Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Should You Wear an Apple Watch to a Wedding?

Episode Date: December 13, 2024

This week, Marques, Andrew, and David discuss a post Marques saw that about someone who got an invitation to a wedding that specifically requested no Apple Watches to be worn. After that, they talk about a new feature for Instagram Reels before going over four new Android phones that just came that Marques was really impressed with. After that, it's all about Sora and Apple Intelligence before we close it out with trivia. Enjoy! Links: Engadget - You can now buy your next EV on Amazon Techcrunch - Instagram rolls out ‘trial reels’ that aren’t shown to a creator’s followers GSM Arena - S25 Qi2 rumors Wired - What is Qi2? MKBHD - OpenAI Sora Reddit - Reddit Answers Music provided by Epidemic Sound  Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Socials: Waveform: https://twitter.com/WVFRM Waveform: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David Imel: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin TikTok:  https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast 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

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The OnePlus. The number three. Okay. Okay, the number, there's a tie for second. So the number four is the iPhone 16 Pro Max with a 157. Jeez. Wow. Then there's a tie for second between the honor magic 6 pro

and the pixel 9 pro xl no way 158 oh those have bad cameras dude that that's a 163 that's the number one score damn i know hey what is up people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. I'm Andrew. And I'm David. And we actually do have a lot of stuff back this week.

Sora has officially launched, and we took an exclusive first look at it. We'll talk a little more about that in a second. Galaxy S25 rumors are catching our attention. We have some rapid fire end of the year brief reviews on some phones that didn't get full videos. And also fun fact, Gemini 2.0 literally just got announced like 10 minutes before we jumped in here. So we haven't actually gotten to test or try it, but it's a thing that happened.

That's some news that you should know about Gemini 2.0. It's an experimental version. It's cool. But first I wanted to start with a thought exercise. I put this in the slack because i was very curious to hear what you guys what all of you guys would say about this including zeri who's sleeping in the corner um it's a tweet that reads you uh received a wedding invitation that specifically said on the dress code line. No Apple Watches, please. How does that make you feel?

Do you, because there's lots of takes about this now. Oh, Apple Watches don't dress up well. Oh, I would just wear an Apple Watch anywhere. Where are you on the spectrum of I'm going to a wedding that's no Apple Watches allowed? How does that make you feel? It makes a lot of people feel something because it has 9.1 million views on this tweet it does um i guess i'll go first yeah go first of all i just want to hear what you say so that i can say the if i'm going to a wedding and they asked it i would take the yeah like i'm the least uh like not argumentative or like least least conflicty person you're not that attached to the apple so i'm not trying to it's their day yeah it's their day they're the one paying a ton of money for it

if they ask me to not wear the apple watch i'm trying to figure out why well okay if i was in the middle of a like workout competition i would be devastated because dance floor weddings racks up the rings on that fitness app um yeah that's true you you'd severely have to make up a lot for that or just lose the day so that would be a huge bummer i agree they don't dress up very nice um i don't know about that i feel like i don't do i think if you throw like a metal link uh watch yeah on a dark colored watch and throw a nice watch face on it, like one of those simple watch faces, that looks fine. That's pretty classy. I imagine it's a pictures thing. They're taking pictures at the wedding and they don't want pictures of Apple Watch?

I guess that's the distinction. If you're in the bridal party, you definitely just listen because you know them well enough. Sure, yeah, yeah. Just listen to them. I assume this is a general wedding invitation. Like you're just going, you're invited. I have a take. Okay.

Okay. My take is that things that can become dated, people often don't want in their content. And I think that makes a lot of sense, right? Like I heard a song the other day that was like, there's more to life than retweets on your Twitter. It's not called Twitter anymore.

Now you're like dating yourself, right? It's not this omniscient thing. Watches have existed for extremely long time. Watches, you could make the argument, are more of a concept than are a thing. And the more simple that you make your watch, the more timeless it is. So when you have that Apple Watch Gen 1 and you're really dating yourself, which is, you know, fine. But I think that a lot of people don't want to put themselves in a space

where things could be potentially dated. I fully agree with everything you're saying, and my argument to the couple who is saying that would be, everything else in your wedding is gonna get dated too. It's just a snapshot in time, and it helps you better remember the time that it was your haircut will be outdated your suit will be outdated true all the cars in the background that you drive away and will be outdated the watch is just a part of the times yeah that's that's that's

all i agree with you you know the time yeah time i will say it would be smart to like turn your watch on do not disturb or something during the screen off theater mode or that you know so that you could really experience the time you know but uh i don't know i'll do whatever the hell they want you know one time i bought dress shoes for a wedding yeah well only no way what have you worn to every other wedding my sneakers can i tell you a story that's actually i got yelled at by my roommate at one point actually it was michael fisher so i was going to my sister's wedding right and sister's wedding my sister's wedding pretty big deal and michael fisher was like

well where i had just bought my first suit ever which i wore to like 30 weddings and then i tore them in half by accident i was was dancing really intensely. Yeah. Good rings. Thank you. It did happen. By accident. I tried to own it. Too many children and old ladies were staring at me,

so I went and changed my pants. Okay, but. So he's like, well, what about your shoes? And I was like, what do you mean? And he's like, you have to get dress shoes. And I was like, no. Yes. I'm not buying dress shoes for a wedding. I'm going to wear them once. And he was like, you got to get dress shoes. And I was like, no. Yes. I'm not buying dress shoes for a wedding. I'm going to wear them once.

And he was like, you got to do it. I didn't do it. I went to my sister's wedding, stayed at a motel with my parents. And in the morning, my dad puts on his flip flops. And my dad and my mom put on our sneakers. And I go, oh, so you're not wearing dress shoes. And my dad goes, why would I buy dress shoes for a wedding?

And I was like, okay, you as a person make so much more sense to me now. Yeah. Can I, can I give my Apple watch at the wedding? Yeah. I think so.

We, the five of us in this room, right? We're, we're into tech. We've been in tech for some time. Our brains have been slowly turned to mush over the last 10 years by being in this industry um for those whose brains are still

intact which still have wrinkles in them um i can understand not seeing your apple watch or any smart watch as being fundamentally different from your phone and i could see it just feeling like you have your phone out the entire wedding, even though we don't see it that way. We see it as like a separate product category with separate use cases. You use it in a different way. I understand and I have lots of friends that even if I go out to a bar with them, and they see an email flash on my Apple Watch, they're like kind of offended they're like why do you do you really need to have your email on your wrist like we're hanging out and it's like

there's a part of me that's like come on but there's another part it's like yeah you're kind of right about that one um so maybe maybe maybe the maybe just put it in the theater mode i don't know i could also see in the sense of like, all of us here know how to silence our Apple Watches, but they're so popular that a lot of people who are not technologically advanced wear them. And like the worst thing is just mid ceremony, like ding, ding. And like there's always the-

That's what I thought it was. So like at this point, I would rather just blanket statement be like, please just don't wear it. Cause like that's i've officiated two weddings and i always had to make in the beginning like put your phones away everyone there is a photographer here like they know how to do it and every single time there's always somebody with a phone out it's just pro tip because i just officiated a wedding have them give them two minutes right up top to take all that is what i did i was like take them all now and then put them away as someone has day have you guys officiated a wedding i've never officiated all right so we're at least we're in the majority

here yeah i was about to be like this is the craziest statistic like i've only been the photographer at a wedding i've never i think that's way more pressure way more it was yeah that's a lot of pressure especially because they didn't tell me that it was their wedding. Well, then there's not a lot of pressure. What did they tell you? And then into all of the pressure. You should come out for the weekend for this family and best friends party. Oh my.

They didn't say it was a wedding? And then I showed up and they were like, this is actually our wedding. Surprise everybody. And then I was like, and they were like, David actually our wedding surprise everybody and then i had and then i was like and they were like david can you take the pictures that i was like but luckily i bring my cameras everywhere so it worked out but i have two notes on this on this whole topic one uh true story linus uh wore socks and sandals to austin's and evan's wedding nice there were black socks and black sandals but it was socks and sandals. It was on the...

Dressed up. I was going to say, that's pretty impressive. It's on brand. On brand. Yeah, on brand. It worked out. It was a suit. It was great.

