This is the Best Android Update Ever

Summary

Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast

Episode: "This is the Best Android Update Ever"

Date: June 19, 2026

Hosts: Marques Brownlee (MKBHD), Andrew Manganelli, David Imel, Ellis Hamburger, Mariah Zenk

Episode Overview

In this episode, the team dives into an action-packed week in tech. The big focus is on Android 17, which Andrew boldly claims is “the greatest Android release of all time.” The conversation covers everything from Google’s latest AR/XR glasses and smart home protocol updates to the new Google Home speaker, social media bans in the UK, and even the quirks of fake gear shifts in electric cars. Lighthearted basketball banter sets the tone, while thoughtful debates about AI model bans and youth internet safety round out this packed show.

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Key Discussion Points & Timestamps

1. Quick Banter & Basketball Hype [03:00–04:30]

• The episode kicks off celebrating the New York Knicks winning the NBA Finals.
• David, new to basketball, describes the thrill of the game and the iconic moments.
• The group jokes about stoic Knicks fans and shares personal stories from Madison Square Garden.
• Quote – Marques: “Probably the greatest Knicks game of all time, definitely. But yeah, it’s up there. It was incredible." [03:35]

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2. YouTube UI Changes & Quality Metrics [04:31–11:58]

• Discussion turns to YouTube’s recent UI updates – including hiding subscriber counts on mobile and messy search bar design.
• UI Gripes: The team nitpicks subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) YouTube UI bugs that made it into production.
• Views vs. Subscribers:
  • Marques argues subscriber counts are a “glanceable, like quality verification” [08:10].
  • David counters “subscriber count ... can sort of be a legacy artifact,” not always a sign of current quality [08:56].
  • Andrew suggests low-subscriber, high-view videos are notable outliers that can indicate viral or useful content [10:00].
  • Debates the fate of displaying view counts, likes/dislikes, and the balance between quality and algorithm curation.

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3. New AR/XR Glasses: Snapchat Spectacles, Xreal Aura [12:04–28:33]

Snapchat AR Glasses

• Specs: $2,200, two Snapdragon chips, 4-hour battery (20 with case), 51º field of view, two sizes, LED bar, can go from clear to tinted.
• Design Critique: Still “massive and extremely first-gen feeling,” very heavy, not comfortable for daily wear.
• Functional Use? Team questions the utility for regular users outside of Snapchat’s limited AR experiences.
• Marques: “What do you actually do in these besides Snapchat? ... There’s a couple experiences.” [16:52]
• David: “This is kind of analogous to the Windows Phone ... if there’s no developers making actual things that people use every day ... what do you do with it?” [17:21]
• Positioning Problems: Mixed feelings about marketing them as consumer devices when their real value is likely for developers.

Xreal Aura & Android XR

• Design: Lighter (90g), wide field of view (70º), micro OLED displays.
• App Ecosystem: Runs Android XR – meaning full Play Store access and optimized apps (e.g., Google Maps in Street View).
• Utility: Better suited for private consumption (planes, trains, private screens) than all-day wear.
• Notable Feature: Soft body lock lets you fix a video in your field of view and walk around.
• “These glasses I also don’t think are things you’re walking around with every day.” – Andrew [26:56]

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4. Matter 1.6: The Next Evolution of Smart Home Protocols [29:32–38:08]

• What is Matter? The latest standard aiming to make smart home devices interoperable across Google, Apple, and Amazon.
• Feature Highlight: New “joint fabric” lets devices show up seamlessly in multiple ecosystems.
• Improvements:
  • NFC setup for easier pairing (no more awkward QR codes on the back of plugs).
  • Thread Direct—lets you set up devices directly from your phone, no more need for a separate Thread border router just to connect things.
• Skeptical Optimism:
  • The hosts all hope this finally makes smart home integration just work, but are well-aware that adoption by big companies is the real blocker.
  • “Someday one of these protocols is going to fix everything.” – David [34:18]
  • Relatable anecdotes about tangled setups, smart switches, and minor glitches.

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5. Google Home Speaker & Gemini Assistant [42:26–53:59]

• First Gemini-Integrated Speaker: New Google Home device (launched in “spring” … technically).
• Design: Modern look with glowing LED strip; comes in multiple colors, some US-only.
• Key Features:
  • More natural conversations, can make exceptions (“turn off all the lights except the bedside lamp”).
  • Chains commands: “dim kitchen lights, play music, set a timer” in one go.
  • Leaves the mic open after responses for seamless follow-ups.
  • Ten new assistant voices, including international accents.
• Premium Subscription: $10/month for “Google Home Premium” (bundles Gemini Live, faster camera history search, and home event summaries).
  • Team is skeptical about its value, viewing it more as an incentive to drive subscriptions to Google’s broader AI Pro bundle.
  • “... they’re only slapping a price tag on it because they want you to pay for the AI Pro subscription.” – David [51:18]

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6. Android 17: “The Greatest Android Release Ever” [54:15–64:43]

• Headline Feature: You can finally remove the “At a Glance” widget from your home screen.
  • “At A Glance is gone. I removed it this morning and the weight off my shoulders is freeing. I am a free man.” – Andrew [54:15]
• Other Important Updates:
  • Bubble Bar: Up to four apps can float as “bubbles” anywhere on your screen, especially useful for foldables.
  • Foldable Gaming Mode: Virtual gamepad splits the screen for enhanced mobile gaming.
  • Privacy Tweaks: Temporary location sharing, selective contact sharing, improved “FindMy” security.
  • UI Upgrades: Bubble bar, better split-screen resizing, separate Wi-Fi/data toggles in quick settings.
  • Screen Recorder: Enhanced controls for audio mix, tap indication, direct editing.
  • Parental Controls: App limits, downtime, approval/contacts improvements.
  • Community shoutouts to Android leaker-turned-Googler Mishaal Rahman for detailed update threads.
• Group critiques Android’s history of UX regression and course corrections, all glad for these “finally fixed” touches.

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7. EVs & The Quest for Gas-like Experience [64:43–71:37]

• Porsche Taycan Adds “E-Shift” Fake Gear Shifts
  • Marques plays the new simulated shifting sounds.
  • Comedic confusion: “As a non-car person, that does nothing to me. I don’t get it.” – Andrew [65:19]
  • Why do EVs still emulate gas-car quirks?
    • “Why are we emulating gas car things? ... Seems insulting to emulate a gas car with such an obviously fake sound.” – Marques [65:30]
  • The group debates whether these features help or hinder EV adoption, ultimately favoring true EV strengths (torque, quiet, smooth) over backward-looking gimmicks.

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8. UK Social Media Ban: Protecting Kids or Missing the Point? [77:00–87:50]

• Policy: UK plans to ban social media for under 16s, add curfews & stricter content controls.
• Nuance:
  • Platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram included; WhatsApp & Signal exempt.
  • Team questions the wisdom of blanket bans—may push kids off accounts and into less-moderated spaces; could reduce exposure to positive, educational content.
  • “Why is YouTube included here?” – Marques [79:24]
  • Powerful argument: DIY learning, creativity, and opportunity for youth can be lost.
  • Quote – “...for every success story, there’s also the story of someone getting abducted or someone being groomed or someone thinking about self harm from all these things.” – Andrew [86:58]
  • Concludes that nuanced, enforced parental controls and internet literacy are smarter paths than one-size-fits-all bans.

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9. AI Release Ban: Anthropic’s Fable Model [88:00–91:58]

• Anthropic’s “Fable 5” (their model considered “too dangerous to release”) was banned by the US government soon after limited debut.
  • Ban reportedly prompted by worries about potential misuse by foreign nationals and security risks, possibly tipped off by Amazon researchers.
  • Team notes the irony of Anthropic calling for regulation and then facing abrupt, perhaps illogical regulatory action.
  • “...they had to turn the model completely off because they thought that was the only way they could actually do that.” – Andrew [89:09]
  • Recommendation: Read in-depth reporting (“Inside the Fight over Claude mythos 5” by Hayden Field, The Verge) for more context.

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Notable Quotes

• On AR Glasses: “I don’t think I need a pair of glasses that are going to play the dancing hot dog guy in a 50 degree field vision.” — Andrew [17:30]
• On At a Glance Widget: “I raised both my hands in the air ... I was like, she gone.” — Andrew [54:56]
• On Smart Home Protocols: “Someday one of these protocols is going to fix everything.” — David [34:18]
• On Subscription Bundles: “...they’re only slapping a price tag on it because they want you to pay for the AI Pro subscription.” — David [51:18]
• On the UK Social Media Ban: “...for every success story, there’s also the story of someone getting abducted ... so there are all of those things out for sure. We’re not trying to diminish that.” — Andrew [86:58]

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Fun & Memorable Moments

• Lampless Life: Marques reveals he doesn’t have any lamps at home. The team is flabbergasted.
  • “I don’t think I have any lamps.” [01:14, revisited at 38:22]
• Basketball “Expertise”: David’s comically short saga as a Knicks fan (“15 days”) and “teaching” arc.
• Android Naming Trivia: Group struggles to recall Android codenames in order. (“Cinnamon Bun”—who knew? [98:32])
• Bubble Bar: Team enjoys repeatedly saying “bubble bar.”

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Timestamps for Noteworthy Segments

• 04:41 – YouTube UI & metrics debate
• 12:04 – AR/XR glasses deep-dive
• 29:32 – Matter 1.6 protocol explained
• 42:26 – New Google Home speaker
• 54:15 – Android 17 update highlights
• 64:43 – Car sound/EV discussion
• 77:00 – UK social media ban unpacked
• 88:00 – Anthropic/Fable AI ban
• 98:32 – Android trivia (naming)

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Tone & Style

• Conversational and lively—tech deep-dives punctuated by witty pop culture tangents and group banter.
• Critical but fair—the team is unafraid to challenge questionable design choices or industry hype, yet always considers multiple perspectives.
• Relatable and practical—sharing real-world gripes about smart homes, device ecosystems, evolving software, and the societal implications of tech changes.

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Useful for Listeners Who Missed the Episode

This episode is a must-listen for anyone invested in Android, smart homes, or interested in how tech policy is colliding with social issues. Whether you want nerdy takes on AR hardware, candid debates about internet censorship, or hands-on impressions of the latest Google gadgets, the Waveform crew delivers both insight and entertainment this week.

Transcript

[Marques Brownlee]

We've all been there.

[David Imel]

You pop into the shop for five minutes and all of a sudden you've

[Marques Brownlee]

forgotten where you parked.

[David Imel]

Car. Car.

[Marques Brownlee]

Unfortunately, that lost feeling is what it's

[David Imel]

like trying to manage your policy with other insurers here.

[Mariah Zenk]

Car.

[David Imel]

Come out, come out, wherever you are, please. With Geico, you can use the app to easily manage all your policies in one place. Did this parking lot have a waterfall? I think you've wandered too far, mate.

[Marques Brownlee]

It feels good to find what you're looking for.

[David Imel]

It feels good to Geico.

[Marques Brownlee]

This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block. Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it, ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, set up, required compatibility and availability various. 18. I have exactly one smart outlet and every year around the holidays, the Christmas tree goes in that one and it turns on a certain hour. Turns off at a certain hour.

[Mariah Zenk]

Oh, nice.

[David Imel]

Why don't you use that for other things?

[Marques Brownlee]

Like what?

[David Imel]

Like lamps that. You don't wanna put a smart bulb in lamps.

[Marques Brownlee]

I don't really use lamps. What? I don't think I.

[David Imel]

Sorry, wait, what?

[Marques Brownlee]

I don't think I have any lamps.

[Andrew Manganelli]

This is. What's the meme of like. I don't like the big lights, I just like the little lights. Yeah.

[Ellis Hamburger]

You don't have a single lamp in your house?

[David Imel]

Uh, what? No, what I think.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yo, what is up, people of the Internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform podcast.

[David Imel]

We're your hosts.

[Marques Brownlee]

I'm Marques.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I'm Andrew.

[David Imel]

I'm David.

[Marques Brownlee]

Still got that next jersey on? Still very nice.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Never taken it off.

[David Imel]

I've been a fan for 15 days.

[Marques Brownlee]

It must be good luck. Today's episode, we got Google's releases, including Android 17. We gotta talk about that all. Also, multiple AR XR glasses have come out, multiple tech bans have happened, and also new matter updates. So we got a whole bunch of

[Andrew Manganelli]

stuff to talk about.

[David Imel]

It matters.

[Marques Brownlee]

It does matter.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Just in case you're wondering if this episode's a little late, it might be because the Knicks won the NBA Finals.

[Mariah Zenk]

Woo.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Adam is a big Knicks fan.

[David Imel]

Wait, the Knicks won the NBA Finals?

[Andrew Manganelli]

Adam's going to the parade. We're also recording this late because Marquez was just in Rome and flew back like an hour ago.

[Marques Brownlee]

I Just landed.

[David Imel]

Landed now an hour ago.

[Andrew Manganelli]

So we're starting late. We're editing late. Maybe I'll be on time if so, Adam's a bigger MVP than Jalen Brunson.

[David Imel]

But hey, hey, hey.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Wow.

[David Imel]

Well, I mean, kind of true.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Always true. I mean, true. Even if it's super late. But yeah, we here. We're still here.

[David Imel]

Yeah. If you make it to the end of the episode, you can comment. Adam is the real mvp. Speaking of Jalen. Jalen Brunson, though, I just gotta mention, look, that guy can stop so fast. You know, Wemby's tripping all over him. Those refs are not calling nothing on Webby. He's like making jumps going for his acl. David crazy. Also, Cat. Cat was like, very underrepresented. He is really the reason they won game one and two, which is crazy. But in the 15 days, the long 15 days that I've been covering, like, fallen basketball, that hand of OG tip off that I watched that live was probably the best basketball I've ever seen in 15 days. It was crazy.

[Ellis Hamburger]

It's the only and it's the best.

[David Imel]

I mean, it was one of the first games of basketball I had ever watched. And all the announcers were like, I think this is the best game I've ever seen in my life. And I was like, did you see it's time to start.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Was it Charles Barkley? That was like, that was a world class choke or what did he say it was the dumbest team in the history of civilization. The way the spurs lost that game,

[Marques Brownlee]

it was tough to watch.

