Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Wrapping Up 2022 and Blind Smartphone Test

Episode Date: December 23, 2022

The year is coming to a close! In this episode, Marques and Andrew go over some quick news before looking back at some of the predictions the team made last year. Some of us were spot on, and others not so much. After that, they talk about some of the surprising insights gained from the new and improved Blind Smartphone Camera test. There was a lot to dig into this week so we hope you enjoy it! Happy holidays! Links: Studio ping pong video: https://bit.ly/studiopingpong Best Smartphone Camera 2022 video: https://bit.ly/mkbhdcamtest Crazy mechanical keyboard: https://bit.ly/vergekeyboard Power On newsletter: https://bloom.bg/3PzboRs Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Shop products mentioned: Keychron K2 Keyboard at https://geni.us/sTgxy9G Teenage Engineering Op-1 Field at https://geni.us/h7xj Google Pixel Watch at https://geni.us/MlVAiow Google Pixel 6a Smartphone at https://geni.us/2yN2s71 Google Pixel 7 Pro at https://geni.us/1BtZW Apple iPhone 14 Pro at https://geni.us/xznyCLt Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra at https://geni.us/FuSKLRB Nothing phone at https://geni.us/GlwhJS Sony Xperia 1 Mark IV at https://geni.us/4Rma Mac Studio at https://geni.us/E2dlfZ M1 Macbook Pro at https://geni.us/mYI2UPf Twitters: Waveform: https://twitter.com/wvfrm Marques: https://twitter.com/mkbhd Andrew: https://twitter.com/andymanganelli Adam: https://twitter.com/adamlukas17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wvfrmpodcast/ Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at Fizz.ca. Hey, what is up up people of the internet? Welcome back. It's your final week of the year and we have another episode of the waveform podcast for you. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. I'm Andrew. And we got to talk about the blind smartphone camera test. It was a lot of fun, a lot of data collection, a lot of really interesting results. We did it scientifically this time, which was sweet, but also we've got a few keyboard launches we may or may not be excited about. I think Andrew is. Yeah. Yeah. I like keyboards a lot now. So we also have a calendar app that I guess I should give a quick

that you're excited about that I'm excited about. That's me. Uh, we're also going to revisit our 2022 tech predictions which i actually don't remember any of what i said so there's some fun one i had so much fun watching the old episode okay it's gonna be fun this should be good but first i do want to give a big shout out to uh adam bowbrow i don't know if i'm saying it right but he has a table tennis youtube channel i've been watching for a while actually. And we actually got to collaborate with him because he's all over the world all the time, but he was in New York City for a couple days. He hit us up

and we couldn't resist the opportunity. I just wanted to go play, but I also wanted to find a way to shoot a video, so we got him to play Table Tennis using various tech items. He's extremely good at Table Tennis. Extremely good.

I'm not going to spoil anything, like he's pretty good okay go watch the video on the studio channel for sure he's pretty awesome uh there's also a video coming to his own channel so if you want to subscribe to him i played against him and just like straight up matches of table tennis so it'll be fun i also want to real quick you said final week of the We, this is the final week we're recording quote unquote live. We have a prerecorded episode that'll go out next week, which is actually the last one. So there will be a street continued. It's a long form episode. Yeah.

Yeah. Um, David, Adam, Ellis have been working on this for like six months. It's all ready to go for next week. So don't worry. There still will be an episode out next week. Storytime. That's what it is okay you got another calendar app because why wouldn't you get another so i didn't want to like i've i've told you guys about my addiction to productivity apps like it's i'll try anything at this point i've been using this one actually for a little bit and i didn't

tell you guys about it i was just kind of like messing around as i usually do um but i really like it it's a calendar app called cron and just last week which is why i tweeted about it they released their first mobile app which is the iphone calendar it's an ios calendar so there's no android version yet but they keep saying it's coming which is cool but i mostly use it for the desktop app which is a a Mac app. And is it? Let me check if it's also on Windows. It is not. It is not? Okay. So that's one of the downsides of a lot of these niche apps that I try is they'll be like a small enough development team that they're only on one or two platforms, which is really a bummer.

I use Google Calendar. So this syncs with Google Calendar. So sorry, Outlook people, this doesn't work for you. But if you use Google Calendar like I do. That's what you get for using Outlook. I mean, it's a pop in the enterprise world. Lots of people use it. That's why I hate it.

Yeah. My personal calendar, I'm a Google Calendar person. So I never use the Mac Calendar app. I never use Outlook. But this app is good. It's fast. It's good looking. It's functional.

It's got the keyboard shortcuts that I like. I live in, like I said said like three apps and i live in cron now it's really good okay so if you're if you're interested if you use google calendar uh i would suggest also dropping it on your iphone too because it's better than the stock google calendar app that i've been using mostly because of the widget we'll get a shot yeah it's a nice widget this is something where like i've never found myself wanting anything other than just my google calendar app i just accidentally started a workout nice sorry just leave it going yeah whatever we'll check it back later um because like to me a calendar

widget just means hey i want you to be stressed more every time you look at your phone i want you to know how busy you are is it the upcoming event that it's just seeing it right there like i know when i'm clicking the button on my calendar it's like i know i'm busy i know i'm already stressed i'm going to look at why i'm stressed if i just have the cat up every time when i'm like i'm just good to check the time oh my god this is gonna be a long day also i was wrong it is on windows it's a small link all the way at the bottom it looks really good it is also i think it's invite only so it's a small link all the way at the bottom yeah it looks it looks really good it is also i think it's invite only so it's not exactly easy to use i should have mentioned that yeah no dude i had people i had friends of mine messaging me like yo do you guys

have any extra invites yeah i don't have any i haven't i haven't gotten like messages like that since like the early dropbox days or like the uber days when you would get like free rides with early invites and stuff like that it's a very tech company thing to do there's something about it i love for some reason people hated it when one plus did it but that was just to be able to get invited to then buy a thing versus just getting an invite to use a thing like i got on the wait list for a notion ai that one finally got into notion ai and it's like i'm not paying extra for it but i understand the wait list thing builds notion ai and it's like i'm not paying extra for it but i understand the waitlist thing builds the hype yeah it's the hype so you know check it out

if you're interested uh if you're addicted like me there's another one actually i kind of want to try of course never mind i was just gonna ask you like do you think you can use this calendar app for one whole calendar year okay there's another one called routine that's a no if anyone was wondering routine got dot co i went to the site it's also uh in beta and it's on a waitlist thing but there's a mac os a windows and an ios app and good if you go to this website tell me you wouldn't want to try this app it's got just like sunrise it does but it's got your task list next to your calendar which talks to also we use notion and it has your notion tasks in there count all of it is in one i feel like if i could i could use all three things in one app that would

be even better have you guys ever heard of the alarms app okay it's gone all right you have a keyboard you want to talk about yeah i don't know i i was just i have a couple keyboards actually okay my uh my r button is slowly breaking on my current Keychron. Oh, wow. Problems with MacBook keyboard. Oh, on your Keychron. No, on the Keychron. Oh, man.

