Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Phones Will Cost More, but This Camera Is Free?

Episode Date: January 16, 2026

In this week's episode the cast is joined by Mariah Zenk and we discuss a phone that feels more like a camera than a phone, why a certain Fuji camera is being given away, everything is a subscription, and we wrap up the episode by explaining some non-tech news in tech terms. Enjoy! Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Links: Apple Creator Studio Carl Pei's Tweet Free Fuji X half This Episode is brought to you by: Monarch: https://www.monarch.com/ Shopify: www.shopify.com/waveform Music provided by: Epidemic Sound Social: Waveform Threads: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Waveform Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/waveformpodcast/?hl=en Waveform TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Hosts: Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin Mariah: https://www.instagram.com/totallynotabusinessacc/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Apple has always charged this much for RAM. Like now, we're sort of like in an area. Their origins were insane already. It's like, I was looking it up like now like sticks of RAM cost about as much as the actual RAM upgrades cost for. Dude, like, you try doubling the RAM in a MacBook. It's like, that'll cost you another Mac 800. What is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform podcast.

We're your host. I'm Arquez. I'm Andrew and I'm David. So this week in January, we've got a Xiaomi 17 Ultra in the house. We'll talk about that. We also might talk about why your smartphone might cost more, maybe. We also have some stuff to talk about with something called the Fuji X-half, which I'm told is a total bus. We've talked about it on this podcast before.

Well, we'll see. And I also want to explain something to you guys in tech terms that I think would be really interesting to try to explain. But first. I have a but first. of course. Did anyone see there was a best podcast award at the Golden Globes this year? No. Are you serious?

Yeah, there was. Golden Globes website, by the way, is very bad. It's very broken. I'm not surprised. That's the least surprising sentence I've heard in a long time. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Amy Polar won with Good Hang, which is a great podcast.

Cool. But I think as a podcast, it's only fitting for us to ask for your help. I had no idea how the Golden Globes work. I actually don't really know what the Golden Globes is about, if I'm being honest, or what form of media they award, because now there's a podcast. But listen, it's been my dream ever since I was a little boy to win the Golden Globe. So I think we need Wave Form to win a Golden Globe in 27. How do we do that? I don't know who as the audience can help us, but this is our plea.

You're supposed to apply. I think it's on you. We can apply? I think you're supposed to apply. My bad. We're applying next. year. Yeah. First of all, these shows are always like, I'll be doing something on a Sunday night or whatever, and I'll get a news notification and be like, the Emmys are about to start. And I'm like, I don't care at all. Sorry. But that happened with the Golden Globes. And then I was made aware of the new podcast category. It would be so funny to see all the tables of celebrities and then just uts, twiddling our thumbs waiting to win Best Podcasts. Who else was nominated for Best Podcasts for a Golden Globes? Was it actually good podcast or was it just celebrities who are the Golden Globes who also happened to have a podcast.

It's a good hang with Amy Polar, armchair expert with Dax Shepard, Call Her Daddy with Alex Cooper, the Mel Robbins podcast with Mel Robbins. Smartless with Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes. And they're like an OG. And up first.

So up first is in there. MPR. MPR. And then, I mean, Call Her Daddy did start as a podcast. The rest of them are pretty much. It's a podcast. It's a podcast.

I know. It started as a podcast. It's like where everything else. What does it mean? It started. What has it become? I'm saying everyone else is a celebrity that made a podcast. Podcast. Call her daddy is a person who got super famous because she started a podcast.

I mean, we're a podcast. We're also a YouTube channel. We're a talk show. We're also a YouTube video. We're going to be at the Golden Globes next year. I'm not entirely sure what they are. But yes, Golden Globes, Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, and whatever the other ones are. We should be in all. The video game awards. According to Wikipedia, we have to be one of the top 25 most listened to podcasts to have been considered. On what platform? I don't know. That's still the most nebulous.

Yeah. It's according to their data partner, Luminate, that decides based on analytics. Podcasts. Podcasts, I think is the top 25. Podcast numbers are such a black box. Nobody knows what they are. Yeah, and nobody's willing to show the numbers. Let's just have Amy Poller on our podcast and then we'll be fine.

That would be awesome. Well, I want to show you guys this phone real quick. So I'm working on a video about this. We already reviewed the Xiaomi 17 Pro and Pro Max, which were, let's be honest, iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max clones. It's design-wise anyway, but then they added a bunch of other features and the theme was really cool because they won up to the iPhone. This very different. This Ultra, it's basically just a camera. It's a camera phone. It's made by LICA. I unboxed this phone on camera. It came with a case, a lens cap, a microfiber to clean the lens and a lanyard to like use it like a regular

camera. It says the word Lika more than it says the word Shami. It says it over here it's a Lika camera. Over on the back, it's a Lika camera. On the lens, it's a, it's a Lika camera. On the lens, it's a Lika camera and by the way it's a Shami. Like that's, that says a lot about what's going on here. Well, Lika did have a Lika phone, but it was notably really, really bad. It was bad. They made two generations of it and it was terrible.

So that's what's cool about this phone is I am mostly interested in the camera experience. It has camera Lika modes and like obviously very high end hardware and it takes really good photos and videos. But it also is a Shami flagship phone. So the rest of the phone happens to be really good too. It's a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5.

It's got 6,800-m.m. our silicon carbon battery, a really bright 6.9 inch 3,500 knit display, 120 hertz, 90 watt fast charging. So it's a showmy flagship still. But it's got all this camera stuff. And maybe the most interesting part, which I'm going to talk more about in the video, is this ring around the lens does turn. And it has function.

It quick launches the camera app. And then once you're in the camera app, it's probably zoomed in on my phone right now. That is way better than camera control. Yeah. It's a, well, at first you would think that it is. It is. But it, I think, might be a little bit of a novelty because I liked it at first. I thought it was really fun.

But then I've been using it slowly less and less, except for certain cases. It's fun. You can map it to EV. Yeah, you can hold it. They can map it to like EV control or shutter speed or just Zoom or whatever in different modes. You have to share with it? You can do that. So in pro mode, I think.

I think it's, or in video mode, it changes your exposure value in regular photo mode. It just zooms in and out. And it's just a smooth turning wheel, but there's a haptic click. The haptic is really good. The haptic click is pretty convincing. Oh, yeah, wow. So it's nice. It feels like a little ratcheted click.

Yeah. So it's cool. But, you know, when you just hold the phone and use it like regular, your finger sometimes bumps that camera ring and you feel some random haptic clicks sometimes, which is a little bit annoying. The other thing is like when you're generally adjusting focus or zoom on a lens, it's like the lens is long enough that you've got some room to play with. This when I go to use it, I'm using my thumb and index or middle finger and I'm immediately putting my pinky right in front of the lens. Yep. That's something I've noticed more and more. So I love the idea of just making

a smartphone that is all about the camera and that's mostly what I'm focusing on for this. But But it is kind of funny that this is not the best camera. It does not seem like the best camera. And it's not the best camera experience, but it might be the most fun camera experience. Like having a lens cap that you can throw on the end of your phone, having all these fun modes, this LICA, essential mode, and all this character and fun that you can throw into your photos and videos. It's very capable and it's very fun and versatile.

And I've taken some fun shots already. I'm going to keep shooting with it over the weekend. But yeah, it's just an interesting Xiaomi 17. flagship. Yeah, just taking a couple of photos. This is not a good camera. I think it's an okay. I think it's a B-plus camera.

I think it's weirdly, maybe not as good as the Shami 17 Pro Max. Yeah. But it has way more fun stuff that you can do with the camera in photos, videos, in the camera ring, and accessories and all that fun stuff. Right.

So that's what it's about. And it's just like it everywhere. I'm surprised. I'm not that surprised, but I'm kind of surprised how much, I think it's called the 17 Ultra by LICA. Okay. And then there's Lika on the box, like on the case, on the accessories, on the phone, in the software.

So it has a live cinematography feature, which is in the camera app. And there are different things that you can do with it. So one of them is red carpet where it slow zooms in on you. Nice. There's a portrait. There's freestyle, which it doesn't really describe what any of these things are. It just kind of shows little mini videos. Yeah.

There's ultra-HDR live, which sounds terrible. Yeah, there's all kinds of features that are just kind of like they're throwing everything at the wall. The tooling on the rails is there's like grooves and just the etching of the like LICA made by Germany is all really nice. Oh, that sounds like a zip-office. That kind of makes my back tingle. I might do it sure with ASMR with this.

This is pretty fire. But yeah, it's interesting. So Lika just put out that iPhone app. called Lyca Lux. Yeah, like a Lux. That's the manual. Oh, that's been off a for a bit. Well, Lika has an iPhone app.

