Your Luxury Car Now Has Ads!

Summary

Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast

Episode: Your Luxury Car Now Has Ads!

Release Date: August 7, 2026
Hosts: Marques Brownlee (MKBHD), Andrew Manganelli, David Imel, Panel: Ellis, Adam

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Episode Overview

This episode bounces between tech’s hottest, weirdest, and most controversial recent stories. The main themes revolve around how tech companies are shoehorning new features (often badly), unexpected ads in luxury vehicles, rapid product iteration from big and small brands, legislation’s effect on interoperability, and the quirks of modern “minimal” gadgets. MKBHD and his fellow techie co-hosts offer candid, at times satirical, and always insightful takes on these developments.

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Contents

1. YouTube’s Bizarre New Sharing Feature
2. BMW Puts Ads in Luxury Cars
3. Emergence of Affordable Electric Trucks
4. EU Forces Apple to Consider Universal Clipboard with Windows
5. AI in Marketing & EU Regulation
6. Rapid Updates in Minimalist & Peripheral Devices
7. Health Trackers: Fitbit Air, Garmin Circa, & Whoop
8. New Gadgets Quick Hits: Casio Ring Watch, Keychron Hardware
9. Memorable Quotes & Moments
10. Timestamps for Key Segments

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1. YouTube’s Bizarre New Sharing Feature <a name="youtube"></a>

Summary:
YouTube recently rolled out a new video sharing system that inserts a “reply” message interface below shared videos, attempting to make sharing more social, à la Instagram DMs. But the user experience is deeply confusing and universally panned by the hosts.

Key Points:

• When you share a YouTube link (via Slack, text, etc.), recipients see an awkward interface with minimal guidance on how to access normal comments.
• The “reply” pane appears by default, with a confusing swipe system to access other sections (like comments).
• The only way to reach normal comments: "The touch target area is like a razor thin margin in the center of that reply area." (David, 05:54)
• YouTube is trying to keep users inside its platform, mimicking strategies from Instagram ("reels" sharing and private DMs).
• The hosts agree this feature is a solution in search of a problem; YouTube was never a messaging-first platform.

Notable Quote:

“No one on YouTube talks to their friends on YouTube.”
— Andrew, 08:00

Timestamp: 01:25–13:00

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2. BMW Puts Ads in Luxury Cars <a name="bmw"></a>

Summary:
BMW pushed a partnership ad for the Spider-Man movie directly to the in-car infotainment systems of vehicles made after 2020. Owners see a pop-up and trailer-style content on startup, causing outrage for intruding on what many feel is a “private space.”

Key Points:

• BMW justified the ad as a “special surprise” and part of a brand partnership (July 27–Aug 10 rollout).
• Even in luxury vehicles, users are now being monetized after purchase, similar to the ad-laden smart TV experience.
• Previously, BMW execs indicated in-car screens were not for advertising ("I don't see it. It's a private space.").
• Hosts debate: Is this the "Fortnite-ification" of luxury goods?
• Some propose if it had been an Easter egg hidden feature, it might have played better.

Notable Quotes:

“BMW for some reason forgot they're supposed to be a luxury brand and decided to be Fortnite.”
— Adam, 16:48
“Imagine you buy your house and you go turn on the sink and red water starts coming out and it's like code red... the Spider-Man theme starts flying out of your sink and you're just like, why?”
— David & Adam, 16:30

Timestamp: 13:00–20:20

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3. Emergence of Affordable Electric Trucks <a name="ev-trucks"></a>

Summary:
Ford announced its “Fathom” electric truck—a midsize EV starting at $28,350—offering the first clear competition to the much-discussed “Slate” truck. This shakes up the sub-$30k electric vehicle category, especially interesting in a truck-loving U.S. market.

Key Points:

• Fathom targets a similar price and use case as the Slate, potentially launching a race for affordable EV pickups.
• Discussion about truck size categories (Maverick/Ranger/F150) and real-world buyer needs: “If people are honest about themselves and what they really are getting a truck for, they can probably get the smaller one...” (Marques, 27:46)
• The Lightning's discontinuation shifts Ford’s focus to lower-cost, practical EVs.

Notable Moment:

“It would be really funny and super American if the first under 30k EV that really slapped was a pickup truck.”
— Andrew, 24:15

Timestamp: 22:14–27:00

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4. EU Forces Apple to Consider Universal Clipboard with Windows <a name="eu-clipboard"></a>

Summary:
Microsoft petitioned the EU to compel Apple to extend its seamless “Universal Clipboard” (copy/paste across Apple devices) to Windows, per interoperability aspects of the Digital Markets Act. Apple claims it’s a major technical lift, but is working on it, potentially for 2027.

Key Points:

• EU’s regulatory stance focuses on opening “gatekeeper” tech for consumer benefit, but raises questions of overreach.
• Universal Clipboard enables easy sharing of content between devices—an oft-cited “stickiness” point for Apple’s ecosystem.
• Debate on whether forcing such integration unfairly penalizes Apple for simply building a good, closed system.
• Analogy to past EU moves, like forcing USB-C on iPhones.

Notable Quotes:

“You have to make that also work with these other companies' products... [the EU] just made it less like special, made it harder to work. Well that would feel like they're overstepping but it doesn't feel like they're overstepping because Apple has been anti competitive.”
— Marques, 34:20
“The primary question is... at what point is the regulation of forcing interoperability just stifling the innovation and benefit of one company?”
— David, 32:43

Timestamp: 28:05–45:00

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5. AI in Marketing & EU Regulation <a name="ai-ads"></a>

Summary:
Discussion around CMF (Nothing’s sub-brand) using AI-generated people in ads for their new Clip Pro headphones. EU’s new laws require clear labeling of AI-generated media, but CMF’s “disclosure” is subtle, even as they benefit from lower costs and avoid using real models.

Key Points:

• “Contains AI generated imagery. Any resemblance to a real person is purely coincidental.” — watermark required by EU law.
• Advertisement led to backlash: audience dislikes fake people in ads, feels inauthentic.
• The hosts anticipate a wave of “asterisks” as more brands have to label AI-generated creative (from subtle object generation to full people).
• Potential for consumer desensitization over time, but for now, it’s a “new version of ‘via Twitter for iPhone.’”

Notable Quotes:

“We talked before about how companies that don't use AI and use real people will point it out and it’s sort of become like a luxury thing. Like, Porsche uses real animators..."
— David, 84:34

Timestamp: 77:13–90:11

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6. Rapid Iteration in Minimalist Devices & Keychron’s ‘Cooking’ Phase <a name="minimal"></a>

Minimal Phone 2:

• The “minimal” phone returns with a new OLED QWERTY device (teased, not yet priced; hosts estimate $650–$900+).
• Hype and skepticism on hardware, price, and whether these devices can truly be a satisfying primary phone.
• Philosophical debate over what “minimal” really means; most “minimal” phones function best as secondary devices.
• Notable laughter over whether people discuss minimalism on “minimal phone Twitter.”

Keychron:

• Keychron releases and teases a flurry of unique peripheral devices, engaging with community feedback, CEO interacting frequently on Twitter.
• Highlights: new trackball mini devices, enthusiast mouses, feedback-driven product dev.

Notable Quote:

“Now we just have AI Marques talking to the fans.”
— Ellis, 09:31
“Can you really put a price on productivity?”
— Andrew, 61:05

Timestamp: Minimal Phone 2: 56:43–71:54
Keychron: 117:59–121:15

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7. Health Trackers: Fitbit Air, Garmin Circa, & Whoop Comparisons <a name="health"></a>

Summary:
Each host discusses their experience with current leading screenless fitness trackers: Fitbit Air, Garmin Circa, and Whoop, comparing data accuracy, comfort, app integration, and subscription models.

Key Points:

• Fitbit Air: Praised for size, comfort, lack of subscription, and decent band quality. Battery and data syncing highlighted.
• Garmin Circa: New, large, button for interaction, no GPS, more expensive, slightly less elegant than Fitbit Air. Auto-detection of activities is patchy but improving. “Feels like Garmin was creating this to be a whoop competitor before knowing Google.”
• Whoop: Best battery and rich data, but requires a subscription. Some wish for button/band improvements.

Apple Watch Drop-Off:

• Marques has moved away from the Apple Watch, realizing he doesn't miss most features except telling time (and briefly, "phantom buzzes").
• Apple Health as a data repository still valued for syncing with other platforms.

Timestamp: 95:34–110:25

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8. New Gadgets Quick Hits: Casio Ring Watch, Keychron Hardware <a name="quick-hits"></a>

Casio Ring Watch:

• Casio launches a literal ring-sized mini-watch (“you don't need to wear a watch on your wrist if you can just wear it on your finger.”).
• Much laughter and incredulity over the concept.

Keychron Hardware:

• Company is rapidly releasing and prototyping niche input devices; CEO personally active in product feedback loops on Twitter, moving into more enthusiast/professional territory.

Timestamp:
Casio: 110:25–115:12
Keychron: 117:59–122:57

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9. Memorable Quotes & Moments <a name="quotes"></a>

"BMW for some reason forgot they're supposed to be a luxury brand and decided to be Fortnite."
— Adam, 16:48

“You have to make that also work with these other companies' products... [the EU] just made it less like special, made it harder to work.”
— Marques, 34:20

"No one on YouTube talks to their friends on YouTube."
— Andrew, 8:00

"It's the only business software you'll ever need."
— David (parodying ad reads), [Opening]

"You hate whimsy."
— Marques, 112:32 (re: Casio ring watch)

"Companies want to push the lines to all of us on different things."
— Andrew, 88:07 (re: AI ads)

"If people are honest about themselves and what they really are getting a truck for, they can probably get the smaller one."
— Marques, 27:46

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10. Timestamps for Key Segments <a name="timestamps"></a>

| Section | Start | End | |-----------------------------------------------|---------|----------| | YouTube Sharing Features & Broken UI | 01:25 | 13:00 | | BMW In-Car Ads & Consumer Outrage | 13:00 | 20:20 | | EV Truck Wars: Ford Fathom vs. Slate | 22:14 | 27:00 | | EU v. Apple Universal Clipboard Debate | 28:05 | 45:00 | | AI-Generated Ads & EU Labeling Law | 77:13 | 90:11 | | Minimal Phone 2: Hype, Skepticism, Philosophy | 56:43 | 71:54 | | Health Trackers: Fitbit Air, Garmin Circa etc | 95:34 | 110:25 | | Casio Ring Watch Bafflement | 110:25 | 115:12 | | Keychron’s Hardware “Cooking” | 117:59 | 121:15 |

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Final Thoughts

The episode interleaves tech industry critique, humor, and genuine consumer advocacy. The team rails against awkward platform tweaks and advertising creep, delights in niche gadgetry, and surfaces regulatory and competitive issues shaping the future of tech ecosystems.