[David Imel]

That's pretty rough to say.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yes, I was in the Garden for that. And shout out to. Yeah, my dad's a big Knicks fan, lifetime Knicks fan. Decided on a whim to take him to a game that was the game we went to. Probably the greatest Knicks game of all time, definitely. But yeah, it's up there. It was incredible.

[Mariah Zenk]

Top two and it ain't two.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Your dad's the most stoic man ever. Like, you were sending pictures of it and that man was just. He's like. You could tell the hope was there, but he didn't want to get over.

[Marques Brownlee]

He waited till the final buzzer to be like, oh, my God, that actually won. Because there was. There were many opportunities to lose. Even though they had this incredible comeback and they actually won.

[David Imel]

29 point comeback.

[Mariah Zenk]

Yep. And if you like this, like six min. If you like this talk of basketball, just wait because we have a whole bonus episode coming up next week, so

[Marques Brownlee]

we don't even get ready for that

[David Imel]

because I already know everything about basketball, man.

[Marques Brownlee]

We'll see about that.

[Andrew Manganelli]

He's going to teach Alex about the next. Yeah, I'm going to see.

[David Imel]

Yeah, come at me, Alec.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Let's go. But first.

[David Imel]

Okay.

[Marques Brownlee]

Did they even test this?

[Andrew Manganelli]

I have two. They're both pretty small. One I think is more niche and one I know happens to everyone, but it's really fast. Which would you rather like?

[Marques Brownlee]

The one that happens to everyone, I think.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Okay. So have you ever noticed on YouTube web when you go to the search bar and you hover over the X the highlighting circle is breaking over pretty much every line in the UI possible? This is terrible.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, I would have never noticed that.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Tim would freak out if he saw this. But I checked in multiple browsers. It's happening in all of them. For all the ones I tested, how did no one on the YouTube AI or YouTube UI team.

[David Imel]

Have you seen the Fitbit app? Yeah, they fixed it and it's still

[Andrew Manganelli]

not centered that I saw someone say they fixed it but all they fixed was the two different dark modes.

[David Imel]

But dark thing they fixed which was

[Andrew Manganelli]

a big deal, which should be really

[David Imel]

easy but the text is still not

[Andrew Manganelli]

correctly because they put cal under the one number which just absolutely decimates the lining. Which. Yeah. You think anyone could fix.

[David Imel]

I don't know, man. I feel like Google. Google, yeah. Their software can be a little YouTube.

[Marques Brownlee]

YouTube like updates the UI every couple months with subtle things. I think mobile just got this update that doesn't social show subscribers anymore and it shows like live.

[David Imel]

It shows views subscribers.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. And I know that they always claim to be doing lots of small volume tests. They'll do a test that's like half a percent of people on the site will see this and if it goes over well, then we'll show it to 1% and then 1 1/2% and somehow these things make it all the way to the end and then we go, wait, what?

[Andrew Manganelli]

That's. Those are at least on purpose changes that suck. Yeah, this is just a straight up ui like in one of the most clicked places on.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's a good question. Do people actually, I don't. I don't usually click the X. I've never clicked.

[David Imel]

Really? Really?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, I've never noticed.

[David Imel]

I click it all the time.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I click it all the time. Because command a 1 if you notice that whatever you search, no matter how long you stay in the browser, the thing stays in the search box all the time even if you click through a million videos. So I Clearing that out and.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Clicking that X in case someone stands

[David Imel]

over your shoulder and sees the embarrassing thing.

[Andrew Manganelli]

You see exactly.

[Marques Brownlee]

That you were about to search.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Just like, how to know everything about the Knicks in the next hour.

[David Imel]

No, no.

[Marques Brownlee]

Give me the history of basketball. TLDR long 15 days.

[David Imel]

By the way, Steph Curry, I know that he popularized the three pointer, and he can shoot that from like three quarters away from the court. That's crazy. Yeah, but like, they, they put that. They, they gave Wemby that play. They were like, make a bunch of three pointers because you're 7ft 8. And then Jalen Brunson, the mini guy, he's like, I'm. I don't care about three pointers. I'm just going to ram in here and get twos over and over and over again within six minutes. It's freaking crazy. It's so crazy. But Steph Curry still might be the goat of all time is all I gotta say. This is.

[Marques Brownlee]

I. I want more of these takes, but I can't. We can't keep doing this.

[Andrew Manganelli]

You can't get David into hockey. Ye listeners know. Bob.

[David Imel]

Okay, really quick on that YouTube update, though, on the mobile. I think it's a good change. I kind of want to debate this a little bit.

[Marques Brownlee]

What part? The not showing.

[David Imel]

Not showing subscribers and just showing views.

[Marques Brownlee]

It does so when there's a subscribe button. Here's where I'll play devil's advocate. I think showing the subscribe button, I guess I'm generally in favor of glanceable quality metrics. And when they took away the dislike counter to me, I was like, I get why they're doing this. But if I see a video, like a tutorial on how to install something electrical and it has way more dislikes than normal, I know not to follow that tutorial at a glance. I don't have to get 12 minutes in and be like, wait, this doesn't seem right. Right. And to me, the subscriber counter is a glanceable, like quality verification. Like, if I'm watching a video, I guess I feel like people are more likely to watch a video from a channel with more subscribers. And when you, when you don't have that on the watch page. So you're just clicking into a random related video. You don't know how many subscribers it has. Yeah, you're going purely by how many views it has.

[David Imel]

I've got God's advocate for you because it's the devil's. Devil's advocate.

[Marques Brownlee]

Sure.

[David Imel]

Okay. YouTube is now old enough that there are many, many, many channels that have a ton of subscribers that don't make quality content anymore.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Did you watch the latest Mr. Beast video? It's all people with a million subscribers and half of them don't get any views anymore.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, yeah.

[David Imel]

So, like, okay, a lot of the. You're not one y. Yeah, this is the thing. This is the thing. Subscribers can sort of be a legacy artifact. Like, for you, you're still getting really good views.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's still very much a vanity metric. Has been for a long time. Right, I agree.

[David Imel]

Right. But, like, it makes it easier now for people to break onto this because the algorithm behind the scenes is already sort of doing a lot of work to tell the search engine whether or not this is a quality video. Right. It's based on how long people stayed on the video for all of these metrics. And so, like, for me, now it's like subscriber count. There might be a YouTuber from 15 years ago, but he completely sold out his channel five years ago. And so.

[Marques Brownlee]

So there's a lot of subscribers, but it's not a good indicator of quality.

[David Imel]

Yeah, I would say that. Yeah, I'd say there's a small. There is a percentage that is a good indicator of quality, like yourself, but there is a lot of people that I don't think it's necessarily good indicator of quality. Also, maybe they're making the same type of video that they made that everyone kind of vibed with 10 years ago, but nobody really cares for anymore. That's just, you know, times change.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I feel like an argument for showing subscribers, which is your argument, but the opposite of it is if there's a low subscriber channel with a ton of videos, I'm more likely to be like, well, something's going on right here. Like, I want to watch this because something's clicking.

[David Imel]

Outlier.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah, it's like it's an outlier. And outliers generally are either. If it's a tutorial type thing, it's like, okay, people really connected with this tutorial and it seems to be working. Or something insane happened in this, and I want to see what that is.

[Marques Brownlee]

That is in the same realm of, yeah, glanceable information. I glance at, oh, this has 3 million views, but the channel only has 10,000 subscribers. Okay, that tells me something.

[David Imel]

Rather than not happening to that, though, I feel like. I kind of feel like if someone's made a thousand videos, but then none of them get views, I feel like the algorithm is really good at surfacing good content. And so if it didn't surface a single one of those videos over the thousand videos they made. They just don't make good content in general.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, I guess you're more in the realm of suggested videos and the algorithm surfacing things for you on the homepage. I'm more in the realm of search and manually going to content and trying to judge if I should watch it on the spot.

[David Imel]

But doesn't the search engine kind of do the same thing as what the homepage is doing?

[Marques Brownlee]

It tries, but it still will show me bad stuff. So if I get to a video and it's bad, I can glance at, oh, it has a bunch of dislikes. It's bad versus it's gone now. So I might watch too much of the video to realize I wasted my time.

[Andrew Manganelli]

You're talking about, like, you search something specific. How do I pick this thing that's specific? You're talking about home.

[David Imel]

Yeah, but I mean the search. You know, if A video has 200,000 views on the search engine, I still think that's a decent indicator of quality.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's one of them, generally.

[Mariah Zenk]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

The view count. What if they got rid of view count?

[David Imel]

I know you can't do that because this.

[Marques Brownlee]

Can't do that because this falls. This is like the slope of your exact same argument. Well, the algorithm is going to tell me what's good. It's pretty good at that already. It's doing all that stuff behind the scenes.

[David Imel]

I see what you're saying, but I

[Marques Brownlee]

would like to know how many views it has. Yeah, I would like to see how many likes and dislikes.

[David Imel]

Okay, yeah, I get what you're saying.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[David Imel]

All right, well, we'll see.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's still there on desktop. It's still there on desktop. I can still see this stuff, but we'll see how long that lasts.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

All right, we got to talk about these glasses.

[Andrew Manganelli]

You don't even have the name of them.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's funny because there's a post in the MKBHD subreddit that it's like, finally, like, something came out, incredibly dramatic has happened right before the Record on Wednesday, and it is Snapchat's unveiling of the new AR glasses. And of course, Evan, their CEO, is going around doing a bunch of interviews, like, wearing glasses. They've showed it to people. About two years ago, I think it was. We had the previous generation of their AR spectacles here, and they were massive and extremely first gen feeling. But at least it worked and it was a proof of concept. And I could see the Idea. Now this, this new generation of them is $2,200. They're going to sell these. They are a little tiny bit smaller, but they still look quite large, quite heavy.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Do you want me to do specs first and then we'll talk about the most fun part, which is what they look like.

[David Imel]

Yeah, spec.

[Andrew Manganelli]

The specs. Okay. $2,195. Snap is calling them wearable computer built into see through AR glasses. To give them credit, they are standalone. There's no puck, there's no wire. You'll see where they fit all of it later. Yep. Two Snapdragon chips, four hours of battery, 20 including the case. Depending on the size, it's either 132 or 136 grams.

[David Imel]

There's two sizes.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah. I didn't really get what that meant,

[David Imel]

but it's for people with smaller heads

[Andrew Manganelli]

and people with bigger heads.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I guess there's an LED bar to show that they're recording. This has a 51 degree field of view, which the previous ones we did were 46. And man, I remember that feeling. Really limiting.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yep.

[Andrew Manganelli]

So I'm glad it's higher, but that is not much higher. Yeah, 5 degrees higher is not. The meta orions were 70 degrees and that felt so much better.

[Marques Brownlee]

Same with the xreal aura.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Are they 70?

[Marques Brownlee]

70, 72?

[Andrew Manganelli]

I think I do the spec prototypes, we haven't used these new ones. I do think I remember the resolution being so much better than the Orion's. But I would pick field of view over resolution any day because it. When I was wearing them, it just kept getting cut off. Like whole parts of the screen was just gone.

[Marques Brownlee]

I remember playing a golf game with them and the whole idea of the golf game is like it overlays the golf hole and the world over your real world. But I would look down at the club and the ball and then I would look up at the target and I couldn't see them both at the same time. And then when I swing the club, I can't see the club anymore. So I only see the ball. And it was very like segmenting. It just took me out of the immersion because of how compact the field of view is. It cut off really fast.

[Andrew Manganelli]

And then they're claiming it can show 60 million colors and go from clear to tinted.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Okay, now who wants to talk about what they look like?

[David Imel]

They look Prada.

[Marques Brownlee]

Well, okay. There's two things about them that I think are weird. One is the size. Obviously you are fitting a ton of compute in them and to Their credit, they have jammed a ton of compute in these things, but they have these really big thick arms, big thick rims. And even over behind the ear, there's extra weight sort of counterbalancing everything. So 130 grams is pretty heavy for something you're gonna wear on your face that's supposed to feel clear. If it's a VR headset, maybe you're expecting, you know, heavy, but the glasses are kind of heavy. The other thing though is every single one of these pictures, I've seen pictures and videos, I can't see quite through to his eyes very well. I don't know if it's the wave guys or if something about the glass that they're using, but I. It doesn't feel like I'm looking at someone wearing glasses. It feels like I'm looking at someone who's wearing. I mean, they might as well just be wearing a headset. Like I'm not making real eye contact. You know what I mean? Like, this is from the pictures I'm seeing. Maybe there's just a ton of room.

[Andrew Manganelli]

There's video too. Yeah, there's videos. And it cracks me up every time I see him turn his head around and smile.

[Marques Brownlee]

And yeah, they look like fogged over or something. So those are the two things that I noticed that would turn me off from giving a chance. And obviously these are still super early. And the devil's advocate for these is, well, at some point they're going to be really good and then we'll all want these because they'll be really nice. And this is just the early adopter version, to which I say, yes, this is the really, really early adopter.

[David Imel]

$20 from a company that doesn't really have any usable applications for day to day use. Like, that's what seem confusing to me about this is that Evans positions them as a wearable computer to do what exactly in Snapchat? Like Snapchat's UI and AR and whatever, right? They don't have like applications like Apple has with the Vision. Not even, not even Apple has with Vision Pro, which Apple doesn't really have that many applications for the Vision Pro, but at least you can use Safari

[Marques Brownlee]

and some big ones.

[David Imel]

Messages.

[Marques Brownlee]

Got a YouTube app.

[David Imel]

Now there's a YouTube app now you can do. You can watch movies. There's, there's actually, there's a little utility to Vision Pro. What do you actually do in these besides Snapchat?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, that's my question. From what I remember, I mean, there's a bunch of these. There's lenses and there's a bunch of. It felt like applications and I'm not remembering everything. I have to go back and watch my own video just to refresh my memory. But there were some apps and there are some developers who are making things that work with these glasses. But it wasn't in the name of productivity usually. It was typically just like, here's a thing that we built that takes advantage of architect. So like, my computer screen's not in there, my documents aren't in there, my browsers and YouTube videos are not in there. But it's just a couple experiences.

