Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Sony's Car & Toyota's City ft. Austin Evans: CES Part 2

Episode Date: January 10, 2020

Sony unveils a car and Toyota is planning a city? Has CES gone totally off the rails with announcements? We're joined by fellow tech YouTuber Austin Evans to discuss several of the crazy and futuristic ideas companies bring to CES that may or may not ever actually hit the retail market. Links: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli Dope Tech of CES: https://bit.ly/35EPPXw Austin Evans: https://bit.ly/36R08Je Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We are back. It's two days later. We are in the midst of CES as we record this, but we'll also have a little bit of a wrap-up. But we're kind of in the thick of seeing the future right now. And I'm joined by my co-host, Andrew. Yep. And with our guest today, which is Mr. Austin Evans. Hey, guys. This is Austin.

Oh, that was crisp. I'm so glad we have a clean recording of you saying that. Welcome to Wave Forum. Thank you for having me. Yeah. So you just got to CES. You made the smart decision. I've been here for days, and I'm about done with technology. I think I'm going back to the Stone Age now. I love that this is where we're starting. This is CES. Okay, so just for context,

this is, I had to look it up. This is my eighth CES. This is your ninth CES. Okay, and this, Andrew, which third? Third CES. So I'd say after about three, you start to lose hope for how much you think you can get done

or what you think you can make out of CES, and it starts to go downhill. I'm just speaking as a YouTuber who's like, I want to make a good, high-quality set of six videos of cool things I find. And then by year three or four, it's like, I'm going to bring my phone, and I'm just going to point it at something, and hopefully something good happens. Driving into the studio on Monday before our flight,

I honestly thought we were going to get there and you were going to say, well, let's just not get on the plane. Yeah, I've done that to various events in the past. I did not do that to CES. But you know what? We're here. We've seen some stuff.

Austin, what's the best thing you've seen at CES 2020? Oh, man. I mean, so there actually, it's been pretty good this year. All joking aside aside there's been a lot more stuff because i think the trend over the last few years has been ces has been kind of becoming less and less of an important show so many of the big oems have moved to their own separate events and so a lot of times especially the last two years i've kind of felt like it was just sort of the extra small like oh here's a little interesting bit here there but this year

this year there's actually been some really cool stuff so the razor tomahawk i think is probably top of mind yeah it's a very cool concept have you seen it i watched your video on it because i was i was seeing a bunch of them in my sub box and i was like i want to understand why this is cool and i'm sure and i missed this completely actually okay so there's uh there's a a very very very small shoebox size is that accurate 10 liters. Yes. 10 liter. Have you seen any of the external GPU enclosures that they make? Yes, about the same size.

Almost the same size, but it has a full computer with a full-size graphics card inside. So I hear that, and I'm impressed by the tech that makes that happen, but I'm also like, hmm, how much does that matter that I can fit a whole PC into this tiny package? I mean, it's cool. So the idea behind it is it supports not only a full-size graphics card and you have a small form factor power supply of up to 750 Watts,

but it takes advantage of the Intel NUC compute element, which is essentially a full PC motherboard on like, it looks like a graphics card. So it has a PCI slot on the bottom, but it has like a mobile core i7, core i5, or I think they go all the way up to Core i9. You put your memory in it. You put your SSD.

It all kind of fits inside what literally looks like a graphics card. And then you slot it into the enclosure, slide it in, and that's your Razer Tomahawk. You called it a daughter board? Yes. Okay. So there's a couple of components. So especially on a podcast, it's hard to understand. But essentially, you've got a graphics card.

You've got the NUC, which looks very much like a graphics card, just kind of a weirdly shaped one. They both slide into what looks like the world's simplest motherboard It's just a little daughter board that connects the two and the entire thing Gets plugged into a power supply and slides into a chassis just sort of like with the same kind of handle sort of like a Mac Pro or with their eGPUs. It's really cool, but it's also very expensive use it's really cool but it's also very expensive no so I mean the NUC isn't expensive by itself is the whole thing oh it is so I did my video before knowing they wouldn't tell me price like oh you know it's a thing that's coming so the the downside is I believe Intel announced that it is starting a little bit above $1,000 for the NUC and that's for an i5 I think it's like $1,200 for

the NUC with the i7 then you you have to buy the RAM, the SSD, and then your graphics card, and then you still need to get the actual Razer Tomahawk case, which I'm sure. You have to really want your PC to be tiny and you wanna pay for it. All right, let me just zoom out for a second. CES in general, right?

