Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Our Black Friday Rules, a Blind Smartphone Camera Bracket, & the Future of Apple Silicon

Episode Date: November 27, 2020

In today's episode, Andrew pitches his new Mario Kart game mode, Marques gets his hopes up regarding Apple's new M1 chip, and then we go over some Black Friday planning and "rules" to live by. Lastly, we go behind the scenes of our annual blind smartphone camera bracket. Links: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganell https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ shop.mkbhd.com Music by KamrenB: https://spoti.fi/2WRJOFh Why Enthusiast Brands Will Betray You: https://bit.ly/3laLtPr Apple Gun Permits: https://bit.ly/39eOEDF Price Tracker: https://camelcamelcamel.com/ Tracktor Extension: https://bit.ly/3fy5eiS SlickDeals: https://slickdeals.net/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thumbtack presents the ins and outs of caring for your home. Out. Procrastination, putting it off, kicking the can down the road. In. Plans and guides that make it easy to get home projects done. Out. Carpet in the bathroom. Like, why? In. Knowing what to do, when to do it, and who to hire. Start caring for your home with confidence. Download Thumbtack today. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long.

From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk and authorized gaming partner of the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk, an authorized gaming partner of the NBA.

BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager. Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario.

Hey, what's up guys? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques Brownlee. And I'm Andrew Manganielli. And it's Black Friday. It's kind of a holiday, I would say. It's a holiday I think a lot of us tech enthusiasts know very well because we're always looking for deals and gadgets and PC parts. We're finally going to get the last two pieces to build the PC and it's a console year. And, you know, we always think a lot about this retail season. This may be the most virtual version of that holiday than we've ever had before, but we've got a lot of good stuff. I hope so, at least.

Yeah. I hope it's the virtual version for you. In today's episode, we got a lot of that sort of Black Friday, Cyber Monday talk. We're also going to talk M1 Max for a little bit, and we have a little bit of a holiday tech gift guide for you. And then we're going to talk about the blind smartphone camera test. So it's a lot of good end of the year stuff happening around now. Let's get into it. Cool. Let's go stuff we liked to start. I have something weird here or different.

Yeah, I don't have anything. So this one's all on you. Stuff we liked. This is, I don't know if I would call this self-promotion but it's it's an idea that i had and i'm kind of excited to share it and i want to see what other people think about it all right let's hear okay so uh since quarantine we've been playing a lot of mario kart online um and it's gotten pretty like it's pretty easy to tell there are two or three people who are just destroying everybody when we play it. So it's like.

That's been my experience too. Yeah, it's tough when you have a group. Mario Kart's one of those games that's so fun, but there's going to be people who play games and are just going to be better. And that stinks for the people who are terrible at it. Unless there's some other alternate thing you can get good at. Sort of. Okay, so here's my great equalizer game mode plan that i kind of like developed and we've played a bunch of times and i think it's

really fun so what we do now is we'll be in a race everyone's playing you know whatever 150 cc's blah blah everything's normal but at any point after the second lap, somebody calls out a number between one and 12 or a number between one and the amount of racers you have. And then everybody's goal is to finish at that place. So what it kind of creates, and I actually think it works better with a couple of computer players in there because they're always gunning for first place.

But it kind of like leads to these different strategies of like, am I going to just try and, if say if say you say five are you just gonna stay in fifth place are you gonna stay in like uh seventh place and then try and scoot up at the end or are you gonna try and stay in fifth and pause and like it it creates a lot of chaos within the last quarter of the last lap and kind of brings a good equalizer to the people that may not be able to keep up with somebody like it always stinks when you have that one game where somebody's half a lap ahead of everybody else yeah i'm the one that's half a lap behind usually in mario no i like that so a lot of games i've played now and you find this less and less as i get more

realistic but they'll have some sort of like elastic uh version like some elastic mechanic where basically the further ahead you get, the better the competition gets. The further behind you get, the worse the competition gets. When you have other players in the game, you need a sort of a way to add that in. And that's a way to add that in.

I like that. So Mario Kart has a little bit of that in the sense that the further behind you are, the better items you get. Right. But sometimes that's just not enough to like- You can be pretty bad. If you hit someone with a blue shell

and they still have like 30 seconds to recoup from that, it's just not fair. So this brings a little more. It's also fun because it's like really hard to come to a complete stop. So we were playing and our friend Carl kept getting in the place and stopping right before the finish line.

But his car would just like very slowly go over the finish line and he would lose every single time. That's hilarious. So this is my pitch to Nintendo to add a, I don't know what the game mode would be called. Well, it's got to be like house rules. If you add it in built-in from Nintendo's point of view,

maybe it's a little less fun because now it's actually built-in. I think when you have that that house rule like okay i'll bring us up also uno uno uno kind of committed like a an uno crime on twitter we all know uno the card game you have to finish getting rid of all your cards and you have to say uno when you have one card left and you have to say uno out when you put your last card down donovan mitchell point guard for the jazz just signed a gigantic extension congrats to that dude um tweeted wait a second when you're playing uno you do have to say uno out when you put your last card i've never heard that i was really you just saying that made me kind of confused you have to say uno out and if someone says it before you you have to draw cards and if

you say you have to say uno of course when you have one card left. If someone says it before you, you have to draw cards. He said, you have to say Uno out to win, right? And Uno replied on Twitter, no, actually. Technically, that's not the official rule, but it is a common house rule. And they got ratioed to the moon and back. Everyone quote tweeted that like, you make the cards, but not the rules.

Everyone knows you have to say Uno out. It's just a house rule everyone knows you have to say uno out it's just a house rule everyone knows so i don't know that's uh i think house rules are fun for different games house rules are fun it it would be fun to have a random so we always had like one extra person who could shout the number because it would stink if the person shouting the number can just shout whatever they are so maybe someone could develop an app or something that like you press start and after a minute and 30 seconds it shouts out the randomizer a rent yeah like a randomizer or something like that but yeah uh so there we go there's my pitch for uh i cosign thank you very much um okay let's get into a couple quick

headlines we have here first thing i have written is a couple some news about Pocophone, everyone's favorite Android. Do you remember two years ago when Pocophone was just like the hype? It was such a hype phone. It was so good. There's some what I would call waves of hype that certain brands and certain companies have had in the smartphone world. Some waves are longer than others. Some waves are higher than others. The Pocophone's first wave was very, very and very very short it was nutty uh but yes there is

now so the headline is that pocahontas is going independent and they have a new phone called the pocahontas or the poco m3 phone yeah so i think let's split that kind of into two different uh yeah headlines here uh let's go for, so going independent, it's going as an independent brand. It's not necessarily a company. So it is still under Xiaomi, but it is now going to be its own brand with its own marketing department. You're probably not going to see

the label Xiaomi all over it anymore. It is now just Pocophone, name of phone. I think this means absolutely nothing. I think their theory behind it is that the original poco phone had so much hype that they created this kind of brand awareness and almost cult following that they want to get back to that successful like right poco phone is for the people this is a cheap high-spec phone yeah it's a marketing move what i see is basically like they want to capitalize on the poco name and and, hey, look, we're going independent. All these Poco phones will have

their own Poco vision and they'll be unadulterated. They're still backed by Xiaomi. They're still funded by Xiaomi. They're still going to take strategy. The boss move from Xiaomi will always supersede. I don't really see that changing much of anything about the products or the company. supersedes so i i don't really see that changing much of anything about the products or the company i see it kind of the same way you see uh like the mustang as a separate brand from ford but it's still ford super it still runs they still run their own ship but that's not that's not changing the could you compare it at all could you compare it at all to isn't one plus still under like bbk which is the same as like oppo and yeah so that's a little different because there's a parent company, BBK Electronics, which has several smaller, smaller, in air quotes, companies underneath it, including

OnePlus and Oppo. So a lot of people compare OnePlus and Oppo because they have the same parent company. So it's not under Oppo, it's under, okay, yeah. But if you have like one large parent company with several smaller brands under it, which happens in the car world a lot, happens in smartphones a lot, I think air quotes going independent is really just in name and on paper. But I think we're going to see a lot of the same stuff from Poco. We're going to see a lot of budget phones.

We're going to see a lot of Poco designs and Poco marketing trying to ride that hype, which is fine. I got no problem with it. I'm just saying I don't think it's going to change much. I think I agree with you that it's not gonna change much now. I think if they went this route after the original hype and then rather than create all these other ones,

they just went straight into we are Pocophone, here's Pocophone F2 with the same strategy behind it of just huge specs, cheap price, I think that would have been the time to do it and just just major focus straight on poco phone and what they have like for the fans yeah uh you know what else is interesting about huge specs and cheap price a lot of the i think i want to make a video maybe about this of what's happening to oneplus lately which is people are basically calling it the

oppoification of oneplus where where they've just lost their focus, where you used to just see one new phone a year from this company, OnePlus One, OnePlus Three, OnePlus Four, or 3T. I forgot the original few, but then it started. Wasn't there no four because it's like an unlucky number in there? But then you started seeing two every year, and then three, and then you had the Nord, and now there's three Nords, and then there's five Nords,

and then suddenly they're just cranking out phones with seemingly almost no focus anymore. And that, I think, needs, maybe there's a way for me to address it or succinctly explain why it's happening, because I wanna say, I'll shout out, here's a content I like, and it's an old video. There's a video by TechAltar called Why Enthusiast Brands Will Betray You. And it's this time-honored tradition of like an enthusiast brand who caters to what a small group of people really want, but the larger, you know, massive groups can't really cater to.

