Apple Raises Prices on Everything!

Summary

Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast — "Apple Raises Prices on Everything!"

Episode Date: July 3, 2026
Hosts: Marques Brownlee (MKBHD), Andrew Cunningham, Madison Skinner, Ellis Hamburger, Rufus Mulhaupt

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Episode Overview

This lively episode tackles Apple’s across-the-board hardware price hikes, hot takes on emerging tech like Samsung’s new foldable, PlayStation’s banishment of physical discs, and growing confusion about AI startups, all served with the typical Waveform banter. The crew breaks down the rationale and impact of Apple’s controversial price increases, discusses whether it’s a temporary move or the “new normal,” and detours into the ripple effects for other tech, gaming, and automotive companies. As always, plenty of mini-rants, trivia, and memorable quotes abound.

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Key Topics & Takeaways

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1. The Studio Is Heating Up! (and So Is Tech…)

[01:25]

• MKBHD reveals that the podcast was recorded under physically hot conditions because they turn off the AC for sound quality:

  “I don't think people realize…that we turn the air conditioner off in this studio every time we record…we do this for you.”
  (MKBHD, [02:07])

• Running joke about being “boiled frogs” in the studio as the temperature slowly rises—debunking the myth that frogs won’t notice slow temperature changes.

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2. Apple’s Massive Price Hikes: What Happened?

[06:00]

The Update

• Apple “quietly” raised prices across almost every hardware line except iPhones.
• Notable increases:
  • Macs: Up to $1,300 more on high-end Mac Studio models
  • iPad Air 11": From $599 to $749; Apple TV from $129 to $199 (nearly a 40% jump)
  • HomePod, HomePod Mini, Vision Pro, and others also got increases

Why Did Apple Do This?

• Official reasoning: RAM shortages and higher memory costs driven by the AI/datacenter boom
• But prices don’t always directly correlate with memory content—sometimes big increases on lower volume, sometimes subsidizing popular flagship products

  “Some products are higher volume and the price didn't go up as much. Some prices are lower volume, but the price went up more…some prices went up, I think more than they had to…”
  (MKBHD, [07:07])

Is This Just About Memory Costs?

• Not entirely—likely a “Tim Cook spreadsheet” balancing act between maintaining margins and optics.

Business & Consumer Impact

• Some increases (like Mac Studio Ultra) mostly affect business/creative professionals, who can “expense” these costs.
• The iPad Air’s jump, however, pushes a formerly affordable option into a much higher price bracket.

Memorable Quote:

“The Apple TV was $129…Now it's $199. Percentage wise, might be the highest increase…That's close to a 40% increase. That's pretty big.”
—Marques Brownlee ([11:29])

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3. Are Price Increases Temporary or Here to Stay?

[13:20]

Argument For Temporary:

• Apple language implies these hikes are due to an “unprecedented” memory shortage and are meant to be rolled back eventually.
• Analogy made to gas price volatility.

Argument For Permanent:

• U.S. consumers have long enjoyed lower tech prices vs. the rest of the world; that gap is narrowing.
• Inflation and the normalization of higher prices mean these are likely the new baseline.

“If [the shortage] lasts years, then by the time the crisis is over…that's just the way…now the Neo is 699. And that's just the new norm.”
—MKBHD ([18:03])

Precedent:

• Hosts struggle to name examples where hardware prices decreased after a spike.

iPhone Pricing?

• Consensus: iPhone base models likely won’t see drastic hikes (Apple wants to keep volume leaders attractive), but premium and future tech (like foldables) will command even higher sticker prices.

Memorable Moment:

“That folding iPhone when it launches later this year, not gonna be cheap. That thing was already gonna be like $2,100. Now it's gonna be like $2,600.”
—Rufus Mulhaupt ([19:24])

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4. Hardware Speculation & the Future of Macs

[23:02]; [24:44]

• Discussion about future MacBook Ultra pricing — possible $6,500+ base price, with fully specced versions predicted to break the $10,000 barrier.
• Apple rumored to skip M6 Pro/Max tiers, waiting for M7.
• General frustration (“Even when you name things easily, they're impossible to follow. This M Series chip is really hard to understand.” — Andrew, [25:04])
• Nostalgia for times when top-of-the-line Apple desktops cost $40,000, but excitement that performance keeps trickling down to more portable (and sometimes more affordable) options.

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5. Samsung’s Foldable Shift: Prepping for Apple’s Move?

[35:23]

• Samsung is hinting at a forthcoming “Galaxy Fold Wide” (passport aspect ratio) to preempt Apple’s rumored foldable.
• The move mirrors MacBook Air/“iPhone Air” market dynamics, with Samsung trying to undercut or at least meet Apple on form factor innovation.

“Samsung's in the middle of this year going to go, huh? Well, I bet we could do that too.”
—MKBHD ([37:06])

The catch:

• Early leaks suggest Samsung’s “wide” fold may be less premium—dual cameras, slightly worse specs—leaving the “ultra” (vertical fold) as the true flagship.
• Debate over whether users will get the choice of form factor or if price/feature segmentation will frustrate.

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6. PlayStation Ends Physical Discs: Welcome to “Digital Serfdom”

[48:24]

• Sony announces that from January 2028, new PlayStation games will be digital-only.
• Main driver: declining physical sales, better profits, and a supposed “green” benefit.
• Pushback from the crew and guests, lamenting loss of ownership, risks to preservation, and resale.
• Reference to retro gaming longevity vs. uncertain digital futures; shoutout to Video Game History Foundation and The Completionist’s efforts to digitally archive disappearing games.

Notable Quotes:

“Sony removed a ton of movies people had already bought from the PlayStation Store…People cannot watch those movies anymore even though they bought them…We are living in modern digital serfdom.”
—Rufus Mulhaupt ([50:06])

“I don't trust companies with preservation and availability…In the short term, reducing e-waste is nice, but I do support resale and fair competition.”
—Mariah ([51:12])

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7. Other Rapid-Fire Tech News

• Polestar EVs quitting U.S. due to new rules about Chinese software ([42:18])
  • Volvo remains unaffected; confusion reigns.
• WhatsApp introduces usernames ([44:49])
  • Some frustration with username squatting, but also a desire to move beyond phone number identities.
• Accessory Spotlight: dbrand’s Cube for the Steam Machine is canceled over Valve IP violations ([55:21])
  • Demand for the canceled product signals strong Steam Machine (portable PC) interest.

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8. AI Startups: Confusion & Gimmicks

[62:53]

• Crew debates the utility and business model for “Poke” (AI chatbot inside messaging apps, now with $200/mo concierge human escalation).
• Taste Labs mystery: “A data and infrastructure layer to give AI models and agents taste.”
  • Host skepticism: tastes are subjective; will "tasteful AI" just create new “AI slop”?
  • Reflection on design trends, like the pervasiveness of the “Chobani font,” and how cycles of taste come and go.

Memorable Quote:

“We're not ending AI slop, we're just making different. This is AI slop with a little garnish on top of it for a little while. And then the garnish gets all wilty.”
—Andrew Cunningham ([73:29])

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Notable Quotes, Moments, and Timestamps

| Time | Speaker | Quote or Moment | |-----------|-----------------|-------------------------------------------| | [02:07] | MKBHD | “We turn the air conditioner off in this studio every time we record…this is what we do for you.” | | [07:37] | Andrew | “The M3 Ultra Mac studio went from $4,000 to $5,300. $1,300 price increase.” | | [11:29] | MKBHD | “The Apple TV was one 29…now it's 199…close to a 40% increase." | | [13:20] | MKBHD | “The question I've seen the most chatter about...is are these permanent or temporary price increases?" | | [18:03] | MKBHD | “If this lasts years, then by the time the crisis is over, that's just the new norm." | | [19:24] | Rufus | “That folding iPhone…gonna be like 2,600.” | | [22:50] | Ellis | “I just bought an M5 Max full spec...I hope it comes back down, but it won't.” | | [25:04] | Andrew | “This M Series chip is really hard to understand.” | | [31:02] | Madison | (Trivia) "How much does a maxed out 16" MacBook Pro cost?" | | [48:24] | Andrew | “Sony just announced…they will stop the production of physical discs for new PlayStation games.” | | [50:06] | Rufus | “People cannot watch those movies anymore even though they bought them…We are living in modern digital serfdom.” | | [51:12] | Mariah | “I don't trust companies with preservation and availability to games…suggest following [the Video Game History Foundation].” | | [71:50] | Andrew | “We're not ending AI slop, we're just making different. This is AI slop with a little garnish on top of it for a little while. And then the garnish gets all wilty.” |

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Trivia Segment Highlights

• Q: Price of a maxed-out 16" MacBook Pro?
  A: $10,149 ([78:22])
• Q: What Apple product has increased in price 2.5x since 2019?
  A: Apple TV Plus, from $4.99 to $12.99/month ([80:22])

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Final Thoughts & Tone

• The crew combines sharp industry insight with their signature irreverence—joking about Apple’s “Tim Cook spreadsheet,” mourning rising tech costs, and poking fun at AI company buzzwords.
• There’s a clear sense of nostalgia for times when gadgets felt more accessible and “ownership” was more tangible.
• Prediction: tech will continue to get pricier and more ephemeral, while companies chase hype cycles and consumers chase fleeting “best deals.”

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Quick Reference: Key Segments

• [06:00] — Apple’s price hikes explained
• [13:20] — Are increases temporary?
• [19:24] — Apple foldables & iPhone pricing
• [35:23] — Samsung’s new foldable strategy
• [48:24] — PlayStation ditches physical discs
• [62:53] — AI startups and “taste” confusion
• [76:33] — Trivia wrap-up

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For the tech curious who skipped the episode:
Apple’s charging more almost everywhere and tech is getting more expensive; software and subscription “ownership” is fraught; and companies pitching “tasteful AI” may just be peddling new flavors of the same old “AI slop.”

Transcript

[Marques Brownlee]

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[Rufus Mulhaupt]

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[Marques Brownlee]

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[Rufus Mulhaupt]

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[Marques Brownlee]

With the grill fired up and your backyard set to perfection, you'll be able

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

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[Marques Brownlee]

Here we go.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Stop.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Everyone's computers could run protocol to help seed these games.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Unplug his bike.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yo, what's up people of the Internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast.

[Madison Skinner]

We're your hosts.

[Ellis Hamburger]

I'm Marques.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yo, what is up people of the Internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques.

[Andrew Cunningham]

And I'm Andrew.

[Marques Brownlee]

And that's the chair where David would be sitting if the bridge. If the bridge wasn't closed. So he is on the way and he'll be here soon. And at some point video users will just see him appear in his seat and I guess audio users will hear him.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yes, we're we're at a tricky day where you have a game tonight so you have to leave early. And also it is going to be one of the hottest days of the year. So we decided to record a little early. Yeah, yeah, that got screwed up with traffic. And the goal of today's podcast is to not melt by the end because the AC is off.