Okay. Well, okay. Then let's segue that into. I'm in the market. OnePlus is coming out with a keyboard that they're partnering with Keychron, actually. Interesting. Which when I first heard OnePlus keyboard, I was like, kind of weird. Not against it.

Like, I love keyboards. I think they're really fun i think i'm slowly diving further and further down the rabbit hole of keyboards and i love it um one plus making one i was excited but i was like uh i'm not quite sure then i saw it was with keychron i'm like okay cool at least they're partnering with a reputable brand already yeah and they almost feel like they match as far as their market positioning i always feel like maybe not lately but one plus being the lower price competitive but surprisingly good overall like product for the price yeah is and that's also what i i feel like that's a separate question is that still one plus or have we all just kind of given up on what one plus is doing

anymore that's what one plus would like to think it is okay and that's also what i think of when i think of keychron okay is that fair that's fair what I think of when I think of Keychron. Okay. Is that fair? That's fair. I'll call that fair. The thing is, is we don't know much about it, but I just wanted to talk about it because their page for it, trying to find information, is insanely confusing. So I'm going to read

you the first couple things you get when you go to their page about their keyboard. You get one picture of a silver key with a little red squiggly line um a couple things that say it's um switches co-created with fans double gasket mounted design custom made layout and profile and then it says subscribe to get 30 red coins and receive product news updates back this product with red coins and get three times the amount invested during the product pre-order stage see terms and conditions and then a button to

subscribe to news updates and become an investor an investor i'm very confused it feels like a kickstarter for it but like i don't it almost feel do you know what it kind of feels like it kind of feels like what nothing did to invest into it way beforehand, which is funny because nothing is Carl, which is from OnePlus, but not at OnePlus anymore. But also this is for a keyboard, which feels kind of weird. That is odd. I mean, OnePlus, they have BBK money,

so it's not like they need to do a Kickstarter, but that is kind of a hype- thing to do still yeah i'm wondering if more and more companies and i don't think this is like some revelation or anything but um it's telling me my lap speed which is not great right now i need to turn this off i'm sorry what type of workout did you do i guess a run a track workout but it's telling me every minute okay sorry adam sorry future adam um it feels like a lot of companies which isn't much of a surprise it feels like they're launching these kickstarters more along the line of it reminds me of like when you have a teespring campaign and it's like rather than make way too much of a product you want an idea of how many people are

going to order so then you can make the exact amount of the product and not have too much of a product you want an idea of how many people are going to order so then you can make the exact amount of the product and not have too much overhead okay yeah that's what i get from this yeah like if you're one plus you don't really know how many people would buy a one plus keyboard you might think it's a cool idea but then like all right all our all our buyers don't necessarily own a product that needs a keyboard like this so we'll just put the idea out there give people a button to sign up and then figure out more about what these people want and then make it later yeah okay and you just have to use red coins to do that whatever those are whatever the hell that is but um in terms of timetable that's the only other thing we really know here um it says in january will be testing

phase february will be the product launch but i'm guessing that just means the announcement. And then it says March to April mass production starts. So if mass production starts in March at the earliest, I can't imagine we're seeing this till May or June probably. Yeah, I have no idea what the life cycle of a keyboard is, like how it gets made. But yeah, sometime next year is when I'm putting it. Because again, it's going to be like probably limited supply. I think you'll have to get one super early.

And if you don't, it'll be sold out. and then you have to wait again yeah uh yeah i'm not sure but interesting i i feel like i was gonna say there's like several different levels of keyboard enthusiasts i haven't gone all the way to the bottom of the rabbit hole yet okay you're segwaying into everything i want to talk about this fantastically by the way i mean i just i i used to be the just regular chiclet style keyboard person on everything so my laptop obviously but then when i got really good at typing fast on my laptop i was like let me just use that same keyboard on my desktop so i just used literally the magic keyboard for a long time and i thought mechanical keyboards as a category was a little

extra and niche and i didn't really get into it nothing wrong with that so i finally got to try a few and i think mostly it was because i was on a mac at this point and i had realized there weren't as many mechanical keyboards for mac so every time i tried one i'd be like oh that's kind of cool but it just has windows keys and i can't use it so i found a couple good mac mechanical keyboards and i was like all right i get mechanical keyboards over chiclet style more satisfying the sound they're better built this this magic keyboard is obviously just a flimsy piece of you know the thin metal apple made so i was like all right i get it but like artisan keycaps and like crazy seven pound boards and like

people gluing down like making their own keyboards from scratch i was like that is that is far out that is crazy far out i get mechanical keyboards but i'm probably never getting there now you're opening right now now i'm at the point where like i understand i feel like the differences between different switches for different types of activities i'm into that wired versus wireless different keyboard layouts and things like that i kind of miss having a number pad i'm considering my next mechanical keyboard being a little bit bigger and having a number pad we just got a couple um we just got a couple glorious sent us their bluetooth numpad that's just like an extra numpad on the side with a couple extra volume controls and or like macro controls that's pretty sick potentially cool it's

got like that won't work on mac though yeah probably um i'm not sure glorious is a weird thing you might be able to try it we have them we should try it um but like that's the kind of thing i like 10 keyless or like 60 and stuff like that without the numpad and then but sometimes it's just so nice to have the numpad so to have it on the side that i can pull it over kind of like what i do with my trackpad on the mac is really nice yeah um but you you segued into talking about a seven pound keyboard did you just um so like you you said you've been enjoying mechanical keyboards more and more i was lucky enough that after the typing test a company called mono key reached out and wanted to send a board um it was not built they sent us the pcb the case and some keycaps we had a bunch of switches at

home and when i got COVID I got very bored so I built my first keyboard and I'm insanely proud of this but can I hold it feel this it is eight you couldn't it feels like solid metal like you can legitimately hurt people with this oh yeah it's crazy because the keyboard I was using before and I used in that video the key cult 265 I thought was heavy and i really liked it because i mean one it's a beautiful keyboard and two when i'm playing games it just had like some more heft to it and i don't like my keyboard sliding around this thing i can't move i was gonna say there's got to be some diminishing returns like i have a pretty heavy keyboard

it doesn't move if my keyboard is three times as heavy i think the only thing i would notice is a general more thunk feeling i don't think it would move less i don't think it's like yeah it's not the feeling so much i mean it's solid so i'm sure there's somewhat of a feeling coming through i'm sure there's keyboard people out here who are like you guys have no idea what you're talking about but you're right yeah um for me and a perfect example you saw this morning is i get insanely competitive i broke my ping pong paddle this morning when we were playing yeah and like when i'm playing games i will like shove my keyboard and stuff so now it's a lot harder being seven pounds you'll

actually break things with your keyboard this is a beautiful keyboard though um i mean i think i have to give a little asmr test right now sure i'm just gonna type subscribe to waveform solid yeah it's very nice i don't want to go too deep into this because it's not the look i appreciate these keyboards now that's what i'll say yeah i appreciate them um i'm in the market for a wire well it could be wired for a mac os compatible yeah mechanical keyboard of any size actually and i just want to like confirm like we know you can use windows keyboards on mac it's it is much nicer when you do have all the correct keys and all the keycaps and stuff like that. There is, there's, there are just an ease of use to it.