That is a manual camera sort of thing. Which is very good, by the way. But it's iPhone only. So I'm curious if this phone has some of the Lux functionality built into it. It doesn't seem like it does. This is like an essential mode on the side, like like a bunch of different like monochrome,

not filters, but like literally image processing modes. All right, here's the thing. That look like a Lika. There are many different like a, wings of like arms of likea right as a company there's like the licensing wing there's like there's when you go to like a qualcom snapdragon summit event and they're talking about the new chip they have someone from like the lica software portion of lika that comes on and says oh here's how we optimized for these lika looks on this that's like a totally different wing of the company than

the camera portion of the company because there's licensing there's this this to me this kind of just feels like it's primarily licensing with like maybe one or two people that are like, hey, we can optimize this for the like a look, but it's probably not like of the main brand that's doing most of this. Well, if you ever want to edit your photos, Apple just introduced Apple Creator Studio. Well, but you can't really edit photos in the Creator Studio. Yeah, it's somewhere here. Pixel Mater. Have you ever used numbers before?

Yeah. Have you ever used numbers? Like editing a photo where every pixel is one cell in a spreadsheet? Or Marquez who edits his thumbnail. in Final Cut Pro. Yeah, you know. So, okay, Apple introduces the Creator Studio Suite, which is not anything new as far as the apps you use,

but it is bundling a bunch of Apple's apps into one thing that you pay a subscription for, specifically $13 a month or about $130 a year. And it comes with a bunch of apps that are pretty expensive as standalone apps, which is cool. I remember I paid, I think, $400 or so for Final Cut.

Pro like a decade ago. Yeah. And I've gotten all of the updates since then. I've never paid more than once. It's on every single one of my Macs. It's $300. It's an incredible. For me, that's an incredible deal for me for how much I use Final Cut Pro, right?

So if you use a bunch of these apps, then it's maybe a good deal or something to consider. The other interesting thing about this, the more you look into it, and I had to, you know, clarify some of this with Apple and by reading the press releases, there will be some features, like AI features or like premium content built into some of the subscription versions of the apps that are not in the standalone versions of the apps. Specifically, the productivity apps, not the creative apps, will get this like premium content or AI stuff. Yeah, keynote pages and freeform are going to get Apple intelligence features that are specific to Creator Studio.

Yeah. So I was curious about like Final Cut Pro because they announced a couple new things like beat matching cuts or like being able to search through an automatically transcribed video to go to a certain place on your timeline stuff like that all of that stuff is coming to both the subscription version and the standalone version so I was like okay are you going to make me switch to a subscription for final cut even though I've been getting all the features for the last decade currently the answer is no it's going to be on both versions thank you for saying currently so I'm giving Apple the credit now because if you know you see a lot of companies go

all right it's a subscription Adobe well you basically don't own the software, you constantly have to pay for it. And Apple has had a pretty rare thing for a long time with apps like Final Cut Pro, where you buy it once, it's on all your computers, infinite updates forever. That's amazing. And they're not like shelving that. Like that's staying around. Yeah. So if you don't need motion, compressor, keynote, all these other apps, if you just need Final Cut Pro and PixelMator like me, you can just buy one app and get infinite updates forever, and that's still a thing. So I'm happy about that. It's infinite updates for the, one time they updated every five years.

Yeah. Yeah. They update Final Cut with every OS, basically, with like one or two features. One or two features. I think the magic mask thing was the last significant thing. Yeah, magnetic mask they added. It was the last, like, impressive thing they added to Final. Totally.

Totally. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of stuff in DaVinci Resolve that I think they really could compete with. Yeah. I don't know. Apple really needs to get this going. Their services game, they've been trying to beef up because they are terrified of the

world where the iPhone is not their main money driver anymore. So they've been doing a good job in general of beefing this up. And I think it makes sense for them to like want recurring revenue, especially since these apps, you know, $300, um, permanently one time. Honestly, like, it feels crazy that we are even able to buy software once anymore. Like that seems magical that you can buy Final Cut one time for $300. It is a lost art. Yeah. But this does make it a lot more affordable and generally I'm like very against monthly subscription stuff but I think the really interesting thing is that students if you're if you have an edu account are you you know are your student it's three dollars a month or 30 dollars a year that's a huge discount very cheap I feel like the student

discount's usually like 10% off or something yeah this is a massive there's some good ones this is also awesome because like if you're going to school and potentially doing this maybe you do it for a year and then you're like oh I'm going to go into this professionally I should buy the one time thing Right. Because I've going to be using this for a really long time. That's a really good, now that I'm thinking about it, a great strategy from Apple. Like if the most important customer to you is someone who is beginning their life as like a working professional or they're about to start learning creative apps, you want this to be the best deal, the obvious go-to. So that these people are like used to your apps and then they grow up and they pay a little more.

But like you want the customer first. Well, that value is even better because the iPad version of Final Cut is a $5 a month subscription. and so is the iPad version of logic. So if you're only paying $3 for everything, and it includes the iPad versions, the Creative Studio. That's no brain. Yeah, so it is, like, you're saving a ton of money if you're doing that. But even the regular version, that's 13 a month,

like, if you are already paying the $5 for the iPad Final Cut and the $5 for the iPad Logic, that's 10, so it's an additional three. I mean, even this is still a great, even the $12.99 a month, like, you might just be like, all right, I want to start. doing some editing stuff. Pay for two months is still better than $300 just to try it and then figure it out and decide. I'm asking someone who's watching this podcast to do the math for me.

Add up the prices of buying one time all of these apps. How many months in the take? And then how many months does this become a bad deal? Like the subscription for the first month, you win. For the second month, you win. For as many months as you've paid less than it costs to have access to all these apps, you win. But somebody watching this as a calculator and they can find

the total value of all the software and how many months it would take. It's probably a pretty good amount of time. Yeah. As long as they don't jack up the prices every year, like every subscription service. Dave, I hope they keep it this way because like Final Cut has been the same price for forever. Yeah. For reference, the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription is $25 per month for a student. For a student.

So it's probably eight times the price of the Apple one. And the regular one. To be fair, though, like Apple does not really have competitive. to every Adobe app in terms of quality and professionalism. Yeah. You just like PixelMater is PixelMater and it's really good for what it is. And they bought it. Motion is not after-of-Fest.

Motion is not after-Fix. Motion is not after-effect. A lot of these are very, very pro. Like a lot of people use Logic Pro. So there's that. But many of these are not true competitors to Adobe's app suite. Logic Pro is a weird one because it's, like, I use it for almost everything here, but there's definitely a lot of professional work

that it does not have the feature set required. That being said, it's the only app on here that Adobe does not audition. Yeah. You're using audition. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, Final Cut is kind of in a similar place. Like, it's really good for what I use it for.

We use it a lot here at the studio. But there is an Adobe equivalent. I mean, Premier is Premier, and After Effects is in a totally different league for Motion. So, like, you could be swayed. to the more expensive one if you need after effects. But yeah, I kind of wonder what kind of person uses a bunch of these apps. Like, I only use two of them, me personally.

I use Final Cut and PixelMator. Yeah. Somewhere out there, there's a creative professional who also uses logic and motion for some reason. I don't know about that. Does anyone use motion? Shout out to that creator. Well, that's the funny thing is like, doesn't keynote and don't all of those apps like keynote and, what is it, numbers, those come pre-installed on your computer.

Yeah, I guess you get the like... So you just get the AIification versions between the content. We don't even know what that's going to look like yet. I want to know what they're added to Freeform. Yeah, what is Freeform? I love Freeform. I think Freeform and reminders are the two like Apple included apps I use the most now. Yeah.

Freeform, this is, oh, okay. Freeform, it's Apple Figma. Yeah. We don't, I do. You do? I love... Oh, my God, I love Freeform? Oh, I thought you're sarcastic.

No, no, no, no. This could be for you then. Because you use logic. It's two apps right there. I own logic. Do you use PixelMator? No. Do you use Keynote?

No. Final Cut? No. Well, you know, speaking of subscriptions, there's also some news in the subscription world. Mostly, it's just that Tesla FSD is now going to no longer, I think on February 14th, no longer be offered as a single payment. It will only be a subscription. So I think it was a, I don't even remember. It was a couple thousand dollars to add it on to the price of your car if he didn't want to pay the subscription,

to have FST on that car. It was many thousands of dollars. Yeah, I think a couple thousand. It went out like eight. Like it was, it went up to like 15K at one point. Yeah. And I think it fluctuated a lot.