[Marques Brownlee]

I don't think people realize, or maybe we said it, but maybe they've forgotten that we turn the air conditioner off in this studio every time we record. Because, you know, for you, for your ears, we want it to sound good and our mics, you know, no background noise, all that fun stuff. But that also means that if it's 103 degrees outside, like it's gonna be for the next three days, that means that the temperature of this room slowly goes up as we record. And there's a good chance that in two hours, it will be way different. In here, we turn the AC on before we come in so that it's cool. But, you know, we do this for you. This is what we do for you.

[Madison Skinner]

Isn't there a saying like slow boil the frog or something like that?

[Marques Brownlee]

We're just the frogs or the frogs. The frogs.

[Madison Skinner]

Well.

[Marques Brownlee]

But we still notice it get hotter. The thing is, the frog. The frog, if you change the temperature slow enough, doesn't notice that it's getting hot. Have you guys not heard this?

[Andrew Cunningham]

No.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Really?

[Madison Skinner]

Yeah. I thought it was like a thing like you. You slowly.

[Marques Brownlee]

Like a frog. So a frog, I guess, is not particularly sensitive to temperature changes. If it's slow enough so you can slowly increase the temperature of the water, and the frog will not get out of the water until you're literally boiling it.

[Andrew Cunningham]

The chef said, because he didn't. You felt bad that you were boiling frog.

[Madison Skinner]

I just googled it, and it is a myth. And biologists have confirmed that they can escape the water if it gets uncomfortably hot.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay, that's good. That's really good to hear, but for

[Madison Skinner]

anyone that was thinking about boiling frogs,

[Marques Brownlee]

well, it's still a common saying. Still a common saying. Definitely a myth. That's good that it's a myth.

[Andrew Cunningham]

The difference is we can't stop recording this podcast, so we will boil and cannot get out.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, for sure. Okay. In today's episode, we will have Apple's increased prices across the board. I know they tried to sneak that out on a Thursday, but joke's on you guys. We record every week, so we're talking about it this time. But there's also a first look at the new Galaxy Fold Wide polestar leaving the US and PlayStation killing physical disks. And we'll wrap it all up with some AI companies that we don't really understand.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yeah, very confused.

[Marques Brownlee]

But first, did they even test this? Yes, they did. Yes, they did. It was funny. We had a sort of a mini tech support this morning with Google Docs, which is how we organize all of our podcast docs and notes and stuff. And I don't know if you've used a Google product in the last couple of months. You've probably seen a lot of Gemini logos everywhere, like, maybe too Many. And one of them was really annoying at the bottom of Google Docs. And I don't know if you've been annoyed by that bottom button for Gemini.

[Andrew Cunningham]

So the floating button that covers up maybe the last three lines of all your documents, and then when you go and try and select something there, it widens into this big search bar.

[Madison Skinner]

Essentially describe any changes you want to make.

[Marques Brownlee]

Looks like you're trying to write a document on some clippy. So if you want to get rid of it, you can. There's a Gemini button at the top of Google Docs and you go down to bottom bar preferences and you can turn it off, which is. I think they added that probably at some point because they did test it and realized you should be able to turn that off.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yeah, I mean, I've hated it for a while and I lowkey didn't notice the Gemini menu bar thing. And then I saw Hank Green tweet about it yesterday and I was like, I do really hate this.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cunningham]

And then Marquez this morning went, oh, look, you can turn it off. And we both collectively turned it off.

[Marques Brownlee]

There's still a Gemini button in the top right corner. There's still Gemini things all over the rest of your Google products. But that one, you can make it go away.

[Andrew Cunningham]

There is still. When you click the image button, the first menu option is still generate an image new instead of upload from computer. And I still click it every single time I try and put a photo in our pod outline. And it drives me insane.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cunningham]

So very, very sad. But I'm sure that bottom thing, plenty of people won't turn it off and they'll get plenty of fake clicks to make it seem like people are using it. But for all you listeners out there, if you didn't want it and you didn't notice that, you can turn it off.

[Marques Brownlee]

Now you know.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Now you know.

[Marques Brownlee]

All right, let's get into Google price hikes. Sorry, Apple. Apple price hikes.

[Andrew Cunningham]

What do you know that we don't.

[Marques Brownlee]

Google just has software. Yeah, Apple price hikes. So last week, at some point during Thursday, Apple, which they'd warned us about this, but they just went through the Apple Store, went down briefly and then it came back up and there were a bunch of new prices for basically all of their products. Almost every single hardware product that they sell.

[Madison Skinner]

Is this like the top three worst Apple store went down scenarios?

[Andrew Cunningham]

The tweets were so funny. It was like, Apple store's down. What are they cooking? What's coming next? And then there's just like Tweets right above it, like, price, store hikes. All the different changes.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's back. Yeah, the store comes back live. And base prices, upgrade prices. Tons of prices for all the different products that they sell have gone up. IPhone prices, notably, are unchanged. That was one thing that people were thinking would go up. But the things that did go up are Macs, iPads, Apple TVs, HomePods, Vision Pros. Across the board, prices are all higher. Now, I looked at these price increases and they're kind of interesting. They're kind of spread out across the board. Some of them I mentioned on Twitter, some of them are higher than I expected them to be. Some of them are lower than I expected them to be. We know that the price increases are because of the RAM shortages and just how expensive it is to put memory in anything these days. And some of these products do have a lot of memory and some of them don't. But that does not seem to directly correlate with how high the price went up. It seems like more about, well, sort of an efficient balance, maybe. This is a Tim Cook thing of. Some products are higher volume and the price didn't go up as much. Some prices are lower volume, but the price went up more. Some prices went up, I think more than they had to in order to make up for other prices not going up as much as they could.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Would you say it's the opposite of higher volume? Possibly went up higher because, like the, the one that sticks out here, right? Like, there's some big ones. There's the. The M3 Ultra Max studio went from $4,000 to 5,000. $5,300. So $1,300 price increase. We saw the M4 Mac studio. $2,000. $2,500. 500. That's crazy. Vision Pro only went up $200.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cunningham]

So that has to be because it's flopping so hard. No one's going to spend an extra thousand or obviously, like compute, Right? It's like a compute thing.

[Marques Brownlee]

There's a lot. I think there's a lot of factors. I think Vision Pro is already priced really high, and the 200 extra dollars might be fine to cover that. But also maybe if it was 4,000, that would look really bad. Like there's optics they have to consider, there's supply chain stuff they have to consider. Also. Yes, Vision Pro is not selling very much. So maybe the price increase there doesn't do much for them. Whereas something like the MacBook Neo, which they're doing a ton of volume of, goes from 599 starting to 699 starting. Which means it's no longer like the crazy flaming good deal that it just was. It's still a pretty good deal. But that 100 bucks per unit will probably go further than the 200 bucks per unit on the Vision Pro because the volume is totally different.

[Madison Skinner]

Also with things like the Mac studio like the M3, what was the Ultra that went up by 1300 bucks. I feel like people buying that, that's like a business expense. Like people doing that expect to be making their money back somehow by using the professional workflows with that. So they're willing to like Apple's. Like those people will spend a little more and not. It's fine.

[Andrew Cunningham]

And we, I think it was also pretty obvious we were going to see those specific price increases because Mac Mini in was it in March or May already got a price increase because we're seeing them sold out everywhere because of how the like compute to price ratio of what they are. Yep. So like this kind of, I mean I think this obviously all comes down to compute. Again, it kind of reminds me of how we were talking about Steam Machine where like if you price something and subsidize it to where you're giving such good bang for your buck of just pure power in this RAM shortage, you're probably going to eat it because people are going to take it and use it for machine learning and not necessarily all the things that you make money off of. So that's one of the things I was wondering here is like, does Apple see these price increases as like what is our best chance of people still buying the products but buying the products to use them as actual personal products, not AI machines? Because Apple clearly is making plenty of money on hardware, but they're also making a ton of money on subscriptions and software people physically using the products.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's a commentary I've seen a lot is Apple's already been making a ton of money. Why do they have to increase prices at all? Why can't they just eat this? But one, I think the memory shortages and the price increases we've seen are pretty unprecedented. I don't know what Apple supply costs are, but I feel like they, they just decided along with a lot of other companies we have to raise prices. But yeah, I don't know if they're thinking so much about what people are doing with the machines. I don't think they have much control over that. I think it's more just what do we think is a reasonably acceptable price increase for the target Demographic of the product. Some other ones that stood out to me were iPad Air goes from 599 to $749 for the 11 inch iPad Air. That's a different price bracket to me. It feels like $599 was like, all right, I can stomach this. This feels like I'm not gonna get an iPad Pro, but I could get this nice mid priced iPad air. Now 749 starting is quite a big difference there. That doesn't feel like a good deal anymore.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yeah, the iPad Air went up more than the MacBook Neo.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's 150 bucks extra there. Something like an Apple TV.

[Andrew Cunningham]

This is my favorite one.

[Marques Brownlee]

The Apple TV was one 29. They were selling that box. Now it's 199. That is a pretty, I think percentage wise might be the highest increase. That's close to like a 40% increase or something like that. That's pretty big. That's a totally different price bracket as well. HomePods though, you know, not a lot of people buying HomePods. HomePods are already expensive. The regular HomePod goes from 299 to 349 and the HomePod mini goes from 99 to 1 29. So some smaller, some bigger. Just kind of a lot across the board to consider. And I'm sure the supply chain meetings to decide all these new prices were super exciting. Or maybe it's just Tim Cook with a spreadsheet just walking around going, do this, do this, do this, do this, do this, this.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Why does the Apple TV need to go up at all?

[Andrew Cunningham]

I don't know. That was another question I'd need to go up at all.

[Ellis Hamburger]

It's for all the people that are using local AI on their Apple tv. Right.

[Marques Brownlee]

I think that's another thing that people noticed is a lot of these products that don't have very much RAM at all were going up in price when they feel like they didn't have to. Which I agree. But then a lot of the products that did have a ton of RAM were not going up as much as they feel like they could have. So I think some of these price increases are literally to subsidize other lack of price increases, if that makes any sense.

[Andrew Cunningham]

I also want to note that saying everything we've said so far does not mean they had to make price changes. Does not mean that the price changes are clearly not for Apple to make more money. We all agree with that. There's just like the reasons why they're making more money. There's still a trillion.

[Marques Brownlee]

They're going to make tons of money,

[Andrew Cunningham]

wants to make as much money as possible. So obviously that's why they did it. This is, I think it's like, it's more. It's interesting to see what their reasonings were for things and how they were because this is just like such a broad or all over the place in terms of where they increase prices. I still. Yeah, so the number one, $70 is crazy.

