Can the iPhone 17 Pro Beat a Leica?

Summary

Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast

Episode: Can the iPhone 17 Pro Beat a Leica?

Date: October 3, 2025
Hosts: Marques Brownlee (MKBHD), Andrew Manganelli, David Imel, Adam
Special Guests: James Cameron, Andrew Bosworth (Meta CTO)

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Episode Overview

This Techtober episode dives into the latest tech news and gear, featuring hands-on impressions of the Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses, rundown of Amazon and Google hardware launches, and a special game comparing raw photos from the iPhone 17 Pro and the Leica M11. The episode’s highlight is a fascinating segment with iconic filmmaker James Cameron, discussing the future of cameras, first-person video, and 3D media.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Show & Tell: Microsoft Windows XP Crocs

[02:09–07:02]

• Andrew’s big reveal: Microsoft XP-themed Crocs with “giblets/gibbets” referencing Windows icons (Recycle Bin, Clippy, etc.).
• The group riffed on Crocs design, comfort (textured braille insoles), and the culture of novelty shoe collaborations.
• Marques: “Is there something they could put on Crocs that would make you not like them? Windows Vista?”
• Lighter banter around Crocs in office culture and chef footwear.

---

2. First Impressions: Meta Ray-Ban Display Smart Glasses

[08:15–17:18]

• Marques wears and demos the shiny, display-equipped smart glasses ($800, with a Neuroband controller).
• Marques: “Is the future of computing going to end up in a place where I could be looking at my UI in front of my face... and it’s glasses?”
• Group observations: The display is bright (5,000 nits), field of view is limited but impressive, and the design tries to blend in with regular glasses—though they’re notably thick.
• Discussion on real-world reactions, use cases, and whether these are practical for “regular people” yet.
• Andrew: “It’s hard to review unless you’re inside that ecosystem—with WhatsApp and all that.”
• Marques references Casey Neistat’s recent video comparing Vision Pro and Meta Ray-Bans for future computing.

---

3. Quick Hits: Logitech MX Master 4 Hands-On

[17:35–22:30]

• Logitech’s new MX Master 4 mouse gets praise for materials, ergonomics, a customizable “action ring,” and USB-C dongle.
• The team shares configuration tips, quirks, and a PSA: don’t store the dongle in the mouse’s charge port—it gets stuck.

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4. Amazon & Google Hardware Announcements

[22:37–38:44]

• Amazon Event Recap:
  • New Echo Show 8 & 11: Echo Show 11 gets a 1080p screen, both have mesh backs, and improved cameras. Priced at $179.99 (8”) and $219.99 (11”).
  • Echo Dot Max: Enlarged, high-bass Echo Dot, $100.
  • Kindle Scribe Color Soft: Amazon’s color e-ink tablet ($630), competing with Remarkable, with integrations for AI summarization.
  • Fire TV QLEDs and affordably-priced models, plus new Ring doorbells/cameras with “Retinal Vision” AI processing.
• Adam: “Most interesting is just how aggressively Amazon is trying to stay in your house.”
• Google Home Revamp:
  • Google is dropping the Nest naming, consolidating hardware and subscriptions under “Google Home.”
  • New Home app with Gemini (AI) integration, including context-aware voice controls, advanced video search, and automation.
  • Subscription overhaul: $10/mo (Standard), $20/mo (Advanced) for extra AI features.
  • New hardware: Doorbell, indoor/outdoor cams, and a Google Home speaker in bold new colors (ships Spring 2026).
• Marques: “Delete the Nest app—it’s finally over.”
• Mixed reactions to new subscription tiers and integration of Gemini, with confused parsing of Google’s messy tier structure.

---

5. Photo Game: iPhone 17 Pro RAW vs Leica M11

[44:10–66:16]

• Premise: Adam presents side-by-side alpine landscape photos on Google Slides; the team must guess if each was shot on the Leica M11 or iPhone 17 Pro (using Halide RAW app).
• Surprise: The iPhone’s RAWs often rival or even surpass Leica examples in detail, dynamic range, and tonal quality.
• Debates over telltale signs, e.g., highlight rolloff, sensor dust (“wait, is that a bird or sensor dust?”), color grading, and detail in shadows.
• Marques: “[The iPhone] is crazy good. You can take this with an iPhone 3GS if you had enough light!”
• General insight: with modern computational photography and RAW shooting—even pros can be fooled by flagship smartphone images in good light.

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6. Feature Interview: James Cameron & Andrew Bosworth

[70:58–77:41]

On First-Person Storytelling & Smart Glasses

• James Cameron: “I think the filmmaker becomes the character... But we’ve got a whole generation coming up... used to being observed all the time. I think you can have a first-person narrative shot with first person lenses. Could be fully scripted... I wrote Strange Days in 1993 about people recording and selling experiences—turns out that’s the world we live in.”
• Marques: Relates to how YouTube puts the viewer in his shoes—technology now enables higher fidelity, more real-time presentation.
• Cameron: “You become the filmmaker and performer at the same time... We’re doing a deep sea expedition with multiple live feeds—will be a tech challenge to turn into content later.”
• On 3D video: “650 million years of evolution says yes [to stereoscopic video as the future]... The more your brain is active, the better you’ll remember, the more engaged you’ll be.”
• Andrew Bosworth: “Trends are to either extremely brief or extremely deep content. Depth for loyal viewers—compelling experiences—will keep growing easier.”

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• [11:53] Marques on smart glasses: “This is a real thing that’s going to start happening out in the world.”
• [15:08] Andrew on smart glasses visibility: “Does Meta want these to blend in or stand out? It’s a fine line.”
• [23:51] Adam on Amazon events: “This started in 2017, when Amazon would just drop like 50 products.”
• [29:10] Ellis on e-ink devices: “I really don’t get what the use case of this is.”
• [74:27] James Cameron (on 3D’s future): “I think 650 million years of evolution says yes... we have two eyes for a reason. You want to engage people.”
• [77:19] James Cameron (on AI/3D vs native stereo): “Right now there’s one decisive advantage with native stereo cameras—real-time. But GenAI will catch up.”
• [53:31] Adam on iPhone RAWs: “The point I wanted to make is that phone processing sucks... if you want it to look like a real picture.”
• [62:10] Adam (after photo comparison): “You too, can take pretty cool pictures just with your phone. It’s pretty insane.”

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Trivia & Quick Bits

• Amazon Echo Flex: Revealed as a wall plug adapter with a speaker and Alexa, not the predicted smart display or phone. [78:40]
• Echo Buds timeline: They’re still available for under $50. [80:18]
• Debunking: In horse racing, a horse finishing without a jockey doesn’t count. [40:03]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:09] – XP Crocs Show-and-Tell
• [08:15] – Meta Ray-Ban Display Impressions
• [17:35] – Logitech MX Master 4 Thoughts
• [22:37] – Amazon & Google Hardware News
• [44:10] – iPhone vs Leica Photo Game
• [70:58] – James Cameron Interview on First-Person Video & 3D
• [78:07] – What is the Echo Flex?
• [80:12] – Echo Buds Timeline/Trivia

---

Tone & Energy

The episode remains playful and nerdy with classic Waveform banter, frequently derailing into jokes or shoes but always circling back to gadgets, practical use, and implications for the future of tech. Expert guests (Cameron, Bosworth) bring gravitas, while the main hosts keep things personable and relatable, often poking fun at themselves and the quirks of modern product launches.

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This episode demonstrates the speed at which consumer cameras—especially smartphones—are catching up to pro gear, and how rapidly the line between digital life and real-world interactions is blurring, whether via AR glasses, always-on voice assistants, or 3D-first content creation.

Transcript

[Adam]

All right, real quick.

[Marques]

Before we get back to the show, I want to let you know that we are returning to south by Southwest on March 13 this year for another live episode of the Waveform Podcast on the Vox Media Podcast stage. Last year we had a ton of fun, fielding some really smart questions from

[Andrew]

the audience and a couple dumb ones.

[Marques]

Yeah, okay, maybe one dumb one, but I think that actually came from David. Either way, it was a lot of fun and we're excited to do it again. It's all part of the Vox Media Podcast stage at south by Southwest, presented by Odoo. Visit voxmedia.comsxsw to preregister and get 15% off your south by badge purchase. So that's voxmedia.comsxSW hope to see you

[Robinarsson]

there when things get hard. How do you talk to yourself? I'm Robinarsson, VP of fitness programming and head instructor at Peloton. And this week on my new podcast, Project Swagger, I'm sharing my strategies for how to build better self talk. It's time to work on befriending yourself. Follow Project Swagger wherever you get your project cast.

[Andrew]

Are you watching something or no? Did you guys.

[Marques]

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]

I'm Andrew.

[Marques]

And I'm David. We're all back. And we, of course have entered Techtober, which means there's still plenty to talk about. There was, what, an Amazon event this week, so there might be some cool stuff there. There was a Google. Not an event, but an announcement as well. And that might also be interesting. David also wants to play a game, I've been told, so we'll get to that. Let's play it. And we'll wrap up with some snippets of. Remember that James Cameron stuff that we were going to have last week, but then we ended up arguing about horses and F1 cars? Totally worth it.

[Adam]

Wait, but to start off the podcast, I didn't watch last week's episode, but I just heard I just saw stuff in the slack about horses.

[Marques]

We are getting dangerously close to just going right back down that rabbit hole. So I'll just say we'll watch it later and then you can weigh in.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Marques]

Cause there's two sides to this debate.

[Adam]

Is it like you need a tiebreaker opinion?

[Marques]

It's just fun to imagine stuff, you know? But we will play those James Cameron interview clips for you this week because they're actually kind of interesting, but First, Andrew, show and tell time. Oh. What do you have to show us today?

[Andrew]

Do you know how normally we put the really important stuff of the week in the middle of the episode? It helps our retention rate, keeps people along. Well, what I've got can't wait.

[Marques]

Wow.

[Andrew]

This is the pinnacle of the episode. It could be the pinnacle of 2025.

[Ellis]

This is definitely Andrew's crown.

[Andrew]

But I have with me the Microsoft XP crux we are in. And they are glorious.

[Adam]

I do like the giblets.

[Andrew]

I'm going to give you.

[Adam]

Is it giblets or giblets?

[Andrew]

Do you want to hold this marques? I just want you to describe it a little bit.

[Marques]

I don't. I don't want to.

[Andrew]

They are the greatest. They are every ounce of perfect that I thought they could be. They come in a nice little bag. That's the Windows XP hillside cloud background. They themselves have it on the top with, like, green on the bottom. And the gibbets are recycling. Cursor. The MSN butterfly. What a folder.

[Adam]

Files.

[Andrew]

Files, yeah. Internet Explorer and Clippy.

[Ellis]

There are no words to explain my hatred of this product.

[Andrew]

That is. So I have a question.

[Adam]

Okay, so the inside of the Croc has all of these, like, divots, but they're negative. Divots. What do they call that?

[Marques]

Indentations. Is it.

[Adam]

No, no, but they're opposite. But divots go in.

