Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Polestar O2 Concept Car and Steam Deck Impressions

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

Marques and Andrew dive head first into a ton of EV news including some Rivian confusion and the new Polestar O2 concept car. Then they talk about TikTok changing its videos to a maximum of ten minutes and why there still isn't an Instagram app for the iPad. After that, they give some first impressions on the Valve Steam Deck. This episode has a little bit of everything. Links: Polestar O2 Concept: https://bit.ly/Polestar105 Snazzy Labs tweet: https://bit.ly/snazzyLabsTweet105 Jon Rettinger tweet: https://bit.ly/jonRettingerTweet105 10 Minute TikToks: https://bit.ly/vergeTikTok105 Twitters: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://twitter.com/adamlukas17 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ Shop the merch: shop.mkbhd.com Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thumbtack presents the ins and outs of caring for your home. Out. Indecision, overthinking, second-guessing every choice you make. In. Plans and guides that make it easy to get home projects done. Out. Beige on beige on beige. 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 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. Yo, welcome back fellow internet people to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts, I'm Marques. And I'm Andrew. And in in today's episode we've got a bunch of quick hit ev stories electric car stuff our first thoughts on the steam deck also on tiktok now allowing 10 minute videos we want to talk about that a little

bit and then of course the fact that in 2022 we still don't have an instagram ipad app but first tesla's plaid badges it seems like test new Teslas are rolling out now with new headlights and taillights, right? The new plaids. Yeah, I think it's all new Model Ss and probably also Model Xs. Got a little bit of a refresh. The refresh is new headlights and taillights. And then the plaid ones, it seems, are also getting a new badge. Plaid ones, it seems, are also getting a new badge.

Yeah, and kind of like the Reddit thread about the headlights and taillights very quickly devolved into a giant conversation about how, because if we all remember the Plaid badges, the one that specifically looked like from Spaceballs, the Plaid like moving in light speed, were only for the first 25 cars. Right, so if anybody bought a Model S or Model X Plaid and actually had it delivered, the badge on the back just said Plaid in text. It was just a silver PLAID text.

But there is, yes, the special edition first 25, including mine somehow, so maybe 26, I don't know. Maybe. But there's a bunch of, a small number of them that had this visual version of the Plaid badge, which was like the Spaceballs thing. Looks like they're going to just be doing that for all of them that had this visual version of the plaid badge which was like the space balls thing um looks like they're gonna just be doing that for all of them now although it is a little bit different and so if you get real close to the back of the car you could probably visually be able to

tell actually you can just look at the taillights but you can tell which one's which so now i guess my car being one of the ones with the old headlights and taillights but with the plaid space balls badge is a special unicorn yours is a unicorn in that sense but i also want to talk about how this new badge at first glance looks exactly the same but when you compare it to yours they're actually really really different yeah the old one's better way to be clear way way way better yeah so the old ones it's got uh it's more of like this 3d like chamfered look it's it's i mean there's a texture to it and you can yeah see the depth off the back of the car and it's got like physical pieces that are missing in it because plaid has you know lines that are crossing together so you wind up having

squares that see through it so depending on what color the car you have that might be coming through the back of it as well and it just looks amazing this new one looks like if etsy was making a refrigerator magnet of the plaid it's funny badge there there were actually people making uh second hand like you could buy you could get one of these from etsy like you could get a secondhand version and even those look better than this because those were also like oh yeah see through with body color showing through and like chrome and yeah and this sounds like such a small thing but in like mclaren land and porsche land where like every single little thing is an option i learned i was going through you can look at p at Porsche's configurator and literally you can configure like the tiniest, like obviously the back of the side view mirrors.

Do you want that to be body color or black or carbon fiber? Do you want your taillights to be clear or red? Do you want the bar to be clear? Do you want the text inside of the taillight bar to be black or body color or white? Like you can do every little thing and customize it to be exactly the body color or white like you can do every little thing and customize it to be exactly the spec you'd want tussles don't really have options like that it's like which outside

color do you want which inside color do you want fsd or nah ship it so this uh this is just like everyone who gets applied gets this one and that's just the way it is now yeah it's would you rather have the new plaid badge or just say plaid i i would still i like the badge i think the badge is cool because it's still like a it's funny everyone always looks at this like special performance level and says oh the car's got to look special to match its performance level and there was something so understated about you not knowing that this was the fastest sedan in the world until you get real close to it and see that it says plaid instead of long range and you're like oh it's that one but yeah this i think this badge is a little something special because yeah you need a

little something special i think i would pick this badge if the car was black if it was not black i think it would really annoy me because like the edges of the rectangle are black. It would look like you put a magnet on the back of your car. Yeah, it would look really bad. I think a different color, unfortunately. All right. Next up, Rivian R1T, a truck that we have mentioned on this podcast so many times for so many reasons, mostly because we really, I really like it.

I think you really like it as well. We had a ton of fun driving it. We've seen some stuff in the news recently where cars are getting delayed. We were even wondering kind of how much they were really shipping. We saw that some of them were going out, but that a lot of people who ordered the 400 mile version got delayed till 2023, which is now already like on top of a delay. I knew that was going to happen. We all kind of saw that coming yeah um now the issue kind of arises in a bunch of people earlier this week who are

reservation holders got emails about a price increase and it's not just a little price increase it's quite a bit um i have a couple tweets here from quinn from john rettinger zack's cherry brick everything um they i think quinn's was like 15 000 extra john's was 10 000 extra zack's was 10 000 extra like so they all had r1t orders in yep and all of them got some sort of a notification that their price would be going up and that they would not honor the previous price that they thought they were going to get the truck at so if you ordered it at 83 000 or whatever and you got the email saying this truck is actually now 95 000 i think all of them are now uh over 100 yeah then all of those people that i just talked about every single sorry yeah so now yeah i think zach's point you know in his tweet

