batteries are tough for sure i will say i have seen some more action in this space uh there was a mr mobile video either two days ago or something like that and i forget which company exactly what it was but he had a smart watch where the whole idea

was it doesn't look like a smart watch and you tap it it was garmin so that's an almost another reason as to why i think these type these smart watches will be more popular because garmin was always a a rugged outdoor athletic smart watch like i've've, I just got one and Claire got it for me because we go hiking and I want to track stuff like that. Whereas now the fact that this company that's done smartwatches already in the fitness thing want to make it look more like a regular watch. I think is a, you see watch companies

going the smartwatch route and smartwatch companies going the watch route. So here's my question then. Is that those companies feeling the pressure to sell something to the younger crowd? Kind of like you see like Ford is like, oh, oh wow, everyone's going electric. We need to make an electric car now.

So now Garmin's going, we've been selling these traditional watches and beat up watches forever, but now nobody young is buying these. We need to make a smart watch or is it the other way i would argue that it's the watch companies that are looking more towards the younger crowd by going full smart watch and the garments are looking more towards the i mean the thing is is yeah people are young but i bet more older people buy watches so that's the that's the

target market i think you should be looking for okay and if you think that older people like watches that look like watches i would be going that route right okay yeah well i think they'll all probably converge and i think i would i still want to see like some other my my biggest issue and it's not an issue at all but with the apple watch is that the customization is still pretty limited there's like a handful of watch faces there are two shapes and two sizes like you can't there's one shape and two sizes yeah i would love like a different looking apple watch and a couple different choices but uh yeah there's a whole world out there of other smart watches with other functionality that are that are coming up this is actually you've seen moto 360 gen 3 is supposed to come out this year right yeah that's once you said your favorite

smart watch that the original moto 360 with the flat tire design i don't think it has that anymore i think they've gotten rid of that i'm just gonna say that's still my my favorite smart watch ever so here's the thing do you hope someone makes a custom watch face do you hope someone makes a custom watch face for the moto 360 that has a flat tire i think it was funny i don't know i i liked it for a lot of reasons the flat tire happened to be there and i was like whatever it's fine i love the rest of it but uh yeah i i really like that thing a lot so i think if all these watch companies can get a circular watch that's just a tad thinner yeah they'll be they had the money for for thing out the bezels but i i kind of like that prediction i think that that could you've convinced me you've swayed okay cool all right

yeah i want to see more watches that look like watch smart watches that look like watches all right i have a bold longer term prediction okay this is this is a fun one and we we might go a little more into this when we talk about ces later but you know the trend of like every new smartphone now has at least two cameras, probably three, four, some of them five, maybe six this year. And that's because we're getting all these different focal lengths. We're getting a macro. We're getting a wide, an ultra wide, a telephoto. And we keep having to add these focal lengths because there is no optical zoom in smartphones.

They're too thin. They're too small. There's not enough room to do optical zoom. My bold prediction is sometime during this decade, we will see the first optical zoom in smartphones, functional optical zoom to the point where now we don't need six cameras on the back. We don't need like the 1X, the 3X, and the 5x we have one camera that can do all of that and it might be variable aperture it might not do macro it might not be amazing but we're gonna we're gonna see that by the end of the 2020s and then we're gonna start to reduce the number of cameras in smartphones that's my bold prediction i totally

see it makes sense on going to try and lessen the amount of cameras on the back because yeah we're at the point now that cameras are getting so bad you see one plus creating a concept phone just so you don't have to look at them anymore yeah um i do think like we when we've talked about pixel 4 before we've talked about how we want a real zoom in a phone like google's whole reason to not put ultra wide in was because people like zoom or they use zoom or we'll give us a zoom that We actually like enjoy and takes quality. Here's another here's another thing and this is true among many smartphones and something They all work on is the consistency between the cameras is different on every phone like the ROG phones ultra wide Looks like a totally different camera than the ROG phone standard camera. And the iPhone's calibrated them pretty well, but you can still tell the difference. They look like different

cameras. There's different apertures, different sensors all the time. And, you know, having like a zoom that you just zoom in a bit, zoom out a bit, and it just works flawlessly with the UI or maybe even the volume buttons or whatever you want to do, that would be pretty sweet. So that's something I'm crossing my fingers for, but I actually think is worth working towards. That would be pretty sweet. So that's something I'm crossing my fingers for, but I actually think is worth working towards. Man, that is a very bold prediction. And I wrote down my predictions for the decade

and they just seem totally reasonable next to that. I have another bold one that I'll toss out later, but that's a fingers crossed one for me. Yeah. Okay. All right. So my bold predictions for this next decade aren't so much of what I think we're going to see, but lack of what we're going to see.