That's dope. And two, I wore an Apple watch to the Met Gala. Oh, yeah. If anyone... You have the greatest answer to this question possible of like, is this bigger than the Met Gala? Yeah. Is this more formal i

will add marquez yes you looked great you did i think so it was just under the cuff it wasn't like out you know it wasn't like a highlight of my outfit but it was there and you can see it in pictures and it's not that bad but i all the pictures i saw of you with the watch and correct me if i wrong you did have the screen off i don't remember okay it probably didn't show up on camera yeah i wasn't i for sure wasn't on my watch during it yeah but it was there in case i needed the stand hours oh my god or if i got an important email okay as a as a watch guy i'm screaming internally at this whole conversation i want your take because not only should you not wear apple watches i think they should go a step further and ban certain kinds of watches wow yeah i'm saying certain kinds of

regular watches yeah even mechanical watch like because there are there are rolexes that are like 50 millimeters and they're massive and it's like i don't care if it's a rolex get that behemoth off your wrist like it needs to be a nice dress watch classy thin slide under the cuff there's a whole thing yes about when you're doing suits and tuxedos you want like a nice watch that just disappears yeah but then you're trying to like control the the guests look stress code yeah yeah you already have to wear a certain color unless you're harid 43 millimeters max. Right? Am I right? I just want to know, in this scenario, if someone was wearing their smartwatch and the bride comes up and says, I said no Apple Watches, and they go, this is the Galaxy Watch 5. Ma'am, this is a whoop.

This is just a garment. How does that play out? Well, it's the same thing as when you have your Android phone and you go to the bodega and you get a pay and they go oh apple pay and you're like yeah yes i could become difficult here but there's no reason to do so good definitely good move yeah yeah yeah i don't know i think it's funny one other thing i want to bring up real quick yeah related to this is like the apple Watch is the most popular watch in the world. It is. I wonder how many people only started wearing a watch at all because they wanted an Apple Watch versus the people that replaced their existing watch. A lot of people.

Yeah, a ton. So in that way, it could be considered more of an accessory, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah. it could be considered more of an accessory i suppose yeah yeah i i'm pretty sure if any single one of us here got that wedding invite we would just not wear our yeah because i'm respectful do i'm not sure push the bounce except for sure dress up the apple watch and put in theater mode and then you're like do you still want me to take it off you should have it like on a chain in your vest. Like flavorful. Yeah. Wait, do they make? No, I mean like the pocket watch.

Pocket watch, Apple watch. They do. I thought you meant like how he wears a clasp. No, no, how it's like in your vest in the little pocket. I'm not getting the rings though if I do that. That's funny. Fun fact, the Apple watch can track your heart rate through your upper

thigh it's a thing but oh you're wearing it i'm lying yeah i was like strapped this is if it's like in pocket watch config in in the front pocket next to your phone you know how in the movies they have like the assassins that have like the knife on their upper thigh you do that but you just strap the apple watch there so they can track your steps. Yeah. Gotta get those steps, man. Yeah. All right.

Yeah. We gotta move on. Yeah. Fun headline. You can now buy a Hyundai on Amazon in the US. I see this headline, and it's Amazon Autos, and I'm familiar with eBay Motors and other ways of buying a car online,

but there's something funny about the idea of buying a car, and then 24 hours later, they just deliver it to your driveway. Well, they don't do that. That's not what's happening. No, no, no. But that's what you picture

when you see Amazon and this headline, but it's Amazon Autos. They don't deliver it to you? No, they don't deliver it to you. I bought a lawnmower with Amazon Prime. Yeah.

That's pretty close. I feel like we're not that far off. Yeah. Can you get a car-sized drone on Amazon? No, they're too busy flying in our skies right now. Okay, so yeah. So basically they are launching Amazon Autos. It's this new push that they're doing in the United States thus far.

They partnered with 48 different cities and specifically Hyundai right now. But effectively you put in your zip code and it tells you this is the closest Hyundai dealership that has the car you want. You select your make, model, and trim of what they have available. And then you can do everything that you would normally do with an actual car dealership. Like, you can trade in your car through the Amazon portal.

You can also sort by prices. I'm pulling up cars in our area right now. There's a ton. What did you search? How did you actually search this? I clicked on the Amazon Autos link in the article, and it took me to the hub. It's not great that I can't figure this out exactly

from their actual page. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, no. If you type in Hyundai, then there's buy your new Hyundai on Amazon. Mm-hmm. Shop available cars

yeah oh yeah it is crazy it kind of looks like when ebay launched ebay motors it just it it's a weird idea to see a car on amazon but right now it only works it's only with hyundai but they're planning on expanding to the manufacturers next year and they're also going to expand the amount of um dealerships that they they work with what i'm interested in is the button says begin purchase not purchase well which like well but like the every single auto like dealership has a price and then you go there and it's a different price and then you have to to play that dumb game. There is no heckling on this. Yeah, is this like price listed as price out the door? That's great.

Are you sure? Yes. It says that? I read that in an article. I can almost guarantee you this would not be the price when I got to the dealership. Whether they say that or not,

I've had dealerships straight up lie to Claire. You check out on Amazon though. It says begin purchase. Yeah, but you go through the process. The price says price, excluding government fees taxes and 187 50 cent dealer fee oh but then that should be it you're not haggling at an hour after you like lock this price which you never should have ever had to do with cars that's been that was the one thing that tesla really like people changed the world with was like can i just pay for the thing at the price that it says yeah but the price changes

every two weeks that's that's it and you have to win some yeah yeah but yeah you can just uh sort you know cars near you there's a bunch of ionic six ionic five you know what they have to do now they have to bring back the amazon dash button no you should be not only should you be able to buy a hyundai on amazon you should be able to hit a button in your pastry yeah and get six of them for those that don't remember this in like 2017 or so they released the amazon dash button which was a little sticky button you could have in your house that when you pressed it it would just automatically order the thing that you assigned it to usually like paper towels or dishwasher yeah yeah and people people's kids started just smashing them and there were these

stories of like 30 packs of 30 boxes of toilet paper would just show up at people's houses that's wild to not have to factor on that just like give me a notification on my phone don't just order in someone could just i ordered 12 boxes of tide pods just now that's crazy two factor that's the only there was there was a really fun hacker community going on with that though where people were reassigning them to things like opening their garage and like doing sick routines and stuff with them that is sick it was pretty cool because they were free actually i think if you i think they were five dollars but they gave you five dollars off your next purchase of the thing they were assigned why would amazon not want a button that just gave them money yeah yeah yeah wow so that's fun um maybe you'll buy your next car on amazon dystopia maybe your next hyundai uh okay

here's another interesting one that's come up this week and i haven't tried this but i really am curious to um and maybe you'll be interested too instagram trial reels so hear me out typically when you post a reel you want to make sure your followers see it right but what if there was a feature and yes the irony is not lost on me but what if there was a feature, and yes, the irony is not lost on me, but what if there was a feature where you could publish a reel where none of your followers see it, but it does populate to the feed and the algorithm can pick it up and non-followers can start to react to it? I thought that was just called posting on Instagram. That's what the comments are all saying. But the idea behind this trial reel is you're not really

sure if your audience will be into this one, but you do want to sort of test the waters and see how people are reacting to it. And if it turns out to be a good one, then you can sort of unlock it, and it will then show up on the homepage and the feed for your followers as well and on your profile. They can still have it sent to them. Like if it gets shown in someone else's reel, it gets sent to you. It's still visible, but it's a trial reel. I kind of want to – I think it gets shown someone else's reel it gets sent to you it's still visible but it's a trial reel i kind of want to i think it's interesting yeah it's interesting feature to me my first question i don't want to throw this off topic too hard too fast this seems like it would

take a lot of work to develop and creating a way of posting something that goes to an algorithm that doesn't involve your followers like this wasn't an easy task from instagram i actually wonder check all of your followers from people who could see it yeah it just feels the only thing it's doing is it's not populating in in the home feed for the people who follow you yeah so like only like swiping reels pretty much but it does show up when people swipe reels in so if i'm following david not the people follow me yeah but still so like that means it's a it's sending it to the feed but now i have to have a feed it just says exclude from followers of david yeah that's pretty pretty much

it okay i was gonna say they did this before an instagram app or ipad app that is i just got the ipad i'm allowed to complain even more now oh yeah have you tried it on the mini the instagram app no i didn't is there is oh it's just like it's just a shrunken i haven't even downloaded it fair yeah yeah so i want to try this so the idea is if you're like a beauty influencer and you're mostly doing beauty videos but you want to do like a comedy reel or something and you don't want the people who normally only subscribe to you for beauty things to to see it because you want to experiment then after 24 hours you get to see how all the rest of instagram liked it and then you get to decide at that point if you want to put it

on your followers feed and on your page or if you want to archive it immediately which is kind of weird it's a trial run yeah but the thing is like it's going to go out to the random people but then you have to decide if you want to delete it or put it on your page and if you put on your page then your followers will see it so they're going to see it anyway well it also automatically posts to your page after three days oh it does well yeah interesting yeah there's no way to keep it private it would be crazy to like make something that's viral that your audience can like never see and like create this secondary feed of whatever you're doing i have okay i've wanted this for youtube for so long where like you have a youtube

you know how people make multiple youtube channels for different interests it's like can you just subscribe to someone's interest on their youtube channel you know like if i wanted to have a photography section on my youtube channel and someone could subscribe to that and i wanted a video essay section and people could subscribe to that i would much prefer that to just making separate youtube channel google plus was so ahead of its time you follow a playlist was that part of google plus yeah you just share it to your photography circle oh yeah or people who follow you would put you in the photography circle and then the things you share would just be you can't follow a playlist on someone's channel you can you it would mean they would have to correctly yeah but in the playlist i would have to keep only following

the playlist which yeah that would be kind of strange and also they've just deprioritized subscriptions anyway and the algorithm just does everything now so it'd be nice if instagram had this too you know yeah it's like david dot beauty david dot comedy i don't know i just want to like what funny things could you do with these reels that aren't going out to your audience but going out to other audiences Gaslight your audience What content can you like put out there that you're specifically like because you have a huge audience, right? So like yeah, you could say don't show this to 4 million people essentially on Instagram Yeah, and like what?

