Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Tesla Full Self-Driving Subscription & Google Pixel 6 Breakdown

Episode Date: August 6, 2021

This week, Marques and Andrew discuss the new Tesla full self-driving subscription model and if they think it's actually worth it. Then, David Imel joins the podcast to discuss Google's new Tensor processor and what implications it will have for both the Pixel 6 and the future of Google. Links: To check out Unbounce, go to: https://unbounce.com/waveform/ Subscribe to the pod & share with friends: http://bit.ly/WaveformMKBHD Subscribe to the pod on YouTube for full videos: https://bit.ly/WVFRMPodcastYouTube https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganelli https://twitter.com/AdamLukas17 https://twitter.com/DurvidImel https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ shop.mkbhd.com https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. And I'm Andrew. And today we've got a couple pretty new pieces of tech to talk about, but we're going to start off with some random Tesla autopilot subscription chat because we wanted to go over the logistics of it and what we think of it. But also, we got some new Pixel 6 info. As much info as we could possibly get about a phone that's technically not been announced yet. It's kind of a weird announcement strategy. Yeah, they did it kind of strange. Very strange. But we got Tensor, and we're going to talk with David about that new silicon strategy from Google.

But first, Andrew, break down this Tesla Autopilot subscription price thing. Okay. We wanted to talk about this last week, but I forgot to put it to doc. So we'll talk about it this week. We're about a week late on this, but, um, I'm going to break it down and you're going to, since you're the Tesla owner, if I'm kind of miss miss saying anything, just correct me when it's possible. But, um, I think it's safe to say that for a very long time, people have been, uh, asking for a subscription service for full self-driving. Also, before we get into this, I know there's a lot of debate about what full self-driving is,

if it's worth the money, blah, blah, blah. We're not doing that at all today. We're just talking about how it's a subscription base. They finally added it. Just as the feature currently exists, people wanted the ability to subscribe to it for some time and then unsubscribe from it when they don't need it for a while or and then add it back later with no penalty and also not paying ten thousand dollars up front like that's a lot of money up front so monthly i mean we see this happening with everything financing it's just always been a thing in our uh our economy where you try and pay per month rather than up front So people have been asking for it for a really long time. It finally came out and it is currently going for $199 a month or $99 a month if you already paid for enhanced autopilot.

So I guess that's my first question really quick is you can have a base model with nothing. You can have enhanced autopilot and then there's full self-driving. Yeah. Correct. What is the price on enhanced autopilot? That's a good question. I'm going to guess five. I'm going to go to Tesla's website and check.

That's just the link. I'll spec a Model 3. That's probably what most people are interested in. I spec the base one, yeah. So this is perfect. If you compare it like that, I can compare it to what I have already. So I don't think it lets you buy enhanced autopilot by itself now.

It's either nothing or full self-driving for $10,000. Okay. That's it. All right. So still a little confused on that. Apparently, if you have advanced enhanced autopilot already,

it's only $99 a month. But we're going to mostly focus here on just the $200 a month because I think that's what most people will be in this scenario of. Okay. Like you said, it's cancelable anytime.

They don't prorate it per month, but if you cancel it, you just at the end of the month, it goes away and then you stop paying for it and you can do it up again whenever you'd like. So at $200 a month, that comes out to about $2,400 a year. So the first thing I think you kind of do the math on is at what point does this equal $10,000? Because that's what you're essentially trying. That's what you're avoiding is paying the upfront. Yeah. Everybody's doing the math about, okay, if I spend $10,000 upfront, will I eventually use autopilot for enough months that it will be worth it? Where if I had paid a subscription, it would have been more than 10,000. Um, and I guess the question that really affects all everybody's math is how much do you really use autopilot? Yeah. A

lot of people think I use autopilot all the time. I don't actually use it that much, but I do use it in specific situations that are sort of random throughout the year, meaning when there's traffic. So a lot of people like there's a full self-driving beta that's out now that's really, really impressive. And a lot of people are getting this slow rollout where it'll take you from point a to point b stop at stop signs navigate through city streets take turns exit highways all these intersections and everything and it's super cool and i'll try it for the beta but i generally actually enjoy driving i don't know i'm some weird sicko that actually likes holding the steering

wheel so i actually like what the steering yoke How dare you? So I actually like- The steering what? The steering yoke, the steering wheel, whatever. But I actually enjoy driving. So I don't, for the most part, use autopilot. But the one part of driving that is annoying, no matter what kind of car you're in, is like stop and go traffic or like slowly rolling through the Lincoln Tunnel at eight miles an hour,

where it's like not really driving anymore. You're just kind of sitting and waiting to get through it. At that point, I'll turn on autopilot, which really isn't all that different from any other car's cruise control. Just holding you in the lane, moving you forward when traffic moves. Fine. Is that to me worth $200 a month or 10 grand upfront? To me, part of the Tesla experience is having the tech to be able to do that. So I'm going to say yes for me, because there is enough traffic around this part of the country that it happens all the time. But I'm not somebody who's like literally always using autopilot all the time with tons of miles.