And then slowly, once they get more and more popular with all the enthusiast stuff they slowly go oh well we can expand here oh well we can make more here and they become the hero exactly and uh so i'll we'll link that video in the show notes i think we'll have i might end up making like a one plus specific explainer or using it as context but check out that video it's really good okay last part about them going independent their twitter post ended with join us in this powerful cool journey with po and powerful and co and cool oh my god capitalized so that was just the most facepalm like cringe wow sorry poco fun you you may have killed all your hype in your new brand straight off the bat with that one but the best part about stuff like that is that made it to the end of a meeting.

People agreed with that. And everyone went, yeah, that's the one. Definitely use that. I hope that's a rogue employee. But all right. The new smartphone. I kind of have two things to talk about with this. It's called the Pocophone M3.

First thing you see is you see a 6 000 milliamp hour battery which is like yes please on every single phone out there would be great rest of the specs 6.53 inch full hd display snapdragon 662 48 megapixel camera 4 gigs of ram and then you see a lot of places saying starting at 129 which seems insane yep um you need to look a little closer, though, and this is the part that I don't have confirmation on, but early bird pricing starts at $129. I have many thoughts on this, early bird pricing. Please, please. It seems not like something I think is good.

Yeah. Okay, so a couple of quick things on the phone. Number one, we will be getting one, so we'll have the M3 here hopefully within a few days, which is we'll get to check it out. Obviously, budget phones are evolving like crazy this year. I hear 6,000 milliamp hours. I think that's great. To me, it also means it'll be a big phone.

So we'll see about that. Fine with that. I see 48 megapixel camera so much nowadays that it means nothing to me. It's just like, yeah, it means that they're, it's going to be at least probably an average camera. It's like not terrible. I don't even think it means that.

I just think like there's a Sony sensor out there that has gotten so popular and so cheap in mass production that like every OnePlus phone can use it. Every Poco phone can use it. It's just out there. It's fine, whatever. Snapdragon 662, we'll see how that performs. Four gigs of RAM.

Early bird pricing to me. So here's what they do. And I think Poco's done this maybe more than some others I've seen. They will do this early bird. bird actually oppo did this too okay so they did a an early low version of the price that is a limited quality limited quantity and then once that sells out the price bumps up as a base forever so in this case it's 129 for early bird pricing did you see the rest of the pricing or they haven't not said yet? I did not see it. I think the only other price was for the 128 gig option.

So let's just say it's a- It's like $149. Yeah, let's say it's 150 bucks. So what they'll do is they'll grab all the headlines of this new Pocophone M3 starting at 129 bucks and they only have to sell a couple, a thousand of them, whatever, however many they want to be the early bird pricing.

The early thousand will get it and then it will never be that price again. And really, it's a more expensive phone. Now, what they're doing is they can sell that at a little bit of a loss if they want, or they can eat into their profits for the first thousand. And what they get out of that is a lot of headlines saying $129 and a lot of people trying to buy it early. And that's honestly a savvy marketing move and something I hope would happen less often. Yeah, it feels a lot like a GoFundMe, no, not GoFundMe, like Indiegogo or Kickstarter, where companies will generally give you something for a little cheaper as you're backing a new product, even though this isn't a new company. But we see a lot of companies who are established

already doing this, where they're getting the first round of funding for this new product through people getting it for a little cheaper. But I'm not going to be happy when I see all the YouTube videos that say $129 smartphone. Right. Because no one is going to be able to buy this phone for $129. By that time, yeah. It's not going to happen. I believe OnePlus did a version of this where there was a, again, it was a cheaper version and it had like 64 gigs, 32 gigs of storage, something like that. And they just sold it in limited quantity again. So it was like a super

cheap version in a super limited market. And again, it ate up a bunch of headlines for it being even cheaper than it really was. And then it sold out instantly. And then it was never that price again. Imagine if I told you I was going to sell you a, I don't know, there's going to be this new car coming out and there's this new early bird version. Two of them will cost five bucks and then the rest will be 50 grand. You can't keep writing headlines that this is a $5 car. You have to take, just take that little bit of an extra step and understand most people will not pay that price. This is YouTube clickbait as marketing, pretty much. Basically, yeah. It's not a great look, I don't think.

It vaguely reminds me of the first Pocophone where it was like, everyone was saying $300 smartphone, but everyone was showing the $450 version of the smartphone. Oh, that's another thing they do. So like, that was... Well, let me just break that.

That's a little bit different. It is different. I think that's more lies on the headlines it's more as much as them so the reviews so basically they were selling a 300 version and they were shipping every reviewer the 400 450 carbon fiber extra ram high spec version and so all the headlines were already that this was a cheap phone and everyone already wanted to get in and review this cheap phone, but nobody had the cheap version. So a bunch of reviews were saying, this is a great $300 phone and reviewing their experience with the $400 version. There's a little bit of a gap there. Now they are still selling the $300 version.

I get that. That's more on the reviewers, but that is the difference there. I just think we got to just be honest. That's what it comes down to. Just be honest. So yeah, if you see the headlines there, it's not going to be $129 pretty much. If you managed to get it, you got probably a really, really good deal there. Yeah. Congrats on the bots. Yeah. All right. I have a quick headline before we get into M1 stuff. We're not even going to really talk about the article. It is just such a 2020 tech headline that I loved it too much. Apple head of security accused of offering iPads as bribes for concealed gun permits. It's happening. It's a Verge article. I'll link it in the show notes,

but I just love to imagine a guy going into wherever you need to get your gun permit would just like i think it's like 200 it was like 20 000 worth of ipads i think it was like half a million oh was it oh no six digits it was like 200 ipads i guess i don't know it was a lot it was a lot of money and bro my only thought is if you have the job as the apple head of security and you have access to a million dollars of ipads you have a pretty good job man don't risk it for some some gun permits like come on yeah i feel like apple's probably got the power to pull stuff yeah i don't know it all seems ridiculous i don't think there was much in the article but it was

just it's too funny it's 2020 2020 rolls on man that's crazy uh. I wanted to talk M1 Mac for a little bit. I know you do. So I'm sitting right here in front of the M1 MacBook Pro. And when I say M1, I'll just give the quick little explainer. If anyone has missed out on these headlines, we saw that Apple was announcing the first couple of Macs with Apple Silicon in them. They announced a Mac Mini, a MacBook Air, and a MacBook Pro,

all with this new M1 chip that are essentially identical minus the baseline MacBook Air, which has a seven-core GPU instead of eight-core GPU, but essentially they all have the same chip. Their only performance difference is in the thermal envelope of the computer they're in, and they're all crushing, crushing in a lot of benchmarks, performance tests,

and everyday use from pretty much every review I have seen. They're amazing. That's the basic thing I wanted to just get out there is like, we had a whole bunch of questions when the announcements first happened about like, all right, unlabeled graphs, like big claims. We knew there was going to be some performance and some efficiency gains, but how good will they really be?

there's going to be some performance and some efficiency gains but how good will they really be uh this macbook pro that i'm using has a claimed 20 hour battery life of video playback that's what's most impressive to me is battery life like the macbook the m1 macbook air even if you're not a video editor or anything just seems like such a good buy right now. Like just, if you have a MacBook Air, you're probably spending all day in class taking notes or you're writing stuff all the time as a journalist. It's gonna be so good for you. Battery life is going to just be so nice. It's so good for that.

So here's what is crazy. These new M1 Macs have gotten such good reviews and are so good that a lot of my friends, you know, YouTubers, people are texting me are like, should I get one of these to start doing my mobile work on? And while the answer is yes, they are incredible and probably can actually handle that. I still have to give them the answer of no, be patient because the real pro ones are coming later.

Apple plans to eventually upgrade their entire lineup. We'll get a 16-inch MacBook Pro with Apple Silicon. We'll get an iMac with Apple Silicon. We may even see a Mac Pro with Apple Silicon, but we gotta wait. So yes, the MacBook Air and the Mac Mini, while I would ordinarily never recommend those for 4K video editing,

you legitimately can do that on these now, which is crazy. There's no fan in the MacBook Air. A 13-inch fanless Ultrabook can edit 4K video and not even sweat to the level of some desktop replacements. It's crazy. So yes, they're really, really great, but I think the tools that are in the pipeline

and they're going to be upgraded sometime soon, this is kind of how I ended my review. It's like, be patient. Those are going to be even more amazing and I can't wait. That being said, I have a question about them. And it's probably, it mostly has to do with the GPU side. I don't know what the future of Apple Silicon plus dedicated GPUs looks like. And I talked about this on FaceTime actually with Austin Evans recently.

We were kind of just pondering the future of M1 where it made perfect sense for all of these three new Macs to come out with the M1 chip. And the M1 chip has a built-in integrated GPU, and it's phenomenal. And it outperforms anything Intel ever built integrated into their chips, right? So we're like, all right, this is super efficient. It's great. But if you still want a dedicated GPU like the 16-inch MacBook Pro has, you have to get a 16-inch MacBook Pro still, and you'll see some performance benefits with that. So when Apple moves on to upgrading the 16-inch MacBook Pro, for example, are they going to make like an Apple GPU? Are they going to make an M1X with a better integrated GPU? Are they going to make Apple Silicon Macs work with AMD GPUs?