What funny cryptic thing could you do on the side of it there's got to be a if you're saying this it's a joke I could play I don't know what it would be yeah yeah like that's a possibility that it could be really interesting yeah I don't know this is what well I'm sure I'll have this feature at some point soon but yeah I want to try this and I'm gonna probably do it with like a throwaway reel that I you know wasn't gonna publish anyway but just to see what happens so now to properly follow your favorite instagram influencer you need an account

that follows them and an account that doesn't follow them just in case they post something but you have to randomly see it yeah you have to get lucky enough to find it dang true fans why is it different once you've shown it to random people and it performed well with random people that you're willing to put it on your page? Because your followers are still going to react the same way that they always have. Well, maybe, okay, I'm trying to think, I hear what you're saying, but maybe there's something you're trying that's like a little bit outside of your comfort zone. And you want to try it first to see if regular people, because the goal when you publish a reel is to grow your following anyway. You want it to be shown to people who don't follow you but sometimes if it's shown to the people who follow you and they don't react to it well then it kind of hurts the chances of it being

shown to more people so you want to start with it being shown to those more people just to see if they like it if they do like it okay my regular audience probably will like it too but if they don't like it never mind it was just a trial that's a fair point it's like if i want to do something else but i want to have a better chance of it doing well in the algorithm yeah something a little different my audience probably wouldn't immediately love also quick clarification it auto shares after 72 hours if you click the toggle to allow it to share if it performs well so there's a potential that you can post something and permanently leave it on only the non-follower feed there's some potential to do something silly here and i need to figure it out before someone else does you should be brainstorming

this whole it should be an incredible winter break yeah sorry i can't celebrate christmas lane i have to figure it out i need a crazy there's a joke here somewhere yeah all right well we got to take a quick break. We got a bunch more phones to talk about, stuff that's come out this year and that's coming next year and even more after that. So before we take that break, trivia time. Today's first question is, we talked about buying a car on Amazon, but this is not the first time really expensive stuff has been sold on Amazon. So today I'm going to read you three real Amazon listings, and I need you to tell me which one is the most expensive. I like this.

Are you ready to hear the listings? I'm going to read the titles verbatim from Amazon. Product number one. Quick, simple, easy, SEQ, fully equipped, double two-story or excuse me, double-story, two-bedroom free prefab,

expandable container house, 40 feet by 20 feet, luxury home, stairs included, free bed set with terrace. I would love that. The most Amazon listing possible. I know, right? So just for clarity, this is a luxury prefab two-story home with 40 by 20 feet floor plan. Stairs included.

Stairs included. Item number two. Number two, Queen Victoria, Banco de Londres y Mexico, 1,000 pesos, 1905 dated, stock certificate with dividend coupons attached, uncanceled. A bond? I thought it was a painting at first and then... Those are vintage peso notes from Mexico from 1905. Item number three is a painting. Peso notes from Mexico from 1905.

Item number three is a painting. It is the painting titled The Way by expressionist artist. By, that's a really hard name. I apologize. Leave this in. Gaffer Tamirianoff. Gaffer Tamirianoff. The painting is called The Way and it is an expressionist painting you're looking at

what it looks like no because if you look at what it looks like you'll probably see the price oh i was trying to make a joke oh the way i didn't see any price right you didn't see any place i didn't see any price i was trying never mind i was doing the way like show me the way the sonic the hedgehog yeah yeah knuckles the kididna work uh anyway so think about which one of those is most expensive old money a a small a small a big small house a small big house stairs included stairs included or some painting some paint on a canvas by a person by a person that i personally have never heard of but maybe they are a world famous artist it's on Amazon

alright we will think about that answers will be at the end like usual we'll be right back support for this show comes from Klaviyo Thank you. in one place. With Klaviyo, tinned fish phenom Fishwife delivers real-time, personalized experiences that keeps their customers hooked. They've grown 70 times revenue

in just four years with Klaviyo. Now that's scale. Visit klaviyo.com to learn how brands like Fishwife build smarter digital relationships with Klaviyo. All right, welcome back. We've got a bunch of phones that are next to me here now.

You can kind of see them if you're looking at the video version, but the idea behind this is we reviewed a bunch of phones this year, but there's also a bunch of phones that come out that we don't review. And a couple of them I still think are at least noteworthy in some way.

Spoiler alert, the smartphone awards are also coming out. Depending on when you're watching this either soon or it's also just come out we love the smartphone awards that's like the big flagship video to end the year we recognize a lot of phones and a lot of phones get mentioned that didn't get their own videos i think this is a good time to highlight some phones that have come out in the last few weeks of the year that haven't gotten a video, but that are interesting in some way. There's also a lot of phones that come out this time of the year, we realized, because we started doing this at the beginning of November and then

looked at our email and we're like, there's a lot of things we still need to see. A big thing is that Qualcomm used to release their new flagship ship in December. So the first chips would come out around, the first phones would come out around January, but they keep moving it back. And now they did it in early October. Yeah. So this year we got a whole wave of phones in November and December. Yeah.

And that was really interesting because I put together my award winners like mid-November. And then I thought, hold on, wait, there's like two or three phones that might actually be worthy of checking out. And we like held back on some of the trophies and like on some of the awards

and actually got to test some of these phones and have now put together the awards accordingly so anyway i got four phones in front of me here and we can do them in any order or i don't know if we have a theme for how we want to start but they're all they all have the word pro in the name they do that's the one thing i noticed from here they're all very expensive phones. But I think we can just go through one by one. Yeah. Maybe let's start with the Vivo. Okay. Okay.

So here's interesting phone number one. This is the Vivo X200 Pro. There's also a family of X200s. There's an X200 and an X200 Mini. This phone is complete. It's got it all. It's the ultra of Vivo's lineup. I think the most impressive part of it, though be the cameras so they work with ice it's

got a 50 megapixel primary camera 50 megapixel ultrawide camera and then a 200 megapixel telephoto camera and what that means is you can crop in a lot and ideally still maintain sharpness and it's a really good set of cameras. I think this is the closest to a real camera that I've seen a smartphone camera shooting experience get from the results to the actual shots, like shooting them. And you can tell by looking at it, it's a very camera-focused phone. Yeah. Thoughts? Any other things you want to know about it?

I just think that the funniest thing about this line is that the Vivo X200 Mini is still 6.3 inches. Yeah, Mini, yeah. What does Mini really mean? We'll talk about that in the Smartphone Awards, but Mini, there's not too many small phones these days. Yeah. This phone also has a giant battery and super fast charging and wireless charging, and it's got a pretty high-end chip that enables a lot of the ai features it's not the snapdragon 8 elite but it is media tech density 9400 there you have it yeah and it's yeah it's a rock solid phone it's actually a really really really really good phone so wait this uh street photography mode is kind of cool there's a bunch

of modes that are crazy in the camera if you should also try, so there's a portrait mode lens emulator. I'm assuming it's emulating half of these, but it lets you pick the focal length. It actually has contrast. Oh, and there's different. Oh, wow. There's different, like. Are they got the portrait modes? Yeah.

So the lenses, you can emulate the background bokeh swirl characteristics of different lenses as well which is really and it still has like a cutout and you kind of can tell it's a fake portrait mode but it's cool that it works and actually looks we're in the like street photography mode that makes it kind of look that's filmy and has like different uh textured yeah there's it says textured and then it says like a zeiss one it seems like natural looks like any other smartphone camera and then it just jacks the shadows a ton but textured actually gives it textured contrast versions not the it's one of the luts luts vivid is just it's more saturated than natural with brighter highlights then there's black and

white and then textured just is more contrast so as you can see by what's happening here this is a phone that you would get if you're really into photography if you are very into the different looks you can get the different customizations you can mess with the different lenses or like pseudo fake ai helped lenses that you can play with on a camera. These, this is all of that. There's just a ton of stuff in the camera here. And then it happens to be an awesome phone outside of the great camera. So see,

wait, that zoom seems kind of nuts. Zoom is really, so it goes to a hundred, right? It one 35, one 30, 135 X.

