Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - US Banning DJI, Apple's Spurned Acquisition of Tesla, & Our 2020 Tech Awards!

Episode Date: December 25, 2020

In this, our last Waveform episode of 2020, we take a look at the big end-of-year tech stories like DJI potentially being banned in the US, Elon mentioning that he tried to have Tim Cook acquire Tesla years ago, and explanations for our reasoning behind the 2020 Smartphone Awards and who some of the snubs may have been. Lastly, we do our own 2020 Waveform Awards where we celebrate some of our favorite tech and creators of the year. From our Waveform family to you and yours, HAPPY HOLIDAYS! Links: https://twitter.com/wvfrm https://twitter.com/mkbhd https://twitter.com/andymanganell https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ shop.mkbhd.com Music by KamrenB: https://spoti.fi/2WRJOFh Google x Nickelback: https://bit.ly/37JdhXH DJI Entity List: https://bit.ly/3rkTHZX Mark Rober Squirrel: https://bit.ly/37KHc1N Julie Nolke Pandemic: https://bit.ly/3mMbeqm ProzD Let's Try Food: https://bit.ly/2JgRGg5 Dave2d Thumbnail: https://bit.ly/3hbpYhi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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We're your hosts. I'm Marques. And I'm Andrew. And this is the last episode of the year. Yeah. Of 2020. I think a lot of us feel a certain positive way about leaving 2020 behind. For sure. But, you know, since we're still here, we're going to do a bit of a year end extravaganza. We're going to talk about a lot of year end news and a couple of year end projects we're going to talk about. And then we're going to give a bunch of awards, a bunch a bunch of you know props for things that happened during 2020 that we think deserve recognition uh right off the top you wanted to give a little google and nickelback ad some recognition so i'll let you do that yeah they're just right off like we just had i think we watched it last night while we were battling final cut for the smartphone award video and it was just a hilarious ad very meme-y I appreciate Google and Nickelback both like just embracing the the hilarity of it and and coming out with an ad that

was just it's hard to have an ad where everybody seems to gather around it and really enjoy it so kudos to them it was really funny I'll link it in the show notes. But yeah, the Nickelback, look at this photograph meme is one of those transcendent, like much longer lasting memes. We had a lot of quick, quick memes, you know, but this one, this one we can appreciate whether you're, whether you're 27 like me, Jesus, or if you're 17, you've probably heard this, even though you don't know who Nickelback is. So good looks, Nickelback. I kind of wanted to give props, actually.

So this is coming out on Christmas. So first of all, if you're listening to this on Christmas Day, Merry Christmas, happy holidays if you're into it. But a couple days ago, Lou, our friend from Unbox Therapy, he did the live stream giving away 100 iPhones. And I wanted to just give quick props for that. So by the way, on top of all this, this is going live on Christmas.

And so is our Christmas Day, 12 Days of Christmas giveaway of a bunch of next-gen consoles. So if you haven't seen that, go check the channel. That's going to be pretty lit. But Lou did it in a live format, which I thought was really interesting because this whole year, I've seen some really fascinating attempts

to keep attention during massive scale live streams. And so, you know, you look back, we saw David Blaine's Ascension Project. That was, I was a part of that, but essentially it was this whole lead up to him finally leaving the ground with the balloons, to him parachuting to the ground, skydiving, and the moment at the end when he lands. So you try to keep people talking about it the whole time. It was really fun. Then you also had MrBeast's YouTube original live, The Creator Games. There were two actually. The first one was the rock, paper, scissors one, which again, it was a ton of people, bracket style, but it got a little repetitive because it's just rock,

paper, scissors over and over. So he did a second version, which was trivia. But yeah, that trivia format, you're kind of following along answering questions on your own hoping to see your favorite creators win that was a great way of holding attention for a long time for a long live stream at that scale so lou does a live stream he's a tech youtuber so you know let's give away some iphones like that's the that's the base of way of looping tech into it but really it turned out to be maybe the most successful on paper of all the live streams I've seen this year. It was like two hours long. And he basically was giving away iPhones one by one.

Well, all you had to do really to enter is follow an account and tweet a hashtag. And that hashtag blew up millions and millions. Number one overall on global Twitter trending, which is no small feat. I don't think those other live streams I mentioned, maybe David Blaine's did, but I don't know if I got to number one global.

I don't know about number one, yeah. And yeah, gave away 100 phones and really kept attention that whole time because people are like, next phone, can I win this one? Next phone, can I win this one? Yeah, I think it was really successful. The reason it was successful was,

one, Lou, like Lou's whole channel is about him just being good at initial reactions and entertainment. And he thrives in a live situation like that. Lou off the cuff is great. Is amazing. Something it focused on that we have had issues with, or we've noticed at least doing giveaways, is it's really easy for people to try and cheat the system by creating like bots or fake accounts and stuff like that.

So the way he did it, not only did it, you had two minutes to reply if he sent you a message. So not only does that keep attention to everybody and keep everyone like super, super into it, but it also prevents people from creating a thousand different accounts and, and just spamming it i mean people were still

spamming it but that was kind of the point like cheating almost it severely limited that and then he said he's had issues with giveaways having like a lack of connection in them like a gleam io type of giveaway where you're like going to a third-party website and sharing a bunch of stuff it like doesn't feel that personal so i thought this was amazing i think it's probably one of the cooler giveaways i've seen and it was and i wasn't i didn't enter and i watched it for like 45 minutes it was just fun to watch yeah i thought it was great i tweeted uh i was i think a lot of people are going to be taking notes on that i myself was taking notes on that i'm i'm thinking about doing more live stuff next year so yeah it would be a lot of fun yeah props, props to Lou. Good luck.

Okay, let's go into two quick kind of news articles that I've written down here that I just thought, despite us wanting to do all these awards and stuff for the end of the year, both of these are just too interesting not to talk about. Okay, man. So we'll go over them quick. First one, DJI potentially getting banned in the United States.

Yeah. If you haven't heard, the U.S. has been enjoying attempting or banning things a lot this year. It really feels like we're hitting a stride, if you want to call it that. This is, if I'm understanding it correctly, kind of the same as Huawei being put on the entity list. Exactly. So, first of all, I think this whole thing is very wait and see because we don't know if they're actually going to end up on the list. And I think DJI has already posted a statement about how we don't think we should be on the list,

and of course they don't believe that. But DJI makes a lot of great products that we already use and buy here in the U.S., in our studio even. So yeah, it's a big wait and see. It's weird. It's tough because there's probably a thousand different angles to this story, and I don't know all of it. I didn't have a lot of time to go super deep into it,

but if we were just to think off the top of our heads, the first thing I thought of initially is, do you even know another drone? DJI clearly makes the best consumer drones out there. Do you know another drone company you would ever recommend someone to get? That is a key word recommend no no i would recommend dji drones pretty much to anyone in any price range or category because they're so they're just so refined easy to use and easy to troubleshoot and span every single price range pretty much i mean like if there's

ever someone who couldn't afford a DJI and wanted a drone, I would just tell them to wait and save because they're the only ones I've really used that I've trusted. They're super fun. We've used them for car shoots. We've used them just for fun. We've reviewed them. They do a bunch of great stuff. I don't know what would happen to the consumer drone industry in the US.

It's definitely better with them not banned. For sure. That's the bottom line. And if obviously there's like total reason to do it because of security risks, like I definitely understand that. But it's like a lot. There's a lot of stuff going behind the scenes. So as tech enthusiasts focused purely on the product it would be a huge

huge bummer to see dji go away even if it was just like because huawei is not allowed to use the app store or google play store right so even if dji wasn't allowed to use those that would bottleneck these all the drones completely because you basically need the app to fly any of them yeah if you if you're somehow you're saying if you're able to get around it and import one like the product is allowed yeah but yeah it's like hard for the product to get here when they're not allowed to do business with anyone in the u.s they can't even ship here yeah that that's definitely tough i'm putting a i'm putting a giant wait and see asterisk on because we saw what happened with tikt, which is almost nothing.

So we'll see. TikTok was what? Did it even go through that they needed to find their like trusted partner or whatever? Yeah, but then didn't the deadline get here and then come and go and then nothing happened? And then TikTok's like, uh, hello? What are we doing?

I have no idea. I hope everything's okay on both sides i hope there's no security risks and i hope we get to keep them as a product because even even outside of drones we use all their gimbals and stuff so it would be a true huge bummer it's all those okay facts all right well speaking of uh big companies we've got all i mean, this has kind of reached a fever pitch. We've forever been wondering, I wonder if Apple would make a car. And it seems like it's been on the back of our minds. We've seen those random rumor videos forever.