So here's the thing though. You say you're not using it all the time, but it's easy to say you use it once a month, right? Yes. So like in terms of being like canceling it when you don't really need it and grabbing it again when you do need it, that's not like really an option. You're probably, I would say for this, you're either doing it all the time or maybe you're doing like a trial run of it for a month or two. Yeah. So I feel that's, it's cool that you can cancel it whenever. I don't see a lot of people canceling it,

bringing it back, canceling it, bringing it back. Um, yeah, there might be some super niche opportunities there when that happens, but I think it's smart for Tesla because there's going to be a lot of people who don't pay the 10,000 upfront thinking they won't use it that much. And then one day they'll try it and a certain percent of those people will like it so much that they convert into paying every month for it. And so it'll end up making Tesla money from people who weren't going to try autopilot at all ever, which is pretty good for them. But there's also a group of people who were going to pay for autopilot, but have done the math on how many months they think they're going to need it and use it. And they're going to give Tesla less money. I'm sure Tesla has done the

math and landed on this price and figured this is good. But yeah, I think the overall like mission of getting more people used to autopilot and air quotes, I'm doing air quotes for audio listeners, I think that sort of helps it. I think the biggest issue I see with it is, and I know Tesla has to think this as well, it over four years you are now paying that's when you equal about ten thousand dollars four years okay four years i would argue most people keep their cars for longer than four years especially if we go into like i financed model three here just to take a get a guess of it so i did five thousand down for 60 months i think that's that's what i did for my last car i think think that's pretty typical if you're financing a car.

So the Model 3 starts at $40,000 and you put $5,000 down for 60 months, you're paying $642,000 a month. So the $200 is like a 20% increase on that. Yeah, you got to really want autopilot. Yeah, you got to really want it. And you're also doing it for 60 months. So that's $12,000 if you do full self-driving the entire time. So you're now paying two grand more than just paying for 10 up front. Yeah, I'm just trying to think.

Maybe there's some customers that are like, I'm going to do a road trip in June of this one year. I don't really use autopilot that much, but you know what? For my cross-country road trip in my car, I'm going to buy autopilot for for that month and so they'll just pay the 200 bucks to have it for that month and then cancel it and then it'll go away and they don't use it that much and maybe they love it so much that they'll keep paying for it after that trial but that's a that's a possible use case yeah i've been so what i've been my my initial thoughts on it where i love that they did full self-drive or the subscription model i think a lot of people asked for it and they wanted it did they price this too

high to where they're essentially almost they're they're making you want to do the ten thousand dollars because it is generally the better deal assuming you have your car for more than four years which we can agree is the majority of people. Yeah. Also, an interesting point. Full self-driving doesn't transfer with you if you move to a new car. I had that question. So if you buy a Tesla or lease or whatever you finance, you get a car, you pay the $10,000 and then you sell that car, you have to pay the $10,000 again on your next car to get full self-driving with it.

So it's like a feature of that single device. It's funny because most subscription services aren't local to a single device. They'll apply across everything. If I pay for Spotify, I didn't just pay for Spotify on my one laptop. I pay for it to access anywhere. So it's kind of funny that this one subscription service does not transfer. But yeah, if you do pay for the subscription on one car

and you want it on your next car, you unsubscribe on one car and then resubscribe on the next car. And so when you sell it, you're selling a car that does not have autopilot, which is bringing the value down. But that's something to notice.

Do the majority of these cars have the hardware already built in? Like you don't get the extra hardware when you pay the $10,000. They all have the hardware. Okay. So like that to me feels kind of strange paying the $10,000 and then having to pay it again, where I guess that's where this could come in a little better. Let's say you are somebody who might only have the car for three years,

then it definitely makes sense to just do the $200. My other question would be, can you pay the $200 to try it for a month and then pay the $10,000 because you loved it so much and you know you're going to have the car for more than four years and you want to have the better deal? It's a good question. I would guess that Tesla should take your money, but I actually don't know. I don't know. You could in the past, before the subscription subscription started you could add it later right um weren't they charging it would cost more yeah it would cost more so if you did it up front from the factory it would be for example 8k if you didn't it would be 10k after the fact but the hardware was always there it was always like okay

now we have to go through enable the software and you get this new feature. I think my final thought on this is, I think it should be $100 a month. And I think that averages out to the typical lifetime of a car better. And then while still has the potential of making more money than the 10,000 upfront, because there are people who keep their cars for 10 or 12 years.

And we're in this age where we are assuming electrics are going to last longer than gas cars in a lifespan because they don't have all the wear and tear on a regular transmission or an engine. I think $100 is great. I kind of think the $200 is like they didn't really want to go full blown into the subscription model, but so many people were asking it. So this to them is like, well, if anyone wants it that bad, we're going to make quite a bit of money off of it. Yeah. It's one of the cases where there is no competition. Like there is no alternate version of this, a subscription service to a adaptive cruise control version where you can go, oh,

well this one's only $80 a month. So I'm going to get this one instead. Also, if you own a Tesla, there aren't, even if you had other versions on other cars, it's not like you could buy Mercedes' cruise control. So there's definitely no, there's no competition internally to sort of push that price one way or the other, which is interesting. But yeah, I'm trying to think of if there's some other feature in the tech world where you already have the hardware capable and you're just paying to unlock some software to take advantage of that hardware like all the tesla cars have the cameras and the the yoke and all the sensors around the car but only some of them actually use all of that

for this certain self-driving feature you could think of like Peloton or something like that where you have this bike that has a multitude of options of how you use it. And the best way to do it is by buying the subscription to the application and getting the classes and getting the leaderboards and stuff like that. I mean, it doesn't necessarily make the bike work any different, but it's- It's the only way to use the Peloton.