[David Imel]

This is kind of analogous to the Windows Phone because if there's no developers making actual things that people use every day and like porting their stuff to it, what do you do with it?

[Andrew Manganelli]

It's a confusing thing because he says there's 450,000 developers creating for Snap AR, but like, that obviously is including the Snapchat AR that they've had for years. So, like, I don't think I need a pair of glasses that are going to play the dancing hot dog guy in a 50 degree field vision.

[David Imel]

This is the primary use case of glasses.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I'm sure there is more. I'm sure there's some stuff, but none of that can get past. I think calling it thick is an understatement. They're like if you took glasses and made them bold and then still 1 1/2x them, like, they just do not fit. On his head, his ears are absolutely crushed.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

There's an interview of him on CNBC that is brutal. And he literally looks like he's like moving down his head like throughout the whole thing. And I honestly think it's because of the weight of the glasses. They stick out like four inches past your ear with these big. I mean, it's cool that they fit all that. I know that it's a huge tech advancement for where it is, but two years ago these were really cool because it was a prototype that we could see where they're going now. It's a $2,200 thing that a person can buy and it's going to get made fun of because of that.

[David Imel]

Yeah, I, I think that it's, it's cool that they were able to pack that much technology into the, into the glasses. And if you, if you were to compare these to like an actual wearable computer, like a Vision Pro, and you said, oh, we basically packed most of the Vision Pro's technology into thick, arguably very thick glasses, it's still like shrinking down the tech by for sure.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's what I was going to say is like there are two ways to look at this. This like dimensions and one of them makes them look really impressive and the other makes them look really bad. Yeah, the really impressive one is okay, these glasses are 130something grams and Envision Pro is 7 or 800 grams. And this doesn't have a puck. This has all the compute, all the sensors, all the chips, all the batteries, everything all built in at 130 grams. That's actually very kind of really impressive technical feat. The other angle is Ray Ban metas with the cameras in them and the batteries and the compute for that are according to Google, about 50 grams.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

So you're wearing. And the X reels which I just showed you, which feel too heavy. They're a little bit front heavy, but I wouldn't want to wear them all day. And they have the electrochromic glass and the tint and everything. Those were in the 90 gram range. So these being 130 is. But not an all day.

[David Imel]

I feel like use your.

[Marques Brownlee]

Use your phone and they have a separate compute. Exactly.

[David Imel]

Yeah. In my opinion is better.

[Andrew Manganelli]

But that's just using your phone or not.

[David Imel]

Yeah. Using your phone.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I will. I mean it's cool that they can do it using your phone. I don't think is that big of a deal because we have it. The tether. Not having that is huge. I totally agree. But by saying like these all compute by themselves and these don't have a tether or they don't have a puck, they still have to be glasses at the end of the day and they just look so uncomfortable. No part of him wearing that in any of those interviews. Does he look like he's having a good time with them?

[Ellis Hamburger]

I don't know who it was. Someone sent a picture of Danny DeVito and they, they missed out on having him wear the glasses.

[David Imel]

I think. Yeah. The closest thing to this is like hololens. Right. Because it's a standalone device that you wear when you want to do certain tasks. But it's not necessarily like a. You like they're kind of angling them as a thing that you just wear every day. Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

I think that's the problem.

[David Imel]

That's the mistake.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I have a quote from him. He says during that CNBC interview, he says the goal for these are to bring computing into the world and make it more human. I think it's something people are really looking for where screens are distracting them and people are spending more than seven hours a day staring at a screen and spending, instead of spending time with their friends, he's saying that with two giant screens glued to his eyeballs where the interviewer can't even see.

[Marques Brownlee]

That would have hit so much harder if the glasses were clear.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I know, like it feels like more of separation because now I just can't see your eyes. I don't know if you're looking at something. Also, you can't spend seven hours a day staring at them because it has a four hour battery life. So like, I don't know, is it

[Marques Brownlee]

four hours or two hours?

[David Imel]

It's four hours.

[Marques Brownlee]

Four hours. Four hours, yeah.

[David Imel]

And he wants you to spend 14 hours a day staring into the screens.

[Mariah Zenk]

So. Okay, I'm going to be devil's advocate here. I think these are dope because they are specifically an Apple Vision Pro alternative. I don't see them as a meta glasses alternative. Like I'm not expecting anyone to wear these walking around all day. That these are developers that are building the future of ar, just like Apple Vision Pro. No matter what Apple wants to say, yeah, regular people aren't using that. That's for developers building the future of ar.

[Marques Brownlee]

I agree with you.

[Mariah Zenk]

And that's kind of how I view these things.

[David Imel]

It's just not how they position them exactly.

[Mariah Zenk]

Their positioning is where they're positioning.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. So I remember years ago, way back at the beginning of this AR XR thing, we talked about the spectrum of like on one side of the spectrum there's VR headsets where you're obviously not going to walk around in them. They're an opaque thing with pass through cameras. And you put it on, you're fully immersed and they're heavy and you watch a movie in it for an hour or whatever, wear it for work. That's one side of the spectrum. And on the complete other side of the spectrum is glasses with a tiny bit of tech in them. Maybe a camera and a speaker and

[Andrew Manganelli]

a battery and some compute mono screen.

[Marques Brownlee]

And they're transparent. There's no screen. The absolute basic, total other side of the spectrum, those you can actually see people putting on and wearing for half a day, an entire day. And then companies, in order to get to this future of like, you know, the future of AR computing, have to decide which part they want to start with to get to the future. And I think if you position yourself in the wrong way, you're kind of doomed and you have to start over. So Vision Pro is where Apple chose to start. They're going to eventually do glasses Someday, we all suspect these are kind of like. I mean, he's wearing them as if they're supposed to be regular glasses. He's having conversations with people. He's doing interviews with people wearing the glasses as if they're not a. Like, if this was a Vision Pro, you'd be like, what are you doing? So they're positioning them very clearly as a thing that you can wear and walk around and live your life because it's glass and it's AR and they're the world around you. But then they look, like just a little too much for that. Yeah, way too much. They're kind of in the middle.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah, they're in the middle, which is, like, where they want to land. It's very clear in his interview, he said, like, that almost that exact same thing. We want to be in the middle. I think the problem is, is when you have to describe things as wear them like glasses instead of wearing them as glasses, because that's what they are. It's just proof that none of us are looking at this and thinking, this is a pair of glasses.

[Ellis Hamburger]

I guess my question is, as a regular consumer, is why do they need to announce this, like, very publicly? Could this not just be an email within, like, a community space or the targeted audience?

[David Imel]

Yeah, that's what I was about to say. That again with their positioning problem, they're saying, we're going to sell these to consumers, which is a bad move. Like, the HoloLens was always for enterprise and enterprise only, and selling these direct to consumer and going on CNBC and be like, look at our big consumer. Like, what are you doing? Consumers are not going to buy this.

[Marques Brownlee]

2,200 bucks implies a lot of tech and a lot of functionality and usefulness. And I tweeted this like, there are actually two things you have to overcome. You have to overcome the price and how dorky they look. If there are some amazing utilities or some incredible functionality or productivity things that it does that makes you want to do that, then you're willing to go, okay, I know it looks, like, ridiculous, but look at this amazing functionality. Same with the price. I know it's $2,000, but, like, I don't have to use a MacBook Pro anymore at $2,000. I don't see that with these. And maybe I'll be proven wrong. Maybe there's some development happening. Maybe there's some amazing apps that I haven't seen with these spectacles yet. But I think that's what it needs to overcome. How ridiculously bad they look and how expensive they are.

[David Imel]

Yeah, we don't really even know anything about the app ecosystem or functionality yet,

[Marques Brownlee]

so waiting to see that.

[David Imel]

We'll see that. Hopefully they send us a pair so we can look stupid for a while.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I'm sure they'll love to after they hear what we just said about it.

[Marques Brownlee]

At a different place in this world. We still have xreal's AR glasses, they just launched which are running Android xr. So we know the ecosystem. It's the Play Store. So it's whatever you want to do in the Play Store. And all the stuff that's optimized for Android xr that's actually pretty interesting now, like Google Maps has this, this cool optimized Android XR version. You can fly down into Street View and look around and then pinch and zoom and walk around. It's kind of interesting. But yeah, I did some of this. I covered these actually on the latest dope tech episode. So if you want to watch that, there's about two or three minutes in there, about these again, 90 grams, you know, 70 something degree field of view, micro OLED displays. It looks pretty good. They're high resolution. And I think my favorite feature is you can like soft body lock a video in the corner of your vision with you and walk around with it. So instead of like having to pinch and hold and walk around carrying the video, you can like watch waveform in the corner of your vision while you actually wash dishes because you're just looking

[Mariah Zenk]

through glass, which is exactly how I watch it anyway when I'm doing dishes.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's perfect. It's funny.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Next to the sink. Yeah, that's such a simple thing. Like so many of VR Arkansas is. Like how do you pin things to a spatial place that's in your actual environment? And this is just like put in my corner and then stays with me and I can see it.

[David Imel]

I don't need to move it around.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah, exactly. Which the extras were, were cool because they can do pinning to different places in the environment. Like it was a really neat. I still want to call it a demo of what Android XR was because these glasses I also don't think are things you're walking around with every day.

[Marques Brownlee]

No.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah, they look very similar to some previous X Rails where even though the shape is smaller and the weight is lighter, it still just fits really strangely off the front of your face because it has to fit those windows.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, I've always thought of these as closer to a VR headset, even though they don't look like it. They're very much like a put a screen on your face type of thing.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Sit down at a desk, an airplane, a train. Get yourself a private, larger screen.

[Marques Brownlee]

They're nice on a plane. Yeah, I think they'd be nice on a plane.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Wasn't the previous version the one Ellis was like fully locked in?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, because they're plug and play.

[David Imel]

A few of these.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, it might have been those are unreal or something like that. But a lot of them are saying, well, like you, you. They're plugin just X Rail, but they changed the name.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah. So when we were using Unreal is actually for the third person video that we did. Right. I think Ellis is more locked into the Meta Quest Pro. Yeah, for a while. But the Unreal ones were very awesome because like they were super plug and play. You just plugged your phone in and it's there.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[David Imel]

These.

[Andrew Manganelli]

The whole puck thing that just looks like a phone, including it essentially has a like hole punch cutout on the front was just very funny to me.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

It's a plug screen.

[Marques Brownlee]

You can plug that plug into something else, like your phone or actually even better, what I did was plug it into my laptop so that my laptop screen became one of the things in the virtual space.

[David Imel]

That's cool.

[Marques Brownlee]

So that was a legitimately interesting. Like 80% of the stuff that I would do with this is just being on a plane. I want to go on a plane and I have to edit a video that's embargoed so nobody around me on the plane can see it. So I would just plug it into these. The screen would go black here and it would just show up in my glasses and I could edit the video on the plane.

[David Imel]

That's smart, stuff like that. Yeah. I still wonder about the utility of these things. I guess for that it makes sense.

[Marques Brownlee]

Or watching a movie.

[Andrew Manganelli]

We didn't have a price on these yet, right?

[Marques Brownlee]

No, but they promised me that they would be under the price of the full Galaxy XR headset, which makes sense.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Okay.

[Marques Brownlee]

Because that's like 1800.

[Mariah Zenk]

It's like two GS.

[Marques Brownlee]

Well, that's already cheaper than the Snap the spectacles. So the galaxy XR is 1800, I think.

[David Imel]

So this is ideally, people around people need to get that utility curb up there. They need to figure out the utility real hard because putting these things on your face has a very high goofiness scale.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I do like the electrochromatic tint because the old end reels we used to had just came with a cover that you put over Top of the glass to get the faded black background so everything popped more.

[David Imel]

Okay, well, speaking of gosh, you can do this. You can do this. Fabric. Digital fabric.

[Mariah Zenk]

Okay.

[David Imel]

Is that something I could say?

[Mariah Zenk]

Speaking of things made in the universe,

[Andrew Manganelli]

speaking of things that matter.

[David Imel]

Hey, that's true. Honestly.

[Marques Brownlee]

Thank you, Andrew.

[Andrew Manganelli]

You're welcome.

[David Imel]

You really saved me on that one. Matter 1.6. Okay, you guys have heard me talk about matter before. I love protocols. We love protocols here at the Waveform podcast.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's more than the Fediverse corner. It's the protocol corner.

[Andrew Manganelli]

It's.

[David Imel]

Yes. Expanded Fediverse corner.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, because the Fediverse is dead. So we can just.

[Andrew Manganelli]

It's not dead.

[Marques Brownlee]

This. Into the protocol's corner.

[David Imel]

Hey, Meta's tried to kill it many times, and they're still trying to kill it.

[Marques Brownlee]

They stabbed it. It's bleeding openly, but it's not dead yet.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Wemby's stomping on its acl.

[David Imel]

Yeah, Wemby stomped on the Feniverse corner.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Jcl.

[David Imel]

Hey, hey, hey. Okay, Matter Matters. You guys might remember Matter protocol. Smart home protocol. You probably don't like going to the store, you know, being like, oh, I like this smart bulb. It's cool. But then you see, works with Amazon Alexa. I have Google homes in my home, which we'll talk about later. Because Google Home is also a feature on this podcast today. Matter is supposed to be this. Just like, oh, it works with Google Home. It works with Amazon Alexa. It works with HomeKit. Amazing. They've stumbled quite a bit with this future.

[Marques Brownlee]

I remember looking forward to this.

[David Imel]

Yeah, we were.

[Marques Brownlee]

I remember having the little glimmer in my eyes.

[David Imel]

That's how all protocols start.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Marquez.

[Marques Brownlee]

I go to Home Depot, I'd be like, someday these lights will all talk to each other.

[David Imel]

They'll all talk to each other. So the early version of Matter, basically how it worked is that you would still set up in one of the, you know, Google home apps or like, the Amazon Alexa app or the Siri HomeKit app.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[David Imel]

But then you had to, like, share the device with other apps through the Matter protocol, which used a thread border router. It was sort of like, Thread. Yeah, thread Matter over thread. Sort of like tacking on a bunch of, like, little protocols onto existing things.

[Marques Brownlee]

It was like velcroing something to more Velcro.

[David Imel]

100%

[Mariah Zenk]

situation. There are 14 protocols there.