Oh, no, it's converting to millimeter in this. Gotcha. The street photography. Sony needs to take notes. Because this is the exact opposite of Sony. Sony is like... It's like in between.

But Sony's is really hard to understand. And this is like, let's take pro features and make it fun to look at. And a clean UI. Sony already announced something like this. It's just coming out in two years. No, I mean, it's got all these pro features like white balance and aperture and shutter speed that you can control manually and then it's got these rapid uh focal length changing features but like this is considered basic mode yeah which is crazy c11, C2. Oh, there's presets. Oh my God, this is awesome. Like a fun UI that feels filmy.

Anyway, sorry. That's just the camera. That's just the camera. It also is a great screen. It's also got these nice flat sides and it's got this brushed metal look to it. It's nice. It's got this ring.

Vivo X200 Pro. That's the first one. Any other questions about it? Any other ideas? Yeah, that's the first one any other questions about it any other ideas yeah that's the first you're gonna swap to that ellis oh yeah yeah this is one where like the it's got an ultrasonic fingerprint reader too there's one where the camera bump is so big that it kind of you kind of feel it when you're holding it like weighs the phone i will say the the oppo find x8 pro is kind of like a cousin phone to this, but it's similar, except it has, I think this phone has two different telephoto lenses. So it's all 50 megapixel sensors, but it's like a 50 megapixel primary, ultra wide, 3X and 6X. So that's what they do with this instead.

It's got this nice, I'll let you hold it. It's like a marble feeling back with this particular color. It is, let me double check, but I believe this is the first Snapdragon 8 Elite phone we're looking at. So let me just. The marble back is really nice. No fingerprints, although the marble texture

almost just looks like it's already smudged. Yeah. This feels nicer in the hand just because it's like thinner and less top heavy despite still having a huge camera bump yeah it seems like the oppo one is a little bit more about style than functionality necessarily even though that the find x phones have always been really really amazing ever since the first one came out it's just been i've i've reviewed a lot of oppo find x phones this is not a snap 8 Elite phone, by the way.

So this is still the Dimensity 9400. It was in consideration as well for battery because if you look at the specs, it's a 5910 milliamp hour battery with wireless charging, with fast charging. So that was another thing. This thin? Yeah, in a phone that looks like a regular thickness.

So there's a lot of good things going on with that phone too it has the word pro in the name for a reason you know it's got high-end stuff happening with the screen it's bright hasselblad branding hasselblad branding pretty classic that's the thing they keep doing but does it have ai yes in fact when you go to the website it just says powerful camera powerful ai yeah it It has the slider, the alert slider. That's the OnePlus calling of it. But the volume slider switch on the corner as well. Alert switch, yeah. Alert switch.

So that is the Oppo Find X8 Pro. That's also out. Oh, it's called the alert slider too. Okay, cool. Then we have these two phones over here. These are both Snapdragon 8 Elite phones. So I just want to say what that means. So that's the new Snapdragon chip, the new Qualcomm chip.

The Snapdragon 8 Elite has started coming out, and I think Dave2D did a really good job with his video about this. Somehow this chip has made like a really big leap from the previous generation of Snapdragon chips from Qualcomm to the point where it's both more efficient and has higher peak power in a meaningful way. So you can get better performance in a way that doesn't throttle with games when they make good cooling solutions for these phones, and they get longer battery life, like 20, 30, maybe 40% longer. That's a crazy jump for one year. So really looking forward to seeing a lot of phones with the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip in them. These two we have here are very much gaming phones. So they have focused on the performance aspect, but also happen to do a really good job with the rest of the stuff too, because gaming phones are great media phones. So here's the first one. This

is the ROG Phone 9 Pro. So a couple things about this one is they have the screen on the back that you saw me make the short on, but also still has wireless charging, which is higher on the back of the phone. You have a 185 hertz display at the front. There's still a headphone jack at the bottom. There's still the two USB-Cc ports they've kind of tamed down the aesthetic overall but you still have the front facing speakers it's still very much a gaming phone with the high refresh rate and high brightness and the snapdragon 8 elite but that's that there's something funny about going from the the x200 pro with the zeiss branded camera to the oppo with the hassleblad branded camera and then this one just says like the

good luck have fun yeah yeah the difference in cameras between the gaming phones and the the other daily flagships is this is sleek though this is like what the rog phones should have always been in the sense of like it's still a gamer phone it's got somewhat of gamer aesthetic but not the like make fun of me on the subway gamers because last year they kind of took away a lot of the things that made it feel gamery at all and then now they brought back like the texture and the like this those rapid triggers and stuff too right and then this side usb c port if you're really gaming all the time awesome because then it's not in the way on the side although the headphone jack's still on the side so that feels counterintuitive yeah but yeah yeah so i you can play i mean if you're on the

subway playing games on the back of your phone you're probably still gonna get looked at but yeah yeah it's great for that 5800 milliamp hour battery 65 watt hypercharge yeah good looks it's it's funny because like the percent doesn't seem that big. It'll be like, oh, this is a 5% or 10% larger battery, and that might not make headlines the same way as the experience difference. I think people just don't care why their battery life's longer. They just want their battery life to be longer. That's also true. I mean, we get into the details, but this is the last phone.

This is the Red Magic 10 Pro. This has a cutout in the back or in the side for an active fan, which turns on anytime temperatures get up, anytime you're gaming, or anytime you plugged in charging. And when you plug it in, you hear the fan. I wish I had like a USB. I would hold it up to the mic so you could hear it. But like the fan spins up and it makes like a whining noise. So this phone is very much concerned with performance and thermals oh do we have uh do you need an inch charger i just figured your computer yeah let's actually plug it in so you

can hear the fan all right this is plugging in the red magic 10 pro oh oh my goodness i would not want that to happen every time I plug my phone in. You can turn the fan off, but that's a default because it wants to maximize your charging speed, which is a 100 watts peak without overheating. It has a 7,000 milliamp hour battery, 7,050. Okay. So it's combining the new Snapdragon Elite chip

with the 7,050 milliamp hour battery. It also has the air triggers. It's very squared off. This is much more in the gamer aesthetic. I dig it. Yeah. For some reason, I think it looks really sick. It's a good looking phone.

It's pretty clean on the front, pretty minimal, not much to the bezels. You've got a front facing, or you got a headphone jack at the top, which is cool. Yeah, this is a gaming phone for sure it's got all of the fun graphics on the back that you'd expect but it's fans on both sides yeah so i'm assuming this is you can literally see the fan yeah this is not going to be a waterproof phone no this is not yeah yeah pretty crazy that this is a phone with a 7050 milliamp hour battery and it just

looks like a normal phone yeah it's a big phone but it's a normal looking phone yeah a few manufacturers recently switched from lithium-ion to silicon carbon batteries and you can pack a lot more energy density in that same package yeah that was a very quiet update that we didn't really hear a lot of fanfare about but that's actually a pretty major thing it's probably because a lot of manufacturers instead of actually giving you more battery capacity will just make the phone thinner and have the same battery capacity which is probably what's going to happen in the iphone 17 slim or whatever that ends up being called i keep seeing that the air or whatever yeah yeah but i do appreciate that they are improving battery

density in a meaningful way because there's always all the hype about the graphene battery or some crazy breakthrough battery. That's not really usually how it works. Usually it's just slow improvements over time. And this is maybe a 3% to 5% to 8% improvement in battery density. But that's the difference between 5,000 and 5,800. You could get a 7,000 mAh battery in a phone now. It's wild.

They put a 7,000 mAh battery in here. And a fan. 24 gigs of RAM. You can see it through the side too wow dang yeah that's wild and a headphone jack they have space look at this they've always just telling you 7 000 milliamp and a headphone jack and a fan they've always had they've always had space andrew i something crazy i would maybe switch to that for a little bit it's kind of sick i just think it's one of the prettiest finishes i had seen on a phone in a long time it's just like very industrial kind of like yeah and i like the battery life and i would miss literally everything about

my current phone but this is as opposite as your iphone purple mini but i think i think in spirit it's kind of the same you know what i mean it's like no i need to explain that this is the iphone mini spirit animal look i i'm not using an iphone 12 mini because it's better than any other iphone right i'm using it for two reasons I'm using it because I already have it, and I'm using it because I love the finish. You know what I mean? Like, if I really cared about my phone to that extreme degree, I would just get a better iPhone for

at this point, like $100, because I could get a better iPhone and get an iPhone 13, you know? And that's the spirit of that thing, you know what I mean? Like, it's got a great finish, it's already in the office, so You know what I mean? Like it's got a great finish. It's already in the office, so I wouldn't need to pay for it. And yeah, so I think spiritually that is the 12 mini purple finish of bizarre Android phones. I'll just point out all the differences.