I think it's officially stands for Consumer Electronics Show, is that right? The types of things that we see at CES, since we mentioned at the top, like everything you start to see or you start to notice is that manufacturers will realize that they can just get more press

if they hold their own event for new products. So whether it's Mobile World Congress or CES, these events get less and less major announcements and more just like, hey, we made this concept. We made this cool little side project you should check it out pay attention to us for this week we make cool tech stuff and then they move on and make their real products later um that's i think the persistent theme for me for

like the last five plus years of ces um and that's that falls in line with even the coolest stuff i've seen at ces this year so i like the Tomahawk. I'm going to go to Andrew. Do you have a favorite yet? We're halfway through it right now. A favorite. Yeah. Because we've seen now. We haven't seen too much yet.

We saw a little bit of the smartphone display stuff. We saw there's always a ton of TVs. And now there's a whole bunch of these cars and these automakers that are projecting their future of mobility onto the show floor whether that's like a box with wheels and like no steering wheel or like an actual legit concept car I have a picture of Sony's electric car pulled up on my iMac right now and we can talk about that for a second because that came out of nowhere we went to the press conference and there were some rumors that there were going to be PS5 there so like oh excellent so they get up in like five minutes and they start talking playstation and

we're all getting ready we pull the cameras out like oh they're about to drop playstation 5 and then they drop the logo and move on to their car that is so ces that is so perfect because you know they're obviously going to have their own event for the ps5 why the hell would they put it in ces right so they show up to ces everyone like, why should we go to the Sony presentation? Here's what we'll do. We'll tease what they really want to see and then pivot right into just some like press show, which is what they did.

But what they did is actually made a, I don't know if I can call it a concept car or a one-off prototype, but they made a car. And the way Sony described it to me is, it's just a, it's a show of all the different hands we've had in car parts and making cars that you don't know about. So we just made a car to show you. So we have cameras in the side view mirrors because we make these Sony Alpha cameras and these CMOS sensors are great. And we tie that into the displays in the front and Sony makes screens.

So now we have screens in the car. And you start to go through this whole list of things. And it makes a lot of sense. But it's also now a car sitting in their booth. It's also an incredibly good looking car. I think so too. I wanted to ask about that. So I think it's a, I'm going to make a bold take right here.

It's the second best looking electric car here. Okay, I was about to say, what is number one? Number one is a Tesla Model 3. It's the second best looking electric car here. Okay, I was about to say, what is number one? Number one is a Tesla Model 3, and that's even bold. Wait, when you say here, yeah, wait, here. That exists. In January 2020, that exists. And I'm not talking about the hypercars of the Rimac Concept 1 or anything,

but as far as things that you would think about buying. You have the Ford Mach-E. You have the Tesla Model S, Model 3, Model 3 model x model y you have all these other electric you have the the ipace you have the bmw i3 you have all these other electric cars i think you have like the weird ones this one looked better than all of those i think so as far as like sculpting whatever this body they made out of clay and it's like the satin silver thing we'll have a link in the show notes if you want to look at it. But I agree. I think it's the best looking electric car here.

It's just the most Sony thing ever to be like, oh, by the way, we just designed a car. You can't buy it. We're just showing this off. Like Sony makes everything. It's fine. Yeah. I was talking about them because I was like,

okay, so you can't buy this. So like, should I even ask you about the specs? And he was like, well, we'll tell you like it's quad motor and there's a 200 kilowatt hour battery and it's 0 to 60 in 4.6 and i was like well that sounds like you tested it and drove it and they're like well we're going to be doing more of that later this year but that's where we'll stop talking about it i was like wow okay i would usually make concept videos i'm like this video is going to be great we're never going to make the good video but like it's really good

don't worry about it it's fascinating here's another one and i think you saw this also was the oneplus uh concept one yes called what are your thoughts on this it's a very cool concept so oneplus especially over the last i mean last year was a huge year i mean they're obviously the mkbhd smartphone of the year winner which i think is years running i think it's a really big idea. It's a big deal. Sure. They're obviously coming off of a really strong 2019. Yeah. And I think that going at that with a concept phone makes perfect sense, right? Because obviously they, all of these companies, OnePlus included, have a ton of really cool tech that they don't really show off.

And obviously it's something that will come out at some point. But they've done a lot of work. So I guess we should kind of explain. And obviously, it's something that will come out at some point. But they've done a lot of work. So I guess we should kind of explain. So essentially, what happens is that it's a feature actually taken from it's the McLaren 720S. The 720S is the first one that they had with this.