You can't even just like free ride without a subscription all you can do is free ride okay yeah i mean you still can use it to the exact same potential sort of in like in terms of the exercising goal of it but you lose the classes and the leaderboards and the thing that kind of motivates you yeah to want to do it yeah it's weird i feel like my final thought on this would be if you're purchasing a Tesla and you really, really want full self-driving, if you can't afford to pay the $10,000 right up front, I would probably not go for the subscription model

because I'm guessing you're going to keep it for long enough to where you're going to be paying more eventually. And I would try as hard as you can to pay it up front even though clearly ten thousand dollars is a lot of money up front yeah i feel like this subscription model isn't quite there for the the majority of the people who can't afford to pay ten thousand up front it's not benefiting them yeah we as far as we know because we don't know how many how many people are going to love autopilot versus are going to pay it and then regret paying it? Who knows?

Watch as many YouTube videos as you can of autopilot in action. That's the best way to know because unless you can borrow somebody's car and use autopilot with a couple of trips and figure it out if you want to pay for it or not. But watch a lot of videos. That's the best way. Why doesn't Tesla do a 30-day free – when you buy your car, you get a month of full self-driving for free. And then at the end of the month, you can purchase it front yeah the car arrives that would make people so mad but if the car arrives with all the full self-driving features you get really used to them and then a month later all of them go away i mean i'm sure people would get annoyed at that at first just

because it's the option just like how people were annoyed when like remember in florida there was that hurricane and they unlocked like a little more of the battery or whatever, and you could drive faster, but ultimately that's not really that big of a difference. Those specs were what you paid for already. Um, but getting a free trial of it might make people wonder if they, and it'll, it'll stop a lot more regret of paying 10 grand and then realizing they don't like it or don't think it was worth it. Yeah. Give them, give them a free trial that they can activate at any time. Oh, you're being way more lenient than I am. They don't start with it, but at a certain point,

you'll go, you know what, I want to try it. Then as soon as you try it, that's your free month. And then after that, you'll have to pay. That's how I would structure it if I was running the program. That's a nice way of doing it. All right, well, let's take a quick break. We're going to come back. We're going to have David on,

and we're going to talk all about the new Pixel 6, what we know, and what we think we know, and all about Tensor. Be right back. With Uber Reserve, good things come to those who plan ahead. Family vacay? Reserve your ride as soon as you book your flights. To all the planners, now you can reserve your Uber ride up to 90 days in advance.

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four tasty chicken tenders, four regular size, and everybody's favorite, four buttermilk biscuits. All right, we're back. Let's talk Pixel 6. Yeah. There's a lot. We aren't going to do it, but you are going to talk about Pixel 6. I mean, I'm excited for it, but I've said kind of what I wanted to. I know David's very excited to talk about

not just Pixel 6, but Tensor and a whole lot of other stuff. So I'm going to actually relinquish my seat for the rest of the episode. David will be your host for the rest of this, and I think he's very, very excited. Before you leave, though, since you're a current Pixel user, what are your reactions to seeing Pixel 6?

I want the smaller one, I think. If I get it. If. If, if, if. Interesting. We don't know a lot yet. We don't know a lot. Like price.

Okay. Let's bring in David. Whoa. Oh, hey. Welcome. This keeps happening. David. I don't know how this.

David, you keep taking over the podcast man welcome back thank you okay we've got a bunch this is maybe the strangest smartphone pre-announcement I've seen in a while so what Google did was they hopped on well first of all they emailed a bunch of people behind the scenes including me and they were like hey you want to come to New York City and just like check out the pixel but also we're not announcing it yet, but you want to check it out and then you can talk about it. And I was like, yeah, okay, I'll take a look. And then yeah, we went out, I saw the pixel six and pixel six pro got lots of hands on a pro not ultra,

but exactly not an ultra. I didn't get to shoot any video or photos of it. Um, but I got my demos and then came back here and then made a video talking about it. And then, yeah, Google spills all these details, but not a whole bunch of like official specs, just a bunch of details about Pixel 6. But it's not the announcement yet. There's no price. You can't order it. They're going to announce it later, even though they just revealed it this fall. It's weird. So here's what they revealed. So we've got the two designs. You've probably, if you haven't seen the leaks by now, they look pretty accurate. It's got the camera bar across the back instead of the camera circle.

There's a 6 and a 6 Pro that are similar in a lot of ways, but there's a few differences. The 6 has a 90-hertz display instead of the 6 Pro, which has a 120-hertz display. The 6 has a flat display with slightly bigger bezels. And the 6 pro has a little bit of the the waterfall display going on over the edges and will give you a slightly bigger 6.7 inches instead of 6.4 slightly bigger battery of course in the pro as well but i don't have the sizes in front of me here and then you will get a 4x telephoto camera in the pro in addition to the cameras they share which is the primary and

the ultra wide and the colors are all like pretty pastel-y there's a there's a gray one there's an orange peach-ish looking one there's a blue green um but that's basically it we've got the camera bar is sort of the most obvious new thing but the one thing that i wanted to focus on that I talked about in our in my video about it Was the new chip inside inside of both which is called Google tensor So yeah, we have a lot of thoughts on tensor and maybe it's implications and I made the video Of course, you can check that out already But how would you how would you describe what tensor is because it was rumored for a while? Yeah, okay Um, I I'm a little mixed on the naming i

don't think the naming is going to matter that much for a lot of people like i don't think regular people are like oh apple a14 i want to buy it because of the a14 yeah i i do actually think the name is is probably good um for people that don't know google also makes a machine learning or deep learning library called TensorFlow. And a tensor, it's basically just a higher order vector. So you've got scalars as a point. A vector is like a one-dimensional point with direction.