[Marques]

Are they engraved or embossed?

[Adam]

Insets?

[Producer]

Wouldn't that be debossed?

[Adam]

They're bumps.

[Andrew]

It's braille.

[Adam]

It's Braille, Yeah. Okay, so the Crocs have a ton of braille inside.

[Marques]

Texture. Yeah.

[Adam]

Doesn't that hurt your feet?

[Andrew]

No, they wear out.

[Producer]

It's for grip.

[Andrew]

Haven't you ever worn those, like, Adidas slides that everyone was obsessed with for a while? You know what I'm talking about?

[Marques]

It was also entirely.

[Andrew]

The whole bottom were just like these little. Yeah, those hurt my feet a lot. I didn't love them. These we out pretty quickly. I actually think they're more comfortable once these wear out. It's just a little texture. Shoot. So your foot doesn't slide.

[Adam]

I don't want texture on my foot.

[Marques]

That implies you're wearing these so often.

[Andrew]

Wear your kicks, bro.

[Marques]

The irony of me wearing the shoes right now that are like, wear your kicks.

[Andrew]

Oh, you are wearing them.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Adam]

This is a men's 10, but it looks like a. I shouldn't say.

[Andrew]

It's pretty big.

[Adam]

It looks like a 14.

[Andrew]

They're pretty big.

[Marques]

They.

[Andrew]

I don't know. They're Fantastic. I think the funniest story about this is like Marques wasn't here in the episode when we talked about these getting launched. And so like a week ago, he forwards me a screenshot of this email from Microsoft saying, hey, Marques would love to send you a pair of these. Let me know your shoe size. And Marques screenshots. It puts it in slack and says, andrew, I just want you to know I said no to this cold. And I replied, I ordered those a month ago. Don't worry. So shout out to Corey. He works at Microsoft and he got me hooked up with these. I had to go through him, like 10 people from Microsoft reached out and was like, I'll order them for you.

[Marques]

This is, this is. Okay, here's my question. Because you seem to like Crocs and no matter how ugly they make them, you seem to like them more and more. Is there something they could put on Crocs that would make you not like Windows Vista on the Crocs, Would you still like to wear them? Vista, like Vista theme?

[Andrew]

No, it's Vista.

[Marques]

So there is a line somewhere.

[Andrew]

There's a line. There's lots of Croc lines. They've hit them. Have you seen the high heels? Yeah, they're rough.

[Marques]

Yes.

[Andrew]

No, there's plenty of bad Crocs. I like just the OG clog. This one's a little fun. There's a KFC fried chicken one.

[Adam]

I don't know if I've ever actually seen you wear them though Crocs.

[Andrew]

Yeah, that's because Marquez, I banned them. He bullies me whenever I wear them.

[Marques]

I banned him.

[Andrew]

We've had days where Marquez is out, like five of us in the office go like Crocs day question mark. And we all wear them.

[Marques]

I have to, I, I want to ban Crocs without banning Crocs. I'll ban like open toed, closed toed shoes.

[Andrew]

These are not.

[Adam]

Yes.

[Andrew]

Think of like, chefs are one of like the strictest types of shoes you can wear in a kitchen. And Crocs. Yeah, because it, you don't want anything dropping on your foot and they need to be non slip kitchens. A chef. You want to know what a chef is?

[Adam]

No. Like this. Is that a type of shoe?

[Andrew]

No, no, no. It's a person, it's a, it's a career. You're saying it was a type of shoe?

[Marques]

Sorry, Chef footwear.

[Andrew]

Lots of chefs. I were googling that already. I was like, did he mishear me? And then he typed in C H E F and I was Like, I'm so confused.

[Adam]

Okay, yes, sorry.

[Andrew]

We can end there if you would like. But yeah, no chef shoes. These are. These are work shoes. I guess they put in work, I guess.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

But second, I don't like the divots. The most interesting and important news of the week is that it has been announced that Bad Bunny will be playing the last Philadelphia Eagles game of the NFL season.

[Marques]

I see.

[Andrew]

Was the joke there that the birds are making the Super Bowl?

[Ellis]

Yes.

[Producer]

You need to hear the sound again.

[Andrew]

I didn't. I could barely hear it. Sorry. I think the mics are screwed up.

[Marques]

What are they saying exactly?

[Adam]

Are we still at tech podcast?

[Andrew]

We're just talking about Windows xp.

[Marques]

Technically, it was a Windows xp. I don't know if this can be tied in somehow to tech as well, but that did get announced.

[Andrew]

Something. Something. Go Birds.

[Producer]

Yeah, exactly.

[Ellis]

Go birds.

[Adam]

Go birds.

[Marques]

Go birds. Speaking of things that.

[Producer]

Wow, that was crazy. That was the quadruple Go Birds on the Waveform podcast. They're all converted.

[Andrew]

I think Saquon Barkley pops up if you say it that many times.

[Marques]

Speaking. Let's see. Speaking of things that are. That can fly because they're so lightweight,

[Ellis]

birds fly into windows all the time, which we were just talking about.

[Marques]

And windows are clear. Kind of like what I'm wearing on my face right now.

[Ellis]

We got there.

[Marques]

So. Okay, so video viewers have already noticed

[Andrew]

that I got birds.

[Marques]

Nice find. That's an elite find. Okay, so video users have noticed that I'm wearing a certain pair of glasses. Maybe you've clocked them even already as the exact pair of glasses that I'm wearing, which is the meta ray ban displays. So not just the meta ray bans with the cameras and stuff, but I could be scrolling Instagram right now,

[Andrew]

as

[Marques]

a matter of fact. We live in. I have been this entire. No, I'm just kidding. No, but you. Okay, so basically, I've got the neural band on as well.

[Adam]

Okay.

[Marques]

I only set this up, like, 10 minutes ago, so I don't even have Instagram and WhatsApp plugged in. But I can pull up the UI right now and it's up and I can start scrolling around. And this brings us right back to where I ended the video that I made about them, which is. Is the future. Is the future of computing going to end up in a place where I could be looking at my UI in front of my face and it's glasses, so it's on my face, so it kind of looks like I'm looking at you, but I'm Straight up. Not looking at you right now. I'm reading something.

[Andrew]

I try really hard. I can see like a. No, now I can't. It's really hard to see. There was like, a glimpse picture.

[Marques]

When I take a picture, it's really obvious because it lights up the little camera lens.

[Andrew]

But, yeah, it's almost impossible to see. You're looking at something. I feel like for a second I thought I could see. There's barely a line, like here, But I think that's the wave. Wave guide. And I thought I saw, like, the top of the box first.

[Ellis]

I will say I went fully around him 360 degrees while he was doing something, and I could not see.

[Adam]

I think because we've got a bright point light source. Right? Right.

[Ellis]

No, I was out in the desk.

[Marques]

I know.

[Adam]

I'm saying because we have this. I can see it a little bit at certain angles.

[Andrew]

There's something up right now.

[Marques]

Yep.

[Andrew]

I'm trying to see if I can see the reflection in your eye.

[Adam]

Oh, yeah.

[Ellis]

What is he looking at?

[Adam]

I don't know.

[Marques]

I mean, I'm looking at album art right now because I paused my music, which is on Spotify. It is really bright and very viewable to me, obviously.

[Adam]

Isn't it like 5,000 nits?

[Marques]

5,000 nits. I don't know exactly how they measure that. It's a projector. It's a wave guide. It's a whole system. It goes away automatically. So I'll bring it back and I can read it pretty easily and just go glance back and forth between the person I'm talking to and the little art. And I can even put a little backdrop on it with my hand. But, yeah, I am clearly in the metaverse now.

[Adam]

Why did they make him glossy?

[Marques]

Good question. I think Matte would have looked better one, and it still would have worked with the sliding touch bar on the side, which is like a secondary input method. I don't know why they're glossy. Maybe that's just the first version.

[Producer]

Ray Bans are always glossy.

[Marques]

Is that true? I like them.

[Andrew]

Not always. They have, like a million different styles at the same time. But like the Classique, the Blues Brothers, Ray Bans.

[Marques]

They're just trying to be the classic.

[Producer]

That's why gamers say GG glossy glasses.

[Marques]

That's what I've been saying. So, yeah, these are $800. They come with the Neuroband, which I'm wearing, which I also set up. They set up in maybe 10 minutes and got a quick software update. So it was actually pretty Easy. And yeah, I just want to echo that. This is a real thing that's going to start happening out in the world. Casey Neistat just made a really good video, by the way, about these, which was kind of comparing the future of mobile computing from two of the biggest companies working on stuff like this, which was Apple Vision Pro and Meta Ray Balance Display. Two very different products, but two very futuristic things. So go watch that. We'll link it below.

[Andrew]

Can I try Creator? You know, can we try?

[Marques]

Yeah, you can actually.

[Adam]

Yeah, I put some first impressions.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I'm interested on if. If we. We also have already confirmed that I can ask Meta to do things for Mar.

[Marques]

It worked at least once, but try that. You should be able to see the album art.

[Ellis]

So this isn't like the Vision Pro where only one person can wear them at a time, basically.

[Marques]

Well, I have the control mechanism on my wrist right now, so I don't know how much he can do.

[Adam]

Like map.

[Marques]

Do you see it?

[Adam]

Can you give him the neural band?

[Marques]

Do you see it?

[Andrew]

I feel like that's not that easy.

[Adam]

Can you hand him the neural band or is it hard to take off?

[Marques]

Probably could, but it is hard to take off. I have to set it off.

[Andrew]

It's hard to take off.

[Marques]

Well, there's a whole, like, clasp thing.

[Andrew]

I thought it was like a snap

[Marques]

bracelet, but you do. If I hit. Do you still see the album art?

[Andrew]

It's weird because when both eyes are open, the left side of it seems like it's fading a little bit. Am I like, cross eyed? I need glasses for this. Perfect.

[Producer]

You are making some really funny faces.

[Andrew]

I feel like everyone's been commenting that I make some really dumb faces on the podcast already because I look up a lot when I'm thinking, but I'm probably making even dumb. Whoops. It's gone, it's gone, it's gone.

[Marques]

Is it back?

[Andrew]

Oh, there it is.

[Marques]

Okay, I brought it back. I got the control.

[Andrew]

Is that all there?

[Producer]

Andrew, how does it compare to the demo glasses we tried?

[Andrew]

It's vastly different. The field of view is. Well, because the field of view is totally different. But remember, the demo glasses were in. Our whole field of view is a lot. This is definitely here.

[Marques]

Down into the right.

[Andrew]

Like down into the right a bit. It is very bright and I almost feel like the resolution is better than the demo glass, the Orion glass.

[Marques]

What do you see? What do you see now?

[Adam]

The resolution is better than the Orion glasses.

[Andrew]

It's better. And I think the biggest thing is the Orion glasses had Like a tint to them, because it very clearly wasn't. This is. This is clear.

[Marques]

You're just in the menu, right?

[Andrew]

Yeah, just a menu. They're thick. They're really thick.