For listeners, it’s an entertaining, skip-the-ads, insider’s tour of tech’s most head-scratching current trends—served up with candor, laughter, and plenty of off-the-cuff wisdom.

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Next episode drops next week!

Transcript

[David]

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[David]

that's weird. All right, well, this is the weirdest

[Andrew]

thing I've ever seen.

[David]

I'm not a lawyer. I would not recommend doing this.

[Marques]

This isn't legal advice, but like I wouldn't do this.

[David]

I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I personally would not do this.

[Ellis]

New sound bite just dropped.

[Marques]

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

[Ellis]

We're your hosts.

[Marques]

I'm Marques.

[Andrew]

I'm Andrew.

[David]

And I'm David.

[Marques]

And this week it's. It feels like the calm before the storm of smartphone season. We have a bunch of different various topics that aren't too gigantic, but that's because we know it's around the corner. It's about to be mid August and then September. So what do we got? Let's see a couple different health trackers, including thoughts on Garmin circa ads or BMWs. That's fun. A new Ford EV truck. That's hopefully more fun. EU making Apple add more cross platform features. We can talk about that and a few other quick hits. But first, did they even test this?

[David]

I have one for YouTube. So we all know that on YouTube you can send each other videos, right?

[Ellis]

Correct.

[David]

They recently implemented this very weird feature where if you. If you use the share sheet and you send it to a friend, whether it's through Slack, through text, whatever, and they click that link, it is now a special tracking link that knows that the friend sent it to you. So then when you open the link now, you'll have the video, but below the video, instead of just seeing the comments or the description of the video, you'll see a little reply function which has you reply directly to the person who sent it to you, which is really, really dumb.

[Andrew]

This whole thing. Did we talk about. Sorry to interrupt this. Did we talk about this on the podcast? Cause the other day I sent a video in Slack and it like, opened a DM with both of you guys because you opened it through Slack, but I thought both of you were DMing me, and I just assumed it was because we were. You were testing a new feature, and I didn't realize it was because I sent the link.

[David]

Yeah, this is the other bad thing now. Yeah, it's. It's. It's very weird. I. We all know that they need. YouTube is trying to make itself more of a social media platform. There are better ways to do this. I have suggested implementations, such as a recommendation feed where your friends just hit recommend on videos, and then it just shows all the videos your friends recommended. Dude, if Instagram. Okay, if Instagram's main feature is sending

[Andrew]

each other reels, which is what they're trying to copy.

[David]

Which is, yeah, sort of what they're

[Andrew]

trying to copy with this.

[David]

But there should just be a feed of your friends recommended videos in YouTube.

[Andrew]

That's. Adam, I'm saying that.

[David]

Let me get around to the daily.

[Ellis]

If that were the case, how would they make money? Answer me.

[David]

It would make a lot.

[Ellis]

Riddle me that.

[Andrew]

We don't want that.

[David]

It would keep you on the platform much longer.

[Ellis]

Not nearly as much as algorithmic slop, bro.

[Andrew]

Well, it turns into algorithmic slop, and then you don't know where it goes.

[David]

The feature they shipped is way worse.

[Andrew]

Okay, this is really stupid.

[Marques]

It does seem clear that they're just copying, like the feature where you send someone an Instagram reel which just opens a DM between you and now there's messages in YouTube. This is the thing that's new. My theory is they tested this, but only a little bit. They only tested this a little.

[David]

Well, they clearly only tested a little little bit. Because the actual point of my. Did they even test this? Is that now it opens the video and instead of seeing the comments right below the video or the description, it shows A little like reply to the person who sent it to you thing, like on mobile. On mobile. And there is a, there's a little three dot icon in the top right, indicating that there are three different sort of menus that you can swipe between.

[Marques]

Not very clear at first.

[David]

Not clear. And I, I just want to get to the general comment section.

[Marques]

Right.

[David]

Because like, why would I reply to Andrew in YouTube? Because then he has to open YouTube and read my message in YouTube and it's like, if a friend sent it to you, they probably texted it to you. They probably send it over like it's some sort of messaging app, whatever. Anyway, I want to get to the general comments section. The only way to do that is to touch in the extreme center of the reply like area.

[Andrew]

Where, Where?

[David]

Well, to touch and then swipe from the center of the reply area to Andrew.

[Marques]

Right.

[David]

Because there's the three dots. If you, if you try to swipe from anywhere in that area to get to the next screen, it just doesn't do anything. But the touch target area is like a razor thin margin in the center of that reply area.

[Andrew]

Yeah, yeah.

[David]

And if you touch anywhere except for the reply section, you can't get to the comment section. So I legitimately could not figure out how to get to the general comments of this YouTube video until I could. I walked over to Andrew and I was like, how does this work? And then he eventually was like swept

[Andrew]

in the right spot. Essentially it's for audio listeners. If you can't. If you remember when we talked about the hype feature, essentially when under a video in mobile, it almost feels like a bubble now is like comments and you click it and that's where you type. But if you swipe over, that's where hype is, which I think still exists. Yeah, somehow. And then if you swipe one more time, that's where the reply thing would be. But it defaults to that slide. Yeah, that's what the three dots he's talking about for each individual page, I guess.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And because of where you type, the top says like reply and then under it it says like the box for where to type in.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

If you swipe on the top of the little bubble, nothing happens. Or actually it was just like going into full screen, I think.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And then if you swipe a little under, then it actually swipes the pages. So the touch target is razor thin.

[David]

Yeah, just super confusing. Touch target. And I just also think that replying to your friend that sent it to you in general inside of YouTube makes no sense.

[Marques]

I feel like I can see how this went. They did the usual thing where they're like, we would like people to spend more time on YouTube versus other platforms. And we know that people text each other YouTube videos, but then we want them to stay on YouTube after they watch the video. Kind of like how on Instagram they might DM each other videos. Okay, so let's do like a 0.1% test where a tiny fraction of accounts, we'll just see if it keeps them on YouTube longer. If we have a built in messaging feature where instead of replying or commenting in the text thread, they can do it on YouTube. And it did satisfy the metric of keeping people on YouTube longer. So they were like, all right, technically this is a successful test, let's roll it out. And now everyone's sending each other videos and text threads and then it opens up and we're getting all this do you want to keep messaging them on YouTube thing. And we kind of don't.

[Andrew]

I mean, Adam, Missouri has said that that form of sharing reels is like the reason. So one of the main reasons people stay on Instagram so long. So YouTube knows why the problem is, is it's not that YouTube didn't have the feature. It's that Instagram was a place that people used to talk already. So therefore that first party integration is so much easier and fluent and recognizable by people. No one on YouTube does that. No one on YouTube talks to their friends on YouTube.

[David]

Instagram is already practically a messaging app that happens to have like reels and other stuff built in. YouTube is a consumption app that nobody was talking to each other through before.

[Marques]

And you know what's funny about that? YouTube used to have, it did an inbox and a messaging feature. This was back in the day. I don't know when they stopped, when they got rid of it. This might be a trivia question, who knows? But I remember when I first started my YouTube channel, there were channel comments so you could kind of like writing on someone's Facebook wall. You could leave a comment on someone's channel and there were messages that you could just literally add someone as a friend and then message them in the inbox. So every single person that subscribed to the MKBHD channel, I would get an email for it. And I would use that email to open up their profile and send them a message and write a comment on their profile saying thanks for subscribing. And my theory was that people would see a comment on someone's channel that says thanks for Subscribing. And they'd go, oh, someone said, thanks for subscribing. Let me check out why they subscribe. And they would see my channel and they would go, oh, that's cool. And they would subscribe too. I don't know if that actually worked, but I was kind of in the early stages. Like, if I just say thank you to everyone, maybe that will have some positive impact.

[Ellis]

Now we just have AI Marques. Talk to the fans.

[Marques]

No, that's actually an Instagram feature. But no now. So they. I think I had to eventually stop doing that because I was getting too many emails. And I think I did. Actually I did a giveaway once, which then There were like 3,000 emails in one day. And I was like, I can't keep doing this. Yeah, yeah. So I stopped doing that. Then they got rid of the feature. But at one point there was an inbox on YouTube that is usable.

[David]

What is so ironic about this is you can see now how Google would be an amazing thing. Yeah. Because that, that would be a social network where people could easily integrate YouTube videos. Because also Google, you could share YouTube videos, you could have friends, you could DM, there would be messaging. Like, now Google would be an amazing idea. But as usual, Google is just too early to everything.

[Marques]

Yeah. YouTube is like, they always. They've chased things in different directions. Like today we talk a lot about how they chase tv. Like your channel is like a TV channel and like all these TV features. But back in the day, they were chasing other things and I think those might have been better things to chase.

[Ellis]

I don't think it's a problem that they're too early. I think they kill it too soon.

[Andrew]

I mean, to be fair, since I shared with you guys, I've never seen that thing pop up again. And I know I've clicked on other people's YouTube links or sent YouTube links.

[David]

This is the other thing too. Like, Andrew sent me a video and it's been like, chat to Andrew and I'll chat to him. And it doesn't even send him a notification that I, like, replied to his video.

[Andrew]

Did you actually do.

[David]

I've done it.

[Marques]

Can I try one right now?

[Ellis]

It might be because he has notifications

[Andrew]

while you're trying that I want to also throw this. So you two both clicked on a link in Slack and it like opened that DM that I was confused by.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

If you were to copy that link from Slack and send it to your friend that I don't know, it'd probably also. Would it open with me. Right.

[David]

Probably. That's unless there's some sort of hidden tracker link that you can't even see in the URL.

[Marques]

The reason it got annoying is because I would share a video on, like, threads or Twitter, and then I would get a bunch of notifications that people had accepted my request and wanted to message me.

[David]

That has happened to me, and I

[Marques]

didn't want to message any of those people.

[Andrew]

Oh, really?

[Marques]

Tweeted to publicly share a video link and it just opened inboxes with everyone who. Yeah, turn it off.

[Andrew]

I don't even know how I would get to those messages now.

[David]

Maybe they turned it off. This was happening a lot last week to me.

[Andrew]

Oh, no.

[David]

Because I shared a video on Twitter or something and I was at the gym and I suddenly started getting a bunch of notifications that people were trying to DM me. Yeah.

[Marques]

Maybe they've walked it back a little bit or realized that public accounts need to be able to share.

[Andrew]

You did react.