And then you've got a matrix, and then you've got a tensor. So a tensor is basically just like we can in N directions flow this information with an input and come out with an output. It's basically deep learning. So that's how they named it. Yes, that's why they named it tensor. So it is we were hearing about the Whitechapel project

before and obviously there are other smartphone manufacturers that design their own silicon in their smartphones. I mentioned the Exynos chip that's designed by Samsung. Kirin or Kirin? Kirin. Okay, Kirin chips from Huawei. People always correct me when I say it wrong. Yeah. And obviously Apple with their A14. So yeah, the Tensor chip will now be in pixels. Yeah. Makes it competitive in its own unique way, but also allows them to focus on dedicating certain parts of the chip to certain things. Yep. And this is a lot of what they were telling me.

They gave me some demos on photography. Computational photography is a big deal. They're doing something new now where if they take a photo of a human and the face is blurry, they're also now taking some really, really fast shutter speed shots on the ultra wide that they can merge in to get a clear face on an otherwise blurry subject. Pretty cool stuff. Also, computational photography inside video is something they showed me and they gave me a quick demo of basically like an HDR shot right into the sun against Pixel 5 and iPhone 12. And of course, it's doing all its pixel magic. So, you know,

that was tailored by them. And of course, we'll have to test that for ourselves but that's pretty cool and then on device speech to text recognition which covers a lot of things it covers like obviously just texting somebody with your voice but it also covers google assistant and it also covers uh like turning on transcriptions yeah or translate and also live transcriptions that are also live translated into a different language all happening on device a lot of really cool stuff yeah um we don't know the rest of the details of like how it'll benchmark and if it's equivalent to a snapdragon triple eight yeah or a an eight 765 we don't really know yeah but we got all these details now and we've got thoughts on them but yeah i'm curious how do you feel i have so many thoughts, man. Okay, hit me.

Okay. So, okay, here's the thing. Big reason why Apple is transitioning from Intel to ARM, for example. On the Macs. On the Macs is because they're realizing that ARM was originally developed for smartphones, right? It's reduced. It's like a reduced architecture that was originally like, let's save as much power as we can. And then over the years, because smartphones are like one of the most replaced products of all

time, they were able to iterate it on it more than like any other thing, right? So ARM just became better and better and better. Apple realized like, oh, these are now basically faster than the traditional processors. This is a similar transition. It's also ARM, of course, because Qualcomm uses ARM architectures. And then it basically tweaks it to its own specifications. But Google here is effectively realizing that machine learning is becoming more and more and more important in our phones, right?

That's the reason that Apple created the A14 Bionic, the whole like Bionic thing. Right, because there's certain parts of that chip that are dedicated. There's like a neural core and there's the part that's specifically for Face ID and all these different biometrics and often, yeah, ML gets looped into that. Right, so the neural processing unit. So if we pull this back to the original Google Pixel, right? Pixel 1. That was a classic.

Pixel 1. A classic phone. It was the first made-by-Google phone. That's when they announced the made-by-Google brand. They released the Pixel 1. They released the Google Home. And then they also released, I think, Google Wi-Fi at that time. Google Wi-Fi at that time didn't have Google Assistant.

But more important than the hardware that they released, than Google made phones, was the Google Assistant. Google Assistant was their first step in doing basically like deep learning stuff on your device. And more importantly, ambient computing. Google's future is ambient computing. Which is to say, you don't have to interact with your device that much, right? Everything that you should be doing should be able to be done just with your voice or it should predict things for you. It's kind of like that Elon Musk, like any input is failure of the system.

Basically, Google wants the Google Assistant to be all around you at all times. And that's why now if you go in the Google Store, they offer so many products that are all made to be all around you all the time. Yeah. Yeah. There's a bunch of parts of this that I'm curious about. Obviously, we have other assistants that work in their own ways, Siri and Alexa. And what's the one that's Cortana is another one. But Google Assistant, yeah, Google Assistant to me tends to be the most consistent and the most helpful because it knows the most about me, but also it's the most proactive. A lot of times it's already about to tell me what the traffic is to work before I even leave. Stuff like that is

really cool. So I imagine Tensor, you know, putting your own design silicon in the phone you make is a step to sort of centralize and maximize this advantage that they have. Right. Like Siri on the iPhone, while it's decent, as currently constructed, I feel like it can never match what Google Assistant does because Apple's so focused on privacy that there's so much that they don't know about you. And they try to map it out and do a good job about that. But Google sort of shamelessly knows a lot about you and is constantly ambiently computing with that information. So Tensor is just another way of optimizing and speeding up and centralizing that on the Pixel and making it, does it make it a buying point for the pixel is that a reason people will buy pixel 6 here here i think is google's core problem okay uh is it will make the experience way better because all of all of the reasons to buy pixel are all of the things that google assistant does

and the ways that pixel are smart right like or not even just google assistant but the machine learning chops that google has yeah so i was just gonna say that not to interrupt the camera on the pixel is a feature that people care about a lot yes the reason the camera is good is because of google's software prowess yeah with machine learning yeah okay yeah because like computational photography everything is kind of using machine learning, right? Like it is using machine learning to know if that face is blurry, it'll always take another photo with the wide camera and then it uses machine learning to clear up. You know, it'll crop in with the wide camera, clear up that area with machine learning and then make the face not blurry. It's crazy. But they have this like whole ambient computing push where they don't want you to have to

interact with your devices that often. And when I reviewed the like Pixel 4a and the Pixel 5, I basically was like, well, it's okay that these phones are like not pro phones in a way because they make you not need to touch them as often. You've got things like now playing on your phone. So you glance at your phone when you're in a coffee shop and you already know the song that's playing. It's one of my favorite features.