[David Imel]

We should make one that encompasses all of these.

[Mariah Zenk]

Situation.

[Marques Brownlee]

There are 15 protocols.

[David Imel]

Okay. Matter 1.6 is supposed to fix this problem. They have this new feature called joint fabric which should allow any smart device on the network to just automatically show the device that you set up, which is a big deal.

[Marques Brownlee]

Anything, anything, anything.

[David Imel]

And allegedly. Supposed to, supposed to. Allegedly. Now all these companies obviously have to support this, this joint fabric thing.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I feel like that's always the roadblock.

[Marques Brownlee]

You say that line. I know now all the companies are

[Andrew Manganelli]

supposed to support this.

[Marques Brownlee]

Now we have 15. But if you.

[David Imel]

Okay, if you remember, if you rem. Entire reason that Google and Apple and Amazon decided to support Matter was especially, especially Apple, they went way too hard on certifying every single HomeKit device. And then they realized like, we don't have the infrastructure to like certify every single one. That's good enough for us. So it's easier if Amazon just like makes all, all these smart home things and we can utilize it, we can tap into it. We don't have to deal with any of this stuff. So Apple, I think still has incentive, whether Google or Amazon now still have as much incentive to support Matter. Similarly to how Meta at one point had some incentives to support the Fediverse and now just doesn't yet to be seen. Yes, boo them every day. Anyway, it does bring some other benefits. There is now NFC setup, which is very good. I had a Samsung smart plug.

[Mariah Zenk]

Congrats.

[David Imel]

It had a QR code on the back of the smart plug.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. So you can't scan it while it's plugged in.

[David Imel]

Yes.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. It's pretty classic.

[David Imel]

That was the most. Did they even test this thing I've ever seen in my life because it can't find it when it's not getting power.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. I have this incredibly frustrating, also incredibly boring situation where I've gone through several smart locks in my garage. I have this one door. It's like really far from all the other appliances. It's far from the WI fi, but I just want to have a smart lock there. And every time I try to set one up, it's like, well, I have to connect to something else on the network and I'll unplug a doorbell and walk over and wave it. Nothing ever really gets it to connect. And I'm just hoping that at someday one of these protocols, man, they're gonna fix everything.

[Mariah Zenk]

Unplugging a doorbell sounds crazy.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[David Imel]

Someday. What are these?

[Marques Brownlee]

Because I have a nest battery door. Yeah.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Dumbest thing ever.

[David Imel]

I have it when I die on my tombstone I really want you to write, someday one of these protocols is

[Andrew Manganelli]

going to fix everything.

[David Imel]

That's all I want on my tombstone.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I feel like Random smart home gadgets are the most often Claire will find me just like sitting cross legged on the floor watching a YouTube tutorial. Everything okay? I'm fine.

[David Imel]

The cool thing about this new NFC setup though is that you can pair to the device before you even power the device on. So this problem that I have, where they put the QR code on the back, okay, that's not a problem. It won't, theoretically, allegedly won't be a problem anymore. Companies like Eve have been offering Matter upgrades for a long time and now they sell direct. They used to be like a homekit only company, but now they're doing matter, which is good for them because they can just be like, hey, we're available on everything. And then matter could be like, hey, look at our big, you know, these guys are supporting matter people. So that's nice. So hopefully we're going to see a lot more products like that. Also one more thing, the Thread protocol of which Matter, you know, because matter over thread, that's how the whole thing

[Marques Brownlee]

matter happening over thread.

[David Imel]

Yeah, yeah, I've explained this to my dead grandma. She understands it. She understands it. There's a new thread update, it's called Thread Direct and it allows you. Because now I think we did a short about this a while ago. There are now, there are hidden thread radios now in like new iPhones, new Pixels and new. Some new Samsung phones. And now you won't have to have a Thread border router to set up the device because previously in order to set up a Matter enabled device over thread, you had to have. Well, you still have to have this. But not to set up, you had to have a Google Nest WI Fi Pro, which is a Thread border router, or a Apple tv which is the Thread border router or some Alexa devices, whatever they're called. I don't even remember. And now you can just set it up directly from your phone, which is really helpful. And you can deal with all the networking stuff later, but you can at least get it set up on the thread network and then matter will work afterwards.

[Marques Brownlee]

Allegedly, allegedly.

[David Imel]

So yeah, this is all extremely alleged did get announced this week. We'll see how long it takes to actually get implemented. Please God.

[Andrew Manganelli]

It's one of those things where like, I really hope this works, but this working just means things work. It's like, it kind of sucks that when all of this goes perfectly, there'll be no big hype around it because it just mean I won't be banging my head against.

[David Imel]

It's like the IT guy, man. It's like nobody appreciates the IT guy until you got a real big problem.

[Marques Brownlee]

All things are broken.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Can I get a vibe check? What percentage of your guys homes run on smart things like this? Like if they were to just not work, could you function?

[Andrew Manganelli]

Percentage is hard because.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, the percent is hard. But I do have several pretty important. Like my doorbells are all. Smart doorbells.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I don't.

[Marques Brownlee]

I mean, that's fine, but like if, if the Internet goes out, I guess I don't get like if someone rings the doorbell, I just won't.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Luckily there's something called knocking, so.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. But there's a doorbell.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Doorbell.

[Marques Brownlee]

People just don't knock anymore. They just hit the doorbell. Yeah. So that would be bad.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I think the only thing that would screw me is the lights in my living room. Because that's a smart switch.

[David Imel]

Yeah. All of my lights are on my smart home, which is a problem because occasionally it does glitch out and I just can't turn my lights off. Sometimes I sleep in the bright light.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Are they smart bulbs or smart switches?

[Marques Brownlee]

Smart switches.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Good. Smart switches are the best. Except for that issue.

[David Imel]

Yeah, yeah, they're smart plugs. Sorry.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Oh, and like lamps in a smart plug.

[David Imel]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

You can still press the button on the side, right? You might just have to go to. No, all my smart plugs have a button on the side that the eve

[David Imel]

ones that I have are on the side. You can do it. But the Samsung ones on the back,

[Marques Brownlee]

I do have one. I have exactly one smart outlet. And every year around the holidays, the Christmas tree goes in that one and it turns on a certain hour. Turns off at a certain hour.

[Mariah Zenk]

Oh, nice.

[David Imel]

Why don't use that for other things?

[Marques Brownlee]

Like what?

[David Imel]

Like lamps that you don't want to put a smart bulb in lamps.

[Marques Brownlee]

I don't really use lamps. I don't think. I'm sorry, wait, what? I don't think I have any lamps.

[Andrew Manganelli]

This is. What's the meme of like, I don't like the big lights. I just like the little lights. Yeah.

[David Imel]

What?

[Marques Brownlee]

No.

[Andrew Manganelli]

What? To be fair, I think my lamps are plant lamps.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. I don't have like fur plants.

[David Imel]

Okay.

[Marques Brownlee]

We got windows and we got big switch.

[David Imel]

You use your overhead lights, you get natural sunlight. No, I don't get natural. I live in the basement. You don't use your overhead lights?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. Or just windows with. No. Sometimes I just don't turn the lights on because it's bright. Because the sun.

[David Imel]

I would do that if I had windows. Anyway, great.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Okay.

[Mariah Zenk]

That's great.

[David Imel]

It is time for trivia cellar dweller over here.

[Mariah Zenk]

Snap has launched multiple things under the Snapchat umbrella. But which of these is not real? A Snapchat Apple watch app. Self explanatory. Snap Cash, a feature that lets users send and receive money to each other through private messaging.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Mariah Zenk]

Snap code. Customizable way to add friends via usernames. Snap tracks with an X mini Beatbox machine app inside of Snapchat.

[Andrew Manganelli]

That's definitely real.

[David Imel]

All right, that's cool.

[Marques Brownlee]

Which one? And one of them is fake.

[Mariah Zenk]

One of them is fake.

[Marques Brownlee]

One of them is fake. Okay.

[Mariah Zenk]

In honor of Ellis still on vacation,

[Marques Brownlee]

we will learn at the end. Answers will be at the end. Like usual.

[David Imel]

We'll be right back.

[Marques Brownlee]

Support for the show comes from Shopify. Starting a business can be super overwhelming. Every day seems to introduce a new decision that needs an answer. And the to do list just keeps growing every day. And eventually it starts to overrun your life. Finding the right tool that not only helps you out, but simplifies everything can be such a game changer. And for millions of businesses, that tool is Shopify. They're the commerce platform behind millions of businesses worldwide and nearly 10% of all E commerce in the United States. From established brands like Gymshark and Magic Spoon to companies just getting started, their design tools make it simple to create the exact online presence you're envisioning. With hundreds of ready to use templates available and with built in marketing tools, you can launch full email and social campaigns in just a few clicks. So you can connect with your customers wherever they are. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify and start hearing. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com waveform. Go to shopify.com waveform that's shopify.com waveform. Support for the show comes from Framer. If your team wants a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship, Framer is built for that you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting and a CMS built in so the work is production ready. From day one, agents work alongside you to draft pages and polish sections. Then you review and publish what goes live. Framer is the pro site builder for creators, teams and businesses that want a professional site and care enough to get every detail right. Agents solve the gap between AI generated ideas and production ready website work. The agent works in the same place where the real site is designed, managed and reviewed and published. It lands on the Canvas stays editable and can be published when the team is ready. Agents and framer work alongside teams to streamline collaboration on the same Canvas, build custom code components, create and manage CMS content, optimize SEO settings, and ship everything in one place. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a framer specialist or get started building for free [e-mail] wave for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's Framer.com wave for 30% off Framer.com wave rules and restrictions may apply.

[David Imel]

When I got a new car, I

[Andrew Manganelli]

thought my insurance premium would increase and empty my bank account like if fatween won the lottery.

[David Imel]

I've invested most of my winnings in chicken tenders because they're bomb, but bro, I bought a house and it's sick, bro. I'm thinking the floor is going to be all trampoline, bro, with the helipad on the roof. The contractor said it's structurally unsound, but they're just being babies.

[Andrew Manganelli]

But switching to Geico saved me hundreds,

[Ellis Hamburger]

so my bank account is safe.

[David Imel]

It feels good to save some hard earned cash. It feels good to Geico. What's up? Welcome back. We gotta talk about the Google home speaker that launched in the spring, but actually the summer. I don't know if you guys remember, but during the October Google Made by Google event last year they announced a very, very nice looking new Google home speaker. It comes in basically all the same colors as the Fitbit Air, which is very nice. Although half of them are exclusive to the US for some reason. Yeah, the good colors are exclusive to the US like the berry and the, I believe the green one are the exclusive US colors. I don't know why they have weird color names.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's like jade and porcelain and stuff.

[David Imel]

But yeah, jade, porcelain, berry. Yeah. So this is effectively their first Gemini first speaker. That's the big deal. It has a glowing LED strip on the bottom that will kind of illuminate and dance when you're talking to Gemini. And instead of being the classic, you know, Google 4 color combo, it's sort of that blue purple look. It's supposed to have 360 degree audio. You can pair them to each other. You can. If you pair it to a Google TV streamer, you can use it for surround sound audio. They say the audio is a lot better. But the main things honestly are the Gemini reasoning. Now there's a lot more things that you can do with this. Just like there are a lot more things you can do with Gemini Over Google Assistant, for example, you can say turn off all the lights except the bedside lamp. So you can make exceptions. You can say dim the kitchen lights, play some relaxing music and set a 20 minute timer so you can chain together reasoning. That's pretty cool. Turn on the coffee maker. I mean, turn it off. You can say, I mean, and kind of interrupt it in the middle. That's great. What's the weather going to be like for the next Mets game? That's pretty cool. Because it understands where it is, you know, when it is.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. Currently, if you ask Google for that, it will absolutely without question get it wrong.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Yeah. What if I don't have any lamps in my house?

[Marques Brownlee]

That's a little unrealistic, Mariah. Everyone has some lamps.

[David Imel]

Everyone's got a lamp.

[Marques Brownlee]

At least one lamp.

[David Imel]

And it's got to be a smart one as well.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Yeah.

[David Imel]

Uh, it will leave the mic open or on for a couple of seconds after you finish. After it finishes giving you the response so that you can continue a conversation with it.

[Marques Brownlee]

Huge.

[David Imel]

Very useful. By the way, I was testing this on Siri yesterday. I was walking over the Manhattan Bridge and I was trying to like ask Siri some questions, but it will just give you the response and then every time you have to say hey, S. Again, just to continue the conversation. Really annoying. I would really like it if you just keep it going. So that's cool.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, it doesn't. That's a good point. It doesn't have a live mode. Whenever you open like Gemini, you can open a Gemini live chat and it's just back and forth conversation. It's always listening. You can keep talking, you can interrupt it and ask another question. It'll keep going.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

And Siri does not have a like chat mode. No, they all do.

[David Imel]

No.

[Marques Brownlee]

Interesting.

[David Imel]

Yeah. They're going to need to add that, I think.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[David Imel]

There are 10 new voices so you can really, you know, get very specific with the way that you want your Google assistant Gemini to sound. You could make it Australian, making Marquez as an Australian.

[Marques Brownlee]

Of course.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I'm not sure if either of those are true.

[Marques Brownlee]

You can definitely.

[David Imel]

I think The Australian is 100% Australians. True on everybody.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I would Lampless house.

[David Imel]

I would know if I could have, if I could have Marques as an Australian as the assistant, I would 100% pay for that.

[Marques Brownlee]

I'll do some recordings for you.

[David Imel]

Thank you.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[David Imel]

Google is now also selling a Google Home Premium subscription starting at $10 a month. Does not give you that much. I don't really understand why people are going to want to pay for this but it gives you Gemini Live which you already have on your phone. Again. I also don't completely understand the difference between this and the microphone just being left on and then you continuing the conversation. Google says it lets you say hey G, let's chat to have free flowing chats.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. So like when you have it's the same, it's kind of the same as on the phone. When you open Gemini and just ask it one question and then it gives you a response and then maybe listens a little longer for another, that's one thing. But when you open the chat, the full Gemini Live thing, that's what hey let's chat does. Then you can interrupt it while it's talking back to you. You can ask unrelated questions and then ask it about previous questions. It's like this whole live and same thing with the ChatGPT app and others. They all have this just talking version.