[David]

I reacted.

[Andrew]

I had no.

[David]

That's what I'm talking about. It's confusing. I don't understand. Anyway, free business advice. YouTube From a guy who dropped out of college. All you need is a feed of friends recommendations, and you just hit recommend on the video. Because I look the feature on Instagram. The best feature on Instagram on reels is when it's. It shows you reels that all your other friends have liked.

[Andrew]

That's.

[David]

I love that feature.

[Marques]

Pretty nice.

[Ellis]

David, you're thinking too logically, man. These are good features. You need to stop copy.

[David]

This is Google. This is Google. But I would love to just, like, watch the videos that my friends are watching and recommending because then when we meet up in person, we can talk about them.

[Marques]

It's weirdly the nicest antidote in a while to the, like, Internet. What is it called? The dead. Not dead Internet, but, like, where everyone's Internet is so personalized that you are the only one seeing the videos that you watch, and everyone else's videos are totally personalized to them. So when you go, it's like, for you, effectively, you go to school the next day, you're like, hey, did you see that video? Nobody else saw that video. This is weirdly the best antidote to that.

[David]

Yeah, 100%.

[Marques]

Speaking of free business ideas, if you're a car company and you want to make a bunch of money, what if you just, like, put ads on all the cars as soon as they turned on? Wouldn't that be great? I think that would work.

[David]

I need to buy a vintage Car.

[Marques]

I think if you had like a high enough tech car, maybe like all of your cars since 2022 have Internet connections. 2020 and maybe there's like a movie coming out. You just, you just like put the trailer on the screen of the car and then you just make a ton of money like that. That's like a great business idea, right? Am I overlooking anything? Isn't this great?

[David]

Every day we get, I see no issues. Crazy.

[Marques]

All right, well, I guess I'll tell BMW to do that. Oh wait, they already did that. People got very annoyed.

[Andrew]

Yeah, yeah, they. People were reporting that they got a Spider man ad during their BMW startup this past week. And confirmed by BMW, this quote, special surprise is part of a, quote, broader brand partnership and is running from July 27 to August 10. Basically it's like certain BMW operating systems are all getting this. But essentially any car made after 2020, when you started it up, you got this little pop up that was, says something about Spider man and if you click it, it then shows this. Like it's not a trailer for the movie. It's this weird integration of like a BMW SUV driving down the street, going into the city and then like Spider man watching and like zipping around the city. It even uses the ambient lighting in your car as part of it. And it's weird. It's terrible.

[Ellis]

Unrelated, there are a lot of great pre 2020 BMWs on cars and bids.

[Andrew]

Not enough.

[David]

Yeah, every day when one of these car companies just uses your, your Internet connection to do worse and worse things, I just think about getting a vintage car again.

[Andrew]

It's. This is first of all, in 2023 when they were releasing a bunch of larger infotainment systems, their senior VP of connected company development claimed quote to say, I'm selling the screen to play a commercial. I don't see it. It's a private space.

[David]

Excuse me.

[Andrew]

Apparently not that private because here's a Spider man ad right for you.

[David]

It's a commercial.

[Andrew]

It's a commercial.

[David]

Yeah, exactly what it is.

[Andrew]

Called it. I, I kept wanting to, I don't see it articles saying that like that maybe BMW is attempting to put this under the like festive like you know, Halloween and Christmas, like festival. But I don't even think they're doing this because they called it a brand partnership.

[Marques]

Like, yeah, they got brand partnerships. I mean, I can't confirm because I'm not in the back deals, but I assume this Spider man thing wasn't just for the lulz. Like they got paid to put this

[Andrew]

here yeah, of course, that's what it could have been. It could have been an Easter egg and like just release it to put it somewhere in the car. Maybe there is the integration. Maybe Marvel had a BMW because like, there's all across promotion inside a lot of movies as well. But if it's some sort of Easter egg where you have to like tap this steering wheel button four times or do the Konami code or whatever and then it pops up, then that's a cool Easter egg. Because it doesn't maybe almost force you to watch. To be fair, you had to click it, but it still came up. But like, I don't know if this was a. Just if this was a buried Easter egg where it gave you a little extra thing about the new Spider man and like, somebody quote, leaked it and then people were going and searching for it then. It's fun. I just like, it turns into an Internet thing.

[David]

Imagine you buy your house and you go to turn on the sink and red water starts coming out and it's like code red.

[Adam]

That's the. You know what I mean?

[Marques]

Yeah, whatever.

[Adam]

The Spider Man.

[David]

Yeah, the Spider man theme starts flying out of your sink and you're just like, why?

[Andrew]

I didn't ask for this.

[Adam]

I'll tell you why. Because in America, there's two ways to run a successful business, okay? You can either do the Nike, the Apple, the Hermes thing where you convince people somehow to pay a ridiculous markup compared to what it actually costs to make the things. Or, yeah, you can be Fortnite, where in exchange for paying slightly less money, you can just shovel things that you think people like into their life, you know, season after season after season. Yeah. And BMW for some reason forgot that they're supposed to be a luxury brand and decided to be Fortnite, you know, and that's okay.

[David]

It's strange philosophically because when we think about, like, you have a smart TV in your house, you know, we at this point we kind of expect that the Samsung smart TV that you have is going to play ads or the LG tv.

[Ellis]

Not ads. Special surprise.

[Andrew]

Special surprises.

[David]

Yeah. LG TV you have is going to play special. Special surprises. If you had put like a. I don't know if you bought a tablet to put in your BMW that was made by Samsung or made by what? I could maybe see an ad playing on that tablet that is not part of your car. But in this analogy, your car is your home, right? It is a place that you sit and you drive and whatever. I just don't think that Built into the infotainment system of the car. Similarly to like your sink in your house, there should be things that are automatically playing against your will.

[Andrew]

I mean, first of all, the senior VP of connected company development agrees with you because he called it a private space at BMW. So if anyone disagrees with you, BMW agrees with you. Yeah, I guess. Then this. First of all, I don't want my tablet. Selling me ads is cheaper. Apple and Samsung have done this of like trying to sell. You remember when like the Fold 6 came out and was still trying to sell you the Fold six in a. In a notification? Yeah, this sucks so bad. But yeah, they're like, I could understand. No, I couldn't understand anything. But you would expect the cheaper car companies.

[Marques]

What was this guy's title again? The senior VP of what company?

[Andrew]

Connected Company Development.

[Marques]

I would expect that in a company that's making modern cars where they have Internet connections and the ability to download software updates and new ambient lighting settings and random GPS enabled front axle lift. I would not be shocked if the senior VP of connected, whatever you said company development was like, hey, I have an idea. We could make way more money from this if we also made it a billboard. And they did it.

[David]

Yeah, they had.

[Andrew]

I still think they had such an opportunity to actually make this almost the exact same thing, but the user had to find it. And then it turns into this like scavenger hunt kind of.

[Marques]

That would be a way better experience.

[Andrew]

And goes viral on Twitter and Instagram and everyone's actively trying to find a BMW do it.

[Marques]

That would be a better experience, but it would by default reach less people.

[David]

Way less eyeballs, I think.

[Andrew]

Well, this is reaching a lot of eyeballs for the wrong reason.

[Marques]

BMW was like, we can sell you 30 million eyeballs right now. And Marvel or whoever, Sony was like, deal. And so they just. They just did it.

[David]

Yep.

[Andrew]

Kids movies these days, to Ellis's point,

[Ellis]

that's the only way to make money. You either make a new thing or you squeeze the customer for everything.

[David]

That's called in.

[Ellis]

Vacation. Yeah, they already sold you the car. So how do we make more money? Yeah, let's put an ad on a screen.

[David]

I'm gonna buy a vintage car.

[Adam]

Can't wait for BMW season 37, man. I have a related reverse. Did they even test this before we move on? Which is, I've unlocked reverse because they didn't test this. And it's improving my life. We're like, okay, I like new segment. I. I've gone from like, I love my LG tv All the way around to like get this thing out of my house. I hate it so much. And it's because of how poorly made the hardware and software is. But a little bit ago, part of the. So, okay, there's been a bunch of stuff coming out about how a lot of smart TVs are like doing lots of things on your network that you didn't give it permission to. And the modems are held up and there's lots of traffic going in and out. And that's why a lot of them are like so slow and unresponsive. And my TV a little bit ago updated and then presented me with like a new user agreement. And the LG terms of service are like a million pages long and they make you sign like 50 of them. Anyway, I realized that this time with this user agreement there was a later button. And I hit the later button and I do this every time I turn on my tv. I'm like, I'm not signing this. And it takes me over the whole page every time. My TV has never run so smooth. Somehow it does not have permission to do something it needs, it wants to do. But my Internet in my apartment reads faster when I do speed tests. The TV is more responsive, apps are more responsive and it's. There's some background process. I have not. And you know, I do have to hit later, but I'm pretty. I feel like I've slightly deified.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Adam]

My LG television.

[Andrew]

Until you like turn your TV on and just instinctively press okay or like press down twice and it comes back up and it accepts and then you're just gonna throw it out the window.

[Adam]

What's beautiful is I have six separate agreements I need to hit.

[David]

Oh no every time you turn it on.

[Adam]

Well, but only one later button. So even if I slip once and accidentally agree to something, I still have five more.

[David]

Babe. Wow.

[Marques]

I hope it keeps working.

[David]

We talked about the Slate truck many times, especially because recently they have put out new pricing. But it turns out Ford has some competition coming up.

[Marques]

They have some competition. They've unveiled the name and starting price of what they're going to have as basically their midsize electric truck platform. They're calling it Fathom. And it's going to start at $28,350 plus destination and delivery. So call it right around $30,000 for a small or a mid size electric truck. So basically I, you know, a lot of the people who are talking about the Slate being not competitive were comparing it to gas trucks and like the Maverick Comes up a lot being like a 28 to $30,000 truck which is fully equipped obviously because it doesn't need to spend money on the battery so it can do all of the screen air conditioning, all the other power windows and stuff like that. But the Slate was. I guess I was defending it because it kind of felt like it was a one of one without any real competition as a electric truck. But now this will be a one to one competitor. This will be another small electric truck option at this low price from Ford.

[Andrew]

I'm already confused by that. Cause midsize or mid.

[Marques]

Yeah, officially the category is called midsize. I think that would be bigger than the Slate truck. Like the Rivian is a midsize.

[Andrew]

Yeah. But that's way. That's like significantly bigger than the Slate truck. That's like four door. So like yeah. Google says like Tacoma, Ranger, Canyon, Frontier,

[Marques]

like all about sized.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Closer to Rivian R1T.