Yeah. Yeah, fluctuated. Way more palatable for it to be $99 a month, but also it's, you have to pay every month. So again, you'll do the math on how long you have to own that car for it to be not as,

I mean, it doesn't matter anymore because you can't do the one-time payment, but that is a new subscription. One thing I saw is, I guess one positive of this is, if you're paying for subscription, it quote unquote transfers to cars right because previously if you're doing a one-time payment and you sell that car it goes with the car for whatever stupid reason it was so stupid yeah

it was like if you bought it permanently it was locked to your car so if you sold the car you couldn't get it on it if you bought another Tesla but it would it would mean you could sell the car for more yeah which is what Tesla does with their leases because they don't let you buy out a lease so what they do is like you lease the car you give it back to them they actually activate the full self-driving, and then they sell the car as like a pre-leased car, but with full self-driving. Which costs more. They sell it at full retail value. Got it.

Yeah. Sick. Yeah. I love subscriptions. Subscriptionize my life. Well, speaking of things that may or may not have subscriptions, we're not really sure yet, Apple has formally come out and announced that they are going to be using Gemini to power the new Siri. Yeah.

If you guys remember properly, two years ago now, when they announced the new Siri that we all got very excited for, we didn't really know how it was going to go. But then, you know, they had the OpenAI partnership where you can, you know, ask ChatGPT and you can send queries to JetGPT. People are like, is ChatGPT going to be on device and is it going to power the Siri features? We're not really sure. Now Google and Apple have issued a joint statement that say that Apple did a blind test and that Gemini. provides the most capable foundation for our foundation models, which is ironic and funny. Yeah, they're also going to be running on Apple's private cloud compute,

so queries won't get shared to Google and stuff like that, which is nice, and they get deleted off Apple servers. We're still apparently supposed to see it this year. The rumor is that in the spring, some of the features will start to trickle out, and then the full-fledged, this is what's doing, is going to come out at WWDC, only two years late.

And I hope they also roll back Liquid Glass, but that's another conversation. Let's talk about this a little bit. You made a whole video about this. I made a whole video about this. There's a lot of interesting, like, thoughts floating around about what this could mean and what it definitely means. I think the most interesting one to me is Siri.

Okay, it's actually going to finally have, because we keep talking about Siri. There's a whole bunch of Apple Intelligence stuff. We're just talking about the LLMs and the foundations behind Siri. Siri bad now. Siri could be good soon. exciting. And it will be, it will be able to do all these things that Gemini is already doing and is already good at, which is very exciting.

What else will Apple add on top of it? Because I don't know, it's not going to just be a one-to-one clone. It's a foundation model. And then they build a bunch of stuff on top of it to obviously build things like that feature from the commercial they deleted, where you ask Siri about some appointment or whatever. I don't remember is where you were at a certain time on your calendar. Whatever that was happening. like they got to build stuff on top of it and make their own features what are those going to be we'll see um the other one is what else aside from the lLMs would this help with because i brought up in my

video circle to search which might touch this might not touch it at all but as of right now the apple intelligence feature where you do a visual search of what's on your screen just does a google image search which is pretty basic but what if it had all the jemini goodness and you did like true circle to search just like android and it can could search anything. It could search an image and know what type of dog breed it is or what map location that event is happening at or all these other things. I think that would be really interesting to keep an eye on. Yeah. And then the other question is what happens to the open AI integration with chat GPT? Because as of right now, the way it works is this is like very

bolted onto the side. Siri does Siri things. And if you ask Siri a question that is too complicated or have multi-step or whatever and chat GPT would be better for it, which is lots of things, it will literally ask you, hey, can I use chatGPT to do this? And you say yes, and then it does that query. But if you're getting the Gemini Foundation model and Siri gets this huge LLM reboot, it will theoretically not ever have to kick out to something it can't do anymore. Right. So why would we have the OpenAI partnership anymore at all?

Yeah. So we'll see what happens with that. I don't think we ever really discussed how insane it was that in the settings menu of your iPhone, you could open a login portal to the OpenAI ChatGPT login website. It's pretty crazy. In the settings menu of your phone. That's crazy. You still can.

Yeah, I know. I'm just saying like it's an insane thing that they did. When they announced all this and the ChatGBTGPT integration, am I remembering correct that they said there would be other models that you could choose to answer some of the questions in the future and that that would be the choice you could have? So at the event at WWDC, there was a Q&A afterwards. and they said, Gemini will be an option in the future, which never happened. Yeah.

But if they're using it as the foundation model theoretically, you wouldn't even need to do your whole model picker thing. I wonder, well, I guess my wonder was if they're trying to portray this choice that you have, would they keep a chaty BT as an option to throw out to or have other options in the future? I doubt Google wants that to happen. I think most people will think right now, like chat GPT, Open AI is going out the window. Yeah, probably.

It's just too much complexity. I think that they just don't want consumers to have to go through the whole model picking thing. Yeah. It's a lot. It's better if it's just behind the scenes than it just does stuff and you don't even have to think about it. Yep. That's how it is ideal for most people. Yeah.

I'm sure Apple wants it to be as behind the scenes as possible. They'll make this announcement. Dubdub will mention it and they probably never mentioned Google's name ever again. It was a small of an announcement as they could make. This wasn't a newsroom post. This was like they gave it. one quote to one outlet it was on the Google keyword blog but the blog well Google made their post yeah and then Apple did make there was no other those we agree yeah

it is yeah it's a joint statement from Google and Apple yeah the keyword and it was two paragraphs yeah it was a small of the splashes you could make yeah so yeah and then I made a video about it so there it is it is crazy though because like you would assume Apple is very very used to making their own versions of things because they don't like relying on other people and the most that they've relied on other people is using Google search for things which they you know notably there was a lot of money that was flowing between those companies which then they got sued for so it seems like they would be less likely especially

for like the future of the iPhone to be powered by a Google model is going to be a recurring deal that they're going to have to keep making with Google until the end of time like it doesn't seem like Apple is investing in making their own LLM so here's this is the last thought I had about this is how much does that really matter like if we I know it We can't do this, but let's take the money out of the equation. Okay, you're using Siri. It's falling back on a device, a model on the device that happens to have been made by Google. Cool.

That doesn't mean new users for Google. That doesn't mean new info or data for Google. It just means that that's where it came from. Yeah. And Apple still retains the user. They still have the user. They control the user interface and everything. And so if one day it happened to switch.

to chat GPT, and if that's just as good as Gemini, the user shouldn't notice. It will still not have any of your history because it's not like feeding any data to that company. It's not any flow of users from Google to OpenAI. It's just the user keeps using Siri and it just keeps working. So how much does it actually matter outside of the financials that they picked Google? Yeah, there's a lot of question marks because they have their private cloud compute thing, which is supposed to like not keep a lot of your queries and all that stuff.

But at the same time, part of the new Siri features is that it remembers things about you and then it dynamically, like, suggests you things and it puts things on your calendar for you. So that's something in which it's going to have to, like, retain a certain level of information. And then the question mark that I have is, like, is that information just retained locally on the device? And can that easily pass to a new model that gets pushed to the device? Probably not pass to a new model. But I think that will be the idea is, like, Apple builds all their functionality on top of this model. that happens to be Gemini, but the point of it being Gemini is it's just way more information

and way smarter. So then, yeah, they can build their like, look into the user's apps and have all this data happening locally and be really helpful. But, like, that's not showing up as like a Google user or anything like that. It's just a statement that Google is the best one and that's the one that's the one, which is like a big deal for people who follow the race and which one's better, which one's number one. But after that, it's like, yep, okay, series is going to be better now. Great. It is interesting that Apple didn't decide to invest in this whole AI race compared to everybody else. Everyone thought they were going to buy Anthropic for a long time.

That would be an investment. They should have done that like two years ago. I don't think Anthropic would sell to them at this point. Yeah. It's a statement about how much Apple believes that this AI race is actually a meaningful race to be involved in. Correct. Yeah. I mean, if they never decided to build and ship a search engine, that just means they figured it.

was never going to be worth it to Apple. That doesn't mean they don't think search engines matter. That just means they don't think it's worth it to be involved in that business. Well, and the Metaverse, remember? And the Metaverse. They were like, they already got. Didn't Meta just fire a huge amount of people? Yeah, they, they, they, because they're just like giving up a bunch of funding to the

Metaverse division and there's like 100 people that are still using it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, Apple didn't, notably did not invest in that for, because they thought it might just be a fad. and then they notably did not invest in AI because they thought it might just be a VAT or at least the LLM like hype wave.

Now I think that they are like, okay, well, we have to do this, but it's still surprising that they haven't tried to build up their own infrastructure. It's also on the back of like, it's not just AFAD, it's a fad that could potentially help a product that they've had that's been terrible for a while.

So like I guess it links a little closer. But at a certain point, people are still buying iPhones and using garbage Siri. Is it easier to just continue? And you'd be like, no, no, Syria will be good one day. Yeah, it's fair. And how many regular users actually are like, oh, Siri's bad, and that's why I'm going to buy a Google phone.