[Marques Brownlee]

That is a big one percentage wise. The question I've seen the most chatter about on social media is are these permanent or temporary price increases? And I have my thoughts. I think I actually believe that they are temporary. But I do see valid on both sides. I see both sides of this argument. I think I'll explain why I think they're temporary. I think a lot of the conversation and we haven't gotten very many quotes from Apple but a lot of the talk about these memory price increases has been like this is unprecedented. We've literally never seen anything like this before. Our hand has been forced. This is like a spike in pricing. This is not how we want to continue to sell our products. We want to get back to eventually regular pricing someday. Which all to me kind of implies like we are rising prices here as long as this memory shortage AI data center boom is happening and then once it's finally slowed, then we would love to go back down to regular prices, which is a good way to market as well. But I think the other thing people are saying a lot of is yeah, these are greedy tech companies. Of course they're gonna leave the prices,

[Andrew Cunningham]

not just tech as there's plenty of greedy companies all over the place. That's just how it goes.

[Marques Brownlee]

They're making tons of money and if they aren't like negatively impacted too much by raising the prices, why raise them? Why lower them back down again? And I see both sides of it. I kind of see it as like gas prices. It's very closely tied to supply and demand and if demand goes too far down, they can't leave the prices this high, especially if other competitors start lowering prices again. So I would, I would like to be right and say that they will bring prices down at some point months slash years into the future. But who knows?

[Andrew Cunningham]

History probably doesn't seem to be on that side. I don't, I don't know a lot of examples of things going up and coming back down when they see they're still selling.

[Marques Brownlee]

So there's a couple interesting examples there. And I used the price of gas as an Example because like gas did spike and then it has started coming down, but it is more of a commodity. But we've seen some products once in a while, like the Quest go down in price again. We've seen occasionally a smartphone model will go down in price again. When did. Sorry, Quest didn't go up. Quest didn't until it did. But I'm talking about older devices. Older devices. I'm trying to think of like phones that dropped in price by like 50 to $100. Wasn't there? Well, I guess the, the iPhone doubled in storage but didn't go up in price. So like things happen sometimes where you're like, oh, I could see them increasing the price but then they don't. So I don't know. There's not that many precedents for price spike and then price drop again. I haven't really seen it.

[Andrew Cunningham]

I think my most optimistic assumption is me. I don't think any of these prices change on these specific items. I think maybe when new versions of them come out, we could either see, you know, depending on the global economics of what compute like pricing is, they go back to their normal or we see them doing the game of like, you know, now the, the MacNeo 2 starts at 699, but starts at a higher storage or whatever. Like, and that's our, like this is higher. It's still a higher base barrier of entry, but we have more compute in it or like it's a more powerful machine, therefore it's worth that price increase when probably really could have went back down to the other one. I don't know. That's like the, the capitalist way of going back but not really going back.

[Madison Skinner]

I don't see this going down at all.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

And you still get in half an hour.

[Marques Brownlee]

Welcome.

[Andrew Cunningham]

It's definitely just New Jersey and not New York City.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, it's not, it's not like a World cup or anything.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yeah, definitely never traffic in New York City.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Well, hey, at least the New York City traffic is generally predictably bad. Well, Jersey is like, are you in hell or are you in hell? Plus. Plus.

[Madison Skinner]

Yeah, I was going to say I don't think that these prices are. We're talking about Apple prices, by the way.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Okay.

[Madison Skinner]

Prices going up for context.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Yep, yep.

[Madison Skinner]

I don't think they're going back down just because. Well, one, if it is temporary, it's temporary for a while. Like it's going to be a minute because of how everything is right now. It's not like temporary for another cut, like another month or two. This is like it's looking like a year or two more.

[Andrew Cunningham]

So like cycles.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Yeah.

[Madison Skinner]

Like it's going to be a while. And then on top of that, everywhere else in the world, technology is fairly expensive. The United States has been pretty, pretty hidden from those costs for a long time. And I think that barrier is kind of coming down now.

[Marques Brownlee]

I also think probably one of the best arguments that prices will stay and only continue to go up is just inflationary. If this lasts years, then by the time the crisis, or whatever you want to call it, is over. That's just the way. That's just the new norm, I guess is the phrase people keep using. The prices of everything have, have gone up and now the Neo is 699. And that's just the way it is. Crazy.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

We made that video like a couple of months ago and it's already completely different.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, that was the. Yeah, the sentiment is like, remember that three or four months when Apple had several of the best priced pieces of tech in the world? That was fun.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I felt bad for Quinn at Snazzy Labs because he just made a video a month ago about how like the whole premise of Apple devices being more expensive than their competitors is just completely gone now.

[Marques Brownlee]

It was, it was. He was correct briefly for a moment in time. And now here we are for a

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

beautiful moment in time.

[Madison Skinner]

Yeah, there was a long time when Apple things were just regularly priced and now they're going back to being expensive.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah, some of these MacBooks, oh my God, they added like 1,200, $1400 to the pricing. It's a lot.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, it's a lot. And memory increases. So we'll keep an eye on it. Obviously other companies are probably going to be increasing prices of tech as well. This also makes me think that, that that folding iPhone when it launches later this year, gonna be cheap.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Not gonna be cheap. That thing was already gonna be like 2100. Now it's gonna be like 26 or something.

[Marques Brownlee]

We can probably rewind and find an old podcast episode where we were debating if it was over under 2000. I think it's definitely over 2000.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Oh, it's 100% over 2000.

[Madison Skinner]

Okay, question for you guys then. And David, this is perfect. Cause you just got here so you need no other context.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Okay.

[Madison Skinner]

Do you think these price increases are gonna hit iPhone? Will it be the same price as last year's iPhone or will they all be 150?

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

They could do the little magic that they do where they just get rid of the bottom tier, you know?

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yeah. Pretty much what I said. Like the new version of things are going to be like the more expensive price but a little higher in power. So that will be their excuse when.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Really? Yeah. What's kind of for iPhone? Well, it's kind of hard for iPhone. They already cut the lower storage tiers from the iPhone. Right. Because that was your whole thing was that Google was still offering.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yeah.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Low storage phones and Apple wasn't.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Well, it was that they. Their lower tiers got better. Instead of cutting, Google cut their lower tier.

[Marques Brownlee]

But now. Well, the iPhone. The iPhone 17 had doubled the base storage to 128 and didn't go up in price.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

So they got rid of the lower storage tier and they kept the price the same, which is good.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yeah, I guess when I think of it, I think of the price tier. When I think of lower tier, I think the lower price tier. So in my eyes, Google just upgraded the lowest or sorry, Apple upgraded the lowest tier where Google got rid of the lowest tier, which then made the lowest tier more. More expensive.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Right, right.

[Marques Brownlee]

I tend to think this kind of goes along with the rest of the price increases, which are sort of all across the board. I think Apple realizes they can't increase the price of certain things by too much. And I think the iPhone is one of the things that they know they don't want to have dramatic price increases on. So I think they're willing to do bigger price increases on other things to keep the iPhone competitively priced. I still think that ultra. That folding one is going to be expensive, but I think the base iPhone 18 and 18 plus, for example, will probably not be $100 more expensive.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah, it's hard because they're already at 256 gigs for the base tier.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay, 2:56.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

They moved it to 256.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. I hope I don't eat my words.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

They can't cut that and only offer a 512 gigabyte iPhone.

[Madison Skinner]

So you think next iPhone will still be 799? The iPhone 18?

[Marques Brownlee]

I don't know if it'll be 799, but I don't think it'll be 999. I don't think it'll be dramatic. Huge increase.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I can see 849.

[Andrew Cunningham]

I don't think any subsidizing any of these things on this list will make up for what they would lose in the iPhones on keeping it the same price. They just sell way too many iPhones. The $70 Apple TV change isn't going to cover that's.

[Ellis Hamburger]

True.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

The things that they should really be pushing the price on are the things that like businesses and enterprise use like the Mac Studio and.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Which they did.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah, that's what they very much did. But even the MacBook Pro, I mean regular people still buy MacBook Pros and they still jack the price a lot. So I feel like the cheaper things like the Neo and the MacBook Air, they should be trying to keep as low as possible. Obviously the Neo, they had to try to be really careful with that.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

But yeah, it's interesting to even see a HomePod mini price increase just because there's a little bit of RAM in there.

[Marques Brownlee]

A little bit.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

And do something. A little bit of RAM.

[Ellis Hamburger]

I, I just bought an M5 Max full spec 1288 terabyte about two months ago.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Oh my God.

[Ellis Hamburger]

That would have been. And, and I was saying, I was saying I don't think I'm gonna be able to get this computer in a year. And you know what, it's fair. I hope I can. I hope it comes back down, but it won't.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah, they're supposed to release the MacBook Ultra at the end of the year. And I was like, I'm just gonna hold out for the Ultra because it's gonna be so different, you know, it's gonna have a better screen. All this stuff now I'm like, that's

[Marques Brownlee]

gonna be a Saturday.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

That might be a seven to eight thousand dollar baseline computer base, you think? I mean six.

[Marques Brownlee]

I think is. Yeah, six. Six something base. Yeah.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah. But for any upgrades it's gonna be. Yeah, that's expensive. Yeah. That laptop, if you give it some ram, is probably gonna be over 10k. It's gonna be insane.

[Marques Brownlee]

I've. So if you want to max out a MacBook Pro now. It's getting up there. Yeah, it's getting up there now. But yeah, this is, you know, new screen, new design, all this new stuff could be pretty, pretty spicy.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah. And that, that kind of feeds into the, the whole rumor that they're basically going to release the MacBook Ultra with an M5 Ultra chip. Right.

[Marques Brownlee]

Or an Ultra chip.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Was it that or Was it the M6?

[Madison Skinner]

I think it was the M6.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

M6 because I'm trying to remember what it was.

[Marques Brownlee]

I think the rumor I. So I think the rumor I've seen now is they're going to have an M6 and then skip all the higher tier versions of M6 and then M7, every version again.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

So the MacBook Ultra will come out

[Marques Brownlee]

next year now with M7.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

With M7.

[Marques Brownlee]

Correct.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

That could make sense. So maybe the reason I whiteboard out, maybe one of the reasons they're doing that is because they are hoping that within the next year, year and a half, the RAM crisis kind of peters out a little bit. And that way they don't charge $10,000 for a MacBook Ultra. Like, they might scare the market a lot if they released a MacBook Ultra starting at $6,500. Interesting.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Madison Skinner]

The base MacBook Ultra is going to be 6,500.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I mean, it could be.

[Andrew Cunningham]

It's gotta be high.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's gotta be up there.