Yeah, you've got hold for me. So if you're making a call, it can like hold for you. You've got call screening. So you don't have to really touch your phone that much. Like Google's whole thing. And if you go on their website right now, they have so many products that you can buy that all have Google Assistant built in. Now the Nest Wi-Fi, which used to be Google Wi-Fi,

has Google Assistant built in. You've got the Nest cams. There's just like all of these products with Google Assistant. So I think their end goal is Google Assistant should be able to sort of do everything for you. And Google has just been so good at deep learning compared to every other company ever because they have the most data because they're Google. They have everything. They have the internets. They have the internet. Google knows a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. Not even just about you, but just about like trends and everything and like about what I'm likely to do and likely to become. Yeah. It's like funny. We were checking the other day about like, oh, how many cities have we been to? How many states have we been to?

And we're like, how do I even figure out for myself how many places I've been to? I could just sort of count back in my memory. Or you could open the Google Maps timeline and it'll give you a bunch of points on a map where you've ever been. Yeah. Because you have your phone on you at all times. Since you started. It's like they know so much about you.

Yeah. Okay. So to go back to Tensor and the Pixel. Yeah. Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, I'm going to guess what I think the prices will be. Okay. Just the way they were talking about them and the way I saw them built and after holding them, I feel like we can say, or at least I'll say,

I think Pixel 6 Pro is going to be right around $1,000. And I think Pixel 6 is going to be right around that $750 mark where we saw like OnePlus 8 and Galaxy S20 FE and a lot of those phones. Which is, you know,

it's expensive, but it's competitive-ish in that way. Do you think this brings Pixel to, like, the finally competitive flagship landscape that we've been hoping for? Or is it going to take more than just Tensor and a nice computer? Yeah, this is the problem. It's like Google is so focused on making the experience for you amazing and seamless. Their whole thing is ambient computing, which means that you shouldn't have to worry about things. Things should just happen for you. And the experience that they

offer on Pixel with things like their deep learning algorithms is so amazing. Unfortunately, from a marketing perspective, it's really hard to market that. Like you can say like Pixel is delightful. A lot of people will call pixels delightful but unless helpful like google uses that term all the time but unless you have like a headline feature like the camera right everybody uses the camera everyone knows pixel cameras are great so i really hope that they're really pushing how much better these cameras are now especially since they're finally putting new um they're putting new uh new hardware hardware in it oh yeah thank goodness i'm excited for that oh very yeah yeah yeah they that's a good point like if they have like a

really catchy maybe not just slogan but like an entire campaign because they've they've flirted with this they've talked about like how i don't know exactly the way they phrase it but how like google works for you yeah or like let google let google do it do it for you yeah something like that yeah and it's like it makes sense. That's a whole campaign. Yeah. And it's like it makes sense to me because I know what they mean, but I just don't see it clicking with a lot of people.

You know what's funny though is they actually, they had their earnings call recently and they told the investors, by the way, we're going to be spending a lot more money than usual near the second half of the year

for the holiday season, which means they're going to market the crap out of Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro, which means they're going to market the crap out of Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro. I'm very interested. I think they really, really want to get past that single-digit penetration number in the U.S. market share.

But yeah, when I say that Tensor is a similar transition as from x86 to ARM, it's because like companies like qualcomm have upped the amount of machine learning cores that they're dedicating in their chips like qualcomm is doing a good job of like scaling that up more and more but i think google is realizing sort of like single core cpu performance and multi-core CPU performance are fine. But we've kind of gotten to this point where the chips are fast enough that you don't really notice slowdowns.

So let's go over here and just like put a ton of resources into the thing that isn't quite there yet for everybody. Right. Like just allowing your phone to seamlessly do all the deep learning stuff as seamless as possible. And then tensor is like you said in your video, tensor is so important because you can scale it up to bigger hardware. You can scale it down for things like watches.

And then Google also cuts out the middleman. They can make it cheaper. And so I'm when you say when you did the pricing guess, I'm a little mixed. I'm like, they've gone through this, right? They've done the premium Pixel where they charge a thousand bucks. They've done the cheap Pixel where they charged 700.

349 for the A series? I mean for the A series, yeah. So that's the baseline. For the A series. But then if we're talking about like Pixel 5, that was what? 799. 799.

Was that 699 or or $799? I think it launched at $799 and then obviously dropped. I have a feeling they're going to try to make it $899 for the Pro. Okay. And $699 for the non-Pro. Because I think a $250 Delta is kind of a lot for people, especially since the only thing you're losing, you're only losing a couple things on the smaller one. Yeah, that is true.

Like when you think about putting those phones next to each other in the store, one of them is going to be slightly smaller. One of them is going to have an extra camera that a lot of people don't really know what to make of. Like, you know, the iPhone Pro has an extra camera. But as far as I can tell, people aren't buying it for that. Yeah. It'll have a little bit of a bigger screen. And that's kind of it. Same exact chip, same exact software.