he says he would have talked about it a little bit differently if it was a hundred thousand plus dollar truck versus like an eighty eight thousand dollar truck that that difference does mean a lot, especially in people's minds. And when you're not getting anything extra from it, like you're not they're not saying like, oh, we're adding a bunch of stuff that we're just doing to the baseline ones. doing to the baseline ones um if you want or you know we're creating this new model and we're going to ship those out first kind of you know tesla usually ships out their more expensive cars first yep it's not something like that they're not getting anything extra and saying like would you like to pay this extra money to get the ones coming out first um so i think this is probably something i mean rivian's not dumb they knew this would be pretty rough like you know that looks bad and not honoring the previous price looks pretty bad which leads me to believe they probably felt like they really had to do it sure which is probably a combination of you know pre-pandemic

versus post-pandemic prices in general have gone up so here's one thing to note real quick while you're saying that Quinn and his tweet thread which I want to link in the show notes because it's like 20 tweets long, but it's really, really interesting because he loved the car. He went to the press event out in Colorado with everybody. He made a reservation instantly. He came on the podcast, talked about it and how much he liked it. He tweeted one of his tweets in the thread was Rivian told me five months ago when I asked him about supply chain issues that COVID made it tricky, but they're confident they could ship the cars at the prices expected. Stuff hasn't changed that much in the last five months. Certainly not 20%. They lied to customers, investors, and myself. The last part is his words, not mine.

Yeah. I mean, a company that thinks they're immune to supply chain issues is usually wrong. Yeah. Especially when you're in the process of building hype. Like you're building hype based on a certain price and now... And also, how can you be immune to supply chain issues if you're not already shipping the thing? Like you're saying, oh yeah, we're going to ship this truck in like a year and a half. It's not ready, it's not done.

We're still in the process of putting things together. But we know we're going to be set. How? You would never know that far ahead. so yeah you know projecting confidence is great for a public company but now it's kind of backfiring it's backfiring real hard because i believe all of those people i'm not sure about zach um but quinn and john both said they canceled their orders and i saw multiple other tweets about it obviously we're in a pretty niche tech sphere where a lot of people you know ordered them potentially even to make videos on them so i don't know how many people in the grand scheme when we went back and talked about that uh the like mercedes markups that john had also like people

are going that was crazy but we know people are gonna buy that so i'm sure there are plenty of people who will still pay this price yeah but it's just like a bad look from a new company trying to get their boots on the ground and like immediately kind of hurting and hitting their loyal customer base of a truck. If you want to establish a good reputation, not a great first step. Now, I think you're right.

Ravine's probably done the math and realized that people will cancel those orders and other people will fill in and take those reservations at the higher price. No problem. It's going to happen. They're still going to sell a lot of these trucks because it's a good product. And that's where a lot of the leverage comes in. If this was like a, meh, I think I'm kind of interested. I put down the $75,000 and now it's $10,000 more.

It's not worth it anymore. I think the leverage from it being a good product is what's so painful about this. But that's why it hurts me so bad. I think this truck is awesome. It's not in the cards for me to get. But even seeing that happen makes me really sad because this that trucks I still think is the coolest EV I've gotten to like drive in so far. All right.

Quick update. We're interjecting this clip right after we recorded. There's since been an update about that Rivian story. Yep. So we just want to interject the correct information since we've recorded this has happened. Actually, this comes from John Rettinger, who's tweeted some screenshots from an email from Rivian

since he is one of the people who canceled his pre-order. Rivian has actually decided to go back on two of the things that they changed. Number one, they are going to honor all previous orders before the price hike at their original prices. Yeah. And number two, they've decided that if anyone did cancel their order, they are willing to reinstate that order and at the original price. Yeah, at the price they pre-ordered at. Yep.

This makes me think a ton of people canceled their orders. I can only imagine, yeah. So, I mean, obviously, you know, actually we'll link this tweet in the show notes, but John sent out a screenshot from an email from Rivian. They talked about things like supply chain management and how prices have gone up and they needed to manage these things,

but also didn't realize people thought the prices were locked and there's a miscommunication there so yeah they're willing they've done the math on probably how many people pre-ordered and thought we'd rather have those people's money even if it's at the lower price yeah for sure um and i give you have to give them credit for doing this yeah i guess we do yeah some credit at least yeah but it's uh i'd be interested to see how many people bring their order back based on that price. But obviously, I'm sure the numbers got hit pretty hard. And as a company that recently went public, you don't want to drop numbers like that.

Yeah. I tweeted at John saying that makes it sound like a lot of people canceled. He tweeted back at me. I don't know where he got this, but he said rumor was over half of the pre-orders canceled a public company would never tell anyone that but if that's anywhere near the truth yeah this is that's rough if that's true yeah so that's just an update on that story now back to the conversation do you want to talk about another ev that might not ship oh yeah that's a great segue we were uh we came into the studio today,

and somebody had put in the Slack a link to a Polestar blog post. They just posted on this Polestar 02 concept car. And just from the preview and the thumbnail, I was like, ooh, that looks kind of nice. I clicked it. I was like, this thing is sick. I hate seeing concept cars that I know for a fact will never ship that look super good. Like you remember the Sony car at CES like two or three years ago, however long it was?