The 12 mini is one of the smallest phones in the past decade. Facts. princess the 12 mini is one of the smallest phones in the past decade facts uh this phone has a 6.85 inch corner to corner 144 hertz 2000 nits led display yeah that's pretty big it's gorgeous it is huge yep yep it's about the size of the battery i think that's about where it would fit in the corner of the phone jeez uh i will note the iphone 12 mini also had a decent camera i don't think this phone is going to have that good of a camera it's just a hunch i haven't Jeez. I will note the iPhone 12 mini also had a decent camera. I don't think this phone is going to have that good of a camera. It's just a hunch. I haven't tested it that much.

You can't use your camera when you're ripping subway surfers with your fan on, so it doesn't matter. There's also no bump, so I imagine small sensors. No camera bump at all, which is cool. Make the phone a little thicker and do that, but that is another difference. The iPhone has, I mean, this is a nice purple finish, a pretty lilac color, not too offensive. This phone has text all over the back. It's got a big X logo.

I don't know why. It's not the Twitter logo, and it's not the Snapdragon 8X Elite logo. So what is the X? Is it? X Games mode? It's probably X Games mode. It says cooling system on the back.'s got the rog or it's got the the red magic logo it's got a it's got a lot it's busy i would say there's another difference seeing you hold it up like that it reminds me of how the battery of

like the hummer ev is the size of yeah yeah that's exactly what i was thinking yeah yeah it has a headphone jack yeah and it has a hell was thinking. It has a headphone jack. Ellis likes headphones. But what do you do about your Apple Watch, Ellis? How much RAM does the iPhone 12 mini have? See? This is why they're being sued by the US government. But, yeah. Honestly, AirDrop

would be the thing I miss more than the Apple Watch. Because then I can start going to weddings again. True. The iPhone 12 mini had 4 gigs of of ram how much does this one have this one has 24 gigs of ram does this really have 24 gigs of ram gamers can't afford this if you're a gamer you cannot afford this i'm sorry this phone might not be too expensive but yeah that's that's what's going on big new batteries new higher battery density new chips massive new interesting camera stuff those four phones all came out in the last month basically in the u.s which is pretty cool

um and there's also a phone we're expecting to come out next year which some rumors are starting to spill about a little bit which would be the galaxy s25s uh number one i would also expect those to be snapdragon 8 elite phones at least here in the u.s but number two there's a rumor about this keeps coming up chi 2 yes what is the what is the deal with chi 2 in this phone is this happening or not probably there's well it's kind of weird because there's an a rumor from ice universe but ice universe didn't tweet it someone else tweeted that ice universe said it so i'm very confused about that part but there are so many articles saying ice universe says chi 2 and the s25 but all of them are sourcing it from a tweet from someone else. So take that as you may. Okay. What?

This is not the first phone with Chi Tu. That's the HMD Skyline, which I'd never heard of until I was- It's really weird. It looks interesting. It's a badly rated phone. Okay, cool. All you need to know about it is that it tries to do the curved aesthetic in the front, but then for some reason, it's also square. Oh, this is the Windows Phone aesthetic.

Yes. Yes, exactly. The Lumia aesthetic. Exactly like look at the screen of it wait what the which wait i think oh doesn't hmd own uh nokia yeah and they did the nokia lumia so this is just the same company i guess so it looks like the front of the pixel fold yeah the first one oh that's but with like the side yeah you're right you're right but just the side of the Pixel Fold. The first one, yeah. Oh, that's the new one. No, you're right, you're right. But just the side of it, yeah. Yeah, it was not rated very well. Okay. Yeah.

But, Chi 2. Yeah, so Chi 2. We've all been dying about Chi 2. And then there was a bunch of questions. So what was confusing is the GSM Arena article about this said that there's two profiles for chi 2 one called epp and one for mpp but then david found a wired article that explains the difference is essentially that's extended power profile or magnetic power profile the biggest difference is one has a magnet one doesn't have a magnet so everyone on reddit's like is it gonna have the magnets is it not gonna

have the magnets the magnets is what we really care about here yeah yeah um do you want to read the quote from the article okay so wpc's paul golden which i did an interview with when we did our chi 2 episode actually he was quoted in this wired article and this is a quote from him he says epp refers to a device that complies with the specification but is not officially Qi2 and thus cannot use the logo or be referred to as a Qi2 device. Golden told Wired in an email that such devices would carry the Qi logo, not Qi2, and packaging and or marketing materials have a required statement that the device does not contain magnets.

Any device labeled Qi2 is MPP, which is magnetic power profile, and must contain magnets any device labeled chi 2 is mpp which is magnetic power profile and must contain magnets so i remember actually when the hmd skyline came out at first and i was everyone was like is this chi 2 is it not chi 2 because it has the magnets but it doesn't work with some chi uh device chi chargers that's because the magnets are in like a different arrangement or the charging coil is in a different place it's confusing effectively if if you have the chi tube branding if there is the little two right below the chi logo it will have magnets okay so magnets does not mean chi 2 but chi 2 does mean magnets correct okay and what so i guess what we're going off of this as is based on what ice universe saw so if this was which we don't even know because he didn't

even tweet allegedly possibly um gosh that if they saw the logo somewhere on the phone or the marketing materials if it's a chi 2 then we should have magnets yeah is what i'm getting from that's what the wireless power consortium who standardizes chi says and it seems like most leakers are seeing things that are marketing material boxes like cad renderings and stuff like that so i'm assuming the reason ice universe is saying chi 2 is because of seeing one of those things inside of a leak which makes me think they saw the logo, which would mean magnets. That would be good. I hope so. I got plenty of magnetic accessories.

I just want to still think it's one of the best things that every single phone needs. Yeah. Yeah. For every car out there that doesn't have car play where you put your phone up on a magnetic dock. It's just been iPhones on those docks so far, but I would love to put my Galaxy S25. Yeah. Or a phone with a case yeah or a phone with a case while it's on there that'd be huge fire okay well i hope that comes out um all right well we do want

to take one more break we'll be talking about sora and some other stuff right after but before we take that last break we got one more trivia question trivia dude so we were talking about the apple watch earlier being allowed at weddings or not but do you remember the apple watch edition yeah the gold one the twenty thousand dollar 18 carat gold apple watch it ranges in price from ten thousand to what what was the most expensive version of that watch? Too expensive for a thing that will become outdated and get slow. It already is outdated.

It was outdated less than 12 months after it was released. Yes, indeed. I remember that. Because I almost did a video. I was researching about the fastest outdated products of all time. And I read that the Apple Watch Edition was discontinued like 10 or 11 months later.

And that was really sad. Well, they stopped doing the edition gold thing with the next apple watch like the next year so it's like you just bought a 10 000 up to up to some crazy number very expensive watch wow and uh yeah you literally could have just gotten the gold colored one for so much cheaper i think they very shortly started making gold that's tough i'm trying to remember the price okay well we'll think about that answers at the end like usual we'll be right back support for this show comes from Misfits Market. Want to save money on groceries, discover delicious new foods, and help reduce food waste?

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you can save $30 across your first two orders with Misfits Market. Just visit misfitsmarket.com and use the code shopmisfits to save money on your grocery bill. All right, welcome back. Is this video real or AI generated? Who knows? Who knows? I can prove it's real. You can prove it's real or AI generated? Who knows? Who knows?

I can prove it's real. You can prove it's real? Five fingers? All my fingers are moving around normally. It also has audio. Physics is working. Audio is a really good sign. Physics moving things in realistic ways is a good sign.

Okay, so we're real for sure, guaranteed. That's what an AI would say. But we just got Sora's official launch this week sora being open ai's ai video generating model and we got early access to it we got to publish an exclusive early review of it i prompted it probably 300 times i did all kinds of stuff i was trying everything i possibly could messing messing with the features, diving around and digging in. There was a Slack thread that had like 200 plus replies in it. Yeah.

And it was all of us just sending you random things. Do you remember when Blue Sky first started and there was like the hell thread? Yeah. That's what that was for us in our Slack. It was just one Slack thread of like hundreds of videos. Yeah. I was messing with it and I just put in the Slack like,

hey, if anybody wants a video from sora or wants to like try something just let me know mariah's keyboard started smoking we got we were we were prompting like crazy and we learned a lot of things about it that it's you know we got we got the hand selected videos before that open ai showed us but now we got to try our own stuff and really figure out what it's good at you You can make all kinds of stuff. There's obviously the parameters that you have an OpenAI, you have a ChatGPT account, and it comes with the ChatGPT Plus account, right? So if you're paying the $200 a month, this is part of it now, which is, I think that's

what it's called, ChatGPT Plus? I think it's pro for the 200 but let me make sure oh pro pro max but anyway yeah we we tried everything it was possibly capable of the headline is that for the 200 a month that chat gpt pro subscribers are already paying sora is just now a part of that it's just loop looped in, which I think a lot of people... Sort of. I'll just give you this first, and then we'll do it. Okay. So, plus, you get 50 videos a month with your $20 a month ChatGPD subscription. Up to 720p resolution, 5 seconds duration.