Exactly. I mean, I'm not against it. I love the glorious keyboards. That's just, this is what got me. Like I was using a glorious keyboard on my Mac after I was using the magic keyboard and I'd remapped all the control key, the windows key, everything to like match up.

But I still realize that I use the brightness and media controls a lot also on the magic keyboard. So having those just not work at all was kind of a bummer so I really just want a specifically mac os compatible one yeah that's where I'm at but yeah okay well okay I have one more keyboard that I want to show you that's um just got announced I want you to click the link in the doc it's from final mouse and I want you to tell me what you think about this because i will be up front i don't like this company at all so i am super biased looking at it but i would like to see what you think maybe describe it a little bit verge one uh with a screen yes okay because the verge title is this mechanical keyboard has a whole ass screen underneath its keys which is amazing yep final mouse has a 350 keyboard which appears to have transparent

keys and a video playing on a screen underneath those transparent keys so when you touch keys on the keyboard the video actually reacts this is more than just a video it's actually yeah it looks like you're uh it's like an overhead view of a, like a, a koi pond. And when you hit a key, the fish all scatter away from the key that you pressed. That's, that is, that's over my head. That's, well, okay. This, I don't know if all of them do that

because they've showed a few examples and I believe the fish one was the only one that kind of interacted correctly. But yeah, it's, it's a keyboard where essentially there's a screen underneath the keys you have full transparent keycaps and then rather than just like rgb and kind of like in rgb keyboards you can have things that like the lights pulse or you can have them rainbow slide and like if you press keys it'll like puddle from out from that this is taking it to another level with video but this is nuts i'm looking at the video on right now

there's like a marketplace for buying videos that play under the keyboard this is like like yeah this is clearly the level that i'm not on with keyboards yet i think of this like a pc like when you buy a computer 75 85 95 of people don't build their own computer they buy a computer and just use it until it doesn't work anymore and for the few percent that do build their own computer there is a massive enthusiast market for all kinds of subtle things that only you would notice and be very proud of in the thing you built your ram sticks of rgb that you can you know coordinate the colors of as you're gaming and be very proud of in the thing you built your ram sticks of rgb that you can you know coordinate the colors of as you're gaming and like all these little things you have the glass

and you can see it and that's cool but like that's a very small amount of people and this is kind of the same thing with keyboards like most people just get a keyboard but the small amount of people that are building their own keyboards are gonna think this is crazy cool i think but that's a small amount i will i'll counterpoint that a little bit and i'm again i'm biased i inherently don't like this keyboard because i think final mouse is a pretty terrible company um at 350 i don't think it's at the price point of the people you're talking about for reference i believe the case to this keyboard is 500 just the case in the pcb just the red heavy piece like keyboard keyboards get expensive um so like at 350 i wonder what really the like build material is on all of this and then i thought you were gonna say the opposite i thought you're

gonna say like a normal board is like 80 and i think they're just overcharging i think there i mean there are like if you bought a gaming laptop from like or a gaming board is like 80 and i think they're just overcharging i think there i mean there are like if you bought a gaming laptop from like or a gaming keyboard from like steel series mechanical gaming keyboard like pretty cherry switches 150 bucks yeah 150 to 200 and then like glorious gets a little more expensive but i think they're in that like sweet spot of it's like you can buy a full keyboard that will just work out of the box but it's got hot swappable switches it's got like different keycaps that you can buy a bunch of customized stuff that you can upgrade later so it's almost like buying a pre-built pc but knowing you can change the graphics card later it's a it's a foundation it's like the it's the the um

oh my god what's it called what's the word we're thinking we're both thinking of i don't think we're thinking it's a platform it's a platform i was gonna say it's the gateway truck oh no no it's the it's it's the platform that you can you can swap things out later yeah and it's like it's like the entry level into that like you can start pretty entry level but you can go pretty deep on a glorious keyboard which i think is why they're in a really cool marketplace but that's like that's a little more expensive than that. And I'm assuming there's not much you can change because all of it needs to be those clear pieces. It's proprietary.

And I just, as good as people are at typing, I don't think I would ever want a keyboard with none of the letters or anything on the keycaps. Yeah, I'm a pretty good typist, but I do check my hands once in a while. All the time. Like there are so many times where I have to check my hands for certain things. There are keys you just don't hit all the time.

I had a matte black keyboard for a while. I remember that, yeah. It got pretty tough. I don't think we ever used it to actually type on. We used it for like a prop. Yeah. So yeah, I don't know. I don't love this thing.

I think it's kind of weird. It's pretty wild. I think Final Mass kind of sucks, but. Well, we'll check out. Well, I'll keep my eye out for keywords. I'm sure you guys will be tweeting them at me as I say this. So I do have to take a quick break and come back, and we will talk about the 2022 predictions

and the blind smartphone camera test. But first, a little bit of trivia. All right. So trivia finale was last week. So this week, we're still doing trivia, but it doesn't count. Think of it like a friendly or. The numbers don't matter. The numbers don't matter.

Yeah. Whose line is it anyway? Okay. So Facebook was launched in 2004. Twitter debuted July of 2006. But in 2011, which celebrity jointly bought MySpace? I think I know this one. I don't.

Be right back. I am so dreading groceries this week. Why? You can skip it. Oh, what? Just like that? Just like that. How about dinner with my third cousin? Skip it.

Prince Fluffy's favorite treats? Skippable. Midnight snacks? Skip. My neighbor's nightly saxophone practices? Uh, nope. You're on your own there. Could've skipped it. Should've skipped it. Skip to the good part and get groceries, meals, and more delivered right to your door on Skip.

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the whole episode and it's there's some good predictions there's some really bad ones and some really good ones and the cup some really funny things that we're just we should go over what people said and then maybe react slash summarize yeah let's do like future predictions a little bit maybe we'll do a full episode of those later but i'm curious what we actually said last year i'm just going to bring it up if you remember last year we brought the team in and everyone kind of had a prediction some of them kind of overlapped with each other but we'll just go over everything see who was right who was wrong um let's start with, everyone's favorite producer, Adam. He predicted something and then funnily, accidentally predicted something.