Like fads that either die out or aren't ready for the next decade. Okay. Okay, maybe aren't ready. So my first one is I don't think AK resolution in televisions is going to be something we're going to see a lot of in the next 10 years and oh 10 years in the next 10 years 10 years okay because i'm thinking obviously obviously not this yeah obviously not this but i really don't think it's going to change much even in the next 10 years the thing about tvs is they're so slow this is like this is like refrigerators

like people don't buy new appliances until they really need them. So the timeline for upgrading your phone is like, there's a new one next year, mine's slowing down, I'll get the new one, it's better already. Boom, see my return on investment. But with a new TV, that 38-inch 720p LCD I've had since college, if it still works, I'm going to keep using it. So people just, they're not'm gonna keep using it so like people just you know they're

not gonna upgrade until it's like okay now my tv until it's pretty much broken yeah then i'm gonna get a new one uh so as great as tvs are and as drastically better as that 88 inch oh 8k oled on the tv like in the studio looks versus a regular tv people don't spend that to upgrade they don't need to it's like just the life cycle is so long and right now if anyone's buying a tv in the next five years 4k is extremely reasonable and i think a lot of people who are going to upgrade in the next five years are probably still on 1080 they'll upgrade to 4k yeah like who do you think in their right mind is going to go from upgrade a 1080 screen to an 8k screen that's going to cost

10 to 15 times more than a reasonable 4k would the real thing yeah and nobody will yeah exactly the real reason is because you almost can't take advantage of 8k at all so that's the other thing and i think a really prime example of that is you just recently sent a clip in for the ABC's New Year's Rock and Bash. New Year's Rock and Eve, yeah. Would you like to tell the audience what resolution they made you send that in? Yeah, they told us we're going to play it on ABC for 25 million people. Send in whatever format you like. It can be you standing up, sitting down, cheering, whatever you've got to do.

Just give us a clip, 20 seconds or less, 720p. I was like, wait, what? 720 720p 16 by 9 and they're like yes that's what we need so that's what i said that's that's national prime time broadcast 25 million people thought that looked like fine yeah yeah that's the thing like tv is probably still like cable television is still the majority of what people are watching on television would you say that like yeah we're in a totally different niche where we watch a lot of youtube on smart tvs and netflix where that's taking a little more advantage of 4k but i would say that the mass population is just watching it's still it's still most people watching cable there's a lot of cord cutters and a lot of slowly migrating and like younger people who don't who

don't do that as much i guess my question to your bold prediction is by 2030, so you're giving it a whole 10 years and it's still not catching on, right? I'd say like less than 2% of the population has 8K. I was going to ask, okay, 2%? Yeah, that's not crazy. I think the decade is going to fly by and we're going to look back and there's going to be like a couple 16K TVs and we're going to be like, look at how crazy this is.

Yeah, those are going to be the bleeding edge and I think 8K is going to maybe start being the like, not, I don't know if I would call them reasonably, like reasonably priced yet, but I think you might start seeing them in a couple of houses towards the end. I think so because of the new tech we're getting in OLED and QLED, I think HDR is the new front to talk about. We're going to get 4K and then we're going to get 4K HDR and then we're going to move on.

Good 4K is way more important. And then my other one is so that was like it's not ready yet by 2030 i don't think we're gonna see curved anything screen wise really yeah you so you don't think like any galaxy fold action's gonna no no no not that that's folding i mean curved like uh computer monitors and televisions i know you agree with me i tv i fully agree on tv so i agreed with it on tv because you're destroying a viewing like if you have a 60 inch curved television you have a good viewing angle for two maybe three people who are like sitting on each other's laps yeah computer monitors makes a little more sense i still don't think it's worth it like i don't

think it gives you really that much of a benefit if you want to go something that wide curving it in doesn't really help you that much i'd rather just set up another monitor up and make it bigger or portrait on one i don't care if it's one you know like nice rectangular i'd rather have a landscape and a portrait monitor set up next to each other and just increase my screen real estate that's fair i i it's funny because i don't even necessarily think of it as phasing out because they're not even that popular now like ultra wides are kind of like hanging out and i see them in a setup once in a while and oh look i have my two monitors replaced with one but uh i don't see that number drastically going up anytime soon which is why

i think it will just fade which is why it'll fade out okay yeah i mean we just did see that that odyssey by samsung on the show floor today and that thing it looked like it wrapped around your head it looked like you were like putting on some futuristic uh like vr helmet or something like it was gonna wrap from ear to ear but it just seems so ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. I could definitely see that number fizzling. Bet MGM authorized gaming partner of the NBA has your back all season long