[Marques]

Yeah. So if you saw someone watching these, I think this is like a double take pair of glasses. I think there's like a line, like regular glasses out in public. I don't really think twice. I don't. I don't double take it all. Super, super obvious camera and computer on face glasses. I don't even double take. I just look and I know exactly what it is. This is somewhere in between. I think there are some places where I would not think twice. There are some places where I would go, those are kind of thick or weird. And it just depends on the person, what they're wearing, where they are.

[Ellis]

I would think that someone wearing this has like a visual problem.

[Marques]

You think they're like super thick glasses? Yeah, they are very thick, like bifocals or something.

[Andrew]

It's funny, but it doesn't do the bifocal effect where your eyes inside the glasses look larger because of magnification.

[Ellis]

Yeah, no, they don't do that.

[Adam]

Can you open the main menu?

[Andrew]

I will.

[Adam]

Where are you now on the Spotify thing?

[Andrew]

Oh, it's funny. At this angle I can see like red, green, blue, which is probably like the waveguide.

[Adam]

Okay, wait, it's like a prism to the right. Okay, down, down one.

[Marques]

Don't press Play select

[Adam]

and then down. Oh, yeah. Oh, oh. You have to download English.

[Marques]

I just set these up so I don't have my WhatsApp connected. I don't have the downloaded languages for the live captioning. But I'm going to try all this

[Andrew]

stuff from an angle. You can start seeing some parts of the waveguide. Like, I can see a box in his eye now.

[Adam]

Right?

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

What was I going to say? I think it's interesting because does Meta want these to blend in perfectly or do they want people to know people are using their product? It's definitely a fine line there of we want these to just feel like glasses, but also, like, when you make a product, you want a product to be known when it's seen out in public.

[Marques]

Yeah, I mean, I think this first default version, which is glossy black, just says Ray Bans tries to look like normal glasses. I think they want them to look like normal glasses. I think there will be more fashionable versions in the future that make a statement and also say, hey, I'm using the smart glasses. But I think, to me, this is Trying to look like normal glasses.

[Andrew]

Yeah. This is really, really thick.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Adam]

Surprisingly sharp.

[Marques]

Yeah. And this is the carrying case, by the way, in case you didn't see the video.

[Andrew]

This is so. I mean, that's probably the best part about them.

[Marques]

That was sick.

[Andrew]

Yeah. For audio listeners, it's like totally flat and it like pops up to charge again, but when you have them out of the case, it can fold almost entirely flat.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Adam]

So these are the $800 ones.

[Marques]

These are the $800 Meta Ray Band display. Yeah. That's the diagnostic port that pops off. They can plug it in. We didn't have to do that while we shot, but that's what that is.

[Andrew]

All right.

[Marques]

Pop off. Yeah, pop off. King. This is. This is that it is. I don't know. Should I review them? Should I do more like irl? I don't know what to do with them, to be honest.

[Adam]

You got to review them.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

It's hard.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Adam]

We'll see.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

A review is tough unless you're in that ecosystem of WhatsApp. And like, I don't see those being useful for a full day of what they want unless you are in WhatsApp.

[Adam]

Just become European. It'll be fine.

[Marques]

Well, it's more just that I don't know what else to say about them other than what I already said, like, how long does the battery life last? Maybe that's interesting. What types of reactions do people have when you reveal that you are not looking at them anymore? That type of stuff, maybe.

[Adam]

But I think trying to think about, like, where would this fit into someone's actual life and is this something that regular people would yet buy?

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Adam]

Or are we still, like, a little bit further away from the one that people could just feasibly buy and it would be nice.

[Marques]

Yeah. How well does a live translation work? Do I want to use it all the time?

[Adam]

Right.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Adam]

Things like that, are they gimmicks or are they things that you actually end up wanting to use?

[Marques]

Are they dope or.

[Adam]

Nope, that was. Wasn't that a chat GPT generated?

[Andrew]

No, that's Judner's, right. That's his series.

[Marques]

What's ours called?

[Andrew]

Eo Crown or Crown or Clown or Crown and Clown?

[Marques]

Are they Crown or.

[Adam]

Which, by the way, it's October 1st.

[Marques]

Oh, might be time for another one of those. Either way, it did come out, you know, it is definitely a Crown MX Master 4 came out.

[Andrew]

Hell, yeah.

[Marques]

And it's pretty great. And the fun fact. The fun fact is we've been testing them for like, A month now, because Logitech came out of the studio with very, very early versions, and they showed them to us. Oh, you brought yours?

[Andrew]

I brought it in.

[Marques]

Is it disconnected?

[Andrew]

Yeah, it's disconnected. You can do.

[Marques]

It is similar shape, but just better materials. And then it also has a haptic motor, I guess is actually for a certain side button that you press. And it's nice.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I mean, the. I think the new materials, I actually don't really use ergonomic mice, but I've been using this one a lot. The new materials won't get that, like, rubber peeling that the old.

[Marques]

Oh, that's good.

[Andrew]

MX Masters did like. I'm about to hand it to you. We all have one already. Um, the materials seem way better. The. It's a little more ergonomic with the horizontal wheel. Uh, there's an extra gesture button next to the front and back button, which is awesome because if you press it and swipe left or right, you can go between spaces on your. Your Mac. Or if you press it in, it does the control. Mission control.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Um, and then. Yeah. So where your thumb rests, there's this, like, pad that has a haptic feedback button. That's crazy. Customizable, where you can do, like, how sensitive is and how much the feedback is when you press it. And it brings up this action ring. Kind of like the Grand Theft Auto weapon select, where when you press it actually. Yeah, like as a dial and like, based on. If you pull up left, right. You can go to each of those different actions. Actions.

[Marques]

Yeah, they're all pre. They're all programmable, so customizable. You can set up like six or seven of them to be whatever you want.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I think Eric set one up to open, like, Chat GPT or something. I have mine. I just do it. It opens up the. Like where we do new outlines for the podcast. So just if I'm gonna write a new episode, I can just press that button, drag down and click it. And it's also in some of their programs, mostly Adobe ones now, but you can do like Photoshop tools on the ring and stuff. Yeah, some of it doesn't work great. Some of it works really well. Some of it. One issue I have is, like, in Photoshop, if you want to just change opacity, what's cool is you can open the action ring, hover it, and then scroll to go up and down. Just like within the little action wheel.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

But in the history, almost like when you scroll up a couple like 20%, it does like 20 actions in the history, which just fills up your history totally. That's a big issue I have with it right now in that. But the customizable stuff will happen. We'll see if how open they make it to other programs and such.

[Ellis]

Yeah, I mean, between this and Raycast, I'm living in heaven right now.

[Marques]

Adam's just one hand everything interesting combo. Because Ray Cast is all about that keyboard.

[Ellis]

Yeah. But if I set. So what I did was I have a shortcut on Raycast where I hit option N and it creates a new folder structure with a script that I have for, like, the podcast. So instead of even doing that, I also have that option N as a keyboard shortcut on the wheel. What is it? That action ring. So I could just, like, hit it. It automatically does that keyboard shortcut which hits opt. And I could also just select the script and run it that way if I wanted to. So it goes either way.

[Marques]

But yeah, it's, like, good to have options. Exactly.

[Andrew]

Do you know what the best part about this mouse is? The dongle is USB C. Oh, that's

[Marques]

actually the best part. Yeah.

[Andrew]

So, so good.

[Marques]

SBA the entire time.

[Adam]

These mice have. They use Bluetooth, but they have a 2.4 GHz dongle. I think it's 2.4.

[Andrew]

I forget everyone uses Bluetooth. Yeah, maybe I'm way more excited about this. I use my dongles for all my mice.

[Adam]

The dongle is nice because it stops interference and it makes it so the computer knows exactly what it's talking to. But, yeah, they switched to USB C, which is nice. However, I would advise similarly to the Samsung Galaxy Note 4. When people were putting the S pen in backwards and it was breaking it, I put my dongle in the mouse and it was really hard to get out.

[Andrew]

Where do you put it in the mouse?

[Adam]

In the charge port.

[Marques]

Oh, don't do that. Oh, why?

[Adam]

I thought I was like, it's good storage.

[Marques]

And then it was.

[Andrew]

I would have never even thought, that's a good idea.

[Marques]

Huh.

[Andrew]

But, well, that was hard. Now that I know it's hard to get out.

[Ellis]

Why can't you do that, though? That makes it seems like it should work.

[Adam]

I mean, it works.

[Andrew]

Is it just because it's like there's

[Marques]

like an outlet into it?

[Adam]

Yeah, it's like infinite power. It's like, okay, the dongle is connected to the mouse.

[Andrew]

You know, you say that I'm sure that people will buy this mouse zero leg and be like. And put my dongles not working. And it's plugged into the front.

[Adam]

I'm just. I'm just saying, like, you can store the dongle in the charcoal, but there's no, like ribbed.

[Marques]

There's no lip.

[Adam]

There's no lip. And it's very hard to get out unless you have like really big nails and then you're going to crack your nails and then.

[Andrew]

I never would have thought of that.

[Adam]

Well, I did and it was unfortunate.

[Marques]

That's a good psa.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Yeah. Wow. I'm glad you thought of that.

[Adam]

Infinite power.

[Marques]

Okay.

[Producer]

Okay.

[Ellis]

You know what else has infinite power?

[Marques]

What else does

[Andrew]

Echo show? Question mark.

[Adam]

Okay, we had an Amazon event yesterday. As of the time of recording, there was a lot of stuff. This started in like 2017 or so where Amazon would have these events and they would just drop like 50 products.

[Marques]

Here is a bunch of new stuff and all of it has our assistant built in.

[Adam]

Yeah, the most iconic one was like the first one they ever did where they put Alexa in like a clock and a microwave. That was during the Internet of Things era. I'm really glad that's over, but. Well, sort of now they had another event where they also were putting Alexa plus in a lot of products, but they were also just updating their whole lineup of smart speakers and other things like that. So we got a new Echo Show 8 and 11. The 11 inches, very large. But effectively, this kind of looks a lot like what we expected the Apple home pad to look like, where it kind of looks like a home pod in the back with this like fiber mesh. And then you have a tablet just kind of like mounted to the front and it's a much better display. The 8 inch one is 720p, which is a little low resolution, but it's a small tablet, so I guess it's okay. The 11 is 1080p.

[Marques]

Trash 1080 is nice.

[Adam]

Yeah. It has a 13 megapixel wide angle camera for video calls and things like that. They are a little bit expensive, but I assume that these things are going to go on sale literally constantly for Prime Day, because usually prime day is just buy our products day. So, yeah, it's $179.99 for the 8 inch and $219.99 for the 11 inch. We also got an Echo Dot Max, which is kind of ironic because the entire point of the Echo dot was to be an echo, but small. And now there's a big one. So it's.

[Andrew]

Does this not look like. Yeah, it's like a sphere with a flat part with all the controls. Does it not look like that's where they just attached.