So I'll explain. He was looking for the OP2 from Teenage Engineering. But in that process, you and I didn't know what it was. I still don't know. Did that happen? Well, okay, yeah. Tell us if it happened or not we didn't get an op2 but they did release the op1 field which is an updated op1 so they fixed the things that i wanted fixed about in the episode you were like you wanted usbc you wanted

just some like it was pretty like better 3.5 millimeter yeah yeah so they did kind of do that it's just not called op2 exactly in the process of asking for that i asked you since we didn't know we asked you what the chances of that happening and your words were not very optimistic and said about as good of a chance as a pixel watch coming out which funny enough oh funny you say that yeah we did get it we got the pixel watch yeah so you so you know both this is why i don't gamble this is you technically were right with your gut you're like probably the same chance as a pixel watch and then they both happen yeah exactly yeah we'll call that a win i think i think definitely you got that one unintentional win unintentional um hayato pretty said what i

think a lot of us agreed with and after he said this i think almost everyone kind of agreed but more evs from legacy car manufacturers and from startups he did specifically mention canoe i'll give the l on that one um but i do think it's fair to say we saw a big influx in evs this year yeah if you guys aren't already subscribed to the Autofocus channel, we're checking out a lot of them. I mean, we've had our hands on a lot of them, but now we're able to give thoughts on individual models

and a lot of the strategies that we see from these companies. So yeah, I want to give a lot of credit to Volvo and GM, who I feel like have been like quietly doing a pretty solid job. Volvo, I just think their website is incredibly like future. Like they just showcase their evs which is cool uh and they also do

pole star stuff but then uh gm's got like cadillac's got the lyric the hummer's got the hummer the truck whatever but it's an electric pickup truck so that exists uh and there's some stuff in the pipeline f-150 lightning ford is out that came out just barely correctly on time it waited till like maybe the last month yeah so ford's got the maki and f-150 lightning out um there's some startups like rivian's real rivian's killing it oh these okay we're kind of close to an amazon warehouse or whatever's going on back there uh and the other day i was coming into the studio and I couldn't like get the angle or like shoot it with my phone as I was coming in, but I was stuck in traffic and I looked up on the bridge and there was like

12 Amazon delivery vans in a row. Then it was like Rivian, non Rivian, Rivian, non Rivian, Rivian. And it was like, they clearly like started updating their fleet or whatever.

That's awesome. And I wonder how long it'll take before they just go fully electric. But those things are everywhere. Yeah. and the r1s is starting to like is it what is it it's coming out for like reviews it feels like i don't know i saw i saw the first one on the road okay on the way to the studio a couple days ago so it's in customer hands not in big numbers but it's out there it's hard to tell sometimes because isn't there a rivian place in new york city and we started seeing a couple of trucks yeah it's probably test drives but still yeah rivian's doing great canoe's not one of them um we did also we had a bet going of who would make the first sub 30 000 ev with at least 240 miles. Ooh, is the Bolt over 240?

Yes, 259. Okay. Starting, you can get one at 259 miles for around 28 or 27, I think. So that's officially, back then, the Bolt was starting at like 32. So we did get it. The funny thing is, is we all said like,

this is a bet we'll come back to in five years. And then Chevy just decided to like drop the price by $5 dollars it's tough cars are not cheap right now no that is impressive but you got to test drive the bolt like yeah i did a whole video on it it is i think it's it's basically the baseline for a good acceptable ev there's a couple like other cheap evs um but i think the bolt is a good baseline yeah it's really solid so um that was good you uh we'll just say a couple of us guessed which company we thought would do it first um you thought tesla

hayato adam and david thought hyundai the worst guess was me i thought toyota and i thought i had a reasonable but i am any electric car one the uh or the easy 4x or whatever which is terrible and way too expensive easy yeah it's i i took a massive loss on that guess um but yeah we did get the sub 30 000 240 mile ev okay very proud of that i hope that starts a lot i hope that's next year i hope we see more things like that i hope the boat's not the only one at the end of next year. Exactly, yeah. David guessed more folding phones. This is true. Yes.

And this is a bit of a spoiler alert, but I'll just say it. We were considering adding a best folding phone category to the Smartphone Awards this year. We ended up not doing it because they're still sort of burgeoning. It could still die off but i think there's a good enough variety that we we could have done it this year okay um the find n2 just dropped it's like really nice we're expecting a pixel fold around the corner we still have like the big ones and the crazy xiaomi ones and the fold from samsung and the flips all of them do the flip thing the razor there's a bunch i love seeing all of them because

it feels like a lot of companies are doing kind of a piece of it right like samsung's clearly the furthest ahead and like it all works so well but like the xiaomi one is so thin i picked it up the other day on the table and i was like there should be a xiaomi folding phone too and david's like you're holding it i was like oh my god i'd like i didn't even notice i was holding something that like the find n2 the for the size of it is fantastic like i absolutely love it so yeah i guess once samsung loses its lead a little bit then a folding phone category will make way more sense it's still funny because in the u.s like most people aren't buying a xiaomi they're not buying the oppo find n they're not really able to buy the rate the razor is just if you're on verizon it's like you

basically just have samsung as your options outside of verizon so it's gonna be tough but it is true that we have more theoretical folding options now and when pixel comes out yeah that could be who knows when that will actually come out but um all right let's go on to tim tim's was fun he was wrong and also kind of dead on so he said he wants an imac pro 27 inch with apple silicon yep we all want that so that's wrong but he said specifically more range of products for professionals from apple and he says he needs something for professionals between the apple silicon regular imac and that and the mac pro which he kind of was dead on mac studio the mac studio was exactly kind of exactly what he was talking about that's that is pretty close uh there is a recent report from mark german on bloomberg of basically the

saddest thing i've read in a while i know i have this later in here because there's yeah it's like hey guys remember how Apple said there would be a two-year transition and that was two and a half years ago yeah so they kind of missed the boat there it looks like they're canceling the M2 Extreme which would have been like twice the size of the M2 Ultra which is already like four times the size which is already huge like they're canceling this super mega chip thing and they're just going to do Mac Pro with uh the next they're going to do m2 stuff across the board so we have m2 in the ipad now we're going to get an m2 pro m2 ultra and that ultra will be the highest end chip there won't be an even bigger chip in the mac pro and i was very sad to read that and then i also read that they appear to have canceled the imac pro which is also very sad

oh i missed that part and i also believe i read that they appear to have canceled the iMac Pro, which is also very sad. Oh, I missed that part. And I also believe I read that they, remember when we were writing about this like upgraded 7K Pro Display XDR? Yeah. That's also delayed. Oh. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's clearly delayed because it's not out and we were hoping by the end of two years it would all be out.

But Apple, they've got to eventually drop it. Some sort of modular desktop mac with apple silicon at some point that is what mark german's article said right is that there would be an m an m ultra chip in a package that has more like ram and gpu slots and i forget i don't know more upgradeability yeah like modular upgrade because you people don't open up the mac studio and and add ram like that they don't do a modular computer outside of the mac pro basically right now do you think it'll be in a in the same form factor as the current mac pro or because that seems to be much smaller i was gonna say that would seem ridiculous to be that big for yeah if the m2 ultra chip can kick

ass in the m2 in in the mac studio yeah then if you just do a Mac Studio that looks like it gained a few pounds, I feel like it can be an on-the-desk computer instead of an under-the-desk computer. It can be the size of kind of what Apple was hoping they could do with the trash can Mac Pro. They can actually finally do it in that size now because they were out of their minds

to try to do it with an Intel chip and all the Radeon stuff, but now they can actually do it that size. I hope they bring it back and they're like, told you so. Can't innovate anymore. It's funny because they say that on stage and then that product just bombs, but they could do it now. Yeah.