No clue. I mean, and the same question also kind of goes with, isn't all the RAM integrated in the M1 chip as well? Right. So now all of the system memory, both the GPU memory and just your RAM is all just one shared unified memory architecture, basically. Yes.

So are there going to be like a million different types of M1 chips, like upgraded M1 chips? Are they going to play differently with expandable RAM or external GPUs? It's all kind of a who, then, then, then. It's kind of up in the air. I think we're kind of guessing like, all right, let's call it the M1X is the next one.

It's a 12-core chip and a 12-core GPU, and it pops in the new MacBook Pro. Will you see good enough performance on that that you don't need a dedicated GPU anymore, or are you still going to want a dedicated GPU? A lot of apps really depend on having those cores and having that RAM built into the GPU, so I don't know. And I also just can't imagine a Mac Pro, like a fifty thousand dollar tower machine with one gigantic chip and no upgradable ram i can't yeah when you get to mac pro that's where i really start wondering like because how much ram do you have in your mac pro right now i currently have 768 gigs of ram in my mac pro like what oh my god i don't even know what happens like yeah i am i'd like to imagine there's some crazy

labs underground underneath the fountain on apple campus or whatever where they've built this machine already and it just has this silly high performance but it's just like do we do we do this is it actually good enough i don't know i'm because like when i picture is this too powerful will we destroy the world with this chip it's crazy like when I see the iPhone's camera and it does all this computational photography all this amazing stuff with this tiny tiny tiny sensor and then I see like these mirrorless cameras which are like a little bit bigger but have a full frame huge silicon sensor and I look at that that's simo sensor and I'm like wow imagine that in an iPhone imagine that with all the computational

you know photography work that Apple can do on their chips and then I think like the Mac Pro version of that would be like a Hasselblad a hat like a full frame like a like a mic not full frame like a what is it called again oh god I'm blanking on the sensor size medium format yeah a medium format sensor with like all of the computational. You'd probably need a whole computer for that. But that's the level that I'm seeing this upgrade to Apple Silicon on. I have no idea. I think it's safe to say you're pretty hyped

about what the potential for the future is. I really hope they do because I feel like you are going to go into a sad, sad state if they don't get it to that point. You're going to be very, very upset. So let's tone our hype down a little bit. Let's not get upset.

Here's where I'll leave it. I am currently using the 13-inch MacBook Pro, the M1 MacBook Pro. It has been amazing. This is all of the computer I need on the go because I don't edit video on my laptop. That might change if there's some amazing one in the future, but again, toning down my hype.

The battery is so good. I think I tweeted a while ago, I'd use Safari. Safari, I mean, all the Apple apps are super efficient, but as all these apps get updated now, they're so good with battery. I'd use this machine for, I think, about an hour and a half, and I just checked my battery real

quick before I closed the lid and it said 96% battery and I just laughed out loud and closed the laptop like this is crazy this is great would you say like the biggest m1 benefit right now to the average consumer is just it's just battery life on a laptop like is the is the macbook air one of the like best everyday laptops probably right now? I think that was the biggest gain, yeah. So Apple still sells an Intel version of the MacBook Pro, but they don't let you buy an Intel MacBook Air anymore. Their most popular laptop, the MacBook Air, just M1,

and I think you'll start seeing them everywhere, and people are going to love them. And if you do start to create, let's say you don't at all, you just use it daily. And then suddenly you start shooting videos on your iPhone and you just want to start, you know, chopping together some whatever for YouTube, Instagram, whatever you're doing, it's going to be great for that too. So the fact that your headroom is that much higher and the battery life is that much longer is just a win overall. So small. I think the MacBook Air seems like that perfect. I'm a win overall so small i think the mac the macbook air seems like that perfect i'm a parent i want to buy my kid a laptop for college the macbook air is going to do

everything they want has potential for more and the number one thing for when you're sending a kid off to school is they can run to an apple store and fix it at any point so it just seems like i have a lot of people who ask me like, what should they buy their kid for college? I think M1 MacBook Air right now seems to be, if the budget's there, the best option. That's where it's at. All right, let's take a quick break. We've been talking for a while. We'll come back.

We'll get into Black Friday and smartphone camera bracket. With Uber Reserve, good things come to those who plan ahead. Family vacay? Reserve your ride as soon as you book your flights. To all the planners, now you can reserve your Uber ride up to 90 days in advance. See Uber app for details. This holiday season, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health is counting on your support. CAMH is on a mission to make better mental health care for all a reality. And they've made incredible strides forward, breaking down stigma, improving access to care, and pioneering research breakthroughs. But now is the time to aim even higher.

You can help create a world where no one is left behind. Donate at CAMH.ca slash donate now from December 23rd to the 31st, and your gift will be tripled for three times the impact. Okay, we're back. We're going to go over some, I kind of wrote this section as like a Black Friday slash Cyber Monday rules. I think right now you're going to see, right now you might be listening to this, why you're like literally shopping Black Friday deals on the internet. But I feel like you're going to see a million videos or articles that say like, best Black Friday deals on the internet. But I feel like you're

going to see a million videos or articles that say like best Black Friday deals, this, you're going to try and save a bunch of money. It's Black Friday. You're just going to go on the computer and try and find every deal you can. So rather than do deals that we found, one, because it's not even Black Friday yet and we can't put the podcast out the same day, we're going to kind of go over like a couple of rules to just follow, I think, as you're going into this, because today's a really easy day to just waste a ton of money. Yeah. These are like pro tips. Yeah, kind of.

These are also kind of like jaded tips. Possibly. We've lived through enough disappointing Cyber Mondays and Black Fridays that we know what to look out for and not be disappointed by. Exactly. Yeah. All right. So I have a bunch of different kind of little rules here to go by. fridays that we know what to look out for and not be disappointed by exactly yeah um all right so i have a bunch of different kind of little rules here to go by i'm just going to go through them i've written these all out ahead marquez hasn't um gotten the chance to read it yet so he's just going to kind of react and throw in his uh tips and tricks of the trade my two cents we go through

it yeah so uh i think the one of the most important things is like, know what you want. Have an idea of like what you're looking for. Do you have like some tech upgrades? Like maybe you're finally looking for a 4K TV. Maybe you're still using a PlayStation 2 and you're trying to upgrade a console or you need a new phone. Like kind of have an idea of what you're looking to get before you go into these websites.

Because it's so easy to just type in Amazon and 50 deals come up and you're just like, oh yeah, electric toothbrush, I need one of those. I kind of do need a blender, actually. I thought you were actually telling me you needed a blender. Yo, food processors are hot right now. I mean, yeah, it's fun.

But I think kitchens are actually a great example. The amount of things I have in my kitchen that I probably don't need because they're one-use things, it's a lot. And there's a lot of times those just sit in a cabinet or a cupboard somewhere because I found a great deal on an air fryer. And then I realized I don't really use the air fryer that much. So just have a sense of an idea. I think a good example here is like,

if you want a new TV, say you want to finally upgrade to a 4K TV, go into these deals with kind of what you're looking for and don't stray away. Don't settle for anything. I have a great addition to that. So, okay, TVs are going to be one of the big upgrades. They always are.

And they should be, especially now, because new consoles are arriving in a lot of people's homes also over the next few months. Yeah. So when we say know what you want, do a little bit of research into actually, like, spec on paper knowing what you want. Because some of these consoles have features

that you might be interested in taking advantage of. Maybe it's you want a 4K screen. Maybe it's you want a high refresh rate screen. Make sure you look into actually getting that because what you'll find is a lot of the TVs that are going to be on sale that are going to be super cheap and going to be amazing deals are going to be the ones that have been on the shelves for the last year or two and don't have those features. And they're looking to get rid of them as fast as possible so they can move in the new, more expensive, high-margin stuff. So you might walk in, or not walk in, you might log in and see, oh wow, a $799 TV for $250. I want a new big TV. This is it. It'll go great with the PS5. It might not. So double-check

exactly what you want. For a lot of people, I think it's going to be their first 4K TV. Exactly. Look out for that. There's going to be their first 4K TV. Exactly. Look out for that. There's going to be plenty of 4K TVs available. And I think a lot of other people are going to be looking for their first OLED TV, which is another big advantage for a lot of stuff. I think OLEDs, HDR OLEDs look amazing, and you can start getting them for really good prices.

But if you see a good deal, make sure you're actually getting that. Yeah, because say you want 4K, you want OLED, you want high refresh rate. If you find like a 4K TV that's, you know, 20% off, if you miss the high refresh rate or miss the OLED and then in two years, you're really upset, was it really worth saving one or $200 if then in two years, you're going to just want to be upgrading again like tvs are something you hold on to for five or ten years make sure the upgrade's worth it it honestly like make the investment it's going to cost more if you wind up upgrading earlier because you settled for something just because it was a deal which probably like you said means it was two years old and sitting on a track somewhere that is uh that is one of my great rules of thumb for life, honestly.