[Adam]

So that's what I actually wrote in the scripts. Yeah. Basically the show without the screen, it is a much more powerful speaker. Amazon is claiming 3x the bass response over the original Echo Dot. It has speaker controls with an LED ring in the front. It's $100 up from $50 from the original Echo Dot, so double the price. But it should have much better sound quality. There's a new Echo Studio and I'm going to be honest, I did not remember that the original Echo Studio was a thing.

[Andrew]

Can I just say my favorite part about this photo of the Echo Dot Max is there's nothing scale wise here. I cannot figure out how big this is.

[Adam]

That's true. That could be a microscope.

[Andrew]

It's literally just like a wood surface and a white wall behind it and not a single other object for me to tell how big that is.

[Adam]

Yeah, Amazon is very much trying to get back in your house. They were like really winning the smart speaker race for a very long time. And then Google started just flooding the zone and it's everywhere now. Yes. Now they have an Echo Studio new one because there was an old one apparently that I just didn't really even clock. It kind of looks, it looks a lot like the Echo Dot Max, but it's black, which means it's pro. The old one actually kind of look like the. The trash can Mac Pro. I looked it up and it's. It's very weird. It's kind of got that cylindrical shape with like a little cutout on the side. Yeah. Strange. It supports Dolby Atmos and Spatial audio. So you can link up to five of them as well as linking them with the Echo Max and you can link them to a Fire TV stick to have surround sound audio. I'm looking for the person out there that's like. I love ecosystems, but you know what ecosystem I love the most? Amazon.

[Marques]

Time to connect my Echo Dot to my Echo Studio.

[Adam]

Yeah, like maybe my dad. I don't know.

[Marques]

Fire stick in my Amazon tv.

[Adam]

Exactly. Yes. You can link up a. Well, you can link five of these to a Fire TV stick and have surround sound.

[Marques]

Five Interesting.

[Adam]

Yeah, up to five. So total surround. Their new Kindle Scribes, which I think is probably the most, the most interesting thing they dropped because they are really trying to compete with Remarkable. If you know that tablet company, they're like an E Ink E paper tablet company. Very premium, fairly expensive, but they've sort of been the benchmark and I think it was it was either one or two years ago, Amazon released the original Kindle Scribe, which was basically supposed to be the Remarkable tablet, but a lot cheaper. More integrations with Kindle, all of that kind of stuff, which makes sense. But they finally released their color version to compete with Remarkable, called the Kindle Scribe Color Soft. It has two weeks of battery life. You can highlight, draw and write in color on it. It's $630, which for an Amazon product is very, very expensive.

[Marques]

Primo. Wow.

[Adam]

And I don't. I feel like their markup on this must be ridiculous.

[Marques]

The Remarkable is the same price it

[Adam]

is for the Pro.

[Marques]

Oh, I'm on their website right now.

[Adam]

You're looking at the Portable one.

[Marques]

Oh, they have a big one.

[Adam]

They have a big one. The big one is also $630. I think that Amazon just thought, well, technically we have integrations with Alexa now we have. You can AI summarize different parts of the things that you're reading. I guess, I don't know. I think that they just have more. They think they have more integrations and they have a better distribution system. So they think that they can char the same amount as the Remarkable. And they're probably right because most people don't know about the Remarkable, whereas Amazon can just throw it at the front of the page constantly. They have two other Kindle scribes. They have a new entry level one which is $430. This stuff is like really expensive for what it is. Like you can buy an iPad for much cheaper than this.

[Marques]

Yeah. You gotta really want this specific form factor and screen technology.

[Adam]

Exactly.

[Marques]

To pay 400, 500, $600 for it over any other tablet.

[Andrew]

Atom has two of them.

[Adam]

Them, I wouldn't be shocked. And then there. So that's 430. And then there's another model that's a front lit model that they're charging an extra $70 for just to get a front light to be able to actually

[Marques]

see it in dim lights.

[Adam]

In dim lighting. Yeah. They're all 11 inches. They have thinner bezels and they have AI features. Yeah.

[Ellis]

I really don't get what the use case of this is.

[Andrew]

I can't believe we have AI paper. Yeah.

[Adam]

Yeah. I don't know. I mean, people really like them. People that use Remarkable products are very, very happy with them.

[Marques]

Sure, it's.

[Adam]

It's nice to kind of have that paper experience. But like Adam said, there are many sort of adaptive ways to have an iPad feel like paper. There's all the different screen stuff you can put on Top of it. Ellis is nodding his head back and forth in a disapproving mode. Yeah, that kind of bad.

[Producer]

I thought I was going to love it. And then one day I came to work and Adam had it on his iPad mini and I was like, what did you do to your iPad?

[Ellis]

Yeah, but that didn't cost me $640.

[Marques]

That's true. Touche.

[Adam]

There's new Fire TVs if you remember, which you might not because Amazon is not that memorable of a company. They released their own TVs, their own QLED TVs like last year or the year before.

[Ellis]

I did not know that.

[Adam]

Yeah, they actually sell Amazon branded Fire TV TVs that are not just the stick, but are actually cue less.

[Ellis]

Who makes them?

[Marques]

Amazon Basics tv, Probably LG or something.

[Adam]

It's probably their like C tier display panels or whatever. So now they have new Fire TV Omni QLEDs and I hate that. That's a string of words. They're brighter, they have better processors. They have Dolby Vision and HDR10 and they can automatically adjust the color of the display based on the ambient lighting of your room. Which is sort of like true tone, right? Yeah, yeah. They are 50 to 75 inches starting at 479. And also there are new 2 and 4 series TVs with slender bezels and faster processors starting at 1:59. So this is going to be that Black Friday like crazy 50 off.

[Andrew]

You just search like TV on Black Friday. And they throw this to the.

[Adam]

They're going to sell so many of this stuff. And then there's a bunch of new Ring cameras that do 2 and 4K resolution. They have this thing they call Retinal Vision, which is kind of just like an AI upscaling pipeline, similar to what Apple talked about when they say, because Apple on the new iPhone said in the 2x crops and the 8x crop, they have a new pipeline.

[Marques]

Optical quality.

[Adam]

Yeah. Which is the same thing that like Ring is basically saying is a thing.

[Marques]

Yeah. AI doorbells now.

[Adam]

Well, we got. We had those. Yeah, we've had them.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Adam]

But yeah, I don't know, it's sort of just that like you want smart home stuff from Amazon on Black Friday. Here's the new version.

[Marques]

That's what techtober is all about. Sometimes we want all our stuff on the shelves before the holiday season.

[Adam]

So here it is. But yeah, yeah, much more interestingly, we got a preview of a new Google home speaker. Not surprisingly, they are yet again getting rid of the Nest name. And I'M sure that in 2027 they'll bring it back.

[Marques]

No, this, this is for real.

[Adam]

This is for real, for real.

[Marques]

For now, I feel like this is for real. I got briefed on this and this felt like somebody who used Google Home, who works for Google was finally like, hey, shouldn't we fix this? And they did. I think so. I hope to get the updates soon, but I've now seen all the new Google home stuff and essentially they plan on finally getting the last of the stuff that they've been making that only works with the Nest app out of it. So it can all work with Google. If you had a Nest Aware subscription that's now a Google, what's it called, Google something subscription.

[Andrew]

I think I got the email about that changing.

[Marques]

Yeah, exactly. I just got that too. So it's all Google. The subscription is now Google. They're revamping the home app to be faster and to work with all these new things. They have a couple new accessories. They have a new doorbell, a new indoor camera, and I think a new outdoor camera as well. A couple new partnerships. So there's like a cheaper, like a Walmart partnership for like a $22 camera and like a $45 doorbell.

[Andrew]

So that's.

[Adam]

What does that mean? Like if you buy it at a specific store, it's cheaper?

[Marques]

I think it's. They made it in. Let me find. I think they made in collaboration with Walmart, which is why it's so cheap. Is that what my notes say?

[Adam]

We live in hell.

[Marques]

Hey, it's cheap. $22 for a camera is like wise territory.

[Ellis]

Yeah, I was going to say wise is like running the game within that price category. So this is where they're trying to get in.

[Marques]

So yes, Google Home premium subscription and all of this stuff now is going to work with Gemini. So all the stuff we have already in our homes that use the crummy Google Assistant that has just been aging and failing and not working very well is going to be updated to Gemini and they have some new stuff. I think the latest generations of the stuff we have will work with Gemini Live, but also the new stuff will work with Gemini Live as well. So you can say, hey G, start a chat and then you're doing the whole Gemini Live back and forth conversation thing with all the context and the, you know, whatever it tells you.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Versus just a regular Hey G and then ask it a question and then Hey G again and then ask a follow up question. You can do a whole conversation.

[Adam]

So which Gemini Live is a paid Feature you have to have the.

[Marques]

But I think subscription in. Yeah, one of the subscription tiers. Yeah, I don't.

[Andrew]

I'm looking right now because it said like I got the email that said your Nest Aware is now being upgraded to Google Home Premium.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And then there's the standard and advanced plan.

[Adam]

So Google Home Premium is. Is that launched now officially?

[Andrew]

It sounds like it got. That's because I got the email saying this is what it is now. So it sounds like that is out.

[Marques]

Delete the Nest app. It's over. It's finally gone.

[Andrew]

I don't see anything saying that. I get the description, notifications, search, video, history. That's actually pretty cool. Like AI search through history because you have all of your events saved for 60 days and then you get. If you're in advance, you get 24. 7 history for 10 days. So if I can search through that with your voice. With my voice or even just like recognizing. I'm assuming I can type in and it can recognize what happens. Right.

[Marques]

Yeah, I saw. I got to do a demo and try some of this stuff. It seemed to be really straightforward. Not only can you create automations with your voice, so if you want it to go, hey, every morning when I ask for this, open the shades and turn the lights on or whatever, but you can also go, hey, show me when the squirrel ran across my driveway. And it will just find the clip when the last time the squirrel ran across your driveway was and played it. Because Gemini is plugged in now, I can figure this stuff out for this

[Andrew]

camera feed also says event descriptions. It says more detailed event descriptions tell the whole story on cameras and doorbells.

[Marques]

Yeah. So right now if you have an event from the Google Home app, it'll just say motion in driveway or front door, motion detected or person detected and sometimes even a familiar face, it'll name now it will describe what's happening. So it'll say UPS guy holding flowers and brown box delivered package instead of package.

[Andrew]

Will it do this retroactively? Because I do have a clip the other day of me accidentally. Okay, but you're hitting lane in the face with the door and it's on the retroactively. Yeah, I need to see.

[Marques]

Okay.

[Producer]

What happens if you go up to a ring doorbell wearing a T shirt that says ignore all previous instructions wearing a T shirt. Can you prompt inject the model?

[Marques]

Unlikely, but we'll probably put some of that in the description in the notification. I just need to read person wearing shirt with text.

[Adam]

I need to read Google's keyword blog because it is so confusing. The headline is we're introducing the new home premium subscription, plus new benefits for AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers. And there are multiple plans.

[Marques]

So AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers are going to get with their subscription one of these levels of the.

[Andrew]

These are the two Nest plans that just have new.