They could do it now. In terms of XDR, Vin actually predicted a Pro Display XDR, but with 120 hertz. I guess it's almost like a an imac pro because you wanted a pro display xdr casing 120 hertz refresh rate but then a chip inside that then you could plug into an external gpu for extra power oh so it's an imac so it's pretty much an imac pro with an x with the capability of plugging in an external GPU. That would be really nice.

That would be pretty cool. It definitely did not happen. Nothing close to that happened. No. But I can still dream. We can still dream. We can still dream. Yeah.

So Michael's prediction was, it wasn't really a prediction. He just wanted to know, are we going to stop seeing as many desktops in the, like, creative world? Right. And kind of bang on on that. We didn't see a new Mac Pro. We didn't see a new iMac Pro. We didn't get as many desktops.

The Studio obviously is a desktop, but it feels like it's going to that, like, smaller form factor, which is obviously still a desktop. And also the MacBook Pros are really good exactly and i feel like for what we do like so michael has a macbook one of the macbook pros now and it's like it's great for the workflows the apple silicon advancements for a lot of the third-party software is all catching up like those machines are great and it does feel like he was right that the desktop is less necessary than ever i think his like example essentially was that like he does very intense motion graphics and he's using a

laptop so if he's at the point of not really needing like a desktop and can go around and then do stuff like this at a coffee shop or something is pretty wild like how many more people in this space are going to really need desktops? And I think proving it, but even still- I'm still a psycho though for that. I want that. I mean, almost all our new hires, when they get their equipment, they're picking MacBook Pros at this point.

Mariah's got a MacBook Pro. Hayato's got a MacBook Pro. It's one of the best Apple products in a long time, those things. Yeah, I'm a fan of them. I am still the crazy one waiting for the super overpowered desktop because i still see a little bit of headroom in my workflow that i would like to

take advantage of but generally yeah they're great yeah we did also very specifically mention this is for creative workflow like this not for gaming desktops will never die when it comes to gaming just for all you commenters who are already typing up that that's what's gonna happen very specific here um all right your predictions what did i say let's see well okay we'll just you were hoping you were very adamant about the mac pro and i was hoping for you and an iMac pro actually um. But yes, unfortunately, Apple did not complete their 2022 predictions. I was hoping the biggest tech company in the world could follow through on a two-year prediction, but they unfortunately were unable.

That is pretty rough when you think about it like that. They've had a lot of time to do this and no dice. But you also did predict more collaborations on all of our channels. And I think, especially on Waveform, i would totally say that for sure waveform we had some fun ones studio we're starting to do a little more obviously it's it's tough to have you know traveling happen but we're getting back to it uh yeah that is definitely a goal more just as much as it is a prediction yeah but waveform we had like tech people like jrig everything come on we had hasan minhaj come on which i don't think any of us could have ever predicted last year that

was not on my 2022 bingo wasn't on mine either yeah very happy it happened but wasn't on my prediction um so yeah lots of new collaborations let's hope for more in the future i think we really really like those um and then me just on the predictions l list again we'll come down i guess a drone with a battery life of 40 minutes i don't think drone battery prediction drone battery life changed like at all in terms of like consumer drones and stuff like that yeah it's trying to think that i think there's like one dji drone that has a super long let me just double check this i will i will say the um the dji avada or avata whatever it's called is probably my favorite piece of tech of 2022 it was so much fun but it still has the exact same battery life that it feels like every single dji

consumer drone has like it's all like 25 minutes. Yeah, there's a couple niche ones. There's one called the Autel Evo 2 Pro, has a 7,000 milliamp hour battery, and is rated for 40 minutes. There's definitely a lack of long range drone batteries in the consumer world. Still makes me sad.

And then my other prediction was that I was going to get you on a live stream teaching you how to play a video game and that also didn't happen and that was a pretty easy one so um yeah i'm gonna try again in 2022 time there's no time we do not have time to do anything this week yeah um so yeah i pretty much failed every single one of my predictions good job andrew same um no you you had the collaborations part, right? Yeah, yeah, decently. Okay.

Yeah, I know. I think there's going to be a lot of good stuff for 2023 along the same lines of our 2022 predictions. I think there will be more foldables again. I think there will be, hopefully, a Mac Pro. And more EVs, for sure. I think there will be even more EVs. I think probably, what did I say?

Basically, every year for the next 10 years will be the most interesting year yet more EVs. I think probably, what did I say? Basically every year for the next 10 years will be the most interesting year yet of EVs. And we're in like year three of that. So there's going to be more next year for sure. I am also still hoping for like a nice Pro Display XDR equivalent, some sort of sweet display that we can use for the desktops,

but also MacBook Pros are still really good. There's a lot of good stuff that could still happen that we predicted last year that may come true in sort of a part two in 2023. Okay, I thought you were going to say the last week of 2022. No, in 2026. We could just be super early with our predictions. Yeah, I think that just means we're wrong.

Yeah. What if I play a video game on stream and we get a 40-minute drone battery life and we get the Mac Pro all next year? That would be awesome. We were right just like a little early. I will get you to play a video game somewhere i think we talked about me teaching you how to play something so whether that's a studio live stream or a studio video i will i will get you on that yeah i usually learn off camera like table tennis okay yeah fair but

we'll see yeah let's do it all right well we'll take a quick break we got to come back and talk through the blind smartphone camera test. But first, one more trivia question. All right. So I've personally been using Notion for a while. And when we switched to Notion for work, I was super hyped. But all of my notes are spread between a bunch of different apps, including Google Keep. So the question, when did google keep launch

we want a year i'll take a year and a date the closest one year that's the fake point okay all right okay i also have notes in google keep all right i'll think about i'll think about that one we'll be right back breaking news coming in from bet 365 where every nail-biting overtime win breakaway pick six three-point shot underdog win buzzer beater shootout walk off and absolutely every play in between is amazing. From football to basketball and hockey to baseball, whatever the moment, it's never ordinary at Bet365. Must be 19 or older, Ontario only.

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and Machine Learning at netsuite.com slash waveform. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash waveform. netsuite.com slash waveform. All right, welcome back. Let's talk through the Blind Smartphone Camera Test 2022. We did it science style this year, which I think was a super fun project. Shout out to the Discord for helping us test this stuff. Shout out to Zach for helping us build this stuff.

What we did this time was we had an entire site built. So instead of doing social media polls of 60 different phones and like it's kind of up to whatever matchups we load up and maybe this like people suggested maybe do double elimination, maybe make it a little more scientific because like something could happen on the first picture. Seeding and stuff. But it's hard to do all of that. That is tough. So we did full science mode. We took 16 different smartphones. We took the same picture with all 16.