The longer you plan on having something, the less I would want to skimp on price. If you only want to have this thing for a year, like maybe you only want to have this new phone for a year, fine, a lot of people do that. You can shop way lower in price. You only plan for it lasting about a year. But if you want something that you know you're going to have for nine, ten years,

like a lot of people don't upgrade their TV forever. Or if you want to have, I mean, you could apply this to cars or I applied this to LASIK. Like, don't cheap out on something you plan on having for the foreseeable future because the reason it's so cheap is probably because it's not built to last as long. That being said, you can get a good deal on a well-built TV. You just got to actually do that research yeah reviews exactly reviews don't don't happen it's gonna be there's gonna be a lot of pressure on black friday to think something's gonna go away and chances are it might so it's a tough but just be okay with that like make your make a good investment in the long run it's going

to be more worth it and i I know you guys are probably, some people might be thinking like, oh, I don't have that much money to spend on it. That's fine. Then just budget yourself, make your decisions beforehand so you don't get tricked by some looks like good deal and then wind up making a big mistake on that.

All right, so we got another one here about what might look like a good deal but isn't actually a good deal and how you can figure out what's a good deal or not. Should we get into that? Yes. I think it's really easy for Black Friday to see a bunch of stuff that says like 50% off MSRP. MSRP. MSRP is good old fashioned manufactured suggested retail price. What does that even mean anymore basically nothing you know how some phones go on sale and they'll have an msrp of a thousand bucks and then they'll never once for a single minute sell it for that price it'll immediately be 800 exactly when's the last thing you bought

off amazon that didn't have a price with a line through it and negative yeah yeah um there's a website i like called camel camel camel i've been using it for a long time it's a hilarious name uh it's a website and in chrome or like a internet browser extension basically lets you track the prices and graphs prices over time of the item you're looking at the extension lets you do it right in like amazon but chances are most of these deals you're seeing have been these deals before. And Black Friday is nothing special. Yes, that is facts. Okay, so I have a similar, there's a Tractor Chrome plugin that does the same thing. It'll give you a little graph for the new and used price underneath the Amazon listing.

And a lot of times what you'll see, and I've found this whenever I recommend people buy like the M50s, the popular headphones, I'm wearing them right now. They go on sale fairly regularly and you can sort of see a pattern where like, wow, they've been at this 125 bucks for like four months now. It would be silly of me to buy them now because they're about ready to get back on sale and go back down to 99 bucks. And so if you can study these graphs, I don't want to say study, but like really just take a glance at the graph and you'll pretty easily realize, oh, this Black Friday deal is the same price it always is around every three months.

Or you'll notice, oh, the price went back up a month ago so it could drop back down again for Black Friday. You'll start to see a lot of this stuff and realize, oh, I was going to get tempted by this deal, but it's actually not that amazing of a deal. That is a very useful plugin. We'll link that in the show notes, I think. Yeah, we'll link it in the show notes. I also, you say studying graphs. If you don't want to do something like that, there's another website called Slick Deals where you can set up alerts on certain items that you want and get email

notifications for when something like that drops in price. So if you're looking at the M50s and you know they're going to drop in price soon rather than checking it every day you can just go to slick deals and write in yeah looking for this alert me when it drops under a certain price um i've done that with so many things in the past and i still get emails because i forget to unsubscribe from it but promo stuff goes on sale all the time black friday is just trying to get you to buy asap because it's q4 and they want to make as much money as possible when you just said that emails i just remembered like there's a couple days of the year when you just get a ton of emails for whatever reason and black friday or at least

the days leading up to it and that cyber monday stuff is just endless emails about like this this promo this sale um i wouldn't get too worked up about an email you got. I think just again, know what you want. I have just one more quick thing. You're probably going to go on a million websites or YouTube and you're going to see a bunch of gift guides. Just understand that. And this is something we do in our videos, not off of this, And this is something we do in our videos, not off of this, but almost every influencer or content creator or tech blog or whatever has affiliate links. Right. And make sure you trust the people you're going through those affiliate links because they are awesome and terrible at the same time.

If you really trust the people that are writing it, the affiliate link is a free way to support them. And it's amazing. Exactly. is a free way to support them and it's amazing. If it's a sketchy website that's just listing 100 Black Friday deals with literally no information and affiliate links, it's a cash grab and chances are they're putting zero effort into what's actually coming out. Yeah, for me, typically I see affiliate links all the time. I don't think there's any problem with them.

I think they're fine. But something I've noticed generally is the more you see of them, the worse probably is so you see like I trust and follow wirecutter and they do their research and they'll link me the the best products and it'll be an affiliate link and I'm happy to purchase from that and that affiliate link what that means is let's say there's a I don't know let's go with 10% for sake simplicity there's a 10% rule where for every product that they sell on Amazon,

they will get a 10% kickback on the price of the item that they sold. So Amazon can track that and reward people for sending them to Amazon. So that's a good thing. So for Wirecutter, I buy it from them. They get a little kickback for doing their research and I'm supporting them for free.

The negative of that is, you know, you'll see people linking like 75 things and they're all affiliate links and they're just like, please click one of these because it'll track you on Amazon and eventually you buy something and I get credit for it. And that can kind of get a little bit out of hand, a little bit crazy sometimes.

So yes, I think as long as you're made aware that the link you're looking at is an affiliate link, no problem. But generally, my rule of thumb, the more you see of them the less quality they are yeah i think that's good uh do you want to go into now our gift guide sure okay let's start let's go shameless plugs let's immediately go yeah let's i love that immediately okay we have two here icons icons you want to do icons i just want to get into icons. Do it. This is weird. If you're one of the people listening to this podcast at like four or five in the morning today,

one good morning or I guess good afternoon if you're somewhere else in the world. But like this technically hasn't dropped yet. It is dropping today. So you might even get a little sneak preview. I don't want to say sneak peek because you're listening. It's a less visual preview, but you'll get the idea. So yes, we are launching what I would consider the first MKBHD product line. It is a collab with dbrand and it is called Icons. And so basically I'm going to, I'll try to describe this as best I can, but we've partnered with dbrand in the past and they are sort of like the perfect perfect tech channel sponsor i think a lot of people like see them everywhere and they start to wonder why they're everywhere it's because

they're kind of perfect like they make accessories to every piece of tech we review right uh i'm gonna take a little bit of credit for being like kind of the first one to start working with them heavily i think i nexus 5 might be the first phone i showed their skins on. And they've been a channel sponsor since like right after that. So they've been great. They're great because it doesn't take away or add any conflict of interest to what is actually being reviewed. While also providing a high quality product that's like very easily recommendable. Exactly. Yeah.

And also I'm not a big case guy. So every time I want to customize or change a color of it, it's like easily recommendable. Exactly. Yeah. And also, I'm not a big case guy, so every time I want to customize or change a color of it, it's perfect for me to put a skin on it. You're a big Mac guy, so that works out perfect. So we're out here thinking of ways. I think dbrand came to me about a year ago at this point with sort of a blank slate idea of we should collaborate on a product and a full custom thing.

MKBHD and dbrand making a new thing. I was like, yeah, that's good. We, we kind of, we, we actually kind of did like a super simple version of this a long time ago. Again, maybe like five, six years ago. It was like a little red, black and white carbon fiber three pack called it MKBHD edition. Super simple, little discount, nothing too crazy. But like we wanted to do something new custom. Right. so basically what we came up with was this icon print so it's a hundred unique icons all of them perfectly like vectorized and the exact same size and in the same style and these hundred icons are laid out and arrayed in a way where basically you skin a device and it's got this array of icons either in red or black or black on black and every single one of these icons is something specific,

either tech related or related to the channel or dbrand or social media or something in the past few years or tech. And so if you guys like Easter eggs, you're gonna start to see a lot of this stuff in those 100 icons. And they're sweet. I mean, I'm obviously biased.

I don't know if you wanna get into it, but it looks so good. It looks great. and they're sweet. I mean, I'm obviously biased. I don't know if you want to get into it, but it looks so good. It looks great. They sent us the first email with the links and everything or just like samples of it and I was blown away. It just looks so clean,

but at the same time can be super, I don't want to say busy because it doesn't physically look busy, but there's so much to it and there's just so much you can look at and you can spend so much time just skimming through it. We've shot with these quite a few times now and we're still like, oh, that icon is an ethernet port

or that is- I forgot about the 3090 in there. Yeah, there's the Boston Dynamics dog. There's so many cool things in it and it's just, it looks really good. It has kind of like a Louis Vuitton feel to it, which might not be up to everybody's like. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That might not be what everybody's dying to have is like Louis Vuitton, but it's just a really nice pattern at like a 45 degree angle, and it just looks super clean. From far away, it looks like kind of a cool pattern. Then you close up on it, and it looks fantastic. At the risk of taking away a few of the phone sales,

I think it looks better on bigger devices. I think it looks super good on laptops and tablets because you get more of that lineup on the pattern. But anyway, yeah, lots of really good stuff in there. So there's also not just skins. You can customize a grip case. Obviously, you can toss a skin on that. But we're also doing a Rubik's Cube.