Like, I don't really know how much swear that has. But I think Apple at least sees the writing that there are people who are like, look at all these cool things that Circle the Search and Gemini and all these AI, like built-in features on Android phones is doing. At least we can match that just to make sure that's not a reason why you're leaving the iPhone. And the fact that they announced it very publicly and made advertisements around it and then haven't been able to deliver. That's true.

Very embarrassed. I clearly planned on delivering. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The only other connection I can make between businesses slash fads that Apple has decided not to invest in, which at this point is just search engines and their AI foundation models. And multiple wireless charters in one.

And the metaverse. Oh, yeah. Well, I guess between those two is air power. Those two are reliant on all of this data. And Apple's thing is privacy. Privacy and not sharing user data. For sure. And so if you're Apple and you're going,

should we invest a ton in building our own foundation models and competing with OpenAI and all these companies that are just inhaling data? No, because that's not in the wheelhouse of like how they make money or what they do. And same with a search engine. Like Apple could build the UI to a search engine, sure. But all the other things that make a search engine. search engine good are not things that Apple really does.

Yeah. Google makes money on data. They don't care about the pixel. Apple makes money on the iPhone. They don't care about the data. Yeah. And that is basically it boiled down. Yeah.

Yeah. We got more to talk about in the future, including why things are more expensive. Maybe. Probably. Welcome to every day of the week. But before that, trivia. Also, Mariah is here. Hi.

Hi. She spoke a couple times in this episode. I'm assuming trivia might be coming from Mariah today. But not yet. Okay. This question is inspired by a listener of the show I ran it to in the city yesterday named Sam, who is an architecture student. So everybody say, hi, Sam. Hi, Sam.

Architecture. And in researching possible architecture questions, I found something really funny, not just about architecture, but about the great state of New Jersey, which is that. New Jersey is home to many, many, many different styles of architecture, but there is one that is actually only found in Staten Island and North Jersey. What is the name of this two-word alliterative style of New Jersey architecture, of which the first word is a city here in North Jersey? Oh. Carnicore.

That's kind of the answer I'm looking for it. It's not Carnie core and it's not Carney at all. I was like, can we get an example of what? There's like a Jeffrey question. Like what it looks like? Bow-Baus. Will that be too obvious? I think I can describe it.

Oh, yeah. Do you want to try to describe it? Frankly, I don't think anyone's going to guess this. But I will say for a clue, can I give a clue? I would love a clue. A clue is, I would say it's within a 15-minute drive of here. So let that sink in. I want to know we're talking like commercial.

or like a house residential okay and it's alliterative which means it's like i have a guess like in houses or something yeah like carnicore my guess is literally maplewood mansions one of the things is something else somewhere else in the northeast so i'm pretty sure i'm wrong on that one statin sweetness but isn't satin island in uh popular is not new york yeah but he said it's not really new york though can we by the way can we just agree that Staten Island is just part of New Jersey. No. Nope, nope, nope, nope. We don't have time for that.

We aren't taking that. I went there for the first time and it was just New Jersey. We, it's New York. It's literally. You guys, we will take the Statue of Liberty if you want to give us. Well, because it's ours. No, no, no, no. Give us next to each other. Answers be at the end like usual.

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All right, welcome back. We got to talk about why your next smartphone, well, according to some people, will cost more. I was going to say might cost more, but will definitely cost more. And I'm saying it that way because we're mainly basing us on a Carl Pay tweet. He posted this really long tweet, which, I mean, okay, we could have kind of figured this out by context clues, but we know that memory is getting more and more expensive and smartphones use memory, so maybe your next smartphone is more expensive. But Carl's tweet is much more definitively like,

look, smartphones forever have relied on prices going down for these things, so every year you can expect a spec bump and the price doesn't have to go up. But this year, 2026, that's not true. Memory has gone up so much in price that it is impossible for your next phone to cost the same amount for the same specs. And so, yes, if you haven't already heard memory shortage,

like this is, have you tried to build a PC lately? Dude, it's really hard to get random memory. It's all super expensive. Every tech trend just really screws people who want to build a cool PC. I feel like crypto is like, you want a GPU, suck it. I ordered a Lowe's. Everything. I ordered a little NAS enclosure thing because, again, I was trying to do the photo stuff.

And just buying storage. Yep. I'm like, holy crap, this shit is like four times as expensive as it was like six months ago. It's all happening. In fact, in his tweet, he has, he, He's his numbers. And I, credit to Carl, he's always super transparent about component pricing. That's like the one thing that I can say.

The one thing that he is always very transparent about that. So he says that we know of. Yeah, he says brands face a simple choice, raise prices by 30% or more in some cases or downgrade specs. He's saying it based on... Something that costs $20 a year ago could exceed $100 by year end for top tier models. He also thinks that entry to mid-tier markets might shrink by 20% or more. logically all of this makes perfect sense but as we were like entering this into the like we should talk about this today in the podcast i remember we we had this same discussion like eight months ago around tariffs right there was a sudden and sharp increase in prices among not just components but like entire brands like their whole like top to bottom supply chains and so we assume that

that there would be no choice but to raise prices of certain things. But to my memory, that didn't really happen the way we thought it would. It happened with some things. With a couple of things. We will talk about the Fuji X half soon. Sure.

The pricing of that device is notably a tariff device. You remember last year we were thinking, I think the iPhone might get affected and they might have like a higher priced iPhone because of tariffs. Yeah, because everyone on Twitter was like, the iPhone's going to be $2,000 now. And that obviously didn't happen.

Matter of fact, we got one of the best deals of an iPhone of all time last year. That's true. So we also, tariffs were also super confusing because every time we talked about it by the time we released the episode, it was different. So that was really hard to try. Who's exempted, who's not exempt. A lot of it comes down to market predictability. And I think the fact that the tariffs were changing every single day, a lot of companies, especially the ones that could afford it, just decided it's worth it to just not change pricing and just wait it out and see what happens. if we need to in the future maybe we will but we don't want to do this thing where we just are

fluctuating our pricing like every two days yeah i think when you sell to consumers like the number one thing you can do is be stable and predictable but that's only easier as you get bigger of a company yeah if hopefully that sentence made sense and so if you're smaller like if you're nothing a then you maybe deal with you deal with more fluctuating supply chain pieces and things like this memory shortage are a giant blinking red light on your radar because how can you build enough margin to accommodate this crazy change? It's a combination of that and your ability to sustain those changing market dynamics. Like Samsung, for example, notably does not make a ton of money from its mobile division.

That's not its main source of money. Actually, probably most of its money comes from the RAM it makes for other people. So they're probably doing really well right now. And I don't think that Samsung will change its prices for its smartphones at all. So in a way, Carl is kind of just like, we're going to up our price it because we can't do this. And I think that there will be some larger companies that'll be like, hey, don't speak for all of us. Yeah. Come on.

Come on, Carl. I wanted to ask you guys, do you think that, because we, again, we looked at this with tariffs and we saw kind of what was happening there. Do you think that we expect smartphone prices to go up because of ram shortages? Or do we think that these huge companies are insulated enough that we again, well, they'll just eat that cost and try to be as stable as possible. And hopefully that goes down next year. I think they're going to eat it for one more year and if the memory prices are still insane next year. Because the main reason the memory and storage prices are so insane right now is because of the data center explosion and like open AI buying up all of the RAM. So if that, you know, if that capacity changes next year, if either the companies that are building it build more fab.

that can make more capacity, or if Open AI just doesn't need as much next year, the prices could go back down. So I think it's still kind of seen as a market fluctuation. It's just a little bit longer term than the week-long market fluctuations of the tariffs. Sure. I have a thought, well, I agree with David. Even though he ends this whole post with, um, we learned early on we couldn't win on spec sheets alone and said we focused on perfecting the user experience, proving how

phone looks and feels matter more than its raw numbers. Great quote after everyone hated the nothing phone three. but like I think Carl just taking the time to write this super long paragraph that could have just been RAM is expensive phone used RAM to the math like yeah it's proof that the nothing phone's going to get more expensive this year and he's already making excuses for it yeah I have another question though that Ellis and I were kind of talking about beforehand that might prove that I'm an idiot for the 8,000th time on this podcast um but we were talking about new macbooks and I guess when I'm thinking of RAM,

I'm immediately thinking of RAM sticks, right, like that we're all used to. But when the memories integrated onto something like Apple Silicon, is that going to be something that's going to, would be affected by something like this? And now I'm not exactly sure how RAM is working inside. Phones if we're talking about it. So where is the, what RAM are we talking about,

you know, we saw before because of like microcenters, throwing it up, which is the RAM sticks we all know. is Apple Silicon going to be hit by this at all because it's all integrated into their chips? That's a good question. I don't know the answer. I kind of assumed everything that uses memory, whether it's a RAM stick they put in a PC or if it's memory that's in the Hofzoblad camera or in Apple Silicon, it's all affected. So everything.