We fed them into a site which would randomize and show you matchups of all these combinations of the 16. And then instead, well, so that first of all, that's like that's pretty sick. So we have the side by side of the same picture. We did a standard photo, a portrait photo and a low light photo. So you could go through and vote on all three of these categories and then you would get a winner at the end of your voting. The challenge was 16 phones is a lot of pictures so if you want you to give like a theoretical fair shot to every single camera that would be at like at least 120 votes yeah so we actually we ended up going with an elo rating system which is kind of the same

thing you might see in kind of any ranked video game or like table tennis or anything like that where you have an overall ranking where your rating goes up based on the winnings against uh who you play so if you beat a highly ranked thing that's worth more than if you beat a lowly ranked thing it's weighted because a lot of the like organizations or games or stuff that use it is like you don't get the exact same amount of matchups so like in chess or tennis or even just like video games it still needs to match you against someone who's played 10 games versus someone who's played 50 games so you weight everything and then wins and losses are weighted differently so this means the person that went on voted for five minutes and did 40 matchups is getting a similar score but maybe not as specific as a person doing 100 votes yeah so

the more votes you do the more tight and statistically accurate your results will be. Yeah. And that was basically the concept. And so we went through it. I blind tested myself, which was really fun because now I didn't know which photo was attached to which picture. So my winners when I blind tested myself were, for the standard photo, Pixel 6a was my winner.

For portrait mode and for low light, Pixela was my winner for portrait mode and for low light pixel 7 was my winner really interestingly um but my god we got a ton of data out of this so we had to fight up for like three days or so ended up accumulating well over 20 million votes from over 600 000 voters and i don't know that there's a collection of unbiased data like this anywhere else on the internet it's really really interesting yeah i want to throw on there too like you mentioned you didn't know which is what like you were blind testing it you knew a little more just because you knew which phones were in it but right in order to make sure that people could couldn't cheat first of all it would be really hard to cheat in this because you have

to vote so many times that if we didn't take the measures we did you would have to like open each picture go to the x either see the file name or the x if data then vote and i mean like most people were voting you would only be cheating yourself yeah because even if you were to go through and vote 400 times and just make sure you only vote for one phone at the end there were 20 million votes yeah and people were just bam bam i think there was something like a peak of 35 000 votes per minute yep so people were really just bam bam just clicking through reacting gut reaction left or right left or right and just going through them and that's how we got so many and pieces of information even on top of that we still took the extra steps and we cleared

all exit data and labeled everything with letters that way people don't know what phone it is it was i actually didn't see a single person with a post that says like i know this is this phone because you guys left something behind which i'm very surprised at um we definitely we took a lot of extra time to make sure this did it we cropped them all to the same resolution we compressed them all to the same file size yeah we did a lot we did a lot of things um and i'm super super happy like you said about how it came out i think it was so much fun i i like the fact that it was like you voted quick because you could pixel peep if you wanted to or you could just very quickly be like this one looks better this one looks better and like you're subconsciously picking the things the traits in the photo that you like and therefore like quickly picking them because when you're

scrolling through instagram very rarely are you zooming all the way in are you like yeah and and it's cool too because like people were saying make sure you tell people to turn off true tone make sure they're looking at it on a color accurate to spray you're you're not when you're on your phone true tone's probably on night mode might be on past 10 like you're looking at these pictures how you would look at them 95 of the time that was the goal yeah just glanceable photos on the internet so with all these 16 phones uh there are various ways that i could determine a winner but also way more interesting things that we could determine so i want to get through all of them yeah first of all the winner i determined the winner by the one with the highest average elo rating across all three categories so a high elo rating for standard and for low light

and for portrait highest average that winner was the pixel 6a it won the entire test against all their flagships against the pixel 7, its bigger brother, but also against the Huawei Mate 50 Pro, the iPhone 14 Pro, against the Sony Xperia 1 IV, the Galaxy S22 Ultra, the Vivo X80 Pro Plus that we used. There are a lot of heavy hitters in here. And the 6A, which is incredible, because do you remember what won

the blind smartphone camera test last year i do the pixel 5a so this is not a fluke now we have millions of votes people really like the photos across the board out of the 6a yeah i do also want to give honorable mention and some people might consider this the winner but the reason we didn't go with total overall winning votes was because through when we were looking at our votes because standard was the first category and potentially because it might be people's favorite categories but we don't know that it got about three times as many votes versus low light and portrait so i think it was like 12 million votes in standard 4 million million low light, 4 million portrait.

Total amount of wins, the Oppo Find X5 won. Yes. If you consider yourself somebody, and I don't think this is an unreasonable thing to say, somebody who finds just regular standard pictures way more important than portrait mode and low light mode, the Oppo Find X5 may be the winner of this. So the Oppo Find X5 Pro had the winner of this so the oppo find x5 pro had the strongest elo in standard photos yes and it had a solid hundred thousand more votes than second place pixel 7

and third place pixel 6a so if you just care about standard photos oppo find x5 pro was up there but guess what that was second to last in portrait mode yeah i don't know what happened real far down in portrait mode so the pixels were very consistent and the oppo had the strongest elo the biggest win though was in portrait mode the pixel 7 pro demolished yeah it was by far the strongest elo um it had it had way more wins than second place which was the pixel 6a again um sneaky third place realme 10 pro plus in portrait mode realme 10 pro plus might be the dark horse winner of this whole thing because while it didn't place top oh no it did place top three there i guess but like it didn't it was probably like sixth overall in total votes or something but when you look at uh like we did a little math of votes per dollar

overall and while pixel 6a1 real me was right there and both of them in terms of how many times they won for how much they cost were just far far ahead of everything else which everything else was flagship so like yeah the fact that so many people blindly voted and really found the real me 10 pro plus photos universally better than iphone photos across the board is really interesting um and yeah as far as how many dollars you're spending on these phones it's a much less expensive phone than most of the others yeah and and it's the cheapest phone we used in this entire test i think so there is the nothing phone which did terribly in most of these categories um which is still a little more expensive but there were a couple other like mid-range budget options but

the real me did fantastic i was not expecting that my biggest surprises i'm gonna go with my biggest surprises across the board okay number one was that the sony xperia 1 mark 4 in auto mode just couldn't pull any wins it just got it just lost to everything um number two is that the iphone 14 pro is kind of middle of the pack. It was fine. Nobody really, it didn't come at the top. I think it was sixth, tenth, and fifth in the three different categories. So it didn't really lose at all or win at all.