I mean, cars are long-term projects, but for whatever reason, it's sort of bubbled back up to the surface again. These rumors of Apple maybe making a car to reveal in 2021 and start production in 2024, and all these little details coming out. And I think it reached its pitch when Elon replied to a tweet about one of these rumors. And he mentions that in the darkest days of the Model 3 program, he personally reached out to Tim Cook to try to discuss the possibility of acquiring Tesla. This was when they were about in the worst part

of their Model 3 production hell, their ramp up. Sleeping in the factory floor, Tesla's at a 10th of its current value, and apparently Tim Cook never picked up the phone, refused to take a meeting. He just tweets that, just in response to like, oh, this is kind of a weird rumor. wow what a different world first of all we would live in there's if he even took that meeting and if apple actually did decide to acquire tesla uh

yeah i think so all this started with apparently apple was taking notes during tesla's battery day event and those notes got leaked talking about a couple different things so of course that's the perfect bait for Elon to just swoop in and say why these battery options wouldn't work or something like that but then he just tacks on that nice little uh tried to have a meeting with team Tim Cook for Apple to acquire Tesla and that just sent sent everyone wild. It's kind of funny to me. It was like, to me, it's like,

I love that he's a CEO that just tweets like off the cuff fun facts like this. Like, oh yeah, I almost sold the company to Apple a couple of years ago. But like to us, that's like, holy, what? That would have been crazy. That would have been really, really different. Cause now I'm imagining like Cybertruck

with an Apple logo on it. The weirdest possible combinations of like different things, all the memes of Apple products and how that would apply to a car. All of that comes to mind. Do you think, I didn't think of this, would an Apple car, this might sound dumb,

have like an Apple hood ornament on the front or like an Apple logo right on the front? I think it would. Do you think they would like make their own car company? I mean, the way... So I don't... I mean, cars to me are so far from tech in the legacy of like nine out of 10 cars

and nine out of 10 automakers are just way out of their league when it comes to tech. But then there's Tesla sitting there writing software, coding and autopilot and all that stuff. So I don't have any clue how Apple and cars come together. I can't picture an Apple car in my head. I can't picture an Apple logo on a hood ornament. I just can't.

Imagining like the wheels with the Apple logo, the like emblem on the back with the Apple logo. I've seen a lot of weird mock-ups. I just can't picture that being real. Like it's going to be pretty surreal if we do get an Apple car reveal. Yeah, that's something my brain hasn't computed yet. It's funny to me because when we were talking about this last night, I had mentioned, so Brett Winton's the guy who originally,

I don't know if he broke the story, but he's the one who tweeted that Elon responded to. originally i don't know if he broke the story but he's the one who tweeted that elon responded to and he thought he he tweeted like imagine apple and cyber truck like do you think that would mix and at first i was like no definitely not but then you said well why not why not what like what what do you imagine an apple car and at first i was like well not hard pointy lines like the Cybertruck has it feels feels very raw and not super clean and like meticulously designed like a Johnny Ive product but then why not we don't know anything about it the Mac Pro is a cheese grater yeah with plenty of sharp

lines so I was trying to think to myself myself what I thought an Apple car would look like. And I weirdly want to say white, first of all. Like, come on, it has to be white. Only available in white. Or just pale pastel colors. White and space gray, that changes every year. Oh, man. Yeah. I imagine like a Volkswagen Beetle.

And is that just because I want want isn't there like a scholastic book logo that's like an apple that's a car oh maybe something like so that's like weirdly what i imagine so i'm imagining this like futuristic white volkswagen beetle that's ev no grill, super clean, chrome, wherever there's not white. So here's my take on, here's my take on, uh, Apple car DNA. I was, I was never a car person, so I had to learn this, but basically car makers, they, they're old and they're recognizable because they have established like their, their DNA and the way they look. So when you picture a Volvo, without even picturing a specific model, you kind of already have a shape in mind.

When you picture a Mini, when you picture a Mercedes, they kind of all have their own shape already. So from the beginning with Tesla, Tesla Model S, the first one ever, it has its DNA like Franz was in charge of design and when you picture a Tesla they kind of do have the same lines throughout Model S Model 3 Model X Model Y Roadster all of them and so when I think Cybertruck hit and it didn't have any of that DNA I don't think it's that the Cybertruck didn't look like any other car I think it's just it didn't look

like a Tesla because I think if you put that like a tonka logo like the you know the dump trucks and like random like construction materials i think you could put that in yellow and it wouldn't have shocked people nearly as much you could be like oh hummer or tonka made this thing and you'd be like oh yeah i guess that's what that would look like maybe see hummer bringing that, although Hummer's very flat and boxy while that's very sharp. Yeah, but I guess my point is I don't have any clue what Apple car DNA looks like.

I know what Apple smartphone DNA looks like. Matter of fact, I know what Apple handheld gadget DNA looks like because that rounded corner thing applies to their laptops, their tablets, their phones, even their headphones, pretty much anything you can hold in your hands has that Johnny Ive touch, right? Does that apply to cars? I don't know. I don't know. I think knowing that rounded corner DNA is why I can't see Cybertruck. Fair. I mean, we are at this alternate reality right now that's just so out there, but like rounded corners and the front of a Cybertruck just don't feel like they mix in the same. Right.

Yeah. I guess the ultimate question is who's to say Apple car DNA has anything to do with the rest of their DNA. Definitely not our say. Look at the Mac Pro. Look at, you know, there's all kinds of weird shapes in their universe. Anyway, that's enough alternate reality talk. I mean, there's a bunch more stories sort of bubbling up for the new year,

and I think we'll talk about a lot of them. And I actually do have plans to finally make this Dear Electric Cars video that I think is even more viable as a video now that this is bubbling back up because I've wanted to talk about Tesla and I have a couple new experiences with the Mustang Mach-E

and these other electric cars to sort of put together and just address every electric car from here on into the future. Here's what you need to do. Here's what you should avoid. And this would apply to Tesla. This would apply to Apple.

This would apply to anyone jumping in or anyone who's in the space now. So maybe look out for that by somewhere in January and that should be a fun video. Yeah, for sure. All right, let's take a break. We'll come back, we'll talk smartphone awards, reactions, and more. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points.

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We're going to be our own Reddit comment section on this video right now. We'll argue it. Honestly, just to get to the point of the video, though, there's been a lot of conversation. I think you and I, one day we didn't have a video we were putting out and you said, let's talk about smartphone awards.

And we sat in front of a whiteboard and I think two hours later, we had everything written down with a bunch of runner-ups or reasons why other things could have done it and a lot of arguing back and forth. It's a really fun process something behind the scenes would be really interesting of one day we'll have to record that but um also just as a note we're recording this on wednesday so before the video is actually published so we don't know the biggest reactions or what people think the

biggest snubs will be but this is our well you'll be able to trade notes with the the actual real reddit comments later i always appreciate it because people realize like this is it for the mk these are your awards these do not necessarily mean these are the best choices for everyone but they always have very important great discussion afterwards because you can see from a lot of different people's perspectives what some of these phones have done for them exactly this year so let's get into it right off the top we started with best big phone best big phone so i gave this one to xiaomi mi 10 ultra uh this was the 120 phone this was like a huge huge phone for them this year yeah this phone had 120 hertz display had 120x zoom on a really high resolution impressive camera and it had a 120 watt fast charger included in the box uh now again it's a big phone 4500 milliamp hour battery

really big screen great hardware overall not my favorite design but i'm talking about just like overall best use of space they put every possible feature in here and push it to the max fast wireless charging reverse wireless charging really fast Yeah, 50 watt wireless charging. Yeah, this was this was a phone that I felt comfortable saying they Used every inch of space in this zone that they possibly could and didn't make any bad choices based on space Also biggest camera bump I've ever seen Bigger wait, is it bigger than Note 20 Ultra? It's bigger.

Wow. Taller, wider, it's just massive. Huh, I'm surprised, and the mirror finish on the back probably does not make it look any smaller by giving it that, looks like extra depth. But it also runner up in the blind smartphone challenge. Yep, did really well. Barely, barely lost that.

So now, here's why i think uh so biggest snub could be note 20 ultra because the note 20 ultra again does a lot of i mean basically almost all of that flagship stuff plus a stylus in the side and obviously that's a rare thing to have in a smartphone but it still has the same size 4500 milliamp hour battery it has wireless charging it has reverse wireless charging it has a has a great camera system has a huge screen but just just because it has that stylus in there that's either a huge win or a huge loss for your space in the phone if you use a stylus that's a win if you don't use a stylus that's a waste of space you could have had a bigger battery so I gave that

its recognition and a runner-up but is that fair to say that's the biggest snub there i think that is like probably one of the categories that you could argue the most either way like fair yeah honestly the day we wrote all those down depending on how you felt that day probably could have swapped that answer yeah um but i think both of them are totally reasonable winners or runners-up. But other big phones... I mean, that's the thing is every phone's big to an extent. Like iPhone 12 Pro Max crossed our radar, and we were like, can this win best big phone?