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HelloFresh makes it easy to get a home-cooked meal on the table. With flavor-packed recipes like crispy chicken parmigiana, you'll be filling your kitchen with the cozy aromas of a homemade meal in no time. Visit HelloFresh.ca and use code SPOTIFY for your exclusive offer. I have another bold prediction that also has a bit to do with numbers and whether they will go up or down. And I think we'll probably get a big taste of this at CES because of the big part that's cars now. What percent of the major car manufacturers

will actually live up to their predictions of going electric by whatever year? So you know all these bold claims like Audi's like, we'll make half our cars electric by 2023, and Volkswagen and whoever else, everyone has made this promise of how far electric they're going to go. I am thinking that they will all try to make those electric cars, and they will offer those electric versions but the adoption will discourage them from continuing to commit until they make really

good ones so here's what i mean there's a couple really good electric cars right now yeah then there's a whole bunch of not that great electric cars and they're pretty expensive yeah so people when they when they cross shop they're like oh there's this electric car. I could buy the Nissan Leaf. Let me look into it. Uh, it's about the same price as a Prius, but it gets what? 70 miles to a charge. I'm not changing to electric. And then they get a, you know, a different car. I think it's going to be that sort of choice for a couple more years until they start to get into a groove of actually putting R and D into making better electric cars. And then they get to start making those sales. Because as long as, you know, the top three, the Model 3, the i3, like the Volt, like the

couple of big dogs are actually making good electric cars. As long as those dominate, no one's going to buy the competition until they really work on it. So yeah. And I don't think it's all necessarily just the car not being great, but I think just like owning an electric car is not just owning a car. It's almost a lifestyle change in a certain sense. First of all, they're expensive. Um, I mean, even if you just want to go hybrid, you're generally spending quite a few, like a couple thousand more dollars. I claire was looking at she just recently brought i forget if she bought a camry i think it's a camry not a corolla and she was looking at the hybrid version and it's just so much more expensive it she wound up getting the regular one it's interesting i think when you look in the new car market there is a lot of that i i remember i got

my my first car was a hybrid and it was like one of the cheaper cars you could get and i got 40 miles a gallon for every yeah everywhere i drove that thing but even now yeah like a fully electric car is a little bit more than just a different type of car it's like now you have to charge it somewhere every night that's another thing if you're not a homeowner i find it much a much harder sell like i wouldn't want to stop in supercharged every single time I go out driving pretty much and So if I don't own a home right now, I rent so I can't put a charger in I Would I feel like I would never think about buying an electric car until I owned a home and had a place I could Charge it every night. This is the number one place that Tesla is ahead is if you don't use either Tesla

Superchargers or some sort of equivalent charging network, like the Electrify American network or whatever Porsche is using for the Taycan, then if you don't have enough range for the car, you get that range anxiety when you're just like parked in the garage. Because if you don't have someone to charge at night and you don't charge up every night, you're always thinking how much range do I have left?

How much range, when do I have to charge? When do I have to charge when do i have to charge i gotta go to a charger i gotta park somewhere and that's not fun at all so that's gonna be a big reason why people also don't want to go to electric cars if they don't have a garage but going back on your prediction of people living or car companies living up to their pledges yeah do you remember what like one of the earliest years they accompanied pledged to be? I think like 2030 is probably one of the earliest I remember. 2030 or 2040. Okay, I have a list here of some of the promises that have been made by various manufacturers. And they're all pretty much during this year.

Or sorry, during this decade. Ford has promised they will make 16 fully electric vehicles by 2022, including the F-150. I don't see that happening. That is not happening. They're going to make about four or five. I don't know about 16. Four or five I even see being hard

because they've only announced the Mustang Mach-E, where if they want by 2022, they would have released an F-150 already. So they've promised they're going to make an electric F-150. So that's two. And then in the next two years, two more. That would make four. Like if they really start leaning into it, maybe five or six.