Pro, which is the $200 a month, you get up to 500 videos. Yep. Unlimited relaxed videos. I have no idea what that means.'s a little oh yeah uh relaxed mode lets you queue additional videos to be completed when the traffic is okay okay up to 1080p 20 second duration and five concurrent generations yeah download without watermark jesus christ um and learn more about everything okay Okay, yeah. So those are the differences. Yeah. So we'll just start.

So I essentially had unlimited free reign of like a maximum capable version of this. And so we're putting in our own prompts instead of just looking at what was provided from the last early look we got early in the year, which was handpicked from OpenAI. the last early look we got early in the year, which was handpicked from OpenAI. And so we got to figure out more of what it's good at, what it's bad at, and what it could actually be used for today. So watch that video. That is the best way of getting all that information. I think the TLDR is it's good at abstracts. It's good at really, really crude, like basic title slide type stuff. What it's bad at is generally physics. Now, videos have moving objects in them. That's the important part.

And I think when you generate a photo, you can get increasingly good at, you know, high resolution photo realistic images. But a video has things that have to move in different ways. And that is usually the giveaway of an ad generated video is it doesn't know how fast to move something or how to fold things on top of each other or have them like overlap in front of each other often things with legs moving the legs will switch between each other object permanence is not really that good like it's not it's not amazing at that stuff but it's still crazy that it's making 1080p 20 second high resolution videos so yeah that's it's been interesting to watch and it started a lot of conversations in various departments number one about, about still the sources, where is it trained? How does all of this actually come together,

and is it stealing from people like me who have uploaded YouTube videos? I made a prompt that just asked to see a tech reviewer sitting on a desk with a phone in front of two displays and it had this this plant on the desk the and we've called it the tech reviewer plant like the classic tech reviewer plant it's not just us but it's tech reviewers yes so maybe not 100 our stuff yeah but i asked for a tech reviewer you asked for a tech reviewer to put the plant all of us use and uh that video was just publicly available so my car is publicly available on the street but you can't steal it challenge accepted there's there's a lot of questions around that still the other question is um would you even want this to be good like

is this a tool that we're ready to unleash upon the world in the year 20 no and the fact that you get to remove the watermark with the pro subscription is so ridiculous. Yeah, this is funny. I was testing this and it was evolving right under my nose as I was testing it. The minimum resolution was 360p and I had that in my script and I was writing that down and then it was suddenly

480. So the lowest resolution is 480 now. And you can do up to 720 with that account, but 1080 is still the max. And the lowest resolution videos take 20 seconds to generate if you make a five-second low-res video. The highest resolution 1080p 20-second videos can take three, four minutes to generate. I think to some people, it wasn't exactly clear that this is all in the cloud. It doesn't matter how fast your computer is. You can queue up three, four or five different ones all at once. And it doesn't matter. They're just happening on open AI servers. Uh, and it's just, there's like this little

moment of thrill when it's done and you get it back and you watch the video that it made. And you're like, this is crazy. This is not a real video. It's also interesting because most of them, the first one second is always like impressive and then it like devolves from there that you did the one where you uploaded the photo of me playing ultimate frisbee right and it's like me catching one and at first it's like he caught it oh he's coming down that's kind of wait he's rolling on the ground now he launched 20 feet in the air yeah yeah so there's a feature where you can upload a photo and then tell OpenAI to make a video out of this photo. And so the video that you, the photo you upload will be the first term in the video and it'll start to move from there.

So you can upload a video of a person like standing still giving thumbs up and it will make a convincing like video of somebody giving the thumbs up but if you give it a moving object like a person flying through the air or even a car or a bird flying or whatever immediately the physics yeah go nuts and it's typically not very accurate it looks crazy so we did see that in our testing as well um The one thing that I was most impressed by, I would say, is simulated drone shots. That would be my number one most impressed thing. Where if you gave it a landmark or even just a terrace that you describe and ask for a drone shot of it, it can give you a high up slow moving high resolution landscape drone shot yeah everything you just solved the new jersey drone mystery it's open ai knowing they gave you the exclusive look at it getting real they wanted to get as many new jersey landmarks as possible

for those who aren't aware there's been mysterious drones spotted over. Car sized drones. I haven't seen any of them yet. I saw them. You saw them. I was the total non-believer. I was making fun of them so hard for a whole day. He's like, those are planes, David. What are you talking about? Because everyone's videos of them just look like planes.

And they are like propellerless, like unmanned. I was making fun of everyone i was like this is so stupid everyone's an idiot and then i drive home and see three of them go right over me like pretty low down i guess like a little lower than like helicopter height so way too low for these plane-esque things to be flying did you hear it i didn't i was in my car plain ass i don't want to call it a yeah no no i did i know i know i am i am egg on my face i am i got crushed that day wow i don't know what they are i'm also fbi is still like oh i'm not scared by any means though because the lights are bright and on they're not trying to hide themselves from it i something in our whatever

i don't want to go like conspiracy theorists here but i'm i'm not worried about them i'm where you were now i'm like i haven't seen them i don't know it seems kind of like a plane to me but okay aliens for sure maybe i'll see it anyway yeah so you can make drone shots you can make drone shots with soros open it and we'll pull that off you can watch the video the one with mount fuji the one with el capitan the one with uh the the bay what was that called i forgot this is a california landmark but did you try with like cities bridge by any chance i did one so yes i did one with the golden gate bridge and it looked decent but the cars on the bridge were going totally wrong speed so that was a giveaway but the bridge looked incredibly accurate they always drift into the

other lane and just like- And like disappear. Disappear, like dissolve into each other. Totally. The physics, dead giveaway. The other one, I did New York City in the fog and I had the Empire State Building poking through the clouds. And I think I showed you that one.

That one, the Empire State Building looked accurate. And as I panned out a little bit, I think David pointed out the Chrysler Building nearby also looked accurate. But then the rest just looked like new york city like i couldn't tell you what direction we were facing but it seems to be able to do that too so there is plenty of blowback from people who are like this sucks i don't want this to exist in the world and i i totally get that especially the fact that you

can they this is another thing they added mid-testing is the download without a watermark button that was not there when i started testing it super weird you have to have the pro account to do that um the fact that you can do that at all and you're just this is a we're going into a year where let's just say fake news is a thing people are talking about it's a concern um that the fact that that's real at all is very concerning for a lot of people that was one of the first videos you sent was like the two newscasters talking and i thought it was real at first glance i was like oh what video clip is this and you're like no this was the ai dude that clip is we don't they they still they have they have a safety team they have the AGI team and OpenAI wait they don't

OpenAI? no that was the joke they fired all of them so here's what I'll give them credit for and I know this is going to sound like very little to a lot of people but I'll give them credit for this they seem to be able to identify and refuse to do certain types of videos

so anytime anyone's likeness is involved they won't do it. If you ask for a prompt with someone's likeness, it will modify your prompt. If you upload a photo with someone's likeness, it will refuse. If you upload a photo with someone who appears to be a minor just by a visual identification, it will refuse. If you ask for any violent or disgusting acts it will refuse and generally i mean i haven't gotten it to do anything that i would consider objectionable in a way that would like like literally making an actual fake news clip but that clip that i that was early in the video that we're talking about is such a perfect representation of this, which is at first glance,

it looks like a real video. And then in two seconds, you're, Oh, all the text is garbled. Like none of this makes any sense, but, and there's no audio.

So it's like, they're not saying anything. It's just a two second video of some news anchors, but it's immediately in this uncanny valley of, I know that this isn't real, but if I wasn't checking, I might not have noticed. And this is the worst it's going to be from here on out. And that's a lot to digest. I have a question for you.

Yeah. Remember when they first announced Sora and they were just, you know, showing all these clips that they were generating and obviously OpenAI is going to showcase its most believable clips, the ones that it's really collected to make people think, wow, this is amazing. Would you say that it feels like they've improved it since they first announced it, especially as a user? It's hard to say because we didn't get to use it. So I don't know how long those videos took to generate versus now i don't know what their prompt looked like then versus now to me they like handpicked things behind because like we gave them prompts back then and they gave us stuff that they said was just what it created but we don't we don't know how many times they adjust the prompt

exactly it to me in general seems like it's gotten marginally better at some of the basic stuff. We did see it make like one or two landscape shots before. I got to try way more landscape shots. Turns out, yeah, that's a huge highlight. It's like pretty good at those. But yeah, it's hard to see a trajectory. Yeah. It's kind of just launching now. It kind of feels like they got pressured into releasing it because Runway was getting better.