And then the McLaren GT has this as well. Electrochromic tech in the roof. Yes. So essentially, what they're doing is, obviously, as smartphones get more and more cameras, especially you look at like the 7T, which I have sitting at the desk right now. Wild back of that phone. Look, it's, I like the phone. I don't like looking at that camera bump. It's just really ugly. But the idea with this electrochromatic glass is that with the press of a button,

essentially the entire thing can sort of tent and you won't really be able to see the cameras, which kind of makes it a much cleaner look on the back of the phone. I really liked the idea and it took me a second to realize why, but in this world of like, all right, there's four cameras on the back. Maybe next year we have five. Next year we have six. If we're never going to get to the point where we have enough space to put a physically zooming single lens, we're just going to keep adding cameras to the back of phones. So I don't know, why not just hide that area and put to the back of phones so i don't know why not just hide that area and put as many as you want it doesn't have to look weird so that that's the like future vision of like why this could be applicable um but yeah they it did seem to work pretty well they had the one plus 70 pro basically like rocking that leather back and

hiding the triple cameras but you can imagine a world where there's like six back there and you don't see them and the other uh added benefit of some real functionality beyond just the looks is that it will function as an nd filter right i thought that was cool yeah and they only uh they only really showed like one instance of it where you open the camera open pro mode and you can turn it on or off um but that's like a video person's like dream like wait i could have nd built into i don't even have that built into my cameras and the red cameras so that was cool to see if only they could spend some more r&d making those cameras behind the glass really good better that would be nice all right i want to ask about a gaming thing for you guys and you've seen this correct me if i'm wrong austin but a asus made a

360 hertz display it was like nvidia and asus worked together or something yes okay so we've actually seen a couple of crazy high refresh rate displays so actually the first one we saw was at razor they have the new razor blade 15 and 17 at some point i think in the first half of the year have 300 hertz displays wow and a laptop and a laptop wow did they just skip 240 no no they actually made it 240 yeah completely yes so they have 240 right now they're upgrading that to 300 but then asus is like nah nah that's not good enough so they have a 360 frame per second display okay so here's here's my question because i've i'm an advocate of higher refresh rates as you probably know but that's in the smartphone world where

everyone's at 60 right so you can really tell the difference between 60 and 90 and i can tell the difference between 90 and 120 but like once you get to 120 great can you tell the difference between let's say 240 which is like the bleeding it you know the high-end stuff now and 300 or 360 or even anything over that so So I'm going to start by shamelessly shouting out a video we did like five years ago. I don't know if you remember. We did a video. I had a 144 hertz display in the office. And so I had you play like Minecraft locked at a bunch of different frame rates.

I did this? Yes. What? You did this on my channel like four years ago. Whoa. Okay. What happened? I actually don't remember.

I just remember I couldn't see much past 90. So the idea with the 360, the motion actually, so first let me just start off. This is not a mainstream monitor by any stretch. It's a 24 inch 1080p monitor. It is exclusively meant for esports and people who wish that they were good at video games. So the idea

behind the 360 frames per second is less so for the pure motion and it's more so for the clarity and the motion. I don't think anyone can really see a huge difference between 240 and 360. They had a really cool demo of text or it was a video game screenshot that was scrolling really quickly. And even though to like my eye, I couldn't really see any difference as far as the smoothness, but you could really see a clear difference in how sharp the text was and everything on screen was so we were trying to figure out how to shoot it because even with a slow motion camera you really can't see but by snapping a still it's very very clear that like the 240 even i mean which

is a very very fast monitor yeah everything was super blurry and with the 360 it was razor sharp wow i am not a good enough gamer to really tell you how big of a difference it will really make but i've got to say like you could definitely see a difference even from something like a 240 hertz display okay i think you would need to be not just really really good at games but so deep into that specific game like you look at counter-strike professionals like i'm sure that will make a difference for them because they've been playing this game non-stop for 10 years they know exactly what it looks like. And then any little competitive edge they can get from something like that

might be beneficial. But like you said, a 10 80 and 24, that's like what a gamers play. Exactly. Sports gamers playing on it. That's okay. That's gotta be who it's for.

I could be sweet. Cause before you guys talked about this, I was, I was ready to make the comparison between like an amateur photographer buying a one DX mark three to get like 21 FPS instead of 16. Like how much better is that really? But you're right. When I, I'll relate it to when I shoot video and I'm doing like scrolling moves and I shoot my videos at 30 FPS, the correct frame rate.

And you'll see like if you scroll too fast at 1 over 60 shutter speed, a little bit of tearing, a little bit of weird artifacts. So yeah, you do notice the difference when you're moving quickly in games i guess that's the best case to notice a difference so all right they're not done so sort of a little a little birdie told me that they're actually still targeting at some point mind you not anytime soon 1000 hertz i was gonna say that as a joke i was gonna say like 500 seems like a really cool number but to just double that. A thousand is the goal. I can't imagine what kind of PC you would need to smoothly run a game at a thousand.