I've given up on trying to remember the Sony cars at CES. Not that it was the coolest car ever, but it was like it had some cool ideas and it was a silver matte finish. It looked kind of nice. But it was a Sony car sitting in a booth at ces and at that moment i knew this car would never exist yeah now polestar is talking about you know this is a concept car so we're using this design inspiration and blah blah blah there's lots of reasons why concept cars exist but then they do these promo videos of the car driving around looking cool yeah it's a render so it's just sort of promo for pole star um but i get you know we were watching the videos and i think we're i like i like the look i think it looks aesthetic let's try to describe it a

little bit here um i thought it looked like a really really modern aggressive sharp like nissan 350z like coupe roadster from the future yeah yeah exactly like kind of hatchback on on the back where it has a like no big lump on the back and then straight down to a super sharp almost like shark nose front end it's like if the 350z and the cyber truck had a coupe baby kind of yeah yeah and looked way cooler than the cyber way cooler lights i'm a fan though it has the very very like typical pull star back single bar brake light that looks incredible that's very very angular yeah um convertible as well um which is like of course in the renders had this really crazy way it like folded back that we all know well yeah physics means that that won't know well yeah physics means that

that won't be able to happen like that but um yeah it looked awesome except for the aero wheels yeah i think that's the thing about evs this is from a video we scrapped but every electric car needs to have good aerodynamics but also wants to look good yep and so one of the things we've seen is like all right if you put the aero caps on a tesla model 3 it gets like 10 7 8 9 percent longer range but it looks way worse yeah do you want to do that so tesla solution is yeah you can just pop off this plastic piece it'll look cooler you'll get less range but if you want more range yeah embrace the ugly aero wheel a lot of other manufacturers are just shipping the car with an aero type cap basically closing up the spokes on the wheel uh the taikan cross turismo testing right now has a bunch of black plastic over a lot of the wheel taikan is my favorite

aero wheel so far just because it kind of create makes it look like a normal rim and kind of when it gets dirty you can obviously tell there's a lot of space taken up i would say this being your favorite is also the least efficient aero rim exactly so so pulse star was trying to do an aero wheel of the future and it's it kind of looks like just a big plus sign the way they did their cut out it's like the playstation x button exactly yeah yeah it looks terrible but it's a concept i think in black it would look fine. I think it would look okay in black. Yeah. I don't know. It looks bad. But anyways, to the fun part of the video. Yeah. Well, okay. So we're watching the video in the studio and then we see, you know, these, it's kind of like it's driving through this rendered Mojave desert looking type thing, but then a drone flies over the back and we see a shot of like,

oh wow, they're in the future. They're even like rendering in a drone to drone flies over the back and we see a shot of like oh wow they're in the future they're even like rendering in a drone to like fly over the car i thought it was kind of like extra effort put in so people would wonder more if it's a render real life because why in a render would you put a drone flying over the back like yeah oh we accidentally got the drone in the shot from a different from a real car yeah yeah yeah then we scroll down on the page and at the bottom of the page they detail that this car has a drone built into it yeah and it's specifically built in to take off from the back of the car get cool shots of the car as you're driving and then land back on the car it even has like it showed an uh like a top down of the car and it has this like line straight

down the middle of the rear trunk they made a whole video about yeah and i was like oh is that just like a interesting design choice i think it might have had the polestar logo up there and then yeah the that's the track for the drone to like pop out of this little like corridor and like slide down the track and then take off behind it. Yeah. So I don't know. I thought that was like somebody in a boardroom was like, yeah, all these car videos, we always have like drone shots. What if it was built into the car? Oh, yeah, Concept Car of the Future should definitely have a drone built in.

And then they went over the top and they like made this track down the middle of the back of the car. And there's a software UI on the screen of the car, which lets you, I guess, sort of just position the drone in relative space around the car on the screen, and it just gets there and gets the POV shot of the car. So if you're driving around, you can just get shots while you're driving easily.

Like target tracking, because we all know that every drone out there can keep up with an electric roadster. Well, that was the funny part to me, is I think the drone is less realistic than the car. It's far less realistic. So you mentioned before how concept cars like we'll never see the light of the day. I think you mentioned when we were watching it that you're so mad you'll never get to actually see this car. Yeah, but I'm only mad that I'll never see the Pol star because they won't make that car not that they can't yeah i think they physically

could make a car that looks like that that is electric it's an adjustment of the current pole star whatever um but it just wouldn't sell very much because it's a doesn't have great rear visibility not a lot of space not everybody wants an expensive four-door coupe with a convertible. It's like, oh, they wouldn't make it, but they could if they wanted to. Just checking. And then this drone is like, okay, theoretically we have a drone that can pop out of the back of a car, take off from the back of the car, fly around remote-controlled by a system in the car,

keep up with a car, have a long enough battery life to stay with the car and then find the car again and land on it and i guess charge from the car's battery that doesn't exist no that won't ever exist that will not happen yeah this went for me thinking like i'm hoping they eventually do something that looks like this car like that looks similar i do think there's there will eventually i agree with you there's not really that market of like people wanting ev roadster coupes like that right now because it seems like a lot of those people are super car enthusiasts and they want to see ev take a few steps forward before they're making that leap um we see tesla coming out with it but that we all know that still isn't quite out yet um

coming out with it but that we all know that still isn't quite out yet um but the drone to me just made it feel like i had a little hope that maybe it would like come eventually and that just was like this is yeah they don't care vapor maybe it's great vapor great video great looking car i i so hope something like that comes out in the future because it looks really good. It's kind of funny. We see all these car of the future designs and they all kind of have this angular look, but that's not really any real car shipping yet. I'll say the Kia EV6, right? That's great.

It's got some angles. It's got some angles. It's literally the angled version of the Ioniq 5. Right. I think that's the most futuristic looking it's like a cyber truck uh rivian yeah angle versus like flat cheery like wally versus like killer yellow jacket robot but i like i'm i'm i want to see more of these like angular sharp things yeah i agree i like angles i like i love the new headlights that they're doing and

stuff like that that fit with the angles really well and just uh and then when you add all that without needing a grill i think it all comes out exactly really really good yeah so i'm ready for that future of sharp angular cars with drones that fly out the back someday easy eventually probably in the next two years. For sure. After this ad break, probably. Probably, yeah. Well, place your bets.

Which will ship first, the Cybertruck or the drone that takes off from the back of the car and lands on it? Or the Faraday Future. Oh, God. We'll be right back. We'll see you next time. with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca.