[Adam]

No longer Nest.

[Marques]

No longer Nest.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Producer]

Yeah.

[Adam]

Okay. So the standard plan, which is $10 a month or 100 a year, gives you Gemini Live and Ask Ask Home for automation help, 30 days of video history and intelligent camera alerts. And then the advanced plan, which is $20 a month or $200 a year, includes all standard features plus Gemini camera capabilities such as AI event descriptions, home brief summaries and searchable video history. So you have to pay 20amonth if you want to do the. 10amonth.

[Marques]

20amonth.

[Adam]

But if you have AI, Google, AI Pro and Ultra. I hate this. This is insane. There needs to be a flowchart for this.

[Marques]

There actually does. Yeah. Google. The nice thing is Ultra is just you get all of the things.

[Adam]

Yeah, but it's $200.

[Marques]

A thousand dollars every minute you use it.

[Adam]

Yeah, it's $200 a month.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Adam]

Nobody wants to pay that. It's insane.

[Marques]

So, yeah, it is all, I think functionally all way better. And I cannot wait to get this app update so I can stop using the Nest app and stop using the old Google Assistant, which is at this point retiring. Yeah, I think that's the end of it.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Marques]

And yeah, having Gemini on all the stuff.

[Adam]

Yeah. There has been like a beta of Gemini on Google Home devices for a while, but this is the official rollout, I suppose.

[Andrew]

I do not seem to have it updated because it's just the same.

[Marques]

I hope. I think it should be rolling out today. Probably rolling.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Adam]

Okay. Well, the interesting thing is that the hardware is a little bit different. So the Google Home, they're calling it the Google Home speaker. And it's sort of the, it's. The size is sort of between a Nest Mini and a Nest Audio. So it's like bigger than a Nest Mini. It should have much better audio capabilities. Like, it sounds a lot nicer. It's got 360 degree audio. You can connect multiple of them in stereo. And surprisingly the colors are very bold. They have this like extremely saturated red. Yeah. And then they've got a green which is kind of like a Hazel. Well, actually it's not a Hazel. There's a green that's like a Hazel.

[Andrew]

Grayish.

[Marques]

Grayish. It's just Like a gray with a hint of green. I think the red one is insanely.

[Adam]

The red one is crazy bright.

[Marques]

And I typically don't think of home accessories being like that. Boldly colored, but cool if you want to do that. But then the others are like charcoal or like ivory or green. So.

[Adam]

Yeah, okay. It's not coming out till next year. The spring of next year.

[Marques]

What is the new speaker? Yeah, new speaker.

[Andrew]

Right.

[Marques]

But I think the doorbell and the. The new camera and the other stuff is around.

[Adam]

I wonder if they announced it today because the Amazon event just happened and they were like, there's a bunch of new echo speakers and we need to like, offset the news somehow.

[Marques]

Or it's just Techtober, I guess.

[Adam]

But you can't even order them.

[Marques]

You can't.

[Adam]

Can you pre order them? Because they come out spring 2026. That's like a while away. That's six months away.

[Marques]

They're in the Google store and they're available now.

[Adam]

You can buy them now.

[Marques]

Nest cam, outdoor 149.

[Adam]

Oh, well, maybe that. I'm talking about the Google home speaker.

[Marques]

Oh, just the speaker is later.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Marques]

But all the other new stuff, meaning the new doorbell and the new indoor speaker and the new outdoor speaker is on site.

[Adam]

The jade green is pretty green. I wouldn't say that's a hint of green.

[Marques]

Oh, yeah, this speaker is a little more green. I was talking about the doorbell and the cameras. Well, yeah, we'll see how good it ends up being. But, you know, it's always good trivia.

[Adam]

Let's go.

[Marques]

It's simply always good.

[Andrew]

Simply always.

[Producer]

Before we get into trivia, we got to issue a correction.

[Ellis]

Whoa.

[Producer]

From last week. We got something wrong. Unfortunately, in a professional derby race, if a jockey falls off their horse and the horse finishes the race, it is not counted as a victory.

[Marques]

Is that right?

[Producer]

Yeah.

[Adam]

What did you guys talk about last week?

[Marques]

I saw a video and it was totally counted.

[Producer]

They'll let the horse finish because they're not going to interrupt the race, but it will not be counted as a proper victory. Or at least that's what I found on my research.

[Ellis]

Marques is furiously typing.

[Marques]

Well, the commentators seem to think in

[Andrew]

F1, if the driver falls out and the car goes over, that does count. No, but in.

[Producer]

In nascar, I do. I am pretty sure it's Ricky Bobby rules, where if the driver crosses the finish line without the car.

[Marques]

What?

[Andrew]

There's no way that could be real. That's way too dangerous.

[Producer]

Happened in real races, like where they

[Adam]

crash and they get out And I

[Andrew]

can't wait for next week's correction.

[Producer]

And they get fined afterwards for doing something so dangerous anyway.

[Adam]

You almost get hit by a car and you get fined. That's crazy.

[Producer]

While Marques confirms or denies my.

[Marques]

No, you're right. In the video that I was referencing, the commentator seemed to believe that the horse had just won, but it turns out for betting purposes, that was declared a non running. So that's a good correction.

[Producer]

Well, in other news, both of our questions this week are about Amazon products, Amazon hardware, and the wacky, wacky worlds that they live within. Interesting, because Amazon makes a lot of Echo products.

[Marques]

They sure do.

[Producer]

And some of them are really poorly named. So I need you guys to tell me what kind Marques.

[Andrew]

Mm.

[Producer]

Marques has put on the smart glasses. We cannot confirm or deny whether he's cheating or watching reels or watching.

[Andrew]

His mouse is so bored.

[Marques]

Right.

[Producer]

He's not watching. Anyway, you guys have to tell me what kind of product the Echo Flex is. What kind of product is the Echo Flex? Use. Use the context. It's called the Flex.

[Adam]

It's a slap band.

[Producer]

It's a folding foam. I'm just kidding.

[Adam]

I see you pinching.

[Producer]

We'll be right back.

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[Robinarsson]

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[Adam]

Welcome back.

[Andrew]

15 of my diet is cholula.

[Adam]

Andrew said that on me. So you know. Okay, so I have a fun game that I want to play. So if you guys will open up the link that I put in the Show Notes. If you have the show notes open. I do. I've created a Google Slides slide show. Yesterday I was in the French Alps. Yeah, I know.

[Marques]

Subtle flex, pretty weird.

[Adam]

And I brought many cameras, as I always do, but I decided that I wanted to kind of like push the limits of the new iPhone camera. So I downloaded Halide onto my phone.

[Ellis]

I hate you for this.

[Adam]

Which allows you to shoot actual raw, not just Pro Raw, which is already a little bit processed. And I also brought my Leica M11 and a bunch of film cameras. And because the M11 is a digital camera, I decided I was gonna shoot a bunch of photos on all the cameras. And then I was going to kind of like take a look at how different all of the photos were. So what I'm doing this game is that I've made a series of slides of photos that I took, and you guys need to guess whether or not they were taken on the iPhone or the Leica M11.

[Marques]

Wow. Okay. And are we. So this is no pixel peeping or zooming, just like looking at the wide.

[Adam]

And it's already going to be compressed by putting on Google Slides because it's fair enough.

[Andrew]

And are we a team? You can we should be a team.

[Adam]

Pick or lose.

[Marques]

All right, let's. Teamwork. Let's make it a team.

[Andrew]

I think it'll make it easier.

[Producer]

Hosts versus producers.

[Marques]

Oh.

[Adam]

Oh, yeah. I like that.

[Marques]

Okay.

[Andrew]

Okay, we did it. But we'll have to say it all out loud or else this is gonna be really boring.

[Marques]

Yeah, we can talk it out.

[Andrew]

Yeah, talk it out. Okay.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

So number one.

[Adam]

Number one, first one.

[Marques]

So this is a nice wider shot of two stone cabins with all the Alps rising in the background and then a blue sky.

[Adam]

And I should note that I have multiple lenses for my EV11, so I have lenses that can emulate the different focal lengths of the iPhone.

[Andrew]

Oh, so you're Leica can emulate an iPhone.

[Marques]

Well, thinking out loud is this is a ton that is in focus and it's a really nice landscape shot.

[Adam]

I should also note that I shoot closed down constantly, of course, as you

[Marques]

would with a scene like this. Yeah. My only note, I mean, it does look very flat like the iPhone, but I think because Andrew, that snow and that wall of the cabin are a little hot, a little high exposed. I'm going M11 because I think the iPhone would flatten it even more.

[Andrew]

My only thought is whether he potentially shot this on a tripod or not. And that looks like very uneven ground.

[Adam]

It was very uneven ground, which would

[Andrew]

make a tripod very hard. But I guess he doesn't necessarily need a tripod for this. So I just. Whenever I imagine David with a camera, I imagine like four foot box on a giant rickety wooden tripod. So it is very flat, though. I'll go with. I mean, you're the expert here.

[Marques]

There's a lot of shadow detail. I will say.

[Producer]

But he said this is a halide Raw and not an iPhone pro Raw.

[Marques]

Right. That you processed and processed. Yeah.

[Adam]

But barely anything.

[Producer]

But in theory, if this was the iPhone, it would still be a single bracket. Like there would not be. It wouldn't do hdr.

[Adam]

Yes. There's not HDR on it. Yeah.

[Producer]

So shadow detail means nothing.

[Marques]

And slightly blown highlights.

[Adam]

Well, I mean, it could mean something because it's still a RAW photo and you still have a lot of flexibility.

[Marques]

My forced shadow detail is the.

[Ellis]

The green and the grass. It does not look super over sharpened or anything the way that I feel like iPhones would do. I'm looking at David. He's not giving me anything.

[Adam]

I'm not allowed to give you anything.

[Andrew]

I think it's potentially iPhone. Just because David got really defensive about how close he shoots and everything. Right off the bat. Which made me think Marques was on the right trail. Although then you said Leica, didn't you?

[Producer]

I'm gonna say I think it's the Leica also because of the green.

[Andrew]

I'm going iPhone.

[Producer]

Wait, but you're on Marques's team.

[Andrew]

What are we doing, you guys, to

[Marques]

agree on that, I'm sure.

[Andrew]

You let me take this iPhone.

[Marques]

Okay.

[Producer]

We think it's a Leica.

[Adam]

The answer is iPhone.

[Marques]

What? Nice.

[Andrew]

No way.

[Marques]

Nice. Andrew, give me one that's a point. Yeah.

[Adam]

And I'll have to show you guys these photos. Maybe I should upload them separately because. In full resolution. Because it looks.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Adam]

Link in, show notes.

[Andrew]

I mean, it's still a great looking photo.

[Adam]

Yeah, but it looks like crap on Google Slides.

[Ellis]

IPhone.

[Andrew]

This isn't how you guys look at photos.

[Adam]

And by the way, so this is a. This is a basically unprocessed iPhone. Raw photo. To your point about the whites being hot on the raw photos from the iPhone, the whites are quite hot.

