Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Nothing Like a New Macbook!

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

So much happened this week that it felt like Techtember all over again. First, the crew sits down to talk about the week of Apple product announcements including the new iPhone 17e and MacBook Neo. After that, it's all about Nothing which released the new 4a and 4a Pro along with a new pair of headphones. Then it gets existential as discussion turns to the future of AI and the internet. Enjoy! Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Links: The Studio - MKBHD Knockoff desk video MKBHD - MacBook Neo Nothing - Nothing Phone 4a Design reveal Nothing - Nothing Phone 4a Pro reveal Nothing - Nothing Headphones(a) RTINGS statement Music provided by: Epidemic Sound This episode brought to you by: Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/waveform Social: Waveform Threads: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Waveform Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/waveformpodcast/?hl=en Waveform TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Hosts: Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Intro/Outro 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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That's A-T-T-I-O.com. slash waveform. All right, real quick, before we get back to the show, I want to let you know that we are returning to South by Southwest on March 13th this year for another live episode of the Wayform podcast on the Vox Media podcast stage. Last year, we had a ton of fun fielding some really smart questions from the audience. And a couple dumb ones.

Yeah, okay, maybe one dumb one, but I think that actually came from David. Either way, it was a lot of fun and we're excited to do it again. It's all part of the Vox Media podcast stage at South by Southwest, presented by Odu. Visit Voxmedia.com. SXSW to pre-register and get 15% off your staff by badge purchase. So that's Voxmedia.com slash SXSW. Hope to see you there. 460.

460. What? The Mark 6th? Yeah, remember they went up. They went up in price this year. Like 460. Yeah, they're hell of expensive. For headphones, that sound like the music is coming out of a bees asshole.

I remember when they were like 3.30. Then they were 350. For that. That is not what they sound like. This one not bad. Engines are 6p. Prodek. Yeah, what is up?

People of the Internet. Welcome back to another episode of the Wave Form podcast. We're our hosts. I'm Marquez. I'm Andrew. I'm David. And welcome to TechTember. Everything is happening.

Wait a second. Hold on. It's Tarch. It's March. It's not. It's Tarch. It's starch. It's Tart.

It's Tart. It's the start of tarch. We don't claim tarch. I don't know what you're talking about. Meck? No. I don't like that. It's like Christmas in July, but

Tectember and March. Yeah. It's a lot. We've got, so we're working on the S-26 Ultra Review, and then Apple drops six new products, nothing drops, three new products, and suddenly we just have a lot on our plate.

And also, we've got to talk a little bit more about AI and how it's affecting reviews. So this might be a six-hour episode, is what I'm trying to say. It's rough because it's Thursday. Yeah, we're shooting it on Thursday. Don't thread me with a good time. Yeah, make sure you get subscribed because we have a lot to talk about.

So if we don't get to all of it this week, we'll probably get to more of it next week. Yeah. But first. I was waiting for it. I was going to take it in. Did they even test this? Apparently, this has already gone outside of this room, and Olivia has something she wanted to add. So Adam, it will be her surrogate.

Surrogate, right? Yeah. Olivia and Michael were doing graphics for us because we asked for specific graphics for it. channel you might actually be seeing them on this episode so YouTube viewers let me know how how you like them is this the thing that happened yesterday yes it's so they've been working with an app called Apple Motion which is their version of after effects because they were like you know the team kind of works in Final Cut yeah Marquez is like you could call it that's what they want they want they're doing this for our benefit because we

work in Final Cut mostly and they're like you know what all our graphics we make an After effects. Let's see if we can like learn this other program. It'll be easy to drop, drag and drop into Final Cut. It'll be simple. Olivia ran into this weird problem where she had this template that it was popping like a spec up on the screen and then she would go do other things, come back and it would just be like slightly off to the right. And she's like, this is so weird. And she's like working on this for like the past week and every time she has to keep moving it back. She's like, why does this keep happening? And then she like talks to Michael about it and Michael's like, I figured it out.

What happens is every time she hits save, it increments the X position by one. What? Yeah. So she hasn't sent it at zero in a graphics app. The solution they came up with is she just has to remember

every time she hits Command S to move that asset to negative one on the X axis and then when it saves, it reverts to zero. What the heck? That's real? That's so funny. It's so funny. That makes me not trust computers. That would be like if in Microsoft Word every time you hit save, it added a dash to wherever your cursor is. It makes me afraid to save, which is the one thing I should not be

afraid to do. Is motion, does motion have not auto save like Final Cut? I do not know. I should because that might be a habit you can drop by switching to motion. I remember when I was in Premiere, I would automatically save every time I could because if it crashed, it would just forget everything I did for the last 12 minutes. But when I switched to Final Cut Pro, it could crash and I would bring it back and it would remember it would actually start trying to do the thing that made it crash again like it was that recent of a memory so I wonder if the move is to stop command sing and just stop saving maybe I'll ask her I'll see if that's a little life hack super weird bro just tell Claude to one shot this app.

We don't need Apple motion we don't need Apple's software we can just make it I wonder if it's a weird shortcut thing that's happening I don't know that maybe that's so what I can believe Michael found out. That's really impressive, but... Yeah. Well, he's an after-effect guy, so he's Command S-Ell. Now when she does want to move at one, she'll just be like Command S-S-S-S-S-S-S. It's like 10 spaces over. At least she's saving it, making

sure it doesn't crash. I have a great segue, because the video that Apple played for the beginning of their event, and that's now on their YouTube channel, was really, really good, which is why I'm so sure they didn't use motion. It's really good. It's really good. So Apple dropped a little

we had a week-long event. Oh, I guess we haven't talked about any of this. So we had Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Yeah. Monday we got iPhone 17E, if I'm remembering correctly. Tuesday we got MacBook Pro M5 Pro M5 Macs. Oh, Tuesday, yeah, yeah. And studio display and studio display XDR.

Monday, we also got iPad. You also got iPads too. Oh, I forgot about those. Yeah, I mean, it's been a week. Yeah. And there's new cross-body strap colors, two of them. Cool. Yeah.

And then we also got the Seuss. And then Wednesday we got the MacBook. Oh, wait. Tuesday. We also got the M5 MacBook Air. Oh, did we? Yes. I know.

Yeah, the things that just got spec bumps are obviously less interesting. Yeah, I feel like we can skip those pretty quick. M5 MacBook Air, it's the MacBook Air, but with M5. Yeah. And Wi-Fi 7. Okay. But there's other things. Oh.

Okay, never mind. I mean, it's mostly just like they started at 512 gigs of base storage now. Sure. That's pretty awesome. and it goes up to 4 terabytes instead of 2. 2X faster read and write speed, which is pretty awesome. Supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.

$100 more expensive than the base M4 error. So that's not great. But at least it starts to double the storage. Well, sorry, and you may have kind of answered that, but I missed it. Okay. It's 512 base storage, but the price has gone up. Yes. Is it the same price as the old 512 base storage?

It's 100%. So it is more expensive than the baseline M4. but for the Stame Storage Tier, it's actually $100 cheaper than it would have gotten on the M4 MacBook Air. So it is like a better deal. And for a lot of people, the MacBook Air is going to be the better option anyway,

which we will get to the Neo in a bit. But yeah, and then like you said, M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros, that's kind of a big deal because we didn't have M5 Pro or M5 Max of anything yet, right? So those are going to be way better for AI tasks, et cetera. They also have video editing.

They have way. better GPU, 4x peak GPU compared to M4max, which is pretty insane. Where is the M5 Ultra, man? I know. Even M4, yeah, they don't love the ultras. They've only released a couple of those. Only three Ultras. Yeah.

Up to 614 gigabytes per second, up to 128 gigabytes of unified memory in the M5 Max. Pretty crazy stuff. It's ironic that they're releasing these now because people, again, were saying that in November or so they're going to release the M6 series because of the type of. screen MacBooks that are going to come out. Yeah. But it was funny how everyone was speculating that these were going to be the touch screen MacBooks because of the animation that they released, which was like the pinching of the Apple logo.

Yeah, that was funny. Yeah. And I just went out of tirade on Twitter being like, no, it's the cheap one. Yeah. It's the cheap one. Also, they started a terabyte now, which makes me feel kind of old because a laptop starting at a terabyte storage is... That used to be the top tier model.

Yeah, that used to be like, you could get a terabyte. Now it's, you have to start at a terabyte. That's wild to me. Do you want to talk about the displays? On the M5s? No. Macropros? Oh, the Pro Display.

Oh, studio displays. Yeah, okay, so two new displays. They have a new studio display and a new studio display XDR, which is fancy and has sparkles around it. I mean, it is a new technology. The new studio display is a little underwhelming. It's still like $1,600. It's still 60 hertz. I think essentially what they did is add a Thunderbolt port.

and it's, yeah, they didn't really do a whole lot else to it. But the studio display XDR replaces the pro display XDR. Yeah. And it's smaller. And it's significantly cheaper. And here's the difference. So I've had... That's a really nice way of putting it's $3,500 or $3,200.

Yeah. But instead of $5,000. No, this is a true. Well, okay, so this is a thing that happens with Apple a lot, which is we go, look how much better it is than last time, because last time was, like, horribly overpriced or something. What we're going to do with the 17 years. Yeah, exactly. So it's like,

The pro display was $5,000 plus $1,000 stand and $1,000 in anore texture. So, yeah, this is significantly cheaper, but this is also a better display in just about every single way. The only thing that I will miss when I inevitably get two of these is 6K and 32-inch, because these are both now 5K-27-inch displays. But they are, I think, now 2,000-nits peak brightness. There are mini-l-l-D instead of the backlight in the pro displays, which I think is just a bunch of backlight zones instead of. mini LED. So yeah, 5K, 27 inch, 120 hertz, and very exciting. And also you can daisy chain them

because they have an extra thunderbolt port, which is sick. Yeah. So I think I have to get these. I'm excited for what the mini LED ends up looking like. There's 2,304 dimming zones, which are supposed to have even better contrast levels, which is very nice. And 120 hertz is pretty crazy to be able to do that on these displays now. Obviously, we've had gaming displays for a long time and there's like pro artist there's like all these high-end displays but the reason people always end up buying these even though that they're a bad deal is just because of the seamless integration where you can just plug it in and it just works and all that stuff that is probably the top of the list the quality the second thing on the list is probably color accuracy and being

able to depend there's a ton of reference modes in here like this is actually still going to be a very good display um i kind of wonder how it'll look next to a pro display or how comparable they will be Ideally, they're very, very similar. But yeah, I think these are actually a really good display. And the fact that they're $2,000 cheaper makes it look good compared to a pro display, which is obviously why you should never buy a pro display again, and they're discontinued. That's going to be a pretty significant lack of real estate you're going to lose when you're 2xing this now, putting them next to each other.

Yeah, I'm going to miss that. You're losing a lot of space. It would be way easier to have made your replica desk if I could have done 27-inch 5K monitors. Well, maybe now on the replica desk you can just buy used pro-display. Because those are going to be cheaper. You don't have to buy the XDR. You should just buy the studio display. Well, but the purchase play XDR might be like the same price

and they use now, you know? Oh, you think you use the press? You don't think it goes up? I mean, it won't be that low, but I don't think they go up for people who want stills. The 6K Apple display is now going to be like no more production. It's limited edition. I think people are interested in the mini LED. I totally agree with that.