And it's like, well, all they really did in that phone is bigger battery, bigger screen, slightly bigger sensors. Is that it? Yeah, you didn't get that much out of the the version under it where like note 20 compared to the version under it which was still a big phone it was massively better than it um i guess the other like did rog phone 2 win last year oh yeah you gotta think it had a killer killer one last year but i just don't think that like it doesn't quite stack up with everything else yeah it is a great use of space phone,

but not quite as complete a package. It's not a great display despite being 144 hertz, but it is a big screen, and it does give you those front-facing speakers, which is the use of space that guided its recognition in the video. Yeah. But overall, yeah, I'm gonna stick

with Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra there. Yeah, I think that works. All right, best compact phone this is one the one that i that got snubbed i think i fought for pretty hard yeah and i you eventually convinced me to why it shouldn't have won so it should have been runner-up so we gave it to iphone 12 mini i think that's like the what everyone's expecting because iphone always. This is the safest bet. And I might I'm going to have to double check. But I think it's won every compact phone award we've ever given. No one really challenges the space that much.

Sony usually has a compact phone. But we've explained why Sony is a very tough thing for us to do because generally we don't get them and they're not in the US. So it's hard for us. But like, other than that, everyone's focusing on big. And iPhone always has a small option. So the general breakdown, not that it needed one, was it's the same phone, but smaller. It's the same chip, same software, same experience. All you're really crossing your fingers about is, is the screen too small or the battery too small? And you know, the battery is smaller, obviously.

I don't think it is, though. Yeah, we kind of saw it coming. It's a perfectly fine flagship-grade mini phone. There are a ton of tech YouTubers who have the 12 Pro Max, have the 12 Pro, and are using the iPhone mini as their daily. So I think that says a lot. That being said, our snub is a phone that is, technically speaking, smaller in some way than the iPhone 12 mini.

And that is the Galaxy Z Flip 2 from Samsung. You could also probably argue Razer, but I think the Z Flip's better out of the two. True. Clamshell folding. So let's address that. So Razer is also smaller. Yes. But it's not quite a flagship grade phone.

They have the Snapdragon 765G in there. They have a much worse camera in that phone. And it's just overall not quite the flagship experience that you get. I love the outside screen on the Razr. I do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I wish it was on Samsung's, but Samsung made a better flip phone. For sure. I would pick Z Flip 2. No, just Z Flip, right? I think it's technically the Z Flip 2, even though it's the first one. It's pretty rough out there. Man, we're getting Sony naming levels here. Yeah, I would pick that over Razer any day. But to compare it, I guess our argument was

it is smaller in terms of carrying size and in terms of taking up room in your bag, in your pocket, in your purse, anywhere. But it expands into a larger phone than the iphone mini so therefore you are getting more space out of at a smaller footprint which you would think would make it a winner right it's even smaller and it becomes bigger that's the ultimate small phone win uh but it's just it's not quite up to like the overall package of the highest end stuff. If you literally just take the camera straight

from the higher end version, that would compare to the iPhone, then I could give it more props, but it's a slightly different camera system. If you had the same, I mean, it's a smaller split battery, so that's kind of the same as the iPhone. The battery I think was really the, you think it's around the same as the iPhone?

I just think you're losing battery no matter what going smaller. Like if you had big battery and you could win on camera. You're having a smaller battery but still the same size screen as like a medium sized phone. So you're probably gonna kill the battery a bit faster. And iPhone's great at just like idle battery and battery management.

So I think that's what would kill it for me like small phones with great batteries are going to be like gems soon i think those are going to start coming more that iphone 12 mini is like getting a lot of recognition and i just think just the fact that it got this close means i think we'll have a real competition next year for best small phone which is exciting we might finally not have an next year for best small phone, which is exciting. We might finally not have an iPhone win best small phone next year. It's one of those ones where you almost don't want to give the, like,

the award was the same for so long, it's just boring. It's like, hey, your iPhone wins it again. Cool, great. Yeah, shout out to Lou Williams. He won six man of the year multiple years in a row and never got switched to a starter because he kept winning.

Anyway, okay, best camera. We'll go to best camera. Okay. So this was iPhone 12 Pro Max here. And again, it's just because of the combination of photo and video and just convenience of like plugging into apps well. So obviously we've seen the iPhone's camera flaws before. We saw the blind smartphone camera test.

We know what it does well and what it doesn't. But generally overall, iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max take great photos. They added ProRAW support. I've seen great reviews from ProRAW. We have HDR video. And iPhones notoriously had the best quality video in a smartphone. Now, I stress that word quality because if I was shooting a professional video on a smartphone, there is debate about whether you choose the iPhone or not.

Would you choose like the LG V60 that has much more customization and manual video controls? Yeah, yeah. Would you choose something else? I just think like for the average person, you want to put the best camera in their hand and hit the record button and go. It's the iPhone again. V60 is always that tough one where everyone asks why we don't mention it as much.

And it has the potential to be the best, but we're so focused on more consumer-based things. And we use cameras so often that smartphone video cameras to us aren't trying to get. I don't want to have to dial in settings on my smartphone video, or else I might miss whatever I'm trying to take a video of. I will say, if the V60, with its manual controls,

and a bunch of LG phones do this, and Sony phones do this, but if they had all those manual controls, like the Xperia 5 Mark II I think it was for example and the quality of the iPhone sensor that would be a winner yeah if the iPhone with its quality added all of that manual mode I mean you can get a third-party app but if it had that built into the stock camera app that would be a lock so I'm not ignoring it I'm just saying overall package definitely still belongs to the photo and video champ,

which is the iPhone. Yeah, I might have had a poor choice of words there. We're not ignoring it. Quick, I just thought to look this up. Have you looked at DxOMark at all? I think. Our favorite. Yeah, what's the top DxOMark phone?

So Mate 40 Plus, no, Mate 40 Pro Plus, Mate 40 Pro, Mi 10 Ultra, P40 Pro, 12 Pro Max, 12 Pro, oh my goodness. Then Vivo X60 Pro plus. Did we even look at that? i don't have the same list as you you have to click it to um all and not usa uh okay yeah um pixel 5 is like the bottom of this page that's like number 20th the reason pixel 5 is so far down is because it doesn't have a telephoto camera and you need a telephoto camera to win dxo zoom tests so it's gonna have a better main camera but loose uh yeah yeah i don't see this is i did a video on dxo so if you want my thoughts on it yeah i just always like looking back at it every once in a while despite what i what i think of it but but it's just, again, you win DxO by, if somehow your preference is exactly like DxO's, it's a wonderful website. Just like how, like if your preference is different than Marquez's, you probably shouldn't listen to Marquez that much when it comes to camera stuff.

Like find somebody who has what you like. But yeah, Pixel 5's almost at the end. There are some of these phones I don't think I've even heard of. Shout yeah, Pixel 5 is almost at the end. There are some of these phones I don't think I've even heard of. Shout out to Pixel 5 for taking my favorite stills. All right, let's go to best budget phone. So we have a winner, Pixel 4a. Yeah. Now this was a heated one, I think again,

because we had a couple big ones. We had Pixel 4a, we had iPhone SE, we had OnePlus Nord, we had OnePlus Nord, we had Moto G's series with Moto G Power, Moto G Stylus. We had Samsung's A series, like A51 was a contender. We had the Pocophones, Poco M3, Poco, all the Pocophones really are contenders. There's four of them.