[Marques]

Yes. So yeah, that would naturally have still more seats than a Slate truck is. Appears to be a more well equipped truck than the Slate truck but we're going to get way more options later. This is going to be coming in 2027, but it's. It's just interesting to see us actually getting something. Responding to Slate and sliding into this absolutely baseline super cheap electric car category. We've been waiting for sub $30,000 EVs that don't suck for 10 years now, 15 years now.

[Andrew]

It would be really funny and super American if the first under 30k EV that like really slapped was a pickup truck.

[Marques]

Sounds like that's what we're going to like because we wanted a model 2 for forever. We have model 3. Obviously not 30 something. Cyber cab is still not here.

[Ellis]

Shocker. Just give me a key truck.

[David]

Give it time.

[Marques]

That's what. Okay, I hear that a lot but people don't really buy those.

[Andrew]

Well, I just want. I'm surprised why we can't.

[David]

Yeah, because they can only go like 60 miles an hour.

[Marques]

Well I guess if you could buy a gas one. Like people, people just default to buying their stuff here.

[Andrew]

There is this guy. This is such a tangent in like Detroit that has a YouTube channel that's like making the basis for like what you're talking about or the platform for it. And like there's a lot of external modification you can do. I don't know how legal it's anyway.

[Ellis]

Probably not very.

[Andrew]

I'm surprised that was so basic. I'm sure there's more into it but this feels like I would guess this is closer to Ranger size when I want the Maverick sized, which is still four doors smaller bed away us much smaller truck, but feels like something that would be closer to this price range. A Ranger is like quite a bit bigger than a Maverick.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And all of them feel like nothing compared to an F150. And then all the truck guys are gonna be like F150 is a ladies truck. That's an F750.

[Marques]

F150 is a full size pickup truck. And I think if you ever like sit in one, you're like, oh my God, this is a massive truck.

[Andrew]

It's a big truck.

[Marques]

So yeah, this will be. I'm curious to keep an eye on this. It's also a platform that can theoretically be more than just this pickup truck. So we'll see more versions of low end EVs from Ford based on this platform when they start making them. So tbd just an interesting headline. Yeah, yeah. Fathom.

[Ellis]

Didn't they stop producing the lightning?

[Marques]

They did stop producing the lightning.

[Ellis]

Is this where they're refocusing their electric efforts?

[Marques]

I guess, basically, yeah. And I think a lot of people read into discontinuing the lightning as oh well, the one thing I mean they make the Mustang Mach E. But like the one thing you expect to be successful from Ford, the electric version of their best selling vehicle didn't work well enough to sell. They must be done with electric. But they're sort of repositioning into a way cheaper electric car.

[David]

What does the regular F150 usually start at?

[Marques]

Let me see. It's the most popular vehicle in America, so it can't be that crazy. F150 starting price.

[Ellis]

Well, MSRP is 37,000 bases, so very

[David]

interesting to me that Ford is making an electric vehicle that is cheaper than it's cheap.

[Marques]

Gas truck.

[David]

Gas truck.

[Andrew]

Well, one of its gas.

[David]

One of its gas.

[Andrew]

And an uncomparable gas truck because they're just totally different things. Like what is a Ranger?

[Marques]

The Maverick is. Yeah. The Ranger is like 33 the Mavericks.

[Andrew]

Yeah. So then it's more expensive than. Or. No, no, no, it is still cheaper. Yeah, Sorry.

[David]

I mean if it's cheaper than it's like cheapest truck. That's kind of crazy.

[Andrew]

My guess is why they're pivoting to this is F1 people still either or believe they tow F150 people. Yes. And therefore towing with electric significantly gets harder.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Therefore that's why they're doing the new. And they're not like totally ditching it. They're doing the like electric with gas generator kind of hybrid. But I bet people looking for whether this is Maverick or Ranger size, less people in that tow while still wanting a truck bed, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, I guess it would hit better even though it's not the most popular selling vehicle in the U.S. yeah,

[Marques]

if people are honest about themselves and what they really are getting a truck for, they can probably get the smaller one.

[Andrew]

Yeah, if they're not honest about themselves, they'll comment on this.

[Marques]

Yeah, I tow once a year and it's so worth carrying around 3,000 extra pounds every time I drive. Anyway, what's the next story?

[David]

The EU is requiring cross platform clipboard from Apple to Windows.

[Andrew]

I saw this, so Adam and Marques seemed interested in this. I wrote down some notes really quick.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

Okay, explain what it is.

[Marques]

So I guess first the clipboard feature, like you can copy and paste obviously on a Mac there is a continuity feature built into macOS and iOS and iPadOS that lets you copy and paste between devices. So I use this all the time. I'll copy a password from 1 passwords on my Mac and I go into the text field on my iPhone and I hit paste and it pastes it from my Mac. It's pretty nice. It's a super useful feature. It's just for the devices in the Mac ecosystem, the Apple ecosystem.

[Andrew]

Microsoft filed an EU inoperability request asking Apple to open. It's called Universal Clipboard.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Which does what you just said. And according to Mac rumors, it seems as Apple is currently working on that right now. Now I guess the issue with if it happened right now with what it was every time you went to paste something you would have to grant permissions which is awful. The thing they're like working on Airdrop,

[David]

it's not like the worst thing, it's

[Andrew]

one click maybe every time you paste. Having to accept permissions would be terrible.

[Marques]

It's cross device. Yeah, it's like one more click.

[David]

It'd be annoying but I guess every

[Andrew]

time you're pacing would be really annoying. This would be. So this would open it up to. Well that's what would happen if it were available now what they're working on would be something where allowing copy and paste the clipboard to be cross platform through device pairing with a one time permission. So like it would be a device paired I think they said similar to something they did in iOS 26 with like watch notifications. There's something I didn't fully. I don't use Apple stuff I didn't even know Universal Clipboard was a thing. Oh, it's amazing. So I'm learning about it through this.

[David]

I use it all the time, so it's very annoying when it doesn't work.

[Andrew]

Yeah. And I. I have to assume that this is one of those things where if you are in the Apple ecosystem and you use it, you know what it is. If you're not, you don't really know what it is. So the people who are. Microsoft is claiming this is one of the most requested productivity features that they would like added to Windows because there are enough people that use a iPhone and a Windows laptop. Yeah. Presumably probably for work. I'm sure so many people use stuff for work. Yeah, absolutely. So Apple is claiming that they are. Let me see that. They're introducing cross device. Copy and paste is a significant engineering effort with work expected to be completed by fall of 2027, which is when it would probably into beta following full release after that. So we're talking like 2028 by the time this potentially comes out. And as far as I know, possibly only for the eu. Yeah, I don't know if that means it would come here eventually if they're going to do it anyways.

[David]

So tell me, the headline you wrote here is EU requires. So is the EU requiring this or is this just something that Microsoft requested

[Marques]

and Apple is working on it?

[Andrew]

I guess like there. Yeah, maybe the EU is not requiring it, but it's being requested through the EU inoperability, which is under the DMCA Act.

[Ellis]

And yeah, it's a request.

[Andrew]

It's a request. The Digital Markets act through the eu.

[David]

So it hasn't been like.

[Andrew]

Seems like Apple's working on it.

[David]

Okay. It hasn't been put into law, but Apple is working on it anyway.

[Andrew]

Yes. Okay.

[Ellis]

My question about this, is this going. Not this in particular, but is all this going a little too far?

[Marques]

That is also my question.

[Andrew]

I think there is no middle ground on this headline. I think it is either EU's or like governing agencies are forcing tech companies to do too much with little knowledge about tech, which is like at the head of like fair. Like we know governing agencies don't know a lot about technology. Are they stifling things? But also there's a, I'm sure a whole nother part of this that's like 2027. Apple can't just get this going right now. You know they can. They're actively being a monopoly.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

So I don't think there's a middle ground here in anyone responding to this. Even though there probably is a middle ground of like, this does actually take a whole new team to do this. Because of the variables for something like Windows, they obviously can do cross platform stuff way easier because they run the full stack. But also like, yeah, EU probably is gonna. Or like governing agencies are gonna screw some things up here every once in a while. Even if they're good, they're good ideas on the surface.

[David]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew]

I don't know.

[David]

The primary question here is that like interoperability generally gives consumers more control and more options. And consumers having more options allows capitalism to work better. And when you, when you have two, when you have a duopoly in a market, you kind of generally have to make sure that there's enough interoperability so that people don't get locked into one. And slowly that duopoly just merges into a monopoly. But the question becomes like, because these platforms are both like now part of our foundational daily life, but they're also companies. At what point is the regulation of forcing interoperability just stifling the innovation and benefit of one company? And that's the weird, that's the really weird middle ground that I think these regulatory bodies have to have to mess with. The US usually errs on the side of just like, let the free market, free market play out. The EU generally errs on the side of like the consumer is the most important thing we should care about.

[Marques]

So it's been interesting to watch, I think to that question you asked Adam. My. It seems to come down to have you as a company been anti competitive in the past? Because this is how I see it. Like we've seen the same headlines with like adding USB type C to the iPhone. Instead of the law being, hey, the iPhone has a lightning port, you need to make it USB type C. It wasn't exactly that. It was, you must have a standardized single port across all these things. And so USB type C was the obvious answer.

[David]

I think the law was that every device that charges has to have USB

[Marques]

type C, which is fine. And everyone agreed with that because we all like USB type C and Apple is using lightning and so they update. Now everything is USB type C everywhere. But if you are, let's say, because then this is like another step over the line. This is okay, we have interoperability between Mac and iPhone. You need to loop windows into that too. If you are just like erase the company names and erase the history of the companies in the past and you decided you were going to build a business or a product and you just make two products that work really well with each other. And then the EU comes along and goes hey, you have to make that also work with these other companies products here. They just added work to your table. They just made it less like special, made it harder to work. Well that would feel like they're overstepping but it doesn't feel like they're overstepping because we all like the conclusion. And also Apple has been anti competitive so we're okay with this.

[Andrew]

I think the EU DMA act though is specifically targeted at tech gatekeepers which is a list of specific companies.

[Marques]

So it comes down to has your company been anti competitive?

[Andrew]

Which also in a sense feels like if you are big enough to be a gatekeeper it's, it's hard, it's harder to call it stifling because it isn't mom and pop X and Y thing that now you have to. It's like these are trillion dollar company

[Marques]

and I think we fairly, we've pretty fairly assumed that the only way your product gets to be that popular is not just from being really good but also because of some additional protective behavior. And that's why they're able to step in.