And the refresh rate. Now the only 6K 32 inch cheese grater monitor you can get is that weirdo knockoff that we got for the replica video if you haven't seen that on the studio video yeah also the xDR model the 27 inch does charge at 140 watts so you can plug in the full 16 inch MacBook Pro the other one that is not the xDR model charges at 96 which is i believe the charging speed of the 14 inch MacBook Pro right yeah or some something like that yeah and so that i mean that kind of shows what apple like who apple thinks is going to buy these they think the mini LED ones, they're going to be the hardcore

workstation MacBook Pros, whereas the smaller, well, not smaller. The cheaper one is going to be, you know, the lighter MacBook Pro. But, you know, my summary is the regular studio display is not that great of a deal. Please crush up a bunch of stuff. The pro display, the studio display XDR is kind of one of one

again. Yeah. I feel like it's not going to be adding much to people who were, like, the people who bought ProDisplay XDR previously. Now, this is just what you buy instead and it's not going to be like just because it's cheaper. I don't think it's going to gain that many more users. Yeah, I think it's if you today were thinking about buying a pro display XDR and then this comes out, it's like, oh, thank God I don't have to buy a pro display because that was going

to be way more expensive for essentially two extra inches of screen or five or whatever, but this is way cheaper and a better display. 120 hertz is pretty nice though. That's really what I'm most excited about, to be honest. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty good. You're going to rock and see us two?

I'm going to edit. 3 FPS videos And it's going to be great Yeah Okay we got to talk about the iPhone 17e Yeah So obviously last year Review was called like

Who Is This For or something like that Because it just didn't make any sense at all It was a $600 iPhone With a 60-hertz display With no mag safe Yeah one camera And with the single camera Which is the worst of all worlds

Yeah And also last year was the year That they started making the base iPhone Like really good so it just made even less sense. I reviewed a $900 iPhone 16E. Why would they give you the top model? $900?

Nobody is going to buy the top model. You can get all of the phone for $900. That's insane. So, okay, now we have the 17E, one year later. And what did they change? There's like two ways this could have gone. Either it stays exactly the same or it's horrible, or it's best as we get what the 16E should have been.

I think that's what we got. And I think that's what we got. I think that's what we got. It has MagSafe now. Yeah. It has one more color, so it was black and white, now there's black, white, and pink. I don't know if anyone was asking for pink. I remember we were doing pink this year, I swear.

Yeah. And it has the newest chip, and it doubles up to 2506 seats of storage again, and it's still the same $599 price. And Ceramic Shield 2. And Ceramic Shield 2, which a lot of people are very excited about. Yeah. So, C1X chip may be underrated, but it's in there, too. It's their newest, highest-end modem cellular wireless chip. Yeah.

So that may end. end up being like the most high-end thing in here alongside the processor. Yeah. But I think what's really interesting is they stuck with a single camera and they stuck with the same exact design and the 60-hertz display on the front. Yeah. So now the question is just how much do you care about a single camera and a 60-Ears display? Lots of people don't care, clearly.

Yeah. And lots of people will just buy this phone. I find it still a little crazy that if you cross shop a little bit for $600, you can get 120 hertz OLED. You could get dual, probably triple cameras, but a lot of people don't want the Android thing. I'd rather buy a standard 16 refurbished for probably cheaper than this than the 17E. Yeah, I wonder if there's refurbished 17s already that are cheaper. That are like 600 bucks. Probably not that cheap yet. Probably not that cheap yet. But 16s definitely. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean, a lot of these things that we're going to talk about today, it's like if you're willing to buy used

refurbished, the better one from last year is a better deal. And I think that people should get into the habit of looking at used and refurbished things before they buy the new thing, especially because we're getting such incremental upgrades every year. I was going to say, not even everything we talk about today, every phone we talk about pretty much. Even the MacBook when we talk about it, because a lot of people are talking about the refurbished MacBook era from last year. Well, I was going to say that going off of how Marquez started his video is like, if you're

listening to this, if you're like one. of our like if you're subscribed to tech channels you just this isn't for you just like get the regular iPhone 17 or an old like air or like refurbish like do do that because this is not for the people that are aware of of this yeah this is like you walk into a store and you're like give me the cheap one I don't care whatever like those people they're going to get but it's got a high bye message because my nieces and effes use have my message like I don't the same thing with the with the new computer like I don't care what's the cheap one that's that's who this is for At least this year they get a decent phone, like a phone that makes sense in the lineup where last year it felt like they were getting scammed.

Not having MagSafe was like a big L and then like they're kind of mugging Google with the storage right now. I don't know what mocking means, but get mugged pixel. Alyssa Lou said it so I can say it. They're storage mocking. Yeah. Apple frame mugs. Google in Miami Club. Google with a massive cortisol spike.

Google massive cortisol. I'm sorry, after being frame-mogged by Chad Apple. Google's 10A has 128 gigs of storage again. So, yeah, if the 11 comes out, I'm assuming that'll be 256 base. It's got to be. Yeah, you're right, because now they did the 17 over the pixel 10, doubled storage, same price, and now they did it for the cheap versions on both. This just feels like they're picking on Google at this point.

Google's pick it on themselves. Yeah, they deserve to get picked up. Google, well, yeah, Apple's getting to the point where they're like not releasing anything with $100. 28 gigs of storage anymore because when we get to the Neo starts at 256 as well. Like there's not a lot of 128's left in the Apple ecosystem. Google's got to catch up. Otherwise, they're going to have a lot of cortisol this summer. I know you're watching.

I know you are. I know you've heard us. You can delete that comment and just get to work on the phone. All right. There's one more thing that Apple announced. Then it was the final thing that they saved for Wednesday, which is a MacBook Neo. New name. Cool name.

We've never heard that word from Apple before. We thought it would just be the MacBook. So MacBook Neo is a $599 MacBook. It's a 13-inch display. It's powered by an A18 Pro chip. So not quite Apposolic an M-series chip. But that was the chip that was in the iPhone 16 Pro, and it seems to be right around the level of performance of M-1.

Probably a little better in single-core, a little worse in multi-core. But anyway, A-18 Pro inside. 8 gigs of RAM. 256 of storage and four colors. It's incredibly inexpensive, and so they've done all the things

they have to do to get a MacBook, which is still made of metal all the way down. Like the keyboard's not backlit anymore. It's only two ports. Both are USB-Type-C. One of them is USB-3, one of them's USB-2.

And they're not labeled. And they're not labeled. The back one is USB-3, the front one's USB-2. You probably figure that out sooner or later. I don't know. I don't think they will. Or you just don't care.

If you figured it out, you shouldn't be buying it. I think most people are just using these ports to charge and not using them for... One to charge, one to plug something in, a mouse, a keyboard, some random accessories. I don't know, everything is wireless now. It's true. I think... Because this is for people that are doing every...

It's the, like you said, you guys both said, the Safari book. Right? So, like, people are using online services almost exclusively with this computer, so, like, why plug anything except for charging it? That's totally true. Yeah. What else is true? Oh, so the keyboard, yeah, not backlit, and the trackpad is not a force touch trackpad.

It's an actual clicking trackpad, and it's a actual clicking trackpad, and it's a a little bit smaller. Yeah. You said it felt good, though? It felt good. It felt totally fine. No issues with that at all. And the last thing I noticed is the keyboards were white, and they had, so on the side,

they had, like, moved the speakers to the side of the laptop. Side firing. Like, sidefiring. I got a couple demos to listen to them. They do not sound good. Yeah. That's okay. They're just baseline at laptop speakers at this point.

Wait, before you move on. This is something I want to clarify on here, because I asked you this question. I was reading in the review. before you even got back or what you were writing, and you say all the keyboards are white. But like, on the picture, they look. They're tinted. They're tinted, but like on Apple.com, they look like colorful, very colorful.

And then I did see some of your footage. You said the lighting wasn't great, but like, it seems like they're closer to white. Yeah, so they're, yeah, to be fair, I think Apple.com pumps the color a little bit. I think they look light and tinted. So on the Indigo laptop, for example, the keyboard looks light, light, light, light, light, light blue.

Close to white. Not quite white. On the website looks like dark purple almost. Yeah, it looks dark purple. Yeah, it's not quite that. So it's like LeCroy blue. A breath of blue, exactly, which is a tiny bit. A truck passed by with a blue in it.

Somebody whispered blue at the factory. Yeah. Yeah. So slightly matching keyboards and even like matching wallpapers and UI elements by default out of the box. So like on the yellow laptop, the menu items are yellow and the keyboard is slightly yellow. and it's like, okay, you got the citrus theme. I love the citrus one so much.

Are you into citrus? I was thinking about that. They asked me, what's your favorite color? There's citrus. That's the yellow one. There's indigo, which is the blue, dark blue one. Then there's a pink one, which I think is called blush. And then there's silver.

Andrew, what is the best? Silver's the best. Whoa. Yellow. I do like yellow a lot. It's piss. Yeah, they got them on the yellow. It looks good.

Also, I just thought, where's Project Red? Oh, yeah. The red would be sick. I don't know. Product Red. Product, right. Yeah. In all the videos, I know the lighting was kind of shit.

Yeah. The piss one looks like kind of, it looks like neon green. It, yeah, because the lighting, it's so tough. It, in person, it's giving lemon lime. It's giving lemon. Like the Gatorade? Yeah. That's like the best Gatorade flavor.

So like a tiny bit of green, but not really. The other morning. It's mostly yellow. Y'all haters. It's mostly yellow. It's my favorite flavor, Gatorade. I don't want to hear that. You probably should not say my favorite flavor.

flavor while he's saying. Wait, lemon lime is your favorite Gatorade? I like orange and yellow, yeah. It's such a boring pick, but I think I agree with yellow. It's so good. A Gatorade? And then Glacier Cherry. What's your favorite?

The white flavor of Gatorade. Like the red one. Okay. You can't feel it's boring and then go fruit punch. I agree. Fruit punch is delicious. It's good. That's the NPC Gatorade.

No, the blue one. Yeah, but. Which blue one? Oh, God. I hate that one. Light blue. No, the problem with the blue one and the yellow one is that they make myself, like, saliva glands fire.

They all do that. The red one doesn't. So full of sugar, really? Well, are you taking a zero? I'm talking because they're a little bit sour. Background. Anyway, there's just a flavor as a Gatorade here with this MacBook Neo. The silver is the absolute best color because it looks just like the old 12 inch MacBook.

It looks very clean. Everyone buying the silver is why we don't get fun colors on things anymore. I know. Because they're giving us fun colors and y'all are like, oh, one silver. That's actually, I want to see this distribution here because there's a silver one. You can get the boring one or a colorful one. And I want to know what the spread ends up being for different colors. Regular people will buy a color.

Schools will buy a thousand of the silver ones. Yeah. And that's it. Everyone I know that pre-ordered one, pre-ordered the piss color. But I think it's just because they like, have taste. Who do you know the pre-ordered a MacBook Neo? Three people. It's weird.

Do they know that it's a piece of shit? Well, it's really, I mean, it's Project Linda. It's a phone. No, think about this. The A18 Pro is about the M4 single thread performance. multi-thread it's not but for single throtted tasks it's about the M4 we should talk about what this computer

is going to be capable of right okay everyone sees it's the the smartphone chip and to be fair it will be not as good especially with the 8 gigs of memory I think that's actually the real bottleneck but it will not be good for video editing it won't be good for

gaming they were bold enough to do a gaming demo for me on this on a 60 hearse display was it an iPhone game though it was basically an iPhone game It didn't look that great. But this is not for that. But if you think about who's going to be buying this, it's a lot of schools. It's a lot of students.

It's a lot of young people's first computer who you're getting them a Mac instead of a tablet or something or like a random HP or a Chromebook. Yes. This, for those people, is a web browser and it's spreadsheets, word processing, texting, basic stuff like that. Email.