[Andrew Cunningham]

It in itself is basically saying, like, let's start towards the top of a MacBook Pro.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah, right.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Like start. Right. I think the base version is going to be really powerful.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Also.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. I'm looking at a 9 to 5 Mac article and there's a couple people sourcing this, but basically from Bloomberg saying Apple will skip M6 Pro and M6 Max. It'll just be the base M6. So the stuff that gets the base chip can get M6. And then they'll start over with M7 by doing the whole lineup again. M7 Pro, Max, Ultra, all that stuff.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

It's crazy.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Even when you name things easily, they're impossible to follow. This M Series chip is really hard to understand.

[Marques Brownlee]

I've been waiting for a new Ultra chip in a Mac for so long. They stopped at M3 Ultra in the Mac Pro and the Mac studio. But then M4 happened. No ultra, M5 happened. No ultra. M6 is going to happen. No Ultra.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

So I'm going to be waiting till M7 Ultra for a new Ultra chip. That's crazy.

[Andrew Cunningham]

That's why it's funny seeing the M3 Ultra price increase being so much more than the M4 because of how confusing that is.

[Marques Brownlee]

Maybe they'll do an M5 Ultra.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I don't know. It seems like they're holding back on the more powerful stuff. Right. If they're not planning on buying M6 Pro or M6.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Oh, I did.

[Madison Skinner]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay. I remember seeing this also on Twitter because there's also rumors of an M5 Ultra coming out with up to 768 gigs of memory.

[Madison Skinner]

Oh, right.

[Marques Brownlee]

And everyone went, oh, that computer is going to be.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

You could buy a house instead.

[Marques Brownlee]

Really expensive.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

How expensive? I'm going to just throw out a guess just to make myself look stupid. 768 gigs of memory. That computer is going to be $9,500.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Probably more. I think it could break the 10k barrier?

[Ellis Hamburger]

No way. That's. That's like 18,000 if you spec it that high.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Somewhere between that much ram is obscene.

[Ellis Hamburger]

15 to 18,000, I bet.

[Marques Brownlee]

Let me look at the Mac Studio pricing right now. But yeah, it's not going to be cheap.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

My conspiracy theory, which we probably shouldn't talk about conspiracy theories on this podcast, is that OpenAI and anthropic are intentionally having the RAM crisis happen because open sourced AI models are getting more and more popular, especially running on Mac hardware. And if it's affordable to buy enough RAM to run your own AI models, you don't have to use OpenAI or Anthropic for your AI stuff.

[Ellis Hamburger]

This is a really compelling.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I'm just saying. I'm just saying. So you have to go to the model providers. Oh, only $20 a month as opposed to 796 gigabytes of RAM.

[Ellis Hamburger]

I think you're onto something.

[Marques Brownlee]

Without checking apple.com without checking apple.com, if you want to buy the most powerful, most expensive Mac studio with just 96 gigs of memory and 16 terabytes of storage, how much do you think that would cost today?

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Today, 12k? Is it over 10?

[Andrew Cunningham]

I don't know those prices at all.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's the most powerful M3 Ultra.

[Andrew Cunningham]

M3 Ultra 90s.

[Marques Brownlee]

12K, 14,000.

[Andrew Cunningham]

God. I was actually gonna.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

You can't check.

[Marques Brownlee]

You did start to say 16. 14,000. $14,299 for that computer today. So if you're thinking M5. Yeah, ultra with 768 gigs of memory, that's going to be really expensive.

[Ellis Hamburger]

That's why I said what I said.

[Andrew Cunningham]

W2 or M5 Ultra.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Not to give Apple like too much credit here, but remember when we used to buy Mac Studios for $50,000 each?

[Marques Brownlee]

It was the Mac Pro, Mac Pros, the Intel, Mac Pro, Intel.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

That's what I mean. Yeah, sorry. Remember when we used to buy the intel Mac pros for $50,000 each?

[Ellis Hamburger]

Just be for yourself.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Well, yeah, not we, the company. But now, you know, we got so used to the price being so much cheaper for so much more performance.

[Marques Brownlee]

Unified memory.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Still, nobody should buy a $14,000 computer generally. Yeah.

[Madison Skinner]

How will I make my TikTok videos?

[Andrew Cunningham]

That's true.

[Marques Brownlee]

This is the thing now, if you are capable of doing the work, like I've found that the amount of computer I need to buy to edit the videos that I make has gone down over the years. Especially when you consider how expensive that Mac Pro was. We had $40,000 specs on the Intel Mac Pro and those AMD Radeon GPUs or Vega GPUs and a ton of memory when those were 40K. Then I started going down to a Mac Studio and then down to a MacBook Pro. I've been editing videos on this MacBook Pro, which costs less than $8,000, which is expensive, but compared to $40,000, it's like reverse inflation for how much I have to spend to edit. So I am pretty excited to continue to spend less.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Well, don't get too excited because I'm

[Marques Brownlee]

just going to edit on this. I'm going to edit on this. As long as I can continue to

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

spend less by not spending anything.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Exactly.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I'm also curious to see how the competitors respond to this, because just recently, Dell and a couple other companies came out with their MacBook Neo competitor devices.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, XPS 13.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Exactly.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

And are they going to raise their prices? Are they going to eat it? Because Apple's the most well positioned to actually eat all of these prices.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's. I'm very curious and I fully expect them to. I think the more volume you do, the more insulated you are because of your order sizes, et cetera. So I assume XPS 13 is selling less than MacBook Neo and therefore is more likely to require a larger price increase unless Dell is willing to subsidize it by increasing other things, which I

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

just don't think they will. I really don't think they will.

[Marques Brownlee]

I think that's due for a price increases.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah, they don't have like 12 different products that they can just slightly update the price on.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, interesting. So we'll see.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

All right, well, I'm sorry to everybody who didn't buy a new computer yet.

[Marques Brownlee]

We'll have way more Galaxy stuff and others to talk about after the break. But before that, let's do trivia.

[Madison Skinner]

Trivia. Do you want the Ellis question first or the me question first?

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Who's Ellis? You mean Rufus?

[Andrew Cunningham]

Never heard of him.

[Madison Skinner]

Never heard of him. Who's that? This is his birthday, by the way.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Happy birthday, Alice.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

If you made it to the end of the podcast. Oh, we're not at the end of the podcast. If you made it to this point in the podcast, say happy birthday, Alice.

[Marques Brownlee]

I would like the Adam question first because I feel like I'll have, like, more I'll, like, have my hopes up. Like I think I might get one right. You know, it won't be as hard.

[Madison Skinner]

All right, so I'll do my question first. And then Rufus will read Ellis's next time.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay. Bet.

[Madison Skinner]

I have in front of me a. Well, not actually in front of me, but I have pulled up on the website, a maxed out MacBook Pro inspired by Marques. Just digging around on the Apple website. How much does it cost?

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

16 inch.

[Madison Skinner]

16 inch.

[Marques Brownlee]

Maxed out. I'm gonna try to do all of the. Because the navigation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All that stuff.

[Madison Skinner]

The 8 terabyte SSD. 128 gigs of unified memory. All the good stuff.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Stuff you said.

[Madison Skinner]

M4M, M5 max chip.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Yeah, I know how much I paid for this. When I. I got one a little

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

while ago, they added like so much. It added like 23 or something.

[Marques Brownlee]

128 gigs and yeah, I think you

[Madison Skinner]

guys could have answered this like four days ago, but now with the new price increases. How much is it?

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, boy.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Well, I think they added $2,300, but I don't know how much it cost to begin with.

[Marques Brownlee]

So I guess I'm going to do Delta for this. Yeah, closest Delta.

[Madison Skinner]

Closest Delta.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Okay.

[Marques Brownlee]

All right, Bet. All right, well, think about it. Answers will be at the end, like usual. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Shopify. Landing on a good idea for a business is basically catching lightning in a bottle. What are the odds it'll happen more than once? You have to jump on every opportunity to make it work. And. And the last thing you need is to get slowed down by clunky logistics. You want tools that are ready to go right out the box. And if your business involves e commerce, you need Shopify. Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide. From household names like Mattel and Gymshark to small businesses just getting started. You can choose from hundreds of beautiful templates that let you customize and match. Your brand setup is fast with Shopify's built in AI tools that write product descriptions and headlines and help you edit product photos. And if you've been sitting on a business idea, Shopify makes it easy to make it happen. Everything you need to start selling is included and ready to go. From day one with Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. Start your free trial at shopify.com waveform that's shopify.com waveform shopify.com waveform Support for the show comes from Framer. So if your team wants a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship, Framer is built for that you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts. Hosting and a CMS built in so the work is production ready. From day one, agents work alongside you to draft pages and polish sections. Then you review and publish what goes live. Framer is the pro site builder for creators, teams and businesses that want a professional site and care enough to get every detail right. Agents solve the gap between AI generated ideas and production ready website work. The agent works in the same place where the real site is designed, managed, reviewed and published. It lands on the canvas, stays editable and can be published when the team is ready. Agents and Framer work alongside teams to streamline collaboration on the same canvas, build custom code components, create and manage CMS content, optimize SEO settings and ship everything all in one place. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a framer specialist or get started building for free [e-mail] wave for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's Framer.com wave for 30% off Framer.com wave rules and restrictions may apply.

[Andrew Cunningham]

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[Marques Brownlee]

We gotta talk now about a different company, Samsung. Samsung's been on this interesting terror and we kind of have some expectations for them, but they started teasing this new Samsung Galaxy thing. They like deleted. They wiped their Instagram account and like started posting these new teasers basically of a bunch of different things with new aspect ratios.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yeah, like, you know, like a candy bar has all the pieces you can break off. So it was like four by three and they popped the top off. So now it's like yeah, three by three. Which doesn't actually represent the aspect ratio very well. But.

[Marques Brownlee]

But I think a lot of what they're teasing is this sort of small, wide passport. You know, when you open your passport, that like aspect ratio, it's like that. And I think we're all expecting some sort of a foldable that is a little more squat, a little more wide and like passport shaped similar to what we've seen in the past from like the.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Remember the first Pixel Fold oppo find

[Marques Brownlee]

N. Yeah, we're gonna see that again.

[Andrew Cunningham]

My favorite thing about the tease real quick is if you open it up on browser because it's. They deleted like the grid. So the grid system comes up to show the pieces snapping off on top of. By being six in a row. It's four wide on a desktop. So none of the things match up. And it's your full screen.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Because I have a. I have a

[Andrew Cunningham]

drunken browser that aren't using a dying browser.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Hey, hey, hey, hey. Just because something isn't being updated doesn't mean it's fine.

[Andrew Cunningham]

I would argue it probably is debatable.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I only have a couple problems.