Tis the season to treat your family to the great taste of Popeyes. The festive family box is here to make your holidays brighter with all your Popeyes favorites. For just $25, you'll get four pieces of delicious Popeye's signature chicken, four tasty chicken tenders, four regular sides, and everybody's favorite, four buttermilk biscuits. Hurry up, though. Like the holiday season, Popeye's $25 festive family box deal will be over before you know it. Love that chicken from Popeye's. All right, welcome back uh for this next segment i'm going to turn all of our cameras vertical because this podcast from today forward will now be on tiktok yeah

this is a tiktok podcast welcome to the waveform tiktok and that's just in like 10 parts though i've buried the lead pretty hard yeah the headline is tiktok extends max video length to over 10 minutes i think just 10 minutes is it over 10 oh is it just 10 i think it's just 10 oh so we can't do the whole podcast then no no but like like how all those people who rip content on tiktok you just have to put part one on the bottom so right really easy easy just a little swipe up and then that's funny because that was like a part of tiktok culture the part one part two thing you know yeah like what like you get to 60 seconds you'd be like hey quick follow me for part two that's like a part of tiktok yeah and then the next 15 seconds of the next video is like recapping it so yeah that's brutal i hate every second of it so r.i.p youtube it's over 10 minute videos on tiktok

that's all we needed i don't see how youtube can recover to be honest um they'll never survive but yeah so tiktok comes out and announced that it already has increased the limit to three minutes before i think we were kind of critical on that but it was not too bad three minutes is still extremely short content if you're watching a video that's three minutes on youtube it's probably like a really fast skit or something like that you don't see a lot i think our average our average is probably like 12 minutes i'd say average youtube videos like 8 to 15 well in this niche of i call it a niche but in this niche of professional creators looking to optimize in some way for the algorithm, you're going to see a lot of long videos.

Yeah. I wonder about the rest of YouTube. I think there's a lot of shorter videos. Sometimes I'm still stuck into when I first joined and we were making like eight minute videos consistently. Well, we, it's funny. A lot of older videos on this channel, I made a lot of really solid five to seven minute videos.

And back in those days, an eight minute video was pretty long. Yeah. And then a 10 minute video was long. And sometimes you'd get accused because this is when you could only add mid rolls to 10 minute plus videos because they added this feature where you could place mid rolls.

We still get accused for that. Yeah, that's because people have no idea what the rolls are. But you get accused of like stretching a video out. Like this video is unnecessarily long. It's 10 minutes and 12 seconds because what you wanted to add a mid-roll, which we never did that on purpose. But that was a long video back then.

Now, I mean, I've said this before, but we play this like guessing game as a video gets edited. Like how long we think this one's going to be? A nine minute video is pretty short. It very short it's pretty short so yeah in in terms of creators who adapt to the algorithm in the environment that youtube is long videos i think since youtube's getting bigger and becoming more of the norm for people to watch attention spans are growing also this is more youtube, YouTube's more at the point where you can go home, sit on your couch and turn on your smart TV

rather than just being on break at work and watching an eight minute video. So that's one thing. I think that's also a different level of commitment to watching something and like how much free time you have. Because a lot of times if I have five, 10 minutes, I'm not gonna watch a five minute video. I'm gonna open up tiktok and

watch a hundred videos because that's all and i don't have to commit to anything like i get to the end i'm like i'm bored now and i put away yeah and that's where tiktok excels so it's fascinating seeing a you know if you land on tiktok i've seen some tiktoks where like they really go on for a while like how long is this video? And I check the scroll bar and I'm like, this is a minute and a half. This is a long video on TikTok. What are you going to do when you get to a 10 minute TikTok? Swipe very fast.

Swipe, yeah. Yeah. I hope there's like a, I know there won't be, but I wish there was something that said that it was a long video, like a little icon that showed it was longer because. Just a scroll bar. Yeah. Like you said, my TikTok habits are very very like i just want to scroll through things maybe i'm like about to get off the couch and go to bed but i don't feel like yet or i'm laying in bed and about to go to sleep and i'm just

rifling through a bunch i always play this game where it's like one more good one one more good one and then i'll go to bed um But throwing 10 minute videos in there seems insane to me. Yeah. If a normal TikTok is, let's say 30 seconds long. Yeah. Sitting on, you know,

if you open up TikTok, you're already in this mental space of short, short, short. And your attention span is ready for something 12 seconds long to give you that instant gratification. I don't know that a 10 minute video can blow up. I might be proven wrong, but I don't know that a 10 minute video

on TikTok in its current state will have quite the same traction ability as a 20 second video. I agree with that. I feel like the only space I can really see it being beneficial in is like if it is a 10 minute video that lives on a user's page but doesn't necessarily hit the for you page whereas like somebody makes something that's super viral or posts a video of maybe an incident that happened that's really viral and then you want to know more about what happened in that and then you go to their page and it's like here's a 10 minute video up to 10 minutes that can describe it because then you don't have to describe it

in one minute or less or whatever. But flipping through the For You page, if I went from like a 10 second video to a 10 minute video and it just kept jostling all over there, I feel like it's changing the entire atmosphere of how I use that app and how probably most people use that app.

Also, from a creative perspective i think a lot of the craft of social media is creating for the platform and specifically like having to sculpt and shave things to fit like how many times have i made a tweet that's 190 characters and i'm like all right i need to find 60 I need to find a bunch of words I can cut out of this tweet to make it, well, now, yeah, 240 now. Sorry, just before someone tells you you're wrong. It used to only be 160 or whatever. How many times have Vine creators

probably had a seven-second video that they're like, how can I take one second out of this edit so it can fit on Vine, right? And for TikTok, it's been, you know, it was 60 secondsiktok it's been you know it was 60 seconds for shorts it currently is still 60 seconds like part of that craft for making a short for me as a creator is all right we shot this whole thing we had this great idea we explained it we showed it we demoed it tied it up in a bow and it's a minute and six seconds long. All right, how are we going to cut six seconds out of this video? So, yeah, I don't know that TikTok adding 10-minute videos,