Yeah, everything that has memory. Cars. Like this happened with the chip shortage when, like, people realized cars use a lot of chips because they all have computers in them. Yeah. The chip shortage affects everything because everything has a chip. and depends on how much like your supply chain, obviously, and what percentage of your device is memory,

which is why we think cheaper smartphones, mid-range smartphones are most affected because memory is an important and expensive component in that. But, yeah, I do think it, I mean, I don't know the answer, but I do think it would affect Apple and Apple Silicon, but I don't think they're going to raise prices because it's not a big enough component. Yeah, I don't think so either.

Yeah. I think I see it both sides. Well, I think one thing that we failed to consider in our earlier conversation, Andrew, is that Apple probably pre-negotiated their RAM prices for, I don't know when their contract with the three big suppliers ends, but I would have a feeling that they're locked in through some to a price through some period of time. The other thing that, you know, we didn't really discuss was that, I guess maybe we sort

touched on a little, but is that Apple has always charged this much for RAM. Like now, we're sort of like in an area where now, like, we're insane. already. It's like, it's like, I was looking it up, like, now, like, sticks of RAM cost about as much as the actual RAM upgrades cost for. Dude, like, you try doubling the RAM in a MacBook. It's like, that'll cost you another MacBook. $800. No, going from 64 to 128 gigs of RAM on a MacBook Pro is an extra $800, you know, so it's crazy. So maybe they can just be like, they built it in. Yeah, they priced it in. The market priced it in. But then you know. You know, on the other hand, everything is getting more expensive. So I don't know.

I feel like Apple probably already purchased this capacity ahead of time, and it probably won't affect them for the short term. I just don't know how long that lasts. I believe it was Lenovo that said publicly that their price contract thing ends at the end of 26, and, you know, Apple's worth a few Lenovo's. So like maybe their contract goes? I was trying to think of a company that I think might be affected that's not Apple. And Motorola came to mind because they sell a lot of two, one, two, three hundred dollars phones.

Right. They're a Motorola, they're a Lenovo company. They're like small. They don't have a ton of, to my knowledge, like super premium stuff like balancing it out where they can eat that charge on the smaller price things and they'll be okay. So I kind of feel like Motorola phones could be more expensive than their previous generations this year potentially. Yeah, that's a total guess from me. Well, speaking of these things being a lot more expensive and now a lot cheaper. There's a camera we've talked about a few times called the Fujifilm X-half. This camera is the camera that was made to be bad.

It's Fujifilm's response to the Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids buying digicams. which are like early 2000s point and shoot cameras. And Fujifilm thought, we really need to get in on that. So they made this camera off the X-half. It's got a one-inch sensor. It intentionally adds light leaks and all these. It's vibes.

You must have not been here when we brought it in. Yeah, Adam had it for a while. It's such an interesting camera. It's an awesome camera. It is both awesome and terrible at the same time. It's the opposite of what I look for on cameras. It has a portrait viewfinder. Like the viewfinder on the back is portrait by,

Because half-frame cameras, X-Half, always were a portrait because they just shrink the film, the film gate half as wide. So they become portrait. It was also plastic, but it looked really nice. And it had this, like, the pictures weren't great, but it had this really cool, like, secondary LCD screen where if you're doing film simulations, it would-swipe. It would look like the role of film was in it and you would swipe. Yeah. This camera feels like the R&D and, like, design people, all of the money went to that. Because the app is also very good.

When you transfer the photos to the phone, you can see the negatives, and then they develop, and then they turn into positives. This is the type of product where you're just like, hey, this is fun. Yeah. It's not going to be the best quality thing, but you're going to have the most fun. Absolutely. And then it's like, so, yeah, give me $800 just to have fun. You're like, I ain't trying to have that much fun.

This is the problem. Launch $850. I remember when I did the briefing for this camera, it was like the day after the tariffs got announced, and they, like, wouldn't say the price. And we were like, so are you guys going to be affected by the terrace? And they were like, ah, yeah. And then it launched at $150, which is just $850. Yeah, it's just crazy, man.

It's so expensive. Really cool camera, really fun, really cute, but $850. So now, Adorama is selling the Fujifilm XT5, which is their flagship prosumer camera that is not the medium format GFX cameras. If you buy the kit that comes with the XT5 plus the lens, you get an X-H for free, which is funny. The X-F also on B&H, everyone thought this was just a Black Friday deal, but they'd never, like, put the price back up. They never stopped. The X-F, you can now buy for $650.

On B&H, it still says $200 off. It's clearly not the MSRP yet, but everyone's still selling it for that. The XT-5, it makes sense that they're trying to move units of that because that came out quite. a while ago. I think it was like 2022 or something. And there are rumors that the XT6 is going to come out in September. So it's clear a lot of these retailers are clearly just trying to move those units, but it's just very funny that they are giving away a $650, used to be $850 camera with it. It kind of makes sense because it's like move this, but also like these cameras are quite a bit different. The X-half is like a more fun like toss in your pocket. This, the, the,

XT5 obviously is not so like, it would be a fun thing to have as a side. Yeah, totally. But it's just so funny. It's like, totally. Buy a camera, get a mini camera with it. For free.

It doesn't sell for free. Yeah, because it's not selling. So, yeah, I mean, again, it's just like they need to move units because the XT6 is going to come out soon.

So that's really the reason. But just getting them out of the store, out of the inventory. Yeah. We made a bunch. We need to get rid of these. So you seem like the person who would want it and you're buying this camera. So have this one too.

I'm curious if sort of the margins or the tariffs became less of a problem for them. And so now their margins on the X half are big enough that they can actually give these away for a relatively cheap place. Like I wonder what Adorama buys these from Fujifone for. Right. It's probably like 200 bucks, would be my guess. So, wow. Yeah. That was just a pretty funny story that we said.

It must be nice. Okay. I just wanted to bring this up very quickly. We don't have to hang on it too much. But there was this news that this happened this week. GROC, notably the anti-censored AI. The L-LM that's built into X. Yeah, the LLM is built into X, Elon Musk, LLM.

You can go on Twitter and you can say, at GROC do this. And then recently they released photo editing and photo manipulation through like the comments. So if you can upload a photo to a tweet, and you can say at grok change it in this way when you have a specifically noted as like uncensored lLM clearly people are going to start doing heinous things with it especially on that platform on twitter your favorite thing this is like sort of why they made section 230 but they never expected it to get this insane uh notably people started doing things with it that you would

expect people to start doing things with including really bad things and because of that um you know there's all these fake nudes that are being made of a lot of people. And at this point, the UK and the EU are taking some action. They are forcing X to retain documents related to GROC until the end of the year so that they can review them. The UK also just passed a lot, criminalizing non-consexual, intimate deep fakes in response. And Twitter responded to this by making the image manipulation feature a X premium feature. The first thing they did was on desktop. that GROC as a Twitter profile,

you could go to it and click the media tab. And if you go to that on one of yours, you would just see all the photos it's posted. But if you were going to GROC and clicking the media tab, it was just a bunch of random people being put in like swimsuits without their consent and really, really creepy stuff. And then they just nuked the media file on GROC at first to just like make it not so obvious.

And then they made it, an X premium feature as if that was going to stop people, except if you have the dedicated GROC app on your phone, you don't even need premium to use this feature. Anyway, it was a whole thing. The Senate did just pass a bill in the U.S. that would allow people with non-consensual de-fix to sue for civil damages. So there's... To sue Twitter?

I think it's the person who asks GROC to create the image. Wow. Yeah. So there's probably a lot of stuff that's going to happen from this. I just wanted to say publicly that Sundar Pachai and Tim Cook should have pulled this from their app store as soon as this started happening. I saw that because I saw people saying, oh, that, but then also all the other apps can do that. They just aren't a meme of publicly doing it. Can they do it with like a totally new image of someone in a bikini?

Can you upload pictures of somebody and get them to change that? Gemini and that stuff can do it. You can upload features. But I feel like there's a lot of limitations on what you can do with the photo editing through Gemini. Most likely. They're probably better than what's happening with Grog. I think that was the argument I saw as like, oh, you can do this with these other apps and they're not banned,

but probably not as easily and probably takes way more effort. Probably way more effort. And here is Grock just displaying them all on the media tab and it's like very public and it's a meme at this point. And it was just in the comments. Yeah, it was everywhere. So it was like that's the difference. And so, yeah, that's what I saw.