It's going to kill it all that. It's super good. And most of these things are single core tasks that this chip is going to be totally fine for. when you ask more of it, that's when you're going to feel like the edges of performance of like, oh, wow, I can't play Fortnite on this laptop. You can't play.

I bet you can play Fortnite. Maybe you can. I mean, you can play it on a phone. So, like, you can do a lot of stuff at 60 hertz on this laptop. But I think us, like, looking at it, like, thinking, oh, no, it's not Thunderbolt. Oh, no, it's not, like, higher fresh rate. Like, this isn't a, this isn't going to be for that anyway.

So I think it's actually a perfectly reasonable performance envelope. I think the 8 gigs of memory is going to be, like, a time thing, like how long before apps are just using too much memory for this 8 gigs? I had an 8 gigabyte M1 MacBook Air when it came out. Yeah. And it's great up until your storage starts filling up because it uses the swap memory. Yeah. And the memory is very fast.

So it's like it's generally fine, but as soon as your storage starts filling up, it starts getting slow. Yeah. So I don't know. I go back to the story with my sister, how she bought the Mac Mini. and the next day, the double storage model was the same price. So I told her to return it. She was like, why would I do that? I don't need storage.

I just browse the web. That's exactly what she said. What am I going to do with storage? Yeah. And I was like, eh, yeah. Because regular people, like, we have so many things on our desktops and, like, locally on our computer

because it's video files and it's big photos and it's all this stuff. Regular people just do everything on the web browser. I know, but that web browser is usually Google Chrome, which demands 64 gigabytes. This is the Safari book. This is the Safari book. Safari book. Which you know how I feel about Safari.

I'm like the biggest Safari evangelist of all time. But like I don't know, man. Yeah, I love Safari. I didn't know that. I'll never use anything else. Here's an interesting spec about like what might make this a Safari book. The battery size on this laptop is significantly smaller than a MacBook Air. MacBook Air has something like a 55 watt hour battery.

This has a 36 and a half watt hour battery. Yeah. But they are quoting almost the same battery life as a. MacBook Air. I guarantee that's mostly like video playback and using Safari because the second you throw Chrome on this thing is going to tank through that half-sized battery. So this is, this is specifically like you're using Apple's apps, you're using Safari, you're using IMessage, you're using Apple Music, and that's, that's going to be great. It's also lower TDE because it's literally the phone processor. But like an M processor is just a big phone processor. They're pretty much

the same architecture. I think it also comes with like a 20 watt charger because it's such a small batteries isn't need a big charger. And that's, wow, lower, total lower power envelope. Wow. It is so crazy that you can run MacOS on an A18. Yeah, man. What's also crazy is we've been running iPadOS on an M4.

That is also crazy. Now an M5, right? That's the opposite. Yeah. No, no, sorry. M4 iPad, yeah. Like, what else can we be doing? You know? So, can I run Linux on a toaster? Like, are we Yeah. Yes. I mean, isn't there? Absolutely. Isn't there an A-9

Pro in the studio display XDR. They just print these chips. Yeah, they put the iPhone in that display just for the camera. This chip is so cheap for them to make. It's unbelievable. To Ellis's point, though, that was the one takeaway that I had from this MacBook Neo thing was like, oh, so you can run MacOS

on these phone chips. They just choose not to. For sure. So you think I can plug in the iPhone fold and have a MacOS experience because it's possible, clearly. They might do that. I don't know, especially if Google's doing it. That would be freaking awesome. I think that's a philosophical thing. Because what you're saying makes perfect logical sense, and we are the consumer, and so we're thinking logically about this.

But if you're Apple, and I've thought a lot about this recently, like the super, super powerful iPad is still not good enough to be your full-time. That's a $2,000 M4 powered iPad. Yeah. And it's still not your full-time laptop. For some people. It could be. For a lot of people. If you can plug in an iPad and have Mac OS, there it is.

It just depends on what you do. There's some evangelists, and there's a small fraction of people who are like iPad sickos that are like, yeah. Yes. I got rid of my laptop. Yes, this is the thing. And you can do that if you're really dedicated. Yeah. But I think for most people, they're specifically designing these products to live alongside

each other. Apple's like, please buy a MacBook and an iPad. Buy everything. Use sidecar. Use continuity. Use the sync across the devices. They are perfect for each other. Michael, our graphics guy, he uses an iPad.

He said just for the pencil and to draw things and then for sidecar. Yeah. He also uses a magic mouse. So like, I mean, if you buy like a used iPad Air for pretty cheap, having an external display that you can just have it anytime is pretty awesome too. Yeah, for your Mac. For your Mac. So they're like, please buy both. Yeah.

And so for as powerful as they're willing to make the iPad Pro, they are not willing to make it powerful enough philosophically to be your full-time computer. But that's you to use it alongside. It's an artificial limitation. It is 100%. Yeah. Apple specializes it in? I know. It's their specialty.

But they also let you plug it into the display and they talk about how. with the new displays. I loved that. Yeah, they talk about how with the new displays, like you can plug the iPad, the new iPad Pro into the 120 Hertz display, and it'll like run at 120 hertz, and you can do all the things.

And I think if they're letting you plug the iPad into that display with the Thunderbolt cable and, like, run iPad OS on the display, they will probably let you do that with the fold. That's my guess. Have you ever noticed the demos, though, that they run? Whenever they do that,

I pay very close attention to the demos that Apple constructs to demo their products, right? And whenever they do the, like, iPad plugged into the studio display, they immediately open Procreate and they just start like doing the artist thing. Yeah. They never do file management. They never do multitasking.

They're doing like the very simple like, oh, here's the big display so you can view your work thing. That's on purpose. I think if they wanted you to do all that like computer stuff, they'd be selling you a computer. I will say really quick with the new display, the really good one, the XDR one, they have the camera in it now. So they could just get rid of continuity camera. Because there's many times when I get on a video call and my feet is just black and I don't understand why.

And then I realize it automatically connected to my phone. It's in my pocket. And I'm like, oh, this is a line. That's true, but please don't. Actually, because you don't have to get rid of it. I'm just saying it's like when I'm in the audio right. I need to take a call. There's no webcam in that room.

Right. And I have so peripheral up in that setup like I really don't want to add another one. Yeah. But I recently added my iPad as a third monitor with sidecar. You can use that camera. No, but I just close the sidecar window and take the call on the iPad. Oh, that's cool. It is cool.

Yeah. So, yeah, I guess you could get rid of it. Marquez, I want to know, because you actually played with these laptops. People were talking about the thickness. Yeah. Can you talk about that? Sure. So.

Are you down with the thickness? I think a lot of people will be totally fine with it. So technically, it is a little bit smaller than the MacBook error. It is a 13-inch display instead of 13.6, right? But it is basically the exact same weight, and it is actually slightly thicker because of the lack of wedge shape. And that's not to hold more battery.

It's not even like a bigger battery. It's just like this is a not engineered for maximum thinness air. So it feels like an air to me when I'm holding it. It does. I didn't worry about like extra weight or thickness. It's, I think, technically on paper, a tenth of an inch thicker than the MacBook air.

Yeah. So like, not a big deal. Yeah. I'm assuming it's not wedge shape because now the speakers are down here, right? Yeah, it's not wedge. all the way down to there, you can't have the speakers in the bottom corner. And also, the headphone jack there looks really strange.

Yeah, it is weird. It is really weird. It is really low. Yeah. It makes more sense, to be honest. I was trying to figure out why it makes more sense. Because it's just closer to you. And when you have actual headphones, you're plugging in the further, I mean, it's like

three inches closer. Eight inches, it would probably be the difference. But, yeah. I will say the refurbished 13-inch MacBook Air right now on Apple's website is $750. This is how I think I need to review this computer. Yeah. Is if you are thinking about buying a MacBook Neo and you want to be a little bit, like, you want to look into it a little bit, there's actually two other things you could do for $600.

Is you could get an M1 MacBook Air. M1, right? That'd be really cheap. That would be a potentially just as good computer for you, but it's an M-CHIP. You get more software support from buying a Neo, today because you're starting today at day zero and have years of software, but, you know, maybe you think an M1A will have a better display, more multi-threaded, whatever. That's a choice you could make. And the other is you could still buy like a $500, $600 Windows computer or a

Chromebook for that price. It's, and I think it's, we all have this reaction because we're like, well, why would you do that if you could get macOS? But I think that's the comparison that I need to put it all, I need to put these things all online and see like, what's the advantage? What's the best Windows laptop I can get for $5.99? For students, $4.99, that's going to be tough. But I want to actually figure that out. I think it's like, if you're watching or listening to this podcast right now, that might be something you look into.

Most people buying this, they, and those people might find your regular channel review going to buy it. They just, like, to me, the MacBook Neo is, it's a laptop. All of us don't have laptops anymore. we have full-blown workstations that happen to be in a laptop now because we got to that point. Maybe workstation is not the right word. But like, these are insanely powerful for this. But when you think about what we just used to do with laptops, we would never sat at a desk with them and like plugged it into something.

We would sit on the couch or a chair or a coffee shop and like that's what the Neo is. It's just a laptop. That's a world I've never known. Like my first, my first laptop was like a plug into a, a, a, workstation desk and like and do it. And I remember being like, yo, why are laptops not as powerful as computers until the M series came out? And it's just like, why would we go back? Like Claire has a laptop. It's never, she's never sat at a desk with it. She uses it on the couch or maybe at the dining room table or like in the like when she uses it at work sometimes. I guess that's at a desk.

But like those are laptop things to just do laptop things or we need to do like a studio video that's like a competition between a MacBook Air, a Neo, a Windows PC, and an iPad. Because I'm so curious where the edge cases that one category, one of those cannot do. I think this is that point, though, where if you're watching a video of like a competition between a Neo and something else, you're out of the Neo range already. No, but like, even for, like, like genuinely. Just to wonder. What can you not do on an iPad that you can do on a Neo?

You can get a keyboard. You can Bluetooth any keyboard. board doing iPad. I know, but... So that might be one thing to add to my discussion because the base iPads, 329, the keyboard and trackpad they make for it are $250. So that's $600 right there. Sure. So you could get that and you can do file management and multi-window and most stuff. And then it's modular at that point too. And you have a touchscreen if you want it. And you could pop it off. Yeah, maybe that's one more option.

Can't put it on your lap. And I would always... That's true. That's true. That's very true. True. I would also argue that the people, the market for the Neo is more likely to use cloud storage. Oh, yes. Just almost all web storage. The file management doesn't matter really on like the iPad. I don't know, man. I think. I just like integrated laptops more than two and one touch screens with detachable keyboards. I also think we're overthinking this. Yep. I think if a parent walks into Best Buy and sees three laptops and an iPad that are all $600, they're buying the Neo because they're familiar with Apple. This thing is going to sell.

Yeah. Also, education discount is $100 off. So it's $500 with the education discount. Can I ask a question if any of you guys might know? I asked this to Marquez. When I always think of getting an educational discount, it's usually with a .edu email address, which is college. But very clearly, this is great for high school.

It might work if you have like a high school ID. I'm not sure. Yeah, I guess a high school ID, but it's harder to prove you are a student. And if you don't have to, then I'm just going to walk into an Apple store with a kid and be like, look at this student over here. It's been a long time since I was in that world. But I believe Apple partners are the company called Unidays to do educational status verification.