And a lot of people haven't noticed the difference between 90 and 120 hertz, so that's not a differentiator either. For the Pro name, you know, I feel like... They're just writing that. Yeah, anytime you see Pro in a name, you immediately go, oh, okay, it's going to cost more. It's the better one, obviously,

but what are the real features? But yeah this this phone isn't going to really have that many different features right versus the regular pixel 6 so you're right it probably can't be that different in price from each other um the other thing i i really like the comparison with uh the mac transition but not just because it's going from x86 to ARM, but I think because they're going from not having control over what new the chip designs will look like with Intel versus having exact control over everything they want to prioritize and design for in every new generation of the chip. And that's what I see when Google's going to Qualcomm and like crossing their fingers for a chip that has more ML core and more stuff that focuses on the stuff they, they care about, but they don't

have that level of control. So they can take all of the control into their hands. And I think I saw some people sort of speculating, this will probably be in line with like a Snapdragon 765G. Like nobody really is going to notice the day-to-day difference in performance versus that and a triple eight or whatever the next one is,95 or whatever and at first i was like kind of bummed by that i was like i was really hoping this would be a flagship but the fact that we probably won't notice a performance difference and it will do better at those ml things yeah probably makes up for that for me i slightly disagree okay because i because for the regular cpu and gpu cores there's no way that they're not just using the off-the-shelf arm parts so i have a feeling that they're going to use probably the

best of what arm offers right now which is basically what qualcomm does but just tweaks it but i think they're not going to be like optimizing cpu and g GPU like Qualcomm will do. I think that's a big reason why they didn't talk about speed in the tweet thread. Yeah, yeah, never. Yeah, it's curious. I don't know enough about chip architecture to really flesh out this theory about, OK,

if you use more space on the die for ML, does that leave less space for normal computing tasks? But also you're trying not to use those cores as much. I don't really know. That's just the way my brain looks at Tensor and like the things they can focus on. But honestly, I'm excited for it. I think when we get the Pixel in hand and use it,

it's going to be like the telling moment. Yeah, I think it's definitely going to be one of those different experiences, kind of like we had with the M1 Macs. Again, it's like they're not switching from Intel to ARM, but they're switching what they prioritize. It's similar to the transition between single threaded they were just like, hey, everything's fast enough. Like single threaded work. Everything can be handled by these single core speeds at 4.4 gigahertz. Fine. What if we just throw more cores at it?

Multi-thread out all the things. Yeah, exactly. And suddenly that started taking off. So then Intel had competition. Intel had to start making multi-threaded stuff. And so now there's that battle going on there. But I think that's a similar example for Google. It's like, yeah, the 888 has a 25% faster CPU,

25% faster GPU. That's not making a difference in your life from an 865 to an 888. What's going to make a real difference in your life is how seamlessly it can do all these ML tasks that you don't actually notice. And that's the frustrating thing, I feel frustrated for Google is that a good experience is when you don't notice the good things happening.

That's so true. That is so true. Yeah. The best tech fades into the background and doesn't impress you as much as the flashiest tech. Yeah. That's sad truth. Yeah.

Here's another, here's a question. Should Qualcomm be worried? And I ask this because I, you know, the obvious logic is, okay, that's one more customer gone from buying Qualcomm chips. And if they set a good example for themselves, maybe there will be future that also drop. But also when you look at like the, like snapdragon versus the exynos samsung phones the exynos version is often worse yeah quite which is quite often which threw a wrench in my whole like optimization mindset because i'm like samsung you make you design the chip and it's worse than the

off-the-shelf one how is it so what do you think about this qualcomm well qualcomm has a bazillion patents and they like pride themselves on making a ton of patents. If you go to their offices, like they have walls and walls and walls of patents. You know what patents do? They don't allow other people to use the technology that they've kind of figured out. Right. So they're kind of building this wall around themselves. I think they should be worried, but not necessarily because of Google, but because of this sheer number of companies that are starting to go full stack architecture. Oppo is rumored to be making its own chips for Oppo and Vivo phones.

Huawei is already doing it. Samsung is like potentially going to be moving completely to Exynos at some point. Now Google is, it's like this race, like welcome to the future where every single company is Apple. Yeah, yeah. I get confused about, you know, why the Exynos version is worse. And like you bring up the patents, it's like there's a lot of things they can't do that Qualcomm has a lock on. But does that also mean that Tensor will be worse

because there are things that they can't do? And will it end up being the Exynos of the Pixel world? Like, I don't, I hope not. But I figure if we're as optimistic with this as we are about how good Apple is with their architecture and their chips, it should be better. How is Exynos not better at this point?

Yeah, I think that... Sorry, go ahead. And how are they going to go full Exynos when the Snapdragon version is still better? Right, right. I think Exynos' main problem has always been battery life. And that's been the main constraint.

Like, on a CPU speed level, it's generally been similar. And I think the thing that most people complain about with the Exynos versions of the Snapdragon chips, well, of the ARM chips, is the battery life. And so, you know, I don't know what Google's going to do in terms of battery life. Like, they could optimize it because it's a full stack thing. But like you said, like the Exynos version of these Galaxy S phones, Galaxy Note phones are often worse. Yeah. So it's possible that we see a rocky, a rocky start.

I think Apple had a big leg up because x86 is such an old architecture, whereas Google is competing directly with Qualcomm because they're both using ARM parts. Yeah. I think the reason I'm so optimistic is because when you look at the iPhone, Apple makes iOS and Apple codes and makes that silicon. Google makes Android.

Yeah. And so when they are coding and making Android and optimizing, they have truly the full stack. Like all the others obviously are making Android phones, but they don't make Android. They'll take it and they'll optimize it for themselves.

Yeah. But that's like the one extra bit where we never really look at the milliamp hour size of an iPhone battery because it doesn't really match up versus the expected battery performance because they don't have the same level

of vertical integration as Apple. So now Google with Pixel will finally have that full stack. That's why I hope, I'm crossing my fingers for audio listeners, I hope that they can take advantage of that and deliver an awesome battery life despite not having the biggest batteries in the world. I think they're definitely getting closer

to what Apple can offer. They are constrained under a similar constraint that Windows is constrained by when it comes to Windows versus Mac. Whereas Windows has to have support for all these older versions, it has to support other phones. And yes, Google can optimize Android for the Pixel,

but it still has to work on other phones. Right. Whereas Apple on the Mac and on the iPhone can literally update to a new OS and say, hey, developers, if you want to be on the new OS, you have to change your code base. Whereas Windows can't do that. Android can't do that. Android's mostly coded in Java. Java's old.