But that one is a little bit tougher to see. But they've invested $11 billion into a factory to do this. Okay, that's awesome. That's great to see. I don't know off the top of my head, but didn't they have something to do with putting some money into Rivian? I don't remember if Ford was one. I know Amazon's one of their biggest investors,

and that's been a good reason for them to start shipping this year. I want to say like Ford or GM, and if that's kind of the same company. Right. I get very confused with the car manufacturers, but I want to say I don't think we'll see an F. If that is true, they're going to test the waters

with that rivian before they really go yeah f-150 but f-150 is super interesting because i truck drivers i'm super skeptical on who's gonna switch the ev um but now also seeing cyber truck like kind of being the big honking like military style I wonder if some like you know masculine truck drivers or whatever are like oh I think I might want to go electric this year I don't know if that's the thought process survive the apocalypse with that yeah well here's a couple others okay so Volvo has said they're going to go half of the cars they sell by volume will be electric by 2025 now this is not something you can necessarily control. You can control how many you offer, but to say that half of the cars

you're going to sell by volume will be electric would seem to imply that people really like the electric cars you make and they're starting to buy them at just as high a rate as the rest of your cars. So that's a tough one, but by 2025 is what they say okay uh i'll i'll be optimistic and say they'll get close to that okay nissan wants to sell a million electric vehicles by 2022 and they have the the leaf now yeah i feel like they're probably not that far off that's that's one of those pledges that sounds really impressive but isn't i mean you know i will never knock anyone for going towards zv i think it's really important but that's it that's like a that's like fast blood that's like apple

saying we'll sell a million fully recycled uh keyboards by the end of the year and you're like well that's that's great recycled uh lightning cables buddy yeah that's nice. A million recycled lightning cables, buddy. Yeah, that's nice, but a million? Okay, well, sure. I guess you could do that. Mercedes, Daimler. They want a hybrid or electric version of every Mercedes by 2022. That's something they've promised, and that's ambitious. That means they want to offer.

How many hybrid cars do they have right now? I know they make the Sprinter vans, and they make some delivery vans that are electric, but I don't think most of the Mercedes class cars have an electric version. I always forget how many like commercial vehicles they have. A lot, yeah. Yeah, and every time you look at one of those, a lot of those like Amazon courier vans are usually Mercedes.

But in that sense, them going hybrid and electric could be huge. That's a lot of miles. Yeah, I like that um Honda wants to electrify two-thirds of all the cars they sell in Europe by 2025 and I think that's probably a little more realistic because Europe has been notoriously there's a couple countries in Europe that are like way further along um you look at the Norways of the world who are like buying mostly electric now. So five years from now, 2025, two thirds of all cars sold in Europe electric. I can see that for Honda. Yeah. And then we got what else? Porsche wants to be half electric by 2024 and 100% electric by 2030.

And I'm not sure what they mean by 100% electric. they probably want to offer an electric version of everything by 2030 but that's basically a full decade to go completely from one version of a car to another yeah and it's also tough because like if 100 of porsches are electric how many in the ultimate population are like how many people are ultimately driving a porsche like what percentage it's low i mean once again kudos to them I love everyone going EV for the sake of the environment but that's not like we want Honda and Toyota if you if you want to like there's really push EV for the environment is you want the Hondas and Toyotas so I'll give you Toyotas okay Toyota wants to offer 10 fully electric vehicles by early 2020. So that's now. Do they have any?

I think they have. Wow. Let's see. They have a Prius Prime, which is not fully electric, but I don't know if they're going to have 10. It's so crazy to me that the company that really brought hybrid into popularity is behind. They have one of the least ambitious goals.

The other half of their goal, ready for for this 1 million electric cars sold by 2030 don't they sell like a million cars a year something like that sure they they sell a lot of cars and that's it's crazy to me i asked you this question because i thought all of these promises were like 2030 at the earliest so to say not all of them are going to hit their marks like i was like they've got time and now you read half of these were 2022 and they like haven't even started so if your prediction is they're not going to meet these yeah i think it's pretty obvious here's what i'll say if i zoom out to all these big claims by like all these manufacturers who clearly see the wave of electric coming up on the on. I like that they're all making these,

I don't want to say empty promises, but they're all saying, okay, fine, we'll do something electric and we'll offer something and we'll see if you like it. And if you buy it, then that's fine. I like that a lot. I think really what's going to drive this is people voting with their wallets.