But to be fair, even though it supports 360, it has G-Sync involved. So even if you're like you drop to 290 or whatever, you really won't notice much of a difference. It's still a lot of that is just how cleanly it's able to display those frames. Right. It's cool. it's cool it's cool it's just not something that uh mere mortals can actually really fully appreciate yeah that's fair bet mgm 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.

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it's gigantic it's super curved right yeah it like looking at it from the back looks like it would physically wrap around your head but when you go see it this is this is my huge peppy the whole thing is that it's 240 hertz like gaming monitor ball they're playing overwatch on it capped at 60 frames and overwatch doesn't support a really wide field of view right i mean it looks stretched it looks very stretched but like how do you go and i didn't get a chance to ask the guy i honestly don't think you would have understood what i was saying but how do you put a gaming monitor on a ces floor for a bunch of tech people and cap it at 60 that's insane and like a game that's so well optimized i can't imagine a computer that... Yeah, that demo would have looked way better

at 240 hertz, right? Unless maybe it's an early sample and they can't hit 240 smoothly. That's very, very possible. I don't know how I didn't think of that, but yeah, that seems very reasonable. That's a big thing at CES is CES is basically a bunch of demos.

You're walking around between a bunch of demos and there's no way 100% of these demos are working flawlessly like they planned you know the way we set up a robot shot and we're like the camera will do this and then it'll spin and it'll turn over and then we start to put it together and we're like the camera will just turn uh this is the way a lot of these demos go so you're probably right there's probably some oops we couldn't make it work perfectly happening hopefully no one notices i think 50 of the videos i've shot this week were like of demos that failed and like oh sorry hang on a second they try it again yeah it's fine i get it these are all because you were right earlier when you're talking about concepts because i think that's definitely a major trend in the industry is that before it's like oh look at this new product

it's coming out in a couple months now it's like it's a concept if you like it we'll make it like there's so much more of that sort of theoretical stuff which i like i like getting like a better sort of glimpse it especially a lot of the foldables. Have you seen any of the foldable laptops? Starting to see that stuff. Yeah. Did you see the Royal tree? I was going to bring that up.

I love that. The tree? I love how bad the Royal FlexPi is. Like it's so easy to trash on the song because it's really just horrible. And they came out at CES with the Royal FlexPi last year and and it was like oh you should probably shouldn't make this but like cool proof of concept made a great thumbnail yeah i made a good thumbnail right and they uh yeah i have a couple i have photos of it too and like some clips for a video but they tree they made a when i say a tree i mean like a 15 to 18 foot tree just covered in these instead of leaves it's just flex

pies i'm not like just the screen of it just this being blown by computer fans also because they didn't sell any flex pies that was that's the caption to my upcoming tweet is look at all these royal flex pies we didn't sell uh we made a cool tree out of them also i just want to say i bought the the escobar fold one i never got that phone just wait did you see that i did not yeah's a phone. Tell me if you think this is sketchy at all. I bought a phone by a relative of Pablo Escobar. Is this brother or cousin or something like that? Yeah, which is just a Royal FlexPi, but different color.

Yeah, it's gold. It was gold. It was $400, and I lost that money. $400? Yeah, I'm never seeing that again. Isn't that cheaper than the actual FlexPi? Yep. Yeah.

I have that email receipt. This is the soldier phone all over again. We'll just assume that's gone forever. No, I actually think, I have a question. Do you think that that's something that some companies here are doing where they're coming here with sort of concepts or ideas and legitimately testing the water and seeing the reactions to them and then moving based on what happens at CES? Yes. water and seeing the reactions to them and then moving based on what happens at CES? Yes. So I actually had a conversation with a fairly big company today and the guy pretty much straight up admitted to like, look, we build these kinds of prototypes day in and day out.

Like, I mean, literally the, the hub executives come through every few months, like, look, there's 10 more things that we built. Do you like this? Do you like that? But they were making a conscious effort to bring more of these out to the public. I think in large part, because it's one thing to kind of pitch your boss on, Hey, no, people are really going to like this, this foldable like laptop or whatever. But it's another thing when you get, you know, real hype behind it or on the flip side, you see, you know, you bring it out and everyone's like, Oh, this is terrible. It kind of helps them make more informed decisions. I actually legitimately do think that these concepts are not just here purely for marketing. There

actually is some research and kind of seeing what people really kind of take onto with these things. Yeah. I think that makes our job of critiquing them that much more important. I think it's so easy to come in here and point a camera at something and being like, look how crazy this thing is. It folds in half. Like this is great. But you know, take a second, like actually think, well, maybe this is kind of an awkward form factor. Maybe they should change it in this way or that way and give realistic feedback because if you just pat them on the back, they're going to make a bunch more Royal Flex bikes. We don't want that.