you know, waters it down in any way. I think it just removes the restriction of, like, what we were doing to fit things into TikTok, which is still, like, it has to be vertical. I guess that's one thing. Yeah, well because igtv did so great previously vertical video thing of the future igtv did not float it sank no it sank hard yeah like a rock um do you think there's any do you think there's anything behind adding 10 minutes to like tiktokers getting very famous and big and then wanting to make longer form content so going to

youtube so this is possibly to get less people leaving the platform. I don't know. That's I don't think that's why they left for YouTube, though. I think they left for monetization. I think that is another thing as well. But but doing TikTok content on YouTube just for monetization, you have to change your whole thing because making a minute long video on on YouTube is not the way to go. Well, that's what a lot of yeah, that's what a lot of yeah that's what a

lot of short-form creators figure out is that when you want to migrate to youtube you kind of have to and engage and do things for longer than 10 seconds so they're so used to being incredibly short form and really engaging and popped right off the bat and making something in 30 seconds that it's a new challenge and a new skill to extend and and build something out for a couple minutes long kind of the opposite of what i was saying earlier like i'm a youtuber makes 10 minute videos yeah how am i going to make it short oh god i gotta trim something out yeah they're thinking the other way around all right i'm used to making things real short and now I have to, I want to make YouTube videos and people's attention spans on YouTube and rewarding watch time mean I have to stretch things out

to reach like five minutes, which is a whole challenge. So yeah, I don't know what's harder, shortening a 10 minute thing to one minute or extending a one minute thing to 10 minutes. It's like when you have to reach the character count on your essay and you just start writing the same thing over and over you just increase the size of all the periods to 14 yeah instead yeah yeah um yeah i'm not exactly sure do you think there will be mid-rolls in oh god i said that as a joke i don't think they can do i

don't think they can either i don't think you see a mid-roll and a tiktok and don't think they can either. I don't think you see a mid-roll and a TikTok and don't swipe or get furious. Yeah, I'm really interested to see metrics of how these work. I am not looking forward to having to swipe through them in my For You page, for sure. It just doesn't feel like the thing for me. TikTok's analytics aren't that great. And so on YouTube, I can tell how far people watch into a video like a three minute video or whatever 10 minute video i can see actually a chart of when people leave and how what percent are still watching by every minute tiktok doesn't show that i bet they know i'm sure

that's how they surface videos but if you're uh if you're out here trying to make like 10-minute TikToks now, your only metric for success is like, did people actually watch it and not skip it? Did it actually accumulate views and get shared or not? We don't know the metric of how many seconds into a video is considered a view. On TikTok? I don't know.

No idea. Do you think YouTube's going to copy this for shorts? Because YouTube- I think that would be so funny. I hope i don't know no idea uh do you think youtube's gonna copy this for shorts because youtube that would be so funny i hope they don't they're already stricter with i hope they don't yeah i hope they don't it would make no sense yeah if you want to make a 10 minute youtube video then just make a 10 minute youtube video if you want to make a 10 minute vertical youtube video you can already do that it's not a short it's a long it's a long video um that's a good point it would literally ruin the name of shorts yeah the whole point the whole point of shorts is we already have 10 minute videos here's a place for the short ones i think they can't possibly

copy it it would also be funny if instagram copied it with reels because then they're just recreating igtv again which would make sense it would have better discoverability than ig tv did because that was a mess yeah reels would actually i could see in 10 minutes it's a long time but i could i could but they need a scroll bar because you can't scroll instagram you can't scrub through instagram videos i would like a better one on tiktok also i think it's a pain in the neck and i didn't know it existed until like a month ago. Oh, really? I think it's pretty decent.

I mean, it's just a little preview thing, right? Yeah, but like sometimes it doesn't show up, I feel like. I think short videos, it doesn't show up. Okay. I think it has to be over a certain length, maybe 30 seconds, then it shows up. Yeah, I have no idea. Instagram, you used to have to be on a MacBook Pro with a touch bar and you'd have the scrub show up on the touch bar. Best feature of the touch

bar by far. That's the only reason it was good. So on a Mac, you could have, I guess on a browser. On a browser right now, it plays like a QuickTime video. But on your phone, if I get to a 10-minute Instagram reel and I can't scroll through it,

I'm skipping. I'm skipping. So they got to adjust that. Speaking of Instagram though, wow. Wow, Marques, that was great. Good job. Speaking of Instagram, I tweeted, what was it, two, three days ago? That is just another random shower thought tweet that turns into a conversation.

Yep. The year is 2022 and there is no iPad Instagram app. If you open the Instagram app on an iPad, it looks hilarious. It's just a scaled iPhone app and you hit the 2X button and it blows up an iPhone on an iPad, which is like, I don't know. There's a lot of pretty good iPad apps. Instagram doesn't make one. A couple hours after that, Adam Masseri, love him, actually answered my tweet, tweeted back at me,

said, yeah, we get this one a lot, which, Adam, I know. I'm sure he's tired of answering this all the time. But he actually sort of explained a little bit. He said, it's just not a big enough group of people to be a priority, hoping to get it at some point. But right now, we're very heads down on other things. And I was kind of curious about that, so I replied. I mean, I'm not an executive at a tech company for a reason.

No, we obviously, like, he knows Instagram better than us. I think it's safe to say that. I would say he's the most qualified person to answer this. But I sort of poked back, like, well, if you made a great instagram app for ipad wouldn't a lot of people start using it like nobody uses it now because it's terrible it's awful so yeah if you made one they will come um his response was really interesting so number one each surface adds overhead we support i iOS, Android, the web, and IG Lite,

and Android is the largest of those. All true. Yeah, but you're also Facebook, so I don't have a lot. We'll get to that. We'll get to that, yeah. So two, he says TikTok and YouTube are behemoths. People share more in messages than they do to stories or feeds, so we need to adapt.