[Marques Brownlee]

But yeah, we. We're expecting new Samsung foldable and I'm curious to see how they're going to market this as being particularly new or different because we have had this already and then we kind of like moved on from it, but now we're going back.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah, it's funny that there were a few brands that did this, but then because everybody else was just doing regular phone that opens even bigger. Yeah, everyone switched over to this because of Samsung essentially.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Like, yes, Samsung was so good at the folding phone. Everyone was like, well that one's working. Let's do that one.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Even Google like use this at first and then moved on from it and now everyone's like, oh well, Apple is kind of setting the trend and so I guess we have to do it first.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, this is kind of almost along the same lines as the Air. Remember we all knew the MacBook, we all knew the iPhone Air was coming. And then in the middle of the year Samsung went, oh, but yeah, here's ours. This is the Samsung Galaxy S25 edge. And it was ultra thin phone. Better than the iPhone Air in a lot of ways. Like had dual cameras, had a bigger battery and all that. But was just their own take on it before Apple to preempt Apple. Now all these rumors are floating around that this folding iPhone is gonna come out first. Folding iPhone. And it's going to be a more squat aspect ratio similar to the phones we've talked about. And so Samsung's in the middle of this year going to go, huh? Well, I bet we could do that too. And so they're going to keep doing the Z Fold in the candy bar style and shape and aspect ratio. But this is a new foldable that is like. I think they're calling it the Wide. I think that's the rumor.

[Andrew Cunningham]

I think so. The rumor is that it's. No, sorry, that's just how I wrote it too.

[Marques Brownlee]

No, I think that's the rumor.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I thought the rumor was Galaxy Fold Wide.

[Andrew Cunningham]

The rumor I saw was just that it is the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and the new, the other one is the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, so Ultra being the one that we're used to.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yes. Which to me reminds me of Note 10.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Which kind of worries me because in Note 10 land we had the Note 10 and the Note 10 Ultra.

[Marques Brownlee]

Right?

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cunningham]

And everyone really liked the size of the Note 10. But the Note 10 also got a bunch of downgrades compared to the Note 10 Ultra.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

It was like plastic, wasn't it?

[Andrew Cunningham]

It was like plastic back. It had worse ram. Like it didn't have as nice of cameras. Like if I remember correctly, almost everything about it was slightly worse. And the leaks we got from Android headlines show the. I'll call it the Note 8 but I'm still going to call it the Wide just for audio listeners to make sure we're talking about the same thing. The Fold 8 wide version, the Passport version only has two cameras. In the leak that we're seeing, there's some case manufacturer that probably leaked it and. Oh, that's clever. It looks like a like three by two aspect ratio but two cameras. So I'm wondering if everything about this is going to be slightly worse than the candy bar style.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Full day three by two is cool for previewing photos.

[Marques Brownlee]

Just saying this could be. This could be extremely clever positioning From Samsung, I think, because if you look at all of the rumors of what the iPhone fold is going to be, that's, that's all the same. Dual cameras, squat aspect ratio. And if you're Samsung and you're marketing, wow. I feel, I feel like you can get really clever. You can go, hey, all right. We have had this candy bar style phone which is really great to use while closed and you can open it up and have a big screen, but oh, if you want like a sort of a compromised experience where it's not that great to use while closed, but you can at least have a bigger like screen open, here's a less premium version. It's only dual cameras, it's only this smaller passport shape. And then we can have the Ultra, which is actually more fun to use while closed. And then when Apple comes out with theirs, you go, oh, Apple made one of the compromise shaped ones with dual cameras and passwords.

[Andrew Cunningham]

I didn't know that's for you.

[Marques Brownlee]

But we're Samsung and we also offer the big bad Ultra.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Marques Brownlee]

I think that's the clever, like, at least that's how I could see it.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah, look at the compromise. You only get two cameras. You have to do this.

[Madison Skinner]

That would be up.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

That'd be pretty messed up.

[Marques Brownlee]

That'd be some chess.

[Andrew Cunningham]

I think my issue with it and why I compared to the Note 10 is like it makes me wish they were both just essentially the same thing. But you as the consumer get to pick which size you prefer.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cunningham]

But if it does wind up being and I haven't seen any specs other than the camera, so I don't know if it's gonna have like slightly worse materials, slightly different battery or. I mean, I'll probably have a different battery size. Yeah. But like then I just wanted to pick my size and still have the same performance. This feels like AB testing titles and thumbnails where the two thumbnails are completely different. And what did we learn out of that? I don't really know. Instead of two thumbnails that are the same but one has an arrow and one doesn't have an arrow to be like, okay, people really do prefer the bigger size. Well, do they prefer the bigger size or did they prefer the better specs? When you're spending that much money already

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Scientifically, the Ultra sells more for Samsung because in America we basically do carrier plans and everything is the difference between $18 a month and $20 a month.

[Ellis Hamburger]

So.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, yeah, interesting. I, I could see that. I mean you, you do Want to isolate one variable and see if people like one thing over the other. But in this case, there's gonna be a bunch of things different about these phones.

[Andrew Cunningham]

So maybe not. Hopefully it's just the cameras and the size and maybe they're running similar. I just don't know if that's.

[Marques Brownlee]

I would assume that this Ultra will be more expensive and the, the small. Yeah. Will be less expensive and they're gonna

[Andrew Cunningham]

wanna put enough of a gap in there that it doesn't feel too close. Yeah. Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Interesting.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Well, we'll see in a couple of weeks, I guess, because that's supposed to

[Andrew Cunningham]

drop sometime in July.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Time in July or August, I don't know. Something like.

[Marques Brownlee]

Speaking of drop. Because you said it was going to drop in July, Polestar is dropping out of the US market entirely.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Kind of being pushed out in a way.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. And this makes me sad. Yeah, I. Well, it's funny. I like a lot of the Volvo EVs and I actually like some of the Polestars. And it is unfortunate to have that competition Leave the US market because I thought the Polestar 2 was a solid option. That's the most realistic one to recommend to most people. It's by far their most popular one. The lineup gets a little confusing after that because it's a midsize crossover and then another midsize crossover and another midsize crossover. But that's okay. They looked nice, they drove nice, they had nice speakers, they had these spartan, super clean interiors. But the Polestar 2 is solid and it's a shame to see it going away. Yeah.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

So effectively what's happening here is the US Government kind of issued this order that you cannot have cars that run software from China. If you didn't know Polestar is a sub brand of Geely. Geely is a giant Chinese automaker. For some reason, Volvo, which is also owned by Geely, was given authorization to sell cars here. I think this could be one of those things where the US Government's like, Volvo. We've had Volvo forever. Polestar's a new thing. Get rid of it.

[Andrew Cunningham]

It is confusing because, like, Volvo is a Swedish company. Right. That then got bought by Geely and then. But what's even more confusing is don't both of them run Android Automotive for their software?

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yes.

[Marques Brownlee]

Which is Google.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah. I'm not sure. There might be some like, code in the way that it. The card.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Well, I guess, like where's, where's data going back to?

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah. I don't know. I still think it's one of Those things where the government just doesn't understand the difference. And we've seen a lot of companies do this. Like people don't like dji so they launch a sub brand. You know, like the, the government doesn't like OnePlus, so they launch a sub brand and then they're allowed into the U.S. so it's, it's very strange. But they're going to be continuing to sell all of their leftover stock in the US but they won't be able to sell after model year 2027 and forward. Um, yeah, it kind of sucks. I personally did not like the Pulsar 2 that much. Cause the interior felt like very, very cramped. Even though I felt that they were one of the best looking cars on the outside. But either way it's not, it's not fun to see our options disappearing. Especially because in the United States our car brand options are already very limited compared to a lot of other countries.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yeah, sounds like New York City just got a bunch of new taxis just like the.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah, just like the Fisker. Okay, next quick story. WhatsApp is launching usernames is my least favorite thing. It's your least favorite. Whoa, whoa, wait, wait, wait, wait. Give me.

[Marques Brownlee]

Because every time a company launches a new thing and they let you pick a username, the second I go to pick my username, it's already taken and I never get my username.

[Andrew Cunningham]

That is quicker. I'll sell it to you.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Evan parking for you.

[Ellis Hamburger]

You tell me you haven't already been testing this for two weeks.

[Marques Brownlee]

I wish.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah. So this is pretty straightforward. Basically. Previously it hooked up to your phone number. Now you can pick an username. I think in general this is a good thing. I understand that for you this is probably not and kind of sucks. Honestly. I think what they should do is because it's hooked up to your ins. If, if you're hooked up to your Instagram account through WhatsApp, it should automatically park on that username for you. And then you can decide if you want to keep it or not. And then if you don't.

[Madison Skinner]

I saw people online saying not to do that though, because then if you have a very public social media now, they can just message you on WhatsApp.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

They can't though, because they did add a feature where you can. Only people with a special private code can message you through your username. So when I signed up for my username, you know, and when I, when I did it, it said there was an option that was like let. Only let people message you if they have your private code, and they gave me a private code. So basically you send it to someone, say, oh, I'm this on WhatsApp, and here's my code, and then that's how they can start a conversation with you.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Hey, friend, if you want to message me. Yeah, here's a code to let you message me.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

You know, I don't know.

[Andrew Cunningham]

That feels.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I would also assume that if they, like, scanned your QR code or something, like when you first give them your.

[Marques Brownlee]

Like, your WhatsApp account.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah. Then it would automatically that kind of

[Madison Skinner]

defeat the purpose of having a username. Well, I wish it was more like Instagram, where I just have my main

[Marques Brownlee]

inbox and then like a secondary inbox. Yes. But the other half of that is impersonation, because if there's someone out there with the official mkbhd username on WhatsApp and it's not me.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

What the is that?

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah, true.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's like the most obvious.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Like, they're. Maybe they're just doing this so that they can do a unified verification system, even though meta verified is not actually verification. It's just.

[Andrew Cunningham]

I also wonder if they play, like, Twitter. Don't want to connect to Instagram as much because Instagram getting banned in the EU, but WhatsApp is not part of that, and they want to keep those apart as much as possible.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

They let you, though? When I signed up for the username, I said, do you want to just use your Instagram username? And then it did a little lock icon, kind of like the Apple one. It l very important. I also just want to point out that six years ago, wasn't me this time, it was Adam. Adam made a video.

[Andrew Cunningham]

You were going to bring this up

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

when him and I used to work at Android Authority. Adam made a very controversial video at the time, which he was right all along about how we shouldn't have phone numbers anymore and we should just have

[Marques Brownlee]

usernames I could get on board.

[Sean Rawlinson]

Yeah.

[Madison Skinner]

I did have multiple people reach out to me afterwards and bring up some very compelling reasons why that shouldn't be the case. But overall, I do stand by it. I think it would be a better world if we had just usernames or

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

something instead of phone numbers. And to be fair, at the time we were trying to revitalize a dying YouTube channel, so they just kind of throw the wall.

[Marques Brownlee]

It was a hot take at the time.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I mean, it was. Yeah, we were like, adam, can you make something? Anyway, he did hold my beer. I think it's good. I Think it's Good.