So real feedback is important. I'll say that for sure. So Ford has the Mach-E Mustang here at CES. It's on a wall. They have one on a wall. I don't think that's a full weight car, but it is on a wall and they have one in the booth. Do you let, I feel like it looks better in person than I've seen in any video. Is that wrong? I agree. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think it is still a little bit

weird to me to call it a Mustang, but it looks good. Yeah. So I, it was kind of funny. They were, they were sort of explaining it around to people and I'm overhearing it as we're getting shots of it but it was funny that so many people didn't realize it was electric that the number one comment i heard was wait they made an suv mustang like that was the first question is wow an suv mustang that's weird and then it was oh it's an electric car oh and then there's this whole other question that comes like well how fast does it go what's the range but yeah i you know i was walking around it and i do actually i'm trying to work with ford and see if we can make a an autofocus episode on the model oh that would be good maki happened because that's a really curious one for me but um i did see that and that looked pretty cool um not as good looking as sony's electric car but i did like to see that

in person that's pretty solid i saw a crazy stat and i don't know if it's true but um i actually think it was related to the mach-e launch where something like 45 of americans still don't understand that an ev doesn't take gas and the fact that you put that mustang sort of badging on it they're going to have an uphill battle that's i think that's why that you have to put the mustang name on it because you think so yeah because what do people know about like Ford really like they know about the F-150 they know it's a pickup truck they know about the Mustang then they know it's a great sports car that people love so if you're gonna try to accelerate like your move into this electric car world you got to put something people already know about alongside it at least yeah so if you put that Mustang name on it I know it's an SUV and that's another dimension to consider.

But like now people are like, oh, a new Mustang. Let's see what's different about this Mach-E Mustang. And then they, you know, that they open that door into the electric car world. I think it would be smart of others.

I think Audi kind of did the same thing with the, what did they call it? The Quattro, but like the- The e-tron. e-tron Quattro. They had some branding on it that was similar to some other SUVs or some other S sedans they done and i think that's smart for them to do that sort of brings new customers and existing customers to the same place things are moving very quickly it's

interesting at how ces over the last few years has got a very very large sort of focus on automotive like it used to not really be like i remember those early days when we used to go to ces the automotive section was like stereos now it's like electric cars everywhere it was fascinating i did a best cars of ces video i don't know how many years ago this was this must have been like five years ago something like that and it was just like sports car sports car sports car f1 car giant pickup truck yacht lamborg sports car. Like it wasn't really like something you would ever try to, you know what I mean? Like it's not cars people are buying. And now you look around CES and like, there's still a lot of that. There's still like, look at this crazy stereo,

look at these wild new tires that never run flat. But like, then there's, you know, Ford trying to introduce their electric car to the world. And that's like a real thing that's happening. Speaking of automotive, did you guys that toyota is building a city no i could see i had wait okay break this down because what this sounds like an elon i am being 100 this is amazing i'm being 100 serious okay they have a i believe it's an old factory it's in japan it's like right beside mount fuji and so they basically it's like 175 acre sort of zone they're basically tearing the whole thing down and building like straight up like a future utopia so it is fully all the like the streets and stuff they're rebuilding so there's

essentially like three different sort of setups so it's fully autonomous there's no like normal cars allowed on the street oh my god they have their e-pilots that will be driving around all over the place the entire like underground of the city will be full of like hydrogen they're building all the buildings out of like wood it's completely insane so is this like the world's largest concept car is this like this is what we need the future to look like if if only everyone else would play along they'd see how great this could be is that what this is yeah pretty much they're going to i believe the number is 2 000 people are going to have living in this city whoa how do they is there details on this like how can i get can i can i look can i live in this city they actually no they were saying that like uh so some of it obviously

will be toyota employees and they're going to have some of the offices that will be you know obviously they're working on you know whatever electric stuff or whatever it is that they're working on but they're going to have people like they were straight up saying like yeah we want people who are like retired people who are like scientists engineers essentially people who want to live the good life okay if they throw in gigabit internet i will i feel like it's pretty sadly yeah i mean that's that's a guarantee right 5g is probably just like hovering around there i would i would live in a city like this just to to make the point that this is the way of the future it's not a concept they're breaking ground in next year like this is a way of the future. It's not a concept. They're breaking ground to next year. Like this is a real thing that they are actually doing.