People share more in messages than they do to stories or feeds. I think what he's saying is that like people are using the private messaging tool in instagram rather than the sharing posting but they don't make any money off of private messaging like he wants to get more people sharing things so i guess that's what they're working on rather than that's how i took that at least and three we are leaner than you think. So yeah, I get it. So first of all, yes, they make an Android version. I don't think there's a well-optimized

Android tablet Instagram app either. Not asking for one, just saying there isn't one. And on the web, yeah, Instagram works fine. You can now upload from the web now, which is really cool. Those surfaces gain more and more features every day. But I don't understand. I still don't understand not adding. Like I thought it would.

I think it would be pretty easy to make a decent Instagram iPad app. I think that's a fair thought. And I know that we are not developers. Full disclosure, if you haven't heard the dumb stuff we've talked about developing apps before um but i can't imagine compared to the other things that they are making they made igtv that was its own app was that did that have an ipad app actually not a specific it had a separate app but would have made way more sense in iPad as content, a way to consume content rather than a way to like, so the number two here sticks out to me a lot

because they're specifically saying they want more people sharing things and consuming content rather than just direct messages. Whereas a phone seems like the immediate space I would go to if I were messaging somebody and an iPad to me when I'm on that, I'm there to consume content I think that's that's good perspective I think a lot of fellow creators are looking at like I like using the iPad as my only computer and if I could have a full-fledged Instagram experience on the iPad that would make it a dramatically more useful

computer to me yeah because right now the Instagram, like I said, the Instagram iPad app is just the iPhone app blown up and pixelated. Yeah. I think, yeah, I think his number three point sticks out to me the most. We're leaner than you think. Because, you know, Facebook owns Instagram. We know this.

They're separately organized and managed, of course, but I don't think Facebook-'s the money's there the money exactly if i was facebook if i was the the if i was running instagram i said hey can we grab a pick a quick billion and like a couple developers because we're going to make an instagram app i don't think facebook would go no we don't want that here's the thing though a lot of people are tweeting at me um the ipad also doesn't have a calendar or sorry it does have a calendar it also doesn't have a calculator and i asked apple about this i was like hey craig why is there no i don't think he was expecting me to answer this but i said why is there no

calculator app on the ipad you know there's some things that we we have not done because to do it, we would want to do something really distinctly great in that space. And I think it's obviously easy to create a calculator app, but creating one that feels like, wow, this is the greatest iPad calculator app that it felt. Like, I think we want to do it when we can do it really really well and and we we honestly have just uh uh haven't gotten around to doing it great so uh that that day that day may come but uh and to me you know they are saying like we haven't

quite thought of or made the best one yet so we just haven't made one and in my head i went you're apple yeah you have it's a calculator infinite resources to make a solid calculator app and you haven't done it i yeah i don't like that is apple leaner than we think i don't know i think they just don't want to make a calculator app they just i mean they could obviously spin one up if they wanted to but they have such high standards that for some reason none of their possible versions calculators just aren't cool calculators aren't aren't cutting it and i you know i kind of see this this answer from adam along the same lines like okay we're leaner than you think fine but if you wanted to make a solid instagram app i think you could i think i think they could make a two column like creator focused you know tab on one hand and then obviously a big full screen high resolution feed on the other i think you could see full screen vertical videos

and it would be no problem i think they could build an instagram app no problem but i think it wouldn't be amazing and they want it to be amazing and so they just didn't do it at all now they're doing other things you're giving them a lot of i'm trying to i'm like devil's advocate like i just want them to just make it obviously i just think there's so many people whose livelihoods are based on social media posting i mean we instagram is one of those things where if you're an influencer on there you can build an entire job out of that, right? Like posting and everything to it

and having to do all of that, like through your phone, you still can't upload photos on desktop, right? No, you can. You can. You can now.

They finally, okay. But like analytics aren't that great and like scrolling through shorts or reels isn't that great. You're just sort of in your feed. And like, imagine all the people who are traveling there are so many traveling instagram influencers that would much

rather carry an ipad that they could do the majority of their work on rather than just a small phone it yeah i know that still and that's that is going towards what he says that like the group isn't large enough for this but i do think there's a lot of people who consume media as well on top of that and it just seems like a win-win for both parties that are using instagram yeah as far as surfaces that add overhead android being the biggest one totally get that and they have to optimize all kinds of different versions for different resolutions and android phones and that's a lot of work and then every feature that they add to instagram they also have to optimize for every version for all these different Android versions. It's a lot.

It's a lot of work. But the iPad is the most popular tablet in the world and it's only one version. You make one iPad app and it works with all of the iPads. I think that would be easier. I think that would be easier than the Android challenge. I don't know. Adam, come on the podcast, man. I think here's be easier than the Android challenge. I don't know. Adam, come on the podcast, man.

I think here's your formal invitation. I think you'd come on the podcast. I think you would come on, yeah. Just to talk, obviously, I don't want to grill you on the one question you've answered a thousand times. If we sound really nice, we definitely are. We actually are, but... Yeah, no, I think that would be fun

because there's all kinds of creator questions. He's actually, by the way, he's one of that'd be fun because there's all kinds of creator questions. He's actually, by the way, he's one of the most transparent. I have to give him a lot of credit for that. Yeah, executives of any social media platform. I've talked to a couple of them. I've talked to Mark Zuckerberg in a video.

I've talked to a bunch of social media people, you know, the Satya Nadella's of the world even, Sundar Pichai at Google. Adam on Twitter, ironically, all the time, posts new updates about things that they're working on, that they are planning on adding and that they are prioritizing at Instagram. If you're a creator and you don't follow Adam on Twitter, you're missing out on a lot of good information about how they look at Instagram and how they run things and how they actually think about things. So I'm, of course, poking him on like the one thing that I can't believe they haven't done yet, but there's a lot of good stuff. I appreciate the transparency and it's not easy to be transparent on social media

where then a bunch of people like us can, cause like he answered you, there were like 40 articles out that day about how iPad's never getting an instagram app so like just a quick little response like that and then it just kind of blows up in your face kind of so i'm sorry if that ruined your day no i think it's i think it's it's useful information useful information appreciate that uh anyway um what else we're gonna talk about oh there's another we have one more thing that they they announced on Instagram, which is just like, oh, what are Instagram's priorities? And then they added 3D avatars to stories and DMs.