These gigantic companies wouldn't go electric if it didn't seem to be changing the way they make money. And they're clearly facing competition now with hybrids and plugins and electric stuff. And if people start to buy electric cars, they will make electric cars, right? That's like the number one reason or way to get them to change what they do. So I think when people vote with their wallets and it comes time to upgrade, kind of like with a TV, like you're not going to buy an 8K, you're not going to buy a Porsche Taycan, but like you might switch to OLED, you might switch to, you know, a 4K, 4K TV or an HDR TV or whatever it is. You might go electric if it makes sense for your

lifestyle. And when people start to do that, they'll start to offer more. Here's a question, not knowing the things you know, because i was just thinking to myself like if i had to guess ford would be the major car company that was the closest to like really putting out some electric stuff i would never believe it yeah i think that's just like a skewed uh like judgment i have on knowing a lot of people who are like really into trucks and like Fords, like I probably have the totally incorrect judgment on that. But like, if who would you pick if you five years ago, if you didn't know any of the information, you know, now which major car company would be make, would you think would be really like stepping into the EV game? Okay. I would have guessed Toyota. Okay. and i would have guessed that because of how successful their prius is and that to me would mean okay now toyota

has some success making hybrid drivetrains they have pretty good battery technology from all these priests they're making and selling uh they will start to ramp that up and potentially do even more you know fully electric stuff in the future so that if i was guessing i was driving a toyota hybrid it was great i think that's what i would have guessed a couple years ago that's clearly not number one anymore but well do you know what's funny so like my guess probably it would be between toyota because of their hybrid stuff and then my other one and maybe being semi of a fanboy of it but subaru talks the game of environment a lot and like they're very they're geared towards people who enjoy the outdoors and stuff like that all-wheel drive

on everything like lots of cargo room it's it's a company that is watch any of their commercials have you seen their booths at like a super yeah at car shows they're usually they look like they're in the woods yeah subaru a subaru is mean, they named the car the Outback. They know their target demographic and what they like to buy cars for. Yeah, the Forester, exactly. So that actually makes a lot of sense. And you could see them leaning into the environmental part of it and stuff. So yeah, I didn't see any of their claims.

I've heard literally nothing about, they used to make a hybrid Crosstrek. They don't make it anymore. And I've never heard anything about any of their EV stuff. Yeah, no, I haven't seen any claims from makes me really sad hopefully they get on the wave or maybe i'll find some claims from them uh as people tweet them at us but i feel like i i would have heard about it i i'd try and follow a little bit um but i've heard nothing and it makes me really upset actually hey get on it subaru yeah that's what we're saying. All right. Well, there you have it. We got some longer term and some shorter term predictions for 2020 and for the upcoming decade. So let's go ahead and take a quick break. And then when we come back,

we'll talk over a little bit of what we've seen at CES so far and then what we're excited to see on the show floor. You know what's great about ambition? You can't see it. Some things look ambitious, but looks can be deceiving. For example, a runner could be training for a marathon, or they could be late for the bus. You never know. Ambition is on the inside. So that thing you love, keep doing it.

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now you can reserve your Uber ride up to 90 days in advance. See Uber app for details. All right, we're back. So now that we've talked about 2020, let's talk January 2020 every year, CES. We always have the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. By the time you're listening to this, we will have gone through one day of CES and we're on the show floor scouting with cameras looking for stuff on day two.

So if you're seeing stuff on Twitter and articles, tag us in them, send them to us. Yeah, we want to know what you guys want to see so we can talk about that. And we're going to do like a recap episode coming out on Friday. Right, and we have a special guest planned for that episode too.

He's in Vegas with us, fellow creators. So in the meantime, we've seen some stuff and we also have some predictions. So let's go over what we've noted about a little bit of CES so far. I'm just going to start off right off the top and say this is a better CES than I expected. Yeah. This is better.

It's better than last year. There's a couple more interesting announcements and fun stuff happening. And CES isn't always an action-packed or fun show. So I'm pleasantly surprised by this year. Now, we're doing a bit differently than we have in the past we are spending two full days in vegas and then booking so yeah what's funny is we say we're going into our day two when it's most people's day threes yeah or four sometimes yeah we came like a day late and i think we did it because last year just the show wasn't that great

and now coming into this year, you even said earlier like, Oh man, I actually wish we came on time this time. But, uh, yeah, so we're kind of,

we came in Tuesday night, spent the day. We, we didn't even really spend the day on the floor. We like, we went onto the floor for maybe an hour, ran to one plus, came back to the hotel by like 1230,

made our video, published it. And then we, we weren't even planning on going back onto the floor but we had time yeah so we went back on went back out went onto the floor checked out a couple things while we could it closed at six so then we got out of there now we're recording this so we haven't seen too much as there's a recording there is a lot to see yeah i will say so i'll just if i zoom out a bit, I'll just say the trajectory of CES. This is my eighth CES, by the way. So the trajectory of CES has been like, okay, they used to be like the Samsung keynote at CES. What phone are they going to announce here?