Now they have to spend a ton of money to do this. Yes. I'm assuming a lot of money. Cities, not exactly cheap. Yeah. But then you end up with, so now there's like, okay, is there a mayor? Is there an infrastructure? Is there like a census?

Is there taxes? I actually don't know if it's a real city. Okay. I was going to say. Because it's a 175 acre campus which is large but it's not like city big necessarily it'll be a sub it'll be a campus is what it'll be yes yes okay it's cool though i still love that idea yeah wow so you're talking you're talking like automotive we've come a long way at ces as far as announcements that's pretty awesome well you know what i think that's

a great place to leave it we we talked through the the bad. We don't have to hit on so hard. I mean, we, I've talked about the flex by enough for the last 24, the only bad thing. It's hours. Yeah. It's really,

it's quite the highlight, but, um, awesome. Thanks for joining me. Absolutely. Talk about CES and, uh,

we'll come back after the break and, and chat it up a little more. This is an ad from BetterHelp. This holiday season, do something for a special person in your life. You. Give yourself the gift of better mental health. BetterHelp Online Therapy connects you with a qualified therapist via phone, video, or live chat. It's convenient and affordable and can be done from the comfort of your own home.

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all the way back to the studio. How are you feeling? Good so far, but I don't even want to say that out loud because I'm jinxing it really hard. I feel like the next three days are just like every sniffle is going to be like, oh no, the flu is coming. CES flu, don't want to get it. No, I feel pretty okay right now. I also am kind of proud of my, I think it's, I'm going to check exactly how many steps I took today or yesterday yesterday yesterday was so for those of you who don't know we recorded the bit with austin on tuesday night it is now thursday night back at the studio so yesterday was a we just spent the entire day on the floor in that entire day i took 14 797 steps that's actually not my highest ever number from CES, but that's pretty good. I was going to, I assumed to be lower because you went out, but I actually hit 15,800

because I made a secondary Taco Bell trip while you were gone. Nice. Okay. So now that we're back, it seems like appropriate to just wrap it all up. And I said this when we were with Austin, but this is actually one of my, not favorite ever, but one of the better CESs for me that I've had. I'm curious if you have any highlights or things that stood out to you for your third CES. Maybe give me like a top two best of CES. Sure. What just strikes you? I think I'm going to, maybe instead of two, I'm just going to wrap up as my one thing that I thought CES really had that impressed me was just,

I thought CES really had that impressed me was just, I really think that we've made this big stride into like smart homes and smart home products and stuff like that. And I know we have all the little things like lights and, uh, you know, smart outlets and stuff like that. And that's all really easy. Smart speakers. Yeah. Well, smart, smart speakers are what is letting us dive head first into this so much quicker. Yeah, like it used to suck if you had lights to just have to turn it on with your phone every time. Now being able to not do that is so much better. So I think the fact that like Google Home Assistant and Alexa Mini or whatever are so cheap, everyone can start creating a smart home now.

It's a gateway. Yeah, but CES was like, oh my God, we're looking at the future future. Okay. So, I mean, the first thing I thought of, which wasn't future future, was I saw there's an Instapot with Google Assistant that I'm really excited for. As silly as it sounds, it actually makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, like I hear it like steaming in the other room and I know it has to get turned off so it can let all the pressure out and I'd rather just not get off my couch. And then because you have to wait another 30 minutes after anyways. But the LG booth was just like it has its cool TVs and everything. But there the rest of their smart home stuff was kind of crazy. They had a lot of smart home demo stuff going on. And I think we did during that little booth tour, we saw some like really intricate stuff.

And I don't know how much of it is going to end up actually shipping or in products or if this is future vision stuff, or as we said, CES is just a cool demo. Yeah. But it was pretty interesting. Yeah. I think it like started kind of basic,

which is like that smart oven, which is to me, it was really cool because it had two separate doors. So you can control two different temperatures in the oven and then you can still control the the stovetop over wi-fi i think it had just like imagine every time you thought you left the stove on and being able to be like i know i didn't it's great and i think that's awesome and the first time that ever has a bug and gets it wrong that's gonna be a massive problem that yeah that could be that could be not great yeah

um what else did that we saw the smart refrigerator with its craft ice craft ice yeah circular ice do you remember how long he told us it takes to make the ice yeah when we went through that that demo he showed us the refrigerator that made the circular ice and i think correct me if i'm wrong he said you could make three circles of ice in 18 to 24 hours so that means if you're trying to make a dozen ice globes it's going to take you about a week something a whole work week if you're having a party where everyone's drinking whiskey and wants their craft ice you better get only the people you really like are going to get those yeah right and then I think like the the craziest thing they had in