Like for the past, ever since I was in college, like even my freshman year of college, to get any Apple EDU discounts you needed to first go through the Unidays verification process. And that's like high school students? No, that's why I'm saying like, I don't know how you would do it as a high school student. Because you need to like, you need to give them a bunch of documents. your transcripts and like your ed email and like but also I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of high schoolers are getting edu emails now yeah possibly I feel like also a lot of middle school's high schools are the ones supplying the computers for the classrooms at least in the US from what

I've seen but I'm sure there's plenty of how do schools work in 2026 I don't really know how you go and your open claw teacher tells you some lies about George Washington and then you go home and like play fortnight and drink caffeine all night I remember in like eighth grade when we got a smart board and the thing just never worked. So they just used the whiteboard instead and we were like, damn, look at this technology. You guys had a smart board in eighth grade? It was called a smart board. It never worked though.

It never worked. We just watched movies on the CRT, baby. That's what we did. The smart board wound up just being the projector white screen essentially and they never used the fake markers on it. 70 pound TV. The overhead projector. Am I old, this might be at the end of people who have to use transparencies. This is like maybe the end of high school.

I had transparency is in middle school. Okay, yeah. So, what was it? Like the projector with the transparent thing. The overhead projector. That's what I just said. Yeah. The overhead projector?

Overhead. No overhead. It's on a cart. Yeah, it's on a car. But it's for some reason it's called the overhead projector because I think the mirror or whatever that's above it is over top of it. So you could write on the light. It's into it. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that thing. That was always funny when they erased and just wiped stuff all over the place. That is an evolution of slide film, by the way, which was used specifically for slides like that. So they could draw on it. Anyway, stay tuned for. for the Neo review. Yeah. I do think this is,

yeah, I do think this is potentially one of the most disruptive products of the last couple of years. I think a lot of Chromebook sellers and Windows,

laptop OEMs who have been feasting in that price segment are very worried about that one. Yeah. But we'll see. Can I think there one other

like pro of this out here which is the pro to all Apple products in the US at least? It's not a pro. It's a Neo. That's, I was gonna make the joke

and then I thought it was, no. No, it's just like when we're looking at cheaper products that are specifically not for tech people, the biggest pro of me suggesting this is when it breaks on you, I can tell you to go to an Apple store and get it fixed, and I don't have to diagnose everything over the phone. Like, it's so much easier to just be like, hey, you can get the help here.

I was thinking that because I've bought my mom computers before. Like I bought her like a Chrome book before I think, oh, it's Chrome. It's just Chrome. She can't mess it up. I was wrong. Like there were just infinite ways and you know she could just go to a store and I don't have to be her son Then I guess that you know that's great anyway I want to make one more thing the closest like analogy to this is the surface go do you guys remember that computer

Oh they tried a snapdragon one it was not snapd was it was Intel Pentium gold 445 y bless you yeah thanks and if you remember Dave 2d just shat all over this computer because it was so bad and it It started at $400 just for the tablet, and then you still had to buy the keyboard and the pen, which were more expensive. I believe altogether was probably about the same price as this Neo device. And it sucked. It really did.

It was seven years. It's seven years old now, obviously. And they made a better one that made it better, but it was still expensive and bad. So I'm just saying, look, all the tech PC channels, that's Linus Tech Tips. Linus is slowly, like, has been making videos being like, oh no, oh no. Mac is better value than Windows in like almost every way now.

Like there is no, it's very hard unless you're a gamer at this point to recommend yourself a Windows computer. Also, like- Also, everyone's mad at Windows, so that helps. Yeah, because Microsoft is a legacy corporation that doesn't, anyway, I'm going to get so yelled at. But I'm just saying. That's okay? I'm just saying. The surface go, if you look at it from the side, just looks like a bad math problem. There's so many angles going on.

The keyboard is like slightly flipped up and then it's got the stand and like everything about this. I don't know. Again, it's seven years old. I get that. But there just hasn't really been anything except for like a Chromebook that is this price and can do this many things. And a lot of people, especially in the United States, own iPhones and the integration and all that stuff. yeah I mean this is a pretty this is a pretty serious computer from Apple

I'm still I'm very interested to get it in and have us like test it and play with it and see what it ends up being like but being M4 single thread performance when that's what everyone wants most of the time single thread performance is like you know it's just yellow too it's sick it's piss Andrew

the silver is the best I want the yellow keyboard so bad I'm happy for you I think we have to take it to trivia yeah stay tuned But first, I messed up. I was so diligently researching when the Galaxy Buds actually came out because it was a more difficult thing to research than you would expect. You mean the Galaxy Gear icon X?

No. Try AI overview? I would never try AI overview. Dude, okay. AI overview almost messed me up for this week, too. I spent way too much of, if you saw me on my phone and on my computer on the computer, Anyway, Marquez, you stated yesterday that the buds came out before the fold, or I don't know what you stated. Last week.

Last week. But you said the opposite of the other two boys, and you were actually correct. And I was wrong. I just want, whoever put the comment correcting them, please unsubscribe. That was the first point David and I got in what felt like weeks. Hey, man, I got another point last week. Wow, that's a huge. Some one point up and y'all are both one point down.

That's huge for me. It's huge for the program. I got the other question correct, though, so it's okay. I know, but you both have minus one point, and I have plus that point now. So it's a two point, two point spread. I just want to say, Alex Waddell, who sent us that on Blue Sky. Appreciate that. So you can admit.

We need to nuke Blue Sky. You can admit that there's value to Blue Sky. Make a way for my guy. Make a way for my cat. Yeah, okay. So the trivia question for this week is one that I hopefully cannot get wrong. So I wrote a crazy question that honestly, let's go for it. I will give each of you one point for every tech product that you can name that has the word Neo in it.

Okay. Assuming MacBook Neo does not count. Macbook Neo does not count. And it doesn't need to have the word, like a space between the Neo and another thing. Just have NEO in it. So well, okay. Yeah, sure. Honestly, I don't, yeah, it just has the letters NEO consecutively in the product name.

The reason I was going to say A over and M.S. B up is because I was just making sure that there were enough tech products with the word Neo in the name to even have. Yeah, it should be a tech product. And tech product can be really broad, like uses electricity broad. Oh, I know one. I don't even, oh, Nero, never mind. I don't even know. Nope, that doesn't count there's an R.

Damn. But what was really funny is that when the MacBook Neo got announced a bunch of AI slot videos came out that were fake Samsung product announcements for a phone called the Samsung S-26 Ultra Neo that doesn't exist. Just because as people would Google MacBook Neo, this would also get served. See, back in my day. Of course, AI overview does not know that those are, that's AI slot videos. So when you Google Samsung Neo to see if that ever existed, you get this really in-depth overview with specs of the Samsung S-26 Ultra Neo, a phone that It does not exist.

It's slopped now back in our day. It was just small channels making the Pixel Ultron instead. All right. Well, we will learn or we will know the answers. They'll be at the end like usual. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Shopify. The early days of starting a business are equal parts exciting and terrifying.

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Let's talk about nothing. Damn, I make a pun every time I talk about that company. Nothing came out with... Yeah, sorry, I had to. It's okay. But nothing's coming out with three things. Nothing phone 4A. Nothing phone 4A pro.

And nothing phone, headphones, nothing, headphones A, nothing A headphones A headphones. Headphones A. Headphones A. Headphones A. Headphones A. Yeah. God. Their naming is still kind of tough, not going to lie. Nothing's a weird name for a company. It is. Yeah. Anyway, so the 4A is the one that most of us are interested in. It's a 350 pound, aka... That's a really heavy phone, I know. There's a joke. $350-dollar-ish phone coming out in a bunch of markets. I think this is the one that's going global. new design Wait which one?

The 4A is UK Europe, India Okay so the 4A Pro is a global one Got it 4A is a nose markets I guess Blue and black

Yeah so it's a slight spec bump It's got a couple New interesting things I think people in this room I've called it The best looking nothing phone ever until today

It's got pink Do you still feel that way I need to look at it again I'll go It's hard to say compared to the pro The pro looks really nice, but not in the colors. Just the regular silver pro looks really nice.

I think 4A is still nicer looking. 4A, I think, is a more general nice looking phone. The 4A pro is really cool and kind of almost gamery, but in like a subtle way. Well, I don't, we can get into that soon. Yeah, I think, yeah, true. So I guess I'll just jump into the specs of the 4A. Well, real quick though, but last week we only talked about the pink and the white. There's also a blue and a black one.

So there's four colors for it. The blue looks good too. The blue looks really nice. Yeah. So this is running a Snapdragon 7S Gen 4. It has a 5,080 million amp hour battery with 50 watt charging. IP 64, a pretty bright display. It says 4,500 nits peak brightness.

I almost never know what to make of that. I kind of want to know just what the regular... 4,500. Yeah, like then peak HDR, like one pixel will be at 4,500 nits, and then you can put that number on the expect sheet. One of the glyph LEDs on the back. Yeah. Gorilla Glass 7i. It's got triple cameras. It's got a pretty good looking set of specs for a phone that is this cheap. I have a question for the audience that maybe you guys can answer. People still seem to care about processors.

Yes. Hard stop. And I understand the gaming aspect of it, I suppose, although I'm not really sure what mobile optimized games don't run at high frame rates anymore. Maybe like Genshin input. or something that seems to be the benchmark. But I still see people caring about the processors. And I'm like, if the processor is lower tier, quote unquote, but it enables things like super bright, 120 hertz, 50 watt charging, like all this stuff, why do you care? This is my question. Yeah.

Great question. I think this is another thing where in the bubble that we're in of people over-analyzing every little detail about a phone, like the enthusiasts. They care about getting the most for their money. And so when a slightly better available part is out there, they want that one instead of the one they got. But I think for most people, a lot of people, especially even sometimes watching these, but who are just more casually shopping, they are not thinking about the difference between the Snapdragon 8 Elite or the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 or the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy. Like they're all a good chip and the phone performs well, therefore I'm not getting ripped off.

I agree with you. I use a tensor chip so clearly I don't give a shit about performance. But I think like what Marquez said in like this more range of things when you're probably cross-shopping, if I'm looking at two phones at the same price and one chip is better, then I'm probably going to go that for the longevity route. Sure. That's when I'm hoping that's when people care about it more so here. But I also, as much as I love speaking for the audience, I'm probably wrong when I do it. There's two audiences.

I think it's less like the people that care about the frame rates on the newest game. It's more so how long would this phone last me? I'm spending like $500, $600, $600 after taxes. Like, I want it to last a while. Well, Apple would say that running at a lower clock speed actually makes the phone last longer, which is why they force lower clock speeds, but they can't really do it anymore. I think that's a perfect example of the two different audiences. Yeah.

There's what audience who's like, how dare you, I want the highest clock speed, so I have every single frame. I want the maximum performance. And then there's the other audience. Then there's the other audience who wants just the phone, hey, it works, so make it last as long as possible. So if you were in the first bucket who's like, I want to maximize and get the best possible performance, especially when you're buying a higher end phone, I think it makes

way more sense to pixel peep and to really want the most out of your phone, then that makes sense. But if you're buying a $350 phone and it just works, and especially with, I think nothing software is pretty good. Like, it's smooth enough. I don't think it would even feel that different on a Snapdragon 8 Elite versus a 7S Gen 4. Yeah.

So it's like, yeah, as long as it lasts me a couple years and doesn't fall apart, seems like it's a good enough chip. Yeah. Yeah. See that way to me. So that's the regular three, the 4A. And we also got the 4A pro, which I have to say, like, got announced this morning. Surprise. You probably got some early stuff about it.

Yeah. I did not know anything about it. It didn't leak online. This has got to be one of the first tech launches that hasn't leaked. They played us. A very long time. I feel like they, the design. video last week was to be like...

Look over here. Yeah, they literally like... Slight a man. And they did a good job at it. Yeah, this morning I came and I was like, we have a lot to talk about the pot. I have a lot to write this morning because we also had to shoot S-26 review.