[David Imel]

Could you not do that if you were just talking to it normally though?

[Marques Brownlee]

I don't think you can interrupt it. I don't think it's quite the same full featured chat experience.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah, it feels more like order based like telling it what to do or ask specific things. Like all of those have a specific outcome.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, it's like when you're planning to have a multi response conversation with it where you don't really know where you're going. That's when I would do the live thing. When you're just asking for one thing or two things then you just ask it.

[David Imel]

The main reason I use Gemini Live on my phone is because I want to show it something in the real world. Like if I'm having a technical issue and I'm like this is the thing I'm having a problem with or this is what's on my screen. Can you tell me about whatever.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, I've asked it about like researching things that I don't know about. So I'll ask it like basic high level questions and then dig in after that. So it's like yeah, tell me about these paint colors and like is it bad to use these types of paint colors and why is it bad to use and then I just ask follow up questions.

[David Imel]

But I feel like you could do that with the regular one. I probably could, yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

But yeah, that seems like the biggest difference.

[David Imel]

If this is behind a paywall it just like you really have to add value. I would feel like totally. I don't know. Other things you get with the Gemini, the Google home premium subscription, you get camera history Search so you can ask your speaker to describe current or recent activity captured on your Nest cams. Like, Hey G, is my back gate open? Or Hey G, did my dog go on the couch today? I don't know why you would need to know that. That was literally one of Google, by the way. So that's crazy.

[Ellis Hamburger]

It's just narking on your dog.

[Marques Brownlee]

Did the raccoons take the trash out of the trash?

[David Imel]

There are home briefs. You can ask Gemini what happened in your home while you were away.

[Andrew Manganelli]

If that's anything like the home briefs that it gives me in the Nest app right now, it will take forever.

[David Imel]

So Nest Aware, which is the paid subscription, is becoming Google Home Premium.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

So it'll be just.

[David Imel]

It's terrible.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

So bad.

[Marques Brownlee]

Really, really long.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I literally, I mean, I pay for it because I just want the. I've probably ranted about this before, so I'm sorry, but I just want to. The history, the events being labeled. Which half of them are wrong anyways.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

And then like the other also the thing's just not good at catching things. Sometimes I send you guys all the picture of the bear walking past my front door. It walks right past the other camera. No event capture or anything.

[David Imel]

A light breeze event.

[Andrew Manganelli]

But. Yeah. But then every time I go to look at it, I have to go through this four paragraph essay of like this morning a woman and a girl walked out the front door. It's like my wife and my daughter that you've seen 4,000 times that are logged in there. It's just too long and I can't imagine it saying that out loud.

[David Imel]

Yeah. Yeah. Kind of strange.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[David Imel]

I. I have a sort of theory slash conspiracy theory.

[Marques Brownlee]

Sounds like it's a conspiracy.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Wait.

[David Imel]

And it's more of a theory.

[Mariah Zenk]

Let me get my tin foil hat.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Mariah Zenk]

Okay.

[David Imel]

Okay. I don't really think that Google wants you to buy Google Home Premium or, or Google Health Premium or any of their like small $10, like bespoke premium feature things because.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Correct.

[David Imel]

They're like, they just keep adding value to the Google AI Pro Google Drive subscription.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[David Imel]

Because it comes with all this stuff.

[Andrew Manganelli]

They want enough of the $10 ones to add up to make the AI

[David Imel]

thing, which is $20, by the way. So like it's basically like we've, we've talked before about like price ladders and stuff like that.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[David Imel]

But I feel like this stuff would normally be free, but they're only slapping a price tag on it because they want you to pay for the AI Pro subscription. So they say they have more Gemini users so that they can keep getting investment for artificial intelligence.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Sounds totally amazing.

[Marques Brownlee]

Mostly, mostly on board with that. I think they have to have a way for it to be standalone as literally your only product. Like you have a Google account and just that speaker and you want to be able to use it with no other anything, then I guess you just have that one subscription or it be free. Yeah. But I think they are pricing it specifically to be like, well, for just a few more dollars I could just have this whole account with all this stuff in it. Yeah.

[David Imel]

I mean Google AI Pro comes with 5 terabytes of drive storage, almost full minus terabytes terabytes. So even if you do not care about Gemini, which is what it, you know, it's AI Pro and it comes with Gemini Pro and all these Gemini features and it comes with Google Health Premium, it comes with Google Home Premium. Even if you don't want any of that other stuff, regular people want the storage.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah.

[David Imel]

You know what I mean? So in my opinion, like they're only throwing price tags on these things in order to get more AI subscribers.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, yeah, I think I buy.

[Mariah Zenk]

Yeah, yeah, I'm buying for sure. And I think that it's really smart of them to use Google Drive as the main workhorse on this because that's the thing that most people like. Marques, why are you almost filled up with your five terabytes of storage?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, because like my Gmail of like the past 20 years of Gmail and my Google Photos are at like 4.9 terabytes right now.

[Mariah Zenk]

And photos are like the thing that most people care most about.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Mariah Zenk]

And they take up so much space.

[David Imel]

Such a long term game for like all of these companies giving you like

[Mariah Zenk]

buy our Pixel phone, you get it for free. I mean, never mind.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah, remember unlimited high definition storage.

[David Imel]

If you upload the photos from the Pixel one, you still get unlimited storage through it.

[Mariah Zenk]

For how long still?

[Marques Brownlee]

I know damn well I'm not still using a Pixel.

[Mariah Zenk]

Well, people have been buying them on

[David Imel]

ebay though in like if you transfer anything from your Pixel from any phone to the Pixel and then upload from the Pixel, it doesn't count against your

[Marques Brownlee]

storage if you're from Google.

[Mariah Zenk]

Stop listening right now.

[Marques Brownlee]

It takes a lot of work. It takes a lot of work.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I can make an AI swap all that if I just get Google AI Pro.

[David Imel]

Yeah, just tell Gemini Spark to do it, then we're good. Uh, Anyway, they cost $99, which is the same price as the HomePod mini so I think that's kind of the market they're going after. If you'll remember the Google Nest Hub Mini, they used to just throw through your window when you weren't looking.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah.

[David Imel]

So this one, it seems like they think people might actually spend money on. Yep, they do look very nice.

[Andrew Manganelli]

It is. It's 20. The original Google Home was 129, right?

[David Imel]

Yes.

[Marques Brownlee]

Usually around.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I still have one that's kicking, but, yeah, these could be. Oh, man, 99 feels expensive.

[David Imel]

The Nest Hub Mini was like 30 bucks, but it was competing with the Echo Dot, which was also 30 bucks. And the sound quality was terrible.

[Marques Brownlee]

It'd be in like cereal boxes if these were 70.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah, no, it really would. Every time you would buy any contract of an Internet whatever, it's like a hundred dollars of Google and I would just be like.

[Marques Brownlee]

And a Google Home Minis.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah.

[Mariah Zenk]

This time I moved so many times, like three or four times, and every time I set up a new Internet, they would just send me another one.

[Marques Brownlee]

Dude.

[David Imel]

So I had like four Black Friday. Literally anything you bought came with a goog mini.

[Andrew Manganelli]

The receipts printed on.

[David Imel]

Yeah, yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

So anyway, one Lamp Goof, four Google Home Minis, all trying to turn it on.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Huh huh, huh.

[David Imel]

Anyway, so it got announced today. If you're listening to this, it was two days ago on Wednesday, but they said during the Made by Google event last October, it would be out in spring. Technically, it is still spring. If you're listening to this for two more days, it comes out on the 25th, which is technically the summer. So it's up to you whether or not you think that they actually made

[Marques Brownlee]

that margin or not, and how much that means to you and how much

[David Imel]

that means to you. You know, we're just trying to keep them accountable over here.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[David Imel]

So, yeah, we should be getting review units pretty soon, so we'll be able to know, let you guys know what's up.

[Marques Brownlee]

Stay tuned.

[David Imel]

Stay tuned.

[Marques Brownlee]

If you were curious, HomePods told. Crap. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of Google, Speaking of Google, can

[Andrew Manganelli]

I jump in here? Yeah. Google Android 17 is out and is the greatest Android release of all time. I'm calling it now. At A Glance is gone. I removed it this morning and the weight off my shoulders is freeing. I am a free man for those

[David Imel]

things right in the world.

[Andrew Manganelli]

At A Glance is sayonara.

[Marques Brownlee]

So this was the widget that was permanently on every Pixel's homepage for the past decade. How long has that been?

[David Imel]

Pretty long.

[Marques Brownlee]

It feels like a day.

[Andrew Manganelli]

At least four or five turners is what it is.

[Marques Brownlee]

And you could just. Did anything crazy happen? Any fireworks show up or you just like removed it and it just went away and that was it.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I was like looking through all the changes and then I forgot like wait. The first thing I was excited about this betas ago was at a glance and I, I clicked it thinking there's a go. Yeah, yeah. I, I clicked it being like it might still not be there. And I saw that removed from screen W. I raised both my hands in the air and Adam was like, what's going on? I was like, she gone.

[Marques Brownlee]

This is life changing. What are you going to do with all that space? You going to put icons?

[Andrew Manganelli]

No, I'm going to leave it as space because that's what I've always wanted it to be. Maybe now actually I can move my clock to where my clock used to always be at the top and kind of spanning across. And I couldn't do that because of at a glance. So now I have it in this weird bottom corner.

[David Imel]

But my clock can be anywhere I want it to be.

[Andrew Manganelli]

It can just be free space. As someone who likes just a clean background wallpaper, I don't need to have. Yeah, the same the date that's already on the screen somewhere else before.

[David Imel]

Poor use of space.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Poor use of space.

[David Imel]

But there are a lot of other updates. I know they're not as important.

[Andrew Manganelli]

No, no, that's the headliner.

[David Imel]

There's some other nearly as important. We got a new floating bubble window thing. Android has tried to do bubbles many times. This one is kind of tailored specifically at foldables. They're on regular Android phones as well. But you can now make any app a bubble. So it kind of just floats above your other apps. And if you are on a large screen device which is like a tablet or a foldable phone, which because Android is really lean into foldables, you now have a bubble bar. And I do like that, that set of words together.

[Andrew Manganelli]

You want to see it? It's. It can do up to four apps and then once you do it, it'll start knocking off the oldest one. But the coolest part. Oh, sorry, I didn't show Marques C4 and other floating windows. The coolest part is when you drag it around, it just has this cool animation that's like the Windows XP when it would freeze. Like physics based too. Like if you go slow, they all go slow, but if you go fast, they all go really fast.

[Marques Brownlee]

Is this built into. Has this been built into like third party skins on Android? Because I feel like this Isn't new.

[David Imel]

There's single chat bubbles are not new. They were only for messaging apps, right? Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Even so this. This is any app.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah, not any app, but most apps. I have a couple of random ones that won't do it.

[Marques Brownlee]

Interesting, interesting.

[Andrew Manganelli]

The Hyper Ice one doesn't do it. Like, which doesn't.

[David Imel]

Developer has to API.

[Andrew Manganelli]

It's probably. There's some smaller ones, like a weather app I have that doesn't. Oh, no, that one does. But yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Weird.

[David Imel]

Yeah. So yeah, there's a bubble bar if you have a foldable phone where it will just kind of be docked in the lower right corner. I feel like this is kind of gonna look kind of weird on. On Android sometimes, because now it doesn't. Android 16, didn't that introduce the dock on the foldable phone at the bottom?

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah.

[David Imel]

So now if you've got a dock of regular apps and a bubble bar of other apps, but the bottom dock hides. Oh, it hides.

[Mariah Zenk]

Bubble bar.

[David Imel]

Yeah, yeah. Okay.

[Marques Brownlee]

If it hides like the bubble bar hide. No, no, it just stays.

[Andrew Manganelli]

It stays. You put it wherever you want.

[Mariah Zenk]

Bubble bar.

[David Imel]

But I find it useful because, for example, if you're like, I don't know, if you're watching NBA sports game like myself.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, my God.

[David Imel]

And then you're texting with your friends. Right. You can quickly pull up the group chat. Hit the group chat, say, Wemby is freaking not getting those fouls. Those refs are not calling those fouls. Tell them trying to break those ACLs.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Nah, it actually, like when you've got four apps, it almost becomes this, like, quick switch because it takes up 80% of the screen.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

And then you can swap between the apps pretty easily.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Apps.

[David Imel]

Are you swapping between Discord, Discord, Reddit, Slack Reddit?

[Marques Brownlee]

Pretty much.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I'm watching how many times Evan Spiegel looks stupid with those glasses.

[David Imel]

You could say that this is like a sort of a minimal phone launcher in a way. If you just keep the bubble bar open. Bubble bar. Then you just have those four apps that you saw.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Would you. Would you say having four apps open simultaneously is a minimal phone feature?

[David Imel]

As long as they're non social media apps? I don't know, something like that. All right, there's other features too. There's other features too. So we're gonna say, oh, yes, there's a foldable gaming mode. So now if you have a holdable phone, you open it up, it splits the screen in half. So half of it is the game and half of it's a virtual game pad, which Actually has a skin on it and doesn't just look like gamers can't afford this. Now you can. If you're a gamer, you cannot afford. I'm glad to tell you that if you're a gamer, you can now afford this. If you can afford a folding card.

[Marques Brownlee]

If you have a $2,000 folding which.

[David Imel]

Which maybe you can't afford this. So that's kind of cool. I still think that the adaptable gamepads and also just Bluetooth ones are way better because I hate slamming my fingies against the screen. I really hate doing that. I've tried multiple times. It's not fun. It's uncomfortable.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah, but it makes for a good marketing ploy.

[David Imel]

It does.

[Andrew Manganelli]

There's something about a folding screen with a fake gamepad that makes you go like that. 3DS is sick. I mean, that pixel fold.

[David Imel]

Yeah, true. Okay, there is now you can grant apps temporary location access, which is good because before it was just like permanent location access or no location access. And you can only share specific contacts instead of your entire address book. So if you really don't want apps to know all the stuff about you all the time, you have a little bit more control. There's now a new mark as lost feature in FindHub, which is sort of their find my kind of portal thing for your phone, where you can lock the phone so you can only unlock it with biometrics. And they said the reason was because if the thief knows your passcode, which is the entire point of a passcode. So I'm not really sure why the thief would know your passcode, but maybe they did. You can make it so they can only unlock it if they're using a biometric login. So I guess that's kind of.

[Andrew Manganelli]

What if he has your finger?

[David Imel]

Yeah. Then you're kind of screwed. Maybe they need blood flow.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Did they even test this?

[David Imel]

Yeah, it was kind of like when. When they. They came out with the face unlock and people were just unlocking their phones while they were sleeping anyway.

[Andrew Manganelli]

You can also hide app names on home screen. Yes, I have a request. Yes, I really want. I don't know. None of you guys use folders on your docs, right? I do now. Okay. No, do you know how, like, you can name folder.

[David Imel]

Oh, wait, we've done this before and we've done it.

[Andrew Manganelli]

So in the doc it doesn't show happening names anyways. Yeah, but inside a folder, you name folders and it shows up on the bottom, right?

[Mariah Zenk]

Like, I mean, mine shows up on top, but yeah, same Thing.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Okay. I don't want it to say anything. Yeah but if you do nothing it's

[David Imel]

still it poor use of space.

[Andrew Manganelli]

It uses something so you have to put a space in. But every time I open the folder I can accidentally click that and then it brings the keyboard up which I ain't trying to do. Just let me not name it. So give me hidden folder names.

[David Imel]

I'll text Michelle for you, please.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Thank you. That would be. I would. That would be life changing.

[David Imel]

I'll text Michelle.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I already lost my place because I was bad about that.

[David Imel]

No, you're good. It was.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Oh yeah. And then there's. Okay. There's a new resize bar and split screen that gives you arrows so you can kind of tick it up in. You know like if you want to go like 70, 30, it'll. It'll help it do that steps instead.

[Marques Brownlee]

Nice.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I thought that was really cool.

[David Imel]

It's useful.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I love this one. Separate WI FI and mobile data tabs in quick settings. Oh wow. So good.

[David Imel]

I feel like they used to have before.

[Mariah Zenk]

I know.

[Andrew Manganelli]

All these things I'm excited about just were what it used to be.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

But it was so annoying to. If you wanted to disable WI Fi for only mobile they just have to

[David Imel]

click into one of the worst changes they ever made.

[Andrew Manganelli]

The first two things I did when I downloaded it this morning was at a glance and get mobile data as a separate quick setting.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, it's nice.

[Andrew Manganelli]

It feels so good. Yeah. There's a new screen recorder. There's just a lot of UI updates with this that the quick setting now it kind of like brings up a bubble that is the screen screen recorder. Rather than like leaving you in quick settings as you leave with a couple different options, it now defaults back to entire screen instead of singular app which I think most people want to do. There's new toggles for recording audio from device and microphone. Separate toggles which is really nice. You can change settings during the recording and like if you want to enable taps halfway through your recording you can go in and enable show taps.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's nice.

[Andrew Manganelli]

And when you're done recording there's just a new screen that lets you click edit which will bring you into photos that it is already. Or you can just delete the video straight up there if you decide you don't like it anymore. Which is nice.

[David Imel]

Nice.

[Andrew Manganelli]

We just talked about Apple parental changes last week. There's some new ones for Android as well. A lot of them are very similar.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

You can set screen amount time per day. You can create downtime schedules so it can lock a children's device at night. There are app store filters based on content ratings. If you know, like mature everyone. All those. It kind of has a list of those. You can limit time on specific apps or block apps entirely. And then through Family link you can do things that we just saw at the dub like school time, app approvals and approved contacts. All great.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I think that's kind of my list of things that got me excited. I thought it was really crazy that Michelle, someone we've talked about as like a Google leaker or just reporter for so long, just straight up has a mega thread on Android right now and saying like these are the changes we made. It's like, oh, okay, that's pretty awesome. You're at Google now. But he has a mega thread on the our Android Reddit that says everything. And I also watched a really good video from in depth tech reviews of all the little visual changes. I mean things he was catching were like this pop up now has an X to close out of it. It didn't before and he's showing 16 and 17 next to each other or like monochrome theme mode. Now all the darkers are like more dark things I would never guess.

[David Imel]

But that's cool.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Just shout out to them. I enjoyed recapping all of that this morning because I was too busy stomping

[Marques Brownlee]

on at a glance's grave like parade around the house being like it's going, it's going, it's going.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Mom, look, it's gone.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Lane's like, I don't know what you're.

[Marques Brownlee]

All right, I got one more thing I want to share. It's actually a video I want to play for you guys, but I'm just going to play the audio and I want to get your reaction to it. Okay, this is. This sound you're about to hear is from the all new 2027 Porsche Taycan which has added E Shift. They are the newest electric car company to add fake gear shifts when you paddle shift. So it's like an eight speed simulated gears. The Taycan already made sounds but now this is what your Taycan will sound like in 20.

[Andrew Manganelli]

20. Yeah, as a non car person, that does nothing to. I don't, I don't get it.

[David Imel]

I'm not against it.

[Marques Brownlee]

When you drive a quiet car. This is such a specific question but like why. Why are we. Maybe this is just a sign of the times. Why are we emulating gas car things? It seems insulting to emulate a gas car with such an obviously fake sound when it's obviously electric. Like, it doesn't have the same emotion as a gas car. It doesn't have the vibrations of a gas car. Like, is this.

[David Imel]

Does it not give you vibrations? No, not really.

[Marques Brownlee]

Not really.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I think it could be, like, why not own it? You can. And the taking kind of did this before. I still never know if I'm pronouncing that right, by the way. So someone light me up. Thanks for the engagement. The like, didn't they have different sounds? Just make fun sounds. You can do whatever you want. And your choices. Old gas car.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, they have sound. Before it was very, like, spaceship Y Famously. Actually, the Taycan is one of the loudest electric cars on the outside. I can hear Taycans driving around my neighborhood because they just have this, like, sound that they play on the outside. And it's fine, but they're never trying to sound like a gas car specifically. You might remember we had the Ioniq 5N here that did this, where we had that. The electric Dodge Charger here. It didn't do the gear shifts, but it had a gas car emulating speaker sound. And my theory is that this is very much going to be a sign of the times, specifically when electric cars are not really popular yet. But car companies are trying to make them as familiar as possible to people who like gas cars by emulating gas cars. And this is one of the things that they're doing is like, oh, yeah, you can fake gear shift and it kind of sounds like your gas car, even though that's obviously not a gas car.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

The people that wanted to. I have nothing against the sound of gas cars. I. I understand. But that usually is like, there's something involved in all of that. That's like a piece of machinery making that to emulate it. The people who like that piece of machinery don't want just the sound. They want the whole orchestra playing of everything. And, like, I just. I also think we're far enough at EVs that we don't need to. To bring people over by being like, look, it sounds like your car. There's so many other. I don't think.

[Marques Brownlee]

I think they feel like they have to just because they're not flying off. They're not flying off the shelves. Like, they're trying to, like, find new ways to bring. To make them. Because there's lots of other. I almost made an autofocus video about this. But there's lots of other features that EV manufacturers will add that are specifically to mimic people who are this is their first electric car. So when you take your foot off the accelerator, that, I think makes sense. And it coasts instead of regening, that's to mimic a gas car. When you're sitting at a stoplight and you take your foot off the brake and your car starts to creep forward. I hate that. That is a gas car thing. It doesn't have to happen in an electric car, but they will add torque and actually start to roll you forward to mimic a gas.

[David Imel]

Why would they do that?

[Marques Brownlee]

Because that's what people are familiar with.

[David Imel]

They're taking away the good things that electric cars have to cars.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I will say the coasting off the brake. Like. Like when you go from a gas car to your first time in an EV car, you feel like a new driver because you're just like. Like, yeah, jerking forward, getting used to it.

[Marques Brownlee]

I think, like, that was the thing that I thought Tesla did really well is they just threw all that stuff out. Like, back in the day, they were like, yeah, there's regen. Get used to it. It's more efficient, and it adds range. It's better one pedal driving instead of two pedals. You almost never use your friction brakes.

[David Imel]

Yeah, it's awesome.

[Marques Brownlee]

And it doesn't. It have creep mode, but, like, that's off by default. And there's no power button in the car. You just get in and it's on. Like, all these cars now have, like, an on button, even though it's just like a. It's an iPad. Like, you just get in and it's on.

[Mariah Zenk]

So we go in the complete other direction. If they're gonna do these sounds, I want a clutch. I want a manual pedal. Go all in.

[Marques Brownlee]

This is pretty close to all in. This is paddle shifting. There's no third pedal, but, like, it's not the same. I mean, you can redline it and lose clutch and lose torque.

[David Imel]

Does anyone have a fake clutch yet?

[Marques Brownlee]

I don't think so.

[David Imel]

You could do E clutch.

[Marques Brownlee]

I don't know.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Don't give them ideas.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Why would you do that?

[Marques Brownlee]

You can go all in. At that point, you're just, why even.

[David Imel]

I mean, all of these are.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Why even every single one.

[Marques Brownlee]

Why are you buying an electric car in the first place if you want a clutch?

[David Imel]

That's true.

[Mariah Zenk]

If you want a clutch. We already have Jalen Brunson, so

[Marques Brownlee]

OG OG.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I do feel like all the EVs are basically like. Like, right now, the selling point is this will totally drive itself. Or like, this makes fake gas noises. It's just like, yeah, what if they just drive well and last like a pretty long time.

[David Imel]

I think we should just need to educate people on the fact that all of these EV features are good for your life and they're enjoyable to use.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, I think they're. My, my. The way I've described it has always been that there are certain types of cars that are best to go electric. Because when you make a car electric, what happens? It gets bigger, it gets heavier, more expensive, but also it gets smoother and torquier and more powerful and quieter than ever. Okay, so then any car that is already big and heavy and you want to be smooth and quiet is perfect. Yeah. Escalade SUVs, big sedans, like all those, when they went electric, it was the best version of that car that had ever been made.

[David Imel]

Although isn't the whole thing with the Escalade that. That it's super freaking loud?

[Marques Brownlee]

No, that's just the Escalade V specifically, but the Escalades you see in Manhattan that are all like uber blacks.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's like the best Escalade ever now is the.

[Andrew Manganelli]

That's just like, this is a Yukon, but I can charge way more money for putting people in the back of it.

[Marques Brownlee]

So sports cars are the worst possible car to go electric, even though I

[David Imel]

feel like that's what people would want.

[Marques Brownlee]

Well, it's a, it's a, it's a really good method of propulsion. And I'm getting into the weeds already, but like it's. You get all your torque right away. It's like very quick in a straight line. And a lot of the world records for acceleration are by electric cars. But people want a lightweight sports car. They want an engaging sports car. They want a small sports car. And none of these things are really the upside of electric cars.

[David Imel]

Yeah. So, yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, they're trying stuff like fake gear shifts.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Just.

[David Imel]

As someone who doesn't really care about cars that much, but obviously like the look of a Porsche is still very, very nice looking. I would love a Porsche electric car.

[Marques Brownlee]

This will convince non0 number of people to get a Taycan. And we'll see. We'll see how it goes.

[David Imel]

We'll see how that goes.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[David Imel]

Yeah, probably one.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah.

[David Imel]

Well, it looks better than the Ferrari, so that's all we gotta say. By the way, I had a question that I did. I meant to ask on our Ferrari episode when we talked about the. What is it called?

[Marques Brownlee]

Luche.

[David Imel]

Do you know why they called it the Luce?

[Marques Brownlee]

Nobody explains Italian for let me find this.

[Andrew Manganelli]

They said light. No, I'm attacking?

[Marques Brownlee]

I believe so. Light. Yes.

[Mariah Zenk]

Correct.

[Andrew Manganelli]

How about that?

[David Imel]

What about the light?

[Andrew Manganelli]

I mean. Sorry, light.

[David Imel]

Wait, isn't it heavier though, because it's navy?

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh, that's actually kind of a pun. I don't know if you're joking or not, but I think they mean like lights.

[David Imel]

They had this very light of God.

[Andrew Manganelli]

There's like a very marketing of like, they're doing it because this is like the light actually didn't say the light at the end of the tunnel of where we're going to. But light at the end of the tunnel is usually what you see before you die, which was a really funny thing after launching the worst looking Ferrari ever.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, I think it was more of just a. Like, lights are electric. Like this is the. The electrical.

[David Imel]

Okay.

[Marques Brownlee]

Thing.

[David Imel]

I can see like in Italian, it meaning light. I can see that just being a cool name. But I just wanted to know because it sounded more like a luchador, you know, And I was like, if you've

[Marques Brownlee]

looked back at other Ferrari names, I mean, they're an Italian company and they have extremely Italian names for all their models.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Okay.

[Marques Brownlee]

They recently came out with a 12 cylinder car and so they named it the Dodeci Cylindry. That's the name of the car.

[David Imel]

It's the 12 cylinder.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah. So the Urus, that's Lamborghini. I mean, that's also Italian, but. Yeah, yeah. The Amalfi, they just said the light

[Andrew Manganelli]

towards future and innovation, not end of the time.

[David Imel]

True.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah.

[David Imel]

What does Urus mean?

[Marques Brownlee]

Udus? I have no idea.

[David Imel]

What about the Toyota Yaris?

[Marques Brownlee]

Speaking of things that start with a T. T Trivia.

[David Imel]

What else started with the T?

[Ellis Hamburger]

Tesla.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Oh, I thought that was an actual timeout.

[David Imel]

A timeout?

[Andrew Manganelli]

I thought she needed to do Toyota.

[David Imel]

Toyota Temerario.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I take time out.

[David Imel]

Tim Cook.

[Ellis Hamburger]

What's up, gamers?

[David Imel]

What's up?

[Andrew Manganelli]

Mariah's here. By the way,

[David Imel]

I'm enjoying your guys's symmetrical shirt.

[Andrew Manganelli]

The green. I wish I got the green memo.

[David Imel]

Oh, yeah, yeah, that's cool.

[Ellis Hamburger]

The question that I definitely totally wrote for you today is codenames used to be a whole thing with Android, but it's kind of fell by the wayside still. The codename of Android 17 was what? Thank you.

[Marques Brownlee]

I don't.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I don't know. I don't think.

[Marques Brownlee]

I know.

[Ellis Hamburger]

I don't either. This is great.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Bubble bar. Find out together.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Oh, yeah. Can you say bubble bar for me real quick?

[David Imel]

Bubble bar.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Thank you.

[Marques Brownlee]

That's nice. All right, well, we'll learn something new then. Answers will be at the end. We'll be right back.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Whoa.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay, this one says you get a free phone if you switch. Hey, this one also says you get a free phone if you switch.

[David Imel]

Yeah, they all do one.

[Mariah Zenk]

Huh?

[Marques Brownlee]

The T Mobile one says their customers had the lowest wireless bills versus the other big guys over the past five years and their latest experience. Plans have Netflix included plus a year of Dash Pass by DoorDash Dash.

[Mariah Zenk]

Hang on, let me see that.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oh yeah, we're switching. That's what I'm talking about.

[David Imel]

Do we clap now or AT T Mobile get savings that keep stacking up. That's value you can feel every day. And right now bring your phone to T Mobile and we'll give you $400 when you switch.

[Marques Brownlee]

Savings based on Harris X billing snapshots from Q3 2021 and Q4 2025 compared to average AT&T and Verizon bills. Comparison includes disc discounts, credits and optional charges. $400 with new account on qualifying line unlock device credit ported 90 plus days with device and carrier and timely redemption required. Virtual MasterCard typically takes 14 weeks. No cash access and expires in six months. Card issued by Sunrise Banks and a member FDIC.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Visit t mobile.com this Father's Day. Do more with dad and spend less

[Marques Brownlee]

with low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot.

[David Imel]

Get him fired up with a new

[Marques Brownlee]

grill and accessories like the next Grill 5 burner for just $299 so you

[Andrew Manganelli]

can spend more time together while he

[Marques Brownlee]

becomes the grill master he was always meant to be.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Or build memories with savings on top brand power tools so you can tackle projects side by side, gift more and do more together this Father's Day with

[David Imel]

help from the Home Depot. Exclusions apply.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Seehomedepot.com Pricematch for details. So good, so good, so good.

[Marques Brownlee]

New markdowns up to 70% off are

[Andrew Manganelli]

at Nordstrom Rack stores now.

[Marques Brownlee]

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[Andrew Manganelli]

That's why you rack. All right, welcome back. We are going to quickly talk about the UK social media ban because we got tagged a lot of on a lot of places to ask about this but we live in the US so I don't have too much to say about it. So I quickly wrote down what I saw. We'll get a couple thoughts but okay. Children under the age of 16 will be banned from using social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X. I believe this is supposed to be happening by next spring. Messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal are not part of that. There will be doing possibly curfews for children under 18 that would require breaks at nighttime to stop infinite scrolling. Ways to prevent children. They will. There will hopefully also, or in their eyes, hopefully be ways to prevent children under 16 from talking to people on online games. And the UK said in a statement that the policy will go further than any other country in restricting children's online time online. One of the reasons they said this was because they claim big tech has had multiple opportunities to try and protect children, but they have failed. So that's why they're taking this on.

[David Imel]

I mean.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah, they're not wrong on that.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

It's just generally when we see stuff like this, the problem is, is a lot of government officials just don't really understand the Internet.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

So we have two separate forms of people that understand completely different things. We have capitalists who want to make as much money as possible. I don't care how old you are, I don't care what you do, as long as you spend time on app. I make money that's never going to be for us.

[Mariah Zenk]

Andrew Manganelli, 2026.

[Andrew Manganelli]

And then you have government officials who are attempting to protect but generally probably pretty ignorant about all of this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[David Imel]

I have so many thoughts about this. This is always a very nuanced topic. Anytime you bring kids into the equation, it's always such a nuanced topic because it's like, like obviously we want to protect the kids. Obviously there's a lot of cyberbullying. Obviously there's a lot of bad stuff that kids can get into online and that predators can, you know, access children easily and whatever. That's all bad. But like. But yeah, and I know. And it's really hard to have this conversation without people screaming at you because it's very, very nuanced.

[Andrew Manganelli]

But.

[David Imel]

And we were having this conversation a little bit off the show. But why is YouTube included here?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, I may be biased. I started on YouTube when I was 15, but YouTube was a very different place back then.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yes.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

And social media was a very different place back then. And we mentioned like the infinite scrolling thing, which is, I think mostly what this gets at, which is like the addictiveness of a lot of these platforms and how much time it makes people spend online.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

So that makes a lot of sense.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Sense.

[Marques Brownlee]

My angle though on YouTube is like, okay, YouTube. Does that mean you just straight up can't access YouTube if you're under the age of 16 and they have to add some sort of a paywall? Or does that just mean you can't have an account in which case you're logged out and will get recommended? Way more insane.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Exactly what Hank Green said. And I thought it was a really,

[David Imel]

it's a good point.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Obvious take is like, yeah, you won't be able to make an account but you can probably still log onto just YouTube with no account, watch things. And now the recommendations are all over the place. You actually will lose restrictions that people could possibly put on.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Yeah, yeah, well, sorry, regionally could they make that an option where you have

[Marques Brownlee]

to have an account, you would have to log in.

[David Imel]

Yeah, they could do that. They could force that.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Possibly.

[David Imel]

It's all a big question. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you know the movie backrooms

[Andrew Manganelli]

that came out recently, I have not seen it. I only know about it because of you guys.

[David Imel]

I haven't seen it. But the director is 20 years old and he made his first short when he was 17 and all of that came from like a creepypasta that he like read online and was part of a community of people that were contributing to these horror stories. And that to me is a representation of the value that the Internet and social media has brought to youth these days where they have so much access to creativity and learning at a very young age. Right. Like when we were kids, yeah, Google was like so new and the idea of going on a forum and like finding answers to things was brin. It was. And so the speed at which we could learn at was very walled off by our access, our ability to access information and the, the two sided coin, the like two sided, two face double edged sword. The double edged sword of all of this is like yes, the benefit of infinite information is infinite information and you can, you can get young, young, young people creating like amazing things because their brains are sponges and they soak up information way faster than us 30 year olds do. On the other side of that coin, unlimited information and unlimited all types of information. It's not learning, it's not all learning information. It's not all educational. A lot of it's really bad. A lot of it's porn. A lot of it is just like things that kids with brains that are not good at tuning like filtering out what's good content versus bad content and what their dopamine receptors respond to. That's what makes all of these incredibly complex topics.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, I always like to advocate for like some sort of built into education, like Internet literacy. I kind of remember a little of that when I was growing up, like learning how to Google things. I don't remember what age it was or what class it was, but like explaining if you put no colon then you could like oh right, exclude words from like your Google search where if you put them in quotes then it will have to appear in that order and stuff like that. Like how to search Google and then filter through your results and find primary sources versus secondary sources. All of that. When I'm writing a paper I had to learn all of that. And I wonder because I'm not in school and I don't have a kid, like how's that going? Are people, is it just out of control? Like there's AI, there's all sorts of changes in the way that you find information on the Internet and it's just like how do we teach kids how to navigate the Internet? Maybe it's too hard. We just banned social media until they turn 16. Maybe that's the solution. Feels kind of heavy handed to me. But again, I don't have a kid so I don't know.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I feel like all of us here can probably talk about our own success stories as being children of the Internet and what we did back then. But like you said, it is so much different like in my high school years with how like overly like conscious I was of thinking. Everyone was always thinking like I can't imagine that day and age now with social media where we're all posting stuff and we're all commenting on people's things. I could text like two people after 8pm because that's when I didn't have to pay for, for text messages. Now anyone can make comments and group chats and everything. So it's a, it's an age that I don't understand quite as well. I don't know if this is exactly how to do it. Yeah, I'm glad people are trying to find it but it really feels like most of this is on if you're on the companies. But I do also like these things like we just saw from Apple and Google of like enhanced parental control so the parents can make individual choices for their kids.

[Marques Brownlee]

A little more nuanced.

[Mariah Zenk]

Yeah, I was just going to say I don't think that everyone is dreaming for legislation for this. But the companies didn't rise to the occasion.

[Andrew Manganelli]

No. So this is the only solution.

[Marques Brownlee]

It reminds me of when the UK was like USB, type C, iPhone, do it now.

[David Imel]

And we're like, remember the EU.

[Marques Brownlee]

Sorry, the EU.

[Mariah Zenk]

Thank you.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Because the UK is. Yes.

[Marques Brownlee]

So the EU. And this was like, okay, this one piece of legislation makes sense here and it's going to advance it and there's no downsides here. So obviously it feels heavy handed but it's actually gonna work and we're, we all benefit from it. But yeah, there's so many different factors in the way people engage with the Internet and all the different parts of the Internet that I, you know, it's possible that this feels like the most complete or safe solution to the uk but it is just the uk, I

[David Imel]

think they need to just enforce like just like the EU forced USB C, they forced removable batteries and a lot of devices. They need to force insanely like powerful parental controls and they need to educate people on that because I agree, I, a 13 year old should absolutely not be on X.com 100%.

[Ellis Hamburger]

I don't think a 30 year old

[David Imel]

should not be on X.com. there's so much stuff on there you should not be looking at. And I don't know, I just, it kind of feels to me like stopping access at an individual level is a much smarter way to control this kind of stuff. Because also a lot of the time when governments institute large sweeping bans on things, they're, they always use kids as like a fake agenda and slip a bunch of like privacy nightmare stuff underneath it. I don't know if that's the case with this one, but it happens a lot.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah, I don't know UK governance very well, but I would not trust the US with regulating any of this.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, I will also say on YouTube there's, I just, maybe I'm YouTube pills, but there's so much good stuff. I know I remember in high school like feeling like I'm falling behind on a class and then looking up on YouTube and finding Sal and watching him teach me the same stuff that the teacher couldn't and actually learning and catching back up in class. That was YouTube.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Mine was falling behind in class. I'm not gonna pass it anyways. I might as well watch some stuff on YouTube. That's the other half of YouTube.

[Marques Brownlee]

There's gotta be some sort of self control. You gotta have it all. You gotta have it all.

[David Imel]

And this is why I use the backrooms. Exactly. Because like that kid could not have made that short that got 8 million views or no 80 million views and then, you know, made a movie with a major studio that made Just as much money as a Star wars movie, you know, that just couldn't have happened. Also, he did a bunch of like 3D modeling and effects. I guarantee you he learned all of those skills on YouTube.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yep. Tutorials. That's how I started all the tutorial videos you watch.

[David Imel]

And he was 17 when he put the. When he put his first short out. So he wouldn't have been able to learn those skills when he was 16. You know what I mean? So I don't know. It's tough.

[Andrew Manganelli]

It's just tough because for every success story, there's also the story of someone getting abducted or someone being groomed or someone thinking about self harm from all these things. So there's. There are all of those things out for sure. We're not trying to diminish that.

[Ellis Hamburger]

No.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I do think YouTube is the one example of like, maybe it's less of that because it's less of a personal. Unless you are physically uploading a lot of videos, it's much less so than Facebook, Instagram, where you're like, this is all of my life. But this is also why every time we talk about social media, I weirdly don't think of YouTube as the same social media as Instagram. X. They feel like personal pages.

[David Imel]

Yeah, yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Maybe ban uploading to YouTube before a certain age.

[David Imel]

That is probably good. I would agree with that. Because every time I see like a, like a video from a kid that gets uploaded and everyone like comments like, yay, this is awesome.

[Marques Brownlee]

Good.

[David Imel]

I really like this. I don't want to be.

[Marques Brownlee]

It's supposed to auto detect when there's a kid and it doesn't allow comments or something. There's this. All these things are supposed to happen when it auto detects that it's a child account, but that it doesn't always work either.

[David Imel]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of bans, last week we talked about how Anthropic released the model that they said was too dangerous to release.

[Marques Brownlee]

Classic.

[David Imel]

So they did that for a hot two days, maybe three, and then sort of out of nowhere it got banned by the US government. So this is very funny in a way because Dario has constantly just been like, regulate us, regulate us, regulate us. And then they regulated them and then they're like, so there's that. However, as usual, the way that the US government went about banning this was extremely short notice and something that there was just no way that they could possibly fix because the, the administration's problem with it was that they didn't want foreign nationals, including Anthropic employees to be able to access the model in the

[Andrew Manganelli]

U.S. or outside the U.S. yeah, actually, if you're a foreign, we don't want you to use it, which is just not. I wish I was kidding.

[David Imel]

Just classic.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Even enforce that you can't.

[David Imel]

And this is why they turned the model off.

[Andrew Manganelli]

They had to turn the model completely off because they thought that was the only way they could actually do that.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

And it seems like the reasoning behind it is because of some concerns of essentially jailbreaking it, which would bypass a bunch of the different restrictions and.

[David Imel]

Right.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Things they had on it because it kept finding potential cyber security risks and all that. So they're trying to avoid all of that.

[David Imel]

There were a lot of funny memes around Mythos because they specifically like or. Sorry, not Mythos. Fable. Fable five is a distill. It's a cut down version of Mythos with more guardrails.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Wait, can I say something really fast? That's not really. Everyone kept talking about Fable 5 and I thought a new version of Fable. The game came out because it was all. All of the things I saw of it were like 3D renders and stuff. I remember that game. And then I realized how wrong I was.

[David Imel]

Okay, well, one of the major restrictions on Fable 5 over mythos was that you can't talk about biology. Obviously they were doing this because they didn't want people to make weapons like bioweapons and stuff. But there were a lot of funny memes where someone was like, my dog is not feeling well. What should I do? And it's just like, you've been reported to the head of the FBI. Anyway, funny, there's a. You know, there are AI reporters that are way better at handling these detailed things. Hayden Field over at the Verge did a really amazing article about this called Inside the Fight over Claude mythos 5. You should definitely go read that. Very complex. It seems that they have been going to Washington trying to work with the US Government and try to figure out a way to find a path forward. They went last week. They did not find a path forward. So, yeah, in the next few days, I guess we'll. We'll see if they can.

[Mariah Zenk]

This was still banned at the time of recording.

[David Imel]

Yeah. Apparently it was tipped off to the US Government by some Amazon researchers, which

[Mariah Zenk]

is, I think at aws.

[David Imel]

At aws. Which is both ironic and interesting at the same time because Amazon is a major investor in. In anthropology.

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay.

[David Imel]

But also, you know, tin foil hat time. Amazon could have some high incentive to make it. So Mythos could Only be accessed through aws. And they could go to the government and say anyway, I don't want to. I don't want to throw. I don't want to throw a conspiracy theories out there.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I guess if they're scared of cybersecurity attacks, AWS would be a major target. And they don't want.

[David Imel]

Yeah, probably that too.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Also Andrew, you're not crazy. There was actually a Fable Gameplay D demo that came out last week, so.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Wait, was there really?

[Ellis Hamburger]

Yeah, cuz someone else was telling me about it. So you're not.

[David Imel]

Is it Fable 5?

[Marques Brownlee]

If it was also 5, that would be, I think really funny.

[Ellis Hamburger]

It might have been whatever the newest one is. I don't know.

[Andrew Manganelli]

By the way, I haven't paid attention.

[David Imel]

Nobody really knows why anthropic called this Fable 5 because it's the first Fable model. But they called it 5.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I've given up on guessing AI model head start on since Nano Banana. I don't care about it.

[David Imel]

AI Pro powered by personal intelligence. Yeah. So anyway, as of time recording that is still banned. We'll see if that changes in the coming days. Yeah, so that's. That's about it for the news this week. So now we're gonna do the thing that we always do at the end,

[Marques Brownlee]

which is give me trivia points.

[David Imel]

We don't always do that, unfortunately.

[Mariah Zenk]

Quick update on the score. Marquez with 28, Andrew with 26 and David with 31. Question one. Snap has launched multiple things under the Snapchat umbrella. But which of these is not real? A, Snapchat Apple Watch app, B, Snap Cash, C Snap code or D Snap tracks with an X. Of course. Because it's tech.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Is it? Did we all assume he meant with an X when he said it out loud? I thought of it 100%. What? What does it do again?

[David Imel]

Beat Maker.

[Mariah Zenk]

It is a mini beat machine app inside of Snapchat.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Allegedly. I thought it tracked you that.

[David Imel]

Oh, it does.

[Andrew Manganelli]

That's just the thing in Snapchat. It does find my. No. What is it called?

[David Imel]

Snap Maps.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Is it Snap Maps?

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Mariah Zenk]

Well, flip them and read. What do you got?

[Marques Brownlee]

We all said the same Apple Watch. Yeah.

[Mariah Zenk]

Incorrect. There is a Snapchat Apple Watch app.

[Andrew Manganelli]

What does it do?

[Mariah Zenk]

No idea. Yeah.

[David Imel]

Was it Tracks?

[Mariah Zenk]

It was Snap Tracks.

[David Imel]

Damn it.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Was it really?

[Marques Brownlee]

I wrote tracks and crossed it out, man.

[David Imel]

Interesting.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Wow.

[David Imel]

Does it just. Did the Apple Watch app just allow you to like remotely shutter? Is that what it was for?

[Marques Brownlee]

That seems like the only thing it could possibly do.

[Mariah Zenk]

According to Google AI overview, it is an official WatchOS application designed to supplement messaging on the go.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I bought Claire a pair of Crocs for Mother's Day and they're too small, so I wanted to return them, but she didn't tell me they were too small till like a way too late.

[Ellis Hamburger]

She's too nervous.

[Andrew Manganelli]

So I went on AI overview and went, what's the CROC return policy? And I said 45 days. So I'm trying to return them and nothing's coming up to return them. So I get on the chat and I'm constantly just telling this guy there's just no way. He's like, that's because our windows 30 days. It's past 30 days. And then I just closed the chat because I was so embarrassed. Went to the overview where it said 45 days. Again, click the link and the link just brings you to a page that says 30 days on what it's called.

[David Imel]

Just made it up.

[Andrew Manganelli]

It's so funny that it constantly sources its incorrect information.

[David Imel]

Yeah, source. I made it up.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Sources.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Source. It's just a page that says, trust me, bro.

[David Imel]

Trust me, bro. That's Google's new tagline.

[Ellis Hamburger]

We need Internet literacy.

[Marques Brownlee]

I would like to teach an Internet literacy class, please. What if we made like a high school level? Like here's how navigate the Internet.

[David Imel]

We should make one for the studio channel.

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, I feel like you could like

[Andrew Manganelli]

volunteer at a library and do that.

[Mariah Zenk]

But if we make one for YouTube, people in the UK under 16 wouldn't

[Marques Brownlee]

be able to watch it in the spring. I feel like you have to teach it physical class, like in person. Be like, Everybody go to google.com, right? Ask it a question. All right. See how you got an AI overview. All right, here's what we're going to do. Scroll down anyway. Okay.

[David Imel]

Go to Wikipedia.

[Ellis Hamburger]

So the second question is code names used to be used. Used. Let's see, for Android codenames used to be used. A whole. How did you word this? Sorry, I'm having a stroke. It's too warm in here. Codenames are a thing with Android, but they're not really as popular, I guess anymore. And this is me abbreviating. Okay, what is the code name? What is the codename of Android 17.

[David Imel]

Shame.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Please, God, somebody tell me.

[Mariah Zenk]

Meat Hook, I want you to come in and summarize every question.

[David Imel]

I wish.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I don't even know.

[Marques Brownlee]

I don't know 16 either.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Is it a dessert still?

[Marques Brownlee]

Yeah, it probably is. Some think of. Okay, if it's logical, what letter would it be?

[Andrew Manganelli]

So it would be Q, right?

[David Imel]

No, we already. We passed Q a long time ago.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Then they didn't go alphabetically.

[David Imel]

No, they did.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Oh, yeah, because it was quiche and

[David Imel]

I don't even know what we're on.

[Ellis Hamburger]

I don't even know where we are.

[Andrew Manganelli]

David, that spelling is insane.

[Ellis Hamburger]

All right, what do you got? David, can you read that for me?

[Andrew Manganelli]

No, spell. No, read what? You wrote letters. Spell it. Why are you trying to publicly embarrass me right now?

[David Imel]

T, I, E, R, R, E, I, M. Wait, say E. M, I, S, S, E, U.

[Marques Brownlee]

That cannot be how.

[Ellis Hamburger]

It's.

[Andrew Manganelli]

It's not.

[Ellis Hamburger]

You know, I don't even.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I don't even know if I can spell it right, but I know.

[David Imel]

Look, it's a French word.

[Marques Brownlee]

It could be spelled anyway.

[Ellis Hamburger]

I like the spirit, but that's not it.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Is that French, Andrew?

[David Imel]

Yeah. Tiramisu is 100 French.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Andrew.

[David Imel]

Did you put that?

[Andrew Manganelli]

I put jello. I would.

[David Imel]

I was thinking, what about jelly bean? Do you remember Jelly bean?

[Andrew Manganelli]

Is jello a jelly?

[Marques Brownlee]

I'm like, no, jelly bean.

[David Imel]

I thought we were on tea. That's why I did tiramisu. But I think that was 16. Was tiramisu too.

[Marques Brownlee]

And nougat.

[David Imel]

Oh, nougat was a long ass time ago. And then Oreo.

[Andrew Manganelli]

If we're on 17, Q is the seventh. He was part of the Alphabet, right?

[David Imel]

Q was Q. Yeah. Q, R, R was red velvet cake.

[Marques Brownlee]

S. Wait, are we on red velvet cake? Maybe it's S. What do you have? Maybe that was citrus. I have a mythos. I just made up the name.

[David Imel]

It's strudel. Right?

[Mariah Zenk]

Right.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Wait, can you tell us the first letter?

[Andrew Manganelli]

Okay. Did spell it.

[Ellis Hamburger]

You're not going to like it.

[Marques Brownlee]

Well, is it S or T?

[David Imel]

It's C. It's C. What?

[Marques Brownlee]

Not even in order anymore. There's no shot. Wait, can we all.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Wait, wait, can we all guess? Can we have With C?

[Ellis Hamburger]

What do you.

[Andrew Manganelli]

That's a great guess.

[Ellis Hamburger]

What is it with C?

[Mariah Zenk]

I don't know.

[Ellis Hamburger]

What do you think?

[Marques Brownlee]

Okay, it's a dessert that starts with C. We had cupcake like a decade ago. I'm going with Cupcake two.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Cupcake two.

[David Imel]

Electric.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Boom.

[Mariah Zenk]

Okay. Too codename.

[David Imel]

Why did they do this? Could I complain to Michelle? I'm texting about so many things today.

[Marques Brownlee]

Bug report.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Michelle's gonna watch this episode and be like, I'm never talking to you again.

[David Imel]

No, he'll be mad about this too.

[Ellis Hamburger]

Codename for Android 17.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Creme Brulee. Those are both so much better.

[David Imel]

Than mine, I bet. Creme brulee.

[Ellis Hamburger]

I like where your head's at.

[David Imel]

Damn.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Marques can go first.

[Marques Brownlee]

I wrote crepe.

[Ellis Hamburger]

I. That's also a good one.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I just wrote cookie. I've been watching too much Sesame street with Lane. Cookie.

[David Imel]

What is it?

[Ellis Hamburger]

Any other final?

[Marques Brownlee]

Cupcake?

[Andrew Manganelli]

Chocolate?

[Marques Brownlee]

Three cupcake. Three cupcake. Three cupcakes.

[Ellis Hamburger]

It's apparently creme Fresh. It's Cinnamon bun.

[Marques Brownlee]

Cinnamon Bun.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I'm not even that upset.

[David Imel]

Why did they do that? It has nothing to do with the old naming.

[Marques Brownlee]

I like cinnamon bunch ones too, but. What?

[Mariah Zenk]

Sure.

[Marques Brownlee]

What does that have to do with 17? That's a.

[Andrew Manganelli]

How is it 7? 17. And we're all the way through the Alphabet already.

[Marques Brownlee]

No, they just Android.

[David Imel]

No, the first got rid of the official names, but then they kept going with the code names underneath.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah, but what did the first. What was the first one?

[Marques Brownlee]

Well, Alpha, beta, whatever. Didn't really have names. Cupcake donut. Eclair. Froyo. Gingerbread was my first.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Wine was Cupcake Cake.

[Marques Brownlee]

No.

[David Imel]

Well, three was.

[Marques Brownlee]

Well, it was like three. Do something.

[David Imel]

Yeah, yeah, but it was. Technically it was the first one. They started using the.

[Marques Brownlee]

Wait, how many?

[Andrew Manganelli]

Okay, what did we skip?

[David Imel]

Cupcake donut.

[Marques Brownlee]

Eclair.

[David Imel]

Froyo.

[Marques Brownlee]

Gingerbread.

[David Imel]

Wait, what about H?

[Marques Brownlee]

Honeycomb.

[David Imel]

Gingerbread.

[Marques Brownlee]

Honeycomb Ice cream sandwich. Jelly bean. Kit Kat. Kit Kat. Lemon Lollipop.

[David Imel]

Lollipop Lollipop.

[Andrew Manganelli]

M. Oh,

[Marques Brownlee]

Marshmallow.

[David Imel]

Marshmallow.

[Marques Brownlee]

Nougat.

[David Imel]

Nougat. Oreo.

[Marques Brownlee]

Oreo. Pie.

[David Imel]

Pie. Q. Q.

[Marques Brownlee]

And then that was it.

[David Imel]

Yeah.

[Marques Brownlee]

Or we had an R. They stopped

[David Imel]

at Q. I mean, technically, what the I Q was.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I don't even know how to pronounce.

[David Imel]

It's technically Android 10. And it's when they officially switched over to letters.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Yeah, I mean, numbers, Kince.

[Marques Brownlee]

They never named.

[David Imel]

It was just Q. Quince Tart was the secret code name.

[Marques Brownlee]

Red Velvet, but they called it Q on stage.

[David Imel]

Red Velvet.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Snow cone's really good.

[David Imel]

Yeah, that's fire.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Okay, that's a great line.

[Marques Brownlee]

I would have.

[David Imel]

Oh, T was tiramisu. Yeah, I thought so.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Upside down Cake. Vanilla ice cream. What? And then they went to B Baklava,

[Marques Brownlee]

and they fell off.

[David Imel]

Dude, baklava's fire.

[Andrew Manganelli]

No, Google broke alphabetical order for 16.

[Marques Brownlee]

They did.

[David Imel]

Oh. So they would just restart it. So B Baklava. C is.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I see where I'm screwing up. They're counting dot versions. That's what I'm. It's not one for one.

[David Imel]

It's not numbers. Okay, wait, so when did they stop

[Marques Brownlee]

they stopped at after P they gave up. They stopped wxyz. They stopped at.

[David Imel]

Oh oh, vanilla ice cream.

[Andrew Manganelli]

So next is D. That's the most

[David Imel]

vanilla thing you could do.

[Marques Brownlee]

I should have done a wxyz. Anyway, Google, I recommend you. You actually make a W, X and Y and Z. I demand an apology. Yeah.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Anyway, but thank you for getting rid of At a glance you can do no wrong.

[Ellis Hamburger]

That's true.

[Marques Brownlee]

Actually, you did some good. And you did some wrong as well. We'll be back next week, but also stay tuned for the bonus episode. Again, it will have not nothing to do with ball and if you made it this far into the episode comment Nixon 5 nix in 5. Catch you guys in the next one.

[Andrew Manganelli]

Peace waveformers Bruce by Adam Molina and Mariah Zenk Today I guess Rufus is probably still going to do some of the audio editing despite not being here.

[David Imel]

What's his last name?

[Andrew Manganelli]

Mulhaupt.

[Marques Brownlee]

There it is. That's it.

[Andrew Manganelli]

I was ready.

[Marques Brownlee]

I aced it.

[Andrew Manganelli]

But now I forgot the rest of the things I have to say. I think it's we're part of the Vox Media Podcast network and our intro outro music was created by vane sill.

[David Imel]

Bingo. Nixon 5 Nixon 5 Bingo.

[Marques Brownlee]

One be the greatest 22 year old of all time.

[David Imel]

Attempted murderer.

[Marques Brownlee]

We all do it.

[David Imel]

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