It's just, I just feel like Google and Apple should have pulled this from their app store until that they made some serious changes. But they didn't because of politics, because now we live under techno feudalism. So just needed to note that because I felt like we had to talk about it. It was a great timing for Razor to announce that they're going to use grok for their stupid little hologram thing. I'm testing the Tesla Model Y right now. And every time I open the menu, there's this big grok icon. and I'm like, why is this built into the car? Yeah.

What are you doing? Like, you, I have to use it in the car. Like, it's not, I get that there's, like, Spotify built in. There's Maps built in. There's a GROC button. I haven't pressed it yet, but it's there. I guess Gemini is not an Android auto yet, right? So.

No, they just announced. Yeah, they brought attention to it recently. I thought I just saw someone saying it's not fully in there yet, and they're excited for it. It got announced a couple months ago. Yeah. I've seen some videos of people using Grock in the car. like talking to it talking to it it can be pretty

weird it's yeah it's insane it's actually right up Razors alley I'm not shocked they did that at all I'm not shocked I'm just disappointed I'm disappointed because you know gamers can't afford this but they also already have the whole like

there's already the whole exactly sorry you can afford this I'm sorry you can afford this I'm sorry but they have the whole persona of being like the creepy sort of insult thing and Razor just kind of like leaning into that, which I don't love, I don't like it at all.

I mean, that one product that, we talked about it like last week, the CES thing, which is like, a companion. I think they're white labeling Project Ava. I, I, late at night, I didn't want to hit the slack because I was kind of embarrassed about, like, why you're thinking about this in the middle of it. But I found, I found all of these, these, like, companies, like, one of them is called AI HoloBox. Yeah. Like, there are all these products that look so. similar to the laser one. I would not be surprised at all.

Somebody in the comments was like, it is kind of like a hologram, it just sucks really bad, which I don't know what that means, but. We were saying it was using the translucent glass, glass,

like LEDs, right? Yeah. Yeah. By the way, Ellis, just schedule send next time. Then you can still get it for 3 a.m.

Just to really freak us out. Yeah. It's else okay. Yeah. Anyway, Tim Cook, Sundar, please pull X. Supreme Raffstars. Let's do another trivia that's hopefully, hopefully about something a little less depressing. I hope it's a tech question. Is that crazy? It's probably going to be about like

cucumbers or something. I don't know. I don't know. Actually, that would have worked well last week when we talked about pickle. Yeah. Wait, do we even do any pickle questions last week? By the way, bread and butter. Best pickle. Best pickle. Bread and butter. Best pickle? Bread and butter. Best pickle. Bread and butter best pickle That might be your worst Insane. They're so good. They're the worst.

Bread butter pickles? Yeah, bread and butter, I agree with you, Andrew. It's a type of vinegar they put in it. It's like sweet. No, it's just sugar pickle. That's right. Oh.

Candy pickle. Yeah, candy pickle. Like when I was growing up, I ate a lot of sugar. So we've been talking about a lot of cameras this week, and I've been going down memory lane for a project we're working on with the studio. I was thinking about the granddaddy of all YouTube cameras. We all know it. We all love it.

Canada 2.I. That is the granddaughter of the granddaddy. I don't know. It's a metaphor. We all know the 2007 flip video ultra. Oh, yeah. We know it. We love it. It's great. And I'm just thinking about it. And it's simple interface with few buttons, minimal menus, built in USB plug. It captured 13% of the camcorder market and was the best selling camcorder on Amazon at the time. So crazy. And it was cool because you could publish directly to YouTube or AOL video, which is definitely still around.

And my question for you is, what was the MSRP for the one-gigabyte version of the 2007 Flip's Video Ultra? One-gigibite? There was one gigabyte and two gigabytes. Didn't the guy that started Flip Video also start like a food chain, like a popular food chain? Probably. Whatever he did, it'll never live up to. It'll never emerge from the shadow of the full. flip camera. The flip camera is iconic to me. It is so iconic. That being said, I do not

remember the price. I was going off of a flash drive I bought my senior year of high school, which would have been 2007. A one gig. A one gig flash drive? Yeah, but then it's not cheap. Monitor, it's going to have... Dude, I bought a one gig flash drive in middle school and they accidentally at Staples gave me the eight gig and I was like... You're rich. I was the coolest kid at school, dude. Everyone was jealous of my eight gigs. It was crazy. Yeah. Well, I I remember the camera, but we'll have to do some digging to try to remember the price. Is it prices right, rules? Yeah, price is right.

Closest without going over. Okay, perfect. All right. That'll be at the end. We'll be right back. Hey, it's Olivia from Ollie. Is it just me? Or are these wellness trends getting ridiculous?

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These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Allie! Hey, it's Olivia from Ollie. I gotta tell you, I saw when you asked AI about probiotics. No judgment. But I think OLLI can help. Probiotics are the good bacteria that support your digestive and immune system.

Just two gummies a day to bring balance to your gut. So, save the AI for drafting that reply to your X. That's going to take guts. Go to OLLY.com to learn more. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. All right, welcome back. I actually have two stories that I would like to explain to Andrew and David in tech terms.

We've had this as a sort of a recurring segment where we bring in something from totally outside the tech world, but in a passion of ours that we try to get you to feel the passion for by using tech analogies for them. I have two. I think I've got my analogies. I'm going to try. All right. All right. I'm excited. So the first one, the first bit of news is the Corvette XR1X, the C8 ZR1X, just became the quickest American production car of all time.

And actually, the quickest car ever made with an engine in it. It is a 1.7 second zero to 60 and an 8.6 second quarter mile. It's a $220,000 Corvette. It's obviously a pretty crazy car in the first place. But the outlier in performance that this car represents is totally insane. This C8 platform has been building for a while, really, really insane stuff. But the numbers, the straight line performance that this car can pull off is equivalent to, it would be easy to say only like million dollar cars.

But honestly, most million dollar cars are not this fast. This would be like three to five to $10 million cars are occasionally this. fast sometimes. The only other car that we've tested that's this fast, Andrew, is the Remack Navarra. Okay. The Remactavera is several million dollars. It's pure electric, quad motor, 1,800 horsepower, all-wheel drive. This is a Corvette that someone's just going to buy someday.

So, I was trying to explain this in tech terms, and the best I can think of, because I think the story is how much of an outlier it is for performance per dollar. this would be like if the 1 plus 15 had also by far the best camera the Android world has ever seen and was also $550. Wait. I like this, but I think I can do you one better, Marquez. I'm down for that, the 1 plus 1. And I just want to let everyone know, I like corvettes.

This is not me knocking on corvettes. But I think the one thing that analogy leaves out is that historically, for performance cars specifically, not for all cars, but for performance cars specifically, Corvettes are the budget option. One plus. I guess I don't really think of One Plus is a budget option. The history of One Plus to me has been like they have been somehow able to, in their prime anyway, like one plus seven days. One plus one.

They were the ones that were giving you all of the specs somehow for cheaper than the competition. So the flagship was Samsung. To me, a Corvette that beats out everything. Also, Corvettes historically compared to other performance. Everyone's cars made a plastic. And so to me, this is the equivalent of someone puts out a Chromebook that costs $4,500 and is the fastest computer you could buy. But it can't do anything.

No, it can do everything. But it's a Chromebook. But it's a Chromebook. I think this, I think I like my analogy because it hammers home two impossible things, which is one, it's just insane to imagine the one plus 15, which kind of has a nerfed camera. So, like, actually think about it, what if it had the best camera you've ever seen by far? Like, the iPhone's to shame, the Samsung's to shame, the shamies are to shame. This is unbelievable camera.

Like, actually picture that. $800 was the best phone? And then it's also $550. That'd be crazy. It would just not make any... How does it have all of this stuff? How is it also the fastest and the best battery? How does it have all this performance?

And it's undercutting all of the flagship. It's half the price of cars like this, or phones like this. Isn't that insane? We don't have a direct comparison. We have to make up a thing. You had to put two exemptions on an existing product. Exactly. The only car, literally the only other car that I've ever seen run an eight and a half second quarter mile from the factory is a $3 million dollar remack Navarra. It's the only other car I've ever seen do this.

Picture the most expensive. You've heard of the baguades, right? Like Baguadis Shiran, it's a three, four, five million dollar car will run a nine two and a two and a half seconds zero to 60. That's batch shit fast. this is a full half second fast. It's incomprehensibly faster. It's like M1. It doesn't make any sense.

It's like the M1 chip. Actually, yeah, it's kind of like if the M1 chip was also a fraction of the price of what it actually was. And they kind of were when they first launched. But they came out in a device made of plastic too. Yeah, because Apple's known as premium. It would be like if M1 in a Chromebook. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

You know? M1 in a Chrome. It would be silly. It would be ridiculous. But it's happening. And it's the biggest story in the car world. Is there a reason they're able to accomplish this? This, like, clearly every company in the entire world has wanted to be the really, the best.