We're doing masks, and we're doing microfibers. I talk about all of this in a video that's dropping today, Friday, so the day you're listening to this, you'll get the full scoop. You'll get the visuals. You'll get that crispy B-roll. You'll be able to see it. You'll be able to buy it. It's called Icons. I think I've relentlessly plugged this enough. You should definitely check it out. Oh, yeah. Last thing I just want to mention is everyone out there who loves to find all our easter eggs we've been teasing this skin in like eight to ten videos and dbrand just announced or had a tweet that the collab was happening a couple days ago not a single person has made the reference to that like one of our thumbnails is literally the skin in the background pixel five no one i haven't seen a single person

make the connection of that we have shown what the skins look like i think you know i i want to just say like oh i'm so disappointed in you guys but i think it's it's contextual where you don't see it as a skin like when you see it as a background you're like oh cool background when you see it as a little rubik's cube you're like oh cool cube but once you see it as a skin on a device then i think more people would have clicked and we haven't shown them that yet so i'll give them that okay i'll give you guys that if you're listening you're lucky i give you zero credit you lose so anyway grab your icons it's uh it's starting out black friday and it's gonna be good cool uh also merch stuff we've made the majority of our merchandise uh on demand there are a couple items that we really like that just due to the printing process can't be on demand

um hoodies jackets kind of the non-t-shirt things so just fair warning the last campaign is open right now and ends i believe either last day day of November or first day of December. Because that is just the window we need to be able to ship everything out before the holidays. Go check it out. We also made a couple new stocking stuffers. One is an enamel pin that looks really nice. I heard about these. If you just need something little, go check it out.

Lots of stuff available over there. We're really excited. What was our last? Oh, we made that new flip phone T-shirt design that I think just. I got to get Austin Evans that T-shirt. Austin needs to literally only wear that for the rest of his life. That man loves his Galaxy Z Fold 2. No, he's a Z Flip guy.

Z Flip 2 5G. Got to say the whole name. Got to get it right. But yeah, that's an Austin shirt for sure. Yeah. All right. So we got a couple actual suggestions aside from all this plugging that are some maybe holiday pickups for you guys interested.

What is this first one? So me, Ross, I think I might have this actually. I think you've used both of these things. These are my... This is like a... These would be gifts that aren't necessarily fun to give, but useful to give and they're great budget options. So like.

Look, if it doesn't have to be flashy, but tech gifts are low key. Some of the best gifts when you get the right thing. I've given away Google Home minis and people open them and are like, cool. And then like three months later, they're like, I have one in every room. Bro, I talk to it every day. It like it's my best friend those super useful things so let's see i have there are these miras i think that's how you pronounce it smart outlets um i bought them two years ago i think because i was terrified of my christmas tree burning the house down and forgetting all the time like i'm sure everyone's had that moment where they wake up in the middle of the night

and like i didn't turn the christmas tree off it's definitely on fire right now um so these are just cheap cheap outlets they connect to wi-fi they have an app on the phone you can set timers for them it's four outlets for 30 bucks on amazon right now like talk about possibly the cheapest way to get your home acting like a smart home i will i will toss in my two cents because i know first of all i know hoverboards always caught on fire but do christmas trees catch on fire that much it's like an old thing with like dried pine needles and cruddy old light bulbs like a real christmas tree ah that makes sense oh you're you're too high tech and no wait do you have one of those like smart ones where you can like uh no no control all the oh you need the like rgb ones

no i have a plastic christmas tree and not plastic but like you know not real dry pine needle and then it has like a you wrap the lights around it and it's fine no i was just thinking you can use this uh smart uh outlet for like smart you can turn a regular lamp into a smart bulb you can have a regular bulb and a regular lamp and you can control it with your Google Home by connecting it to this smart outlet. So it's more than just a Christmas tree. If you want to say, hey, insert assistant here,

turn off the Christmas tree, that's dope. But you can have, without paying a bunch on smart bulbs, a bunch of new smart lamps in your house. So there you go. I've basically turned mine into, in the summer, like a smart thermostat. So I don't have central air in the place I'm renting right now, so we have window units.

All of them are plugged into one of these outlets and left on. So when I'm on my way home, if it's a hot day, I can just turn all my window units on from the car. So it's nice and cool in there. I mean, if you want to hook it up to your coffee pot because you're scared you left the coffee pot on, it's just like an ease of mind and and four for 30 bucks is a pretty good deal i think then something else like that i just tweeted about this recently but wise cam has to be one of the just like cheapest security cams out there right now 20 bucks for one of them i have a couple in

my house it's another thing that's just super easy to check on how the house is doing. I can check on if Mac has gotten into something in the kitchen or if I have a package delivered. Mac doesn't get into things. He's a good dog. That's not true at all. I can vouch for the Wyze Cam.

I think something about the Wyze Cam is it's just a simple white box. I think something about the Wyze Cam is like, it's just like a simple white box. I think a lot of people want to get like the flashy 4K smart, you know, Nest IQ, whatever it is. They don't even call it that anymore. But basically at its core, the functionality is you just need to have a camera somewhere so you can see something real quick.

And they get the job done for cheap. And you've said last a surprisingly long time so that i have one on a porch an indoor camera on my porch so it's a covered porch but it still like gets hit with rain and stuff and it's been outside for two years and still goes i finally uh have a couple of the new versions coming in to give them a try but honestly for 20 bucks you could just hook one up outside your door and probably if there's someone coming to like steal a package or try and break into your house they would just see a camera even if it wasn't plugged in and not do it like i i'd call that worth 20 bucks for sure shout out to

their mascot as their mascots our favorite mascot listen i like a lot of sports mascots i like a lot of random other mascots but at the top of my power rankings for all time best mascot for any product or any company is the Wisecam Cyclops. And I am dead serious. It is at the top. If you want to go look it up, you can go look it up. I can't promise you'll sleep tonight, but it is absolutely at the top. All right, moving on.

Cool. Do you have anything before I get into anything else I have on here? I have a couple other fun options, but they're all gaming things. I can keep talking, and if you... I can just keep giving my two cents, I guess. Okay. Yeah.

I don't know where I am. I'm just going to start. All right. Next up I have, since I'm everyone's favorite MKBHD gaming expert here, AKA probably the only one who plays any games here and still makes me sad. I think wireless mice this year have been my favorite thing I've discovered.

I don't know why I was so stubborn for so long. It's my favorite gaming peripheral since I bought a high- rate monitor. Wow, that's a big deal. Changed everything the most. I have the Logitech G Pro wireless. They just came out with a light version. That's a pretty expensive gift. That's like $150. So I don't know if I would full on recommend that. If you're down with spending $150, you're giving someone a fantastic mouse there. you're down with spending $150, you're giving someone a fantastic mouse there. There's two other options though. There is a SteelSeries Rival 3 wireless that's 50 bucks right now, which has to be like one of the cheapest good low latency wireless mice out there.

It's a little heavy. It's like a hundred grams. The G Pro wireless is like 80 grams. So if you're not used to something yet, you probably won't notice that much of a difference. Once you start getting used to things that are lighter, you don't want to go heavier. How many grams is MX Master? An MX Master? I think we've looked at it. It's probably like 150.

141. Wow, you just eyeballed the mouse and knew how much. I just gauged from what I know. So then the next one is Glorious Model O just released a wireless version also. That's a light one, right? Yeah, they're the honeycomb ones that are super light.

Actually, I don't have it written down here. My Model O that had a wire in it was 60 grams, so I'm guessing it's going to be the same if not lighter because you don't have any drag. I haven't gotten to use it, but I loved that mouse before I got the wireless one. the same if not lighter because you don't have any drag um i haven't gotten to use it but it i

loved that mouse before i got the wireless one i think it's probably going to be great and i know it it can handle anything us casual gamers are doing because there's a ton of pros using it already uh yeah hiko probably one of the best valorant players out there right now is currently using it so it's good, 80 bucks, not bad. Maybe buy it for yourself. I'd say that's probably a sweet spot for a wireless mouse right now. Nice.

I'll just toss in, I've, so I'm working on like a everyday tech carry video. I've found that it's very similar from year to year because I use a lot of the same stuff on the regular. The speakers that have been on my desk, same thing since like 2006 or something crazy, like a long time. Maybe not that long, but I've used the same mouse for a while, the same keyboards for

a little while. So I'm going to give a shout out to my mouse, which is the MX Master 3, and it is about $130, $150, something like that. But it's not a gaming mouse. It's a wireless, multifunctioning, ergonomic, kind of just all-around great mouse. One pro tip with it. If your computer is under your desk

and your mouse is above your desk, which I assume your mouse is above your desk, sometimes the receiver being under the desk can have a little bit of lag. And so the best thing that I found, because this was getting really frustrating to me, I'd have this big sheet metal desk, the computer would be underneath,

and it would start lagging, and I'd be like, why does this amazing mouse have so much lag? Best thing you can do is get the receiver on top of the desk with a line of sight. So I plugged the receiver in, actually to the back of my monitors, because there's a USB port back there, and now the lag is gone.