Apple does everything in new and Swift and it's great. Right. It's fast. It's new. Android's mostly coded in Java. Java's old. Apple does everything in new and swift, and it's great. It's fast, it's new, it's lean. So that's the constraint that Google's under. They said they've been working on Tensor for four years. I think they've been working on it. They've at least been conceptualizing it since they decided to launch the Pixel program. I believe that. I definitely believe that. I want to talk more about software updates, but we'll take a quick break and we'll come back and do that. Support for the show today comes from NetSuite. Anxious about where the economy is headed? You're not alone. If you ask nine experts, you're likely to get 10 different answers. So unless you're a fortune teller and it's perfectly okay that you're not, nobody can say for certain. So that makes it

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We want to talk about a couple other quick things with Pixel 6, because I still have future hope. I'm optimistic. The one thing I wanted to talk about was software updates. So I mentioned this in the video, and this came from a lot of the ideas you were giving me. So when an Android phone manufacturer promises three years of software updates, or a lot of times they'll say like three generations or whatever.

Let's say three years. They are depending on like a couple different variables to be able to deliver those three years. Yeah. They obviously are going to keep getting updates from Android and they're going to keep coding and sending resources to changing that and making sure it works with their new device. And three years later they stop putting in the effort sure it works with their new device. And three years later, they stopped putting in the effort and it just has that version forever. With Pixel and Tensor and Google making Android, they are not just able to deliver possibly longer,

but it feels like they're incentivized to do so. Can you break that down? Yeah, so when you have a phone, when you buy a phone from, say, I was going to say LG, but RIP. Rip. Let's say LG, because I think they only ever promised like two years of software updates. Basically, the software updates are constrained by the chip maker, Qualcomm. I didn't know this. Yeah.

Yeah. So they have to basically support that Android version on that phone for a certain number of time. Now, Qualcomm, the max amount of time they usually support this can be changed depending on their relationship with an ODM. But the max amount of time that they usually support Android updates for is about three years per device. And if you'll notice the companies that make a big deal about supporting your phone for longer, Samsung, for example, offers four years of security updates.

So there are three years of Android versions, four years of security updates. The reason they don't push more than three years of Android updates on their Exynos chips is because they want to have feature parity with all their phones so they don't want there to be confusion. There's been that issue before where Samsung could have done something in the S20

but only on the Exynos version, but they don't because Qualcomm didn't offer it. So they need to have feature parity. Samsung, you've avoided the confusion. You're not confusing at all now. Yeah. But with Google, now they can just be like, oh, well, we're going to support Android for as long as we can. And that is beneficial to them because they make way more money on you after they sell you the phone based on things like Google Assistant, things like search.

They make all their money through ad services, basically. Like they make all their money through ad services basically. And this is a huge reason why Apple has really opened up their ecosystem of monthly payment services like Apple Fitness Plus, Apple News Plus, Apple TV Plus. Yeah. Because they've saturated the market of iPhones like in the US. It was so like obvious when I, they're basically coming in from the opposite direction. so like obvious when I, they're basically coming in from the opposite direction. Like, okay, Google has wanted to just get a phone in your hand so they can make money from you over and over because they sell ads, right? Apple has made a lot of money from selling phones,

but then a while ago, they didn't really make that much money on services. They'd get you the phone, they don't have that much data, they're not selling ads, they're not really making as much money as they could. Obviously, the app store is huge. But when they started making all these services, they generated tons and tons of revenue per customer, per device. Everybody out there with an iPhone who pays $10 a month for Apple Music, who pays for iCloud storage, who pays for Apple News, and Apple TV is just giving Apple more and more money. And that's a new development for Apple, whereas with Google, they want to have the device in your hands

as long as possible now because they've already been making lots of money on the devices. That's where they've been making their money the entire time. When they first sold the Nexus 7 tablet, they lost money on that hardware for every unit sold

because they were trying to get people to make Google accounts. That was literally the reason they sold that tablet in the first place. I remember that. Because they were trying to get people to make Google accounts. That was literally the reason they sold that tablet in the first place. Yeah. So they've been doing that forever. Apple is now like, oh, we made tons of money on hardware, but now we need to start really ramping up our ecosystem lock-in through monthly subscriptions.

Apple used to make a ton of money on hardware. They still obviously do. When you see their iPhone sales, it's still a lot of their revenue. But they're starting to realize thathone sales are going down every year people are replacing them less often and it seems a little bit counterintuitive right because you would say if they're replacing them less often then you should support it for less time but they're realizing they're making more money off the residual services that come with your iPhone, like Apple Music Plus, or Apple Music, Apple TV Plus, Apple Fitness Plus.

All the pluses. Google's been doing that forever. So now it's really in Google's best interest for you to have that phone for as long as possible because on Google's own phone, you're going to have Gmail be the stock email app. You're going to have Chrome be the stock internet app. You're going to have Chrome be the stock internet app. They make the most money if you use their services.