[Andrew]

And my favorite part about this was just that like in the DMA the whole thing is to be like it's to help third party companies not get kept out of things by these gatekeepers. Yet this whole request is Microsoft asking Apple like it makes it seem like Microsoft is having such a rough time that like big old Apple should throw it a bone. But I also, well they're a B2B in that tier. Yeah. But like I wonder if though this feels like it's depending on your point of view picking on Apple and or Apple doing what it should. Like I just don't know if there's the equivalent on the other side of an easy maneuver interoperability between other products that could be like well we want this to work on Apple and Microsoft stifling us. It's just because Apple has it where like there's nothing to attack on the Android Microsoft side right now. That's a good point where like maybe hopefully they would do the same thing to the other one.

[David]

So what you're saying is Windows sucks

[Andrew]

as a Windows user.

[David]

Windows sucks because yeah if, if they have to force Apple to give Windows features but there ain't no features on Windows they gotta force Apple to have

[Adam]

it is it's because there's less like ecosystem. There's not.

[David]

I know it's locked, I know it's ecosystem locking.

[Marques]

I'm trying to think of some of the ones aren't there some with Android phones and Chromebooks, aren't there some, like, you're logged into your Google account and there's some sync that works.

[Andrew]

And this still is nowhere near as nice. It's like a device paired rather than like, just like full stack, just my Apple icloud account.

[Adam]

It's copy and paste. Like, it's not. This is not like difficult to implement. You know, it's a clipboard. It's not like super VOOC. Like, imagine the EU is like, does real meme do superVOOC? Is that their thing?

[Marques]

It's Oppo, damn it.

[Adam]

It's like picture the EU being like, yo, oppo. We love SuperVooc. Every device that plugs into a SuperVooc charger, regardless of if you make it, needs to charge that fast. Like, that would literally be impossible. That's an impossible interoperability ask. But copy and paste, you know, I think we've.

[David]

Well, it wouldn't be impossible, but I think it's just that that type of feature is not even remotely gatekept.

[Andrew]

I think what Ellis is saying though, is like, copy and paste is almost like a quality of like, it is an expected thing to happen. Like, it's such an easy thing that

[Adam]

everyone knows your charger needs to somehow work with every single device, regardless of the transformers in it, and charge it at the 700 watts or whatever SuperVOOC does nowadays.

[Marques]

You know, here's one. Because we've been using a bunch of different browsers. Chrome, one of the biggest browsers, right? Arguably the biggest browser. You can actively sync with the mobile Chrome app. So the mobile Chrome app on your phone syncs with the mobile Chrome app on your desktop. Poor old Apple makes Safari. And you can't actively sync your tabs and bookmarks from Chrome in Safari. I think you can not actively sync. You can import them in export.

[Sponsor Voice]

Oh.

[Marques]

Like you said, you can't have them live update the way they do.

[Andrew]

Like between your phone and. Yeah, like, if you're on Safari on your phone and Chrome. But I think the difference is if you have Chrome on your iPhone, which would be the interoperability. We need to stop using this word operability. Like, you can though, put Chrome on an iPhone on the app and like that will sync. Correct.

[Marques]

In a world where there's no Chrome on the iPhone, we. We'd be asking Google to make Safari able to sync with.

[Andrew]

I think you would be making Google make an iOS app in that sense. If it didn't exist. I think the other thing would be you need to. Assuming it didn't exist because Chrome didn't put it on iOS, you would be forcing Google to make an iOS app.

[Marques]

Yeah, I guess I'm. I'm making a convoluted situation where there's no Chrome on the iPhone, there's only Safari.

[Andrew]

Well, it would be. Who's. Who's blocking? That would be the one getting told.

[Adam]

Apple makes a Chrome extension called icloud bookmarks that syncs your Chrome bookmarks live to your icloud.

[Andrew]

Apple's such a good guy, man.

[Adam]

Yeah, so it's, It's a. It's made by Apple and it syncs it to your icloud and then those bookmarks show up in Safari.

[Marques]

Just bookmarks, just book. Not like, not like open tabs that

[Ellis]

you're actively browsing on.

[Marques]

Yeah, yeah, I know. Still something.

[David]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

I, I think that, the thing that I think about with this is, like, does it actively harm the consumer? Because, like, if you think back to, like, Apple not putting RCS on the iPhone, that was like, that's making their iPhone customers have a less secure experience when they use sms.

[Adam]

Right.

[Ellis]

So the EU had to step in. This, I feel like, isn't that this

[Marques]

is like a competitive advantage, Convenience, copy paste.

[Adam]

I disagree. I think it is. I think it is harmful to convenience consumers solely because one of the main. Not main, but I would describe it as the universal clipboard is top five Apple ecosystem features that make me want to stay in the Apple ecosystem.

[David]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Is it? Yeah.

[Adam]

And removing any sort of freedom of choice from the consumer is, you know.

[David]

Yeah. But the argument would be it's just a good feature. The argument from Microsoft would probably be like. Or from Apple would probably be, well, Microsoft could make universe copy paste between its phone and computer. Oh, and they have the option to make a competitive. Well, I don't know if they do now. They did 15 years ago and they failed. So that would probably be Apple's argument.

[Andrew]

There was a world.

[David]

There was a world five years ago could have worked.

[Marques]

Yeah. There was also a world five years ago where this continuity was, like, added as a feature. There was a world where this didn't exist. So Apple came along and went, hey, we have iPhone, we have iPad, we have Mac, we have this continuity feature where you can use your iPhone as the webcam for your Mac and we can, like, live copy and paste things between them.

[David]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Oh, great. Convenient feature. I don't see any harm in not actively developing that for other people's. Platforms. Yeah, but it would be nice.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

So I mean Apple's never going to like purposely go out and build this themselves without someone to tell. Because a waste of resources in there. As.

[Adam]

Why would they?

[Andrew]

Obviously and because part of that is because. Well, no, no, what I'm saying is

[Adam]

I guarantee you in the next 30 seconds I can find. Fine, I can find five things on the Internet that Apple does that is a bigger waste of their infinite resources.

[David]

Yeah, but why would they just go out and do something to make it easier for other people to use Windows computer?

[Andrew]

I'm not saying this is better for their consumers. I'm saying it's better for their pocket. Like it's a waste of their resources in the sense of direct ROI to them. Like maybe some users of that. But they've clearly run the stats and that what positive. That is not positive.

[David]

There's no.

[Andrew]

Even though it's positive for their consumers.

[Adam]

Maybe there's some guy out there in Belgium who has to use a Windows computer for his sick gaming rig and he also wants to own an iPhone.

[Andrew]

That's what I'm saying.

[Marques]

You know the Tim Cook quote, just

[David]

buy your mom, buy your mom an iPhone.

[Andrew]

I'm still saying that more of a reason to.

[Adam]

Because you can copy and paste to your PC.

[Andrew]

No, I'm not saying it's good for Apple users. I'm saying Apple doesn't give a. That it's good for Apple users.

[Marques]

Here's one that they haven't added yet. The continuity camera feature. So whenever you open Zoom or any video calling app, annoyingly they're like, would you like to use I hate the

[Andrew]

sweeters too, but I never want to use this.

[Marques]

But this is in the same exact set of walls, right? It asks you, do you want to use your iPhone as a webcam for this video call? If you hit yes, it has this whole Bluetooth handshake and it like immediately shows you your live feed from your iPhone, which is a much higher quality camera than the webcam built into your Mac.

[David]

Generally that is an option for you.

[Marques]

Right? Do we think that that should also be included in this for Windows PCs for example? Or is it just not a good enough feature that we don't care?

[David]

I just think that it's not a. It's not a feature that keeps you in the Apple ecosystem because generally people's

[Marques]

webcams enough for some non 0% group of people. Yeah, they're like, I gotta keep using my Mac because I can use my iPhone as a webcam, but that is

[David]

such a small group.

[Marques]

It's a small group of people.

[David]

The amount of people texting Android to iPhone is like more than people texting iPhone to iPhone.

[Ellis]

That feature isn't actively harming the consumer, though, going back to my point. It's just a nice feature. Yeah, it'd be nice if they made it for everyone. I'm all for that. I just don't see the point in forcing them to because it's not actively hurting anyone. Yeah, I think the RCS SMS thing was actively hurting. Not really hurting, but you know what I mean? Like, it's a bad situation, potentially hurting people. Yeah, this is not that. It's just a nice feature.

[Marques]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew]

It also. And if I'm like, David's right, I put requires. I don't see anything requires, just that Apple is responding to a request. Apple might just be like, good guy. Okay, here's a request that scores us not good guy, not good guy. Because they would have done it themselves if they were a good guy. But like, yeah, Microsoft Files request request is out there. We have to respond to it. Yeah, maybe this is one thing that's, you know, still going to take a while, but the team is small enough. It paints us in a good light for a minute. It's like when they started pretending they cared about repairability for a while. Like, yeah, good headline. There we go.

[David]

Companies will also preemptively add things that are not that big of a lift for them in order to make the EU think that they're not trying to be a gatekeeper. Like Meta has done this various times, like when they were trying to figure out whether or not WhatsApp was a gatekeeper, and then WhatsApp, like, improved its features, like the day before the deadline. And they're like, I guess you're not. Like, you would have been. You would have been. And yeah, I think for them. To your point, Marquez, non zero amount of people who care about this. And Apple's like, I don't think that we're gonna lose Mac users because the only people that actually need this are the people that actively are using an iPhone and a Windows computer. And I don't think it's gonna stop people from buying MacBooks. And Apple probably knows that. So it's possible that in the future the EU could have required this if they determined that it was a primary core feature that needed to have interoperability.

[Andrew]

They still could.

[David]

They still could. And it's probably smart of Apple to get ahead of it.

[Andrew]

My favorite thing in the Verge comments for this Was like a bunch of pissed off EU regulators who have their iPhones, but all their work computers are Windows and government agencies are like, I

[David]

can't copy when I'm working at coffee shops, dude. It's like iPhone and, like, the oldest Lenovo laptop you've ever seen.

[Marques]

Oh, business laptop.

[David]

The biggest bezel. Like, yeah. It's crazy. Yeah.

[Andrew]

This is funny. We've argued for this for so long, and I didn't even know it existed before, and I'm just like, I don't care.

[David]

It's amazing. But it doesn't work all the time. I've been having problems with it working recently. Maybe because I'm on the betas. How do you. Okay, I have a question for you, Andrew. Because when I slack it.

[Marques]

Slide it to yourself.

[Andrew]

I just slack myself everything.

[David]

That's crazy. I used to use Telegram for that. I would telegram myself every link that I wanted to open on my laptop.

[Marques]

Damn.