And then I sit down and there's two new nothing products. I didn't know about it. I was like, oh my God. We didn't know about it technically. Marquez told us last week. Marquez did not tell me about... He asked earlier... He left it in the edit.

He did ask, is there a 4A Pro? And I was like, yeah, probably. Yeah. He said, yeah, but I thought you were just speculate. Me too. Why are you hiding from us, Mark? I only say what I'm allowed to say. Earlier this week, I said, hey, I'm writing podcast.

Can you send me the 4A specs so I can write it down? And you're like, sure. And didn't send the pro or the headphones. Well, I didn't get the 4A pro info. That was the thing. So the event was in London. The literal hours after the Apple event in New York. I couldn't physically be at both.

So I made the decision to see the six Apple devices in New York, and I wasn't able to teleport to London fast enough to also see the 4A Pro. Dumber. Dude, what's wrong with you? Yeah. I couldn't. I actually looked. I was like, is there a flight that takes off and gets me there at like 3 o'clock in the morning

so I can just show up and make a video? But no, there were no flights I could make that. Don't. Yeah. We're cutting that. Why? Because that's not real. We talked about it, though.

Is true. That's not coming out. Are you kidding? That's why we couldn't take it. That's why we couldn't fly on it. That's true. Yeah. No.

But yeah. So, anyway, this stuff was sort of held in London for us to see from those who are actually there with cameras. Yeah. And it looks pretty good. The specs also look pretty good. So the 4A pro, again, it's a 4A pro, not a full flagship. It's not a 4. So because it's a 4A pro, it's got a Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chip.

I'm going to kill myself. I think this is just them coping that it's like. Like, hey, if you want to put a mid-range chip in this, you can't call it a flagship. If this was a Snapdragon 8 Elite, then they could call it a flagship. But since it's not, all right, we have to call it the A-Pro instead of the flagship. Fine. So, Snapdragon 7 Gen 4, 6.83-inch ammo-led. It's 120-hertz display, but it will sometimes get to 144 hertz, depending on the app.

Kind of similar to some other gaming phones have. 5,000-knit peak brightness, which means nothing to me. 5,000-million-epar battery, 50-watt charging, triple cameras again. Better cameras, though, than the 4A. So, yeah. And better looking. It's got the glyph on the back. It's got a sort of nothing phone three, like little display thing.

Yeah, in a better way. So like, if you haven't seen it yet, it is an all metal body, which is awesome. Beautiful. Except for a while I was charging it because it doesn't have that because it can't. Oh, I didn't even think of that. Yeah. Pooh-poo. It has like a large camera bump similar to an iPhone in terms of footprint, but this is proof that you

can do that like everyone else and make it unique because this is actually sweet. Essentially, one main camera top left corner, dual camera, what are we calling them again? Pills. It's a PILS. The PIL. The bean. We got a bean, a double camera bean under that horizontally. Then to the right of that, a large circle glyph interface, which I believe has 137 mini LEDs is 57% larger and twice as bright compared to the phone three glyph interface. Wow. Yeah. And we still have the Red recording LED on it because that should be on every single phone ever. Yes. But then encased in that is a full metal silver pink or black body.

Yeah. It looks great. It also has the like... They are cooking over there. It looks so beautiful. It has like the little circular like indent on the bottom that matches the new pixel buds. Or sorry, not pixel buzz. Nothing.

Nothing buds feels like that. Yeah, it just like... Yeah, it matches all together really well. Although the pink, I will say... Okay. So like in the camera bar, it is color matched on the silver and it's color matched on the black, but the pink is still silver. So it looks really weird. Actually, wait.

I kind of wish that they made that pink. Here's my problem is look at this picture on the verge. That looks. This is the black phone, but looks like a silver camera bump and the black metal looks like it got like plasty dipped instead of like... I think the silver version of this phone is the best looking on. It's 100%. It looks great. Yeah.

I will say like I miss the HTC full metal. body phones. And if you're not going to have wireless charging, which I still really love wireless charging, all metal is pretty awesome. I'm curious about heat and how that ends up working out. Maybe because this chipset is a little bit

lower performance, it's not going to get as hot. Is there a vapor chamber in there? Probably? I don't actually know. I don't know. I don't know. The renders might look better than these in person. I'm very curious to see them in person. It's definitely more gamery than their other

devices. It's a little more, I don't know, I'm not getting gamery as much as, I'm getting cyborg. R2D2. Yeah. It's like a little playful pill morphing. It feels like a phone that they took the nothing buds and just put it in the camera bump. Like that's where all the nothing design aesthetic is, the clear and kind of like red accent and whatever.

And then there is a little bit at the bottom, but I kind of dig it because it's not trying too hard while also trying too hard. Yeah. Which is a hard thing to do. Do you see the price yet? $499. $499. So not flagship price.

No, I think a pretty good price, actually. It's cheaper than the pixel. It is interesting, though, because it's $499 USD, 499 pounds, and $479 euros, which if you do the, they've done this before where, like, they match the price, but when you do conversion rates on that, it's wildly different. Yeah. It's the same price as the pixel 10A, right? $4.99?

Yeah. Why you guys are looking? My favorite thing about the video was it says, world's first 140X zoom. asterisk and then says claims are based on publicly available data at launch, which I think is the claim that it's the world's first 140X zoom. Which again, which is just going to look really bad. If you zoom into 140x, what are you doing? Have you watched the video? No.

Even when it zooms in on the like perfectly rendered video of everything, the safe looks terrible. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, yeah. Hey, at least they're honest. Here, real quick, it's $499 for the 8 gigs of RAM 128 storage. Yes. Another $100 for the 12 gigs of RAM, 256 storage. That's the only only those the only two options.

Just do a thousand X and just make it look really bad. Yeah, what's stopping you from going to 2000? Yeah, exactly. You could just brand it that way, 2000X Zoom. World's first. World's first. Yeah. I think it looks pretty good.

I think the nothing design team has been really cooking recently. I think they also did the thing where they kind of made the previous stuff worse so that we'd go, wow, they cooked this time. Look at the improvement. Probably not. I made it worse. Like how the iPhone 16E was so bad that when the 17E was what it should have been, we were like, wow, they really cooked.

Is that, can you do that with design? Or is it just they tried something? It depends how quickly you have turn around. Like, we hated the three. We hated the three, but not the 3A. So I guess that depends on theirs. I mean, the analogy I'm making for the 17E is to the 16E is the iPhone 12 mini to the 13 mini. Because the primary problem was the battery.

And that's the primary thing they addressed in the next one. Yeah. And with this one, the primary problem was the lack of wireless charging and the storage, right, for the price. Versus the 3A Pro? I was talking about the 16E. Oh, the iPhone. Yeah, MagSafe. So now with this, I think this is more analogous to the 3 than the 3A because it uses the same kind of glyph interface, even though it's bigger and better now, apparently.

The 3 still had a chip set that people were not that happy with. It was also super expensive. It was also super, yeah. Like, I don't see a reason anyone would buy the three when the 3A pro exists, which is kind of funny. I feel like maybe they should just call this the 3 pro, but I guess they couldn't because the chip set-set is technically not as good. I just hate, this is the thing. This is my thing. What is everything rotate around the freaking chipset?

Is this because of the super, super, like, the nerds among us would be like, are you seriously making a new flagship with a worse chip? Yeah, but like. We've all set in. We've all done it also. So it's like they can't, they cannot name this. a flagship because everyone will say that about them. So they have to leverage this naming scheme of like, okay, it's not the A because the A was the 4A, but it is better than the 4A, but it's not a flagship chip.

So we'll call it the 4A pro. That's how they get away with this specific set of specs and this price. And when they inevitably try a flagship sometime later, all of us nerds will go, well, you better put a flagship chip in it. Otherwise, I'll spend my money on something else with a flagship chip. Can't wait for the CMF Phone 3 Pro Lite that is better than nothing pro 4A. Yeah, that would be tough. yeah yeah i think they did a great design job this phone i didn't know i didn't even think of no wireless charging though

that makes me sad it makes me sad but i don't know if you're not gonna i mean i want it for sure i always want it but if you if you're not going to do it metal body is sick true because i missed my hdc thunderbolt even though it burned my hand what about there's so many better metal phones you could the hccc thunderbolt that thunderbolt was the worst one what are you talking about that thunderbolt was the worst one you had what are you talking The Funner Bolt was the worst battery life of any phone I've ever used. Yes, I agree. They were like, let's do 4G and then burn it to the ground. What about the HTC1 or the HDC1M7 and 8?

Yeah, okay, I guess. Yeah, those are more legendary. Google Play Edition. I know. Those phones were... Nexus 6P. Yeah. Yeah, we had a good metal jacks.

Good metal phones did exist. Yeah, I guess, yeah. I only made that, it was my first smartphone, so I guess that's why. You didn't know better. Yeah, I didn't. Well, they didn't have anything better at the time. Yeah. So they also made headphones.

Nothing headphones A. Yeah. So now they have two tiers of headphones again. We can assume based on the name that the headphones A, again, I haven't tested them. I'm seeing the design on the $100 lower price. We assume that this is a slightly lower end set of headphones, but it still has all the nothing design philosophy. There's some colors as well. Yeah.

They still have some of those clever buttons, too, that the original nothing headphones had. I think a lot of people forgot how interesting than nothing headphones were. They had like a fat. I use the matter of day. Yeah. Okay, so you know, they have the paddle, they have the roller as well, and the software that talks to them. So these headphones still have a lot of that stuff, and they have, seems like a pretty decent, well, eight hours of playback. Oh, in five minutes of charging, sorry.

We don't know what the battery life is, total. It says five days, battery lasts for five days, which doesn't mean anything. How many hours of playback? This is the one thing where you can tell us the battery. The battery literally dies after five days and you cannot use it. You can't charge it. Yeah, I guess that's a mixed use stat, but like with headphones, you can just be like, I turn them on, I have. hit play, when did they die?

Yeah. That would be a useful number. These, in my opinion, looks significantly worse than the... Really? I think I kind of like them more. I like these a lot more. Than the regular nothing headphones? I think I just like the clear part on the outs.

So it's, if you remember the other nothing headphones, they're square and circle, square outside circle bump on the inside. This time... That's what this is too. Yeah, yeah, but the circle part on the nothing ones, the headphone ones, is where the clearness is. And then on this, the circle part on top of the squareness. is where the color is and the clear parts the square.

I just think it looks like opposite. I think it's just trying to do less. Yeah, but it looks way cheaper, in my opinion. I mean, I think both of them look pretty cheap. I don't really love either of them. I love my nothing ear butt. I will say I wear, I use the nothing headphone ones pretty much every day because I've been using them as earmuffs.

Well, you just use them because the stranger things guys use them. Yeah, that's very fashionable. No, but I get stopped by a lot of people asking me what they are, and people are like, oh, it's cool. It looks like a cassette tape inside. What color do you use? And then they put their AirPods back in and walk away. The black looks bad because it's glossy. I disagree.

The black is the way to go because they're so minimal. You can see the fingerprints so much more. Yeah, but no one knows you're wearing a crazy pair of headphones. The white ones are like, woo, I'm here. The same way with all these colorful ones, it's like they're so pick me energy. The black ones are the ones. You are all, just the color doesn't change the pick me energy on these headphones. I disagree.

I think it totally does. Bro, I don't know. I think we're all contributing to phone companies only releasing black and white at the moment. These are four different colors. You're telling me. No, it looks beautiful. I just would never wear them in public because it's like going to get double takes. Like people are going to look at you and then look away and then be like, wait, what are those?