Yeah, because it's a key building block for the future of personal identity in the metaverse. So, you know, as us, listen, we know Facebook is now meta or whatever, I refuse to call it that. And the metaverse is a priority over there but it stings so much more not really caring about those developers and make an ipad app with them anyway also real quick adam here posted our adam the better adam posted that there are 450 employees at instagram that is a very small number. That is leaner than I thought.

You are right. As of 2017. As of 2017. But still, you are correct. Other Adam, that is leaner than I thought. Yeah. But I still think they could make an Instagram app. I think they could hire 100 more with a couple extra dollars and make an Instagram app.

That's what I'll leave it at that. Let's take a quick break and talk games. The Paramount Plus exclusive series, The Agency. The CIA sends us out to behave in a dangerous way. Starring Michael Fassbender

and Richard Gere. Whatever it takes, make it invisible. The Agency, new series now streaming exclusively on Paramount+. 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. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash waveform. netsuite.com slash waveform. All right, welcome back. I finished my app.

It's done? Yeah. Is it on the App Store? No, it got denied. Okay. Yeah, so no app, sorry. But we do have a Steam Deck here. Ta-da!

There you go. So I wanted to ask you about this. Resident, gamer, you've probably put the most gaming hours actually i don't know out of anyone here does play a lot but i'm also older than yeah so i wouldn't yeah i wanted to ask you about the steam deck okay so just for those who haven't seen because i've actually gotten a lot of questions from people who see this and are like what is it and should i get it yeah picture a nintendo switch one and a half times the size all black tons of extra custom controls quad panel pads on the back like touch pads on

the front abxy buttons it's made by valve it's got a full-on os and it runs steam and can play games in your steam library that is a steam deck yeah it's pretty cool to like joy cons but like this is strictly handheld this is oh i shouldn't say that you can hook this up you can with a deck that is not out yet you can right and then you could play with like a mouse and keyboard if you really wanted to yeah but this is a portable gaming console yeah so this is like really trying to actually hit we all know the switch and nintendo is genius i love it but nintendo games are generally a little like lower key graphics aren't as intense it's more like fun party stuff games like that mario kart mario party you know bright and colorful exactly yeah um this is trying to bring like actual pc games handheld

which is obviously much much much, much harder. It's a challenge. So how do you feel about the concept in general of like there's some games in your Steam library. Do you ever desire to play those games away from your mouse and keyboard at all? So right now, I'm a person who plays one game pretty much at a time

and I get really into that right now that game is not on Steam and it's a game that is very it's called Valorant it's a tactical shooter it's like very intense with precision of your mouth so it would be impossible to play on a controller so I not really but there are games out there Rocket League is the main thing I think of when I think Steam Deck because Rocket League works amazing on a controller best on a controller all but there are games out there rocket league is the main thing i think of when i think steam deck because rocket league works amazing on a controller best on a controller all the pros are playing on a controller yep and this would work so well for that and that is on steam and i've downloaded it and it's awesome it's been my best steam deck experience for sure yes and that's a very

interesting point you put up because there are a lot of reviews out we have not gotten a lot of time to play with this yet this is kind of like a first impressions to us um i we both set it up the setup process was a little tricky i think it was mostly our internet that was kind of being a problem yeah in the setup process i was having some issues with the touch screen i don't think they were too crazy um typing every once in a while didn't feel great um the the overall build quality of this i think is solid it's light and i think i would i like that it's light versus if it was like super solid feeling because if you're gonna hold this your hands it's gonna get tiring right um i don't like these d pads at all they're kind of just big squares under

the analog sticks oh the touch the joysticks yeah are they touch pads they're they click they click but you can also use them as uh moving a mouse cursor around i've i guess that's in games because in the regular uh steam library they do not do that they do work as d-pads but the click on them feels terrible yeah um so i think this is the biggest challenge for the steam deck which is what you said at the beginning which is the games you play yeah if you play a bunch of games that work best with a mouse and keyboard your challenge is going to be translating that mouse and keyboard control experience to some of the buttons and surfaces on the steam deck and if you can do that which you do have lots of custom controls and you can map things and sort of get a similar experience it won't be as precise probably but you can do stuff with the mapping

then you can play that mouse and keyboard game on the steam deck yeah but it will never be as good as the mouse and keyboard no and i guess if you're mobile gaming you're kind of okay with that a lot of the time right um one thing i noticed a lot of reviewers saying and since we had a steam library and we've only tested some we've had we haven't gone through that yet but the curated list for steam deck specific games was not great and I still think they added it and it's still not too good. Which is a problem if you're buying the Steam Deck and you're not on a PC because the

price on 400 bucks, right? I think that's a crazy good price. I think that's awesome. There are going to be people who buy this that are using Steam for their first time because of this. And they're going to have a hard time downloading games or finding games that work correctly for it or work well on it or optimized for it okay so this i think is the the one other thing that's come up a lot about the steam deck

as i've been using it it's been getting constant software updates like major software updates like not just bug fixes but like adding features and like the ability to play certain games and map certain things they've been basically building the software of this thing in the background as we're using it and reviewing it i think if you were to buy one right now today it would still feel pretty early and there's a lot of games that aren't really well optimized there's not a lot of games that are as good as Rocket League on this thing. And I think if you were to wait like six months and get a feel for the landscape

and see how things pan out, you can get a better idea if the games you want to play will work well on this. I mean, they'll work, but will they work well is the question. Yeah, and they do have something which I'm sure they'll build into their search eventually where if you're in your existing Steam Deck or your existing Steam library and you install