[Ellis]

You know there's apps for this.

[Andrew]

It's funny, you guys. I don't do, like, tab syncing in my phone, I think.

[Ellis]

I don't know.

[Andrew]

I like. I like my things to be separate. I don't want them all to be the same thing. I like the fresh start when I

[David]

go all the time. You get like, a text with a video link on your phone. You want to watch it on your laptop or something?

[Andrew]

Yeah. Oh, I also do. I use in web Google messages on my. Oh, yeah, I just use, like, web messages as a tab.

[Ellis]

I have a psychotic answer to your question. Okay, I will press play on the video so that it starts on my phone. Then I will stop it.

[Marques]

Go to your.

[Andrew]

Oh, I do that. I do that all the time. That's a really good.

[Marques]

That's actually probably the best use of the history.

[David]

I do that for my projector because my projector runs Android tv and there's no way to just, like, copy paste

[Andrew]

to my projector or just to. Yeah, to the YouTube app on your TV. Like, oh, play it on my phone. Go to my library history on the tv, and then play it for two seconds.

[David]

Yeah. Wow. The workarounds that we do, I've had.

[Marques]

I have hacks where, like, I know I want to download. I have a flight coming up. So I want to download YouTube videos onto my iPad so I can watch them, and I'll find a video on my phone that I would like to watch later on my iPad. So I have to remind myself later to find it again and download it.

[David]

Why don't you just save to watch later?

[Marques]

Cause I Don't use Watch Later.

[David]

I use it constantly.

[Marques]

So I will save the video to my Raindrop IO bookmark folder before the flight. I can open those bookmarks in the YouTube app and download them all.

[David]

Why don't you just use Watch Later?

[Andrew]

That's the feature.

[Marques]

Because it's. Sometimes it's not all YouTube videos. Sometimes it's a couple articles I want to read offline. Sometimes I know all this stuff, but. But the YouTube videos I have to download because I can't watch them offline without downloading.

[David]

Okay, I could see that Watch later

[Andrew]

to me is a playlist I never go to. But I hope YouTube thinks I actually want to watch this later and they'll recommend it to me. It's basically me being like, it's okay to not watch this right now and then forget about.

[David]

I always forget about it for sure.

[Adam]

Videos in your Watch later do show up on your homepage.

[Andrew]

Okay, they do.

[Ellis]

And it'll say like from Watch.

[David]

Okay.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

So I just hope that that happens one day. And then I probably click Watch later again on it.

[David]

Take a guess.

[Ellis]

I have like 600 videos in my Watch Later.

[David]

Take a guess at how many videos are currently in my Watch later.

[Marques]

How long have you been using Watch Later? For a while. I think there's 350 videos in your watch later.

[Andrew]

700.

[David]

There are 716 videos in my Watch later.

[Andrew]

I've got you beat you.

[Adam]

I have 910.

[David]

And I would say about half of these are watched. No, actually about a third.

[Marques]

You don't remove it once you watch it.

[David]

I know what.

[Andrew]

Okay, wait.

[Ellis]

Now that we're far down this rabbit hole, this is a problem that I have had the past couple days. I have like 600, 700 something videos in my Watch Later. Do I just delete them and start fresh?

[David]

Yeah, you say keep. The more useful feature of Watch later is that when you add it to Watch later, it will then show up at the top of your YouTube feed the next time you open YouTube. That is a more.

[Marques]

Yes, that's nice.

[David]

That makes it more useful to me than a folder of videos that I want to watch. That's nice because I very rarely go to YouTube to be like, look at my backlog. No, it's like feed me algorithm.

[Marques]

I just, I just, I sometimes save videos that I know I don't want to watch right now, but I have a flight in two days of like, that's when I'll watch that. It's a 30 minute video. I don't have time right now.

[David]

Just Download it.

[Marques]

But I'm on my phone and when I find it and I want to watch it on my iPad, that's the dilemma.

[David]

Interesting. You know, there's a feature now on the iPhone where on the App Store you can hit like, download to your other computer. You can download the apps? Yeah.

[Marques]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[David]

You can download other Apple devices through the App Store and enter the Play Store. You should just be able to do that with videos too.

[Marques]

That YouTube free suggestion. I have a bunch of logged in devices. Let me download, but tell it to tell another device to download.

[Ellis]

Guys, guys, this is called consulting. We don't do this for free.

[Marques]

I really want the feature so bad, I'm willing to give it away for free.

[Adam]

What if we did it as a social feature where you hit download and it downloads it on your friend's phone and then they have it and then you can.

[David]

It opens a chat window.

[Andrew]

Yeah, okay.

[David]

And then you can have a conversation. Anyway, I think we could do a full episode, like a bonus episode or like a segment on, like, little dumb workarounds that we do because features don't exist. Oh, yeah, I think that would be fun.

[Adam]

Can we also, in real time, vibe, code all of these features and see if we come out with a working YouTube.

[Marques]

The hardest part of this is realizing that you have dumb workaround features because you've been doing them for so long that they're just normal.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[David]

That you didn't even think about.

[Marques]

You're like, oh, you know, I kind

[Ellis]

of do your normal.

[David]

I guess I do watch that for two seconds and then go on my projector and go to history. Like, yeah, yeah, it is funny.

[Ellis]

Let us know what your favorite hack.

[Andrew]

I'm currently cleaning my watch later.

[David]

That's funny.

[Marques]

Yeah, I opened my watch later. I had one video, deleted it. I think it was there by accident, honestly.

[David]

You're also an inbox zero, guys. So I could see you doing.

[Marques]

Yeah. Inbox zero. Yeah.

[Adam]

I'm picturing like the YouTube. I'm assuming somewhere out there, some YouTube employees are hearing us have this right now.

[Andrew]

Yeah, Hello. And you there, write this down.

[Adam]

And I can only imagine they're just like thinking about how every single tiny change they make to the platform, you know, affects hundreds of millions of customers, billions of people every day. And here is be like, they should overhaul everything like this. What's the worst that could happen?

[Andrew]

We know better than them.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

We know better than the millions of other customers. I'm saying.

[Adam]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew]

Change to the five.

[Marques]

I would consider myself a professional YouTube user.

[Adam]

That's it.

[David]

I think that's true.

[Marques]

I think that I, I use YouTube all.

[David]

Okay. But also, also counterpoint.

[Marques]

Counterpoint.

[David]

Most people aren't so. And companies make features based on what most people do, not what the power users do.

[Marques]

Yeah, unfortunately.

[Andrew]

And most people listen to Waveform.

[Adam]

Listen to Waveform.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[David]

I think the download thing are born in California.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Marques]

I think most people download videos on their device to watch it later when they don't have an Internet connection. Right. That's, that's, that's the Netflix thing. That's. Yes. So I think, I think they should build around that. They should go, ah, you're going to. The only reason you're hitting download is because you're going to watch this later when you don't have an Internet connection and you have a watch later feature. So you should like sort of synergize.

[David]

Well, they did. Because there's an auto download feature.

[Andrew]

Yeah, there is.

[David]

And it has. It downloads you videos that it thinks you want to watch automatically.

[Marques]

Yeah, but there. It's wrong.

[Andrew]

It is wrong.

[David]

I would say about one fifth of the videos I actually want to watch. But it does. There is a hit rate of some kind.

[Marques]

It's not, it's not zero. It's non zero.

[David]

It's not high. Anyway, that's the European Union.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[David]

So do you actually want to hit this Firefox topic or not?

[Andrew]

I'll go really fast.

[David]

Okay.

[Andrew]

Okay. Firefox. To the browser that I say I love all the time, yet could never answer a single reason as to why I love it, other than pretty icon and I've been using it for a decade.

[David]

Chrome.

[Andrew]

Yes. Not Chrome, not Google. They added a new feature and I feel like this is the first time I've brought a browser feature to the table because you guys are all masochists when it comes to browsers and anyway,

[David]

anyways, four browsers pinned to my doc right now.

[Andrew]

Y' all are crazy. Anyways, they just added in the right click menu, open in split view, which is where in any link you can right click and then instead of like open a new tab, open a new window, there's a split view and it will create a tab group of those two. You can click between the split view and that will change the URL bar. So you can change it in that. It has been super helpful in writing the podcast because earlier in the week I will just open a doc and throw the links to all the headlines we want to talk about. And now just in the doc, I can right click and Open each one, write down all my bullet points, and then it's there.

[David]

Did you know that every browser has this feature?

[Andrew]

Not Firefox. Firefox may have had this for years. I've just never seen that specific thing.

[Adam]

I was waiting for him to hold

[Andrew]

on, say that same thing. Well, I still need to tell them a couple things. Things they need to work out.

[David]

First of all, it's not perfect.

[Adam]

It feels like Safari does not have this feature.

[Andrew]

Safari doesn't.

[David]

All right, well, have I ever recommended Safari?

[Andrew]

My two biggest gripes. When the. When there's something open in Split View, you then lose the option to open something in Split View again. It should just replace the thing to the right. So, like, if I'm. Oh, yeah, I have two windows split, and on the left I have a link and I want to open in Split View, it should just replace the one on the right and then add that to the back button. I should be able to go between it and. If I want to close the Split View tab, the only way to close one window is to close it in the tab, and then for some reason it goes to the next tab as the window that's open or the tab that's open. So, like, if I'm in Google Docs and have Verge on the right of it and I'm reading and writing, if I want to close the Verge, it should stay on the Google Doc.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

For some reason it goes to. So here we go. I'm going to open this minimal phone. Spoiler alert for what we're talking about next. Open in Split View. I don't care. That's probably dia. And DIA sucks when I close. When I close this. Now the YouTube one.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Oh, it did stain. I don't know. Before it wasn't doing it. I don't know. Maybe that one's right. Look, Firefox for life. Firefox dsx.

[David]

If you want a direct line to Andrew, hey, follow me on Instagram, you can have it.

[Andrew]

DM me.

[David]

Just email him. They have emailed me before. I have done calls with them.

[Ellis]

Andrew, you don't have to live.

[Andrew]

I also probably won't take these calls because I can't tell you anything about this. I like Split View.

[David]

Baby, you just told them a bunch of things about it.

[Andrew]

Oh, yeah, true.

[David]

You were just wrong about it.

[Andrew]

Yeah. All right. They fixed it already. They're already listening to me. That's true.

[David]

They preemptively listen.

[Andrew]

Please go to the next thing.

[David]

All right. Ellis will be excited about this. Oh, I saw this too. So we talked briefly about the Minimal Phone two last week. If you didn't know what the minimal

[Andrew]

phone was, we have shut off Marques's mic.