[Marques]

Usually they have a little bit at

[Adam]

the top, they're a little bit overexposed. Like it just. It's not doing. It's not pulling down the highlights and jacking up the shadows like it would in a normal. Right. So that is not necessarily a giveaway.

[Marques]

Gotcha. Gotcha.

[Adam]

All right, let's move on to image two.

[Marques]

Okay.

[Ellis]

Wow.

[Marques]

Image two looks like you've climbed to the top of a very tall mountain and pointed down at the peak of another very tall mountain which is poking through the clouds. And again, blue sky in the background and some foreground detail. A lot of snow. This is a lot of snow.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Wow.

[Adam]

It's a climber.

[Andrew]

Yeah. There's a guy climbing in the very deep snow and presumably what looks like people have skied down.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Because of the way it's.

[Adam]

People ski off this cliff in paraglide.

[Andrew]

That's crazy.

[Adam]

It's ridiculous.

[Andrew]

This is one of those things where I'm. I'm leaning camera. But just to think, David got up here with the camera.

[Marques]

There's so much detail. This has.

[Andrew]

There's so much. Yeah. I think it's the. So the mountain coming out of the clouds that specifically just looks so sharp, but not fake sharp. Yeah, it looks really.

[Ellis]

What.

[Marques]

Can I ask one question?

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Marques]

About the M11.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Marques]

How much dynamic range does it typically have?

[Adam]

Quite a lot. The M10. Without getting into too much detail, the M10 peaked the highlights. Like if you clipped the highlights, they were just gone. The M11 has quite a bit More dynamic range.

[Marques]

Yeah, this is M11, I think.

[Andrew]

M11.

[Ellis]

I honestly have no idea anymore.

[Producer]

It's the, like, what did you. Can you tell us what post processing you might have done? Like, did you limit it to just curves? Did you adjust the color? Did you.

[Adam]

I did very little.

[Producer]

To this photo, would you have added a vignette?

[Adam]

No, I didn't add a vignette.

[Producer]

All right, then this is the Leica for sure. Look at the sky.

[Marques]

Yeah, yeah, there's a little vignette in the, in the top corners.

[Producer]

Yeah, yeah, that's a Leica.

[Marques]

That's a Leica.

[Andrew]

Little vinographic.

[Producer]

Let's go, baby.

[Adam]

All right, cool. All right, it looks fire. Let's move on to photo. Okay, so this is a set of photos. Two photos that are kind of the same photo. The focal lengths are a little bit different, but I. They're taken from the same perspective. And yeah, they look. Well, they look very similar.

[Andrew]

Yeah. One is, you can see the rock. So it is a mountain at a, like kind of lakeside. Or is this like a glacier, an alpine lake? But like you can see the rock in the left picture. That's the rock in the right picture. And he. It is in a very tighter lens.

[Marques]

He's very close.

[Andrew]

He's doing the people's eyebrow Marques. What's happening?

[Marques]

Don't worry about it.

[Adam]

It's very tall.

[Marques]

Don't worry about it. So you can see the rock. What else can you also see?

[Andrew]

I'm just saying you can tell the focal lengths are extremely different.

[Adam]

They're different because of that rock.

[Marques]

The green of the water on the right versus the slightly bluer cast of the water on the left. I am fairly confident the iPhone is on the left and the Leica is on the right.

[Andrew]

I just want to. Your green thing though, might be because of how far zoomed in. The one on the. Or the right is where you're seeing most of the green on the shallower part, closer to David on the left. Where the right. Well, you said this is at the same location.

[Producer]

The one on the right is like

[Adam]

a. I'm standing in the same. I know, Standing in the same spot for both of these, but I had different focal lengths on the different cameras. But I have lenses for the Leica that match the focal lengths of the iPhone.

[Andrew]

But that obviously didn't happen on this one.

[Adam]

Yeah, I didn't go in. I didn't. When I was there, I wasn't like, I'm gonna do this. I just had this idea on the plane right back.

[Marques]

I'M staking my entire thesis on this. The way that the rocks look on the left looks like iPhone processing. Even though there's not a ton of processing, it just looks like an iPhone. So I'm going left is iPhone, right is Leica.

[Andrew]

I was going to go right as like it just because of how good the detail in the rightmost mountains that aren't in the left photo is.

[Ellis]

Okay, I got it, I got it. The left is the Leica because there is dirt on the sensor. David, top left.

[Adam]

No, that's. That's a bird.

[Ellis]

Never mind.

[Adam]

Yeah, that's a bird. That's not a bird. It is a bird.

[Andrew]

I just thought that was my computer screen.

[Producer]

I was scraping my computer screen these past five minutes. I think producer table agrees with Marques that the Leica is the one on the right for two reasons. One, I think the one on the right is cropped in after you took the. Like you cropped it in in Lightroom. And I don't think you'd really be able to do that on an iPhone and get something that looks so nice. And two, there's way more dynamic range in the sky on the one on the right, which I think you would need superior like a processing to accomplish.

[Marques]

Okay.

[Adam]

The answer is that you're all wrong. The iPhone photo is the one on the right. And that's a singular raw image that like I barely processed at all.

[Andrew]

It's impressive, isn't that. It's really impressive. Even like all the gravel crash.

[Ellis]

I just want to see.

[Producer]

No, no, no, no.

[Ellis]

It's.

[Producer]

It means that the iPhone's computational photography is trash. If this is what the sensor is doing when left to its own devices.

[Adam]

Exactly.

[Producer]

What are we doing here?

[Adam]

Like, a regular iPhone photo would not look nearly the same.

[Marques]

Well, okay. This is a beautiful scene that it's really hard to take a bad looking photo of. Sure. So if you give this.

[Producer]

Watch me.

[Andrew]

Step aside.

[Marques]

If you stand out there in all this light and take it and you give the sensor this, best case scenario, almost any modern sensor is going to do a very respectable channel.

[Adam]

I don't know. Not with computational photography.

[Marques]

Well, as I was saying, the sensor will. But then the processing is what gives your photo the look afterwards.

[Adam]

And this is the point I wanted to make.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Adam]

Is that phone processing sucks because all they're doing is they're just optimizing for storage. They're optimizing for like shadow detail. This is why. And I might get crap for saying this, but like when Google. Google got rid of their regular RAW processing and they introduced a sort of like pro RAW kind of thing, which is, in my opinion, just worse because it just lifts the shadows and you don't always want the shadows to be lifted. If you want it to look like a real picture anyway, we can move on. You're all wrong.

[Andrew]

Wait, was that actually dust on the sensor and not a bird?

[Adam]

No, that is actually.

[Andrew]

Oh, I thought you were trying to throw at them off.

[Adam]

No, it is a bird. It was a bird. I did later get dust on my sensor, but that is a bird. Okay, next photo. You want to describe it?

[Marques]

Next photo is what looks on the left side of the frame to be a really high stack of various sized rocks.

[Andrew]

So is that a Karen?

[Adam]

What is?

[Andrew]

I think that's how you pronounce it. A lot of like national parks and stuff will put up these small rock structures to indicate where a trail is. Yeah. So this is like clearly a trail pass with a lot of snow on it.

[Adam]

But I thought they had just built it to sort of replicate this, the shape of the mountain in front of it.

[Andrew]

Funny, because I always am not sure how to pronounce it because I think it's C A R I, N. Oh, like a corinth. Oh, no. C A I, R N. Man made pile of stone used to mark a trail, especially in areas where the path

[Adam]

might be fear cairn.

[Andrew]

Somebody's gonna roast me for that.

[Adam]

But okay, so you want to describe the image as you see it. Yeah.

[Marques]

So it looks like on the left side of the frame we got a really solid stack of stones with some snow on them, possibly indicating a trailhead or something like that. And then on the right is a whole bunch of snow covered mountains, whole bunch of blue sky in the background. Still plenty of dynamic range. A lot of things in the shadow of the mountain this time. Yeah, a lot of doctor to play with. I'm confused.

[Ellis]

I'm gonna say this is iPhone.

[Andrew]

My initial thought was iPhone. With no real substantial evidence to back it with.

[Ellis]

My thinking is the shadows on the mountain are a little high and the sky looks the same as the iPhone picture in the last image. Like the gradient.

[Marques]

My logic is they're all giving me nothing. When they're so compressed in Google Slides, you can't use detail anymore. So I'm trying to go by exposure.

[Ellis]

That's fair.

[Marques]

And the whole. At first I was like that little portion in the middle. Right. That is almost fully black. It's pretty dark. And that's something that the iPhone kind of wouldn't allow. But they also have the entire shadow side of this mountain in a lot of detail, which kind of feels like something the iPhone would do. So I don't know. I'm going to. I guess I'm going iPhone. Because the mountain's in shadow and you can see all of it.

[Producer]

This one, this. I'm stumped on this one. Like there's nothing I can really point to, which is frustrating, man.

[Andrew]

Oh, wait, you can see a reflection of him with the camera in this.

[Producer]

I wish.

[Adam]

Into smart glasses.

[Marques]

It's the meta ravens.

[Adam]

It was the meta Ray bans.

[Marques]

David, which camera was this one?

[Adam]

This is the iPhone.

[Marques]

Okay.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Okay. All right, next photo. Next photo is a landscape of a mountainside lake. The lake is blue green. The mountains in the background are covered in snow. The foreground has less snow. It's mostly stones and moss and some olive green plant type stuff. And the sky is blue again with some cirrus clouds. Yeah, I. There's a little grain to it. No.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Or is that just the water?

[Andrew]

That's Google Slides.

[Marques]

I'm just looking at the water and I guess it's ripples in the water.

[Andrew]

I think that's ripples in the water.

[Marques]

Okay.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Well, the shadow is the right side. Plenty of detail there. I'm going iPhone again.

[Ellis]

I'm going like a. I think if you look at the sky, there's a little bit of grain that I think. Yeah, but that would be.

[Andrew]

That looks exactly the same as in the last photo.

[Ellis]

Why are you.

[Marques]

Why are you doing this to me?

[Andrew]

Andrew, which was an iPhone and the one before. Yeah, I think iPhone also.

[Marques]

Yeah, I think we think it's an iPhone.

[Ellis]

Alice is just shaking his head.

[Andrew]

It's also funny because I may have skipped ahead to the next one. I could tell how long you stayed at this lake because there's that one singular rock formation somewhere in all of these photos. It kind of looks like a, like tower camera.

[Producer]

This is a 16 Pro.

[Adam]

17 Pro.

[Producer]

17 Pro.

[Marques]

Yeah. Which camera is this one?

[Adam]

This is iPhone.

[Producer]

Is this what's gonna convince me to buy the new iPhone?

[Marques]

You could take this with an iPhone.3GS.

[Adam]

I don't know about that.

[Andrew]

It doesn't even have a plateau.

[Ellis]

I did see someone go around taking side by side pictures and it didn't do bad. The 3Gs.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Marques]

I mean, give it this much light.

[Adam]

No, the 3Gs processing was better before they introduced computational photography, but. Okay, move on to the next photo. I know these are a lot of fairly similar.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Marques]

This next one is a landscape version from maybe the other Side of that lake.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Okay. A lot of shadow on the left. Deep mountains and highlights on the right. Wow. I'm going back to Leica because I think there's some real shadow depth on the left in that little crevice. Still a ton of range though. I kind of hope it's the iPhone.

[Andrew]

The like rock on the right has like a green tint to it. Yeah, that feels. I know nothing about Leicas.

[Marques]

There's also.

[Andrew]

But feels like something.

[Ellis]

I think iPhone because at this point I think David's just trying to me.

[Marques]

So that's not that strategy.

[Andrew]

That's good.

[Ellis]

Oh, Ellis found something. Nevermind. It's the Leica.

[Adam]

What did you find?

[Andrew]

What'd you find?

[Producer]

We're on slide six, right? I'm not tripping. Yeah, six like a.

[Adam]

What'd you find?

[Producer]

I can't tell you.

[Andrew]

I mean we already put it could

[Producer]

be two really bad bokeh y birds, but.

[Andrew]

Oh, I also thought that was on my screen.

[Producer]

This really looks like smudge.

[Adam]

Oh, that is smudge.

[Marques]

Yeah, the two dots.

[Adam]

I got spots on my sensor. My iPhone.

[Marques]

Just kidding.

[Adam]

Yeah, no, it's still like. I also probably should have cropped this differently because it's more of a giveaway when this landscape.

[Marques]

The aspect ratio. Yeah, yeah.

[Adam]

But I did crop some of the iPhone photos.

[Producer]

So if slide 7 is the iPhone, I'm throwing away all of my cameras.

[Marques]

Okay. So slide seven.

[Producer]

This is like an ultra detailed, really far away landscape of two mountain peaks where the sun is casting a shadow that. So only the peaks of the mountain are illuminated. And you have this valley that is in the shot in shadow, but still has so much detail.

[Andrew]

Yeah, there's a lot of detail in all of the shadow. And even just like the rock face or the hill in front of him, you can see everything. This is really cool because like where the sun is hitting is the only snow capped part of the mountains where the rest you can see the ski trails despite it not having snow gold now. So you can tell this is like the valley of a, you know, a ski town. And the fact that you can still see all of that in all of the shadow is very impressive.

[Marques]

I wish I was at the scene so I could see how light it actually is. But I think because it's darker, I'm going Leica. But I. I could be wrong.

[Ellis]

I'm going like a. For my wallet's sake.

[Andrew]

I think I'm going like on vibes.

[Adam]

I'm looking this up because I don't remember. I feel like that says something Right. Is it this one? Yeah, it's that one.

[Andrew]

This is actually iPhone selfie camera.

[Adam]

Yeah,

[Andrew]

he unlocked the full sensor.

[Adam]

All right. This one's the iPhone.

[Marques]

Okay, well, I guess I'm just going to murder myself.

[Producer]

Enjoy our crazy, David.

[Adam]

I know it's crazy.

[Producer]

It is crazy.

[Adam]

Raw photos are crazy.

[Producer]

You know why I couldn't tell? Because it didn't say shot on iPhone.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Where's the watermark?

[Producer]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Where's the branding?

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Okay, there's two more.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Second to last one here is very blue.

[Producer]

Very blue.

[Marques]

You're on the edge of a lake,

[Producer]

a beautiful reflection of a mountain in an alpine lake.

[Marques]

And there's a person right in the

[Adam]

center of the frame walking past the white snow capped mountain.

[Marques]

Yeah. With a cloud. You must be really altitude right now.

[Adam]

Yeah, it was 12,000ft.

[Andrew]

Sick.

[Marques]

Wow.

[Adam]

I almost broke my knees.

[Andrew]

Oh, man, I wish this water wasn't ripply.

[Adam]

Well, I tried on so many. It was too bright to even do a long exposure on, like, any of my cameras. I tried to do long exposures and it was too much light. Too much light. I didn't have any ND filters with me, so I couldn't. Which is sad because it would have been awesome.

[Andrew]

Well, no, I just mean I wish it wasn't ripply because then the reflection would be like perfectly intact.

[Adam]

Yeah. Of the mountain, which would have been sick.

[Andrew]

Which would have been awesome. That's what they like. Mirror lake at.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Yosemite. Everyone loves.

[Marques]

I want to get this right now.

[Ellis]

I'm going like, I'm defaulting to whatever Ellis wants to say for this one.

[Andrew]

The shadow is very dark. It is very sharp.

[Marques]

We have lost meaningful detail in the snow on the mountain. I've noticed. And we've also lost meaningful detail in the shadow in the foreground.

[Producer]

This is the iPhone.

[Marques]

Because of the lesser dynamic range. I'm going iPhone.

[Producer]

I don't even have a good reason anymore. Yeah, it has to be the iPhone.

[Adam]

This one is the iPhone.

[Andrew]

Is it the iPhone?

[Adam]

Which, ironically, I took this on the M11 as well. And I liked the iPhone shot, though.

[Marques]

Okay.

[Andrew]

I picked it because you pointed to your Leica when you were talking about long exposure. And then you went, I mean, all my cameras. And I thought you just gave it away.

[Marques]

No. Yeah.

[Adam]

Well, all right.

[Marques]

The final shot. This is an iPhone final shot is a nice big valley shot where the mountains are going up to the left and up to the right. And in the far, far distance, there is a trail going up to this beautiful snow capped mountain.

[Ellis]

Also far Less ideal lighting.

[Marques]

It's more. Much shinier. Clearly darker. Clearly quite a bit more. I don't know if it's noise or grain or what, but there's clouds. You know, it's not a blue sky anymore. It almost looks darker. Clouds. Wow. Oh, this looks like a postcard.

[Andrew]

Is this a trick question? Did you take this with a different camera? Because this looks very different from all the other photos you took.

[Marques]

There's way less light.

[Adam]

It's because it's horizontal.

[Andrew]

Well, no, just all of it.

[Adam]

And there's way. Literally, it's totally different lighting.

[Producer]

It looks like a stock wallpaper on a Mac.

[Marques]

Mm.

[Adam]

Complimentary. Yeah, a lot of the other photos were taken at, like, similar times of day. This is just because this is different lighting.

[Ellis]

I'm gonna go iPhone for this one just because I feel like I've seen. Here we go. I'm gonna be wrong, and I'm gonna sound like an idiot. More so than I already have been, but I feel like I've seen this same level of, like, breakdown in the shadows with, like, smartphone photography.

[Marques]

Mm.

[Andrew]

I'm guessing Leica. This is also my favorite photo out of all of them.

[Adam]

Dang.

[Marques]

I think this could be the iPhone. Yeah, I'm going iPhone.

[Producer]

I think it's the iPhone, but just because it looks like Apple Media, I don't have any. The sky is doing that thing again. Like, the. The iPhone seems to take some of the exposure of the mountain and add it to the sky in a few of these, if that makes any sense. Like, I'm noticing, like, on some of the Leicas, it gradients out to dark as you go up. And on a lot of the iPhone shots, it gradients to the color of mountain as you get closer to the horizon.

[Adam]

This shot is the Leica.

[Producer]

I don't know anything.

[Andrew]

I'm. I'm good at this game. I suck the least amount of knowledge.

[Adam]

Anyway. The point of this was to just show you that, like, while I still prefer traditional cameras for the shooting experience, you, too, can take pretty cool pictures just with your phone. It's pretty insane.

[Producer]

Like, freaky good.

[Adam]

Like, freaky good freaky. Like, you can't tell the difference.

[Ellis]

I'm going to steal one of our, like, iPhone pros just so I can go back and forth between the Pixel Pro and the iPhone pro because this is really bothering me. Yeah, I feel like I might have chosen wrong this year.

[Adam]

Are there.

[Andrew]

You could buy a ricoh?

[Adam]

Are there raw apps on Pixel now? Or, like, there probably are.

[Marques]

Right.

[Adam]

Raw camera apps.

[Marques]

I believe there Are there's like open camera?

[Ellis]

Yeah, well, there's raw or like a

[Producer]

little cup of ceviche. Raw apps. Raw apps, anyone?

[Adam]

Very nice with the jokes. I like that.

[Marques]

Wow.

[Ellis]

I forgot what it's called, but I think zero can.

[Adam]

My local ceviche place caught on fire a few weeks ago.

[Producer]

Now they only serve grilled branzino.

[Marques]

Yeah, I think that's our cue. Let's do trivia.

[Adam]

All right, Trivia.

[Andrew]

What was David's local ceviche place?

[Ellis]

What one Echo product that people often forget about are the Amazon Echo Buds.

[Adam]

Oh, I never forgot. I never forgot.

[Ellis]

What was the last year that Amazon tried to sell these sub $50 true wireless ANC buds.

[Andrew]

They were under 50.

[Ellis]

Under $50.

[Adam]

Remember the Echo frames?

[Andrew]

And am I thinking of the wrong ones?

[Producer]

The this is Price is Right rules. You go over your disqualified. It's. Do you hear that?

[Andrew]

You go over your disqualified. Yeah.

[Producer]

So what was the last year they made them?

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Marques]

All right, well, we'll think about this one. Answers at the end like usual. We'll be right back.

[Adam]

Close your eyes.

[Marques]

Exhale.

[Robinarsson]

Feel your body relax.

[Marques]

And let go of whatever you're carrying today.

[Robinarsson]

Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts.

[Marques]

Oh my gosh.

[Robinarsson]

They're so fast.

[Marques]

And breathe.

[Adam]

Oh, sorry.

[Robinarsson]

I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order.

[Adam]

1-800-contacts. Your little one grew three inches overnight. Adorable. Also expensive. Sell their pint sized pieces on depop and list them in minutes with no selling fees.

[Andrew]

Because somewhere a dad refuses to pay

[Adam]

full price for the clothes his kids will outgrow tomorrow.

[Andrew]

And he's ready to buy your son's

[Adam]

entire wardrobe right now. Consider your future growth bird budget secured and start selling on Depop, where taste recognizes taste. Payment processing fees and boosting fees still apply. See website for details.

[Ellis]

So everyone knows our politics are divided. There's left versus right and dividing lines

[Producer]

on age, gender or race.

[Ellis]

But maybe our biggest divide in our politics isn't about identity at all. It's insiders versus outsiders. At least that's what Congressman Ro Khanna would say.

[Andrew]

The real issue is two tiers of justice in America.

[Producer]

The real issue is people with power and wealth using it to be above the law and escape even investigation or prosecution.

[Ellis]

And it's only gotten more noticeable in recent months. As issues like the Epstein files and artificial intelligence have seemed to pit the elites against everybody else. California Congressman Ro Khanna takes on the Epstein class today. Explain in your feed every weekday and

[Producer]

now on Saturdays too.

[Marques]

All right, welcome back. We are using this last segment to jump in to listen to maybe the most interesting part of my conversation that I got to have when I was out in Menlo park with James Cameron, who you might have heard of, pretty legendary movie producer, director, creator, filmmaker in his own right, and with Andrew Bosworth, who was also there with Meta. So he's the CTO of Meta. And we just kind of had a random off the cuff chat about what they're doing with these glasses, the first person video and this, it kind of went off the rails, to be honest. But this last part of the conversation I thought was pretty fun, just because I found interesting to put someone from, like real OG media into a YouTuber's shoes and try to ask him a little bit about what he thinks of, you know, the character and the filmmaker being one in the same. So without any further ado, here's some of that conversation. You know, I'm familiar with audio projects, and it seems like they take advantage of either some bleeding edge technology or some new technology to give a new perspective or make something incredible. And I wonder if you see first person cameras as an opportunity for even a movie or a project that could maybe have some unique perspective we haven't seen before. Do you picture first person movie being interesting?

[James Cameron]

Well, I think the filmmaker becomes the character in that.

[Ellis]

Right.

[James Cameron]

And so how charismatic or interesting is your filmmaker? Most filmmakers are perfectly happy way back behind the camera, not being constantly studied. But on the other hand, we've got a whole generation coming up on social media that are just used to being observed all the time. And. And even the whole influencer culture, people want to be observed. So absolutely. I think you can have a first person narrative shot with first person lenses. It could be fully scripted, it could be a proper production. I think that'd be a lot of fun. Go back again to this thing that I wrote back in 1993, I think, called Strange Days. And it was about people just record their experience and then they sell it to other people, you know, which, by the way, is the world we live in. Turns out, you know, turns out I was a little ahead of time. A little pressure ahead of time on that.

[Marques]

Yeah, yeah, we're kind of there. I feel like a lot of my videos are me trying to put the device in your hands so you can see what it's like to hold it and own it before you actually buy it. And as tech gets better, I'm able to do that with higher fidelity and more personality and closer to real time.

[James Cameron]

But you become, you become the filmmaker and the performer at the same time.

[Marques]

Yeah, the viewer.

[James Cameron]

One man band.

[Marques]

The viewer gets put into my shoes.

[Andrew]

Yeah, yeah. Which is pretty sweet.

[James Cameron]

Well, I mean, you know, we are going to do this deep sea expedition thing where I might be in that very role because as my experience is being lived and I'm seeing something that's never been seen before, that's being piped out and, and part, part of a number of feeds, there'll be, you know, multiple people experiencing this and then we'll have to figure out how to switch that, how to, you know, how to, how to turn it into some kind of a piece downstream that's going out live. So that'll all get worked out.

[Marques]

Pretty excited about that big tech challenge, it sounds like.

[James Cameron]

Can't say too much about that right now.

[Andrew]

I'm excited about it.

[Andrew Bosworth]

Can't say too much.

[Andrew]

Awesome.

[Marques]

Well, I'm looking forward to seeing how that comes together. I did, I watched the Avatar.

[James Cameron]

Oh, you saw the trailer content for today?

[Marques]

Yeah, the two clips from today.

[James Cameron]

And you saw it in the Quest 3?

[Marques]

I saw it in Quest 3, yeah. Yeah.

[James Cameron]

It plays well in the device, I think.

[Marques]

Yeah. I mean, I've never watched an entire movie in a headset, but I'm thinking like it's almost getting to the place where I'd be fine with that. The headset's light enough now.

[James Cameron]

What would you do? You'd make them lighter and. Yeah, we got work to do.

[Andrew Bosworth]

James has notes, I imagine, but we listen.

[James Cameron]

Yeah, yeah, I think it plays. I think it plays well. And you know, the thing I, the thing I love about the, about the, you know, Mr. Or VR is that they're innately stereoscopic. So anything that you're going to want to put up, put up in there is going to be 3D. And I've been working on, on 3D production for 25 years and, and have figured out how to make it. It easy to watch, you know, and non. Not confronting to your senses and so on.

[Marques]

If you were, if you were a YouTuber today, put yourself in my shoes. I've been trying to make more and more realistic content to put the viewer in my shoes to see what it's like to hold what I'm holding. Do you think 3D content is the natural, inevitable future of what I'm doing or Is that more of a long alongside?

[James Cameron]

I, I think, I think 650 million years of evolution says yes. Yeah, because once, once organisms got to two eyes, nature never looked back. And we have two eyes for a reason, because it gives us more engagement. Right, so what do you want to do as a YouTuber? You want to engage people. You want to hold, hold eyeballs, right?

[Adam]

Yeah.

[James Cameron]

What clicks so, so engagement, I mean, it has to do with, with a lot of neurobiology and that sort of thing about how the brain communicates with itself internally. And you probably know this, but there are a lot of neurons in the visual cortex that are triggered by parallax. So when you're writing a discrete image to two eyes, you're generating parallax in the brain. Right. That's where we fuse those two images together to make a 3, 3D kind of sense of the world. And because those different brain regions have to talk to each other. Those. And you know, so a neuron's like a gpu, right? So it's. That particular neuron does nothing but sense parallax. Other neurons do other things. They recognize faces. This is parallax recognition. And then those different regions of the visual cortex talk to each other. So there's, there's actually enhanced brain activity when you're staring at a flat image versus a stereoscopic. So that same thing about when you wrote memory deeper based on emotion, it's the same principle. The more your brain is active, the better you'll remember it, the more engaged you'll be. So, yeah, so that's the long winded answer. The short winded answer is yes.

[Andrew Bosworth]

I think it's a depth and breadth thing. If you look at the, the trends in media content, not just in the Internet, but even going back 100 years to the novel, novella article, they go to the edges. Our most popular media types now are 100 plus hour video games and the shortest, most rapidly available content. And it makes sense. We either have a little bit of time and we're just snatching it up. And you'd be foolish, especially in your business, not to be paying good attention to that. That's where it's kind of the easy in, easy out. But there's a second part of this which is, can you take the depth of engagement for your most loyal, committed people and bring them in deeper? And there is a whole history here of investments to make sure that it's getting easier and easier over time to tell more compelling stories, more compelling experiences to people. And that's one of the things that we're really passionate about, obviously.

[Marques]

Yeah, yeah. I kind of see it as a natural. As a natural evolution. There are all kinds of things too, that will today turn 2D imagery into. It'll try to perceive a stereoscopic version of that. And it's impressive. It's AI and it kind of seems to figure it out pretty quickly.

[James Cameron]

It's going to take over eventually. I mean, I think right now there's one very decisive advantage with native stereo cameras, which is real time. You know, to get a really comparable result from a Genai stereo conversion model or depth model. It needs more time, but it'll catch up. You know, it'll catch up.

[Marques]

All right, well, that was a pretty fun conversation. Shout out again to Boz and James Cameron for the time. Which leaves us with just one more thing to do this episode. Now that everyone's back, it's, of course, trivia time.

[Producer]

Question number one is about the Amazon Echo Flex. What was it?

[Ellis]

That's it.

[Producer]

That's the question.

[Adam]

What?

[Marques]

That's a really good question. What was that?

[Producer]

I know because Echo Flex tells you literally nothing.

[Adam]

I was gonna say, like, that's a bad name if you don't know what it is.

[Producer]

It's.

[James Cameron]

It's sick.

[Andrew]

It's. Is this closest without going over?

[Marques]

Sure.

[Producer]

Yeah.

[Adam]

It's one of those slap bracelets.

[Producer]

Guys. What is it, Marquez, you first.

[Marques]

I think it's some sort of a display.

[Producer]

Nope.

[Andrew]

I said phone.

[Adam]

No, I put smart display. Nope.

[Producer]

Okay, what if I told you that the Echo Flex Was that the clock? It's a microwave USB A to wall adapter that has a speaker and Alexa built in.

[Marques]

Yup. Why did they name it?

[Andrew]

Why did they name it that?

[Producer]

Why did they name it the Flex? Who knows?

[Marques]

Why would you name that?

[Adam]

What the heck?

[Ellis]

All right, quick update on the score while we're here. Marquez with six, Andrew with eight. David after getting 0 for 2 last week when we called him after the pod, still at three. All right.

[Andrew]

Wow, that hit way too well.

[Marques]

Next question.

[Ellis]

What was the last year that Amazon tried to sell 50 true wireless ANC earbuds called the Amazon Echo Buds?

[Adam]

As close as I can say they

[Producer]

fluctuated in price over the years in different versions, but almost all the ones I saw were sub 50. So if there are any die hard Echo Buds users out there who paid more than $50 and are mad I'm not giving them credit, please email me podcastkbhd.com I don't remember that. Is that a secret email?

[Adam]

Oh, Adam just doesn't want to get the angry emails.

[Producer]

Oh, I don't have access to that email. So you will be hitting him. All right, who wants to read first?

[Marques]

We can go in ascending order because I put 20. 20.

[Producer]

2020. They were made after that.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I put 2021.

[Producer]

They were made after that.

[Adam]

I think the answer is 2024, but I put 2023 to be safe.

[Producer]

They were made after that because the answer is. Well, David, you do get the point.

[Adam]

Yay.

[Producer]

But the answer is they are still being made to this day. You can go on Amazon.com and buy a pair of Echo Buds.

[Marques]

That was good framing.

[Producer]

Absolutely should not do it.

[Marques]

I thought when I heard that I was like, really? A sub$50 ANC head, like earbuds seems like a great product today. So if they stopped making them, they must have had like a really important reason to stop making them, which might have been like around Covid times. Cause if they kept going after Covid, they would have found out that there's a really good market for that.

[Producer]

I just thought it's funny that they make this and no one I've never heard. I didn't even know they made it. Yeah. On the Alexa store, there are two different models of Amazon Echo Buds that are both listed as newest model.

[Marques]

Tough.

[Producer]

You know, it's crazy that like, like, you know, one of the most valuable companies in the world, folks.

[Marques]

So run by humans after all.

[Producer]

Allegedly. Man,

[Ellis]

can I yell at a company real quick?

[Adam]

2.737 trillion dollar company.

[Ellis]

How much is OpenAI worth?

[Adam]

Nothing. Because they're still not profitable.

[Ellis]

Fair. Well, they released a new Sora app that we didn't talk about, but we will probably at some point, but not on Android. How is this company so like, it has all the money and they didn't release an end?

[Adam]

Well, Sora is just the slop generator, right?

[Ellis]

Yeah, but they have the app now.

[Marques]

Sora app? Yeah, now specifically.

[Adam]

Cool.

[Marques]

Well, hey, either way, that's been it for this episode. Hope you enjoyed lots of fun conversations. More coming up as well. Obviously we had some people on this episode, but we have more coming on future episodes, so stay tuned for that. Get subscribed if you haven't already and we'll catch you guys very soon next week in Techtober.

[Andrew]

Peace Waveform was produced by Adam Molina and Alice Riverman, partner with Vox Media Podcast Network. And our character music was created by Vane Silk.

[Adam]

Bingo.

[Ellis]

Also, we're already in Techtober. Marques. Can you actually scroll reels on there? Like for real?

[Adam]

For reals.

[Ellis]

No joke.

[Andrew]

Damn.

[Ellis]

That was good.