I didn't realize that until we were setting up for the Smartphone Awards. Yeah. Four. So why did Pixel 4a win budget phone of the year? For me, it's just the best overall combo of wins in every department and then pulling something from the high end that's amazing. So that's something that it pulled from the high end was the camera and it's just a win in everything else. Build quality is fine. Specs are fine. Performance is okay. And the software

experience is a pixel. So that's a win. Why didn't the iPhone SE win? Because for me, it's actually a slightly more compelling overall package for most people. I think a lot of people would really like iPhone SE, but it doesn't have a headphone jack. And so for me, i didn't want to give the winner for overall best budget phone to a phone that doesn't have a headphone jack it makes you pay extra for wireless headphones so and the camera is like two years old also isn't it i mean it's still great yeah it's still great it's a great camera and it's a it's a competitive very useful camera at 400 bucks which is 50 bucks more than pixel 4, by the way. But again, you're going to get metal, you're going to get a new chip, you're going to get probably a longer shelf life. Like you can use that phone probably longer. But again, if you're

trying to get bang for the buck, 50 bucks less and has a headphone jack is going to be my winner for Pixel 4a. And that's a really good phone for a lot of people. Yeah. I think to me, you said how it's like, it has a lot of good looking things and then one thing that puts it up against the rest. I could see the argument for iPhone being the one thing that keeps it that flagship level, which is this chip can be a good or a bad thing depending how you use it. There are a lot of people who were heavy into gaming and stuff like that on their phone and that chip running at its max was killing the battery life really quickly because it was using such a powerful

chip on such older internals of everything else so i think it's just the battery it's just the battery that phone just has a tiny battery with such a powerful chip right so the internals and the specs and the performance will be great but if you're if you're just doing like everyday efficient tasks which the chip has great high efficiency cores for you'll be fine and that's kind of how i tested the phone honestly i'm trying to think how people will use it but yes if you try to push this phone to the max it will ramp up these really powerful cores and crush your battery, which is something to note on the iPhone SE. Whereas the Pixel 4a, that camera can't have a downside. There's no

downside to having a top of the line camera, whereas iPhone could have a downside to it. So yeah, I think iPhone, the reason it's biggest snub is, like you said, if you consider price an investment, how long $400 will give you a phone for with constant updates is the reason it would win. Yeah. But I like Pixel 4a. Yeah. And then OnePlus Nord got a shout out just from being like a well-rounded overall budget phone

under 400 again. So good looks there. But yeah, I don't think there's too many other super glaring should have one names there a lot of people are gonna love the Pocophone but I just think you have to consider the whole package okay best battery this one this one was funny because ROG Phone 3 was my champ right 6,000 milliampere battery lasted me two full days at 144 hertz and you could at any time clock down to 90 or 60 and I never did this but I'm convinced I would get three days of battery out and you could at any time clock down to 90 or 60 and i never did this but i'm

convinced i would get three days of battery out of that phone at 60 hertz right poco phone m3 also had a 6 000 milliamp hour battery also 60 hertz but didn't really have the modularity um they both didn't have wireless charging but there's a phone phone called the Samsung M51 that came out in India that a lot of people were commenting about. I didn't get my hands on it this year, but it has a 7,000 milliamp hour battery. And I kind of just want to see it. I kind of want to hold it,

see if it's actually like thicker or noticeably bigger. But that would see how to be a good battery life too, right? Do you remember, was it, I think it was last year or maybe even two years ago, there was like that Energizer phone that was supposed to come out that was like an inch and a half thick. Do I even get to count that?

No, no, no. I'm not saying to put it as a snub, but just like 7,000 milliamp hours, like are we going to hit 10 eventually? And then are we only going to hit that when technology is good enough that we're not having a crazy thickness to it? We've always said we're fine with phones being a little thicker for a better battery life but what is our what's our limit one of these one company is going to test the limit at some

point right yeah i think the battery tech slowly slowly gets better and it's maybe a little bit underappreciated because phones have lasted one day forever But just for context for those listening to the milliamp hour numbers, the giant thick boy Energizer phone had an 18,000 milliamp hour battery. I would have expected more. It's like five times thicker than a regular phone. It's hilarious. It looks like a charging bank,

like a charging brick, basically. It doesn't look like a phone, but it's funny if you go look that up. The iPhone 12 has a 2,815 milliamp hour battery. So we're talking 6,000 milliamp hours in our winter. There's no direct math there as far as how long the phone will last, but that gives you a pretty good idea of what you're working with. And I think Asus has been focused on long battery life for that ROG phone for a while. So it's not just like slapping a 6,000 milliamp hour battery in there for no reason.

They're focused on gaming and efficiency. So they've always been focused on that battery life. It's just, I would like to see how long it could go at 60 Hertz. Yeah, someone's gonna test it. I bet it's out there. We should test it. We should just test it.

All right, design award. Here we go. This bet it's out there. We should test it. We should just test it. All right. Design award. Here we go. This is the one I'm predicting the most chaos on. For sure. I don't think that's going to be shocking. But I gave my design award to Galaxy Note 20 Ultra. This category is one of those ones where, like,

you could take almost any phone and change one thing to it and it would it could win this category uh i if that makes sense um like my first thought was i loved how the duo was designed minus the bezels so like if duo just felt so clean the hinge was amazing which you mentioned in the video like best hinge um the physical design of it felt like it was kind of hitting another level until you opened it and saw those bezels and that just felt like it had to take it out because it felt so old in that sense yeah design i think that's a really good point like any of these phones minus one thing could have won just for clarity my design award is a combination of style industrial build and like

functional design so i would also dock points from the surface duo for not having an outside camera in its design i can't give it a design award if it doesn't have a camera on the outside and you have to use a selfie camera it's a design flaw. And have a terrible selfie camera also. Yeah, it's a fault that is due to the design. But yeah, I mean, you go down the list of like really well-designed, simple, clean phones, like just go down like Galaxy S20. That phone could have maybe won design award.

It's close. If you look at- Screens too curved. Yeah, I don't like the screens curving over the edge. That was one of my points in the video. I, I really liked the one plus eight pro that I had in my pocket all year, but the screens curve over the edge and I don't want to give that a design award despite how much I liked a lot of that phone. Uh, yeah, yeah. You know, there's just a bunch of that are kind of like that. I want a sort of matte or satin finish and there's a lot of

really mirrory fingerprinty phones that just don't look good after a while. I think there are going to be people who are going to argue the iPhone 12 mini because it took a new, it's not a new form factor, but it did something a lot of people, I think, have wanted for a long time and got great recognition for it. So you could argue that. Plus iPhone itself, I bet people will argue

because it just did the design everyone's been dying for for a long time. The problem is they didn't throw in higher refresh rate or smaller notch. I will say iPhone 12 is probably the biggest snub. iPhone 12 Pro, actually, because of the satin back. It's flat. It's got the boxy shape I like. It doesn't have higher refresh rate, but I don't think that counts as a design flaw.

For me, the biggest design flaw there is going lightning instead of USB-C. But generally, yeah, generally iPhone, you know, it's got a huge notch, but at this point we're all used to it. Doesn't mean it can't improve though. So if iPhone 12 Pro had USB-C and a smaller notch, would you put that over? Yeah. Yeah it just had usbc uh i think i'd probably yeah i would it would at least get a mention it might win okay i i was almost i was gonna go super bold and say if you gave the iphone 12 pro 120 hertz no notch and usbc it would be my phone of the year i mean that would people would be die hard lifelong android fanboys would probably get that phone because it just i mean it costs seventeen hundred dollars and

i mean uh no charging brick you don't get to include that in design flaw right no charging brick in the box yeah it's not a that's just kind of a flaw in general but yeah that's a design award. I could have been swayed any number of ways on that, but I feel okay with Note 20 Ultra. I was just drawn to the phone all year. I was using other phones that I like the software more of, and I'd pull the Note 20 Ultra out and be like,

dang, I want to use this phone again. So good for that phone. To me, I still hate the camera bump on it. I think that's my biggest gripe on it if you're using a case it would make zero difference at all yeah i i really like how uh like lg and tcl do their like camera bumps they still do that old like across the back super super minimal and even though it does have a little lip since it's even across the back horizontally doesn't rock no rock that's a good call yeah i'm surprised more people don't do

that yeah interesting yeah i don't i think at this point when you when we're talking about dna earlier i think camera layout is part of your dna of your phone at this point we recognize the back of the iphone just by the cut out of the camera we recognize the back of a samsung phone the back of the iPhone just by the cutout of the camera. We recognize the back of a Samsung phone, the back of a OnePlus phone, just based on the camera. We recognize LG and TCL by the shape of the camera. And I know there are potentially better functional designs there

that they could switch to, but I think a lot of them are like- Samsung used to do it. What was it? Note 8 had horizontal cameras like that? Yep. I just think there's been a little bit of copying there. Sure.

A little bit of copying. Quick, while we're still on design. Yeah. Best color in a phone this year. Just straight color? Just straight color. Let's even go as far to say it doesn't matter if it gets fingerprints.