Yeah, its low light was okay. So that was interesting. And another fun one, which is the Vivo X80 Pro Plus just dominated low light, but the biggest overall individual matchup dominance right because they all people saw all kinds of matchups a versus b c versus f the biggest overall matchup dominance the biggest dunk i would say the biggest dunk was the pixel 7 pro over the sony xperia mark 4 in portrait mode in which it was a 98 it was rough in favor of the pixel um only 1500 people out of like several tens of thousands voted for the sony that that was an accident and i don't know what they saw in that sony photo because it wasn't close i do want to say to be like we the reason

you said sony in auto mode is because sony clearly can take some crazy pictures in manual mode and that seems to be more what it's for like more quote-unquote pro mobile photography exactly we did force bokeh mode which they called they don't call it portrait mode I think it would have taken and I actually think for a lot of these phones a regular photo in the correct distance tapping on a face would probably give a better depth of feel and roll off than these portrait modes yeah I think we're getting closer and closer to just seeing portrait mode kind of fade away because interesting i think most of these phones would take a better quote portrait picture in standard mode it's funny portrait mode kind of feels like a like a cultural feature 100 like it sort of comes up and goes away

in the in the zeitgeist like people just use portrait mode a lot sometimes and then it just kind of goes away for a while and i know i feel like i know people who will like go on a hike with their friends and they'll just flip to portrait mode and take everything in portrait mode i don't know it's just a thing that just happens sometimes that i've noticed um but yeah you know you can you can wait that super low and just like take that out of the test completely and just look at the other results so but we have all the numbers and there's just so many so much so much data i think my we all know aces phones have done pretty well in these tests before and they did all right here i think the zen phone may have been third in portrait no no no no in portrait zen phone was like fourth it is seventh uh the zen phone was sixth in low

light okay and the zenone was fourth in standard okay it might have been third overall oh i think it was third overall in average elo average elo it is right behind the pixels in third place the yeah zenfone and rog phone 6 uh portrait cutout i thought was immaculate it was like i think it was right there with the S22 Ultra. The problem one is the S22 Ultra blurred the background more, which made, while the cutout was perfect, you know how in Photoshop,

if you perfectly nail a cutout, but if it's on a very contrasted background, it feels like a sticker on like a- Yeah, if you feather the edge in the wrong direction, it looks like it's like melting a little bit. It just feels like it's cut out artificially, whereas the Zenfone just rolled off the background a little less intense and felt more blended in

like a real photo, where the S22 Ultra, it also didn't nail exposure and stuff, so it had a good cutout, but it felt fake and just wasn't a great picture. But the Zenfone nailed it. It's one of the best cutouts i've ever seen and your hair is not easy to cut out yeah always had a challenge with my hair and with the the not a flamethrower that i'm holding yeah the iphone sc i also want to point out does not have night mode and it is the only phone on our list that does not have night mode and we'll chalk

that up to apple's fault and that it still should be in there because it's going against phones that are cheaper than it in some cases and have night mode. And ones that did well in night mode too. Yeah, so it got dominated in the low light because it doesn't have night mode, but it does have a nice sensor with OIS, with the wide aperture, with the new processor.

Why doesn't it have night mode? There's no reason, yeah. So it just got crushed in that, unfortunately. Yeah, those are kind of the highlights i feel like we we now know a lot more about the unbiased nature of people voting on cameras there's there's many more observations in the full video which is like if you put all of the the the pictures in a row next to each other in order from least votes to most votes remember what we said about you know brighter photo typically yes i love this you would expect to see like a gradient of

like dark to light what we actually found was the best photos were a correct exposure at the top yeah the worst photos were the darkest ones on the other side and then in the middle were the too bright photos so you can actually be too bright and lose out to the correct exposure and that happened in pretty much all the categories in every single category really interesting yeah it's not an absolute which is like the previous brackets that we've done a lot of people are just like the brightest and most saturated is going to win and it's like in in the case of a good photo or even in the case of a bad photo yes but like but you can't just crank it all you can overdo it

and this really showed if you are going if you're a camera company out there maybe a low budget one you're gonna have a crappy camera go bright and go saturated it's a good way to not come in last place a bad camera it looks nicer when it's brighter yeah the moto edge is a good example of if it's dark it will just lose yeah it's just gonna lose all of its matchups and so like the the super bright like samsung i think tends now to be a little bit overexposed more often yeah i think i noticed that in the review but like it's very clear now when you see them in that lineup it's like it gets to the brightest ones and then it's the samsung and then it's the good exposures over the samsung so samsung did brighten everything but it didn't win because of it so that

was interesting to note um yeah the the night mode had some of the craziest photos okay i want to like and kind of go on that um just something i saw a lot of comments and i have a couple just like pieces of feedback that i saw that i just want to talk about because the reason we made this test this year is because of feedback we got in previous years and it just finally came to the like like we want to do this different as we're talking about it zach actually reached out to us early this year and we started talking with him and he had a really he's pretty much one of the people who was like i think you could do this in a cooler way in a more scientific way and again shout out to him but let's just go over some of the feedback

and the first one is i think people thought some of the pictures we took were very easy but we were very specific on photos we took and they are hot every single one of these pictures is a hard picture to take okay yeah i'll go over that so every picture we take for these tests intentionally has a bunch of different variables because we don't want one of them to win just because it does one thing exactly right so if i just take a picture of me in front of a blank white wall what you will learn is which one takes a picture of me the best yeah and you can vote on that and that's cool but what if the subjects you take pictures of don't all look like me

so and then you add what about if dynamic range was really bad on one of these phones you would never know that if it's just me in front of a blank white wall. So the bottom line was add as many, not variables, but as many facets for it to do well or poorly as possible so that when people vote, they can just vote on whichever one they instinctively think is better without thinking too hard. So it's me and Adam in front of a window with a deep background, depth of field, with lights overhead. So you're getting dynamic range, multiple skin tones, sharpness of a subject, overall focal length, drop off of like how shallow the depth of field is with a normal photo. All of this stuff in one picture. I had to change my shirt, so we had different colors. We had a blue shirt on and I had a red shirt.

Exactly. Yours is a knitted sweater. And like one thing we really noticed is when uh phones weren't doing great with exposure one of the problems was the blacks and the the uh collar of your sweater had a lot of stitch marks and in good exposed ones you could see every single line and if you look down the list it just looked like a straight black collar the the bottom three or four you could not see any detail on the black collar. Yeah, that was a specific note that we'd noticed because of the sweater I was wearing.

But then also you'd see that more in the hair and then you'd see that the windows look different. It all kind of tied together. So that's all very intentional. Very, very, yeah. The low light photo. Again, you can take a low light photo anywhere. What we did this time was a softly subject lit

low light photo in front of a nighttime nightscape that is far away so what you have now is you have me which is just like can i get the subject in focus almost all of them did they did a pretty good job i would argue like half of them missed you in focus a couple of them i think only one of them truly missed focus which was a samsung but a lot of them slightly missed or would have just a little bit of motion okay i guess that's what i was talking about kind of looks the same feels like you missed it yeah so that was number one which is like these are all going to be longer exposures and you hit that button and that's that's one of the variables is how well can they isolate hand movement it'll have a subject in focus it's gonna have to do it's gonna have to make a

decision about exposure so does it want that dark dark background to be bright or not and if it did you would see it brighten everything in the foreground too it would brighten the floor that was right behind me so it had to make an exposure decision and then it had to make like a it's just a depth of field thing which is like some of them have a bigger sensor and the the skyline behind me and the moon right above my head would either be a little bit more blurred or a little bit more flared or something like that so all this stuff was noticeable in just that one low light photo yeah and then lastly the portrait mode photo this is again a tough one because there are a lot of variables with portrait mode photos from the focal length they decide to use 1x 1.5x 2x 3x um to the amount