Because out bright there. The black ones are just headphones. People will look at you and be like, oh, he's wearing headphones. But you really think that the A looks better? Yeah. It'll look like nothing. Nice. That's a great one.

Fun. Oh, my God. Their website is infuriating. Oh, God. Okay, what I didn't even know was that there's four colors. Oh, my God.

What is that? Holy moor. Show Adam. Okay. Did you see? You haven't seen the yellow and pink are just in the... So that's what I'm saying.

The yellow and the pink ones, I think I like the colors, but I do not like the head... They look so bad. The white and black ones are fine. They're unbelievably ugly. Also, I just want to say, I just went to the

PCMag website where they have an article about these headphones. And they're saying the five-day battery life is a hundred thirty-five hours straight of playtime. That's what it says on the verge too. So just for some context, with ANC off, die in five days. Just for context, a normal, does this have ANC is the other question? Yes, it does. So a normal ANC set of headphones flagships are getting 30, 40, the really good ones, 50. And in some insane cases, 70 to 80. I think the Dyson headphones had a crazy big battery and did 80. 135 is unheard of for ANC headphones. That does seem like a lot.

I need to investigate. That's only with the AAC codec though. As soon as you switch to LBAC or any other lossless thing that it has built in, you're going to cut that in the 90 hours. So they cherry-picked the 135 hours with the lesser codec and ANC off. That's how they got this number. If you do L-DAC and ANC on, it's 62. Oh, that's right.

Okay, see how the context next one more. Okay, that, okay, got it. Yeah. So if you're willing to have it sound like ass, then you can get a lot of bad. Hot take. You can't know. David, I guarantee you you cannot. I know.

Okay. I've been pumping AAC into your headphones as whole. You have no clue. Yeah, you sound like ass. You're listening to AAC and your headphones right now, David. I almost brought this and I wish I did. I'm kidding. Fender released a bunch of new stuff recently.

I don't know if you remember this. A year and a half ago, you had me take a Fender briefing for you. These guys? Yeah. Okay. And they released. My cousin's just an air guitar. Air guitar.

I've heard a Fender. They were announcing like new headphones and some new speakers like wireless speakers that are also amps. And they got bought by like a Chinese company or something. And they decided to make the brand like way better. And they set a year and a half ago is when I had this briefing. And then yesterday on my front porch arrives in an enormous box. enormous, like huge. And I was like, what the hell is this?

And one of them was a pair of headphones, wireless headphones from Fender. And inside of the left ear cup, they have a dongle, a USBC dongle that you plug into any device. And it allows you to do, it allows you to do lossless audio. When you say inside the ear cup, you mean like, you take the ear plush thing off. And then there's a dongle inside that you can take out. and you can put it in your laptop or in your phone. Okay. And it allows you to listen to lossless audio.

Oh. And there's three modes. There's like, there's like AAC, there's lossless, and then there's, um, oracast, which allows you to basically transmit the same signal, like audio signals and multiple headphones. It's actually kind of interesting. It's interesting. And then they're also insanely repairable.

Like the other side has, uh, you can take this off and replace the battery. They're sort of trying to be like the Fairphone headphones, the Fairbuds XL in a lot of ways. Why did I bring this up? I brought this up related to these headphones for a reason. Is it because they're lossless and wireless? The battery likes. Because of the audio codec. Because why you talked about it?

I just wanted to flex on us. No, I had a reason. That's a possible embargoed information. Because he's wearing the white headphones all the time. I had a reason for this. Well, anyway, it was interesting. I'll bring in it next week. I'll show you. Sure.

Yeah, that's cool. That's kind of like, yeah, you can do Bluetooth on the MXmaster for us or you can plug in the dongle and get like a good connection. Right. Right, right, right. So it was interesting. I guess I'm going to say. Say it. Say it.

Last time we talked about the nothing headphones, like when they came out and I wore them on the podcast and I was just sort of like, come on guys, who cares? You know, I sort of gave them. I have revised that opinion because I personally feel that the wireless, over your ANC headphone space, since that conversation has turned into such garbage, that actually I find myself recommending the nothing over your headphones more than most other things.

They're 500 bucks? They're 300 bucks. Oh. And that's the first reason, is that most things in this space are like crazy overpriced. The headphones that I use every day, the Fockel Batisse, I mean, dummy overpriced.

Sure, but that's like, my Maserani. The Fowers and Wilkins, like PX8, whatever. Those are like, way overpriced. They do not sound significantly better than these. I think every single year, the Sony, W.H.X, whatever,

sound progressively worse and worse and like the newest ones, whatever number we're on. I just think are like borderline unlistenable. They sound so bad. Whoa. That's a hot take.

That's a hot take. That's a hot take. He's been whining about it for years. I consistently choose them over AirPods Max, despite the worst connectivity because I think they sound better. I think if you're looking, you think they sound better than AirPods. Especially for flying. I think, well, we got to talk about that. To me, the Sony's are so mid-forward and they have so much distortion in the mids that if you're trying to use them for like any sort of clinical listening, they're like, it's the equipment.

of like rubbing vaseline on a lens like, is that your problem? Like a doctor podcast? No, no, no, no, no. Like if you were trying to like, if you were trying to like listen to something and be like, does this sound right?

You know what I mean? For any sort of like, obviously like I'm coming at this from a different thing but like I don't, I don't enjoy listening to them. I think you enjoy listening to music differently than people. Sure. I think the Sony's probably sound excited.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is like for the money. Yeah. They're inexpensive too. For the money and the feature set, I think that nothing's actually like some, one of the most competitive offerings. And you know something really funny? Because I obviously get asked way too often, like what headphones should I buy? And so I've been recommending the nothing's more and more and more. And I have not gotten a single person to buy them.

Oh, interesting. Because of the aesthetic. The way they look. Every single person I've been like, I think this is the best bang for, like, also because like Bose quality, like, obviously the noise cancelling Bose offers is still like really, really terrific, like sound quality. I can't really say the quiet comforts are super competitive anymore. So it's like, yeah, like this is kind of kind of the jam. And no one wants the nothing is there. The two thing I hate about the nothing headphones is that the ANC basically does not exist.

Like it is a feature that I don't hear it almost at all. The Bowers and Wilkins are the same way and the folkals are the same way. And those are both twice the price. Okay. So it's like I don't love the audio quality on the nothing headphones either. It kind of, it feels like everything is like a very, it's like it feels. It feels like it's trying to force like a spatial audio thing all the time. Okay.

And you can't turn it off. If there is a, sometimes they do. Do you have the nothing except? Maybe it's in the nothing except. It's probably. I feel like with the nothings, it's like you get clear highs that are not piercing. You get clear mids that are not like blurring everything else in the sound desonic field. And then you get good, decent enough lows and the transient response is good.

and music sounds like the way it mostly should on those things. Show me a graph right. I don't believe you. No, no, no, no. All right. And shoot, I wish I brought in these, these, these, uh, I was going to say the other headphones that I, I haven't tried, but I, people I trust say are like pretty decent are the Marshall headphones. The monitor threes, which are about the same price as these. Anyway, this is all to say that I am excited to try these.

headphone A is just because the longer I've like observed the space, the more I've been like, damn, I was really not fair to the original nothing headphones. They really are a cool offering. Yeah, I'm going to bring in the Fender next week for you to try because they look very normal and they also cost $300 and they have lossless audio and or a cast and all this cool stuff. The ANC is way better than nothing.

The Sony's, the Sony's are sound so bad that. How bad do they're so. That when I finally confronted Rich and I was like, you have to stop editing on these. Because you're missing so much. Like you're missing, you're not hearing so much stuff. And I gave him the Bowers and Wilkins, which are not that much better headphones. Like they sound pretty bad, in my opinion, too. And it was literally like, oh my God, like I can hear the room.

I can hear these qualities in their voices. is like the Sonys literally are unable to recreate these sounds. Yeah. Yeah, I would definitely not edit on them. I usually think of like the types of headphones. I think of like the music listening fun headphones, V-shaped graph, all that fun stuff, and then like the more reference headphones. And I've firmly put the Sony ones in the like music listening fun headphones.

Yeah. I guess my brain is just different because like what, like picture me telling you the video equivalent of this Mark has. Like picture me being like, dude, I have this display. The blacks are bright as hell. The whites are not bright. There's no color accuracy, but it's just so much fun to watch movies. But that's actually how TVs are. That's how I would never edit on a TV.

I would never edit on a TV. No, we would watch this. We all think this looks, everyone thinks this looks bad. There's entire subredits that are like, here's how you turn off all the stuff on your TV. But if you walk into a store and they all have all those settings turned on, you buy the one that has all them turned on because it looks better. Yeah, the punchy one. Yeah, they're like, that's why they turn it on. That's what people do.

That's why it's turned on. Am I just like so off base here that I don't know how to listen to me? No, this is classic. No, you're too plugged in. You can't see the forest. You care too much. When you've listened to 30 pairs of headphones and you know the nuance differences between them, it's easy to like evaluate in that way.

I know what I like. You know, there's that too. There's some personal. But I think there's a lot of people shopping for headphones that are just like, all right, I'm going to fly with these. So I need step one, good build. Step two, good battery. Step three, good noise cancellation.

And then as long as they sound pretty good. and happy. And that is kind of the Sony's, you're right. But are this sounds like five or six hundred now? They've gone up, but they're not that high. I think they're under four still. I think they're under four still. I still think getting the older versions is a better deal, but.

I agree with that. But they'd stopped folding for some reason for the last gen, and I hated that. 460. What? The Mark 60. Yeah, remember they went up. They went up in price this year. Like, four six.

Yeah, they're hell of expensive. For headphones, that sound like the music is coming out of a B's. I remember when they were like 3.30, then they were 3.50. I want the folly for that. That is not what they sound like. It's not bad. That's like the engine. They're six feet from.

Yeah. It's like, next sticks to crackers. Yeah. That's what the Sony sound like. They do not sound that bad. They sound pretty good. Someone, I guarantee someone is listening to this podcast on a parisone's. They would be like, I can't hear the difference.

That's just what. Wait, that just sounds like what it sounds like all the time. Oh, my God, you were so hard on these things. I did forget that there were 460. I thought they were more, because, again, the AirPods' Max are like 550, and they don't lose the price, and then all the others start to creep up in price because they're all competing,

and then Apple comes out and seems to enable $500 headphones. Now the 350 ones are 400 and 450. So it's all creeping up, which is valid that the nothing headphones are only 300. That's really nice. But, yeah. Well, and the headphones they are 199. The headphones are 1909?

Yeah. And they... We got to see how they sound. It's hard for me to tell exactly from the website, but it seems like you can bypass a bunch of the digital stuff with the 3.5 millimeter connection, which is something that's a lot of headphones actually you can't do it anymore. I just want to say,

if you want to yell at Ellis Rovin on X. I'm so sorry. I'm like genuinely so sorry if I offended you and you like the Sony. I do really believe the best headphones are the ones that you like. That's so true. for headphones and earbuds. It's like the best. And camera.

Don't let anyone tell you that the ones that you like are bad. You just did. I personally just feel like you're missing. However, comma. Literally just went on a rant amount.

They sound like a bees. And it's quotes. But if they sold them for a hundred dollars, I'd be like, that's amazing. They have, you have to go buy these. These are the best.