That's also cheap. That's a great question. So, or what are the red flags we see going on right now? Fair enough. The C8 Corvette, this platform, this newest generation of the Corvette, they have all a bunch of different versions of it that they've been building up to over the years. So there was the base C8, it's mid-engine. It was very popular.

It was a really good price for performance. And then they started doing more and more higher-end power trains. And we kind of expected them to walk up this ladder, and they got more and more impressive. We had the E-ray here. I don't know if you remember that, that blue Corvette. It was a hybrid. That's kind of in the same, like, power train as the, like, hybrid 9-11 TurboS or the hybrid Ferrari 296, for example, cars that are similarly fast. But it was always cheaper because it's GM.

They just, they make, what else do GM make? escalades, the lyric. They make like regular cars. And they're also making this world beater supercar. So they just kept walking it up more and more. Now they have this massive engine making a thousand horsepower with the biggest turbos ever in a production car and also a front axle, 186 horsepower electric motor,

all-wheel drive, lightweight two-door minogen supercar. It's just insane. And the red flags are only really that, I don't know if there are any red flags, to be honest. The red flag is that this is going to be on the streets. Yeah, I agree. This is insane. Yeah, you said one point, what?

1.7 seconds, 0 to 60. Is that the fastest car ever? It launches harder than the RIMAC. The hardest, I mean, a Model 3 performance is a pretty spicy. When you bought your Model S Platt, that was probably the fastest car I've ever driven. Okay, so that would do an absolute best case scenario drag strip 2.0 second 060, which is unbelievable. That car was already an anomaly for straight line acceleration. Yeah.

This is 40% harder launching than that. That doesn't make any sense. Yeah, that's crazy. And again, it accelerates even faster. It traps a higher speed through the quarter mile. It doesn't eight and a half seconds. It's crazy. So, yeah, it's insane.

But if you buy it. It's plastic. I don't want to say it's a cheap car, right? It's a Corvette. It's a nice car. It's a nice car. But I think anything else you would buy in that performance category would either be super bare bones, like no door handles, no AC, like race car status, or it would be the

Bugatti. Everything feels like it's made of diamonds. Yeah. Quality. So that's why I like the Chromebook. It's like you're not going to get the fit and finish of its competitors. People buying cars with this much performance usually also want the look at me car. Yeah.

And you wouldn't buy a look at me Chromebook. But you can. But you could. You could. They got a couple of them. Chromebook fans are a lot. right now. I'm just like, yeah. Yeah. Can we throw that's the first one. One other one out there. Yeah. Oh yeah, the second one, I guess, because we kind of started this discussion, but it's another

basketball one. We had a lot of fun with the Luca trade because that was a huge one. This is the Trey Young trade because it seems quite a bit different than the Luca trade. Yes. And I would like to understand it. Okay. Unless you might have to help me with this one in tech terms. The Luca one was the guy who was the best and they traded him for nothing, right? That's what They traded him for someone who was really good, but as like horrible knees and is old, right? Who literally just had a season-ending injury like last week. Okay, this trade. Yeah.

The news is that a player named Trey Young, who was on the Atlanta Hawks, who's their point guard for a couple of long time since he was drafted, right, to the Hawks? Yeah. Or traded to the Hawks on draft night. Yeah. Yeah. He's been on that team for a long time. He's been their point guard. He...

The face of the team. Yeah. Yeah. He was traded for C.J. McCollum. and Corey CRISPR, two people, two for one. Now before I kind of mentioned something about CJ, because I thought he was really good. He is good.

Yeah. Okay. But I wouldn't. I'm rolling this on the fact that I have a friend who apparently went to college with him and thought he was really cool. Yeah. And I've heard a lot about him as someone

who's probably under the level of NBA talent that I should know. That's a great observation. You probably would not have heard of CJ McCollum had it not been for this friend. that we share. Shout out Grover. So I'd be listening to this.

Yeah. So Trey Young on a Middling Eastern Conference team, but he's been the face of the franchise for a while, gets traded to the Wizards are the worst team in the East, right?

Or a third worst or something? Bottom feet are like just over the six years. Isn't that the team that Michael Jordan was on? No. Yeah, that's actually true. Why do you know that? That's really actually true.

Yes, that is a team that Michael Jordan was once on. The Pacers are one, two, get wins behind the wizards right now. Okay. So what you basically have to understand is Trey Young was once thought of as maybe kind of like a second coming of Steph Curry, like has a lot of really good qualities on offense

and ran a franchise and was, you know, big stats guy, Trey Young. He was so good that Nick's fans absolutely hate him. That's a great point. Yeah. Do you know the video, the Bing Bongbong video? Bing bong. Yeah, yeah. And then like right after they go like F. Tray Young, F. Tray Young.

That was not something that happened like four years ago that Nix fans like still have to like a big bang. So this guy was kind of a big bad guy in the East. And he, yeah, just abruptly got traded this season to one of the worst teams. For C.J. McCollum, who you probably haven't heard of. And Corey Crispert, who I'm sure is a nice guy, but that doesn't seem like a very even trade. The gene editing guy? Chris. I was going to say, is that the architectural type that we're trying to figure out?

I love to use sports. You get the most random anecdotes. Yeah. So that's a pretty, now in tech terms, this is hard to explain to fully appreciate. But it would be like. Well, so here, I think there are one important detail is that no one denies that Trey Young is really good at basketball. Alex does.

But he's a next fan. Don't worry about him. I have so much to say right there. No one denies that he's really good at basketball, but people constantly put into question whether he was the right flavor of good at basketball to take the Atlanta Hawks to where they needed to be. And so I'm trying to think if there's like an executive

that no one doubted the talent and prowess of, but we're like, this just isn't the right fit. It would be like Apple trading Tim Cook well they are doing that for for a wait wait for the the guy the liquid glass guy they made the liquid glass guy that they went to meta where they did make a trade they traded him to meta it would be like trading him for like the humane CEO HP already did that and a vending machine wait okay so let's see let's see because they traded the liquid glass guy to meta right so in this case meta is the wizard The wizards are really bad. The wizards not only are really bad, but are never good. That is really bad and has never been good, too.

Yeah, but they're a competitor. They're a multi-billion-billion-dollar. I'm thinking, when I say humane, I'm trying to think of like, you would never make this trade type of moves, you know? But technically in the same space. Like, you bought a one plus 15 expecting it to be the perfect camera for everything, or perfect phone for everything, and then you started taking pictures

and after a while you're like, this just isn't the phone for me. I'm going to give it to my friend who's going to give me a Galaxy S-20. To Pro and CMFBuds or something like that. I could see C.J. McCollum being a CMF Phone 2 Pro. That's actually...

Brand new sentence. I could see that. Yeah. And Crispy Coburt is... It's like the buds. Cheap but respectable. Corey Crispurt is like the S&Buds. Yeah.

Like an accessory. Yeah. Yeah. You're trading the 1 plus 15? Yeah. Yeah. That's an awful deal. And so I guess you're hoping that those two just kind of finish out the season you don't care about, and then you go big game hunting and get a real franchise player.

Yeah, because the CMO's phone 2 pro will just break in half. Yeah, so you're just hoping it lasts a way. This is why you're going to have to get a new one. Yeah. Damn. That might track. That sounds good. I don't know.

Is Atlanta going to try and tank the rest of the season? Is that part of the plan? Do they keep making trades till the deadline and then we decide if they tank? Yeah, I don't know if there's a tech equivalent of tanking. because nobody wants to get the... Nobody actively seeks the worst tech. There is like a form of trying to get the worst tech, which is like being the guy who like orders the humane pin,

the one-X robot, you know. But those people think they're getting the best tech, unfortunately. Like tanking is actively, you know, are you familiar? You know, tanking. You know, so the worst... The whole season. If a team is bad enough at the end of the season, they have a better chance of a really good,

draft pick to get a good player for next season. Do you get higher draft picks if you do worse? You want to hear something really funny? In Europe, sports teams are like super capitalist. Like if you do really well, you get more and if you have a really bad season, you can sometimes get relegated. It have to be like in a worse. Which is why the soccer teams, it's like it's always the same teams. They never. They're always trying to be the best.

In the United States, where we do sports communism. Where if you get a, if you just suck, you get to draft players first the next season. Yeah. And it helps keep everyone kind of competitive. So the idea of tanking is being like, our team is really bad. If we try our hardest, we will do really bad. So let's not try it all and make sure we're the last place team and you have the best

odds of getting a really great draft pick. Quick question. In the NBA, do you guys make slogans like for one of teams really bad? Like, I just pulled up a thread of NHL slogans where it was like fall for hall. Because the number one pick was like, Trust the process? Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Here we go.