Just straight out of the box. If you could keep it like that for the rest of the the time you had it favorite color did the p40 pro come out this year yeah so that was your like silver yeah i really so that's not a color thing so much as it's the finish yeah but if i'm just going i would count finish in color just don't give it extra points because of the fingerprint part of it okay i'm just gonna go pacific blue iphone i was thinking of one lg velvet had a really cool green no yeah i remember that there was like a very emerald jewel jewelry type of green it was nice it was

different i think i think we're getting to the point where you throw a color out there that's just different i was disappointed with the red of the red of the red iPhone. Like I really like red, obviously. That was a very coral, like off red, like orangey type of look. So I was hoping to see a little more. The iPhone SE red was good. That was like good Apple Project red. That was candy red.

Okay, most approved award. That I gave to Fold 2 and I don't think it's close. Yeah, I actually, I was the one who argued, I knew it shouldn't win, but I argued the snub of this one. I don't know if it was a snub. The Pixel 5? Yeah. It's funny.

My theory to this was, is generally when we pick something that's most improved, it fixes a lot of things that the people asked for in the past or that people didn't like in the past. So when ROG Phone 2 won it and when razor 2 won it did razor 2 win it both of them i believe were like they found things that people really didn't like about the first iteration of it and fixed it pixel 4 won bust last year one i. Do things win the bust award? It was awarded.

No, it was handed down upon. Given. It was giveth. So to me, Pixel 5 found the things that people didn't like and complained about Pixel 4, which was that awful forehead, no ultra-wide camera, and solely as the main things,

and fixed all of those. But because it went down in specs and wasn't a pure flagship like Pixel 4, I don't think we could have gotten it because technically it did not improve. Yeah, technically the phone is a little bit worse. Yeah. It didn't, so it got an ultra wide which is

which is better yeah for sure but it has a it no longer has the image signal processor built in oh i didn't so it takes longer to process photos okay it no longer has a flagship series chip so it takes longer to process everything, way weaker GPU, worse gaming performance. It no longer has Project Soli, which was actually a good thing, but it technically lost that feature. Yeah, but I think that's, yeah, I call that a benefit. I hated Soli.

Yeah, I think that's actually a win. That's worse than a win. For sure. I think that's a huge win. But yeah, generally speaking, yeah, we're not going to say Pixel 5 is dramatically better of a phone. It just landed better, I think. I think Pixel 5 will sell better than Pixel 4. I think for Google, Pixel 5 is a much better phone just for our award ceremony.

We can't. Yeah. You can't say a race car was more improved when it has a 10-second slower lap time the year after. I like that analogy. Yeah. But it was easier to drive, so. more improved when it has a 10 second slower lap time the year after. I like that analogy. But it was easier to drive, so. Yeah, I honestly would probably, I haven't yet,

I'm still using a Pixel 4, but I would probably use a Pixel 5 over my 4 despite it having worse specs because it did the things I want. Yeah, so that's why it got that runner-up recognition, but I mean, Fold 2 was the clear runaway there. It has way better front screen, way better back screen, way better hinge, way better durability.

The screen no longer looks like a screen protector. You got 120 hertz on the inside. You got edge-to-edge on the outside. You got better battery. It's just everything was better about that phone. I think another one, the FlexPi 2, it's just hard to give that an award when you still would never recommend it to anyone, and it's just hard to like give that an award when you still would never recommend it to anyone

and it's still pretty bad, but FlexPai 1 was so bad that it just immensely got better. FlexPai 2 folded flat. It was definitely better. It just has so many things that are better than. Yeah, not great. It feels like a phone and less like a prototype, but still kind of feels like a prototype.

So last one before MVP is our bust of the year. We gave that to Note20, a.k.a. Nope20. And, you know, I didn't feel super strongly about this one, to be honest. I think it was the more obvious pick just because of the way it landed during the year. And it's really, really easy to just hammer home on that missed price. But as I mentioned in the video, like, it's not actually that bad of a phone. No, not at all. It's just because it's Samsung, it doesn't fit in their lineup. It's a really awkward, poorly landing phone. Even if it isn't a thousand bucks. I think now it's on Amazon for $799, but just this weird combination of 1080p60, non-expandable, big flagship spec phone, but with non-expandable. Like, what? It's weird.

It did have a great stylus, though, and it does have a decent design, and it's significantly less expensive. You still need a Note, but it was hard to just fit that in Samsung's lineup. it was hard to just fit that in Samsung's lineup. I don't think that phone from a different manufacturer would have just fit in the grand scheme of phone lineups at $1,000 because there's other options out there. And then you also put it in Samsung lineup, which covers like $100 to like $1,500.

It just doesn't make any sense unless you're dying for a stylus and are willing to sacrifice a bunch of other things but also Want to toss away a thousand dollars? Yeah, like if you have a thousand bucks to spend on a phone with a snapdragon a65 Unless you absolutely need a stylus. This is the last phone you should buy And that's basically what it came down to but you know Escobar happened this year flex pi 2 happened this year Like there's other bad phones.

It's a good thing that it's harder to pick this, right? That means everybody in general is doing much better. And unfortunately, you mess one thing up pretty big like that, you're going to get picked on. That's true. So we're picking on you, Sam. Any predictions for bust of the year 2021? 21 huh that's that's an interesting question part of me thinks it's going to be a phone that had a lot of hype two years ago kind of messed up this year and then that means next year they're gonna try and go too far and screw something up the same way the same way i think the iPhone would be phone of the year with USB-C, 120 hertz, and no notch, I think if the iPhone, again, doesn't have high refresh rate, again, has lightning or no port, and again, has that huge notch, I think it's bust. So let's say next year, regular iPhone 13 doesn't have high refresh rate, but Pro does have high refresh rate. You're good with that? It's going to depend on pricing then.

Okay. So if you price the Pro at like a thousand bucks for high refresh rate, I get it. But if you try to have like a $900 phone with 60 Hertz display in 2021, that's going to look kind of bad to me, honestly. So that's, I don't think it would be a uh a full bust of the year because honestly it's still an iphone and you're just gonna get people buying it anyway and it's fine it's fine but it's uh it's definitely not gonna win any awards there i my hot take prediction is 9t one plus 9t yeah i I don't think the AT did great this year.

I just think it's a weird spot similar to the Note 20. I think the nine and nine pro will be fine, just like one plus usually does. I think they're trying to find their spot for the T version, and I don't know if they're going to nail it next year. I could see that just kind of being like another year of why for the T version. Awkward middle child in action. Interesting. Okay. We'll keep an eye on all these things, of course. But I guess that lands us finally on the MVP. This is the most fun discussion I think we had. There was like five candidates for this one. But we went with Samsung Galaxy S20 FE,

the fan edition. Yep. So first we'll start with the reason why this won, and then we can go on to others. But this was the, I looked back, just kept rereading all the info about this phone over and over again.

This phone launched for $699 and had all the specs of the best phones in the world of two years ago that launched for $1,000. So this had Snapdragon 865. This had six or eight gigs of RAM. It had a huge 120 hertz display, hole punch cutout, triple camera system on the back, 4,500 milliamp hour battery,

wireless charging, reverse wireless charging, IP68 water resistance, and just everything you could imagine in a flagship phone was there. It was great. It had the plastic back, but it had this polycarbonate hard shell with different colors. I didn't mind it. That's obviously the cost saving, $699.

How do you not get that phone for that price? And on top of all that, there was this emergence of this premium mid-range category that had so much talk this year. That's a lot of what I talked about in the review, but like Pixel 5, around 700. OnePlus' phones, around 700. iPhone 12, around 700.

This is a popular place to be. And I think really this phone absolutely nailed it for that price, led the way. You and Dieter had a really good conversation about this on the Verge cast about kind of Samsung and their pricing. And I think the $ price point was the mvp of 2020 and the fan edition was the mvp of the 700 phone price point that's so it just kind of wasn't the best phone we're not

talking about scoring race here we're talking about the most valuable phone and it's really really hard to argue against that. That being said, I think the biggest snub would be the regular iPhone 12 because of how little sacrifices you make from the iPhone 12 to the iPhone 12 Pro for the price difference you get. Interesting. So kind of rewarding the higher price of the 12 Pro a little bit. It's pretty much, well, so I think the biggest thing was last year, you got the iPhone 11 was like pretty bad, not bad. It was significantly worse than the 11 Pro, mostly in screen resolution.

This year, they upped that, so there's no difference between the two of them besides i think like a brightness very very small brightness difference right but it just it made that gap so much closer while still having the cheaper price point so it just felt like the iphone 12 was just so good and made the 12 pro so hard to recommend over the regular 12. Interesting. Therefore being a much better full package. Here's what I'll say to just put a little bit of backpedal on that. Okay. So iPhone, I think that you're probably right in Apple's world that iPhone 12 is a great value.