a game, it'll kind of bring up this pop up of like what works well with Steam Deck, what doesn't work well with Steam Deck, or just what's completely just not compatible. Doesn't work at all. At all. Yeah. And I found that being really interesting with some things. Rocket League, which is like green checks down the whole thing. CSGO, I'm trying to load it right now

because I feel like this is going to be basically impossible to play. It does work. I'm on here. It looks choppy, and playing with a controller would be almost impossible. But then I was looking at a game like Fall Guys, which I have on Steam. It feels perfect for a Steam deck. The issue arises is that a lot of these multiplayer games have anti-cheat third-party software yep that isn't going to be compatible with this and

that is one of them um so so that's can you explain that so the there's games that are at a certain level of competitiveness yeah wait look this is gyro? Yeah, just moving around. Gyroscopic? That's solid control. That sounds crazy. Not precise. Just in the middle of us talking, I loaded up CSGO and it's gyroscopic.

Oh, interesting. Okay, so if I move the controller, that's actually an interesting way to try and do this. So left analog stick is walk. Right analog stick kind of snaps you about 90 degrees left, right. And then slightly moving the entire Steam Deck is what gives you the precision. Good thing it's lightweight.

That's, I mean, you're never going to actually be able to play this, but it feels better than, and I just died, and the frame rate's terrible. But yeah, CSGO tactical shooters are just not going to be something that's going to do that. But I think by going back to what I was saying before, a game like Fall Guys, I would kill to play. That sounds fun.

Yeah. Yeah. But the anti-cheat is going to be an issue. So what is anti-cheat? There's certain games that are competitive enough where the developers have gone, all right, we want to add anti-cheat into our game to prevent people from like hacking

and getting super good. So they add that and that anti-cheat software is only compatible with certain OSs. It's a third-party software that's running in the background after you launch the game to basically make sure you're not running any programs that are known for cheating.

So Fall Guys specifically, there were ones where pretty much like, you remember Fall Guys, you just like, it's a a bunch of maps it's basically a race to the end and a bunch of different obstacles people could just like jump in the air and fly over everybody and there's like a bunch of different cheats it sounds really stupid for a game like fall guys because it doesn't feel that competitive but it unfortunately was just keeps it fun for everyone when that's not happening everywhere yeah but so but the problem with that is now that since people were cheating they have to add this software which is not compatible i believe if i go and try and do it on here it just says that this game's anti-cheat is not configured to support steam deck and still lets me install

but i can just assume that it's not going to let me play after that yeah so it sounds like a lot of these games anti anti-cheat software only works with like windows or linux and won't let you play if you're not using one of those os's so far at least i don't i guess it will probably be up to the developers to be able to find some solution for that with steam deck if it's something that will be um that they think will do well on it um but i'm not totally sure how they're going to approach that fall guys probably not being the best example now because it's much less popular than it used to be um but yeah so that's i think there are games on here i think there's a lot of indie games

side scrollers like stuff like that that people do really like cuphead um all sorts of games like that people will love to play i would love to play it on this because the screen looks great the controls besides the touchpads that i don't love all feel great triggers lots of customizable buttons yeah um you have noticed and we need to test this more the charging speeds have been pretty rough. Yeah, I want to charge, I want to try a couple other chargers because I plugged in a 65-watt OnePlus charger just to the USB Type-C port at the top, and it charged like 50% in eight hours or something,

which was obviously not working correctly. So I need to see if that's just the charger. Should I use the first-party one only? Should I update the software and will it fix itself? I don't know yet. But to me, the most interesting part about the Steam Deck actually is who is it for?

Because number one, I always find that a challenge to review things that I know that I'm specifically not in the target demographic for. And when I think of the Steam Deck, I think of someone who wouldn't also have a nintendo switch so switch is someone who's like a casual gamer who's just i mean the switch killed it had great sales like people love that thing on planes they

love that like under their tv uh casual games all the time i think of the steam deck as someone who specifically doesn't want the switch but does want to play some of those other games on the go that's how i do think it could convert switch users because i think there are a lot of switch users who play more intense games at home but that aren't available mobile so the switch the switch they're just playing a different style of game not not to say there aren't some competitive games on switch or whatever but in general like i i play valorant but when we go on a plane i'm gonna bring my switch and i'm just gonna play mario kart for like eight hours on the plane if you had a steam deck i'd rather play rocket league okay yeah that's

interesting i mean that's online but still there are other games out there that i think i would rather play on this than I would on that. And I do think there will be people converting. And then if I could bring this, set it up with a mouse and keyboard in my hotel room and play Valorant, I know that couldn't be it,

or CSGO or something like that. That sounds kind of awesome. Yeah, because then at that point, you don't also bring a gaming laptop. You just bring the Steam Deck and maybe a couple extra little accessories. Yeah. Okay.

$400 is a killer price. That's true. Exactly. You're not going to get a gaming laptop for $400. No, no. So there you go. You're not going to get a Chromebook for $400. That's a sad fact.

Okay. Well, yeah, I'm going to keep testing this thing out. I'm going to play a bunch of different games. Like I suggested in the YouTube short, tell me what games I should play specifically on it because I've played Rocket League and I like it a lot. I'm going to try some other stuff. That's a good point. Yeah, I'm working on the review.

Game suggestions for sure. I know there's 10,000 indie games out there on Steam that are still fun stuff like Cuphead that we should play because get out of the comfort zone a little bit to do this because this review is just going to be out of the comfort zone for sure. Exactly. Awesome. Try it.

Well, until then, make sure you're subscribed to, of course, the Shorts channel, but also the main channel, and also the Waveform channel, and also this Waveform Clips channel, and also the Studio channel. Other than that, I don't have much else to say it's been an interesting week thanks for listening to the wave form podcast the ev podcast we'll catch you guys the next one peace waveform is produced by adam molina we are partnered with vox media and our intro outro music was created by vane still Thanks for watching!