[David]

Yeah. Marquez is like, cut it, cut it. We did a video on the sue channel last, last year about minimal phones. Different kind of like phones that get you off of your phone. Ironic. The Minimal Phone one was an E ink phone or at least an E paper display phone and it was very difficult to use on purpose. That was the whole point. Minimal is now back with the minimal phone 2 we talked about briefly on the podcast last week because they showed a very, very, very brief teaser in which they just showed the outline of the device now. Now they have a full YouTube trailer for the Minimal Phone 2. This worries me. Looks pretty nice. You know, it's a. It's got a keyboard, but instead of the E ink or E paper display, it is now oled. And the interesting thing about it is that the UX actually looks very nice. It has this really specific like deep blacks OLED plus orange plus white aesthetic. It's very minimal, you might say. And yeah, the full announcement and pre orders are going to go live on August 10, which is next Monday on Kickstarter. Ellis, do you have anything to add about this?

[Adam]

So much I don't know. No, because they didn't really announce that many things about it.

[David]

The UX looks pretty cool.

[Marques]

I have two thoughts. Exactly.

[Adam]

I killed your mic. You can't. I don't know. There's so much speculation about what it's going to be able to do on Twitter. The thing that I'm kind of most interested in is one of the founders. So there's a notification light. They didn't mention this in the teaser. There's like a notification light, old school led. And they showed a picture of it flashing blue and one of the founders said it will flash blue specifically when you have an imessage come in. And it was not explained how and it was not explained why. And I had my imessage working on the first minimal phone. Fine. Like how with Marques, I'm bringing your mic back with. I forget which one it was with. One of the, like, I ran a server on my imac at home, so. But I didn't need to sign in my icloud like anywhere. So suspicious. Like it was just. It was running a server, I was running a client on the phone.

[Andrew]

Super minimal.

[Adam]

Yeah, yeah, you could say that. I. I think like the, the part I remember being the most annoying from Minimal Phone one was the hardware software integration like there were so many things with like screen sensitivity and brightness that just like never really, I felt like, didn't get worked out by the time I stopped using it. And this new one looks so chic and sleek. I meant sleek. It does not look chic. There's nothing chic about using this thing. But I'm so excited for this thing. I agree with you, David. I think the minimal Launcher, the updated minimal launcher looks dope.

[David]

Looks nice. We're about to hit a interesting golden age of minimal devices. The clicks communicator is coming out fairly soon.

[Andrew]

Market share about to go 0.1, baby.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[David]

About to hit 0.01.

[Adam]

It's going to be incredible.

[David]

It's going to be crazy.

[Ellis]

I can't wait for this whole segment to just be, be slow zooming in on Marques's face.

[David]

You are the editor.

[Marques]

Okay, look, look, look, look, look. Okay, I have two thoughts. They might surprise you.

[David]

They're not going to.

[Andrew]

No, he's gonna say it looks good.

[Marques]

My first thought. All right, this looks really cool. I am intrigued because the balance between like the purpose of a minimal phone and not having social media and doom scrolling but still being able to do stuff.

[Ellis]

Stuff.

[Marques]

This just from the teaser seems to be able to do a lot more stuff and actively avoid the downfalls of the stuff you're avoiding. So I'm curious to try it. But two, this worries me that they're doing a teaser video showing the chic new hardware and OLED display and all this price and they haven't shown a price tag and I am worried that this is going to be eight, $9,000 phone.

[Andrew]

Can you really put a price on productivity?

[Marques]

I think this might be a $900 phone. Now

[David]

I bet seven, $400 I'm guessing.

[Andrew]

Look at this.

[Marques]

Compared to that one, this is a slow mo.

[David]

Video 649 is my guess.

[Marques]

With these beautiful renders of this amazing oled display. It's 49 seconds of, of amazing hardware.

[Adam]

And this with almost no sound design.

[Andrew]

I don't know.

[Adam]

Disappointing.

[Andrew]

Why it makes me laugh that the minimal phone has so many buttons on it. I know it's a keyboard, but there's just something about like keyboard.

[Marques]

The first minimal phone I don't know was $450. It's actually worth every penny.

[David]

It was five, I'm gonna guess 650.

[Marques]

This one has an. That one had a paper display.

[David]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Which is probably lead.

[David]

No OLED. OLED's probably cheaper than E paper.

[Marques]

Not a nice OLED.

[David]

E paper is not Produced in mass enough to be cheap.

[Adam]

You don't need a nice oled.

[Marques]

This is. This is a teaser. Applying a nice oled.

[Andrew]

I would argue you need a nice OLED when you have so little on the screen. Because the blacks mean so much more to look like.

[Marques]

Yeah, like a bright OLED that actually is like black. And the blacks with this ui, with

[Andrew]

the UI that we're looking at would be better with a.

[Marques]

Like, I think they're playing this video. All these close ups of the switches like they're playing this video implying a very premium. Premium experience and very premium hardware and very premium price tag is usually what comes with that. That's all I'm saying.

[Andrew]

Damn rooting. This is going to be sick. Launching.

[Marques]

Don't.

[Andrew]

A separate Android launcher on this is going to be so nice.

[Marques]

Don't buy an 800 phone.

[David]

You know how much it costs yet. You know what?

[Marques]

All right, let's place your bets. This is.

[David]

This is 800649 on Kickstarter. Early bird pricing.

[Andrew]

That doesn't count for anything.

[Marques]

It's a Kickstarter, isn't it?

[Andrew]

That was like that Xiaomi phone. That was like 249, the first hundred people and then $400 after that.

[Marques]

It's going to be okay. It's a Kickstarter. I joined the waitlist, by the way, already earlier today, so we'll see.

[Adam]

I had so many more thoughts about the video than I did about the phone from the video. And that might be because I'm on minimal phone Twitter.

[Marques]

Doesn't that worry you that there's so much in this video that's promising so many interesting little things.

[Adam]

I had the opposite feeling. I was like, God, I really don't want to just like be a jerk because it is like a really high quality video. But the whole time I was watching it, I was like, there's no environmental sound and there's no sound effects for any of the motion. And so it feels like it's. No, guys, that's not what that means. No, it feels. It felt to me like they had done like a blender animation and then just sort of like set. Set music to it. Like.

[David]

Yeah.

[Adam]

Whereas, like, that's what it is. They would have been like. But it would have been a much more impactful, communicative trailer. Had like all of these things made sounds and it had been in a

[David]

space and like they might not have physical units made yet.

[Marques]

They've definitely done Kickstarter.

[Andrew]

Yeah, that's almost more reason to have sound.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Go to make it sound.

[Adam]

Go to freesound effects.google.com and when you

[David]

said in a space, I thought you meant like a real big no, like

[Adam]

adding reverb and ambience. And like I was like.

[David]

So you're saying you want them to hire you to do something?

[Adam]

I'm saying I will be the greatest look minimal phone company.

[Andrew]

Me.

[Adam]

I'll give you the buddy, the. The family, friends and family discount of a lifetime if you. If you bring the. I think I might be the. The. Either the. The best sound designer who's also a number one minimal phone fan or the best minimal phone fan who happens to be a sound designer. I. I feel like I'm at the peak of those two. Watch someone come out of the movie.

[Andrew]

You know Hans Zimmer has a minimal phone, right?

[Adam]

No way. He would have called me by now.

[Marques]

Now that you've seen this video and you're interested in the phone, can I get you to commit to a price tag that is too high to be reasonable?

[Adam]

Like what would be too. Like, at what point am I. Like, this phone is too expensive.

[Marques]

Like now that you've seen this and it's a minimal phone and you've seen what you've seen.

[Adam]

I have one follow up question though. Does it assume that a lot of the integration features are fixed in this version or is it like. Does it have the same bugs that were there when I stopped using minimum?

[David]

They fixed everything.

[Adam]

They fixed everything.

[David]

Everything.

[Adam]

I would pay.

[Andrew]

Careful. Yeah, I know.

[David]

Careful, careful, careful, careful.

[Adam]

Okay.

[Sponsor Voice]

Careful.

[Adam]

I would pay. Oh, I'm gonna make you mad, Marquez.

[Ellis]

Oh no.

[Adam]

Assuming they fixed everything right and like it, everything that's in this video just works.

[Marques]

The integrations, the software.

[Adam]

I would pay the same price that I paid for my iPhone 17 Pro for this.

[Ellis]

This.

[Marques]

Now that's.

[David]

Isn't that $1,000? That's a bold thing.

[Adam]

Thousand dollars.

[Marques]

Cuz it's clearly less capable than the iPhone.

[David]

You're serious?

[Ellis]

That's crazy.

[Adam]

Yeah, I would pay a th000 cuz I want all these features in a phone. I want.

[Andrew]

You have them. You have all of these. You have them. You just also have more of them.

[Adam]

Yeah, no, no, no. I want a physical keyboard. I. I want a headphone. Like I want all of these things and.

[Marques]

But you would pay for them.

[Adam]

I. I don't think that's that crazy.

[Andrew]

I have another question.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

You mentioned minimal phone Twitter before. How active is minimal phone Twitter?

[Adam]

Pretty active.

[Andrew]

Sounds like it's not working very well.

[Marques]

Why?

[Adam]

It says 45,000 views because they're on their computers too.

[Andrew]

Well, because they shouldn't be on Twitter.

[Marques]

No, there's no Twitter on the minimal phone.

[David]

Yeah. Question, Alice, does this run other Android apps?

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[David]

So you could run Sunbird, which just relaunched, which allows you to have iPhone.

[Andrew]

Well, it sounds like they're trying to

[Adam]

do it by itself, doing something. But they haven't said anything. They just said, bloom imessage notifications.

[David]

Wait, so you're saying that. Oh, you're saying that minimalphone is offering iMessage support?

[Adam]

They haven't said anything, I believe. I can't remember if it was Andre or the other founder. And I'm so sorry, I can't remember the other founder's name. He posted a screenshot of his, like, dev unit showing off the notification led because he was like, oh, people always say they want this back. We're gonna show it off. They. And he posted a Twitter picture of the LED being blue, and he said, it will be blue when you have imessage notifications. He did not explain what that meant.

[David]

Yeah, I would be willing to bet that they're doing a collaboration with Sunbird.

[Adam]

I really hope not.

[David]

Remember, Sunbird did a collaboration previously.

[Adam]

I know, but Sunbird was a bad solution to that problem.

[David]

Was a broken. Yeah, it was not.

[Adam]

Yeah, no, it's a solution that requires me giving possibly my most sensitive password to a random warehouse somewhere in, you know, like.