But iPhone 12, even with all those screen improvements, didn't do high refresh rate so it was 60 hertz yeah iphone 12 still has a big notch iphone 12 launched for 830 dollars sorry iphone and iphone 12 launched for 830 dollars instead of galaxy s20 fe launching at $699. So yes, it is a good iPhone value. For sure. And I think that that's what my argument would be. But yeah, I think the icing on the cake for the FE is in this $700 price range,

most of these phones were like $749, $799, $830, or whatever that was. I think Pixel 5 was a little over $700. Like all these phones, OnePlus 8 Pro I think was 800. So they were creeping up over 700. And I just like, you would expect at 699 Samsung to have like one thing missing. Maybe it's 90 Hertz, or maybe it's a smaller battery, or maybe it's the 765G chip inside, or maybe something. There's gotta be something about it that's lower end. The only thing they cut from flagship level was the plastic back. And again,

like I talked about in the review, it's easy to hit on plastic in a $1,000 phone, but in this $699 phone, you still get wireless charging and you get more shatter resistance. So I was a big fan of the value. And like I said, we're just talking about how much it nailed this category in the most impressive, important category of 2020. So I'm confident actually giving this to Galaxy S20 Fan Edition. Let me back that up.

In terms of a snub, that was just my other argument. I was all for Fan Edition. I think it was like, I think when people come down to think about it, it's clearly the winner. I just think the 12 made a huge leap from the 11 last year. And in the Apple ecosystem,

it like created enough of a disturbance in Apple's lineup that it's hard to not take a look at it and give it some recognition for that yeah i think apple played it really well and i think them sneaky raising the price a little bit but also dropping a mini iphone in there at a lower price was also well calculated uh so they definitely stratified their lineup a bit offered a whole bunch of good stuff but yeah there you have it that's the smartphone awards breakdown some of the biggest snubs some of the biggest winners

the video is up of course if you want to watch all the trophies. I think we got the sexiest trophies ever this year. Yeah, we got some pretty cool ones. I just got to be honest with you there. Those are some sweet awards. If we end up sending them out, I'm going to miss them. But we'll take a quick break, come back, and give a whole bunch more awards. Support for the show today comes from NetSuite.

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Donate at camh.ca slash donate now from December 23rd to the 31st, and your gift will be tripled for three times the impact. All right, welcome back. Let's go over some 2020 Miscellaneous Waveform 2020 Awards. I said 2020 twice. I think we're just like in the uh we're in the award giving mood right now and we just were like let's it's festive let's just i think both of us just started typing up categories and we're like we're just gonna go through all these on the podcast i think they're all worthy let's just start from the top i love this is my fun my most fun category most hype

product of the year i i measure this strictly by which product video earned itself the most views without anything crazy happening in the video. And our PS5 unboxing had 12 million views in three weeks. And I have to give most hype product of the year to PS5 over iPhone 12, shockingly. It's always been an iPhone unboxing. This year, it's a PlayStation. Congrats, Sony. I mean, I 100% agree. If you went by TikTok views, though, I think the LG Wing had like been an iphone unboxing this year it's a playstation yeah but that's sony i mean i 100 agree if you went by tiktok views though i think the lg wing had like 10 million more views in the ps5 videos so i mean tiktok really they're the future i think lg wing is actually the most hype product of the year but not at all how many how many watch minutes though um yeah ps5 was just an insane to the point where i almost wonder if xbox should start

releasing their console a year off of my xbox review is late and it almost doesn't matter i might be like six months late it's fine i'll review it eventually uh most useful product of the year i just made up this category because i wanted to give a shout out to and rant for a second on the mac pro and Final Cut Pro. I knew you'd sneak a Final Cut rant in here somewhere after the night we had. Listen, okay, I just want to say the smartphone awards video took me

about two full days to make and that's twice as long as normal because Final Cut Pro refused to work for an entire day. And I was getting kind of mad at it, but then I realized it's the 1% rule of tech. Tech is great when it works. And if tech works 99% of the time, literally 99% of the time flawlessly, I'm a very happy camper. And so when Final Cut Pro started freezing and choking and disappearing and crashing every literally 15 seconds, I almost put my foot through the Mac Pro.

But then I thought about it and I said, you know what, we made 115 videos this year before this and didn't have any fatal errors. So you know what, this fatal error gets a pass from me. We'll figure this one out. We updated to Big Sur Mid Project. We updated some plugins. We figured it out. We broke all the cardinal rules'll figure this one out we updated to big sir mid project we updated some plugins we figured it out we broke all the cardinal rules i would not recommend doing that but it did happen

to fix our issue shout out to the mac pro shout out to final cut pro for holding up that 99 rule even better than 99 so well done love that product this um next category you wrote, and you didn't write your answer at first, and I love your answer. Most? Breakout product of the year. Yeah. And I was thinking, just if you're in the car,

if you're at home, just take a second to think what you think the breakout product of this year was. I was having a really hard time thinking of this. Like what really puts someone on the map? Yeah. Something that's usually not top of the heap, but that sort of arises and makes a big splash and has a good trajectory for

the future. You could maybe this year due to what happened, zoom. Yeah. Breakout. It had, it had its own thing and it had a prize, but definitely broke out.

But our answer is tick tock. And it's a prize, but definitely broke out. But our answer is TikTok. And it's a great answer. I can't, it couldn't be argued. No one could argue something different to me. Yeah, the amount of, so I don't know what Charlie D'Amelio started at this year, but I just like to look at those numbers. And I think she's gone from, I don't't know did she have followers last year at all yeah i looked it up um because you were against her for like creator of the year and i was like that's

true no no no way um she did start getting popular last year but i she had to have gained at least like 50 million followers just in 2020. I think like 80 million. Yeah, I think it's closer to that. Never seen anyone get 80 million followers on any platform in a year ever. TikTok is clearly the breakout platform, breakout product, breakout social network of the year.

And then all that crazy stuff happened with it, maybe getting banned and then not getting banned and it's still here. And at this point, we've all kind of accepted TikTok as part of our lives. Yeah, breakdown product of the year. i feel like i have like a routine of watching like 10 minutes of tiktok before i go to bed every night i go to sleep with a smile on my face because tiktok just has so many random fun things yeah um what else we got here oh i got i have a most improved product i don't know if you have one, but I'm just, I'm just going to give this, I know we have the Galaxy Fold as the phone, but I'm giving the M1 MacBook Air my most improved

product of the year. And it deserves it because I just want to give this as a gift to everyone who needs a computer in my life. Yeah. I think you could argue that MacBook Air is like, it was an all right recommendation as a laptop where now if somebody's not, I mean, they could still edit and stuff on it, but if someone just wants a nice laptop that has killer battery and they can do everything with it, it's hard not to recommend the MacBook Air.

It's it. They almost killed it, and now it's back, and it's amazing. So here I have the minute DJI can make a drone that has a battery life longer than 25 minutes, that will win my most improved product no matter what else happens that year even if it's 26 minutes 40 would be fantastic okay but like give me give me substantial 25 increase or something like that because the

icdj's trajectory has been like 12 minutes 14 minutes 16 minutes as far as i'm concerned it's 26 minutes every drone I've ever flown, no matter the size, no matter anything. So it's just a huge bummer taking all the time to set a drone up and then start beeping 15 minutes later. They're getting there. You have missing product of the year, and if you can't guess what Marques is going to say here,

then you probably just started listening to Waveform and have never been to the channel. Just take a second. Just think of what I was looking forward to. The 2020 blank. What could it possibly be? Yeah, it's the Roadster. It's the Tesla Roadster.

Yeah, no, it wasn't the FlexPi. The 2020, on Tesla's website, by the way, it still says coming in 2020. Wait, does it? Yeah, if I go to Tesla.com and go to my account and click on Tesla's website, by the way, it still says coming in 2020. Wait, does it? Yeah, if I go to Tesla.com and go to my account and click on the Roadster, it says, yeah, production will begin in 2020. You've got like five days, you never know.

They're not wrong. And you better believe I've thought that might still happen. Maybe if Apple took over, Roadster would be here. Oh God. It's off with air power right now. I'm just gonna go ahead and say with the last few days of the year, that's not happening. And that's my missing product of 2020, sadly. Following on that, electric car of the year. I had to make a second category

because I know I'm a little biased. I have driven Teslas way more than other electric cars. But my electric car of the year is the tesla model y that came out this year i agree with it and but i think that's also because i just think the model y is my favorite tesla that's out to be honest i think i love that form factors and when we went to shoot it just the chrome delete oh i thought you were trying to reservation confirm is expected to begin in 2020 oh production is expected to begin in 2020 that doesn't necessarily mean delivery yeah that means hey maybe they're at tesla creating roadster emblems right now production 2020 check that off increase tesla stock to Mars. Through the roof.