It was a big deal. And slowly, year by year, big companies like Samsung and Huawei and all these guys, they realized that, oh, we can get more press on our own by just making our own event a month later, which is what Samsung's doing this year. Like, that's a common thing to realize. And so year after year after year, there were less and less major announcements at CES. All the way to 2019, 2018, where, like, there just wasn't all that much crazy great stuff happening. There were some concepts here and there, a flashy self-driving car demo and then like a pretty quiet show you're there for four days and you're like what else is there to even see um 2020 i think a lot of

maybe maybe new year new me maybe new decades for a lot of these guys and suddenly they're a little more uh a little more active and there's some some really cool stuff so one of the things uh that we mentioned is the oneplus concept phone yeah that we have seen by now and there's also a video on the channel already live we'll toss it in the show notes if you haven't seen it but that's on the oneplus concept one which is a chromatic lens shade on the back of the phone that can hide your cameras or whatever else you want to put behind the glass which is kind of interesting and i mean you could do a whole back of the phone in this or you could just hide a dozen cameras back there.

Yeah, all it has to do is be in it. Now, see, I'm interested in, so the concept phone we saw has that leather on the sides. Right. Do you think it would be possible to do a glass back where only a portion of it is that chromatic? Electrochromatic. Electrochromatic. So like imagine just the top left corner of the screen where cameras might be. Can just that be it? And then you can fade it so

it almost matches the rest of the phone and you're losing the camera? It is a different technology. So when you think about these, this electrochromatic glass, that's literally just a layer on top of whatever else is underneath the phone and this layer of glass has you know you pass an electric current through it and the filaments change the direction based on polarity and they create this shade this is just being able to add or subtract a shade on top of something where what we're thinking about is how can i put the camera beneath the display which means so i'm to... Sorry, sorry. I'm talking about... Let's imagine the back of the phone is fully glass

and just the color that matches the electrochromatic color that it would be if it's turned on all the way. Okay, so imagine the phone we saw, if you haven't seen the video yet, it just has a strip kind of down the middle where the cameras would be, but the side of it is an orange leather that's supposed it's the mclaren edition so it matches the mclaren orange leather um yeah i do not want a phone that has leather on the back

that's no part of me is interested in that so what i'm wondering is that if the phone on the back was fully glass as in not leather as in looking like a regular phone that all of us actually want to buy okay if just the camera array could have would the whole back of the phone have to be that electrochromatic or can just a portion of the phone be it because like you said in the video the main reason for something like this is we're having these phones that have five or six cameras on them now and they look terrible crazy and they have a huge camera bump so the best implication of this would be that it covers it hides them yeah it hides it so can say all the phones on the back of my phone were like where the iphone bump is it's a square do you think that one square could be just the electrochromatic and the rest could be a glass

color that looks like that okay here's what i'll say based on what I know about this technology. Okay. This is, it's a shade and it's a very, very expensive neutral density shade. Okay. So it's, you can't change the color of it. These filaments are all just in there as like a, they're a black filament. You change the direction of the filament to see through it or not. So on this OnePlus phone that we saw, the cameras were covered by that

electrochromatic shade, but then they put this whole black strip in the middle of the phone. That entire black strip is not going to be all electrochromatic shade. It's just a small portion inside of it. And if you think of it as like a gradient, you make however much of the phone you want black, but you only have to put the shade where you need it so if the whole back of the phone was black it would then in theory yes you could put whatever you want behind that shade and it would just blend in and match but if you added like a blue phone or a red phone it would be it wouldn't match it would be a different color shade okay i pretty much just don't want that leather yeah i i think they were just kind of flexing a little bit with the McLaren collab on that one. They'd probably do some other materials.

I used to actually be kind of into the leather backs on phones. They had that Galaxy Note 4, I think it was, that had like the fake plastic leather stitching. It was really cheesy, but I was into it. It was like a texture. It was like a new different texture for a back of a phone. Motorola did this too but uh yeah no the the the sort of filament hiding however many cameras you had back there I like the idea just because it's uh it's possibly going to be able to hide

like 12 cameras or whatever else we put in there before we get zoom so that's what I'm that's what I'm hoping for so cool we did see that. We saw a couple other things with Samsung. Yeah. Do you know what we didn't see at Samsung? What? Galaxy Home. Yeah. God.