terms of smart home stuff which i don't see us seeing easily in the next 10 years probably 20 years they had like a smart door imagine like uh for everyone listening imagine almost like frosted glass door that has touchscreen essentially built into it and then has a door handle that can read your no it wasn't fingerprints it was vein id right remember the g8 with its vein id so it could read that you could let people in through that you could do a couple other things but then it also has this like cabinet to the side of it that you can access indoors and you can access outdoors so if a delivery man comes he can scan the package put it in the door so no one steals it but also refrigerate it if it needs to be refrigerated there's a fridge a smart fridge

built into your door yeah so if you get refrigerated package you can have them put it in the refrigerator and never have it loose i get blue aprons every week i feel like that would actually be a legit use of it it was one of those things where you're like, this is so cool, but no part of me wants to be excited because I don't think I'll see this anytime soon. By the time this comes out, I will have forgot about it already. Fair. Yeah.

I think all of this sort of wraps up and ties into my takeaway from CES, which I actually tweeted this earlier this week. Before CES, I think I tweeted this, is tech is so great when it works. And that's really what it comes down to because there's all these cool demos at CES. And if you go back and look at that smart door, like, all right, let's say someday, you know, Alexa and Google Home and Siri and, you know what, Bixby, they all talk perfectly

with this smart door and the whole world can get this smart door and it's inexpensive and they install it. And every time the delivery guy walks up to your house with the vein id it works perfectly and he puts it in the correct place every time and no one ever steals the package in that world where the tech works it is awesome yeah that is an awesome place maybe i want to live in that city well yeah every going around the lg booth made me remember austin talking about this toyota city and i'm like all of this stuff only seems possible in something like that where like everyone's, it's gotta be insane.

Yeah. It's gotta be pretty, pretty future looking even in a world where you have a, what is it? A poop robot little, man, we didn't never delivery. We never got to find it.

I think I found the booth it was in as we were on our way back. And it was CES is like expanded into the sands and the venetian and everything and you have to go to different ballrooms for meetings and stuff i didn't realize they had a ton of booths at the sands not just meeting ballrooms uh so we didn't get a chance to go over there a lot of discreet stuff out there yeah but yeah we in a dream world like even that works perfectly where you're sitting there realizing you don't have all the toilet paper you need. And you just say the magic phrase, hey, Bixby, get me some toilet paper. And it rolls over and knocks on the door and brings it in.

So, yeah, tech is awesome when it works. And I think we start to see the separation between how good tech can be in our ideal worlds versus how good it is now. And we're just trying to bridge that gap, trying to make things better all over the place. And that's not to say that the future is impossible. I think we can still dream and get to this stuff, but it's going to be a long time before we see it. The stuff you see at CES is just so far out. It's funny, the people working on it

might barely even be able to see it really come to fruition. And that's really grim. I'm sorry. It's's also kind of interesting because and this is a total coincidence that the night that we're recording this is the 13th anniversary of the unveiling of the first iphone really so it wasn't a september thing i i just found this on twitter it was like right now steve jobs unveils the iphone to the world and you think of like the big type of like unveiling like dramatic new product, like the way people must have thought about it back then. Like, oh, this is crazy. This is going to be a long time before this catches on.

But hopefully it has a good first year. And now the world a decade later has never been the same. We're literally reading the script off our phones right now because neither of us decided to set up a laptop after getting off the flight. That's crazy. 13 years ago, we saw like... World was a different place, man. So yeah, tech.

Tech is great when it works. It's kind of embarrassing and funny when it doesn't work. There are demos all over the place that don't work. Usually the best part of CES is just watching things fail miserably. Yeah, and I want to be optimistic because I feel bad because obviously people are out here setting up

the ideal demo and oh no, there's wifi interference. Oh no, this knocking on the refrigerator isn't lighting it up. What's going to happen?

What's going wrong? But you know, it's still kind of interesting to see the difference between the things that work really well and the things that are like really

far out in the future. But that's my takeaway from CES. Yeah. Do you, did you have any products or anything that you, uh, specifically,

well, you mentioned in your video, if you haven't got a chance, we did a dope tech of CES that is all the really like eye catching stuff. Uh, yeah, you got to rematch Omron ping pong robot. I did.

Uh, that was pretty interesting. Yeah. Yeah. The robot was reading my emotions to try to not get me too mad while it improved my backhand. And you know what I actually noticed while I was playing the robot and I was emotions to try to not get me too mad while it improved my backhand. And you know what I actually noticed? What's that?