Google's Im n was coming out right so that's the thing there's a bunch of other there are other image generators and video generators now that exist yeah and this is one of them this is i you know there's a bunch of channels that cover this like ai tools as they come out and sora if i've watched enough videos and i'm judging this correctly seems like one of the most capable video generation models um but it is like brand new so yeah tbd if there are other better ones coming out we should also mention that uh open ai had given early access of sora to specific artists and a lot of them had gotten together and leaked the model online

about a week and a half ago so that could also be another reason why open ai decided to release it like if it's already available in a Hugging Face repository. It was temporarily available, got taken down, but it's out there on the internet, and you can never completely erase something from the internet. Yeah, they're doing this like 12 days of ship miss thing where they're announcing a bunch of new features. So this is like day three or something like that.

Right. So yeah, it's launched. It's out into the world. We'll see how it goes world we'll see how it goes i will say i looked up some of the like different places on reddit people posted our video and i it really feels like there's two camps of how they're reacting to this is like this is terrible it shouldn't be released into the world it's so dangerous and then the other half a bunch i saw was like this product sucks it's censoring so many things i can't even do this and this and this so

why would i even use it so yeah it seems like they're striking out on both sides um but well if you strike out with if you if you are successful with one of them you will guaranteed fail with the other because those are the polar opposite sides of of the camp yeah but yeah i mean they have to be safe as best as they can i'd be worried that there's no way of making the the side that's like this is dangerous they're never going to please those people so they're going to want to please the people that are saying you're taking away too many of our things yeah and make it very capable yes yeah that's terrifying yeah interesting okay i have a question yeah so you were saying that you were trying to like get it to do something questionable and it wouldn't do it

those are restrictions that open ai has placed on it themselves like with their ui i'm assuming it's not like an inherent thing in the model that's a good question um this was yeah as far as i can tell because i'm just a user using the the end that i've been given access to this is a ui thing i don't know if that means i assume the model is capable of lots of things it's just sora is the ui that is restricting what it's able to do yeah i'm sure that when you put in a prompt like the language model knows what words it does not want to work with and so it just changes that to something else or says you shouldn't be able to do it because the whole thing

about large language models is it relates words to each other anyway so you probably don't have to do that much work to kind of like blacklist certain types of words you know and people are going to try to break it yeah it's only been a couple days at this point but i guarantee someone is going to find something crazy that it can do and then there's going to be an article and then there's going to be an update that's what's going to happen yeah so we will see yeah we'll see what that ends up being all right speaking of ai stuff again uh updates yeah reddit has just launched its own sort of ai chatbot in a way it's not really a chatbot it's more like a search engine and a chatbot in a way. It's not really a chatbot. It's more like a search engine

and a chatbot had a baby. And effectively what they're trying to do here is they're trying to stop people from Googling blah, blah, blah, Reddit. Because then Google gets to eat up that ad revenue and Reddit obviously wants to keep people on their site as long as possible. Didn't they already make that deal with Google though?

So they made a deal with Google where Chrome was the only browser that's able to index reddit after august of 2024 which in my opinion should be the most antitrust thing that they're going after right now because reddit is like the number three website in the world or something. So anyway, what this new Reddit AI answers engine is, is it is a thing called Reddit answers. And you go on the page, and it gives you a bunch of examples where you can just ask different questions like what's the best vacuum cleaner? Or what should I do if I want to change my hair color to this, etc. You go on there there and it basically gives you a list of generated answers but with direct hyperlinks to the conversations and it doesn't say you should do this it says in this thread people say that

this this this this this yeah so reddit i think okay whether or not this is like a good i don't love chatbots you know but whether or not this is a good thing i think reddit went about it the right way actually where they're not actually saying we the reddit chatbot we read it the organization says you should eat five rocks a day it's gonna source its answers it sources the answers and says but but in a very direct way and says people in this thread say this and then you can click that button go to the thread and it'll talk about all those things very smart from them honestly if they can get people to actually use the service it is actually quite well formatted and i think it's more like a competitor to google than it is a chatbot it's not available yet right i have access to it can i see it well you're at least

i did earlier that i didn't i don't think i have a button that says keep me updated so they take it down they didn't like give you access because no i have access to it right now no i mean is that just because you're a tech reporter though no no i don't know anyone at reddit but they know you well they don't know sometimes they just know you i don't know well that's weird i have access can i try real quick yeah sure can i ask you guys a question? Wow. Because this is something I've been thinking about lately. When you're on Reddit, when we are on Reddit,

how do you determine how trustworthy a comment should be? That's a great question. Like when you're reading a Reddit post and someone in the comments is like, here is information. Yeah. What is your personal veracity test? I mostly take everything with a grain of salt, and then I do Googles off of that information.

It's the same way that I would use like Gemini or something like that. It'll tell me something, and I use that to go Google other things, but I don't just believe what it says. Right. And if they don't provide links, that's not necessarily a red flag for you. That's a red flag. Okay. It helps if they don't provide links that's not necessarily a red flag for you that's a red flag okay it helps if they provide links it helps i would say the more discourse there is based on the comment that i found like because it's really easy to just have a comment that's upvoted that can be botted who knows it's a small thing it could just be like a comment and

then a bunch of people saying that's great that also could be about it but if there's like legitimately like multiple trees of conversations coming off of it then i at least get like a gauge of knowing that that's 15 or 20 people that might be part of a conversation even if it's not 100 true there might be useful information in there yeah for sure totally yeah that's another really good point generally how i look at reddit you guys should give me a prompt and i'll do this it wouldn't do is steve huffman a giant loser i guess it's too easy of a question yes i was gonna say typically if it has a lot of i just believe it ask it ask it should andrew when is the correct application for a multiband compressor versus a dynamic equalizer? Okay.

Mark, how about you? How do you determine what's true? So, okay, yeah, context is everything. If I know enough of the context already, like if I'm in a subreddit I've been in a lot and I know the poster or I know something about this already then it's kind of like asking AI it's like a confirmation of what i already knew

if it's something totally new then i'm with david i'm taking that information and then either following the source links or going and googling myself i almost all the time subreddit is really important um yeah because like yeah with seo having links on reddit is really important and there's lots of subreddits out there that are literally for people to just post links to increase SEO. So if you can get into a subreddit you know is already active, it has upvotes in that. It has comments in that. That's a good sign that it's real people talking about it. Also, know how to sort. Because if you're looking for something that is the best recommendation for something, then often the most upvoted one is a good place to look. But if you're looking for something that has not been tried before, then sorting by controversial

might be better. Yes. No, I remember in like 2012 when I first got on Reddit and I was so excited about it because I was like, this is such a good system. If people are upvoting it, it'll bubble to the top and that just means you get quality information. But there's a thing called the hive mind on reddit which is where if most people think a certain way you are more likely to think that way so i have i have experienced this myself before where i have gone to some sort of question

and i see something that's very highly upvoted and i go to upvote it without even really reading much of it and then i go whoa hold on let me read this people people want to be part of groups and so they they go to think and do the way that the general group of people thinks and does so you really need to make sure that you're uh you're taking your time there i just did ellis's question and read it answers what is the correct application for a multi-band compressor versus a dynamic equalizer is this one that has a definitive answer it has a pretty definitive answer but i thought it would be a good one because there are things that are like absolutely true about that question and then there are finer flavor like taste skill very niche trade stuff okay and i so i only wanted to ask

that question also because my answer to the question i asked you guys how do you determine i don't have a great answer and I thought you guys had really good things, but one hard rule that I follow on Reddit is that if someone ever begins a comment with insert occupation here, answer, you are lying. Like I have never, ever, ever. Doctor here.

Exactly. I've never, ever, ever read an audio thing where someone began a question, audio engineer here, or answer audio engineer here, and then gave even one correct piece of information ever. And I just feel like there's a lot of people on Reddit. I feel like actual professionals would never do that. You know what I mean? I would never be like, hi, this is my job.

So I worry about this bot being unable to determine the difference. But the answer it gave wasn't terrible. Again, at least it's not just an LLM that is making up a bunch of random stuff based on a giant data set. Like at least it's taking from Reddit itself and then directly linking to everything that it says.

So I think that's an inherent strength because it's Reddit, so it's only looking at Reddit. Yes. So if you are Google and you're looking at the entire internet, that could be a pro sometimes, but is actually harder to sort through. And if you're Gemini and you're not linking back to sources, it's almost less useful.