Whereas other Android phones, it's becoming more common for other Android phones to use Google services as the primary dedicated app. But the EU will actually fine Google for making their app the default app. It's anti-competitive behavior. Because it's anti-competitive and they'll lose money. So the more people that are on Pixels where they can say, this is our product, we're allowed to make all the Google services,

the default apps, the longer you're on that, the longer you stay on a Pixel and don't go to a Huawei phone or a Samsung phone where you might be using Samsung internet, the more money they're gonna make. Yeah, this reminds me of a question I asked Satya Nadella, but it kind of would apply to Google as well. Google makes Android and it's open source and anybody can use Android and anyone can make a competitive Android phone. But Google has the biggest advantage theoretically to make the

best Android phone. Yeah. And I'm so curious how that's going to pan out now that this seems like they're really going to spend and they're really going to try and they're going to actually try to if they want market share, they can be going to spend and they're really going to try and they're going to actually try to punt. If they want market share, they can be competitive and they can actually push this phone. So I'm curious about that. One more thing. Pixel is all about camera. Yeah.

And I noticed that these phones all have new sensors, like bigger sensors there. I think they literally said in the blog post that these cameras are so big now that they don't fit in a normal camera bump. Yeah we have a camera bar yeah so yeah i i wonder if this is this is just pure speculation but if this is going to take the leap that we were finally hoping for where you know pixel 2 was like an incredible smartphone camera and maybe the photos were a little blue but they eventually improved that and they had better glass in air quotes because as we learned, it's plastic lenses in smartphones. But like they've had a really good camera for a while that didn't make huge leaps. And they're making a big hardware leap here.

Do you, at the risk of hyping it too much, do you think that this is a big leap? Yeah, I mean, you know, what's really funny is that the Pixel 2 actually had a worse sensor than the Pixel 1. If you look at that, a worse camera. It had a higher aperture so it let in less light and it was very slightly worse. I think it was probably just a cheaper part and because the Pixel 2 was like,

they started using those OLED screens from LG. It was more expensive to use the overall phone. Anyway, regardless of that, it's really funny watching the curve of the last maybe like four years when the reviews come out and the Pixel reviews come out and everyone says, camera, still the best. Next year, camera, still the best but barely. Camera, uh.

One of the best. I feel like it's one of the best again. And then iPhone 11 Pro came out, and everyone's like, I think Apple's starting to make a better camera than Google. I gave it my camera of the year in the smartphone awards. Yeah. Yeah, this is, the Pixel has always been, or the camera, sorry, has been one of the reasons why I love the Pixel so much.

And it's one of the best cameras on any Android phone, not just as far as quality, but it's always been really fast with instant shutter and all these new ML things to, like, remove remove blur and it just seems like it's going to be a great camera again uh but i wonder like you know we have huge huge sensors in some other smartphone cameras and they really don't do all that much more with it right like if you'd compare let's say a pixel 5 shot with that small sensor with like the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra with this gigantic, like almost one inch sensor. And you take the same shot on each. It's like, sometimes I just prefer the pixel photo. Like it's very detailed. It doesn't have the big sensor look, but like

pixel moving to a huge sensor now has me really curious. You bring up that big sensor look. And I think people are starting to notice that more over time because a bigger sensor look will make things look more lifelike. Whereas like even if a pixel's tuning and sharpening from the older pixels look better, you start to zoom in at all and it just completely falls apart. You look at things like grass and it's over sharpened. If you actually look at any details of pixel shots, none of the individual details are good. The whole shot is good. Right. That's a good point. A lot of times, if you put a side-by-side shot of the Pixel versus the Mi 11 Ultra or whatever other big sensor phone you want to give, even a Samsung, like, yeah, you're right. The zoomed out shot, I picked the Pixel nine times

out of 10. The second you want to zoom in on pinching in some detail, you're going to get a sharper image from the other. So I'm curious. I've heard rumors. I don't know if this is I don't think it's confirmed at all. But if like a 50 megapixel primary sensor, I'm like, whoa. I think the reason I'm most excited is because there are like a multiplicative of reasons why this could be amazing. Right. You're letting in way more light.

Right. And Google was already using ML to add in like artificial pixels. Right. They were filling in space that wasn't there using machine learning. So not only do you get the combination of natural physics benefiting you, but you get natural physics plus tensor, which is like we're going to use a lot of this chip for ML. So you have like physics plus insane machine learning capabilities. plus Tensor, which is like, we're going to use a lot of this chip for ML. So you have like physics plus insane machine learning capabilities. Big physics and real physics are both on your side. Exactly.

I mean, the interesting thing is like if they had used the A88, they actually could have made the camera better because to Qualcomm's credit, they did add like multi-frame video, like HDR video, which is literally one frame. They're actually taking three frames, one of which has a short exposure, one that has a medium exposure, and one that has a long exposure. So even if it's 1 30th of a second, it's actually doing like a 1 90th, a 1 70th. Yeah, they're doing a lot. It's crazy.

Yeah. But I am really, really excited for both video and photo capabilities of these phones. Yeah. I think they're going to be very awesome. I think Night Sight from a massive sensor with Tensor is going to be sick. It's going to be insane. It's going to be sick. Yeah.

Well, at the risk of overhyping and making our expectations way too high, we'll end it there. I do expect to see more info on Pixel over the next couple of weeks. It's probably going to come out in October again, or at least get announced in October again and then come out after that. But yeah, 6 and 6 Pro.

You can watch the video on the main channel if you haven't already seen it for our organized, condensed thoughts on Tensor. But definitely check that out. And also head over to the Studio channel if you haven't already. Go ahead and subscribe over there it's brand new

but it's good stuff alright that's been it thanks for joining me David shout out to everybody who's been with us since the beginning of the video podcast and we'll catch you guys

in the next one peace Waveform is produced by Adam Molina we are made in partnership with Studio 71 and our intro outro music is by

Vain Sil. Sick. Is that good? Yeah. And we might as well just use it, right?