So for anyone who's been struggling with that or wondering why this expensive nice hundred dollar mouse has lag that's the number one thing you need to fix from that point on it has software for it it's got remappable keys it's got a side scroll wheel that I can't live without I video edit like 40% faster because of this mouse uh so big shout out to Logitech's mx master 3 i'm surprised they don't include and i know some i know the glorious includes this i i've seen other mice include this but basically it's like a male usb-a to female usb-a that so you can bring the dongle closer to your keyboard but still hide it somewhere and get rid of interference like that right so i think a lot of people have used this mouse and similar logitech mice with their laptops so they have this

thing called the unifying receiver it's a usba tiny little receiver um obviously don't have many usba ports in my laptops these days so i have an adapter for it um but the idea is you can plug it into anything and immediately have this mouse work on like any surface, on a plane, on a glass table in a hotel, just anything. You can just use it anywhere. So yeah, it doesn't come with that. That would be something smart to include maybe if they made like a higher end version.

I think you can buy ones on Amazon for like 10 bucks too. Yeah, so if you can't put it in your monitor's USB port, you can grab one of those. But yeah, shout out to that mouse. I think, how long have we talked? We've gone- 54 minutes. Okay, well, anyway, I think we'll end it on just again.

Check out the icons drop. That video's coming out today, and I'm really proud of all the work we put into this collab, like the packaging, the Rubik's Cube themes, like every little thing. Dbrand went all out with this. Exactly. So it's really good, and I'll end on that note because I think it's worth it. But again, if you're shopping for something this holiday season, whether it's Black Friday or Cyber Monday, stay safe, wear a mask, do it responsibly, and we'll catch you guys. Shop local

if you can. I know tech's hard to shop local, but I will always make sure to say shop local. People are struggling right now. If it's possible, it'd be great. So now let's take another quick break. We talked for a bit and we'll get back and talk about this gigantic blind smartphone camera test that we're yourself the gift of better mental health. BetterHelp Online Therapy connects you with a qualified therapist via phone, video, or live chat. It's convenient and affordable and can be done from the comfort of your own home. Having someone to talk to is truly a gift, especially during the holidays. Visit betterhelp.com

to learn more and save 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Support for the show today comes from NetSuite. Anxious about where the economy is headed? You're not alone. If you ask nine experts, you're likely to get 10 different answers. So unless you're a fortune teller and it's perfectly okay that you're not, nobody can say for certain. So that makes it tricky to future-proof your business in times like these. That's why over 38,000 businesses are already setting their future plans with NetSuite by Oracle. This top-rated cloud ERP brings accounting, financial

management, inventory, HR, and more onto one unified platform, letting you streamline operations and cut down on costs. With NetSuite's real-time insights and forecasting tools, you're not just managing your business, you're anticipating its next move. You can close the books in days, not weeks, and keep your focus forward on what's coming next. Plus, NetSuite has compiled insights about how AI and machine learning may affect your business and how to best seize this new opportunity. So you can download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash waveform. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash waveform. netsuite.com slash waveform. netsuite.com slash waveform.

You know what's great about ambition? You can't see it. Some things look ambitious, but looks can be deceiving. For example, a runner could be training for a marathon, or they could be late for the bus. You never know. Ambition is on the inside. So that thing you love, keep doing it. Drive your ambition.

Mitsubishi Motors. All right, welcome back. Let's talk smartphone cameras. So we, at the end of every year, have sort of built this tradition of a couple of main staple videos. Like once everything comes out, we get to evaluate everything that came out in the year.

So 2020, we're gonna have our smartphone awards which i'm so excited for we went hard this year we have a couple other things but this one this blind smartphone camera test never fails to be one of the most interesting entertaining assortment of findings from the stuff that came out in the year it's because we have like no real control over it. Like we, we get to judge it, but we don't get to like make the decisions. So it's just always fun kind of seeing what everybody, what everyone's doing. So for those unfamiliar with the concept or the idea is, well, we already know what we like in a smartphone. I'll tell you during the year, listen, the iPhone had a great camera. The Pixel had a great camera. The Note 20 had a great camera. And I can explain to you, I can describe to you, I can show you the photos. But at the end

of the day, that's pretty subjective. And if you like something about some other camera, you can just like other cameras. And that's cool. So what we do is, in order to sort of discover the consensus people's choice best camera, we take 16 smartphones that came out during the year, set them up bracket style, that's why there's 16, take the labels off all of them, just take the same photo with every single one and bracket style match them up and compete them against each other.

Now what happens is you're putting now photos next to each other and so people start to eyeball them back and forth and will pick a winner without knowing which phone is which. So they might see one from a Samsung, one from an iPhone and go, hmm, I kind of like this one. It's a little brighter. And they'll just pick, you know, the Samsung without even knowing it. And that's sort of the original idea was like, hey, people think they like one thing, but they might pick the other thing. So this is the third year we're doing it. Yeah. And so now we kind of have this behind the scenes look of how are we going to set this up to give everyone a fair shot?

Yeah, kind of our thought process. Yeah, to sort of make this happen and to sort of learn the most we possibly can from it. And I think one of the things is that this is a video that has so many variables that every year people have suggestions and we read all the suggestions. There's just like because of how fair we're trying to be there's a lot of and just our time as well there's a lot of people suggesting a lot

of crazy things that make total sense but just we don't have the time to do that um so i just kind of wanted to go over why i think we're just going to kind of talk about why we made these decisions and answer kind of like a couple of frequently asked questions on why we decided to do all the things we did because almost every single idea makes perfect sense. It's just there are so many ideas. We can't do all of them. Yeah. When you see the photos we've taken and the way we've arranged it, every single thing has a reason for it. Like there's a reason behind the photos, the arrangement of the photos, the composition of each photo, the arrangement of the bracket. When you eventually get that revealed, we're kind of in the middle of it right now.

We're after like three and a half rounds or something like that. But yeah, everything has a reason and we'll talk through those reasons. So first of all, we got to make the bracket. I think that's the place to start, right? So I think the natural thing to do would go, all right, let's pick the 16 best cameras that came out this year. Start right at the top, right?

iPhone 12 Pro Max, Pixel 5, Galaxy Note 20. Let's not get too deep into this. I'm not going to name drop, but I'm giving you the philosophy. Okay. But what we're really doing is we're picking 16. We're including the classic favorites, a lot of those best ones you'd expect. And we're also including just some others that have their own unique advantages.

Some of them are just on cheap phones. Some of them are on swiveling phones. Some of them are just unexpected ones. We always have a meme phone, we call it. Maybe a meme level. Maybe a meme level you would never expect it to win. Like when the Palm phone was in for one year. Exactly.

But let's just see how it does, right? So we got all our 16. And I'll basically just say for that, we're trying to give a healthy mix of different styles to compete against each other so we can ultimately really tell the best one's going to win. I remember one year we had two different pixels in. It wouldn't make much sense to put them both against each other

in the first round. We put them on opposite sides of the bracket with random different opponents. So that brings a good, uh, a good look into kind of like seeding, I guess. Um, I think this is something we've talked about maybe in the future, but we still haven't figured out how to do it is like how to seed these phones, like a regular bracket style, because you kind of don't want two really good phones going up against each other and then maybe a really good phone gets taken out but i i think the main thing here is we're looking at we're looking at everything but the winner the best phone should be able to get by anybody and make it to the end so like yes it

might stink that like a top rated dxxOMark camera gets knocked out in the first round by another top rated DxOMark camera. And I'm just using those because I don't want to say any memes. I don't like giving up any of the phones that we use. But that doesn't really matter that much. Like we're not giving these rankings afterwards. We're not saying like, oh, Pixel was the 15th best phone just in case it got knocked out in the first round that's not what we're looking to do we just kind of want to make this a fun

competition and then see the are like people's choice winner at the end um yeah so we kind of set the brackets up uh pretty randomly we've learned a lot going through this that like cameras can just do really well sometimes and do really poorly sometimes and we try and give them as much of a chance and as every picture we take has different ways it can succeed it's so we don't want to like bias it towards one of them so the the ranking shouldn't really matter that much in the beginning right so the the methodology part which we'll get into in a second i just want to say there are a lot of parallels with March Madness for this, right?

It's the bracket style, obviously, number one. And the fact that there can be upsets and what you might not consider an upset on paper might happen because like you said, there's a lot of different things cameras do. They all operate differently.

One small change we made to our methodology this year was not tapping every single time instead we're just pointing and shooting and letting the camera again make the automatic selection for every single one this year um but again yeah like some cameras will just have fluke weird games some cameras will just have fluke amazing games so yeah it's gonna happen people have suggested uh potentially doing three photos for each round and while i would love to do something like that one that takes so much time especially in the first round of 16 that's a lot of pictures um what is 16 it's like almost 50 photos we have to take in the first round which is just a lot um two upsets are fun like i hope you don't look at this video and get really salty because like a phone you really liked lost that doesn't mean it doesn't have a good camera yeah but a fluke is way much way more fun for the rest of us and the march

madness winner is not necessarily the best team in basketball that year it's who had the best tournament and the same thing is going to happen. There's going to be, you know, there's going to be ones that have really great stretches where they just happen to have a great set of features that work well for the photos. We're going to try our best to throw in different situations with dynamic range and close up versus far away. We did a flat lay this year with different lighting and different mixed conditions that we can hopefully use to evaluate as many different things

as possible about these cameras. But at the end of the day, there's going to be winners and there's going to be losers. And it's not a scientific test. I think that's the thing to take from this is this is not, we're not trying to be as scientific as possible.