While I was playing the robot and I was hitting it back and forth and just trying to hit the table basically and see how well it does, it started, I guess because I was smiling during this and I was hitting a lot of backhands, no matter where I hit it, it would always start to hit it back to my backhand side. And I could see it very deliberately hitting it back to my backhand side, no matter what I did. That's amazing. And I was like, it's really honing in on this backhand. Like, it's learning fast.

And then I put on a frown, and it started hitting it back like a normal way. You were coursing the robot to do different things. When she first came up to us and said, oh, it's different, I said, oh, we've done a video on it. And she's like, oh, no, but now it reads emotion or it has emotions yeah or emotional intelligence yeah i was like uh she's like oh yeah it'll it'll figure out how you feel and then respond to that i was like so it trash talks she's like no it helps you i was like oh man it should trash talk way better trash talking robots ces 2021 i'm here for that i want to just see it lay the smack down

on people who wait in line to play it and i hope that i hope that robot trash talks next year they should bring it i'm ron if you're listening to this trash talk is the next improvement to your ai yeah all right so i'm gonna wrap up this fun second episode of 2020 with what i actually mentioned in the end of my wrap-up of ces which are like my three big takeaways. One, and you can give me reactions to these if you agree. I think number one, 8K is nowhere near mass adoption. I think that's pretty obvious. Yeah, I think I said that in our first episode actually. Yeah, but 4K is at least, it's a minimum to be at CES.

Like you're not showing 720p or 1080p stuff. No, I don't think I saw a single, or I think the only 1080 thing we heard about was like the 360 hertz monitor, which is, okay, you can be 1080 for that. Sure, yeah. And we really saw a lot of different technologies. We saw OLED, we saw QLED, we saw HDR stuff everywhere,

and that was more of what differentiated inside of 4K. And that was cool to see. So that was my number one takeaway. Number two was you can put Alexa in anything. And they made a big push at CES this year. Amazon was everywhere. They were, let me see, some things that I did see with Alexa in them were a Lamborghini. Yeah. I liked that one. It's like, Amazon's so affordable. Put it in your Lamborghini. I actually don't know what you can do with Alexa. Just unlock the doors probably.

I hope you can set up launch control with it. Oh my God. Alexa, drive me to work. I mean, that set up launch control with it. Oh my God. Alexa drive me to work. I mean, that's again, you don't know what the future is of that, but they did have an Alexa enabled Lamborghini sitting there. They had appliances, of course they had the TVs.

So, but yeah, just the, like you said, you could put it in a, a toaster. You can put it in a smart, what was it?

A hot pot, smart, what is it called? Instant pot. Instant pot. I, I kept thinking to myself, like how many things can assistance go in a smart, what was it? A hot pot? Smart, what is it called? Instant pot. Instant pot. I kept thinking to myself, how many things can assistants go in and everything I thought of was kitchen related.

That really seems to be, I think if we're talking about the first rooms that are just gonna be completely Wi-Fi connected and smart is the kitchen. There's too many appliances. There's a future somewhere in like 2029 where you walk into a room and say, Alexa, and like 75 things

light up like your knife oven preheats yeah the knife gets sharpened the knife like starts glowing in the corner i've never been more excited yeah so that's you can put alexa in anything that's that's my takeaway and and last but not least like i mean this is ces is still fun like this yeah i the show had its own trajectory i I've, like I said a million times, I've been to CES many years and you sort of see CES becoming this show where, oh, car stuff is becoming more important and the smartphone stuff is becoming less important

and all the things are ebbing and flowing. But at the end of the day, there's crazy stuff at CES every year. And where else are you gonna play ping pong against a robot and then five minutes later race in a racing simulator against a bunch of people in the cloud and then play Counter-strike at 300 hertz like all in the same day yeah right that was that was literally 20 minutes that we did all of that exactly so i think ces is fun i'll go back

next year if you will just i think i think i'm forced to but i mean that's my job but yeah not get no no i'm definitely down to go as long as I don't get sick this year. Perfect. Well, that's the plan. Either way, that's been it. Thanks for listening to this second episode of 2020. If you have any other things you want us to talk about or if you just have suggestions for the next episode or questions, you already know where to get at us. It's usually Twitter, at WVFRM.

And that's been it. Thanks for listening. Thanks. Waveform is brought to you by Studio 71. And we actually want to give a special shout out to Mark who works there. He has been editing our last two episodes while we were out at CES. He's coming super clutch, getting it done on time at crazy hours. So thank you, Mark.

We really appreciate it. And our intro outro music is brought to you by Cameron Barlow.