[Andrew Cunningham]

All right. PlayStation is ending physical disc production. Also, for everyone reading this. I'm sorry, how often I wrote disc like a Frisbee and not like a disc, like a PlayStation disc. I'm pretty sure that's a K. Marquez didn't even notice until I didn't notice.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

You can tell.

[Andrew Cunningham]

You can look, it swaps back and forth because I realize sometimes. Anyways, Sony just announced that January 2028 and on, they will stop the production of physical discs for new PlayStation games. Only digital versions will be available. And this I think has initial reaction from almost everybody. So before we get to that, I'm going to play Bad Guy or Good Guy or Sony and say a couple reasons why they're probably doing this.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Physical games are sold way less often. Most people don't want to wait for delivery or go to a store. Game discs for PCs have been dead for ages. We download things. I'll throw out the little apple. Look at us. We good. Environmentally beneficial because that's a lot of waste plastic and discs that probably get thrown out and giant profit margins in capitalism when you don't have to make physical things. That's probably the main reason. Let's all be.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, yeah, Daboo you now. Or.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I just want to point out that Sony put out a video a while ago for the PS4 that I just need you guys to watch. Okay. I'm gonna have you watch this. I don't know if you already watched it, but it's very funny. Came out 13 years ago. To be fair, a lot changes in 13 years.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Totally.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

This is called official PlayStation use game instructional video from the PlayStation account.

[Marques Brownlee]

I remember this.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Okay.

[Marques Brownlee]

This is how you share your games on PS4.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Thanks.

[Marques Brownlee]

Wasn't this done as a retort to some other console that xbox, they stopped?

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Probably something like Xbox. Yeah. And so. And I also. And I also need to point out that last week Sony removed a ton of movies that people had already bought from the PlayStation Store because they ran out of their licensing deal for them and they just. People cannot watch those movies anymore even though they bought them. There's no refunds offered unless they have a disc. We are living in modern digital surfdom. You do not own anything. You are renting a license by paying money and it's bad. And that's a reason why the discs should sell this. Even though most discs are just kind of ways for the console to actually talk to the Internet and say, oh, hey, nowadays. Yeah, nowadays. Anyway.

[Mariah]

Well, well, well, here we are again. Once back in Our digital serfdom resident

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

gamer Mariah is in the house.

[Mariah]

I just want to say I saw this article this morning. I got so mad it gave me a headache immediately. I'm an avid physical media consumer for games and I don't trust companies and probably a good.

[Marques Brownlee]

There we go.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Probably a good phase.

[Mariah]

In fact, I was actually researching this for a video recently and in the short term I personally, my personal opinion, I don't think it's bad to reduce e waste and all those kinds of things coming from disks and streamlining the process and making it cheaper for consoles that don't need to have disk drives and all that kind of stuff. But I do support resale and fair competition. And as you will note recently that the. Let's see, we've had a bunch of different online digital stores actually close down within the past five or six years. Since COVID We had the Wii online store shut down, the Nintendo Eshop, the Wii u shop, Nintendo 3DS shut down, Xbox 360 stuff became limited over the past couple of years. So I don't trust companies with preservation and availability to games. And so there's a really great foundation if anyone actually wants to research this, called the Video Game History foundation who would like to provide access to researchers and other people who would like to be part of video game preservation. And I suggest following them and we'll see what happens with Sony in the next couple years.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Very nice.

[Mariah]

And that's my rant.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Good shout out.

[Andrew Cunningham]

I feel like I know I mentioned like PC games don't have discs and haven't forever but like consoles feel like like a time capsule. There's like this, like this is six years of video games on one thing. And the fact that all of us now can go out and buy the like systems we grew up with, like if I want to go play Spyro on a PS1, like it's probably not the hardest thing to find. It might be a little pricey, but not crazy. Or N64 cartridges are still kicking ass out there. I mean they're expensive, but you can find them and you can play those games. And like I can show my kids the games that I played back then because they don't know that Crysis looks almost identical.

[Marques Brownlee]

Is this going to happen?

[Andrew Cunningham]

They're going to play goldeneye and be like, the aiming in this game sucks.

[Marques Brownlee]

Is this, is this the same thing that happens to music where we all used to buy albums?

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Oh yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

And now in the future, kids are not going to know what that's like. But we'll have our albums and we'll be like this. This is the one I bought. It'll be like a relic of former times.

[Mariah]

Yeah, it's that. I think it's. In my opinion, it's also all the indie games on the storefronts. And once the storefronts disappear, access to the indie games and the smaller developers also will maybe disappear with it as well. There's a really cool video from a YouTuber called the Completionist, where when the Nintendo WWII U&3DS store shut down, he downloaded every single game in the storefront, every single one, before it shut down, and then he donated it to the foundation for research purposes.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Very cool.

[Mariah]

Very noble. Very sick. I hope we don't have to do that again in the near future.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Wouldn't it be cool if we had some sort of protocol that all the games could be hosted on online?

[Marques Brownlee]

Here we go.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Stop.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Everyone's computers could run this protocol to help seed these.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Unplug his bike.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, well, that would be nice.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

It's depressing. I. Yeah, I don't like digital serfdom anyway.

[Andrew Cunningham]

That video of them is like the quintessential big company. Makes stand regrets it a lot later when it gets put against them. Yeah, it's. It was literally the Netflix sharing password tweet.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yes.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Like, yep, that's. This is fun. We're all for this age.

[Marques Brownlee]

Like milk.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah. And also the. The Samsung haircut, the Notch haircut.

[Marques Brownlee]

That one aged. So it was like two years later.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Something like that. Yeah, like that. So. Well, speaking of gaming, last week we talked a lot about the dbrand companion Cube accessory for the Steam machine.

[Andrew Cunningham]

I don't think we talked about it at all.

[Madison Skinner]

At all.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Never mind.

[Marques Brownlee]

But it did exist.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Well, if you didn't.

[Andrew Cunningham]

I meant to talk about it. I just. We.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I really thought we did.

[Andrew Cunningham]

I had it in there and we just talked about the machine. That's crazy.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Well, dbrand made this really cool companion cube accessory. I say made because they're not making it anymore. Basically what happened is they didn't ask permission from Valve, which is crazy. Didn't we talk about the video they made for it?

[Andrew Cunningham]

And we were just watching it.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Are you kidding me? Okay, well, this apparently wasn't on the podcast. Dbrand made some incredible launch video for this where they used like the Cave Johnson voice and a bunch of companion cube stuff and some portal guns and like the robots from Portal Atlas and like those guys. And everyone's like, wow, this is crazy. This feels like an official Valve video. It's wild. That dbrand was able to do this. Turns out they weren't able to do this.

[Andrew Cunningham]

I also know. I mean, we're close. Okay. First off, dbrand is a major sponsor of the channel, so everything major disclosure, I find. I never thought that. And I hadn't talked to them before or anything about it. Dbrand's always kind of been a.

[Marques Brownlee]

They kind of go rogue all the time.

[Andrew Cunningham]

All the time. They did the dark plates with the. The marketing term of like, sua Sony. And they've had logos in the past that they had to like, stop including. It's just kind of their vibe, which is a fast and loose vibe. And I'm sure they're very, very aware of that.

[Marques Brownlee]

Sometimes they'll, like, show a case for an unreleased phone before the phone comes out.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah. Which I'm sure the company is not happy for.

[Marques Brownlee]

They just kind of wing it sometimes. Yeah. This is maybe backfiring on the winging it part.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah. They made a big apology post on Reddit and they said that they definitely should have asked first. They did try to plead with Valve to work up some sort of licensing deal. They said no. They said that was fair. So unfortunately not going to see the light of day. However, I'm sure that we will see a bunch of 3D printed face plates and stuff like that. Because the entire point of the C machine is to be able to be modded physically.

[Andrew Cunningham]

We have one of the cubes. It's.

[Marques Brownlee]

Does that make it sick?

[Andrew Cunningham]

Sorry to say. For all the people who don't get that. I'm going to look at it really well. After the podcast, I saw a lot of people saying hopefully they'll release the. Is it STL file. Is that a 3D printing file? Which a lot of people appropriately responded like, this hasn't. Doesn't just have to do with the fact that it's like something they're selling. It's the distribution of copyright trademark material. Like they're definitely not going to be able to release that.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cunningham]

But yeah, it's a bummer they couldn't. It's obviously a huge mistake that they made that they know because dbrand's great at being transparent.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Yeah.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

They also said it was their second fastest selling product ever, only behind the Kill Switch case for the switch, which is great.

[Marques Brownlee]

Which.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Which actually tells you a little bit about Steam Machine demand.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

That should imply that Steam machines, despite all that we said last week about how expensive they were, are still pretty in demand.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

To the point where people are buying accessories for it.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

It sold out instantly.

[Andrew Cunningham]

In Japan, Alex got screwed over with his steam machine because he. He put in his reservation for the, like, 512 gigabyte model. And then like the day he was supposed to get his place in line went, oh, wait, I'm going to do the 2 terabyte one. And then got launched, like months back in the line and isn't getting one. Okay.

[Marques Brownlee]

Hey, speaking of sold out, did you guys see that random headline that the Ferrari Luche, despite all that we talked about it, also sold out in China.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Only Marquez could segue in China.

[Marques Brownlee]

Do you know how many cars that was?

[Andrew Cunningham]

Oh, wait, did you find out?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yes.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Oh, 12.

[Marques Brownlee]

No.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Is it more?

[Andrew Cunningham]

35?

[Marques Brownlee]

More than 12?

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

100.

[Marques Brownlee]

More than 35.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

More than 100?

[Marques Brownlee]

Not more than 100. All 88 Luches for that market.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

They made 88 for China.

[Andrew Cunningham]

All of China?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Known little country China.

[Marques Brownlee]

How do they come up with 88? I don't know how many they were planning on making, but that's what the article said, 88.

[Ellis Hamburger]

So you just like, you take orders for six minutes and then you cap and you're like, we sold out.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yes, we sold out.

[Marques Brownlee]

Or they. They came to that market with the number 88, and they were like, this is how many we're gonna sell here.

[Ellis Hamburger]

You know what I think?

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Is it important in China?

[Ellis Hamburger]

I think it's lucky, probably.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I think eights are. Oh, yeah, because Snapdragon 8. That's what they called it. Snapchat and 8. Because in China, 8 is a lucky number.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

They figured if they closed, they had

[Andrew Cunningham]

a Snapdragon 7 series, didn't they?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, but that was lucky.

[Madison Skinner]

The.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

The flag, the flagship 1 was 8. The 7 and 6 are just cut down. But yeah. All right, well, that's just a fun.

[Andrew Cunningham]

You just wanted that Luche jab in there.

[Marques Brownlee]

Just wanted to throw that in there. Yeah.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

How many did they sell out in America?