It's the opposite of DxOMark. Exactly. It's the opposite of DxOMark pointing at a chart and measuring sharpness. Yeah. One more thing on selections. A lot of people have asked us to do 32 because that's the next step of a general bracket like this. If you can name 32 phones that came out this year and get them all in one place and take the same exact photo with the same controlled lighting with all of them, more power to you. I tried and we have the resources here.

It's hard. I think I made it to potentially 30, but at that point, there's like seven Samsung phones, like five OnePluses. It just felt super unfair to maybe have like potentially one TCL phone and seven, like you just have the benefit of one company potentially getting to the end. There's more horses in the race. Just out of sheer luck. So we kept it to 16. Maybe we could,

we thought about doing a play in bracket of like four phones we were kind of on the edge on, but we just made the executive decision to pick our own 16 this year. That is one thing we're kind of open to maybe changing in the future. I think could have some fun play in brackets, but we'll see. All right. Do you want to get into like round one here? Yeah.

So the round one photo, let me just go ahead and look at the round one photo so I can talk to you about what we did here. Okay. So the first round photo is every single phone takes the same picture of me sitting in front of the window on the blue couch with a bunch of colors and different mixed lighting around me. So there's a couple things you're going to notice right away.

With the first round, we try to give it as many variables as possible. So you're not going to get a fluke winner because, boom, you have better colors. There's a bunch of stuff it has to be better at. So number one, the window behind me is basically a dynamic range test when you start doing A-B comparisons. I'm in the photo usually in the first round because of skin tones. I happen to value skin tones in cameras a lot. So I'm looking at that. And I want to talk more about

white balance overall in a minute. And like saturation always. We always add a lot of colors. Yeah. So what you might remember if you've seen previous versions of the test is usually when you put two photos together and you ask someone to pick the better photo, in like a split second, what do they do? They just pick the brighter one. It just looks like, oh, it got more light. It's better. It's brighter. That's the one. We aren't necessarily trying to bias against that,

but I think we found that with our shooting scenarios, there's less of that just brighter photo win stuff and a little bit more nuanced picking in some closer races. Yeah, I think this year in the kind of three rounds, we're actually in the middle of a third round that we can't call yet because we have one matchup that is like within a couple hundred votes, I think. It is insane. It is insane. it's really cool

250 000 to 250 000 and 300 it's it's so close uh yeah but yeah so like we've set up all these different scenarios where like we said there's a dynamic range test in the background and some cameras just did terrible at it and some of them did really well but because it's this small portion of the window in the back some people kind of overlooked that and there was one photo i i remember i think it was p versus o where p had the better dynamic range but since o did all the other things better it won the scenario and that's these aren't just purely based on brightness there are darker photos that won this first round so i I think we found a good, everyone likes to kind of like poke fun at,

oh, the brightest camera is just gonna win every year. It's like, that's what we found the first year, but we're finding way different things this year. Yeah, that was our main year one finding was when it comes down to it, if two photos look almost the same, the brighter one's gonna win. But I think now that we're in our third year

and we're actually sort of changing up photos so that it's more than just brightness between them um the number one thing that's sticking out to me and i'm we're gonna make a video of course summarizing everything once we get to the finals and we get a winner but what's sticking out to me and this might be by accident that this started happening but in every one of these photos we've had some sort of a neutral color something that's supposed to be like black or gray so in the first photo I'm wearing a black shirt in the second photo which is our flat lay we have the black you know fork and the knife and I think that's maybe less so but again in the third photo we have the black camera and the black asphalt mm-hmm and for me

white balance is starting to come up a lot in these photos. And certain cameras very consistently, and I might not have noticed this as much in previous years, but very consistently bias cool. I don't see quite as many biasing warm, but I see a lot of them going blue on the gray and black hues. And I think it's costing them. I think people are voting for the warmer, more tonally accurate photo when all else is similar.

And that's one of the most interesting things I've found so far. I also find it really interesting. And the fact, when this video comes out, there's always someone who takes all the pictures and puts them together in a bracket. And when you look at that and can see all the photos next to each other

or skim through all of them, you can very quickly see. You might have not thought it was that blue, but when you see it next to some other ones, it's very blue. And if a blue photo manages to match up against a warm photo, they look vastly different. And it's cool to see which way people go. I'm actually someone who I think almost prefers to lean cooler. To me, cooler photos look nicer. Sometimes I, it depends on the scene, I guess. But most of the time with a sky, I like things that lean cool because of the blueness of it. I think that's huge. So you've mentioned the sky.

I think a lot of these cameras realize that there's going to be a sky in a lot of their photos and might buy us a little cool for that reason. And that's because of the second piece, which is specifically saturation. So anytime you have, again, a color in a photo and it's more saturated, the brighter one sort of pops more, the more saturated one sort of pops more

and people like that vibrance. Now, when you have a warm tone in a photo, when the photo is warmer, the warmer tones look more saturated, and vice versa. When you have a cool tone, like a blue, or a sky in a photo, and you bias a little bit towards that cooler Kelvin, that lower color temperature, those lower temperature things look more saturated and vibrant. So what do you do if you have a sky in a lot of photos? You'll air on the side of a little bit cooler, I think, because a bright blue sky looks great and you can dial that in with your HDR. So I think, yeah, we do see a lot of things airing a little bit on the side of cool. And when you have a lot of warm tones like we've had, or at least neutral tones, you'll

start to notice that. Now, speaking of warm, if we want to move to the second round and kind of describe that scene, this is a very warm scene. Our goal on this was, so we get a lot of suggestions on doing night mode photos, and we don't want to do night mode. We want this to be standard cameras right now um because that's just what you take pictures of the most but we were we were trying to think of scenarios and poor lighting in a restaurant is very common so like not night mode but not ideal

lighting so what we did is we shut out all our house lights had the windows open in the background and then we hung an Edison bulb, which is like a super warm light bulb straight above it. Very nice wooden table. We put up some plates. We did a salad, a piece of bread, a drink with a lemon on it. We did a candle.

So you kind of got the warm glow from the candle as well. You had all these different things, greens and reds in the salads, brown on the bread, the forks you had details on the mat there was a million things you could look at here sharpness uh color temperature poor lighting like if it messed up focus because of poor lighting and stuff like that yeah so there's a lot to look at here and this is one where i found myself leaning towards warm pictures because warm felt moody and like you're in a pub or something like that. You could almost hear the like dishes clanking in the background kind of.

And I think more accurate too. Like I'm just looking at them right now and we have this white plate. Yeah. And I think when you're trying to white balance, a camera is generally looking to find the most neutral white thing in the image and make sure it's white. And when you're in this really warm environment and you want to stay true to life, you want to keep that white plate a little bit orange because that's the way it looks to your eye. But a lot of these, when they try to go a little bit cool, they're

trying to bring that warm looking white thing back to white. And then the whole thing becomes a little bit bluer a little bit more pale because of all the warm tones and that was real i feel like that's that's my number one new observation that i didn't really notice in the first two years we did this i think this was one of the best photos in like giving a lot of different uh like scenarios so so just when i was looking i found myself every time i was trying to vote because we vote for these and try and we've been doing making the bracket for so long we generally first and second round don't even remember what phone we're voting for um what did you look for

because i i found myself looking at two specific things of every photo that really like to me help me judge the photo the best sure okay so first round yeah uh let's go second round okay there's just i think there's so much to do and like i i've reading comments people are picking very specific things on why they chose that picture over the other one so i just want to hear what you were looking at so i think i i came into this with uh my my quick glance just being at sharpness and contrast perceived detail and my second glance being at dynamic range. And I had a couple of photographers DM me because they were looking at these photos like, I can't believe people are voting for the photo with worst dynamic range. I'm like, bro, photographers, we want as much information as possible.

So when I bring it in Photoshop, I can adjust as much as I want. Most people aren't thinking that. But if you look at the candle. Yes. A lot of these, you'll see the candle, you'll see the wick, and then you'll see the orange outside, but if you look at the candle yes a lot of these you'll see the candle you'll see the wick and then you'll see the orange outside and you'll see the tin and they'll all be very separated with great dynamic range and some of these it's just blown out the whole thing is just one orange blob because you couldn't handle that much highlights

and the dynamic range was worse that was the second glance for me as the little photographer inside i'm like well this is a better camera because i get more highlight information that to me uh so i looked at two things the candle and the piece of bread the candle to me was dynamic range and some of them did really great some of them did really poorly it's funny because even the ones that didn't really get the flame and just got the glow it it was still a great picture. Like they looked good, which I think means, like you said, some people weren't picking the dynamic rain shots. There was one towards the end where the photo

that you could clearly see the flame in the wick lost to the photo with just the blown out orange candle right there. And that was, I think, the only one I voted against for in that bracket. But then, I think, the only one I voted against for in that bracket. But then also to me, the piece of bread not only showed the detail in the grain in the middle of it, but the outskirts of it, kind of the color and the warmness of it. Some of the pieces of bread look super pale and some of them looked like nice and warm brown and the bread was

very brown. So to me, those are the two things. I know a lot of people looked at the salad, which I think was kind of a tough thing to look at because there's so much detail in the greens in that. Yeah, that'd be your detail test. Yeah, it's a good detail test, but also could potentially look almost over sharpened. Or if the phone does tend to sharpen,