that they blur the background to how good the cutouts are to how good the rest of the photo is so we again i had that sweater on yep and you had me as a subject you also have me with a wall on one side with a close-up background and the rest of the studio on the other side with a faraway background so you can sort of judge the fall off of the amount of blur you also have me holding an object that is not a human so you have the face cut out with the hair but you also have a non-human cut out with not a flamethrower and the flamethrower had a like hole in it as well so you can see if it decided to like yeah include exactly include the piece that is clearly the wall that should be blurred but is not because yeah it might think it's part of the they all did different levels of good at that so there's a lot of data other than just like me

and how well you cut me out so we we did a lot of thinking about like how to do all of these tests with one photo because what we didn't want to do is have you do three portrait mode tests yeah and three low light tests exactly that was our and we didn't want to be like we know every single person is going to vote because the cutout is good in this or we know everyone's going to vote because like the skin tones in this are good you like photos for different reasons and that's part of what we tried to figure out when we saw all of these because when we were looking at portrait mode it was like all right cutouts seem to be super important here and like the the focal length of things didn't seem like that much of an issue or and just we can look through that and then see like oh the top three things had this in common and the bottom three things had this in common and then yeah we can kind of that's how you learn

why people yeah from the patterns yeah so yeah i would say check out the video it has all of the summarized thoughts and organized versions of these conversations as we get into the weeds i also want to give another shout out to zach who like built this system that helped us like serve these different matchups to you it turned out that across the board it did a really good job of evenly showing you a random series of matchups the total votes for the phones across the board are all pretty much 2.7 million. The absolute minimum that any phone got was 2,737,148 votes. And the absolute maximum that any phone got was 2,742,474 votes.

Yeah. That was something I saw a couple people worried that I think people were taking the personal test and seeing like, phone B got 17 chances, and then like one of the other phones only got six. And they thought, well, B had more chances to get wins. And maybe in your personalized results, like there might be a little more if you didn't vote that many times, it's a little less quote-unquote scientific but when it comes to the full data set that we got that was within 5 000 votes and the average was 2.7 million so like yeah crazy crazy crazy close in terms of

evenness of votes across it i don't think any phone got an unfair advantage at all yeah so we got really accurate elo scores from that which is sweet so uh shout out to the pixel 6a people's choice yeah winner for i'm gonna keep saying oppo find x5 also did fantastically it did and pixel 7 yeah and the shout out to the roomie 10 pro plus bang for the buck winner yeah alongside the pixel 6a good stuff if people still want to take the test also we're going to leave this site up for personalized results we're not collecting data anymore because it's a lot of data for people who are wondering why we compressed in the first four hours it was two terabytes of bandwidth um just for people voting so like i mean that's a lot of smarts but also a lot of data so yeah that's why we can but you can still get your personalized results i do think we're

going to make a switch so it won't show letters anymore you can just straight up see so you don't have to reference the video but take the test take the test it's a lot of fun um and like the test doesn't mean i like take it with a grain of salt look at it look down the list your number four on the list could still be the perfect phone for you that doesn't yeah use it as a reference. It's great. These are always fun. There's more things to a smartphone than a camera, but it is always fun. You will go into this with an expectation of what you think will win, and you will very

likely be surprised by where that expectation shows up on the list. The best part about this every year is finding people who absolutely hate a company and realizing that that's their winner. So that's always a fun part. I can't wait. As of recording this, we haven't launched the video yet. It will be out by that time. So I can't wait to read the comments and everything. It's going to be great. One of my favorite videos of the year, every year. Fun time.

Well, we've talked for a long time, so we should probably wrap this up. But I think we do have some trivia questions to answer before we do that. So let's do that. All right. Trivia that doesn't matter. Yeah. do have some trivia questions yeah before we do that so let's do that all right trivia that doesn't matter so facebook was launched in 2004 twitter debuted in july 2006 but in 2011 which celebrity jointly bought myspace that is the question do you know the answer and it's not tom can we ask who they jointly bought it with uh you can it's not gonna help doesn't matter angie you can write whatever you want i still want to win no one's gonna judge you all right ready i mean they might and flip what'd you guys write i wrote matt david i wrote justin timberlake wow you knew that yeah it became like a music site yeah like my i should have known the music thing i still probably wouldn't would not have guessed they pivoted super hard all right next question bring it back

new twitter myspace new twitter let's go justin timberlake buy twitter please oh god no okay when did google keep launch okay i've been using google keep sense of launch because i've been a tasks user but i needed a separate place for my notes i was gonna say but dude yeah how many different google task apps have you used and can you make you write your answer already yeah okay i'm gonna think out loud though okay i was using it at the end of college for sure so i was 2015 at least so it's gotta be before 2015 now i'm trying to picture i think it was on like a google play edition htc when i was first in that apartment which was like 2012 i think what 2012 like uh i forget yeah because i was using samsung for so long and i think i was using oh actually i

was using the note and i was my notes app was just wherever it would go when you just scribbled it on the front screen. S Notes. Samsung. Yeah. So I was using Samsung Notes for a while, so I have no real reference to this. That was probably 20, I don't know. And I don't even know when I went to a Pixel if it had Keep or Notes or both. Pixel has it.

Pixel definitely had Keep. Yeah. Was there another one that it had at the same time did i not take notes notes alarms app set an alarm for remembering all right i'm gonna i'm sticking with my answer here what do you mostly do and keep right now um i have a couple pinned notes which is just like things i need to remember i have all my stock yardages for each of my clubs golf oh interesting so i have carry distances for everything from my lob wedge to my driver i have a lot of recipes and uh that's all my pinned ones are all it's basically pinned

for every different type of coffee gadget that i have so like my chemex recipe my v60 recipe my uh what notes app do you use besides keep or is that that's a lot i keep the notes on the cars reviewing as i'm driving the car oh i'll pull over and take a take a note on what i've noticed okay i'm always so mind blown by like how many people actually use keep because i find it horrible it's super basic it's i it's it is all temporary for me like there are probably 50 grocery list app like notes in there would that are all blank because i delete them as i pick the thing up at the store so it's just like costco oh yeah oh if you it used to be that if you asked google assistant to write something down on your shopping list yeah it would write it in google keep and then

they got rid of that but now they got rid of that. But now they got rid of that. I'm totally wrong on this answer. All right. My answer is 2012. I said 2016. Is it 13? 2013. I knew it. March 20th, 2013.

Okay. That was close. Yeah. I got the imaginary point for being closer. Closer. Either way, happy holiday to those of you listening. It's probably around the holidays, and I wish you could see Mac wearing his holiday sweater right now I'll put him up

thank you for an awesome year the podcast itself has grown tremendously the video podcast views have probably doubled which is awesome so seriously thank you all from the whole team here even audio is up like 10% so lots more people listening to Waveform. Keep sharing with your friends. We seriously appreciate everything, and I'm super

pumped about 2023. On that note, catch you guys in the next one, which is a long-form episode. See you later. Peace. Waveform is produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Roven. We're partnered with Vox Media Podcast Network, and our intro and outro music was created by Vane Sill.