How many hundred days has it been? I was too embarrassed to ask somebody there because I was wondering if they would just be like, I don't know what you're talking about. You know what's funny? I did see a headline though that they're going to be shipping the mini version of the Galaxy Home before they even ship the barbecue grill that we thought we were going to get i mean i'm still down i i want to try it i hope we're the first people to review that i i can't wait for them to actually ship it but i still something

about like those smart speakers and like weirdly like you know i remember homepod was delayed like how hard can it be to make a bixby speaker? I must not know something about these speakers, but hey, that's not in Samsung's booth. So what else did we see at Samsung though? Let's see. I did not tech related, but there was that one guy, I'm assuming he had a Galaxy Watch Active on

who was just ripping that like treadmill, that like stationary. Oh man. The entire time we were there that was if you're listening to this or someone at samsung who's at the booth listen to this give that guy kudos because that was give him a raise this guy's just straight up like stair mastering in front of everybody so for those who don't know ces is like it's just a bunch of demos like you're walking around between like here check out this ak tv we're gonna play this beautiful video on it isn't that nice cool demo walk to the next booth, check out this AK TV. We're going to play this beautiful video on it.

Isn't that nice? Cool demo. Walk to the next booth. Hey, check out this accessory. Look how well the magnet lines up and attaches. Isn't that a cool demo? Cool. Moving on.

So you just have things happening around you everywhere. And in the Samsung booth, there is this stair stepper where the guy is like demoing a Galaxy watch where he can like show you how well it tracks fitness. And the entire time he's in this booth, people are like swarming around him with cameras, like visiting the TVs. He's in the booth demoing this watch, stair stepper, full sweat. Yeah. Like going hard.

I was sweating watching this. This guy was in a pant by the time. And this was what? 9 a.m.? Yeah. 10 a.m. when we saw this. So good for that guy. Yeah.

Total champ. Okay. And this was what, 9 a.m.? Yeah. 10 a.m. when we saw this. So good for that guy. Yeah, total champ. Good for that guy. Okay, we saw the Odyssey gaming monitor, which I said before, I don't think curved monitors are that big of a thing. But my biggest pet peeve was it's a 240 hertz gaming monitor and they had Overwatch playing at it capped at 60 frames. Okay, we'll have to go back to that tomorrow

and see if this is the right one. Yeah, I guess people don't really notice because they don't know high refresh rate in terms of gaming, but they left the FPS counter in the top left on the game, and you can just see it hard capping at 60, and I'm like, I was losing it. I was so upset. It's funny because I heard you say that, and I was like, when I was looking at this demo, I was like, wow, that's a huge monitor. It's 5K.

It's 49 inches diagonally. I had no clue it was high refresh rate uh because they weren't showing high refresh rate content on it so that's a question mark but we did get to see the monitor look pretty wild um we saw a bunch of cars yeah also interestingly we headed over to uh the north north hall north hall i think is where all the car stuff is we didn't get to totally look through it yet but we got to see some cool ones so yeah yeah so the ces is it's off on on a pretty good start there's also a whole bunch of folding uh stuff there's a there's a couple dell folding and i say folding laptops like they don't already fold but like yeah a full touch screen inside clamshell that's

like a laptop but there's no keyboard in it it's just two touch screens that fold in half that's kind of interesting that that exists um some people were tweeting at me also tcl was making like a folding phone in a clamshell design but there's no screen on the outside so it's just like a normal it's like imagine a galaxy fold with no outside screen that's interesting too i don't know if i i have to see it and like you know tcl had we walked past this one part at the tcl booth that had their frame tv which is funny because we have a samsung frame at the office yeah it had a it had this wall with maybe like eight paintings on it but two of them were the frames and we're we're just sitting there looking at it and we're all like these are all fake right these are all fake, right? These are all paintings. And then just two of them changed.

And we're like, well, I think Vin missed a change at first. And he still didn't believe us that. And we're like, no, dude, that just changed. That's real. So TCL, I don't know if you just picked the perfect picture to put on there that really looked like a canvas painting, but it was super impressive. Great demo. Yeah.