Yeah. Where with Reddit, you are just looking through Reddit. So if you're going to give me an answer or even summarize it with an llm fine but link me back to where you got it from because i know it's from reddit right find me where you got it from yes so it's doing that and again you should take everything you read on reddit with a giant grain of salt as well yeah but you should also just feel that way about most of the things that you consume on the internet yeah is the part of this that's ai just the language like you're typing into the box for the search because the rest of it just seems like a search engine like if it's

which reddit notoriously basically hasn't had yeah it's entire existence so it seems to use google search engine for a long time and just it like just narrowed it the beginning of reddit they had a search a search bar when you would search something it would just do a google search but narrow it narrow it to reddit.com yeah so which is how most people use google anyway i'm sorry adam i cut you off not most people that was it that was my question okay yeah yeah if you it does feel more like a search engine with some answer engine stuff in it so potentially helpful potentially interesting i think that if they mixed this in with their search bar and they also like gave you suggested subreddits and stuff based on what you were searching that would probably be the way for them to go can you type in there why do you

have access and none of us do why do i have well what if it revokes my access what i've access to you have access i mean there's a strong possibility that like eight months ago i signed up for early access i just don't remember all right speaking of more ai stuff again remember when we used to have welcome to the way i talk about what do we talk about we talked about like going to weddings and stuff before in the past. iOS 18.2 is officially out in its stable version. This brings things like Genmoji. Yes.

Yes. Chat GBT integration. Image playground. So if you have been waiting to use Genmoji or Chat GBT integration, this is out. Very cool. I have an immense amount of thoughts use genmoji or chat gpt integration this is out very cool i have an immense amount of thoughts about genmoji that we do not have time to talk about on this really about genmoji yeah

i have thoughts about you having thoughts about genmoji what's that how could there be that much to oh because it's not an emoji it's a sticker it's a sticker do you want my rant about this okay here's what i think genmoji is okay it's just an ai image generator who adds in the style of an emoji to the end of every image prompt wait but it doesn't come up as an emoji it's a sticker so okay all right one minute get them on the clock i can probably do this in one minute i can probably yeah okay so an emoji is text right it's it's basically a pointer to this giant database that unicode standardizes okay now a genmoji is actually what apple labels as a sticker apple stickers are things that have existed in imessage and other things in apple for a long time but now genmoji are also stickers they reduce the size of stickers to be

the same size as Gen... That was not a minute, right? That wasn't a minute. No, it wasn't. That was 30 seconds. But this is still part of it. Okay. They reduced the size of stickers

to be the same size as emoji, and so Genmoji are also the sizes of emoji. And Apple used a special type of image generator that basically only is trained on the Apple emoji character set right so it skews everything to look like an apple style emoji they also introduced a new api called dynamic image glyph api which makes emoji genmoji and stickers all act the same way previously emoji only work uh emoji are the only things that can be used inline

with text, because they are text. Now, with this new API that they're introducing, Genmoji and stickers can also be used inline with text, unless you are texting an Android phone. Perfect. In which case, RCS just got borked, because

a Genmoji, because it is trained on the Apple emoji character set, is inherently, looks like an Apple emoji. When you send that to an Android phone, it just appears as a giant PNG. It's actually a tiny PNG. It's a horrible tiny PNG. It's bad.

It's a big PNG. Is it? I've gotten it from, I guess when I did my text sample thread, it was just like a tiny little, at least I didn't click on it and zoom in. Maybe it was bigger, but it was a small PNG. It didn't look great. I texted my sister, Jen Moji, of a pumpkin devil, and this is how it came out on her phone.

Wow. Just enormous. It was enormous. Maybe they've changed it since then. I guess the 18.2 update has come out. Well, this is when it first came out. Oh. When I did that video, it was like i sent it to an android phone and it was but on your

iphone was it because on the iphone it's huge it's bigger than usual yeah but then on the android phone it's even bigger oh my android phone had a tiny with the black box with a black background with the black background well either way okay yeah you can it's it's another way of hooking you into the iMessage thing yeah so but i also think that being able to generate more images to express yourself is better so there's sort of this there's sort of this back and forth you know what i mean okay yeah that was a good solid 90 seconds thanks times four that four. That was not, okay, that was not not, six minutes.

Anyway, whatever. In the video, I'm going to have a real timer going and the viewer and listener will know right now. Place your bets, how long is that timer?

Anyway, if you want to try that out, you should update your phone. You should always update your phone anyway. If you're my dad, please update your phone. Update your phone, y'all.

Well, I think that's it for this week. We talked about everything and then everything in between. There's only one thing left to do what trivia 2025 that pause is going to get longer until the last episode is going to be a two minute one year pause get it if you can get it like two minutes long we can just put an ad break in there yeah exactly question number one you can now get a hyundai on amazon or soon can get a hyundai now right now right now right now i know what i'm doing i have to work today um but uh

uh that's not the first time really expensive stuff has ever been sold on Amazon. So I'm going to lead you three Amazon listings that are real. They are links you can visit right now. And you have to tell me which one is the most expensive. Hit it, Adam. Number one, quick, simple, easy, SEQ, fully equipped, double-story, two bedrooms, prefab, expandable container house, 40 feet by 20 feet, luxury home, stairs included, free bed set with terrace. Listing number two.

Queen Victoria, Banco de Londres y Mexico, 1,000 pesos, 1905, dated stock certificate with dividend coupons attached, uncanceled. I don't know what uncancelled means. The way of Bashkir artist-expressionist Gafur Tamirinov. Which is the most pricey? And I think for this one, I'm going to have all three of you read your answers, and then I'm going to tell you the prices are we ready

I'm ready flip alright who would like to read first dang we all put different answers that's exciting so I put the fake money. The fake.

No, it's real money. It's real money. It's real money. It's just old. I think the old money costs a lot of new money. You know how much that's depreciated by now? Or. But they're more appreciated.

Or appreciated. Relation. Yeah, I put that. Yeah, but it's really old. I also put the peso. Peso. Peso. Peso.

I put the way. All right, peso. Peso. Peso. I put the way. All right, everybody. The house. The quick, simple, two-story prefab house. With stairs. With stairs included. $44,200. The Hyundai cost more than that.

One star. The pesos. The pesos. Cheap ones are $23,000. $250,000. The pesos. The pesos. Two puns are 23. $250,000. Is there only one quantity available? What do you mean? Like, is there only one in existence?

Available on Amazon. Can you buy three or something? Yeah, well, because like the house, there's probably multiples of those available. Well, how many are in stock? Somehow, this listing has 11 ratings. And does it have a quantity? Yes, three left in stock.

You weren't joking. Wow. Our painting, The Way, by Gafur Tamirianov, goes on Amazon. There's a buy now button for $32 million giving David the point.

Closest thought going anywhere. So you can just click that. Do not click it. Wait a minute. I need a dash button for that painting. It is not a prime item, so you will have to wait until after Christmas to receive it.

It goes by stocking stuffer. it just shows up with usps also uh just a quick quick side note uh a few weeks ago two weeks ago maybe adam switched back to iphone and he texted me like at night like hey just to be like it's a blue bubble and i like free i was like oh my god you're back like i can finally send you and so i was doing all the like inline message animations and sending them all sorts of stuff and i was like and i could finally do this too and i sent him like the venmo widget request for a hundred thousand dollars you can say apple cash adam thankfully i did not click it okay quick update on the score marquez with one andrew zero one two yeah we back with zero david with two it's so over so next question speaking about the apple watch the apple watch edition was gold plated i think it was just gold plated, right?

I don't know. I don't know. Whatever. It was ranging in price from $10,000 for the base model to what? How much? And closest without going over. Let's make it interesting. They probably have the same amount of gold.

So they're probably not that different in price. It's probably like 10 200 i do think that the the differentiator between this model was like a special band like a leather clasp with gold or whatever okay but how much was that entire i honestly don't know if i'm way too high over or way too low under i same. Exactly what Johnny I've wanted. Flip him and read. What do you got? I think you might be over.

I originally thought it was $120,000, but I put $28,001. Nope. I put $20,000. Nope. I put $80,000. Nope. All the way over. It was $17,000.

Oh my God. We found a way for no one to get the point. So it probably came with like an Hermes band or something like that. Did it come with an Hermes band? I don't know. Probably. Sure. Probably. Sounds like it. Cool. Damn.

Well there goes my chance to catch David. I got really excited when you made David answer second. I was like I nailed it. 80 grand, baby. Okay, well, that was a lot. That was a fun episode. It was all real, I promise. Nothing was ad generated this week.

This week. But next week. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. If you haven't seen the videos that we talked about, they will be linked below. Sora Review, Smartphone Awards, all sorts of other fun stuff but until

next week see you later bye by Adam Molina and Ellis Rubin we're partnered with Vox Media Podcast Network get our intro outro music it was created by Vainsell bingo Can I sort all items on Amazon by price? Support for this episode comes from AWS.

This episode comes from AWS. AWS Generative AI gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud.