Is Flighty a Top 5 App of All Time?

Summary

Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast

Episode: Is Flighty a Top 5 App of All Time?

Date: March 27, 2026
Hosts: Marques Brownlee (MKBHD), Andrew Manganelli, David Imel, Ellis
Main Theme: A fast-paced, insight-packed discussion of tech news, ranging from Apple’s upcoming software, ads in Apple Maps, revelations in the Windows laptop space, the enduring utility of the Flighty app, rapid-fire gadget updates, and increasingly wild AI integration.

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Episode Overview

This episode is a classic “everything’s happening” tech roundup, from fresh Apple rumors to a debate about whether the flight-tracking app Flighty deserves “top 5 app” status. The hosts cover new phone releases, Apple’s maturing AI ambitions, the awkwardness of ads in navigation apps, government tech bans, AI overreach, and a side of classic tech nerd banter.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. The Ergonomics of OS Design: Eject vs. Erase

[02:27 – 04:28]

• The team riff on the nerve-wracking proximity of “Eject” and “Erase” in context menus, both on Mac and Samsung devices.
  • Adam: “Who decided that? … If you go into the files app and hit eject, it’s right next to erase.”
  • Marques: “Even worse… both start with a capital E. … If you’re not paying attention…”
• Consensus: User-centric interface design should separate high-risk actions like “Erase” from benign ones like “Eject.”
  • David [04:10]: “Engineer brain vs. designer brain… engineer thinks they’re both actions on a drive, designer knows they should never be neighbors.”

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2. WWDC Announcement & The Next Evolution of Siri

[06:28 – 11:27]

• Apple's developer conference set for June 8th, with speculation about major AI integration (“Apple intelligence”) and a revamped Siri.
• Apple is allegedly working on a standalone Siri app styled like iMessage, speculated to leverage Gemini.
  • Ellis: “It feels like it will possibly just kind of be a Gemini wrapper.”
  • Andrew: “Why not just a pinned chat in Messages?”
• Integrating AI deeply into Apple’s ecosystem, akin to Google’s Gemini integration in Android.
  • Ellis: “Apps will also be getting an ‘Ask with Siri’ option… Apple is following what Google is doing.”
• On iOS update schedules and beta release etiquette, the hosts explain why their own reporting is sometimes delayed.
  • Marques [12:00]: “We try to follow the actual rules… So when the developer beta comes out… I wait.”

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3. Apple Maps to Introduce Ads

[12:47 – 17:56]

• Apple will allow businesses to buy ads in Maps search results, mirroring Google and Yelp's approaches.
  • Ellis: “Google Maps… has had ads for an extremely long period of time.”
  • Marques: “Maps is a very personal app. Wouldn’t you rather have personalized ads than random ones? I never drink coffee, so why Starbucks?”
• Discussion on privacy implications and the broader shift toward software/service-driven revenue at Apple.
  • Ellis: "Apple is in this weird place where it's slowly trying to transition towards other revenue sources..."

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4. Is Flighty a Top 5 App Ever?

[18:05 – 21:18]

• Marques: “I think Flighty is top 5 app of all time.”
• The hosts debate Flighty’s niche yet essential status:
  • If you fly a lot, it’s “unbelievably useful… Waze for airports.”
  • Ellis: “United’s CEO literally said he wished they’d bought Flighty.”
  • Discussion of new "Airport Intelligence" feature for broader airport status insights.

Notable Quote

• Marques [18:07]: “If you do fly a lot, Flighty is goated. And everybody who flies a lot knows that.”

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5. Samsung’s New Mid-range Phones & The Battery Paradox

[21:28 – 23:17]

• The new Samsung A37 and A57 share the same battery spec as the flagship S26 Ultra.
  • Andrew: “It’s one of those things where you're pumped for the cheap phone and bummed for the expensive phone.”
  • Marques: “That is maybe the least ultra Ultra phone right now is the S26 Ultra.”

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6. The Windows Laptop Problem & Vertical Integration

[23:29 – 37:11]

• Marques summarizes his recent YouTube video comparing Apple Silicon laptops with Windows competition:
  • Apple’s vertical integration gives it a huge edge at both ends of the market.
  • Windows manufacturers rely on many vendors, leading to “margin stacking” and bloatware to stay competitive.
• Andrew: “That’s literally the main problem... insane to do that.”
• Discussion branches into vertical integration vs. platform openness (Windows/Android vs. Apple).
• Riff on the persistent support for legacy tech in Windows as a positive:
  • David: “I like that they support old graphics engines.”

Notable Quote

• Marques [25:29]: “Apple doesn’t need a big margin on Neo. It’s a Trojan horse for new customers who will spend way more on services.”

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7. Google/Android vs. Apple—Ecosystem Gravity

[37:12 – 40:12]

• The pain of switching ecosystems; iMessage group chat “bullying” converts even seasoned Android reviewers.
• The dominance of “lock-in” features and peer pressure in platform choice.

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8. Sora’s Shutdown: OpenAI Pulls the Plug

[46:27 – 50:36]

• OpenAI kills Sora (AI video generator) just months after launch.
  • “It costs too much,” says Marques.
  • Discussion of a billion-dollar Disney partnership that evaporated as a result.
• Meta’s failed attempt to compete, broader observation: most “AI slop” generators don’t last.
  • Ellis: “We don’t need more AI slop.”

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9. Instagram DMs Drop Encryption

[50:46 – 54:18]

• Meta announces end-to-end encryption in IG DMs is ending by May 8th (bleak privacy outlook).
  • Andrew: "Meta is just not getting rid of encryption. They're just moving it to WhatsApp. ...without encryption, they can access your data to target ads and train AI."
  • Pressure from US and UK agencies over child safety cited as a reason, but clearly data is a motivator.

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10. Government Tech Bans: The U.S. Blocks Foreign Routers

[54:54 – 63:58]

• FCC bans sale of consumer routers not made in the US.
  • Ellis: “It is so isolationist to say anyone not made in the United States.”
  • Andrew: “It feels like this wild blanket ban that doesn’t actually help anything.”
• Questions about definitions (consumer vs. enterprise), feasibility, and how ISPs will adapt.

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11. AI Overreach: Grammarly Impersonates Journalists

[64:24 – 75:44]

• Grammarly’s now-killed “Expert Review” feature misleadingly surfaced writing advice “from” real journalists (like Nilay Patel)—complete with verified badges.
  • Marques: “The check mark is… attempting to trick a person into thinking it’s for real.”
  • Intense debate over “inspired by” versus outright impersonation, and the risks of “catfishing” users with AI models.
  • Andrew: “It's just impersonation and lying at that point.”
• Recap of Nilay Patel’s tense interview with Grammarly/Superhuman’s CEO on Decoder, recommended listening/watching.

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12. Mouse Corner: The Haptic Button Revolution

[80:02 – 88:41]

• Andrew demos the Logitech Pro X2 Super Strike mouse, featuring fully haptic (not mechanical or optical) clicks.
  • Ability to customize actuation, “rapid trigger,” etc.—deemed a significant innovation for competitive gaming.
  • Excitement over customizability, curiosity about longevity.

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13. Roundtable Banter, Trivia, & Community

[88:41 – End]

• High-spirited trivia about Apple TV Wikipedia pages and Apple Maps launch year.
• Miscellaneous debunking, basketball/film analogies, and a Streetlight Manifesto fan update.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Marques, on Flighty [18:07]: “If you do fly a lot, Flighty is goated. And everybody who flies a lot knows that.”
• David, on Windows laptops [39:35]: “The data that Nilay’s brain was trained on are things like his childhood, like, things you can’t… You can’t do that, bro. It doesn’t work.”
• Ellis, on Instagram DMs [54:18]: “If you really care about privacy… don’t touch a Meta product.”
• Marques, on AI features [73:54]: “Free advice to any CEO: if you run a company that does any sort of AI product and your idea is to have it replace people in any way, think a little harder about how you think that's gonna go.”

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:27 — Did they even test this? ("Eject" vs. "Erase")
• 06:28 — WWDC dates, Siri revamp & Gemini
• 12:47 — Ads in Apple Maps
• 18:05 — Is Flighty a Top 5 App Ever? ("Waze for airports")
• 23:29 — Windows laptop problem, Apple Silicon’s edge
• 37:12 — Platform lock-in, iMessage vs. Android
• 46:27 — Sora AI Video Generator killed by OpenAI
• 50:46 — Instagram DMs lose encryption
• 54:54 — US bans foreign-made routers
• 64:24 — Grammarly impersonates journalists (and the tense Decoder interview)
• 80:02 — The new haptic Logitech mouse: hands-on demo
• 88:41 — Trivia, community shout-outs, and banter

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Recommended/Referenced Content

• Marques’ YouTube video: “The Windows Laptop Problem”
• Nilay Patel’s Decoder interview with Grammarly/Superhuman’s CEO (for more context on the AI editorial impersonation)
• Dave2D’s video on Windows laptops vs. Apple Silicon pricing

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Tone & Structure

Conversational, opinionated, and filled with asides and digressions, the hosts remain accessible but deep-dive into technical topics, mixing sharp analysis with irreverent tech humor. The episode blends breaking news with timeless tech issues (vertical integration! interface design!) and manages both “gadget head” excitement and serious privacy skepticism.

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Final Takeaway

The Waveform crew effortlessly mixes playful banter with expert-level tech analysis, weighing the costs and consequences of every new feature, hardware upgrade, and AI overreach. Whether grappling with sticker design, the fate of OS platforms, or the ethics of AI-generated “expertise,” they remind us that in tech, details always matter—and team Flighty really, really loves to fly.

Transcript

[Marques Brownlee]

Support for the show comes from Odoo. Running a business takes everything you've got. And a lot of the tools out there that are supposed to make your life easier just aren't great at talking to each other. And that means you end up having to toggle between a dozen different apps and services just to keep the lights on. Enough of that. Now there's Odoo, an all in one fully integrated platform that might actually help you get it all done. Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you try Odoo for [e-mail] that's O D o o. Support for the show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. So if you're someone who can't leave a tech question alone until you've actually figured it out, Claude is the AI partner for that. For developers, Claude code runs in your terminal and handles complex tasks end to end. And if you want that same kind of power without touching a terminal, their new Cowork feature brings it straight to your desktop. Try Claude for free at Claude AI Waveform and see why problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. When I was a kid in either fourth or fifth grade, we had to make and this is a horrible assignment to give a child a paper mache.

[Andrew]

Oh God, terrible.

[Marques Brownlee]

Already two scale solar system.

[Adam]

Wait, so you had like.

[Marques Brownlee]

Which as you know, is absurd.

[Andrew]

That's impossible to get one scale.

[Marques Brownlee]

So kids and I.

[Adam]

You mean like a marble in a football field?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yes, yes. So my son, my son was like this big and Pluto was still like 20ft away and I had everything connected with like dowels and strings and like,

[Adam]

how did you bring that into school?

[Marques Brownlee]

I don't remember. I gotta ask my parents about this. Cause I remember this project.

[David]

What you should have done is brought in the sun and be like, the rest is at home where it belongs.

[Marques Brownlee]

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

[Andrew]

I'm Andrew.

[Ellis]

I'm David.

[Marques Brownlee]

This week it's still tarch, believe it or not.

[Andrew]

Are we doing that? I thought we were still.

[Marques Brownlee]

It is still Tech March and thus we have lots of things to talk about. We have dub dub dates getting announced, we have IG DMs, we have US governments banning routers, lots of acronyms. Also some new Flighty updates, one of my favorite apps of all time, ads and Apple Maps. No more Sora and a million other little things. So let's just jump right in.

[Ellis]

So many Things this week. It's crazy.

[Andrew]

It's a lot of small things.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

So a lot of four bullet points. Yeah. The whole outline, pretty much.

[Ellis]

But we can. We could at least vamp, you know, that's what we're good at. Bull.

[Andrew]

We yap. We're yappers.

[Ellis]

Yes.

[Andrew]

Adam's ready to yap. And did we even. Did they even test it?

[Adam]

Oh, nice. Good segue. You caught me off guard.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Adam]

Did they even test this? You might have caught it on the studio channel if you follow them. They did a short about it yesterday. Eric and Rich. But I was annoyed because me and Rich were transferring files yesterday, and I gave him a hard drive, and then as he's going to give it back to me, he right clicks it and he looks for unmount, but it's right next to Erase. Like format. Who decided that?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, even worse.

[Adam]

And erase should be right next to each.

[Marques Brownlee]

I was gonna say even worse. They both start with a capital E, so it's. It's just right there.

[Adam]

Like, if you're not paying attention.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Adam]

And I think I've done that.

[Andrew]

I've never noticed it, to be honest,

[Ellis]

but Erase does give you an additional prompt that says, are you sure?

[Adam]

No.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Adam]

And then I panic, and I'm like,

[David]

no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

[Adam]

But I've definitely hit erase accidentally before.

[Marques Brownlee]

Doesn't eject give you a no, it doesn't.

[Ellis]

No, no, no.

[Marques Brownlee]

But you wouldn't be surprised if it got a prompt and you just hit yes and you're like, wait, did that say yes?

[Andrew]

Your reactions to the enter button are much quicker than reading comprehension.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's true.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Adam]

And it's the same on. So it happened on his Mac, and then it was the same thing on my Samsung phone. It's also like if you go into the files app and you hit the three dots to eject the hard drive or whatever, it's right next to Erase. So this is like a standard wait

[Marques Brownlee]

when you connect a drive to your Samsung phone. Yeah. That's hilarious that more than one company did this.

[Andrew]

Who decided this?

[Marques Brownlee]

Is it alphabetical? Hold on.

[Ellis]

This is crazy.

[Marques Brownlee]

Eject. I guess I don't have a drive attached. Wow.

[Adam]

Maybe because they're alphabetical, but nothing else.

[Andrew]

Wait, I doubt it.

[Marques Brownlee]

No, it's not. Because right above it, it's probably just

[Andrew]

because it's an action for the disk.

[Adam]

If I right click anything, it's not

[Andrew]

in alphabetical order because generally that dropdown is like folder colors and a bunch of other stuff. So then those two are just like actions that are similar, but not ones you want to be similar.

[David]

It's like engineer brain versus designer brain. You know, like, engineer brain would be like, yeah. Like, those are two things you do to the drive. I'm going to order them in terms of severity. Whereas a designer would be like, at no point does anyone ever choosing between those two options. Like, they should be far away.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. Erase should be at the bottom.

[Andrew]

If we want a good example of a designer brain that may not have noticed something that feels too obvious, we just released these studio stickers, which, if you are an audio listener, essentially what our design team has thought up, of which I think is really interesting, is the eyedropper tool from, like, Photoshop or any design program, except that we have cut it out. So there is a. It's not clear. It's just a straight cutout in the eyedropper and in the circle that it's selecting. So no matter what you put it on, it looks like you're selecting the color.

[Ellis]

A lot of people got very confused at this. Somebody posted on our subreddit, our unofficial subreddit, they're like, I'm confused. How did they get the colors to match exactly what the thing they put it on? And it's because there's a cutout and it's clear and you can see through it.

[Andrew]

That's what I was saying. Like our designers, somebody said in Instagram, is there a red one? It's like, yes, there is. Any color you could ever think of, whatever object, because it is using the object underneath it.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew]

None of us ever thought that would happen, but there are multiple comments on Twitter and Reddit and Instagram. So, yes, whatever color you would like. These are new stickers available, except.

[David]

Except teal. It doesn't work on teal.

[Ellis]

It doesn't.

[Andrew]

Well, it shouldn't. Sorry, Dave.

[Ellis]

I will say that it works much better on, like, brighter, more vibrant colors. I put it on my iPhone. Blue. Whatever the blue color is called this year. And it's like, it's not as poppy. You know, when you put on your water bottle, you're like, whoa, it looks like a red sticker. Like a bright red sticker. It's pretty cool. But on my dark blue iPhone, it's not as vibrant. So I would put on your more vibrant.

[Andrew]

You're using an old version also that has a clear outline, which creates less contrast on the oval.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, yeah, we updated.

[Ellis]

Oh, you're right.

[Andrew]

I'm using a vintage. We have an old all white outline now. So no matter what your Color is. You should get a big contrast boost because it's.

[Ellis]

That's a great point. That's a great point.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's a classic of like, we've been in the weeds working on this for so long that when it comes out, we assume everyone knows all of the things. But now you know all the things.

[Andrew]

Luckily, this is just a sticker and you can figure it out by yourself.

[Marques Brownlee]

You get the sticker, you're like, oh, this is nice. This is good.

[Ellis]

Yeah. And if you want new things to put the stickers on, there's new software coming out in June from Apple because WWDC just got announced. You can put your stickers on your software in the Metaverse.

[David]

As long as it's not teal.

[Ellis]

As long as it's not teal.

[Andrew]

I'm kidding.

[David]

It's a sticker. It does work on teal.

[Ellis]

Yeah. So here's one of our two bullet point things. Actually, there's only one bullet point, but WWDC starts on Monday, June 8. It is once again on a Monday. For some reason, I don't know why they keep doing this. Usually events are on Tuesdays so that people can travel and not have to travel over the weekend. But it is on a Monday. So, you know, we're going to be seeing what's going on there. There's going to be some new Apple intelligence stuff. IOS 27, hopefully iOS 27. Which brings us to Apple is reportedly testing a standalone Siri app. And we know that Siri is going to be powered by Gemini. And so this feels like it will possibly just kind of be a Gemini rapper, you know, because Gemini has a dedicated app and that's how people interact with it. But you can also interact with it through the phone through asking, you know, hey, G, what's up with this? You can do things via Gemini.

[David]

It's not a Gemini rapper. It was just Meek Mill.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, wow. Did you have to get.

[Andrew]

That was a crazy cut. Not even deep because it's new, but if you saw it.

[Ellis]

Who is Meek Mill?

[David]

I'm just on. No, there was a Twitter reference.

[Andrew]

Yeah, it's a recent Twitter reference tweeting

[David]

about AI all week.

[Andrew]

Sorry, I told he's a rapper also, if you didn't know that.

[Marques Brownlee]

Hence I thought she meant he was actually his birth sign.

[Ellis]

That's what I thought too.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[David]

Now Miko's been tweeting about Claude all week.

[Andrew]

It's really funny.

[Marques Brownlee]

God, it is funny.

[Adam]

Okay, I need to know now. What's his sign? Hold on.

[Marques Brownlee]

Is it.

[David]

I know.

[Adam]

He's a Taurus.

[Ellis]

Taurus Bros. Nice. Anyway, anyway, yeah, so it seems like we're going to get the Siri 2.0 potentially in the iOS 27 release, despite previously being stated that it will come out in iOS 26.4 or 26.5. Gurman is reporting that there will be a separate app that looks like imessage when you message it.

[Marques Brownlee]

I thought that was really interesting.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Because a lot of this was. Maybe this is just because of what was the new one, openclaw. How people were like interacting with through messages. And that was interesting. Like paradigm of just I want to chat with my chatbot. Everyone knows imessage. So an app that's Siri. But it looks like imessage is interesting. It's a concept that Apple can do.

[Andrew]

I think it's good and weird because, like, it's obviously familiar to iPhone users because it looks like imessage.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

But then also like the fact that there's two apps that look exactly the same, but one is the AI one. I guess you'll never get them confused. But it feels like maybe it could just pop in the messages app. Like, why not just a top chat, like a pin chat that's now inside the messages, which is what WhatsApp did

[Ellis]

for a very long time.

[Marques Brownlee]

And I think. Didn't Google Messages do that with Gemini or you can chat to Gemini.

[Ellis]

You can chat to Gemini.

[Adam]

You can pin it if you want to the top. And yeah, there's a chat in there,

[Marques Brownlee]

so I can see that.

[Ellis]

I think that makes a lot of sense. It's also being reported that they're testing a lot of new, different Siri designs, which is kind of sad because I like the current kind of rainbow wavy one that they got going on. But. But apparently it may come out of the dynamic island and it will probably be replacing Spotlight so that Siri can access different types of data because Spotlight is fairly limited on what the phone can access. And now that Siri is going to have this new LLM built in, it'll be able to understand more context and kind of reach for different types of things. And apps will also be getting an Ask with Siri option so you can get more context about the things that you're currently looking at on your screen. So it really kind of just feels like Apple is following what Google is doing with Gemini, where Gemini is embedded inside of Android and it's just kind of part of the os. I think Apple is moving in that direction.

[Andrew]

Clippy.

[Ellis]

Clippy.

[Andrew]

Microsoft had it right years ago, ahead of its time.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, Google, we always say Google Glass ahead of its time, Clippy ahead of its time.

[Andrew]

I like how they kill Clippy so hard. We're saying Microsoft's ahead of its time and this series isn't even out yet and we're still giving it more credit.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, that.

[Andrew]

Bring back Clippy. That's all you needed to do.

[Ellis]

Some people were saying there were rumors that we were going to get a beta drop that included Siri, like this week. I would personally prefer if they just waited till June and it was one big, like, release announcement because it'd be more exciting.

[Andrew]

I think the thing I heard was like updated Gemini queries inside of like Apple Intelligence, but that the new Siri would be in iOS 27 because, like, they have to drop it at Dub Dub. Apple needs an event. It's been two years for everything except for AirPods Max 2. And then, yeah, they. That's where they're going to drop it. Even though it probably should have been dropped at last. Dub Dub. Even though it probably should have been dropped at the 24. Well, it was dropped at that one and then not actually dropped. Announced event announced and not dropped at the iPhone.

[Ellis]

They did drop it, you know, they dropped the.

[Andrew]

They dropped the ball.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. So, I mean, iOS 27 is going to come out officially with the iPhone 27. So that'd be like a September ish type of time frame. So if they announce what they're going to do with it in summer.

[Ellis]

IPhone 18.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, sorry, iPhone 18. IOS 27.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

2027. 2027. September.

[Ellis]

Correct.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. That could possibly be the big drop of like, all the new features, the new Siri, everything comes out at once. And the new phone happens to have a couple other. We've seen rumors of, like, new features

[Andrew]

of the iPhone, but we should get some developer stuff in like July, right? Yeah, 27. Beta comes out early beta.

[Ellis]

Well, the beta comes out on the day of Dub Dub. Like, it drops that day.

[Andrew]

Oh, yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Developer beta.

[Andrew]

Developer beta. But like, people usually aren't allowed to make videos and stuff until.

[Marques Brownlee]

Fun fact, you're not technically. Okay, how in the weeds should I get?

[Ellis]

I also get weedy right now.

[Marques Brownlee]

Well, okay, you are not allowed when you sign the developer agreement to make videos about the developer beta. Yeah, most people don't read that and don't care. Yeah. But we are in a unique position where we have some working relationship with Apple and so we try to follow the actual rules. And so when the developer beta comes out and everyone makes videos about the developer beta, that they're technically not allowed to, but they do it anyway.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

I wait because I agreed to the developer agreement, and then a month later, when the public beta comes out, I make a video on that using my experience from the developer beta on the public beta.

[Andrew]

The benefit of Waveform is we can just report on everybody else's videos and talk about it however we want before that.

[Marques Brownlee]

Exactly.

[Ellis]

That's that. Should we do the other Apple thing and just get it out of the way or what do you think?

[Andrew]

Ads and Apple Maps.

[Ellis]

Yeah. Okay. Apple's going to allow businesses to buy ads in Apple Maps. And I can already hear people being like, wow, Apple Maps is sucky. Which I still don't like it. To be clear, I still like Google Maps a lot more. Google Maps, you probably don't know this, but has had ads for an extremely long period of time.

[Marques Brownlee]

A Google product with. With. With ads.

[Ellis]

It's their main.

[Adam]

Are you sure?

[Ellis]

Their main moneymaker.

[Andrew]

That's crazy.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

No, I mean, if you go on Google Maps right now, you'll just see Dunkin Donuts around you without trying to search for it.

[Andrew]

It's so weird. Oh, is that in. Maybe that's in ways I think Waze when you're driving and it's just like, hey, there's a Wendy's right there. Okay, cool. I don't care.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, it's like your friend pointing out the window like, hey, yeah, there's a one. He's right there.

[Ellis]

So it's gonna allow people, well, people that want to sell ads to have suggested places at the top of search results. And this is going to be based on places that are trending and based on your recent searches. And it will not be associated with your Apple account because all of the data is stored on device. They're still trying to be hardcore about security, about that. And they also say that the places that you go to are not shared with advertisers. Now, that's also what ChatGPT said when they said that they were going to do ads. But we'll have to see if that's true.

[Marques Brownlee]

What's funny about that is Maps is like a very personal app. It's like where you're going in your location all the time. And I do feel like, and this is maybe this is a hot take, but everyone loves to talk about, I would rather have privacy than have personalized ads. But when you're in your Maps app, wouldn't you rather have personalized ads than like, I never drink coffee. Why am I still getting Starbucks Ads everywhere I go. I would rather have the personalized ad for the thing that I would actually maybe go to than constantly get things that are not associated with Jollibee at all. Yeah, I feel like that I would actually appreciate that. Cause I might actually go to the Jollibee and I would never go to the Starbucks that I might get an ad for from Apple.

[Andrew]

You go to Starbucks a lot for a non coffee drinker?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. Okay, maybe that's a bad example, but

[Andrew]

I just want to say I've never seen someone go to Starbucks as often and never order coffee.

[Marques Brownlee]

I think people I just pump.

[Andrew]

You're big on the pumpkin bread.

[Marques Brownlee]

The bread is. Can I warm it up for you? Yeah. Yes you can.

[Ellis]

I think best item at Starbucks is the. The thing that has the spinach and the feta wrap. The spinach feta wrap.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's a solid breakfast. Yeah, they got a couple breakfast sandwiches. Anyway, my point is Google's gonna give me ads based on the way too much that it knows about me. And Apple is going to give me ads based on the knowing nothing about me. And I suspect I'll be more annoyed by the ones that are for the thing that I've never considered going to.

[Ellis]

That's kind of the big question that's been asked for the last few years because when Apple dropped the Ask app not to track feature and then Meta was like, wouldn't you rather that you had more integrated. And it's like, it's kind of. I don't know. I know a lot of people who buy a lot of things from Instagram ads. So I've never bought anything from an Instagram ad because I will not let them win. But I know that it can be quite effective for a lot of people. It reminds me of that story of the. The woman who didn't know she was pregnant, but Amazon did because it was certainly Target.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, Target, Ye Target. And then they start recommending things for targeted her.

[David]

I guess it was also a minor.

[Andrew]

So I'll be interested in how this pops up. Is it popping up while you're searching for places? Is that taking over the top of it? Is it just suggestions? When you first open Apple Maps is like you think about places like Yelp that were a place thing and Yelp is just destroyed. Ever since they did all the like you can pay to get like placed up higher and better reviews or whatever. No one cares about Yelp anymore.

[Ellis]

Yelp has also famously like kind of exploited businesses and called them and be like, we're going to take you off of our recommendations. If you don't pay us, that's.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

Like, there are stories about this is crazy.

[Andrew]

So.

[Ellis]

Yeah, well, we'll see. I mean, it's. I don't even know how many people actually use Apple Maps anymore, but. Yeah, or not anymore, but ever did.

[Marques Brownlee]

As long as it's clearly marked as an ad so I can very quickly skip it, then I'm happy.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

So that's the hard part though is like, what if the ad does look really scrumptious?

[Marques Brownlee]

Damn it, that's a successful.

[Andrew]

I know, but how many like. Like what you said, if you see it, say ad, I'm usually like hardwired to skip. But then there's the times where it's like, that does sound really good. But is this actually good or is this just an ad?

[Marques Brownlee]

Then you gotta do the second layer of research of like, let me click it, let me look at the reviews.

[Andrew]

I'm hungry. I'm just trying to eat.

[Marques Brownlee]

I know. It's usually.

[Andrew]

I ain't trying to research.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's why I don't like, this is why nobody wants ads and maps. Like, you just want to find the thing, go to the thing, but the ads gonna pop up and be like, hey, what about. You wanna go to this other place? No, I actually opened this app just to go somewhere else, thank you very much.

[Ellis]

It is frustrating. Even in Google Maps, it'll be like, best food near me and it'll give me like a 4.5 because that's that restaurant, like paid for it or whatever. It's like suggested sponsored result. And it's like, ugh, yeah. Apple is in this weird place where it's like slowly trying to transition towards other revenue sources because they're scared of the iPhone, making less money over time and all of these things happening. And you know, they can't retain as many people as they want on their other services.

[Marques Brownlee]

So they're like, this will come up again later in this podcast. Oh, it will.

[Ellis]

Yeah, it will.

[Marques Brownlee]

It will.

[Adam]

Foreshadowing.

[Ellis]

We'll see how that happens.

[Andrew]

Marques, what are you more excited about? The Samsung A series or Flighty?

[Ellis]

Is that a question? Is that a real question?

[Marques Brownlee]

I literally licked his lips when we heard Flighty before we started, before we started recording, I was like, I think Flighty is like top 5 app of all time.

[Andrew]

Insane take.

[Marques Brownlee]

And it's not like a multi. It's not multi platform. It's not like a very broad thing that everyone can use. Not everybody flies enough to give any hoots about flighty.

[Ellis]

But.

[Marques Brownlee]

But if you do fly a lot, Flighty is goaded. And everybody who flies a lot knows that. So it's weirdly in that it's tucked away in the corner of like, hey, do you fly a lot? No question about it. This app is unbelievably useful.

[Andrew]

That will be a Flighty ad by Monday.

[Marques Brownlee]

Sorry, it's just fact. Anyway, they. No, they just announced another thing. So kind of like, I'm describing it as like, Waze for airports. They're calling it Airport Intelligence. And essentially what it does is it allows you a broader view of like, what's going on with airports in general. So Flighty, for those who don't know, is like a flight tracker app. You put in your flight information. It tells you everything you need to know about your flight as you're about to fly, while you're flying. As soon as you land, it tells you where your baggage is going to be. If it's delayed, it tells you why it's delayed before. The airline usually does all this stuff. It's super useful. So airport intelligence is like, let's say, hypothetically, there's something going on with airports in your area.

[Andrew]

Allegedly.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, allegedly. This could happen. Maybe.

[Andrew]

The timing for this release is perfect.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's really good timing. So something weird is going on at an airport in your area and it's affecting like kind of all flights, and you're flying tomorrow and you just kind of want to get an idea of like, maybe I should go to security check in like two or three hours early, for example. Just a hypothetical, you would be able to look at the airports in your area and look at their status in this, which is sort of aggregating a bunch of data, I assume, from flighty users and from, you know, the FAA and everything contributing to one spot. Kind of like Waze. And you can get an idea of if the airport in question is affected or not and make your decision accordingly. So again, as someone who flies a lot, another useful feature, I will be happily using this. It is kind of slow right now, I assume. Cause it just launched, but it is full of information about every airport.

[Ellis]

It's crazy that they launched this before the FAA did, but I think that's

[Marques Brownlee]

the least surprising thing.

[Ellis]

I mean, yeah, true. Yeah. There was an interview with the United CEO like a year ago, and they're like, they asked him what is one thing that you wish that you did to like, update your tech stack earlier? And he said, I wish we bought Flighty.

[Marques Brownlee]

Wow.

[Ellis]

Like, he specifically said that. He was like, they're doing insanely good things. And I have made. I think they've made them offers and they said no.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, every time I fly I get the. My iPhone has the live activity for the United app and for Flighty. And I immediately dismissed the United one because I just used the Flighty one.

[Ellis]

You should just not allow it to send you notifications.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, well, I also click on it for my boarding pass. That's the one thing I have the United app for though.

[Ellis]

Your boarding pass.

[Marques Brownlee]

Everything else I. I just get from Flighty.

[Andrew]

Wait, did they even test this United boarding pass? If you have multiple people on the reservation and you are not the first one. If you have like your boarding pass up and ready and then lock your phone waiting in line and then come up, it resets back to the first one I've scanned Adam and before on business trips. And then we have to figure out which one I did wrong. Yeah, terrible. United.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Should be able to pin your boarding pass.

[Ellis]

Yeah, you should be able to have your boarding pass in Flighty.

[Marques Brownlee]

You should be able to what?

[Ellis]

Be able to have your boarding pass in Flighty.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh. Ooh. Yeah. Why can't we do that? There's probably a reason why we can't do that.

[Ellis]

Because they want you to use their app. Yeah, probably. That's probably why.

[Marques Brownlee]

Anyway, so that's that. The other thing that you mentioned, Andrew, is Samsung dropping the new A series of phones? I only put this in here cause I thought it was just a note and interesting that they all have the same battery size.

[Ellis]

These aren't notes.

[Marques Brownlee]

So yeah, so it's the Samsung A57 and A37. The A37 will be 449, the A57 will be 400, 549. So these are like your mid range fighters. We've seen a lot of phones coming out at this price points and they look just like the rest of the Samsung S series phones. Like S26s, they look like they have triple cameras, but one of them is a macro camera. You know, they make the appropriate cuts to reach these price points. But the one thing they did is they both have 5,000 milliamp hour batteries, which is the same size as the S26 Ultra. So the $1,200 phone has a 5,000 milliamp hour battery and the $450 phone also has a 5000 milliamp hour battery.

[Andrew]

It's one of those things where you're like really pumped for the cheap phone and really bummed for the expensive phone. Pretty much it's like hard to complain about this because I'm so happy that the mid range phones are getting that, but you gotta take that as a kick in the teeth if you bought the 26 Ultra.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, you can't.

[Andrew]

That's.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's. I said in my review, so I don't have to harp on it again, but that is maybe the least ultra ultra phone right now is the S26 Ultra.

[Ellis]

Back to the S20 days.

[Marques Brownlee]

Great phone. I told it like it is in the review, but yeah, as far as the word ultra concerned.

[Ellis]

Adam, did you purchase another phone?

[Adam]

The S26 Ultra?

[Marques Brownlee]

He had it last. What color was it? It was a different color that I. It's black. Yeah.

[Adam]

The black one.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. Had the like purple.

[Ellis]

How long do you plan to stay on that?

[Adam]

Till the iPhone allegedly folds.

[Andrew]

We'll see.

[Marques Brownlee]

Interesting.

[Ellis]

That's. I don't think that's going to happen. I think you're going to change earlier.

[Andrew]

Definitely.

[Ellis]

Possibly.

[Andrew]

I thought you were gonna say till my next shipment comes in of whatever I ordered yesterday.

[Ellis]

Yeah, well, you could buy that or you could buy a MacBook Neo. So choose wisely.

[Marques Brownlee]

For 1200 bucks.

[Ellis]

No, the cheap one.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, oh, yeah, the cheap eight.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's crazy. Yeah, you could buy that or a Neo. That's wild.

[Ellis]

Speaking of the MacBook Neo, you want to talk about this Windows 11 problem?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. We can do this before break. So recent video on the channel will be live by the time you see this, which is just talking about the Windows Laptop problem. This was inspired by the two Mac laptops that I've tested most recently, the MacBook Neo. Their 599,499 mid range fighter and the M5 Max MacBook Pro, which I've also tested. I was running all my benchmarks on it. It had like 18,000 megabyte per second SSD read and write speeds, which is crazy. It has benchmarked multi core higher than any other Mac ever, including the Mac Pro and M3 Ultra. And it has GPU scores matching M3 Ultra, which is insane. This is a Max chip and a laptop. So I'm actually thinking like, this is now a laptop that could actually replace my Mac Pro and be my desktop. I might be that guy at some point. But having all these thoughts also made me think, well, what's going on in Windows land? Like, what is actually the equivalent of the highest end laptop you could get? And could it be the desktop that I choose to use? How good are those laptops? And so that had me digging into like okay, what's going on with xps? What's going on with Razer Blades? What's going on also with the NEO competitors? I bought a $550 Acer laptop. We tested that and essentially the conclusion I came to was Apple's Apple Silicon advantage. And their vertical integration is a huge advantage at the high end for efficiency and performance and it turns out to also be a huge advantage at the low end for cost. Yeah, and the cherry on top is that Apple doesn't actually really need to make a ton of money on NEOs on the hardware margin because it's basically as I said in the video, like a Trojan horse for new Apple customers which then will spend way more on software, on services, on Apple Care, on Apple tv, on Apple Creative Studio, all these other things. So they don't have to make the hundred dollars on the hardware margin, but they will make a ton of money over time on just getting a new person to be a Mac user.

[Ellis]

This is the entire Chromebook play. It was get people on Google services when they're five years old so they will use services for the rest of their life. Yeah, yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

So it was interesting to sort of see that in real time and just like put the machines next to each other and be like oh yeah, they can make just a straight up better laptop for the same price. And that's going to get people to become first time people.

[Ellis]

I mean a Windows computer has parts from a ton of different companies and every single one of those companies has to make margin.

[Andrew]

That's literally the main problem disadvantage off the Rift, like insane to do that. And that bites. It's the same. It's like similar with Android phones, it's similar with tablets. It's just like when Apple has the full integration through they've there's a benefit there. Even just like making software on mobile. Right. Like we see all the time, if you're making iOS software you don't have to do it that hard. But if you were making Android software, it has to fit a thousand, like thousands of thousands of tens of thousands of different like form factors and phones and resolutions and aspects.

[Ellis]

That's why Google has been so hardcore about just trying to make Android so flexible with screen sizes and stuff.

[Marques Brownlee]

And that's part of the advantage right is there is a choice like in Android Land, if I really, really, really care about having 8k video, well there is no iPhone that can do that. So if I just want to choose a phone that can shoot 8K video, you can find that in Android Land you Can find all sorts of other different things you might care about, like a folding stuff screen or whatever in Android Land. But the couple of phones that Apple makes are like locked in super tightly integrated and you might not be super used to the way they do things, but they do it the same way every single time. So you kind of just get used to that when you're in that ecosystem.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

And yeah, that's kind of the same thing with Windows now in this sort of latest generation. This is the nuance of it is. Yes, you depend on all these different companies who make the parts to your computer to all make their margin, but also make a good piece. You have to have to make a great Windows laptop. Several different companies all executing and firing all cylinders at the same time for your one computer to be good. So if you're Dell and you make the XPs like I showed, you're also depending on intel to be making a good chip at that time, which they are. And you know your Dell, you have to make a good computer with a good screen and a good keyboard and all that stuff, which they are. And you need Windows to be good.

[Andrew]

I'm fine with Windows. I like Windows.

[Marques Brownlee]

So Windows 11 is in kind of a weird place because not Everybody's loving Windows 11. I do not. I haven't used Windows since Windows 10 and I was jumping into Windows 11 again and I set up this XPS. It took me 45 minutes to set it up. The setup is insufferable because there were mandatory downloading updates and stuff. Once I got through the updates it was like sign into this, sign into that and download Microsoft 365. Do you want to use Copilot? Do you want recall on? Do you want all these other things? And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. All this stuff it was asking me. And then I finally got into my clean install of Windows and then I got a pop up for McAfee to be installed.

[Ellis]

And this is the other thing. The only other way that these manufacturers that make the laptops can make the laptops cheap enough to even be competitive at all is that they have to put a bunch of bloatware on it.

[Marques Brownlee]

They have to get to make more.

[Ellis]

Yeah, I mean we see this on Android phones too. Like the Android phones that come with Facebook installed and come with Instagram installed. They don't do that out of the kindness of their heart. They do that because Meta pays them to do that. So yeah, it's just, it's not a good situation for anybody else. And Microsoft, really, they tried to do the vertical integration with the Surface, but I just. They're such a B2B company that it's such an afterthought for them. We saw this with the Pixel for a very long time. The Nexus program, the Pixel, now Tensor. Google didn't really care about the Pixel

[Marques Brownlee]

and they still don't really, really.

[Ellis]

They're trying to care more. And the Pixels are really good now. They're really, really good now, but it still doesn't have quite the level of vertical integration that they would like.

[Marques Brownlee]

And even if they achieved it, they're in this weird spot where they make Android for everyone else. So they're competing against all of that while also providing them with the os. So this happens in Google Land because they make the Pixel and Tensor and they're all vertically integrated and they'll give the Pixel exclusive Android features. And now they're competing against every other Android phone. Same thing happened with Windows and Microsoft and Surface and making this beautifully, ideally very vertically integrated thing. Now you're competing against all your other OEMs trying to make good Windows machines. And maybe that's like a lead by example type thing, but it just, it never went well.

[Ellis]

Yeah. And the funny thing about the Google Android features thing is that they also want to make Android a popular OS to compete with iOS, and so they have to eventually give a lot of these features to the broader Android ecosystem. And that's why Google does this awkward thing where they have Pixel exclusive features for like two months and then it goes to every other Android phone because they need other people to want to use Android in general. And it's also why they had that weird bromance with Samsung for such a long time.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

Ellis, you look like you really want to say something.

[David]

I know. I've just been fighting a Windows PC all week. And like, to be honest, it's all tinfoil hat stuff because it's a Windows PC that on paper has a really good graphics card and a really good, or, you know, good enough graphics card and a good enough processor. But, like, and we didn't build this PC and it sort of is the things that, you know, you. I think you've been talking about, Marques, like, like it's for a video we're working on that involves this like, peripheral device that connects via USB 3.0 and it keeps crashing all the time. And I couldn't figure out why it kept crashing. And my working theory right now, and I haven't, like, tested this, so again, it's tinfoil Hat is that the USB 3.0 ports on this computer are just not USB 3.0 parts. That. That's my best guess. Because when you. And the USB 3.2 ports are USB 3.0 part ports, and it's like, there's no way. The company who built this PC, you know, they didn't build the ports. They definitely got the USB IO box. Like, from the motherboard. Yeah. From someone else. But it's like that. It's sort of what you're talking about. It's like you need all. Or like, for some reason, not a single Bluetooth keyboard will connect to this PC. Not one. There's one Logitech keyboard in the whole office that connect for 30 seconds and then immediately disconnect. And the rest of. And it's not like I haven't tried all 100 Bluetooth keyboards that are in the office.

[Andrew]

Where could those be? Where could those have come from?

[David]

This is all ringing very true.

[Andrew]

It also is shaped like a shoe.

[David]

Well, I was trying not to. I don't know if that any of these are the problems I don't want out.

[Andrew]

There's a chance, like, that computer doesn't get used very often. There might be some driver updates that are in there that we haven't, like, dug that deep into where, like, it was dormant for a while. So.

[David]

Totally. And I don't.

[Andrew]

Some are probably that, but some are also, like. It should be easy to figure out what those problems. Yeah.

[David]

I don't want to. I don't want to accuse anyone of counterfeit USB ports, but I genuinely cannot. I'm at the point now where I'm like, why. Why does the USB 3.0 cable not get USB 3.0 speeds until it's in the 3.2 port? Why does the 3.0 port not give 3.0 speeds?

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[David]

What?

[Ellis]

Yeah, sorry.

[Marques Brownlee]

I was looking into the eyes of your hat for a second.

[David]

Yeah. I should probably address this. This is Franklin, the mascot of the Philadelphia 76ers. Thank you to fan Michael for the sick hat. I'm gonna be wearing this.

[Andrew]

Why do they have a cat as the mascot?

[David]

It's a dog. His name is Franklin.

[Andrew]

That is a cat. A thousand percent.

[Ellis]

Isn't Franklin.

[Marques Brownlee]

A turtle has whiskers.

[David]

Franklin is Benjamin Franklin, the founding Father. That's half of the things in Philadelphia.

[Ellis]

He was a dog.

[David]

Benjamin Franklin was, in fact, what number president was he? He was president number six. And he. When he signed the Declaration of Independence, it was a paw print.

[Ellis]

He got that dog in him.

[Andrew]

Cat Print to bring it back. I think the best way. I didn't notice that. I feel like the best way. If you really want an example of the difference between like the vertical integration in Apple and the vertical integration in Android Windows, go on our Apple and go on our Android and watch. Everyone in Apple is just generally mad at the same thing where everyone in Android is mad at each other because even though they're all using Android, they're all fans of different companies of phones and they all hate each other. It is just the wildest infighting ever. And like now imagine all of those different people need to work together and build something. And it's just.

[David]

And to be fair, like, I'm a

[Andrew]

full Android and Windows user at home. By the way, I only use Apple stuff.

[Ellis]

Yeah, I like Android better than iOS by far. And there's a great piece by David Pearce. He tried to use Android for like the last four months and he used a bunch of different phones and he really liked the Fairphone 6, but it doesn't work on Verizon, so he couldn't do it. But he went back to iOS because his conclusion was effectively phones are app machines and iOS has better apps and he relies on too many iOS apps to go back to Android, which sucks. Cause Android is a way better os.

[David]

Well, I want to play devil's advocate because as someone who's like, fully Apple, you know, ecosystem up, there are a lot of these like vertically integrated things in the Apple world that are like not supported to the degree they should be. Like Freeform has like six updates that they just need to add. Like, there's just no excuse why Freeform doesn't have these things. But I just don't think they care enough about Freeform to do it. I don't think they do. And there's a bunch. Or like, why does the Apple Mail app still kind of blow? Or like, so you know what I mean?

[Andrew]

It's even when you're just the default and you get to be the default thing for what, 80% market share of the U.S. like, why change?

[Ellis]

Why update it?

[David]

Yeah, but like, why is it so hard to rotate something on the desktop version of Freeform? And why is it so hard to select multiple objects on the mobile version of freeform?

[Ellis]

I would like to see like user base for Freeform.

[David]

It's me.

[Ellis]

Yeah,

[Andrew]

that's your average Apple user. Definitely. Some people who hate Apple. Screenshotting you in the cat hat right now. Like, average Apple user.

[Marques Brownlee]

There's also Benjamin Frank. There's also. It's Kind of like either that or the massive graveyard of stuff that Google tries and then just kills a year later. So it's like, would I rather have the kind of weak updates but at least works the same way every time on one side of the fence. Or like Google launching an app and me going, I don't think I want to switch to this because I don't trust them to even keep this alive for a year.

[Ellis]

RIP inbox, bro.

[David]

So true.

[Marques Brownlee]

So it, yeah, there's choice on one side, but there's the upside and downside of that choice.

[David]

Also there's at least six Freeform users because there are several things that I force my friends to do on Freeform with me. So they're monthly plan, vacation stuff. Freeform is excellent for that.

[Andrew]

That this whole conversation is also negating people who have like very specific needs that software wise or like needs to be on a Windows machine, needs to be on Android, needs to be on iOS. Like we're talking outside of that because clearly then yeah, they have one option.

[Ellis]

Almost every business distributes Windows computers.

[Marques Brownlee]

I think that's a big part of the equation for like why they are where they are. Especially because you talk about like David having like he come from an iPhone so he's already plugged in and use a lot of iPhone only apps.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

There's a lot of people who play a certain game that you can't play on Mac or there are people who use certain softwares for their business that are just only Windows xp. That's a real thing where okay, now Windows XP has a massive market share because that's still stable and that's the thing that we use and that's where our apps are. So if your dependencies or you're plugged into one specific thing. I'm a Mac user. I you not because I switched to Final Cut Pro.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

That is why I started using a Mac.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

And now here we are a decade later and I'm in the ecosystem and they got me. That's the point of neo, that's the point of all these other feelers is to just get a device in front of you that gives you options and hopefully you like one of those things and then you are sucked into that ecosystem.

[Ellis]

Yeah. I mean I was the lead reviewer at Android authority for five years. I didn't use an iPhone until the iPhone 13 when I reviewed it. And I didn't switch to an iPhone until the iPhone 15 because I had USB C. I would have never touched an Apple device. And all of my dependencies Were in Android. Like I could use my world. People were. Nobody texted because when I lived in the Bay Area, everyone used Facebook messenger. But then I moved here and now I swear I am in so many imessage group chats that every time I test an Android phone they bully the out.

[Adam]

Now look at you. What have they done to our lad?

[Ellis]

I know, and I know that you say that's not a real problem, but bullying is real. Okay. I don't like crying. Do you like crying? It sucks.

[David]

You should. We should get on group me.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, my gosh.

[Andrew]

Fun facts.

[Ellis]

Oh, my God. Worst app of all time.

[Andrew]

First messaging app of the MKBHD business.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

When Brandon and Vin started, well, because Marquez and I were in a group me for our both of our ultimate.

[Marques Brownlee]

Every Frisbee team I've played for for 15 years until like last year was a group me.

[Ellis]

Unbelievable.

[David]

That was the most like feature, not an app app of all time.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's genuinely. I was talking about Flighty being one of the five best. Group me is one of the five worst apps of all time.

[Ellis]

I want to make one final note related to this and then we can take it to break on the Windows 11 thing. Dave 2D put out a really good video recently about this. And the kind of. The gist of this was that a number of years ago, like five or six years ago, he had all of the Windows manufacturers send him laptops that were in the same price range as the Apple M1 Air, I believe, so he could compare them. And all these manufacturers, like, sure, yeah, like, here's our laptop. That's that price. And then he asked all the same manufacturers this year to send him laptops that were in the same price range. And they were all like, no. And I feel like that kind of distills the entire thing. That's all you really need to know. Because they're all afraid.

[Andrew]

They knew the video he was gonna

[Ellis]

make, it was gonna make it look negative. Yeah, it was gonna make it look terrible. They didn't really know at the time how insane M1 was, but they still feel five to six years behind at this point. So it's. It's crazy. Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

So go watch the video if you haven't already.

[David]

I want to say something nice about Windows.

[Ellis]

Go for it.

[David]

Because everyone always tells me I'm too mean to my Windows Green Bubble people. I know those are two separate Windows Green Bubble. To me, you're the same.

[Ellis]

But yeah, that's fair.

[David]

Something nice about Windows, I like that they support old graphics engines. I like That I can still get a DirectX driver that runs on a modern Windows motherboard. I think that's cool. Apple does not do that. Pre. Pre Metal stuff. Very hard to run on Mac OS. DirectX stuff. Very easy to run on a Windows computer.

[Andrew]

Pre.

[Ellis]

Metal use like Rocks and fire.

[David]

Yes. That was the name of the old Apple graphics engine actually. Rocks and fire. Yeah. Steve Jobs was super against it.

[Ellis]

Yeah. And then when. And then when Jony I've came in and he said aluminium and they knew it had to be metal.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's a great place to jump to. Trivia.

[Ellis]

What was the old graphics driver of Apple?

[Marques Brownlee]

Rocks and Fire.

[David]

Today we're doing a number question and it's Delta, not Price is Right rules.

[Ellis]

Is it United?

[David]

No, it's Delta.

[Ellis]

We'll talk about United later.

[David]

Yeah, we will, will we?

[Ellis]

Yes. Oh, I thought.

[Andrew]

I think we lost our chance to talk about United.

[David]

Oh, yeah.

[Ellis]

Also, they don't have to talk about it.

[David]

That's really cool. But they're like the seventh airline to do that. So I was sort of like, why are we freaking out about this skycap?

[Marques Brownlee]

It's called mingling bad in regular class. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I thought that was like a super, super premium crazy feature.

[Andrew]

No, no.

[David]

Most other airlines just call it the first one that did it. Okay. United was like. United was like, guys, you could get a whole row.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[David]

And then we'll like, we'll like.

[Andrew]

You can turn it into a bed and mango.

[Marques Brownlee]

Relax.

[Andrew]

Row.

[Marques Brownlee]

Relax, relax.

[David]

Other airlines call it Sky Couch. I think Jet Blue does this too. A bunch of the European airlines do it. But this is not like a new groundbreaking thing. This is like a United catching up sort of thing. Well, they pretended it was anyway. Well, of course it's a business thing. But anyway, today's trivia question is. Yeah, Delta. How many Wikipedia pages have the title Apple tv?

[Andrew]

I'm assuming it counts. If it's like Apple tv parentheses.

[David]

And I'm only accepting Apple Space tv, by the way, that exact set of. Was that nine characters in a space?

[Ellis]

What about like, would Apple TV plus

[David]

count seven characters in a space?

[Ellis]

Or does it just have to be Apple tv?

[David]

It's Apple Space TV and then something in parentheses.

[Ellis]

Oh.

[David]

How many Wikipedia pages have that exact title?

[Ellis]

Damn.

[Andrew]

Delta.

[Ellis]

Delta.

[David]

Pretty good question.

[Andrew]

Can we do a quick shout out?

[Ellis]

Yeah, sure.

[Andrew]

Someone on our subreddit watched Waveform at a planetarium.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

At their university. It was so cool.

[Marques Brownlee]

I kind of want to know what that sounded like.

[Andrew]

It was probably like a bees ass, dude.

[Marques Brownlee]

No, I've sounded amazing.

[Andrew]

I was probably the opposite when I

[Marques Brownlee]

worked at Liberty Science center. The planetarium was sick. And it was also. It sounded really good. I don't remember why. I remember it sounded really good. But the videos that they played because everything's, it's like you're looking up, everything's around you. There's speakers everywhere.

[Ellis]

Your visual field is making that sound better.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. At least my memory of it was that it sounded.

[David]

I really hope they played the episode where Andrew says he can't name all the planets.

[Andrew]

I just, I wish he stretched it. I wish there was a stretch to fit somehow. Because seeing a lot of our giant faces, circular like over top, that is

[Ellis]

what it felt like to watch Project Hail Mary in the front row in 70 millimeter.

[Andrew]

Oh man, I've seen the, the clips of like Oppenheimer from the front row and it's like Crimson Shin.

[Ellis]

I watched Oppenheimer from the front row and I watched Project Hail Mary from the front row.

[Adam]

Amaze. Amazing.

[Ellis]

Amaze. Amazing. Amaze.

[Marques Brownlee]

Shout out to that person on our subreddit. Yeah, we'll think about the trivia question answers at the end like usual. We'll be right back.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I don't. I don't think I can name all the planets. Still can't.

[Marques Brownlee]

Support for the show comes from Monarch part To believe it's already spring. That's mostly a good thing. The sunshine, the great defrosting, the spring cleaning. There's just one drawback. Tax season. But breathe. It's going to be okay. Especially if you use Monarch. Simplify your finances with Monarch. Monarch's the all in one personal finance tool designed to make your life easier. It brings your entire financial life, budgeting, accounts and investments, net worth and future planning all together in one dashboard on your phone or laptop. Feel aware and in control of your finances this tax season and get 50% off your Monarch subscription with Code Wave and with their AI assistant, you'll get access to a 24.7financial coach that can actually help you answer questions about personal spending trends or debt repayment. Or in this case, where you might want to put your tax return. Achieve your financial goals for good with Monarch. The all in one tool. The master makes money management simple. Use code [e-mail] for half off your first year. That's 50% [e-mail] Codewave support for the show comes from zapier. So when it comes to incorporating AI into your workflows, there's a lot to consider and lots of trend chasing. But actually making it happen starts with the right tools like Zapier. Zapier is how you break the hype cycle and put AI to work across your company for real. It can help you actually deliver on your AI strategy, not just talking about doing it. Their AI orchestration platform allows you to bring the power of AI to any workflow, so you can do more of what matters. You can connect top AI models like ChatGPT and Claude to whatever tools your team already uses, so you can incorporate AI exactly where you need it. That could be workflows, an autonomous agent, a customer, chatbot, or whatever else. You can orchestrate it all with Zapier, letting you do more with the rest of your time. And it's for everyone, tech expert or not. According to data from Zapier, teams have already automated over 3,300 million AI tasks using the platform. So join the millions of businesses transforming how they work with Zapier and AI. Get started for free by visiting zapier.comwave that's Z A P I E R.com/support for the show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. So when you're deep in something, figuring out how a new chip architecture works, or trying to understand why an update broke something you built last week, you need a thinking partner that can keep up. Claude works through those problems with you, not a quick summary and move on. It digs in for developers. Claude code runs directly in your terminal, so handed a task, writing tests, refactoring a module, tracking down a bug, and it takes it from there without you walking it through every single step. You can kick off multiple tasks in parallel and come back to finished work. If you want that level of capability without ever opening a terminal, that's where cowork comes in. Point it to a folder on your computer, connect your tools, and it handles the heavy lifting. Organizing files, synthesizing notes into reports, building out spreadsheets while you stay focused on the thinking that actually requires you. And one more thing worth knowing. Ads are coming to AI Anthropic. Committed to keeping Claude ad free. Your conversations won't be shaped by what someone else paid for. Try Claude for free at Claude AI Waveform and see why problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. All right, welcome back. There is some news of a product that was killed, but not by Google.

[Andrew]

Big day.

[Marques Brownlee]

It was killed by OpenAI. It's called Sora. Ring a bell? Anyone? Anyone remember Sora from a couple months ago? I actually remember making a video when Sora first came out.

[Andrew]

We've made two, I think.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, Two. Now, at this point of their video generation, models generate. Models generate video slop.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

But it would get higher and higher quality over time. And I remember the first videos from Sora, you know, they were, you know, Will Smith eating spaghetti, but, like, higher fidelity than before. And it got better and better and it cost more and more and more. And then OpenAI was like, this costs too much.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

And I'm glad they made that realization because, I mean, there's other video generation models out there. But Sora was like the big one that everybody knows about from OpenAI. And they made the decision to kill the Sora app, and I assume the entire AI slop generator from top to bottom is now gone. They'll probably turn those GPUs towards something else that we're very excited about.

[Ellis]

Maybe.

[Marques Brownlee]

But, yeah, no more Sora.

[Ellis]

Yeah. Big day to dance on a grave.

[Andrew]

I'm dancing, boy.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

What's the meme of, like, is he giving the peace sign or the sign

[Ellis]

where he's like, in front of the grave?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

Yeah. Sora was bad. The funny thing about this that we reported on when it happened was that Disney had made a $1 billion investment deal with OpenAI about Sora.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, yeah.

[Ellis]

And Disney said, we are going to invest a billion dollars in OpenAI over X period of time, and Sora is going to be in the Disney plus app with AI generated versions of our characters that you can just sort of scroll through on the Disney plus app as a sort of like little Disney TikTok feature. This never launched. And reportedly the Sora engineers didn't even really know that Sora was getting killed. They even put out a guidelines as to, like, their safety standards about Sora. The day before they announced that they were killing it, which is very funny. And now that $1 billion deal is not happening. So OpenAI can't find money. And now they really can't find money.

[Marques Brownlee]

I guess a billion dollars is like pocket change for them.

[Andrew]

I mean, I guess. How much money were they burning in the process of billions?

[Ellis]

Yeah, probably more than that. And also, one thing you should know is that pretty much every OpenAI deal is not real money. It's like the idea of money. Nothing ever really happens. Everyone's like, Nvidia is like, we're investing 1 trillion in OpenAI. And they're like, what does that mean? And then they just started, do jazz hands and walk away. You could have been, you know, none of the these circular deals have. Are inflating the stock market. And that's why you're seeing a lot of red recently.

[Marques Brownlee]

A lot of them are like promises to invest over time or something.

[Ellis]

That's what the Disney one was. It was $1 billion investments over a period of time and it didn't even start.

[Andrew]

Yeah, no money had changed hands.

[Ellis]

No money had changed hands.

[Marques Brownlee]

Huge win.

[Ellis]

So it's not happening.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[David]

David, I'm going to give you $1 billion over the next three years.

[Ellis]

I hope my stock goes up.

[David]

Psych.

[Ellis]

Yeah. So the. Another funny thing about this is that Meta had purchased. Had Aqua hired a guy to lead the super intelligence lab. And the first product that they launched was an AI slot generator, video generator, that was supposed to compete with Sora. It was. It was horrible. And I think they shut it down too, hopefully. But this is good for everybody. Like, we don't need more AI slop. If you're ever on Twitter, there's a lot of fruits cheating on each other on there. I don't know if you've seen this.

[Marques Brownlee]

Fruits.

[Ellis]

Yeah, fruits.

[Marques Brownlee]

What?

[Andrew]

Yeah, there's some weird stuff.

[David]

Wait, you guys haven't seen this?

[Ellis]

I'm jealous of you guys.

[Andrew]

I see. Mostly because you can do like the remixes with YouTube videos. Every once in a while, I'll go to one of our old videos to reference something. I'll just be like, blah, blah, blah, remix with this video. And it's a short of like a pregnant cat.

[Ellis]

Yeah, that's. Yeah, yeah, they're always pregnant.

[Andrew]

There's always like a pregnant cat and a dad cat and they're like having a baby. And it has like your voice over the background.

[Ellis]

Well, in the background, music is always meow, meow, meow, meow, meow. It's really bad. It's like, I think it redefines hallucination.

[Adam]

Are you.

[Ellis]

It redefines the word slop? Like really? It does.

[Andrew]

It's also. This stuff makes a ton of misinformation out there, for sure. Not just straight slopes, not just freaks. Like literal harmful videos.

[Ellis]

Yeah. So I'm glad it's gone. I'm glad I missed that dance on the grave. Speaking of Instagram, Meta doing slop things, do you want to break this down?

[Andrew]

Yeah, I'll try and break this down really quick. IG DMS are no longer going to be end to end encrypted by May 8th. This is kind of a. I mean, I think everyone knows what end to end encryption is. You and you're the recipient are the only ones who are able to see the message due to a code.

[Ellis]

Encryption.

[Andrew]

Encryption. Yeah. That it has Public and private keys. So like, this feels like a really big deal headline wise. But like, there's a couple of weird things about this that make me confused. So I'm going to read out a couple of the reasons why I think or they've said they're ending this encryption and everyone can be the judge on why they think they really are ending it. So they've been the way they announced this. First of all, Meta is not like a full post. They updated a 2022 news post about encryption to say that encryption is ending on May 8th. So like two months away and a couple of reasons. One, a Meta spokesperson said that which I didn't know about, the encryption is opt in on Instagram, which I never knew about, I'm sure most people don't know about. And they said very, very few people on Instagram use encryption because it's in the end because it's opt in. Exactly.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Poor. Not even just communication, just poor design. I mean, Meta Price doesn't want it to be encrypted because they want all of that. So like.

[Ellis]

Well, yeah, there's a lot of drama going on right now with like the EU and yes, that's the uk. Yeah.

[Andrew]

So like the next point is FBI, Interpol, UK safety organizations are all urging Meta to break encryption because of child safety, because of how much Meta in general and Instagram specifically is essentially harming children in so many different ways. One of them being through dms and with encryption, if the correct people have the encryption on, it makes it really harder to find chat logs or stuff like that. So they've. They're urging Meta to end encryption. Another thing is Meta is just not getting rid of encryption. WhatsApp, they're telling people to just move to WhatsApp. If you want encryption, just use WhatsApp, bro. They literally pull the just use WhatsApp.

[Ellis]

I hate this.

[Andrew]

And then the last reason, which I think most of us can agree on, is Meta's favorite, but maybe the one they don't want to make model is yes, without encrypted DMS, they have the ability to use those DMs to target you with advertisements and train data, train AI data on your messages. Which the reason this is all kind of weird is it seems like most people aren't using it, so they're probably doing all of this anyways. But like the actual end to this is probably just saving them money because they don't have to run Community Compute

[Ellis]

to encryption and saving them face with like all the, all the public stuff. With the.

[Andrew]

It's really nice that they're having other people, like government agencies tell them to remove it so they can just be like, well, that's the reason we're removing it. Thanks for the training data. Thanks for the advertising. Yeah, that's kind of. I'll let everybody be the judge of how they want to see this story with encryption. But I think the thing to know here is if you really care about privacy encryption, don't touch a Meta product. Yeah, that's like the easiest thing here

[Ellis]

is the number one advertising company in the world.

[Andrew]

Yeah. I think Meta realizes that like a lot of the DMs on Instagram, they mostly care about you sharing reels and sharing posts and pushing you to other parts of Instagram to spend more time on and get. Gather more data to spend more money. So they don't really care about this. WhatsApp is still encrypted if you want to use that. But I personally would just stay away from Meta products if I really cared about my privacy.

[Ellis]

Yeah. I mean, speaking of which, they just announced yesterday as well that they're going to integrate sort of like Buy now buttons into reels. TikTok shop has this where you can be watching a reel or something and then it will show a little like you can buy this now and it outlinks to a store. Instagram's gonna add that.

[Marques Brownlee]

So YouTube shorts has this already. Probably the like little product shelves.

[Ellis]

Dude. On Amazon. What is like prime tv? Prime. What do they call it?

[Marques Brownlee]

Prime Video.

[Ellis]

Yeah, you'll be watching like, you'll be watching like Fallout or something, right? And then it cuts to an ad and in the ad there will be a purchase on Amazon button that you can just do straight. It's like, holy moly, we are. Cause I, yeah, I only wanted to watch Fallout and I haven't used Amazon Prime TV in like a really long time. And I was like, wow, we're in the, we're in the dystopia where you can literally the product is in your face and there's just a one click Buy now and ship to me immediately button.

[Andrew]

I mean with.

[Ellis]

It is so crazy the like UI

[Andrew]

on all these short form contents. How far are we away from it? Just feeling like the old annotation, like scamming where just there's like 20 different boxes up on your screen. Because we have all these different sets of guidelines for different short form. Because depending on where you put text or something in a video, it's going to get covered by a username, an Icon, the description and like now we're adding shops and stuff. This is already a really small form factor of what we're watching. There's not a lot of real estate there. So adding all of that on is.

[Ellis]

Yeah, it's crazy.

[Andrew]

We're just not even going to watch videos anymore. Okay.

[Ellis]

They're pushing you to use Instagram on the iPad because all they want you to do on that is watch reels anyway and then you won't miss click because it's a bigger screen.

[Marques Brownlee]

Wow.

[Andrew]

True.

[Ellis]

Big brain got him. Kind of related. The US Government has officially banned consumer routers made outside of the United States. Which by the way, pretty much all of them.

[Andrew]

Yeah, essentially all. The only one I could really think of that's not is Starlink, because that's made in Texas.

[Ellis]

Is that a router?

[Andrew]

Yes, I guess. But like it's not what you would think of in the general sense of like a router when you already have an ISP and you're using it as a router in your house.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

So like similar to banning drones made in foreign countries, the FCC is adding consumer grade routers made outside of the US to a covered list. And if you're not sure what that is, the covered list is a list that the FCC and Homeland Security Bureau used to add devices that quote, pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of US Persons. Like you just mentioned, we're all pretty familiar with where technology is manufactured. It's not in the US and like it's not here. Seriously, it's got to be. 90 plus percent of routers, dude, I mean, are made outside of the US

[Marques Brownlee]

I'm just looking up all. I'm going one by one to look through all the router companies that they're all like Taiwanese, they're all not made

[Andrew]

here, but even some of them might be stationed or like headquartered in the US they're still not manufactured in the US So like first of all, if you already own a router that's doesn't meet this criteria, it's going to work fine. But the new ones then coming into the company, into the United States will be put on a list where the radios won't be authorized.

[Ellis]

It's just insane. Like it's so isolationist to say anyone not made in the United States.

[Andrew]

I think that's wild.

[Ellis]

Like it is. It would be more understandable if it was like from specific countries that the government deems to be adversaries or whatever. But the fact that it is not in the United. It's like, I cannot name a single router company that is based in the United States. They probably exist, but they are not mass market.

[Andrew]

I think TP Link is now headquartered in California.

[Ellis]

They're probably made in Taiwan.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ellis]

Or Vietnam.

[Andrew]

I forget exactly where. A lot of ones I was finding were made in Vietnam, but still, that is just straight up foreign country. That is not the U.S. what does

[David]

this do for, like, IP or ISPs?

[Andrew]

That's exactly what I was thinking. Like, what Xfinity. My guess right now is Xfinity, Verizon probably have just a boatload of routers in a warehouse somewhere that they're the ones sending to you. But, like, that needs to update.

[Ellis]

Well, I also know that there's sort of a workaround you can do where, like, all of the parts are basically made outside of the US and then, like, there was a thing that some. Yeah, there's the thing that some companies were doing for a while where it was, like, all the parts but one were already assembled, and then they would ship all the parts and that one part to United States, and they would put it in the thing, and they'd be, like, made in the United States.

[Adam]

Well, there's like, guidelines for made in the USA or assembled in the usa. Like, there's things that they need to, like, more than 60% or.

[Ellis]

Oh, yeah. Like the Trump phone, Right? Like the Trump phone. Yeah, yeah. Made in U.S. no, not even.

[Adam]

Also with the Verizon. Not Verizon. Xfinity routers and stuff. Does that count? Because this says consumer.

[Andrew]

Yeah. How much consumer? So consumer. They define as for residential use and installed by the customer.

[Adam]

Installed by the customer. Okay.

[Andrew]

But any Xfinity router you can have just shipped to you, and I can.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, okay.

[Adam]

That's what I was gonna ask.

[Andrew]

I mean, maybe that's. It's. It's a weird thing where the way they're.

[Adam]

Cause the company's the one buying them and bulk. So I don't know if this would, like, apply to them.

[Andrew]

You know, the fact that they say consumer grade. I think it's less of consumer bought and consumer grade. Again. It's like. It's kind of weird. What they're doing is either companies can apply for, like, an extension to be allowed into the United States if they're proving that they're working on creating a manufacturing aspect in the United States to pass that. I've seen stupid nobody. We do that so many times. Doesn't work. Or, like, similar to what DJI does. The company is just not going to release it in the US for X amount of time until this either stops or just not care.

[Marques Brownlee]

Have we seen companies like, like buy a building like an old manufacturing plant in the US and then just slap a label on? We're going to for sure make stuff here. Yeah, Fox, okay, you're good.

[Ellis]

They do a big groundbreaking thing in Arizona and they're like, look at all these jobs and then just leave them empty.

[Andrew]

The United States is claiming the routers were directly implicated in the Volt Flax and Salt Typhoon cyberattacks which were a set of cyber attacks. A while.

[David]

Yeah, but I'm confused because the Salt Typhoon ones was about Cisco routers.

[Andrew]

Okay, so this is the funny thing. United States, like what? Like they were Cisco and Netgear routers that were designed by US companies. But the reason they were vulnerable is because the companies stopped providing updates for them. So they were unupdated security risk routers. Which has nothing to do with who made them. It has to do with who's continuing the software up there.

[Ellis]

So this is like saying he's doing the same.

[Andrew]

Hey, hackers targeted vulnerable things because they're vulnerable and probably shouldn't be used or should have been updated anymore. That's nothing to do with the fact. I get that there is like foreign countries that maybe we're worried about and stuff like this, but this feels like a blanket ban. That is not actually helping anything.

[Marques Brownlee]

Heavy handed government intervention in tech.

[Andrew]

No, no, it's.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

So the residential thing I'm really confused about because I'm also confused. There is. If the main thing we're trying to protect is like government agencies and government information stuff like me, maybe government shouldn't be using residential. That's what the ban should be. Government should stop using residential grade routers and like buildings or the ones made in these certain companies. But like why do I need or have one? Why does that make a difference if

[Ellis]

I'm using or have one U.S. company, like make a government grade one. Like a, like change one of the routers to be government grade ad features.

[David]

I think in theory the reason it matters if you have one, Andrew, is that you are sort of inherently plugged into your telecom companies network and like that is who all of these attacks were against. Were like we're getting into telecom companies networks. I don't know quite enough about this whole thing.

[Andrew]

There's. There's obviously so much more going on than what we're saying here. But it still feels like this wild blanket Ban. That doesn't really.

[David]

No, I agree. And also watch. This is, you know, me predicting the future, but watch Oracle launch a new line of US based routers.

[Ellis]

Wait, oh my God, I didn't even think about that.

[David]

Yeah, no, no, no, I haven't. This is not a thing that's happened.

[Ellis]

I know, but it will.

[Andrew]

You know it will.

[Ellis]

And they'll be called Freedom Router.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

So. God. The cyber attacks were also on like energy, transportation and water infrastructure stuff as well. So it's not just straight up communicate or just communications. Although those were in there. I also, I guess saying the router was directly implicated, I was like, well, yeah, it was online. It has to go through a router. But it's because those routers were missing their security updates and had vulnerabilities, which is like, yes, if things on the Internet have vulnerabilities, people are going to attack them and they shouldn't.

[David]

But I really don't know enough about this. But it's always been my understanding that like, you know, a big part of what routers are doing are like assembling these packets that are going out over, you know, and so if they're putting like a router with malware on it can put for sure stuff in a packet that can make it pretty deep inside a network. Yeah, that is like the most like middle schooler friendly way I can describe network communication.

[Ellis]

That's why Cisco was supposed to prevent this. That's their whole thing. Yeah, they do B2B.

[David]

It wasn't him. Is that Cisco?

[Andrew]

No.

[Ellis]

What? Is that a rapper too?

[David]

Damn it.

[Andrew]

Damn it, Shaggy. Yeah, that's not the first time you've made that mistake.

[Adam]

Wait, this confuses me because I feel like if. If a company in the US made routers and those routers were not updated and weren't patched over time, they would also be susceptible to these attacks.

[Andrew]

Yes, correct.

[Adam]

So what does this do?

[Ellis]

I don't know. It's just they're going after the wrong pro. I don't know. I imagine that is a very popular. I imagine it is. It is all a bunch of like bull to just try to. They're so obsessed with stimulating American manufacturing, but they don't understand like the amount of work that it requires to actually build an entire business in the US Making various things like routers. Like, how often do people buy routers?

[Adam]

You know, once every five to 10 years.

[David]

It's just most people never buy a router.

[Ellis]

Yeah, they rent it from their telecom.

[David]

I just, I don't know, counterpoint David, if you had 1 million Optimus robots, you could make them for free whenever you wanted.

[Ellis]

You know, think about that. Think about that. How much would an optimus robot cost me?

[David]

It costs, well, zero dollars. You can't afford by other optimus robots.

[Ellis]

How much would it cost me, though?

[David]

I don't think you're allowed to have one.

[Ellis]

Then how am I going to get my router?

[Marques Brownlee]

Send the robo taxi for it.

[Ellis]

I'll just use Starlink. So we want to talk about this because it was kind of hot news in the journalism world this week, effectively. You guys probably know Grammarly, and there was also an app called Superhuman and. And then Grammarly bought Superhuman. And now Grammarly is Superhuman, and Grammarly is a product of Superhuman. That's your. That's your breakdown.

[Marques Brownlee]

Confusing at all.

[Ellis]

Not confusing. Multiple months ago, but only discovered fairly recently, people discovered this feature within Grammarly that effectively gives you advice based on various different writers that are well known in the writing world or like the tech writing world or things like that. So if you were writing an article or you were writing, I don't know, anything you're writing, you could say like, hey, what would Nilai Patel think about this writing that I'm doing?

[David]

So funny.

[Ellis]

Yes.

[David]

Are you serious?

[Ellis]

I am serious.

[Andrew]

I don't know if it was necessarily you asked Neelai Patel, but it was like, if you asked a question about writing an article and it would say like, oh, it was called expert review. And something would come up as an expert is here to give you an example. And that example would pop up as like, I can't believe I'm saying this out loud, but it said Nei Patel. And with a verified check mark, like Twitter, which is sitting there for no reason.

[Ellis]

No reason.

[Marques Brownlee]

And then it would say like, not verified.

[Andrew]

It would give some piece of advice and then to their credit, it would say like, this is inspired by vergecast hosts and Verge Editor in chief Nilai Patel because of blah, blah, blah, have a source button. And then first of all, no one's going to click that source button. That doesn't count. So, yeah, that's what a verified check mark. Neelai Patel would pop up and say, yeah, hey, not just him, a bunch of other journalists.

[Ellis]

And it would also do line edits too. Like if you had, it would, like, make suggestions based on your writing. And they, they were like, oh, yeah, we pulled specific, like, pieces of work from various different journalists and then we put it in this AI model and now it can make suggestions. And it's like, that's just not how this works at all. Like, it's insane. And this feature has been deployed for multiple months, but people only found it recently, so.

[Andrew]

Well, no, no, it was deployed. It took a while for people to go and it's gone now. They took it away.

[Ellis]

Yeah, it was found recently by like,

[Andrew]

it blew up, I think a few months. I think last year.

[Ellis]

Grammarly had added this feature late last year. Not a lot of people were using it. No one really noticed it. And then recently it kind of popped up in the media because people started noticing it and all these people started writing about it because the people that were writing about it were the people it was impersonating effectively. Every article was like, this is impersonating authors, including me. It was kind of crazy. So funny enough, Nila has this podcast called Decoder. He had already scheduled to have the superhuman/Grammarly CEO on like the following week. And to that guy's credit, he actually did go on Decoder to talk to Nilai about it. And the interview was very tense from the get go.

[Andrew]

From the get go from the start. Yeah.

[Ellis]

And so it became this whole kind of argument about what is attribution versus what is just stealing and using someone's likeness. And the CEO really just defends the idea that it's attribution. He talks about, oh, there's a link that you can go to and it clearly says that, oh, this is inspired by this person. But like, it had the check mark.

[Andrew]

The check mark is the check mark.

[Marques Brownlee]

The check mark is. You can't defend it when you do because the check. Everyone knows what the check mark means in every other context. It means this is verified from this person. Right. If it's on social media, the check mark means this is definitely the person you think it is. Theoretically. Why do they put a check mark here? They put a check mark here to convince you that this is legit. And this is definitely like they're not trying to necessarily convince you that this is actually the human editing your work, but they get about as close to that as possible. And it's definitely impersonation.

[Andrew]

You can't convince me otherwise that it's not attempting to trick a person into this for real. I don't care what he said in that interview. I know it says at the like under that inspired by. But to put the check mark in is just straight up lying.

[Ellis]

Yeah, yeah. There was a class. There is a class action action lawsuit going on, which is, I think, why the CEO couldn't really say a lot because then it could be used against him in court. And it's insane to me that he would even do the interview when he knows Nilai is very combative about these kind of things. Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Well, then if he doesn't go on the interview, then the article is about how he pulled out of the interview.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Adam]

Then it looks even worse.

[Marques Brownlee]

So it's either. Do you get that?

[Ellis]

I don't think that looks worse.

[Andrew]

He made himself look worse in that interview, for sure.

[Ellis]

Yeah, he made himself look good. We definitely recommend that you go listen to this or watch it. It's both on their podcast feed.

[Andrew]

Watch it.

[Ellis]

Watch it.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Seeing facial expressions. And it is well worth it. Also, the CEOs. Whatever laptop he's using should be blown up because the wobble of the screen as he's talking, you're just watching him the whole, whole time.

[Adam]

It was a touch screen, Andrew.

[Andrew]

If you watch it 1.5x scre, it looks like he's in the middle of an earthquake. It's wild.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

This, though, this really reminds me of when we had these conversations about these AI image generators and video generators where if you would just put in, like, tech reviewer, like, Marquez would just show up. You know, it reminds me of the whole, like, who's in this training data? How are they stealing it?

[Adam]

Didn't we do that recently?

[Ellis]

It was a long time ago.

[Marques Brownlee]

Sora.

[Ellis]

Well, there was Sora, but there was also, like, Gemini. There was. Yeah, yeah. There was early ChatGPT stuff.

[Adam]

There was something a few weeks ago where I literally put in, like, a tech reviewer and it just popped out. Marques.

[Andrew]

Oh, yeah.

[Ellis]

When we were out south by Southwest, I said, add a tech reviewer to this photo. And it just added Marquez. And then it said, but it did say, I've added mkbhd.

[Andrew]

It's which.

[Ellis]

That's a whole. That's the same thing. It's like likeness versus the weird thing

[Andrew]

about this is Nei was looking at. So the reason that the interview is so good is because, like, there's personal stakes here. Like, it's literally impersonating Nili. So he's the one interviewing. Which makes it much more tense. But, like, what the suggestion it wrote says it's from, like, using his body of work at the Verge and Verge casting is like, I would never say anything like this. I've never said anything.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Ever like this. So it just feels like straight up lying. To the credit of the CEO, he said, like, this didn't work out really well. How are we supposed to get into the mind of an editor by only Using their. The final published work.

[Adam]

Great question.

[Andrew]

You can't. I know exactly.

[Ellis]

Maybe you can.

[Andrew]

And that's what. They killed it, which I'm glad they got rid of it. But just. That's just impersonation and lying at that point. Who's to say that couldn't have just been like an AI software where Marquez Marques Brownlee pops up, verified checkmark and says a piece of advice that Marquez doesn't believe in at all. Windows is the best, the best editing for A K videos like I love my Windows laptop. And then all it has to say is inspired by Marquez Brownlee's body of work for he's an 8, 20 million tech reviewer, blah, blah, blah, source. It's all, it's.

[Marques Brownlee]

I mean it's. Trust me, bro.

[Andrew]

It's very trust me, bro. And also using the likeness of someone else to prove credibility.

[Marques Brownlee]

And yeah, yeah, I don't see how you ship this feature and not think it's going to blow up on your face. Because in the best case version of this feature it's like, wow, we're going to have testimonials of people going like, I love this product because it lets me get my work checked by these professionals. And the professional is going, no, obviously I would not. That's not what I would have done.

[Andrew]

He said the reason the small team, he kept saying small team because he kept saying that many people under the bus, which he should be under the bus because he ultimately approves it as CEO, but like if you are, he keeps saying you as the person like you might want like Grammarly supposed to be your, your language arts teacher sitting right there and helping you make decisions. So he's like, this is a version where some experts you really respect might be right there helping you make corrections. And you know, I was like, but I wouldn't make those. But I wouldn't make those. And I'm not there. It's like, yeah, the reason we like all these people is the like personal connection we have to them. Personally, I don't want an AI just pretending they're them. It's. This is basic. You're getting catfished.

[Ellis]

Yeah, for sure.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

I mean Nilay even said his line edits are usually just like, feels messy and that's the whole thing.

[Adam]

You know, Anyone who's ever had an editor knows that it's not very coherent thought stuff.

[Ellis]

No, it's just a lot of back and forth and I can't wait until

[Adam]

Final Cut adds a Marques editor and then like I make a J cut. And it's like, great job. Marques would have done this too.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, that feels bad.

[Ellis]

It could happen.

[David]

I think Grammarly took the wrong route with this product. I think instead of like, people like, obviously, Nilai, great writer, people love his writing, but I think they should have gone with people who are known for being unbelievably opinionated writers and just force, like, I want to be writing an email to, like, Marques about our health insurance plan or something like that. And then Grammarly is like. And then a little AI Slavage Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher, pops up and he's like, but what does this email have to do with the struggle of the self? And I'm like, I'd like that. Yes. Distract me. Susan Sontag comes up and is like, where are the mentions of gender? You know, Hector Berlioz pops up and is like, ellis, you mentioned nothing about Beethoven's terrible use of the French horn.

[Ellis]

Yeah, that's fair.

[Marques Brownlee]

I think Clippy could have done any of that.

[Ellis]

Clippy could have done that.

[Marques Brownlee]

Clippy could have done all of that.

[Andrew]

That's what you need.

[Ellis]

Stop.

[Andrew]

Yeah, stop replicating actual people and giving them that attribution is such a bull argument.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Free advice to any CEO. If you run a company that does any sort of AI product and your is to have it replace people in any way. Think a little harder about how you think that's gonna go.

[Ellis]

Yeah, just a little harder.

[Adam]

Just hire funny guy.

[Andrew]

Yeah, take some accountability. All of them just seem to be like, oh, well, if the models we're using are gonna like, pull up the work of blah, blah, blah, and they're gonna use that, then that's what the models are gonna do. Shut the up, dude. Are you serious?

[Ellis]

Yeah. I mean, every. Pretty much every AI CEO makes the argument that this is not. This is just an average of like a bunch of stuff. So it's not copying everything. It's just making new content based on like a. Every. Every AIC is like, well, you could have read all of Nilai's writing and then edited like, him. And it's like, no, you can't. That's not how this works.

[Andrew]

That's not how any of this learning. And also, like, it sounds like. It's so funny that the one art example they're arguing over the whole time is a bad. Like, just straight up didn't work in the voice at all.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Which makes it look even worse.

[Marques Brownlee]

I think the flaw with that logic would be thinking that all of Nilay's thoughts and experience that he's ever had exists in a training data set.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Which as a human, with their own thoughts and experiences that they have not submitted to a training data set.

[Ellis]

No, I mean, ultimately, that's what people in Silicon Valley generally think. Like, they think that you can model everything. They think that with enough information, with enough data, with enough training, you can simulate everything.

[Marques Brownlee]

You know?

[Ellis]

And so they're like, maybe you can, but we're not even close to that yet.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, that's probably why this interview is so good, is because one of the people who you think you're. You have enough data from, and it's like, no, you just don't have enough data. And frankly, I don't want you to have enough data to simulate who I am.

[Ellis]

Right, because you're not paying.

[David]

Because the data that Nilai's brain was trained on are things like his childhood, like, things that you can't like.

[Ellis]

Yeah, you can't.

[David]

Can't do that, bro. It doesn't work.

[Ellis]

Yeah, exactly. So until you put it in a vat.

[Andrew]

No, go. Go listen to the interview. It's fantastic.

[Ellis]

Watch the interview. Watch sickness. Yeah.

[Adam]

Also part of the Vox Media podcast network.

[Ellis]

Vmp, baby. Okay, well, I think we're going to take it to one more ad break, but.

[Andrew]

And then I'm going to yap about a mouse again afterwards.

[Ellis]

That's right. We love mice. Yes, we love mice. We love. Ellis Yappin about speakers.

[David]

The one person that read Hector Berlioz's Treatise on Orchestration, other than me. I hope you enjoyed my little reference.

[Ellis]

He's famous. I'm sure a lot of people did.

[Adam]

I don't know who that is.

[Andrew]

Alice, I agree with everything you say and love everything you say about audio, and I've never interrupted you once about it.

[David]

It's this part of. It's a. It's this composer who wrote a book about how to write for all the instruments a long time ago, and he was really angry. And there's this whole passage in the French horn section where instead of talking about how to write for French horn, he just goes into this giant beef with Beethoven and he's like, that guy Beethoven sucked at French horn. He was a coward on the French horn. It's very fun to read.

[Ellis]

Oh, wait.

[Andrew]

Oh, sorry, I did not. That was a soundboard. That was not me.

[Ellis]

Sorry, Ellis, I forgot you were talking. What was. No, that's interesting.

[David]

I did that to Andrew in the. In the weekly meeting yesterday where he said something, something, and then immediately I was like, but what about this thing that Andrew just said, and then I had to DM and say, I'm sorry. Do you say something?

[Andrew]

Karma. That was karma.

[Adam]

Karmic retribution. Okay, next question. Well, next question. Question number two. Yeah, what year? And we're doing closest without going over. Oh, yeah, what year did Apple release Apple Maps?

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, oh, oh, was that the year?

[Adam]

Access to the dock. Wait, don't look, don't look. I want you to guess, too.

[Ellis]

Was that. That was the year that people were driving into the. The lakes, right?

[David]

I know.

[Marques Brownlee]

I remember how poorly the launch went. I gotta remember the year.

[Andrew]

Okay, there's a joke.

[Marques Brownlee]

This is a WWDC announcement.

[Andrew]

Yeah, it was a dub. Dub announcement. I'm pretty sure in Silicon Valley, the show, they're doing like a control group. And they're like, oh, this is bad. And he goes, how bad? Apple Maps pack sick.

[Ellis]

That is the bar. One more mouse thing to talk about.

[Andrew]

I'll make it quick. I won't.

[Marques Brownlee]

We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. So when you're deep in something, figuring out how a new chip architecture works, or trying to understand why an update broke something you built last week, you need a thinking partner that can keep up. Claude works through those problems with you. Not a quick summary. And move on. It digs in for developers. Claude code runs directly in your terminal, so handed a task, writing tests, refactoring a module, tracking down a bug, and it takes it from there without you walking it through every single step. You can kick off multiple tasks in parallel and come back to finished work. If you want that level of capability without ever opening a terminal, that's where cowork comes in. Point it to a folder on your computer, connect your tools, and it handles the heavy lifting. Organizing files, synthesizing notes into reports, building out spreadsheets while you stay focused on the thinking that actually requires you. And one more thing worth knowing. Ads are coming to AI Anthropic, committed to keeping Claude ad free. Your conversations won't be shaped by what someone else paid for. Try Claude for free at Claude AI Waveform and see why problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner.

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[David]

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[Ellis]

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[David]

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[Andrew]

All right, welcome back to Andrew's Mouse Corner Again. I kind of wanted both of these the same week, but then I kind of thought this one was never coming in and then it came in after we did the Pwnage Sim 3 last week.

[Adam]

You got to order one for next week now so you keep it going.

[Andrew]

That will never happen.

[Marques Brownlee]

This order a Cyborg Rat 7.

[Andrew]

If you order the Cyborg Rat 7, I'll do a review on the podcast next week. Okay, I will smash that thing by the end. This is the Logitech Pro X2 Super Strike. Not a great name, but a lot of words. The this is kind of like the most hype mouse in the the scene right now for a couple of reasons. One, Logitech G Pro has been kind of like the de facto tried and true gaming mouse for years at this point. I think there you could look at like valorant or counter straight stats of how many people use a specific mouse and I think the G Pro is top of the list every single time. But so this is the exact same form factor. But Logitech finally decided to do something kind of cool because they've been kind of boring for a while. This mouse on its the exterior is just everything you'd kind of expect expect. It's not too flashy. It's. It's nothing like really bad. It's nothing really good. It's just a good form factor. Two buttons, symmetrical. It's. It's everything you would want. Um, but this one is doing something a little different. This actually has no switches. Not mechanical or options. There are no switches. This is fully haptic. What similar to like hall effect? No, it's not hall effect. It's haptic. Those are optical switches. Um, it's like your MacBook trackpad. How it is essentially a fake click. Um, and the reason I want to bring it onto this is Because I can get reactions from all of you. Because the easiest way to test what this feels like is I will hand this to you.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay.

[Andrew]

And I want you to click the buttons. You can even do them in the microphone. Click the buttons right now. What do they feel like?

[Marques Brownlee]

Mush.

[Andrew]

Like broken. Right.

[Marques Brownlee]

They do move. They do move, but feels like I'm not actuating.

[Andrew]

Sure. Now the switch on the bottom. Flip that on and now start clicking. The sound is not fantastic, but the sound's not great.

[Marques Brownlee]

But there is a. Yeah, there's a pretty convincing.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I'll let David try this. Now this is off.

[Ellis]

Would you say that you just want to click? You did she just want to click?

[Andrew]

Subscribe.

[Ellis]

Subscribe. Yeah. That feels mushy.

[Andrew]

It feels broken, right?

[Ellis]

Yeah, it feels broken. Does the.

[Andrew]

Now flip it on? Yeah,

[Ellis]

yeah.

[Adam]

This is amazing audio.

[Andrew]

It's great for audio listeners. I mean, we're getting.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, yeah.

[Ellis]

Okay. So it goes from feeling like broken to like, there's something there. There's still a lot of actuation.

[Andrew]

I agree with you. I'm not like full well. So that's one thing that's higher than I would like. That's something that now we can do with this mouse is we can change a couple different things. We can change actuation force. Oh, we can change essentially like the clickiness of it. And you can change what it's calling rapid trigger, which is essentially was really popular on keyboards a couple years ago. Stuff like Snap tap, where not only it got worked in, in certain things like it. It could do things that programs would make it think was possibly cheating. Because essentially what it's doing is if you have an actuation length going down until the button's actuated, essentially what you could do is the lift off to reset. That could be very, very small. You can. You can make it really small. So a way this can be really beneficial is if you're in a game where let's say you have a gun that's semi automatic. So each click is one shot if you can. If that gun is really strong, but the. The like weakness of it is it semi automatic. But now you can make your actuation really small and your reset activation really short as well. You can just. And it feels like an automatic gun

[Ellis]

that would hurt my finger.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's pretty sick that you can get.

[Andrew]

And so right now I have the right. The left click as a five in your haptics.

[Ellis]

Out of five.

[Andrew]

Five out of five. And the right is on one. So if you click these now, it's not A big difference. But there are five levels of activation in per button. Buttons can be different as well. It's just. This is kind of a cool thing in the mouse world, I guess. This is brand new. This is within a month.

[Ellis]

Okay.

[Andrew]

I don't know if you want to try left versus right. Like I said, this isn't like the craziest thing, but like the ability to have this in a mouse is such a smaller version of where you can put this in versus a keyboard where you have full pcbs and individual switches and everything.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

So I thought this was kind of cool. I don't have much to say about it.

[Marques Brownlee]

How much is it?

[Andrew]

$180. There is one other cool thing which is super niche, which is a lot of people when they're doing something called bunny hopping in first person shooters is they actually change their jump button from the space bar, the wheel, so that you can just. Bunny hopping is when you jump and you hit the jump like the second you hit the ground, which carries momentum in a lot of games, which lets you move faster. So when people do it on the wheel, it makes it so you're always hitting the jump as you land. Because you're not just pressing space one time, you're scrolling through it, which is like 10 jumps at a time. Right.

[Ellis]

Just scroll.

[Andrew]

You can just scroll to be your jump. So that's how people will make sure that their jump is always landing at the perfect point. This has a bunny hop mode. So, like, it makes it really. I know I wasn't bad at sensitive. What?

[Marques Brownlee]

I know I wasn't bad at FPSs. I just don't have that.

[Andrew]

Yeah, you just weren't bunny hopping equipment. It has a thing so you can't accidentally scroll the scroll wheel when you're clicking buttons, which can happen sometimes because if you jump when you're trying to fire, you completely screw up. Recoil and everything. But yeah, there's not much to this. I will say, since this is a totally new technology in a thing that you press thousands of times in a life cycle very quickly, I would probably wait till like, is it that people are using this for a while?

[Marques Brownlee]

Because we have haptic trackpads like you mentioned. So there's a motor in there and then there's the sort of attachment to the moving piece. Theoretically, that's similar tech to the trackpad. Like, that should last a long time.

[Andrew]

Think about how often you click on your trackpad versus how often you might click in like one game of counter.

[Marques Brownlee]

Dude, that's very.

[Adam]

Yeah,

[Andrew]

Dota is literally all movement is based on clicking. It's probably.

[Ellis]

You're right.

[Andrew]

500 to 1,000 clicks. Like a game.

[Ellis]

Probably more.

[Andrew]

It might be more where like you do that on this trackpad. Like Dota is like an hour long.

[Ellis]

An hour long game and to move you have to be like.

[Andrew]

You're just interesting. I. My computer is going crazy with right now. But yeah, I want to do a land. I want to try this actually play

[Adam]

Dota and Valorant and all that stuff.

[Andrew]

Dude, I don't know how such dog at Valorant now but I don't know

[Ellis]

how anyone gets into Dota. It's like the most complicated because I

[Adam]

don't know like say these games. I know nothing about that them I'll

[Andrew]

play with you one day. We'll play. Let's play. Let's play Valerant.

[Adam]

Let's play a. Let's play.

[Andrew]

Let's play. Let's play. All right. Studio stream.

[Ellis]

Yeah. I'm Guardian 5, which is the second lowest tier and I have 4800 hours.

[Adam]

Well, Marquez just bought a his rat mouse, so.

[Andrew]

Yeah, you bought the mouse?

[Marques Brownlee]

No, I should. I really want to though.

[Andrew]

I want the rat.

[Ellis]

I'd be better at Dota.

[Andrew]

I bet you that mouse. How much does that mouse weigh? This is 60 grams.

[Ellis]

You can weigh as much as you want.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, it's customizable.

[Andrew]

It's. I remember the days of adding weights where now everyone is like, I need to shave grams off of my mouse. This thing is over 35 grams. I ain't touching it.

[Marques Brownlee]

It could weigh up to 157 grams.

[Adam]

That's like having a mouse with progressive overload is crazy.

[Andrew]

It's like it's weight training.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's modular, baby.

[Ellis]

So the AI overview, which is almost definitely wrong, but it says that one game of Dota can be between 5,000 to 10,000 clicks.

[Marques Brownlee]

That sounds insane.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

That's why I. To be fair, this is something where like gaming really loves to do the. And we've seen this with frame rates and graphics cards and everything is like you need this to be better. But it's like the point top 0.5% might find like a huge difference in this. I do think this will be more interesting than like snap tap because counter strafing is something that is really hard to do. But in games where just like a semi automatic rifle might need to fire faster, you can do that so easily on a mouse like this. I need to go home and actually try it. But now I have two mice to try and no time to try them three. So I'm just gonna start playing games at work.

[Ellis]

Yeah, it's James Bond. No time to try. Can I also make a quick announcement?

[Andrew]

Sure.

[Ellis]

Streetlight Manifesto, this band.

[Andrew]

All right, Trivia.

[Ellis]

I've been waiting. Their album still didn't come out.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay, that's the announcement.

[Ellis]

There's. Okay. They announced the show in June.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's the announcement.

[Ellis]

But in December, they said that there wouldn't be another show until the album comes out, which was last June. So the album was supposed to come out, so.

[Marques Brownlee]

So is the Tesla roaster gonna come out?

[Andrew]

Siri 2.0 or street light Manifesto first?

[Ellis]

Ooh, that's a good question. Probably. At the same time, someone was joking on the Streetlight subreddit that the reason it hasn't come out was because their music is gonna be in GTA 6's,

[Andrew]

like, the radio station.

[Ellis]

So they're just delaying it alongside GTA 6. Anyway, I just had to tell you guys that for my, like, two fans out there that care about this. I know there's at least two, though, because Alice told me that at south by Southwest, somebody said that her husband cared about Streetlight.

[David]

No, she was like. She was like, my husband's a huge fan of the podcast. Like, I'm so sorry. Like, I've never seen an episode. I don't really know anything about it, but I do know that someone on the podcast is, like, a fan of this really small band I'm really, really into. And I was like, it's Streetlight Manifesto and David, isn't it? She was like, yeah.

[Ellis]

So thank you. Now we can do trivia.

[David]

Can I tell you guys a funny AI overview thing that happened to me a little bit ago?

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[David]

I was trying to Google the English translation. I was trying to see if there was an English translation of this book that's like a collection of folklore that I really wanted to read. And so I searched English and then the name of the book, and it's like a collection of these stories and AI overview mixed up the ISBN, which is like the. So the book registration number with the number of stories in it. So it said the Mabanagion is A collection of 111-2502-3925-5081-1137-28100 233-8018-090123-21154 Medieval Welsh prose tales. I don't know what that number is, but I guarantee you there is not that much of anything in anywhere.

[Ellis]

That's almost as long as the Silmarillion.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, there's way more.

[Andrew]

I had a huge fight with AI overview. Well, it was like Google lens search and then the AI like trying to. I was trying to find a key cap that was on the mech keyboard subreddit and I said, what is this? And it like kept bringing me. It's like, oh, it's this and this model from this artist and it's on this website. I'm like, I can't find it on the website. Are you sure? Oh, just kidding. It was actually this one for so long and then I kept going like it's kept saying it's definitely from this. I said, what picture? Show me link. Just send me a link. Only give me the link. Don't say anything else. And I just never got it. And then I just replied on the subreddit and in like five minutes he answered what it was from and I was like, I hate AI so much.

[Ellis]

Freaking talking to humans is better than talking to a human.

[David]

Did it just send you this picture over and over again?

[Andrew]

A key. A key on a baseball cap.

[David]

Key cap. He kept.

[Andrew]

Damn, that's a fire hat.

[Ellis]

Well, you should buy that.

[Andrew]

I should definitely buy this.

[David]

How many Wikipedia pages are there called I hate TV and I'm looking for Delta?

[Ellis]

You can go over Delta Airlines.

[David]

Do you know why it's called Delta Airlines?

[Ellis]

Because.

[David]

Because it changes what place you're in.

[Ellis]

Yeah, that's.

[David]

I made that up. That's not true.

[Andrew]

I thought you're.

[David]

No, it almost is definitely because of prices, right?

[Andrew]

Airline.

[Ellis]

Delta.

[David]

I was going to say Delta wings, but jetliners don't use Delta wings. Delta.

[Andrew]

Christ.

[David]

I don't.

[Marques Brownlee]

I think it's actually just changing where you are.

[Ellis]

It's just changing.

[Andrew]

He was actually on the Delta theory and diet and just came back from it.

[David]

He was eating only triangles. Allegedly it is named after the Mississippi Delta. Guys, how many Wikipedia pages? Whoever.

[Ellis]

It's a river closest to the mouth of the river.

[Marques Brownlee]

I said six.

[David]

Six is incorrect.

[Andrew]

Okay, I said seven.

[David]

That is also incorrect.

[Ellis]

I said seven.

[David]

That is third incorrect. But Marques was closest.

[Ellis]

There are three. Oh, there is kind of a trick question.

[David]

There is the page for the Apple TV hardware device, the Apple TV streaming service and the Apple TV app, which

[Ellis]

you can get because these are dedicated pages.

[Marques Brownlee]

I thought there would be more than one for the hardware device.

[Ellis]

There are three things, but there's not separate pages. There's just one page that details all of them.

[David]

No, these are three separate Wikipedia pages.

[Ellis]

Well, I know those Are. I'm talking about the hardware.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh.

[Ellis]

Ah, yes.

[David]

No.

[Marques Brownlee]

Three point though.

[David]

Apple tv.

[Ellis]

Wikipedia needs the point, so I'll give it to him.

[David]

Not a single TV made by Apple. I'm now going to hand it off to Adam for a quick update on that score.

[Ellis]

Hannah to Montana.

[Adam]

Marquez with 19.

[Marques Brownlee]

You got a point.

[Adam]

Andrew with 19. David weighing the lead, 23.

[David]

Jesus.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Adam]

Next question.

[Andrew]

What really got out of hand?

[Adam]

Did Apple release Apple maps?

[Marques Brownlee]

What year?

[Adam]

Yeah. Closest without going over too high. Yep.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, I think it's this, but let me think. So Dub Dub.

[Ellis]

Let's see.

[Marques Brownlee]

I don't know. Probably it was farther without going too high.

[Adam]

Indeed. Without going too high.

[Marques Brownlee]

Damn.

[Adam]

I'll try it and flip them and read. What do you guys got?

[Ellis]

Oh, Jesus. Oh, wow. We all.

[Adam]

I'm just gonna say all of you are wrong, but tell me what your answers are.

[Marques Brownlee]

I wrote 2017.

[Adam]

Nope.

[Ellis]

I wrote 2014.

[Adam]

Nope.

[Andrew]

2010.

[Adam]

Nope. But Andrew gets the point.

[Andrew]

Cuz I didn't go over. Let's go.

[Adam]

It was 2012.

[Andrew]

Oh, that's my first point. 2020. Maybe in 2026. No. I went on a blazing lead to start and I have not had anything. It's essentially the New Jersey Devils. We're gonna have to blow it out of the water. And then just.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oklahoma City Thunder.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

Sacramento City Kings.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's because I grew up there.

[Andrew]

Yeah. That's a good.

[Ellis]

I went to a lot of games. Kobe. No, Kobe was.

[Marques Brownlee]

No, sorry.

[Ellis]

He was on the page.

[Andrew]

Oh, that's Bam.

[Ellis]

Bam. No, it was. No, the old guys.

[David]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

You got this when the Kings were good, huh?

[David]

Hit it.

[Ellis]

No, Mikey was not Bibby.

[Marques Brownlee]

Are you a Bibby fan?

[Adam]

Bibby?

[Ellis]

I have a. I had a bobblehead of Bibby. Of Mike. Yeah, the baby bobblehead. Baby bobblehead. Kevin Durant.

[Andrew]

No, no.

[Marques Brownlee]

Keja Styakovich does that. Doug Christie. Doug Christie.

[Ellis]

Doug Christie.

[Adam]

Okay.

[Ellis]

Doug Christie.

[Marques Brownlee]

Brad.

[Ellis]

Mike Bibby. Brad Lander. Brad. Brad.

[Adam]

Brad Miller.

[Ellis]

My grandpa was really into Kings basketball, so we went to a lot of games, actually. Wow.

[Adam]

I was waiting for you to explain the film in basketball terms, and you never did.

[Andrew]

Oh, yeah.

[Ellis]

Oh, the film. Oh, yeah. Somebody posted this. Well, okay, Real quick. I got to give you guys. Okay. I got to tell you about this. I'll explain. I'm sorry.

[Andrew]

Mm.

[Ellis]

It's not about Streetlight, though. It's about film. Okay, so Kodak. You know Kodak.

[Andrew]

Yeah, I saw that.

[Marques Brownlee]

I know Kodak. They went out.

[Ellis]

They went out a bit. They went. They went bankrupt a long time ago.

[Marques Brownlee]

I believe you.

[Ellis]

Yeah, they went back up. Kodak was basically. Was basically like. Was like IBM. They were like one of the biggest companies in the world for quite a long time. Then they went bankrupt because they were stupid.

[Marques Brownlee]

And then nobody shoots film anymore.

[Ellis]

That's not true. I do. Anyway, they had to split into two separate companies as part of the bankruptcy and became Kodak and Kodak Alaris. Kodak Eastman and Kodak Alaris. The way that the deal worked was that Kodak Eastman would produce the film and they would sell the film to Kodak Alaris, which would then sell the film to consumers. They'd package it, sell it to consumers.

[Marques Brownlee]

Really strange bankruptcy.

[Andrew]

I don't get that.

[Ellis]

Yeah, I don't really get it.

[Andrew]

Hey, we don't have any money, so let's just be the same company. But two companies do the same thing. I don't complicate.

[Ellis]

There's details and there's business.

[Adam]

Tax reasons.

[Ellis]

Tax reasons. I don't know. Anyway, fairly recently, Kodak Eastman, and I'm not sure why this started happening, became able to sell film itself again. So now Kodak Alera still exists. Who they are still selling film to, but they are now they have new packaging and new names for like a lot of the film that they're selling. So there's like Ultramax and like there's Portra and all this stuff. Portra is the Kodak Eastman like name for the film, but Alaris name for the film. But the Kodak Eastman version is now called like Kodacolor or something like that.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Ellis]

So anyway, over the last like six months they've been re releasing all these films, but with like different packaging and different names. Generally cheaper because they don't have to do like. They don't have to sell it. Eastman doesn't have to. No. Alaris doesn't have to make a margin. Anyway, on Instagram they, they posted. We just released this new film and someone said, can you explain this to me in basketball terms?

[Andrew]

Okay, David.

[Ellis]

So I think my basketball thing would be like, if Mike Bibby and Kobe Bryant. Is that bad to say?

[Marques Brownlee]

No, it's a basketball player.

[Ellis]

Kobe Bryant, okay. My baby and Kobe Bryant were like best friend. Were like the same person. And then they split into two people. This is a bad analogy. I can't make the best basketball. I don't know enough about basketball to make the basketball.

[Andrew]

I think that's a hard thing to do.

[Ellis]

I could do a tech analogy.

[Andrew]

People can't split in half.

[Marques Brownlee]

If you can make a technology, I will try to make It a basketball.

[Ellis]

Okay. Okay, good. This is like Telephone.

[Andrew]

He just likes this. I like this film company split in two. Basketball.

[Ellis]

But no. Okay, let me. Let me do a tech analogy.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Okay.

[Ellis]

Imagine if Android had to spin off from Google, right? Or Chrome. Let's say Chrome. Okay. And Google still made Chrome, but they couldn't distribute it. And Chrome, the company was the one that, like, actually packaged it and distributed it to people. And then later on, for some reason, Google was once again able to make Chrome. And because Chromium is open sourced, because they still have the. Like, they still have the rights to do it, they released it under Google Chrome as opposed to just Chrome.

[Marques Brownlee]

You know, I got. I got a version. Okay.

[Ellis]

Basketball.

[Marques Brownlee]

It would be like if Kevin Durant played for a Seattle team called the Supersonics. And then at some point they went away and they split. Kevin Durant went to another team, and the Supersonics went away and became Oklahoma City Thunder. And then later the NBA was like, we should make an expansion team in Seattle. And Kevin Durant went back to the Seattle team.

[Ellis]

Oh, I like it. Okay, we should clip that and comment on that guy's comment.

[Marques Brownlee]

Let's see if that works. That might not be.

[Ellis]

That was like a game of Telephone.

[Marques Brownlee]

It might happen, it might not. All that, we've learned a lot on the pod.

[Ellis]

That's some humidity explanations. Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Hopefully some of that is accurate. Hey, thanks for watching. See you in April.

[Ellis]

Wait, really?

[Marques Brownlee]

It's been a really long March. I know.

[Andrew]

It will be, because April 1st.

[Ellis]

Wait, is it going to be April 1st when we record?

[Marques Brownlee]

Next time we record will be April. Officially April 1st. So thanks for tuning in, thanks for subscribing, thanks for hyping. I think we finally killed that feature. Either way, catch you guys next week. Peace.

[Andrew]

Waveform is produced by Adam Alina and Ellis Riffin. We're part of the Vox Media podcast network, and a character music was created by Vaincel.

[Ellis]

Bingo.

[Andrew]

Awesome. Quick one.

[Marques Brownlee]

In hindsight, if I was a teacher and I gave this assignment, this would probably be like a lesson in just how big the solar system is. But I was a very literal. I was like, I have to make everything the right size.