Great demo. Yeah. Any demo that makes you say like, whoa, that worked. That one did get me. looked like a canvas painting but it was super impressive great demo yeah great demo yeah any demo that makes you say like whoa yeah that worked that one did get me they yeah they had the perfect backlighting color temperature matching whatever their tech was to make that frame tv look like a painting and it worked pretty well good job on that yeah cool um is there anything that you've seen like on twitter that we definitely should go check out tomorrow? On Twitter? Not even necessarily. So I personally think one of my favorite things about CES is not,

we do videos on like bleeding edge tech and stuff we're really excited to see, but CES gets weird, man. Especially, oh, we were talking about this actually. A lot of the halls, all the really big companies are right in front with these huge booths and we were talking about how every time you take like a couple rows back behind them it's like going deeper and deeper into your google search like once we got past samsung and lg we were on page two of google search and you're just desperate at that yeah it's like you get you get to the front and the main center hall is like oh boom lg yeah there's a wall of tvs samsung

sony nikon like you get past that you walk past like in the sort of a second layer oh djs back here oh razors over here oh we got a couple other and then you get to the the second like layer of them and you're like oh i didn't know that this drone company existed but that's cool all right i think a perfect example of that is I'm pretty, so LG and Samsung always have gigantic booths. So they're going like four or five rows back. I'm pretty sure it was Samsung. Once you walk, or no, it was LG.

Once you walked out the back of the LG booth, boom, Royal FlexPi tree. Oh my God. That was one of the greatest things I've ever seen. And I'll save my caption for it for when I Tweet it. Oh, yeah. It was literally a tree of flex by screens like a giant tree just with Flex pipes, you know shout out to Royal they really upgraded their booth this like doubled the size They didn't have a 20-foot tree last year. No, that's big time

Yeah, no, I don't think there's anything crazy on my timeline that I haven't yet seen I did get to see the Sony car. That was maybe the number one thing. People were like, what just happened? Sony just put a car in their booth? And we did get to check that out and we'll have some more thoughts on that in the full CES wrap up episode. Yeah, I have one item I wanna see really bad tomorrow.

And this goes into the weird category. Charmin, the toilet paper company, made a robot. Wait, wait, wait, pause wait pause okay slow down already yeah so charmin is that ces charmin is that ces charmin that ces if you should know charmin everyone should know who charmin is it's a toilet paper company and it all their commercials are just like cartoon bears that wipe their trees to be clear they only make toilet paper i think paper towels all paper products paper products yeah but like cleansing paper products and so you said they made a robot yes what robot might be a strong word

okay um but it's it's a robot okay this is a this is a cnet article title and it's one of the greatest tech article titles are like sometimes so on point. It's incredible. I don't even want to read the rest of the article. But this one just says, Charmin's poop time robot pal will bring a new toilet paper roll when you need it most. Whoa. So AI.

This thing, it literally looks like, you know, the Charmin bear. It's like if you took a, it's basically just like a small square about the size of a roll of toilet paper with two wheels on it but they put like the little bear's face on it and gave it little ears and then it just has a thing on top that can hold one roll of toilet one roll so so you have to set so you have to set this up and like have a charging robot holding toilet paper just in case because like you don't have a place where you store extra toilet paper but you do have a robot that's sitting ready to bring you more put extra toilet paper like under the sink in the bathroom next to it yeah wow i mean hey if i could think of one of

the worst things that could happen when no one's home it's not having toilet paper in the bathroom and having to somehow find a way ultimately this is the most ces thing i've ever seen this hey the worst thing about it is that with all the robots that are at ces this one might actually be the most useful i know that's the thing it's like it's a great demo and i'm sure there if they ever do a demo for it it'll be like all right take the last piece of toilet paper off see what happens a robot rolls around the corner like here's your toilet paper i sensed that you wanted some and uh there you go sharman did a great cs tech demo yeah i mean it's better than the robot that's playing scrabble and it's better than the robot that's playing ping pong at least usefulness um but yeah i can i can just imagine being on the

bathroom and screaming at the door like okay google bring me my poop robot sorry this has gone so off the rails i i'm so glad it did though welcome to ces everyone yeah listen we're gonna be in the thick of it for the next day and a half or so but yeah we've clearly found some good stuff but if you find more if you want us to check it out let us know we will go find it uh probably it'll probably end up being like a Dope Tech of CES video where we wrap all this stuff together. But I'm excited for the next episode where we'll go back to our regular schedule. We have a guest. He's great.

He's tech savvy. I'll leave it at that. I don't know. It's too crazy. But, hey, yeah, that's where we're at right now. CES 2020 and the first month the first week the first year of a new decade yeah it's exciting well thanks for joining us uh this has been waveform episode 13 and uh catch you guys in the next one waveform was made in partnership

with studio 71 and our intro outro music was created by cameron barlow