Yeah, let's go. Okay, back to Tesla Model Y is just like my favorite form factor. It has everything you would really want. I like smaller cars, I guess, but it's a great car. Yeah. I have two winners of my non-Tesla electric car of the year. And those are the Porsche Taycan at the high end for performance

and the Mustang Mach-E at the mid range for everybody. So the Taycan was dope. I would love if that car added just a couple little software features and could supercharge on Tesla superchargers. And I would probably be a switching man. I'm just gonna be totally honest. That car is nuts.

I would love that car. But, you know, it doesn't and it's got its flaws, so it is what it is, but it's a very impressive performer. Mustang Mach-E we had some driving time with. The embargo's up so we can talk about it, but we will be including that in a bit of a video. We had a nice spicy red one too. It was just a very good overall crossover,

despite what you think of the mustang branding on it yeah you have to like eliminate your your prejudice on mustangs yeah to look at it because if you love mustangs it's nothing like a mustang and if you hate mustangs it's nothing like a mustang so yeah you might love it or hate it um i don't know i i wasn't as impressed with it it was fine It was a base model. Then it was a GT later. I kind of liked that Volkswagen SUV that we... The GTI4?

Despite it not being a performer. Oh, the ID4. ID4, yeah. It felt futuristic. That was a car where you got in and you kind of felt like you were at a concept car at CES because it was just white and clean and different designs inside

and just like everything felt super Jetsons despite us driving it around the like industrial wasteland that we live in in North Jersey. Yeah, I thought that was pretty cool. And they're going to come out at some nice prices too. I think that's a, yeah, that'll be interesting. But I would vote Taycan just because it was the most fun thing I've probably driven ever.

Fair. All right. Production of the year. I have production of the year and I want to give my production of the year award to both Apple for their WWDC production and to the NBA for their production of the bubble, the bubble season that happened to 2020 okay uh the fact that they successfully pulled it off at all and didn't have any major issues

and the season finished and they crowned a champion was very impressive but also the video nerd inside me can't stop replaying the transitions from Apple's WWDC so they're both getting I think you have to give the NBA and the NHL a ton of credit for finishing a season properly with a lot of precautions, whereas there are some other sports organizations that, I mean... NBA.

Oh, I thought you were actually sneezing and I stopped. NFL, yeah. Yeah, like there are some other issues in some other sporting events. I mean, if we're going full production for anything, 2020 is basically defined as the Tiger King year. So it's hard not to talk about Tiger King.

It feels like it was over a year ago, but man, that was just something that had everyone's attention. I threw this one in here. Smartphone company year. So what company had the best, what smartphone company had the best year? And i think this is a pretty easy one i put samsung that's what i was gonna yeah they just covered everything they covered all their bases i was tempted to put apple because i think they

they stratified this biggest ever iphone lineup between the se 12 mini, 12, 12 pro, 12 pro max. Uh, I felt, I felt like that was a pretty solid lineup for them. But then you apply that same logic to Samsung and you're like, well, you've got the mid range, you've got the high end, you've got the folding phone, you've got the S20 FE, you've got the bust of the year in there too, but that's only because you have so much other stuff around it. We said that before. It's basically a bust because of everything else they have. And then they have budget. They have like super budget.

They have like medium range. They have every range you could think of. If you've found bills on the ground, you could probably buy a Samsung phone in some category somewhere. So they've got to be the easy winner there, I think. Sure. All right. You wrote favorite gaming peripheral.

I'm curious what your answer is there. I feel like I wanted to give it to the G Pro Lite, but they didn't make it USB-C, and that made me very upset. You can't give a winner to something that's not USB-C. And Logitech has usbc and other mice they've made the change this is something that came out late in 2020 also you had the chance it doesn't affect it that much but it just makes me mad so no win yeah um i'm dropping ps5 controller as my gaming peripheral of the year i think i can agree with that despite still being an Xbox controller fan.

I think the PS5 controller did something to gaming controllers that we haven't seen a big change in gaming controllers since like DualShock sticks on PlayStation 2. Right. This is a big one. Yeah. I'm a fan. It's cool. All right.

Favorite video game. What's your video game of the year for 2020? Okay. I have a favorite and I have a video game of the year. My favorite's Valorant just because that's the one I'm playing almost every night. But you can't not call Among Us the game of the year. Yeah. The only game I played.

I mean, I play 2K, but it's Among Us for sure. Yeah, it's definitely Among Us. Among Us is a game where I can play with my friends that I play video games with every night. I can play with my friends who don't play any video games. Me. And I can play with my friends that I play video games with every night. I can play with my friends who don't play any video games. Me. And I can, yeah, I can play with my family. Like, it is just too fun and too easy to not play. It's free on your mobile device. Like, it's cross-platform. It's just so accessible. It's so easy. And not many games get reactions like that. So, congratulations.

I think I read someone tweet that it had half a billion concurrent users on at the same time, which is just wild. And it was started by three people. I would consider myself a bit of an Among Us holdout. I didn't play it for a while. And then I started seeing so many Among Us memes. It was torturing me.

I didn't understand any of them, all the imposter memes. I didn't know what was happening. And I finally learned to play, played with some people, and then just started playing a lot. So shout out to them. Yeah, we've never played in the studio. I think we need to change that. We should play. I think we should definitely play. All right, we're doing it. All right. Favorite headphones. Did you write this down just to troll me? Just because you knew what I would say? No, I didn't. I thought you wouldn't say that.

So now I'm like, I'm just going to delete it, right? No, I'm a convert. I got to say it. AirPods Max, they're my favorite headphones of the year. And I mean, not that many headphones come out every year that make me consider switching. And I've used a bunch of different headphones. But they're 550 bucks. I spent my own money. I got some. I bought the space gray ones. And I'm just wearing bunch of different headphones. But, you know, they're $550. I spent my own money.

I got some. I bought the space gray ones, and I'm just wearing them all the time. Here's what's underrated about them. I went over this in the video, but it doesn't get hit home enough. The transparency mode on these is phenomenal. It's so good to the point where, like,

it's like you're not wearing headphones, so I can wear them kind of all the time. And as long as my head doesn't get tired, because I've got strong neck muscles and the thing is heavy, like I can have music playing, I can be editing a video if I really trust them. They're still, I don't know about the latency. I don't know if I trust them for editing at the moment.

But I can be doing kind of anything with the headphones on walking around the studio, and they're fine, and I don't trust any other pair of headphones to that degree. So it's like a convenience piece in the studio. I will say I enjoy them when you're wearing them because of that because there are so many times where I'm talking to you while we're both looking at our computer,

and then I turn and realize you haven't answered because you had your 820s on and just couldn't hear anything I said. So now you can hear me. I'm not talking to myself anymore on the side i used to i used to message you in slack when i was like 10 feet away from you so you you'd know that i was trying to get in touch with you headphones of the year saving us slack messages yeah there we go i don't have a favorite one to be honest i don't know what even really came out this year so i will disagree with you without arguing anything further um you snubbed someone i don't know who but it's a snub okay yeah all right worst worst

design of the year i'm putting this in here just because i specifically remembered how memeable apple's things are this year and i gotta give a shout out to the macOS Big Sur Beta battery icon. Worst design thing of the year in any tech category. Do you think it's extra because Apple did it? Oh yeah, absolutely. Because you have high expectations from Apple. I have high expectations from Apple. And even with Big Sur,

where there's a bunch of questionable, really cartoony icons, it's like, I get it. They're're all cartoony but that battery icon looked like not just an afterthought it looked like an intentional mess up like it looked like the wrong one ended up in the beta it looked like one of those like malware sites you would go to that like gives you better a batter better battery by downloading this exe file or something like that it was it was really bad i think that's my favorite category or we basically designed to that category because we wanted to make fun of that icon because we remembered it today all right let's do some more focus stuff okay so content focused

stuff yeah content focus so first of all we've got all kinds of creators to shout out i mean we're creators here at the studio. I think something I said in the Streamy Awards that I gave to KurtzGazart, which is I feel like I have a really good eye for when I see something that I know took a lot of effort. And I think a lot of the best videos you watch, you get that pass through the video, which is like a level of passion and effort where you can tell when someone's mailing it in.