[Marques Brownlee]

That I don't know. I just saw the Luche sold out in China and I was like, wow, what does sold out mean? So I clicked the article and that was. That was the number. Very nice. Instant sellout.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Instant sellout.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Okay, well, we have another trivia question.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Nice. Apple, the company that has always overcharged for ram, is now charging even more for ram.

[Andrew Cunningham]

True. It's true.

[Ellis Hamburger]

But what Apple offering has increased price over 2.5 times since its launch in 2019.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Polishing cloth.

[Marques Brownlee]

What Apple offering?

[Andrew Cunningham]

What Apple offering?

[Marques Brownlee]

So this is an option or a

[Andrew Cunningham]

product that you're saying offering

[Ellis Hamburger]

it is a product.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Okay, so digital product.

[Marques Brownlee]

What Apple product? Has increased in price 2.5x since 2019.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Since it launched.

[Ellis Hamburger]

It launched in 2019. And since its launch, its price has increased over 2.5 times.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I have an idea. I think I might.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's not Airtags.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Air Power.

[Marques Brownlee]

That one's been free the whole time.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

It's free and priceless at the same time.

[Ellis Hamburger]

I think we should go to the break. Okay.

[Marques Brownlee]

Before we spoil it, it's break time.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Break.

[Marques Brownlee]

Be right back.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Break.

[Madison Skinner]

This is advertiser content from Verizon Business.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Let's go. What do you got here?

[Sean Rawlinson]

My name is Sean Rawlinson. I'm the owner of Roebling's Business Sporting Club in Brooklyn, New York. The best thing about watching soccer is it's continuous. You never know what's going to happen or when it's going to happen. It's important to have the place you go to watch soccer because of the camaraderie you build with everyone else, with the bartenders, with the staff, with the other people who come to the bar, the community.

[Marques Brownlee]

Here at Roebling Sporting Club, it's unlike any other sports bar that I've found in New York or in Brooklyn or anywhere really. Like, you might not know any anybody when you walk in, but you definitely are going to know people when you leave.

[Sean Rawlinson]

The FIFA World cup is the biggest

[Marques Brownlee]

sporting event in the world.

[Sean Rawlinson]

You need a reliable network to make sure you can manage all of those different games at different time zones throughout the day. Verizon business keeps things moving.

[Madison Skinner]

Verizon business helps make sure every small business wins. As a proud sponsor of the FIFA World Cup 2020 26, Verizon supports the drive, resilience and ambition that fuels small business owners. Learn how you can strengthen your [e-mail] business

[Marques Brownlee]

I'm Art Shermanning.

[Madison Skinner]

I'm Madison Skinner.

[Marques Brownlee]

I'm Eva Jovic.

[Andrew Cunningham]

I'm Decoria Moore.

[Marques Brownlee]

Wanna train like a Red Bull athlete?

[Mariah]

Tell us your fitness goals this summer to enter the Red Bull Athlete Challenge.

[Marques Brownlee]

You'll get to try each of our

[Mariah]

workouts for a chance to win an ultimate Red Bull experience.

[Madison Skinner]

Think you have what it takes?

[Marques Brownlee]

This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, set up, required compatibility and availability various 18 plus.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Okay, welcome back. I have one more thing for the end of this podcast because I've just been confused on Twitter.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Nice.

[Andrew Cunningham]

And I'm generally confused about AI, but these ones are specifically confusing to me.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's the natural state of being on Twitter. Confused.

[Andrew Cunningham]

That's super fair. And I hate to say it, but I will be on Twitter a lot today because hockey free agency starts, and I'm very excited for it. I think LeBron's going to go to the Buffalo Sabres anyways. Okay. We've seen a million different AI things, but there are two that I've been just bothering me a lot because I don't really understand what they're trying to do.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay.

[Andrew Cunningham]

The first one is more recent, I think it's called Poke.

[Marques Brownlee]

Just poke, Right?

[Andrew Cunningham]

Is it Poke or Poke. Poke. Poke. Okay.

[Marques Brownlee]

Poke.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Okay, Poke. It was already an AI that lives inside of things like iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram. Essentially it is, you know, an AI chat bot that lives inside your messaging apps. Yeah, I believe so.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I've used this.

[Andrew Cunningham]

You have used it?

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I have used this.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Okay. Well, their new version of it is called Poke Humans. And they have this insanely confusing hype video that's just a bunch of messages going back and forth that I can't really follow. But it seems like essentially when you are talking to your chatbot, if something gets too confusing for it to do for you, it will bring you to a human to start doing that thing. This is just. Yeah, customer service.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Actual intelligence.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yeah. Like, this is just your personal assistant, but, like, you're on a call with Comcast customer service where, like, you have to go through 20 different AI recordings to try and just tell you your bill instead of actually figuring anything out. And then it brings you to a customer service agent who also has no idea what they're doing.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cunningham]

I'm so confused by this, because I can't imagine the humans being paid to do this are making enough money that it's not just a call center. Again, that probably doesn't really know what's going on, especially in your personal life, because I assume this is supposed to

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

be a. Yeah, give it all of your data.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Personal assistant.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yeah. So, like, they definitely can't afford to have really high quality train. I mean, what was the. What was that phone that had the one Mark.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, the assistant.

[Andrew Cunningham]

What's it called?

[Marques Brownlee]

Why can't I think of your phone?

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Caviar.

[Andrew Cunningham]

No, no, not the virtue, but what's it called at a hotel when somebody.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Concierge.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Concierge. Thank you. It reminds me of that because that was like, cool. Personal concierge instead. Random person from across the country who switches every couple of minutes and doesn't really have any idea what they're doing. Do you know how much this costs for Poke Ultra, the version that has the human assistance part?

[Marques Brownlee]

I assume it's a subscription.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yes. I mean, it's right there on the page, but take a guess. Monthly.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, I haven't looked. A few hundred dollars.

[Andrew Cunningham]

199amonth.

[Marques Brownlee]

200 bucks a month.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Also. You can get onto it and then go human. Human.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Can you just say human? Type 0 human.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Talk to a human. Talk to a human.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Basically speak to a technician asking for a personal assistant, basically.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yeah. But assuming just like the virtue concierge, presumably one that really doesn't want to do any of the things.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Of course.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yeah. In the hype video, they were doing things like, can you ask David if he wants to go to a restaurant in San Francisco and what his preferences would be? Or like, what is dollar amount? Well, like, stuff like that.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Which feels so hard to send to another human. That's potentially. I mean, they're at a call center no matter what, whether it's in the US Whether it's in another country. Yeah. Like a type center is true. Yeah. Let's make this slower. Let's make customer service slower sounds. Yeah. I just. I thought the whole point. This is confusing.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I want to try to explain this product to you because I did. I did use it for like a

[Andrew Cunningham]

day Poke or Poke. Human Poke.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I did not use the human version.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Okay.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah. So Poke is an AI assistant app that lives inside of imessage, also can live inside of WhatsApp, Togram, etc. The whole shtick of it is that it gets access to all your information, so it knows, like, pretty much everything about you. And it's very sarcastic kind of ribs you. And instead of you having to go to it and ask it questions, it'll just text you periodically to. Throughout the day to like, remind you to do stuff or like, ask you little questions, stuff like that. It was. It kind of launched in the same era as, like, the friend.

[Andrew Cunningham]

I was gonna say this sounds like

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

the friend pen, which, again, I don't know. Whatever happened to that? Who knows? They spend a million dollars on the URL anyway, so that's been out for quite a long time. Famously, when you set it up, you actually have to negotiate. You negotiate with the AI to try to set your monthly price. So it tries to set it at, like, A certain monthly price, and then you go, I'm not paying that. And it goes, okay, how about this? Okay, how about this? And you just argue with it forever. Yeah, it's very weird. A lot of people got it to like, 99 cents. Some people got it for free. I argued with it for like an hour to try to get for free, and then I uninstalled it.

[Ellis Hamburger]

So you have to haggle with your AI.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

You haggle with the AI? Yeah, with the human one. It's not that way, I assume.

[Ellis Hamburger]

So I should just get my AI to haggle with it forever.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

That's true. Just get Claude to haggle and they'll

[Ellis Hamburger]

haggle with each other. I'll get two poke instances and they'll both get each other down to free.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Does anyone remember Smarter Child? On AIM the bot? You had message and no, it, like, responded back to you. But our child, it was called Smarter Child. But like, as a kid, you would be like. I mean, the typical aim, hey, sup nmu. And then you would just be like, you Smarter Child. And then it would just be like, let's not say anything. You'd be like, that was fun. And that's all you do. That's what this poke sounds like. Like, this is an AI that you can just rib at. And it can be sarcastic and maybe screw around with it and be like, I'm deleting this.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

The one positive thing I will say about it is that for the, like, day that I was using it, it was kind of like, scarily accurate about things about my life that it was bringing up, you know, where with, like, Gemini, you'll tell it like one thing once and then it will just fixate on that, you know, like. Like how the Fitbit air just fixates on the burrito that I ate that one time.

[Madison Skinner]

I know things about you, though.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

If it's just plugging, it plugs into your Gmail, like, you give it access to your Google accounts.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, okay.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah.

[Madison Skinner]

So you have to plug into everything.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah, you have to get it.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Okay, so now when it goes to a human. Yeah, humans can't scan through an entire Gmail account in milliseconds like an AI can. So I guess it's being a little more targeted and getting the information, but it seems like it's going to slow down significantly and also human get bunch of information.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Well, what I would guess is that the human. Yeah, the human element is because they trying to make it like a pure personal assistant concierge. And so for certain digital tasks that the AI can handle for you. The AI will do that. But then there's things like, I don't know, booking flights that maybe they don't have access to yet. And so they want it to. To be able to eventually do everything. It's kind of crazy. That's 200amonth. But that's how much humans cost at a minimum, I guess so.

[Marques Brownlee]

So this also seems. It feels like, you know how there's like digital well being tools in your phone to help you use your phone less?

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Feels like the opposite of that. Kind of like you, you're. You're just texting it all the time, basically.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah, yeah, that's true. But it's almost like you're talking to a person because it uses a lot of slang and it uses a lot of.

[Andrew Cunningham]

It doesn't use a lot of capitalization.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

No uses like, no capitalization.

[Andrew Cunningham]

That's cool, man.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

It's trying to be zoomer. Very zoomer.

[Andrew Cunningham]

All right.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah. I don't know. I feel like we're just going back to actual intelligence again. So who knows? Just. I guess just get a personal.

[Marques Brownlee]

Just. I. I don't want AI want.

[Ellis Hamburger]

I just.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Intelligence.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Okay, I'll go with my second one. This has been out for a little while, but I feel like I've not included it in the podcast because it just felt like I was going to make fun of it. But that's kind of the section right now. Taste labs. Did you see this?

[Marques Brownlee]

I saw this.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Okay. A new data and infrastructure layer to give AI models and agents taste. Sorry.