could look really crispy and they're not crispy that's a good to like overly you know the over sharp yeah like clarity like boost it all the way up so like yeah those are the two things I looked at and that's what I voted on but it's really cool to see who looked at what people did the color of the wood grain people looked at the the like reflections of the Edison Bowl there were who looked at what. People looked at the color of the wood grain. People looked at the reflections of the Edison bowl. There were people who looked at the salad, at the tomatoes specifically. This is a fun one. Yeah. We did a lot for this photo. Yeah. Yeah. I think when I look at the overall results of our test, typically, I don't think anyone's

changing their smartphone camera tuning because of our smartphone camera test but in theory if you were if you wanted to win the blind smartphone camera test every year how would you design the the best performing smartphone camera oh man i feel like as someone who gets so deeply invested into this bracket i would rather answer the question of how do i make sure no camera company specifically wins this every year like i want this to be the most fair yet fun it's i'm just always teetering on this weird thing of like i want this to be as fair as possible but i also don't want it to be as scientific as possible like yeah this is supposed to be a i'm it's supposed to mimic i'm scrolling through instagram and someone took a cool picture that i enjoyed looking at yeah and i want to find a camera that can do that really well

true um i don't know exactly what would be the best because it's hard i think if i was trying to win this i would i would focus on like yeah as a company. It would be like two or three things just based... And I think every year we do this, we're gonna learn more about what people start to find in these like little comparisons. I would take Pixel 5 camera, which has a very contrasty, confident look. And I would maximize all the things

that improve perceived quality. And so for me that, you know, Pixel 5 is only 12 megapixels, but because of that contrast, more contrast looks like more sharpness to the eye, even though it's not. So that perceived quality, I would keep that high contrast.

And I think I would just literally, probably just color select. And I would go warm on everything except blue and keep blue really blue so that you have asphalt and it doesn't turn blue when you go with blue sky I would have skin tones stay accurate and warm I would have you know the black shirt and the photo and and the black hair and whatever else actually look accurate and then you'd keep that dynamic range and turn that blue sky nice and blue.

It's like tone mapping it, basically, if I was trying to cheat. And that's how I would do it. I would have the most contrasty, sharp, vibrant photo. Saturation high. I can say one thing. If a camera company out there really wants to make sure they win this, realize that Marques' skin is dark and that you should enjoy dark skins and make them look normal. Oh, this is real.

Some of these phones, they're in regions where there are not a lot of people with dark skin and it shows. Yeah, a lot of people don't want to admit this, but a lot of phones, their features, this is undeniable,

their features are designed for people in different regions. So you'll have different software features because, hey, this app or this plugin is popular in this region, so we built in a feature for it we have ir blasters and phones in these countries because people use that for their tvs um and you find that a lot in cameras where people like uh you've seen these like uh like makeup filters or things like that where you can literally like put makeup on some people did this in their stock camera app where you can like add makeup to your face you know what that means that means they're selling to people who buy makeup

and they're adding this feature in so they can plug it in and you can buy makeup through the camera. And I think this is also true about a lot of phones and especially Asian countries where they just don't have a lot of subjects with dark skin and they don't have to test for that. And that's fine. That doesn't work well because most of their customers don't look like me. And so you'll see a lot of photos with my skin tone in it starting to look a little bit pale and a little bit washed out because they're sort of trying to bend it to look like

what they're used to making skin tones look like. I don't know if there's a fix for that. I don't know if you want to have different software tuning for different regions. That gets a little weird. It brings up an interesting point because it's camera companies understanding that true to life doesn't necessarily mean nicest looking photo in the eyes of many true which is

kind of what we're trying to test here and i guess we're kind of proving that that's correct um that not a lot of these like we've looked at these photos and since we know what the photo is supposed to look like we know what know what true to life really looks like. And not a lot of those phones are winning. And this kind of brings up another point that people ask all the time. They say, why can't you take a DSLR photo for a reference picture? And while saying that right off the bat sounds perfectly reasonable. It's really not. When you're looking on Instagram, you don't have a reference photo. The way screens are calibrated, that reference photo is going to look completely different on almost every single person's screen.

And ultimately, this isn't something that's supposed to look exactly like the reference photo. It's supposed to look pleasing. Yeah. So while I appreciate the the uh embracing of the scientific method among people suggesting a control to our experiment uh i'll remind them that we're trying to make this a not very scientific experiment i have debated i don't think we'll ever do this but i would love to throw like an rx100 in there without telling anyone there is a physical camera in

there but i would be so sad if it or one like it would completely destroy the bracket if it won so i don't think i could ever do it i would just like to see how it fared against other things it's interesting i think honestly my hot take is if we threw a dslr into this blind smartphone camera test it would lose because the computational photography allowing so much more dynamic range out of these multi-frame stitched photos would destroy a typical single shot from a DSLR. The DSLR shot would have much better depth of field

and would have much better focal range and sharpness, but I think it would lose instantly for blowing out the sky. Yeah. That's my hot take. It's supposed to be a photo you take and then bring into an editing software and change to your liking.

Yeah. Exactly. Also, I mean, even with a DSLR, you can completely screw up white balance and there are plenty of ways you can make a ton of mistakes that aren't gonna look like the actual photos. So like, yeah, that's't gonna look like the actual photos. So like, yeah, that's why we don't do reference photos.

Do you wanna kind of talk about our last rounds that we just took pictures of? We haven't gotten to see any results, so this will just kind of be, this will be fun because we can say what we think's gonna happen and then we'll get to see what actually happens. By the time this is out, you'll know what actually happens. Okay, so I pulled up the photo here in front of me. This is the the first one we're doing a close-up subject in a far

away background so this is a couple things you get tested in this number one the size of the sensor will affect the depth of field and how blurred and what that that background bokeh looks like what that is second we have a black camera as a subject, and we have black asphalt in the background. Again, blue sky in the background, so we're getting some dynamic range. And then- Also, hand for skin tone. The hand is in there for skin tone, exactly. You get that yellow on the side for a little more warm color, and then you get the building fall off on the left-hand side. And so this is the semis. Right now, we have versus H on one side and K versus O on the other side.

Most likely K versus O on the other side. It's still close, but it looks like it's going to favor K versus O. Still counting votes. Too early to call this one, but we're probably going to get K versus O on the other side. We'll do the hand recount soon. Exactly. We'll fix that.

So on C versus H, I'm looking at these, and I'm saying H is warmer, and H is just a little bit more vibrant because of it, and I think it wins. I like H the best. I think H might be the best photo out of the four. Yeah, it has a little weird stuff going on in the highlights, actually. Just a little strange stuff.

I don't think it's going to make it lose, but I think overall it is the better photo. Yeah. To me, it just has like, it's very sharp on the camera lens. I think the skin color looks nice and looks warm, but not like crazy. It has a really nice yellow in the background. And while the sky clouds are bright, They still have detail in them. So it's not like crushing down highlights, but it's also not like losing really any information in there. It's funny.

I've already forgotten which one each one of these is. For K versus O, the other side, I'm going to say K is going to win again just because it's a little bit brighter and a little bit warmer, which to me has a little more vibrance on the yellow, on my skin tones brighter and a little bit warmer which to me has a little more vibrance on the yellow on my skin tones and a little more accuracy overall i think i actually think that is the best actually color yeah i was not looking at k because i had it set to the side

i have five photos up because we also have uh a potential recount j i believe which is yeah um k is a very good photo if this were k versus h i think it would be an insanely close fight both of them are on opposite sides right now um i also find it interesting and this is something we're looking at we made the comparison photo between j and o i believe which would be the matchup if J wound up beating K. And O would crush J. Yeah, J looked bad in this one. J is a bad photo.

And I think it's because it looks pale and blue. Super pale. Pale and blue. And I think those go hand in hand. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. It's funny, though, because there are other ones that are warm that still has a nice blue looking.

I would almost argue the blue sky looks better in the warmer pictures and more blue yet that j photo is just washed out yeah i'm gonna have to mess with these and for the final video so uh yeah that is that's my that would be a close one so you think it's going to be h versus k i think i agree with you completely. If it were based off of these photos, if this was finals, it would be like a 50-50 tie. It would be insane. But yeah.

So we don't know what these results are yet. We haven't posted them yet. After you listen to this, go check it out and see. Hopefully we were right and we know what we're talking about. But that's the fun part about this video. Actually, you might know the winner by the time you listen to this actually yeah at least the letter yeah you'll know the letter full video will be out probably within

the next week or two uh we have to gauge our thoughts on everything why we think things won but i think we did a really good job this year of not just letting the bright contrasty photo win yeah um there's way more nuance into all of these shots and i appreciate everyone for voting and all the conversations that have been had behind it they were they're really great read it loved all your all your comments on this it was very fun to see just like pure discussion there with almost no biases because you can't tell what things are so that's my favorite part about this uh this whole thing is the lack of bias that people can have perfect all right well thanks for voting if you want to if you want to look at all the

previous photos i've highlighted the whole thing on my instagram story so you can look back at all the rounds and how you voted and once the the winner is revealed, you'll know what you voted for. But yeah, that's been a long podcast episode. Thanks for hanging out with us on this Black Friday. And we'll get back to you very soon with another episode. Catch you guys later. Waveform is brought to you in part with Studio 71 and our intro outro music was created by Cameron Barlow.