You can tell when something took a day or five minutes to make. But when you watch a video and you can tell like this took a lot to make and research and animate and create, I love that. So I feel like that's a theme throughout my shout outs. There's also like another level to that where you can still have that passion and effort to create something, but maybe you're not using a RED camera. Maybe you're not having insane animation or editing or title sequences and stuff. But just the ideas that you get,

there are a lot of sketch channels that maybe the physical effort they had to put into it wasn't that much but like you still have to have comedy deliverance like there's a lot more to it so don't just count somebody out just because technically it's not insanely difficult i guess we'll give a creator of the year at the top is that the one we want to start with yeah let's just do it my creator of the year is mr beast and i think it it makes sense in a bunch of ways like you see his main channel videos and the theme is high effort like dude doesn't stop he has the most insane like track record of videos that are very difficult to

replicate and just a fun experience to watch plus he's obviously clearly mastered the algorithm and he's doing big things with it so yeah and. And he's generally helping people out too. In a year where people have hit some unfortunate times, like it's, it's great to just watch some people get some benefit out of there from someone who's just caring. Yeah. I also had like maybe a 20 minute phone conversation with him a couple of days ago. And that conversation was like maybe the most valuable conversation of the year so shout out to jimmy great dude great creator all right video of the year i think we all agreed on this right i think we all at the studio collectively said mark rober's video about the squirrel traps that he sort of set up over the course of a couple of weeks and

months it was also kind of landing at like the perfect timing during quarantine where that level of entertainment of just watching squirrels go through an obstacle course in the backyard again we needed that and it hit a level of it hit an audience that expanded youtube which is always fun to watch i had not seen it yet. And my mom texted me and asked if I had seen it. I like that. I like when a video, cause that seems like it doesn't happen very much. There's a lot of viral videos by the numbers that are just kind of like a popular person doing something and it's not really worth sharing. But this type of video, like I would, I would share with friends and family where it's

like check this out by the way i'm friends with this guy he's literally a youtube creator and this is what he does uh-huh and like that level that that's that's awesome to be able to see so good looks mark yeah that that was it was just entertaining and impressive and like you said the effort put into that which all of his videos have an insane amount of effort that's why you get one every four months or whatever yeah i'm just looking at it now it has 53 million views but i feel like the amount of people that probably ripped that and put it on facebook or other websites that thing's got to easily be 100 million views yeah um so yeah that wildly fun on the theme of pandemic entertainment my breakout creator of the year i'm giving this podcast award to julie nolke uh canadian i forget

i think it might be toronto but canadian youtuber she did these sketch these sketches i can't talk the sketches about like explaining the pandemic to my my past self or my future self explains the pandemic to me. If you haven't seen the series, there's going to be a lot of show notes for this episode. It's down there. We'll link one of them. They're really funny. And yeah, the pandemic-focused entertainment. I remember watching TV not too long ago just thinking like, man, all the TV ads this year and every show i'm watching is like permanently

different like every tv ad is like it's been a tough year like this is not good i've probably said that way too many times this podcast but like you keep hearing it in our entertainment and like just to focus on it in a way that's like light-hearted and yeah at least a little entertaining it's for sure so shout out to julie uh i have a favorite non-tech channel which is this is not a breakout creator this isn't my favorite creator but he's just one who constantly kept me and my wife entertained this entire uh entire year uh his name's pros d you've probably you've probably seen him um he has a lot of clips that make it on reddit they're like 15 to 30 seconds long and they're usually like really quick uh he does a lot of stuff like

npcs and video games and and stuff like that he's a voice actor but he did this started this series that kind of took off that is super simple but he basically finds different categories of food and tries all the different flavors of them, which usually is between 15 and 30 different flavors. He's done goldfish, Oreos, Little Debbie snacks, everything like that. For whatever reason, I have not let one of those videos go longer than 24 hours of getting posting without Claire and I sitting down and watching it. It feels like, I don't think there's anything else we're that into besides like when the top strap seasons out.

It's just wildly entertaining. High praise. I don't, it's just so, it's so funny. Again, we'll link it in the show notes. I think my favorite one was probably Goldfish just because that had the most different flavors. I should watch that, because I've tried about 20 goldfish flavors. Fun fact.

Yeah. Goldfish might be like the goat snack, to be honest. Whoa. OK, so you're awarding snack of the year. Snack of the year. It's goldfish. They've been around for a bit. Yeah, right.

I'm just a big goldfish fan, big Pro's D fan. Nice. We have a thumbnail of the year i like your pick for this one i didn't have a thumbnail so yeah i couldn't think of any like one thumbnail of the year that stuck out as incredible to me but i think that's why i picked this one because it's one i specifically remember and that's probably why it's a tech one there are probably some really really good thumbnails out there but um dave 2d did one for the 3070 which was the and among us he basically turned the 3070 into an animated among us character shooting the 2080 in the back because of just like the huge gains nvidia made this year

with their 30 series i don't even know if it's actually his real thumbnail anymore but if you look on twitter you can find it i didn't i like didn't even have to watch the video i just watched the thumbnail for like 10 minutes because it was so good um i think that's my that's my winner all right i've got one easter egg of the year for like our easter our easter egg of the year. Oh, man. You just typed this. I really wish I had time to think about this. Yeah. Okay. Say yours, and I'll try and think of. So we did a video review of the Note20 Ultra

and a video review of the Note20 shortly after. In our video review of the Note20 Ultra, the background had an iMac. It had a shelf with a bunch of props it had a lamp and in the video of the note 20 which was a clearly worse phone in every way we had a worse version of every single prop we had an older worse iMac we had the lamp go crooked we had let me just I'm gonna pull up the frame right now so I can look at it we had the lighting was worse we had the lamp go crooked. We had, let me just, I'm going to pull up the frame right now so I can look at it. We had the lighting was worse.

We had the bicycle in the back being taken apart. We had the HD backwards. There was just every single thing about that background. We went back and studied it and appropriately adjusted for the Note 20. You might not have ever noticed if you didn't see both videos, but that is my Easter egg of the year with a honorable mention to the toilet trophy in the Christmas tree in the background of the Smartphone Awards. Yeah, we don't know if anyone's seen that yet because it's not out, but I'm hoping they see it. I think my favorite one might have been iOS 14.

We created as many app icons as possible on the set so we had a clock we had a folder we had a wallet that looks like the apple wallet what else did we have we had five or six different things it was to the point where we're like this is really funny but i don't know if we have enough things and then we created things yeah and almost every everyone on Twitter was getting like all but one, man, they were all getting different ones. So it's just fine. It was fine.

Fun. Finding the person who finally found like all five or six. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Those ones are fun. Again, we have a lot of fun doing that.

Yeah. Again, we need to record what we do behind the scenes. Sometimes we got some, we got some ideas, some ideas. All right. Last award.

And I think this is a great one to wrap it up on. Favorite video of the year that we got to work on. MKBHD channel video of the year. And for me, I think we might agree on this one. When we got to go up to Boston Dynamics as a team

and just check out spot the robot dog and film with that thing all day basically we had a pair of Canon R5s and all we did was play with the robot dog all day and it was surreal at first because it was kind of like we've seen all these videos of this thing but now it's here and it's three feet long and it's just crazy thing but then we got used to it and we got to learn what it does. We got to make a whole video with it. It was great. If you think deeper into that, just the whole scenario for us was fun because we hadn't really gotten to mess with the R5s.

So it's fun to do that. We hadn't really been a team for the five months coming before that because of Corona. We went up there. We thought we were going to get some cool video of this robot dog. of corona we went up there we thought we were gonna get some cool video of this robot dog in 10 minutes of meeting some of the nicest people we've ever met they just handed you the controller and you were walking away with it and they weren't even following you and the minute that happened i was like we're gonna have the the best time today like i couldn't believe it was to the point where i was talking to them and i couldn't even see where you guys were with the, with spa anymore.

You were like in the woods and no one had followed you. And I was just like, they really trust this thing and they are fascinating to listen to. It's still a guest I would love to have on the podcast at some point. Um, also congratulations to them. They sold to, they were acquired a Hyundai,

I think for a billion dollars yeah who knows how much that changes their operation but yeah crazy stuff they've been doing i just i you look back at three years old from what that robot was to now and i can't wait to see in three years what that robot ends up being so that'll be exciting yeah all right well i think that that about does it we've we've talked our faces off for the is this the longest episode of the year it might be it was certainly one of the most fun ones yeah um but thank you guys who've been listening to waveform who've been hanging around who've been checking out the episodes we have big plans for 2021 and the future

of the waveform podcast so for sure stay tuned a lot of that is coming. A lot of what you guys already know and love, but a lot of new stuff too. So we'll catch you guys at the top of the year in 2021. Happy new year. Happy holidays. Talk to you soon. Waveformers brought to you in part with Studio 71 and our intro outro music was created by Cameron Barlow.