[Marques Brownlee]

I know it's perfect. I saw this whole huge Tweet and this 90 second video. When you got to the end of that sentence, that's when I left. I saw the first sentence of, we're building the data and infrastructure layer to give AI models and agents taste. And then I closed the tab.

[Andrew Cunningham]

That's.

[Marques Brownlee]

But go on.

[Andrew Cunningham]

That's probably what I should have done. Instead, I got really angry. Their CEO tweeted they're on a mission to end AI slop, which feels like the most tone deaf, stupid thing I've probably ever heard of. It actually sounded like a company Ellis would make up for one of our trivia questions. Unfortunately, it is real. So this is what I'm confused about. What are they talking about? Because in the world of AI slop, it's because, yes, stock go up. It's just like we are funneling everything into AI so that it can create the things that it sees all the time. Taste is. Is something that like people have because they're genuinely creating their own thing. So is this just going to be a curated amount of stuff the model is getting fed into?

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Probably.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Therefore, then just turning that curated stuff into the same thing thousands of times over, destroying the taste from the thing they created.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I'm gonna play minor devil's advocate, but then also play Angel's advocate again.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Nice.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Usually, AI design is really bad. It's bad and it's all the same. And there's kind of this, like, AI website look now, where everything has these rounded corners with these certain gradients. And like, eventually when you get the net average of everything, it kind of just ends up like that. And it's pretty lame.

[Andrew Cunningham]

It's happening. Sorry with that. YouTube thumbnails in smaller niche communities right now, I think the tell is slightly dark white, slightly dark background white and yellow text that has, like, brushstrokes and this, like, slight black grunge tint and black outline.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah.

[Andrew Cunningham]

In the disc golf world, there's a bunch of them right now. You can tell they're using the exact same program because all the thumbnails look exactly the same.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah, for sure. So I can see where they came up with this idea because they were like, well, AI has terrible taste, so we have to make things look better. Angel's advocate for the. The problematic part of this is that the way that design works and the way that everything works is that everything works on a pendulum cycle. So if the average of everything becomes really good, eventually that starts to look dry and bland and, like, old. And so then people start using ugly stuff again and that becomes hip. So everything's like this pendulum. And so if their company is just based around, okay, we want to make AI design look better now, that'll work for a little bit, but eventually it's probably going to start looking old and drab. If.

[Andrew Cunningham]

If they're successful, the quicker they turn the. The more niche, tasteful design into the slop, for sure. So it's just like, we're not ending AI slop, we're just making different. This is AI slop with a little garnish on top of it for a little while. And then the garnish gets all wilty.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Exactly.

[Andrew Cunningham]

It's. Yeah, it's. It's stupid. It also almost feels like they're straight up saying, like, we want to make sure we're ripping off the best designers. Yeah, of course. Then definitely not paying them for it.

[Marques Brownlee]

I mean. Yeah. The other thing about taste is it's subjective yet. Subjective. And the AI is inherently based off of someone else's taste and work, so. Yeah, it doesn't.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah, well, it's kind of like how everyone was using the Chobani font. You know, we talked about this a little bit.

[Marques Brownlee]

The yogurt font.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah, the yogurt font. Like everyone has been using the Chobani yogurt font for the last, like, year or so because it's sort of like. It's sort of like New York Times, like really high quality. And now every single brand is using that. And so it's like, yeah, it looks good for now, but I think that pretty soon.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yeah, it's a good ass font. Not gonna lie.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

It's a great font. No, it's a great font. I think there's a reason everyone has been using using it, but yeah, anyway, it's gonna get. It's gonna get long in the tooth pretty soon.

[Marques Brownlee]

Did they make this font? Did the yogurt company make this font or did they. Yo, yo, Chobani serif. Did they make this? Is this better than their own product? This is kind of sick. Yeah.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Shout out to Chobani. I need Tim to use this on the thumbnail. This is original.

[Ellis Hamburger]

It is called Chobani Serif.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Wow.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I mean, hey, they cooked. They cooked. But everyone's using it. I swear to God, everyone's using it.

[Marques Brownlee]

No idea. It does look familiar.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

And.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

And then there's the newsprint stuff, like anthropics, logos, very news prints, very New York Times gothic.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Anyway, but they all have like very slightly rounded corners.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah.

[Ellis Hamburger]

All of the new serif fonts are

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

all soft because all of these new AI companies need to feel more human, you know? Yeah, yeah. That's the reason they're doing it. They want to feel the problem relatable, like yogurt, you know what I mean?

[Andrew Cunningham]

I don't want my AI to feel more human. I want it to just do the small things, like.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah, but they want people to feel like their AI is more human, not

[Andrew Cunningham]

the person for this.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Do you know the best way to feel like a human being?

[Andrew Cunningham]

Breathe.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Yeah.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. We did it, Joe.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Okay. I don't want to go any further because it's just going to be hate.

[Marques Brownlee]

That sounds like I'm just confused by

[Andrew Cunningham]

these things and I'm not surprised that I'm confused by them, but that just seemed wild.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I think we're in the state. I mean, we've been in the stage of the AI boom where like everyone is still trying to find a unique idea and even if it's not good People are still going to try it. This feels like why you're confused.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Taste labs feels like the needle that is currently popping the like. This is like we've reached to that point where she blow in.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Hopefully every time you think you've reached the top, there's another mountain to climb.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Yeah.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

All right, well, let's trivia. I think we should trivia.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay. Okay, here we go.

[Madison Skinner]

Question one.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Madison Skinner]

I have in front of me a webpage. On that webpage is a maxed out MacBook Pro from Apple.com. how much does it cost?

[Sean Rawlinson]

One.

[Andrew Cunningham]

It's one of the things where I'm worried I'm gonna be like so drastically low. It looks like I have no idea what I'm talking about.

[Ellis Hamburger]

About.

[Madison Skinner]

It's a 16 inch with nano texture display. M5 max chip, 18 core CPU, 40 core GPU, 128 gigabytes of unified memory, 8 terabyte SSD, 140 watt USBC charger.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I hope no cheating. I heard they upped the price of the nano texture because it uses so much ram.

[Madison Skinner]

Nice.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Just kidding. They didn't actually do that. I don't know that to be true. I actually don't know it to be true because I didn't look.

[Madison Skinner]

All right, flip them and read. What do you got?

[Marques Brownlee]

I tried. I can break mine down since I showed my work.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Go for it.

[Marques Brownlee]

So I have the 16 inch M5 Max MacBook Pro starting at $3,000. I think the nano texture adds 150 bucks. I think the 128 gigs of memory adds 2,500 bucks. That one I'm not so sure about. And then I think the eight terabyte because I think it starts at two. So you go from two to four to eight. So that's a $4,000 more for that. So I. I ended up at $9,550.

[Andrew Cunningham]

All right, Andrew, I'll break mine down. I put a eight and then a five and then two zeros for $8,500.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay.

[Madison Skinner]

Okay.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

My logic was that it's probably worse than I think. So I put $12,000.

[Madison Skinner]

The closest is marque David Marquez. Oh, Marquez gets the point.

[Marques Brownlee]

What was it actually? That one.

[Madison Skinner]

$10,149.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

I almost attended these.

[Madison Skinner]

So with that, Marquez, you now have 32 points. Andrew with 27 and David with 32.

[Ellis Hamburger]

No.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Tied up.

[Andrew Cunningham]

No.

[Marques Brownlee]

My age?

[Madison Skinner]

No.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's wild.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Uh oh, okay.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's great. Points.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

You know, sometimes people stop you on the street and say good job with trivia. You're killing it. I feel like they're gonna stop now.

[Marques Brownlee]

Now they're gonna stop me on the street.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Really?

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Say, good job catching up to David.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, that's exciting.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Apple, the company that has always overcharged for RAM, is now charging even more for RAM. But what Apple offering has increased its price over 2.5 times since its launch in 2019?

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

You know, marques may have been tied with me for a brief time. Moment.

[Madison Skinner]

I'll give you a hint. This is an Ellis question. Keep that in mind.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Yeah, I was going to say.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

That's exactly my thought. Apple vhs. Oh, I tried to write this in the Chobani font

[Marques Brownlee]

we have.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Oh, okay.

[Marques Brownlee]

Andrew and I both said AirPods. I don't know if you're thinking the same thing I was thinking.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Nope.

[Andrew Cunningham]

But I was thinking both the AirPods.

[Marques Brownlee]

I was thinking like the base AirPods.

[Andrew Cunningham]

That's what I was thinking. The base ones.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Which AirPods specifically. Andrew, it's almost like you could have

[Andrew Cunningham]

just written, Sony AirPods are the name of a model.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

The AirPods 3.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Well, the AirPods line. 1, 2, 3.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah, like Sony, you know.

[Andrew Cunningham]

No, Xperia. 1, 2, 3. It's literally. You're proving my point that I stopped arguing.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Whatever. Whatever. David, you wrote, I'm not salty. I wrote Apple 1.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Apple 1. Which is not correct, but is sort of a little bit correct. Because without going over, the answer is Apple TV Plus.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Wow.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Which has it launched at 4.99 and is 12.99 now.

[Marques Brownlee]

Well, in case anyone is wondering, it is about 80 degrees in here now. It was not at the beginning of the pod, but that's okay because we survived. And just like that, we created another episode for your regularly scheduled programming. Very exciting. If you made it this far in the pod and you already left a comment wishing Ellis a happy birthday.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Take it away. Delete it.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Delete it.

[Marques Brownlee]

Edit your comment and say, congratulations, happy 32nd birthday. Specifically to Ellis and his 30 seconds. Definitely not his 32nd, but it will make sense.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Yeah. Call him Unk.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Say happy birthday. Unk.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. Anyway, thanks for watching. Thank you for listening and specifically for subscribing, which means we'll catch you guys next week. Peace.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Bye.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Waveform is produced by Adam Molina and Rufus Mulhaupt. We are partnered with Vox Media Podcast Network. Our tractor music was created by Vain. Still.

[Rufus Mulhaupt]

Bingo.

[Andrew Cunningham]

Let's go.

[Marques Brownlee]

Wow. I'm on a roll with trivia. That's exciting.

[Andrew Cunningham]

I ain't.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's so exciting.

[Andrew Cunningham]

I'm on a generational collapse.

[Madison Skinner]

This is advertiser Content from Verizon Business let's go.

[Andrew Cunningham]

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[Marques Brownlee]

Here at Roebling Sporting Club, it's unlike any other sports bar that I've found in New York or in Brooklyn or anywhere really. Like, you might not know anybody when you walk in, but you definitely are going to know people when you leave.

[Sean Rawlinson]

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[Andrew Cunningham]

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[Sean Rawlinson]

You need a reliable network to make sure you can manage all of those different games at different time zones throughout the day. Verizon Business keeps things moving

[Madison Skinner]

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[Marques Brownlee]

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