But it's like. I go on, I'll say, I'm on a lot of flights. And I tend to like look around and notice all the headphones. people are wearing and there's, first of all, tons and tons of AirPods. And I know

their $500 headphones and I'm always amazed at how many AirPods there are. And maybe that's because I'm flying out of Newark. But then, too, there's a ton of Bose and Sony. And I know they're not, the Bose especially. It's like, I know they're not the best sounding, but they sell them in the airport vending machine and they're designed to be four flights. And they have tons of

ANC. And they have the adapter in the box. Apparently the newest ones actually sound pretty good. Yeah, yeah. Boz is a historic, like, Bose is an R&D company first. I know what I mean? Like, they put a lot of effort into this. But like the old quiet comforts had pretty ass audio quality with just really good ANC. Yeah, but were they bees ass audio quality? I don't know if I can co-sign that statement. You know, there's a, there's a funny thing in audio where like, you know, the like,

the like, me, me, bell curve with like the angry dumb guy on one side and the angry genius guy on the other side. And like, it's with everything. Well, no, but with with headphones, it's like the, I don't know anything about audio, blah, yeah, use AirPods. And then you have everyone arguing in the middle about what's best. And then like everyone I know who's like a super esteemed knowledgeable audio engineer, like super techie really knows their stuff, it's AirPods. Yeah. It's like,

and they wouldn't even consider using anything else. No, it's the same in pretty much everything. And note taking apps, same with photos. I'll have people that are like, oh, look at this awesome picture. And it's like the worst picture I've ever seen it. Like the HDR is just like, bleh. Did you shoot this from a bees asshole? What is this?

No. Said bees, because it sounds like the sound is coming out of a really skinny tube. That's what I was trying to. I'm just saying. I can't wait for the new merch. Bees asshole, the area under the curve of people that really like ass is high as f***. It is.

That's the fact. People are not going to understand what you just said because it's getting bleeped entirely. I'm going to leave whole. So people vote. All the most, but you're right, every category, all the most mid products in the middle are all fighting each other. And then just like thoughtless product on each end is probably the one most people should get. Yeah. And that's fine.

Because you don't want to think about it. Yes. Ellis is just saying that thoughtless product on each end should be the nothing headphones. No. Carl Pay will clip that. I'm saying, I'm saying, I'm saying Carl, you know, I got on, I got over there right where Andrew's sitting and did not. give you a fair shot and and I apologize and I have since I don't think they sound very good but but it's an it's a great it fits in to the the product lineup really well at a competitive price with competitive

offerings I don't know about all that you got to use the app stuff but hey the new nothing headphones a it looks like you have a pair of AirPods that are glued to the side of a square it would be sick if you could pull a pair of earbuds out of that that would be cool. That's what they look like. It's a pretty old. All this to say, we should get these here, we should listen to them. We should put them on Ellis's head and have them live react to them. Yes. Should see if we can get 135 hours of listening.

Yeah. I want to try them because I want to see how often people stare at me with them and then just take them off and don't want to be the person being stared at anymore. Yeah. They're $100 cheaper. I don't know if we said that. Yeah, 200 bucks. Somewhere in there, we did mention it, but probably got lost. All right. All right. Well, we do have a little bit more to talk about after the break. So before that break, trivia.

I feel like nothing's design team simultaneously cooked and like... Got cooked? Okay. Question two, speaking of nothing. The first video ever uploaded to nothing's YouTube channel was uploaded when? Closed this without going over. Wasn't it just like a praying? It was a hype video.

It was definitely a like a ladybug and a praying bages. It was like eight to 12 months. before they launched their first project. What it was irrelevant, when it was. Relevant. Is this closest delta or closest without going over? Fuck. We'll brainstorm that a little bit.

We'll be right back. Are my gloves? Come on, heat. Winter is hard, but your groceries don't have to be. This winter, stay warm. Tap the banner to order your groceries online at walla.com. Enjoy in-store prices without. leaving your home. You'll find the same regular prices online as in store. Many promotions are

available both in store and online, though some may vary. All right, welcome back. Really quick here, because we spent a really long time talking about bees there. I got bees, boy. We've talked multiple times about how like AI overviews and whatever are going to really screw up page views and journalists getting paid and reviewers getting paid. And we saw that happen this week with the website ratings or artings is how it's spelled out. But they had to kind of make a huge change to their website. They're known for doing super in-depth reviews on a lot of things. Tech included, one of the largest. Like so in-depth that when you're shopping for a printer, you can compare printers by cost per page or like pages per hour or cost per hour at max flow. You know, like they're the

ones. Yeah, it's deep. And it's like they're doing it with different equipment on a lot of different things to be able to test these. So that obviously costs money. But previously it was free. And now they had to make a pretty large change to make the full in-depth reviews of everything behind a paywall. It is now $10 a month or $45 a year. But the most interesting thing about this announcement was a section of their release saying

why we're making this change. It says ratings.com has historically relied heavily on organic search traffic from Google and affiliate links. That model is becoming less reliable. Fewer people click through Google organic results than they used to. At the same time, AI actively scrapes and reuses our test results often without attribution and without the context needed to interpret them correctly. That's like a huge thing by itself, interpreting things correctly.

Meanwhile, performing lab-based and in-depth testing is expensive. We buy every product ourselves like normal consumers, no paid or sponsored reviews, test them using standardized repeatable methods and publish the full test results transparently. a membership supported model reduces our dependency on Google, limits unrestricted AI scraping for our test results, and gives us incentives that are more sustainable and aligned with our customers. So this sucks, but is necessary, I guess is the easiest way of putting it. It stinks for all the people who want to just go to their website and support them,

but also, like, I don't know, not many people are going to pay $10 to just go for a month or pay $45 a year for a reviewing website. because you don't buy things that often. Lots of times you're just like in the pinch of comparing things and want to go check it. Yeah. So this is a tough look. This is part of the inevitable death of SEO and the web.

I mean, every website for the longest time. Adam and I used to work at Android Authority, and we were privy to a lot of the SEO bullshit that the people would have to talk about all the time. And it basically equated to Google makes all of these changes constantly that you have to adapt to, oftentimes when you're adapting to it, making these changes makes your website worse,

but if you don't, then Google will derank your website because you are optimizing the way that you show up in Google search. And with the speed of which this stuff is changing, especially with AI overviews and all of this stuff, now you have the additional factor of having to adapt to what the AI overview shows.

If it chooses your website to show in the AI overview, if it chooses to show in Gemini, when Gemini gives sources and stuff like that. And I mean, There's a reason a lot of websites are moving to pay. The Verge moved to pay it about a year ago. That was a pretty major change. It made their web traffic really sink a lot, but they are making a lot more money on

subscriptions. I just think the entire internet is moving more towards direct to creator payments because SEO is just kind of dying very rapidly. So I think I'm like thinking out loud here. I think this is my real beef with AI overviews. I know I know Ellis, like, it's the accuracy and there's a bunch of other things that are wrong about it. But I think it's because the, like, it's so fundamentally removes the incentives to make good stuff, right?

So before, and I, there's, you know, the ratings video kind of illustrates this perfectly, but like, when you make good stuff and you optimize for people to find that good stuff, Google and all the search engines, when people are in the buying process, will funnel you, we'll funnel those people to find your stuff. Yeah. And so you make the stuff because people find it and you get paid from the ads and the cycle. continues. So you're incentivized to make good stuff so that more people find it. Now you make good stuff, that stuff gets scraped by AI overview, and when people start to go through that buying process, they find the AI overview and they never find your stuff. So the only incentive you have to make good stuff is to be the source for the AI overview to be good, and you don't get any credit for that, and you don't get paid for that. So the incentive is effectively gone.

Yeah. So think about that. The effect, the incentive to make good stuff is gone. Now why would you make any more stuff? It's almost like we've decided, all right, the entire corpus of human knowledge is complete. We need nothing more to be new. We will just be trained on the old stuff. That is my, that's a bummer.

This is a concern that we talked about at the very beginning of this. We literally said what happens when there is no incentive to go to a website because the answers are all on Google. and why would you make content if people are not going to go to your page and you can't get paid for it? And then the AI has nothing to grab from. That is the question that we asked three years ago and now it's actually hitting websites really hard.

Yeah. So we're seeing like the verge and ratings and like adding membership programs because there are still enthusiasts willing to support the creation of good stuff and the membership program is maybe the most ideal way to do that. I subscribe to the verge. I read a lot of these things.

But it's often like like wirecutter, for example, brought up earlier, or off camera, but like when I'm about to buy a blender and I'm doing my six hours of way too much research to buy the perfect blender, that's when I'm deep in the ratings and the wire cutter and the verge and reading blender reviews. Yeah. And then once that's over, I'm not going to read another blender review for years. That stuff, I'm not going to do that. So it's hard to get people to support and to, you know, spend regularly on something when it

seems like the incentive is gone. This is specifically hard because I don't think a lot of people are yet reading ratings for fun. Like we don't, we are part entertainment, right? So like people see our reviews, but we're also entertainment. So that's not getting hit as hard, but like this kind of stuff that is just like numbers and what prints per minute or Marquez's smoothies per hour and his blender. Like, this is not the stuff you read for fun. This is the stuff you read for a purpose. And when you don't have that purpose, it's really hard to pay monthly or yearly on it. Even though, I don't know, if you were like buying a new house and equipping it for the next year, maybe it's 45 bucks for the,

the year wouldn't be bad, but that's not a great business model to be like, cool, every time someone buys a house, we'll get one year of a subscription. So this, I feel bad for ratings. This is just absolutely, probably tanking there. It's very tough for stuff like this. There's, um, there's an interesting graph and also a chart, as Marquez like to call out. Yes. That shows the decline of peak traffic on tech websites year over year. And it's, it's pretty nasty. Like, all of these numbers are really high. And it's only a one year. graph. To 2024, yeah, to now, I guess.

A year and a half. Yeah. A year and a half. So March 2024, digital trends got 8.5 million peak traffic. January 26th, they got 264,000. That's a decline of 97%. That was a rounding error in their previous number. Their entire traffic is crazy.

Yeah. I mean, this is going to decimate websites on the internet because the same way that Facebook video, when it decided to not be a thing anymore, like ruined a buzzfeed basically. Yeah. This is what Google SEO is doing to all the Internet that have built businesses being the source of information. Well, what's crazy is like I think a lot of these websites like, well, services like Google, they just sort of think social media is free information.

And I think in their head, if you take the average of all information about one topic, you get closer to a source of truth, right? Because there's signal to noise. Hopefully you have more signal than you have noise. And if you take a billion sources, hopefully you have the right. data. And I think all of these services and websites are just kind of like, why do we have to pay websites when, you know, we could, social media is free, like, quote unquote, journalism or information. And you can just theoretically get closer to a source of truth. But that really

just, it destroys the internet as we know it currently. So it's not good. It also doesn't give good information for the most part. Yeah, I mean, there's a reason why there are certain trusted sources because they have processes in place that will take away the noise. I agree with you. But I think that they just think that on a numbers basis, if you have one billion people talking about a thing, the average is always higher to truth. That's exactly what polymarkets. Like, you know, all of these guys, they say like, oh, we can predict what's going to

happen because people are putting their money towards this thing because they, this many people think it'll happen and that means it will probably happen. I don't know if that's true or not. There's a zillion problems with that, but either way. The average number of arms per human is less than two. That's taking all the data about all humans ever. The average number of arms. Just saying.

Sometimes that logic can be flawed. It's, I just don't think. That was a fire example. Just saying. They don't all just think hard enough about stuff like this because they just want to get their. I disagree. I think they know. I think they don't care.

I think at a certain point, though, this is going to screw themselves when their AI can't scrape things anymore because no one. making, no one can get paid to make the... Everyone is making stuff all the time for free on social media. I guess, but now that level of what we get is worse and then... Oh, yeah. And then it just all turns into nothing.

When the free stuff that's being made is... Doesn't mean anything. Nothing was the last segment where on Arkansas. I just remember we talked to somebody who made an AI product. I won't name them. But we brought this up to him And he said, I don't think you guys should have any words.