Is someone's name trust? If it, because the idea is if you're a middling team, then you're like not good enough to like win playoff series, but you're not bad enough to get a good pick. So you get like a not that great draft pick and then you're stuck in the middle because it doesn't change anything. So if you're in the middle, you just start to just get worse. Just like stop trying, sit your best players, tank, get to the bottom, then you'll get a good draft. Are there penalties for doing that intentionally? weak ones. Not really.

Because then at the end of the season, all the bad teams are just like, oh, I don't know what a basketball is. Yeah, exactly. Fighting for the worst product. Wait, there is a tech version of tanking. I totally just realized it. What is it? It's when you're meta or Google or Amazon and you lay off like 10, 15,000 people at one

time. Make your stock price go up. So that you can report a bunch of losses for that year on your taxes. Be like, oh, we're the worst. Yeah. And then your shareholds. inflate the stock price, that's tech tanking.

There is tanking. That's tanking. That's wild. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I don't know if we got a perfect analogy for that one, but I liked my one plus one. Yeah, the one plus one feels

with CMF. The CMO was a good phone. C.J. McCollum feels like a CMFone 2 pro. Most people have not heard of that phone or that player. Yeah. But they're like, that's why they work. Decent and like a good contract. You should send him one and see what he says.

I hope CJ one doesn't listen to this podcast. And two, isn't like a huge Android fan and it's going to feel so mad. To be clear, we liked that phone. Yeah. It was a nice fun. I like C.J. McCullough. They won an award. Hopefully now, by the end of the segment, everyone here can appreciate how ridiculous the Zer1X is and how crazy

the Trey Young trade was. Now let's do trivia. Bing Bong. Your life. The lyrics to the trivia music is Bing Bong. The witch is dead. Yeah. Bing, Bing, Bing, bong, bong, bong. Bing, bong, bong.

I miss crazy frog. What's going on? Inspired by listener Sam. Thank you. Thanks, Sam. What is the name of the iconic New Jersey architectural style that is illiterative? And the first word is a city in North Jersey. I forgot your laptop has the grass skin on it.

You didn't know what that feeling was. You never felt anything like that before. North Jersey. You said, and it's based on a city around here. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know North Jersey geography won't have to say it's around here. I know it's near here.

I know it's like... Can we get one point for each? Because none of us are getting this. One point per word. Correct. Sure, sure, sure. Which means I'm just guessing a city. And we might as well throw a second word in there.

Flip them and read. I wrote Hoboken Hazards. That's hilarious. But yeah, neither of those are correct. I wrote Newark. That is also... Male? I don't know.

He said right another word. I wrote Newark Newe. It's also wrong, but I like that. It sounds like a typeface. The correct answer was the Bayonne box. Oh. The Bayonne box. That sounds like an early bird special.

Yeah, I got the Bayonne box. That's cool. I got the Munchy meal. That actually makes... Yeah, like the Jack and the Box. I'm pretty sure all of Bayon. How do you spell Bayon? C-A-Y-O-N-E.

Why the Bay-O-N-B-O-N-Box can't be phased out. Nice. It's a good article, actually. Really? Yeah. All right. Well, I don't own one because I'll never own a home. Let's move on.

What's the next one? Question number two is about our beloved 2007 camera, the flip video ultra. And my question for you is Price is Right Rules. What was the original MSRP for the camera? What was the resolution on that bad boy? 720P. That's what I was good. I felt like this would make a cool noise.

I could hear that being like a Wolf Beck song or something. Do you already have your guess? There is a, can I see that? There is a musical instrument that's like. Yeah. Do you know what it's called? Scraper. It's they use one in rusted roots,

send me on my way. I would give someone a trivia point if they knew what that was called. I can picture it. I just don't know the name. The washboard? Make the first sound. Washboard. A washboard is an example, but it wasn't what I was thinking.

Oh, that's a great. I wish I knew. I'm talking about it. I'm talking about the one that's typically shaped like a fish. It's made of... Yeah, it's like... Fishboard. Fish looking.

Actually, wait, the name I had in my head is wrong. I'm thinking of it. So do I get the point for a washboard? Can I name a song that has it in it? No. I just name something about it. Oh, it is shaped like a fish. No, I had it right.

I was right. I was... What is it? What is it called? It's called a Giro. Like a Greek sandwich? Like a gyro? Let's see if anyone got the price right of this one gig, flip cam.

All right. One gig. What do you got? Oh, I went really. expensive. Whoopsy. David's got $80. I've got $79.99 specifically.

Sorry. Just in case that's the real price. Okay, but, but. I just want you to know, that's how much my one gig flash drive was. Oh my God. When I was a senior in high school. That's how much I paid at Staples and then they gave me

the eight gigabyte. Okay, Andrew, how much do you do? $3.29. That's not correct. That's a little too much. Kids can't afford this. So Andrew's gone over. Marquez.

So I might get this. I, wrote 149.97. 97. And it's another W for Marquez, unfortunately. Why did you do that? And the original MSRP was 149. Oh.

99. Oh. Oh. That's a great Price is Right guess, Marquez. A great price is right. No, actually, that's a terrible. What? No, no, no, no.

Hold on. That's a terrible Price is right guess because 99, you would get right on the nail, which means you get the product, right? there was a chance someone would guess 150, so I was like, let me guess right under 150. Yeah, so you should have done 99.

I think, okay, so according to CNET, it says it was $149, but there's no longer an Amazon page for this. What about, wait, you should have looked at the Wikipedia price. If you can find it. That would be a devastating. Can you say old one more time into the microphone?

Old. It's, I guess like you're, you would be fighting against if it was 97, but it's so rarely 97, unless it's a Costco item that's getting kicked off soon. Should it's on 98 at least. Would you like to know the price with inflation, how much it would be now?

$329. That sounds, but it's probably more. It's probably 500. Yeah. It would be $232. That's what I was going to say. That's it. What a deal?

For 720P? That's a deal. Well, but you'd also change the resolution by inflation. By resolution inflation. Oh, yeah. Resolution inflation? It's like 4K. It's like 4K.

It's 4K. Yeah. That's a deal. Can we get a score update? But do you want to know like, hold on, you want to know who Flip got acquired by? It'll make you cry. I unfortunately know this is. AOL.

It's worse. A hardware? No. Facebook? Sort of. Yes. Hardware. But also software.

I don't know. But is also essential, unfortunately. Yeah. Is it HP? Close. Easy pass. Even more essential, even more terrible. It's easy.

It's Cisco. Oh, right. Like why? Right. Like why? I remember that happening. Yeah. Wait, the Cisco with the Y?

No, with the I. C-I-S-E-O. No, yeah. C-I-S-E-O, yeah, not S-Y-S-O. And not C-C-C-C-C-C-P. Yeah, that is really depressing. Wow. Anyway, I would love a score update.

Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. David holding up the rear with 11 points. I always do. Mark has, pulling ahead. Tank. 12 points.

And Andrew. I'm tanking. Trailblazing. C.J. McCollum-style. Is he number 14? You have 14 points, Andrew. 14 points. 14 points.

Oh, yeah. Okay, so he invented the melt, the burger chain, the grilled cheese chain, the melt. CJ McCollum? Sorry, the flip video guy. They have it in San Francisco. I was going to be like, oh, my God. It's a grilled cheese chain.

I thought it was a mac and sheet. He also did the voice for one of the Saja boys. I'm just kidding. All right. This is a perfect time to end this podcast. We're going off the rails. It also wasn't him. The better time was yesterday.

Thank you. That was a Cisco joke. Thank you for watching and for listening and for learning with us so that we could, of course, you know, get trivia points, but also come away better educated than we were coming in. Catch you guys next week. Peace. Bye. We have performance produced by Adam Alina, Ellis-Rovan, and Mariah Zank. We're part of a Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro music is created by Vain Sil.

Bingo. We'll take the Statue of Liberty if you want to give a... Well, because it's ours. No, no, no, no. Give us next to each other. Oh, yeah. The Statue of Liberty is over the New Jersey state line. If you want to give us Staten Island, we are fully claiming the Statue of Liberty.

That's fine. Ellis Island, the whole thing. Oh, Ellis Island, too. Yeah, Liberty is really. You could have it if you want. I mean, if it means that you take Staten Island, then I think I'd make that deal. Whoa. Listen, to all our Staten Island viewers, we love you.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. This is only day. I just, great. Yeah. I don't have anything. you should stay in New York. I just think you're New Yorkers.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. So that wrong with that. All right. Well, we'll definitely learn. Wait, wait, wait, hold on.