You make really good stuff. And I was like, I'm not talking about us. I'm talking about like these people, the people who are doing the in-depth web text-based reviews and stuff like that. And it felt like he'd never heard that before. Yeah. This stuff is going to be gone. Yeah. This feels similar.

I went to ClawCon last night. Who? You know Clawbot? We talked about Claw bot. Open Claw. Open Claw, sorry. Remember how OpenClaught we talked about it? Is that the one where everyone dressed is?

up as Santa and like goes around the city somehow worse somehow worse everybody did have lobster hats on okay but the people I talked to primarily were like

oh yeah well you can just like create your own apps and blah blah and everything and I was like okay but what happens when all the service people don't need to use any services anymore because they can just spin up their own services and they're like well that's fine it's like okay but then how do people make money

like well you can sell your apps that you make and like but no one will buy it because they can all make people get money so they can pay for housing and food. Those are the primary things I think you're forgetting that people need. Yeah. It feels similar to this. How often did you run into that

the like meme of like, you should try open claw. It's awesome. Cool. What do you do? It's really cool. I use it every day. Oh yeah,

but what are you making? You're going to get left behind. That's exactly why I went to the conference. And I did find some pretty insane use cases that people were using for. I did have to actually talk to people because the actual event where they talked about everything that was going on.

They had a bunch of speakers. All of them were just. open claw wrappers to try to sell you like an easier way to use it, which is very ironic. Yeah. They also did have a wrapper there. They did have a wrap. It was very Silicon Valley, I will tell you. Anyway, there were some use cases.

Either way, I'm sort of just equating that to this because it's like I understand the revenue generation angle, but you're not thinking far enough into the future where it's like, why would people buy, use your service and buy your thing if you're, you're not. you're taking away, if you're giving everyone the ability to have the service and the thing. Yeah. You know what I mean? I don't know. Democratization in a way is like good but also bad sometimes. We, uh, this is not, I guess it's sort of a unique situation, but I do have sort of like

faith that God forbid like we do lose things like ratings in the verge and like these places that do give these like really important honest reviews, Tom God, mashable. that the pendulum will swing back in the other direction. I'm mostly thinking about consumer reports, which I think is a little bit more safe because they're a nonprofit and they get a lot of money through donations. And, you know, a big part of the founding of consumer reports in the late 20s, early 30s was like this period of time

where corporations could just, were literally killing people with their products. and there was not really any like consumer protection ability. And I'm not saying like we're going to go all the way back there where like you don't know if you're the product. If this blender you're going to buy is going to end your life or not. But I, you know, we could get close to back there and it'll necessitate like we'll need some way to know. I think Google would probably say enough people are truthful, but I don't. But they're not.

Well, no. No. I'm saying what I'm saying what Google would say. And especially like, if, you know, God forbid, did you guys watch the Hank Green video, the hour long? Yeah, I did. Like the thing that he said about how, like, there's a world where we lose access to, like, all of Google and all of, and all of our information is gained through some sort of like LLM interface. And at that point, there's literally no way to know what's true because you'll have three sources of truth, you know, anthropic, open AI and Google. And whatever they want you to believe, there's, you'll be.

You'll have literally no way to fact check it, you know. So when you're like, is this the best blender? You know, Google will decide what the best blender is and tell you that. Nobody I will serve you an ad. Yeah. There was like a period of time, remember, where like auto car companies were genuinely telling consumers like, your car will be worse with seatbelts in it. Like, remember. Like that was like, like we've been there before.

There's nothing stopping us from going back there. For sure. I do have faith that eventually like, this is just the thing that we need in a developed society. and somehow some way we as a populace will hopefully figure it out. People still do value quality. And this has been sort of the ultimate debate that people have been talking about. Like with AI slop, will that actually make quality more valuable? And people will gravitate towards the quality.

We don't really know yet. We're still too early in the stage. I think that obviously people go towards the lowest friction generally. So there will be a lot of slop that will be consumed. But the big question is, will people also. seek out the quality stuff, which will still find a way to exist. Either way, it seems like most of these websites really are going to start moving towards subscription models.

I see the value in the verge moving towards a subscription model. I think a lot of people like to read news. Yeah. This is like the moneymaker for them. I don't know how Artings or ratings has a subscription model and uses that to exist. Do you know how farm co-ops work? I feel like this is how we should figure this out. We're like, let's say, I'm not a farmer, so please let me know if I get some of this wrong.

But my understanding is like if you live in like South Dakota, right, and you live in this place where like there's a bunch of independent farmers and you all grow corn. You know, you could try to set up business deals with corn distributors and people who are going to use your corn. Or you could establish a co-op and all the farmers drop their corn off at this mutually owned place. And then the co-op is the one that handles selling all the corn. Yeah. And you just get paid off, you know, you with the co-op consortium decides on how much they're going to sell a corn for and then you divide the, things. That'd be a cool way to do these sort of reviews, right? It's like you have like one place you go for all of these sites independent testing, you know,

and you pay for that. Collectively, we all pay for that. And then that money can get distributed. There was a cool service that Twitter owned before it got bought. Vine. No. Well, I don't know if that was cool or not. It created the Paul Brothers.

Regardless of that. They had this service where you could pay like a $5 fee. Yeah. And it would allow you to, if you clicked a link on Twitter for a website that had a paywall, it would let you like read it without the paywall or like it would remove all the banner ads or whatever. And it was a super cool idea. And I don't know if it was working or not. Yeah.

They had this scalable thing where it was like the more websites that gone on, the more it would distribute the money. So obviously the more websites, the less money to pay. Apple News is another great. Yeah, Apple News is a good example of that too. I don't know if either of those services. just took advantage of these platforms. But to me, like instead of being like with Marquez, it's like, dude, I don't, I don't need to pay for blender honesty 24-7, you know.

But if I do need to pay for product honesty 24-7, and so if there was some sort of consortium here. Yeah. Yeah, it's sad that we have to start thinking about these things. Like this is what Sam Olman's always being like. It's like, in a world without money, how do we give people UBI or whatever? It's like, I don't like to do it. Why are you forcing this world on us right now?

Yeah, it's sad. Anyway, you should subscribe to, you should subscribe to news that you care about and websites that you care about. I think that's kind of the crux of it. If you're willing to subscribe to like Netflix or HBO Max, like think about your, like the quality of your content consumption and what actually matters to you in your regular life. And it's important to give news sources. We were a few days away from those being the same company. We were. And yet something worse happened. Oracle is now. I, Oracle's son, dad. Yeah, son dad. I'll throw one more sad thing in here in the sad part of this part. Let's get it. But if you own meta ray bands, you should probably read the article that just came out about them and the video camera on it. We definitely don't have time to talk about it.

In fact, the ratings thing I thought was going to be the least depressing thing we could have talked about. Definitely was not true. But yeah, if you have these, go read them. Maybe we'll talk about it next week. Yeah, you probably cover the camera. Yeah. Yeah. But we probably should get your trivia because Adam and Ellis need to edit this very fast to come out by tomorrow.

Privia, dude. I've got a marker. When the death bots come for us, I'm going to do a trivia question, like the band on the Titanic going down with the ship. That's going to be my final gift to humanity. Guys, the MacBook Neo is here. None of us knew it was coming until it came. And, you know, so how many other tech products can you guys name with the word Neo in it? You get one point per product.

You guys got mad at me because I made the questions too hard and you weren't scoring. So this is literally a waterfall of points available for you guys. You could literally bathe in the points. I only have one. And I'm going to be so, that doesn't matter. I'm going to be really lenient. Hardware, software. if it uses electricity in any way

and it has the letters N-E-O consecutively in it, I will be fine. Oh my God. How many did you guys? You guys were running pretty good. You definitely don't have the same thing I have. Flip him and read.

What do you got? Okay. All right, who wants to go first? Who wants to go first? I'll go. I wrote Neopets. I'll accept that answer. I wrote the nothing headphone one.

N-E O-N-E Dude, you know at this point, whatever It's yours, bro Clever enough to deserve the funds I wrote four things Let's see it

I wrote the surface Neo The point's yours, great All right, I put A-Neo that like phone company A-O-Neo or whatever it is A-Y-A-N-E-O They make portable gaming consoles

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah Okay, I'll give you that point Even though you spell the wrong Neo-W-N which is the tech website Oh Yep, that exists. You get it.

And neon. If you can tell me... It's the technology. You can tell me what... No, it's a noble gas. Yeah, it's a noble gas. No, I can't give you that. What's God?

You're going to be... Really? It's a beautiful gas. If you could tell me how many electrons are in its outer shell, I'll give you that point. 47. No. A need no. Guys, do you want to hear some of the ones that you missed?

Sure. You missed the 1X Neo robot. That's coming out soon. You miss the LG Neo chef, a microwave. The Samsung Neo, which is a Q-led TV. I should have just written Samsung Neo. LG-Neo, Samsung Neo. The DJI Neo, a pocket-sized drone, the Real Me GT Neo, a budget phone.

Or, no, smartphone. The Motorola Edge 5G Neo. That's a budget phone. The old Kiosera Neo, a flip phone. The Nubia Neo, a budget smartphone. The Experian. Syria, Neo from 2011. And the Vivo ICU-EU-NEO-10R.

The Iku, yeah. The Vivo Neo. Wow. I like it. All right. So not neon, though, you're sure. David, if you can tell me how many electrons are in its outer shell, I will give you that point. Why don't I need to know that point?

Because Ellis said it's a noble gas. It is a noble gas. Which means... It has less than 10? Yeah, it does. But I'm not giving you that point anyway. If you can tell me what neon smells like, I'll give you the point. Oh, sulfur?

No, it's odorless. Damn. That was good. You had two chances. All right. Marquez gets 16 points. Well, he doesn't get. He had 16 points.

Andrew with 18 and David now in the lead with 20. That was a free for all. Oh, baby. All right. Next question. The first video ever uploaded to the nothing YouTube channel was uploaded on what date? Closest without going over. Use your maths.

think think oldest without going newer wait sorry right month just year I'll take anything yeah

yeah yeah like pick a date all of it like pick a date all right flip them and read what do we got

oh wow Markeswin I'm so excellent oh wait Marquez no I definitely wrote down

incorrectly I wrote June 8th 2021 at 5.55 a.m. London time. Okay. Antions. You did not write London.

What I meant? I wrote March 23. Okay. I wrote March 1st, 2021. Damn, no one got the point. We all went to... You're all two new. Damn.

It's funny, I accidentally wrote 2020 and then put three over it with that have been okay. It was February 18th, 2021. Oh. Yeah. That was close. I know. You guys got close, but you went over. Yeah.

As close as it was out for. I just like, because I was like one day off. I started here February 1st, 2021, and I remember it being soon after I started, but I didn't know it was like within two weeks. Yeah. Well, good game. Damn. All right. Take us out, Mark, so Ellis and I could start this at it.

Dang. Hey, long week. It's Tectember slash March, which means there's probably going to be much stuff next week, too. So get subscribed if you haven't already. Hit that like button down below. Leave us a comment. And comment Iceberg lettuce if you made it this far on the episode. Nice.

Thanks for watching. Catch you later. Also, if you're at South by Southwest, see you there. Next Friday. Merry Tarchmus. Peace. With him, it's produced by Adam Alina and Ellis River,

and a partner with Vox Media Podcast Network, and our show of music was created by Vainzell. Bingo. Bingo! Let's go! Should we... It's not a graph. It's a chart.

Okay. A chart is a graph in different clothing. I would like to see a graph. There's a graph near the top.