[Marques]

Well, not.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Do you.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

When you said imessage, the first thing I thought was companion phone. Do you think there's a chance this is a companion phone

[Adam]

that changes everything? That literally changes.

[Andrew]

I mean, I can't imagine them straight up saying imessage without it just being like, this is now the companion to your iPhone.

[Adam]

Companion phone. Before, like, when I was books palming, you know, is my main. But, like, which has its own benefits because then you can still do Apple stuff.

[Ellis]

Dude.

[Adam]

If also, if the. If they never get. Because the. The NFC paying never worked in my minimum phone one too, which produced some really hilarious moments of me trying to get off the subway. And that dumb phones video Adam and I did. If that's not fixed, that gets old really fast. Like the feeling of missing a train because you're just like. Like tapping your phone over and over again.

[Ellis]

My problem with all of these is that they make amazing secondary devices, and I want one that's as good to be a primary device. So, like, to Ellis's point, I don't think spending a lot of money is crazy for one of these, but I would like it to be able to be my primary device and have everything fixed and work perfectly.

[Marques]

That would be nice.

[Ellis]

That would be the dream. But as of right now, everything we've tried, it seems to like, like, flourish as a secondary device.

[Andrew]

And nothing seems minimal like having to carry two phones. Yeah, I think you're okay. It's because naming it. This is the same thing with the Essential is when you name it so precisely, you are inviting people to dunk on you for. Yeah, essentially anything. Pun intended.

[David]

The Essential.

[Adam]

You could say that about everything. You could be like. Like, someone could be like, I'm trying to do like a minimal aesthetic. Check out my black sweater. It could be like. Like, there's like 30,000 pieces of thread in that sweater, bro. Like, real minimal. You know, it doesn't really work.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Except the sweater is not called the minimal sweater. This is calling itself the Minimal Phone. I'm saying essentially if. Yeah, I don't know if you were in the like phone's Twitter with Essential Phone, but it was like, we're the Essential phone. Oh, but you don't have a headphone jack. That's. It's just like it got dunked on. For any personal opinion that someone had that that phone didn't. I'll tell you what.

[Adam]

We'll do a bonus episode. It'll be me and you. Some leather armchairs, a nice fireplace. I'll be wearing a black turtleneck and some spectacles. And it'll be called Ellison Andrew's Adventures through the semantics of Minimalism. And we'll just do like an artist.

[Andrew]

I'm the least minimal person ever.

[Adam]

No, but maybe at the end you realize you are caught it. We'll do a survey through, like, art and philosophy history.

[Andrew]

I would watch out of that.

[Adam]

What minimalism actually is. We'll listen to some Philip Glass.

[Andrew]

I understand it's just Andrew asleep on the chair talking and.

[Marques]

Well, the description of this video. I mean, they use the word minimal, but I think it's. They're trying to apply something else that's just like, no social media, no distractions. Because the description is this is the first official look at everything we've been building quietly. A premium compact 5G phone with a full accorded keyboard and OLED display. And an experience to help you stay focused. Brings thoughtful hardware and intentional software in one device built for communication, productivity, and getting things done. It's more than a minimal thing.

[Andrew]

It also says experience designed to help you stay focused without giving up the tools you need.

[Marques]

Yeah, pretty critically so, like Slack.

[Ellis]

But if it's Just running Android. Can I install it anyway?

[Andrew]

Hell yeah.

[Ellis]

Or is it not running Android?

[Andrew]

I think it's probably running Android. Let's be real.

[Adam]

It's definitely going to be running Android. So there's one. I'm not going to call it a review 1 youtuber got a prototype dev device and was allowed to play with it. He was not allowed to show it on camera, but he did.

[Andrew]

No, no, no, no, no, no.

[Adam]

He did show it on camera. There was. There was shots in. On camera. And it has the Android lock screen. Like where you do the. Yeah, but I wouldn't be surprised if the minimal Launcher. The launcher that it comes with integrates with the hardware.

[David]

Everything is just Android at the end of the day, which is just Linux at the end of the day.

[Adam]

On my minimal phone one, I installed a different launcher. I don't remember which one I had, but I was not using Minimal Launcher on. On my first one. Okay, do you want me to keep talking about minimal Phone?

[David]

No, I remember when we said that this is going to be a quick segment.

[Marques]

Yeah, let's wait till we have more info on this.

[Andrew]

Whole episode is quick segments and then us yapping.

[David]

Yeah, the European Union section was long especially.

[Adam]

I want to keep talking about the minimal phone. I do, unfortunately today have maximal trivia to ask you guys. Oh, don't look so disappointed. That was. Was fine.

[Marques]

Maximal.

[Andrew]

Oh, this is just how I look. You know, that resting disappointment face. I liked it.

[Adam]

Today's first trivia question is inspired by my best friend Ian, who was visiting me over the weekend and you guys brought up a Ford truck called the Fathom, which we all know you know can mean like, to conceive or to conceive of something far off. However, fathom has a second definition. It's a unit of distance, the nautical.

[David]

Wait, is it fathom or fathen? Fathon.

[Andrew]

It was just spelled wrong in the doc.

[Marques]

Oh, okay.

[David]

Got it, got it.

[Adam]

Wait, how is it actually spelled?

[David]

No, you're.

[Andrew]

It just said N in the doc instead of M. Oh, okay.

[Adam]

Okay. We're good.

[David]

Yeah.

[Adam]

Trivia question stands.

[David]

Yep.

[Adam]

And the reason this is powered by best friend Ian is because there was a few years where as a joke, he memorized. You guys ever heard of a gill? It's like another old timey.

[David]

Like the fish thing.

[Adam]

No, there's an old timey unit of measurement called a gill. It's a 32nd of a gap gallon that we don't use anymore. And my best friend Ian memorized that and would only give units of volume in gills for, like, years. It drove everyone insane.

[David]

It was hilarious. Very imperial to me.

[Adam]

And so, because I know none of you know what a fathom is as a unit of measurement, I'm here to ask you, of these old timey units of nautical measurement, which one is the farthest? A, the fathom, B, the league, C, the shackle, or D, the twas?

[Marques]

I have almost no idea. I have only one tiny little bit of information about one of them, which is league. Which is the book called 40,000 Leagues under the Sea.

[David]

20,000 Leagues.

[Marques]

20,000 Leagues under the Sea, yeah. So a league can't be that big.

[David]

That's what I was.

[Andrew]

That's pretty deep.

[David]

Literally, my same mindset, I was like, if it's 20,000.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[David]

I don't think the earth's core could go that far.

[Marques]

It's got to be yards. Actually, big is probably a yard. Okay, so it's not.

[Ellis]

This is not a science podcast.

[Marques]

Yeah. All right, cool. Think about it. We'll probably learn something at the end.

[Andrew]

Shout out, shout out.

[Marques]

Ian, Andrew's at the end, like usual. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is a complete website platform, not just a builder, so teams can launch and keep improving their websites in one place. Thousands of businesses, from early stage startups to Fortune 500s are choosing to build their websites in Framer, where changes take minutes instead of days. Framer is the pro site builder for creators, teams and businesses that want a professional site and care enough to get every detail right. Agents solve the gap between AI generated ideas and production ready website work. The agent works in the same place where the real site is designed, managed, reviewed and published. It lands on the canvas, stays editable and can be published when the team is ready. Agents and Framer work alongside teams to streamline collaboration on the same canvas, build custom code components, create and manage CMS content, optimize SEO settings and ship everything all in one place. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free [e-mail] wave for 30% off. A Framer Pro annual plan. That's Framer.com wave for 30% off Framer.com wave rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from Shopify. I know for a fact that there are people in our audience who have great ideas for businesses. If you need a friendly nudge, consider yourself nudged. Shopify makes it easy to take the leap. Everything you need to start selling is included and ready from day one. The moment Your first customer is ready to pay. Shopify checkout helps them finish their purchase. And when they come back, their details are already saved. One time tap and they're done. Because the hard part should be coming up with a great idea, not making a sale. And with Shopify handling the setup and checkout, you have more time with the more important things, whether that's planning the next campaign or developing your newest offering. And if you're really going to do this thing, you gotta make sure you're doing it right. With Shopify, you'll be on the same platform that powers some of the biggest names in the game, like Mattel and Gymshark. With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business. So go make it one. Start your free [e-mail] waveform that's shopify.com waveform shopify.com waveform

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[David]

all right, welcome back. We got some more news for you. This week, CMF released brand new headphones, or at least they announced them. They're called the CMF Clip Pro. It's their first open headphones. This is a growing category of headphones. Bose made some last year that were fairly popular.

[Marques]

A ton. In the last, like two, three years.

[David]

There's been a ton. There's been a ton. So there's. They're earbuds that basically clip onto the side of your ear and they're open so they don't go into your ear canal. They just shoot sound into your ear. This is for people that want to be able to just ambient play music and watch videos on their phones without bothering other people, but also hear other people talk to them so there's not something like blocking their ear canal.

[Marques]

Good for commuting.

[David]

Good for commuting.

[Marques]

If you're biking or if you get into the street around you. Stuff like that. Yeah. So you don't get hit by A car transparency.

[David]

So CMF is announcing their new line of it called the CMF Clip Pro. They put out some teasers for it on Twitter.

[Andrew]

They sure did.

[David]

They sure did.

[Marques]

Because everyone's talking about the headphones, right?

[David]

Everyone's not talking about the headphones. So they put out these teasers on Twitter. They are, you know, teaser photos, you know, the classic nothing cmf, sort of like British minimalism style that they've always kind of done with the, like, weird haircuts and, like, bright colored blankets displaying canvases and stuff like that. But you'll notice in some of these photos that there's a little watermark in the bottom corner that says, contains AI generated imagery. Now.

[Marques]

Sure does.

[Andrew]

Wait a minute. It says way more than that. Sorry, have you read the whole thing?

[Marques]

It contains AI generated imagery. Any resemblance to a real person is purely coincidental.

[David]

Yes.

[Ellis]

Coincidental.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Okay, so what does that mean?

[David]

There's context here. There's context here. It's very hard to. To see and find and read this text. They're clearly trying to hide it. My first question was, if they're trying to hide this so hard, why would they even include. It turns out that just a few days ago, the European Union passed an AI act, which requires AI providers to embed digital watermarks or technical markers into generated files to make automated detection possible. So now they have to put this labeling in there.

[Marques]

This is more than just like, digital.

[David]

Sorry. Companies must visibly mark synthetic or altered images, audio and videos so that users know when the media is artificial.

[Andrew]

That's the one that users know immediately that the media is immediately.

[David]

Which is what it says. Which is clearly not immediately. I don't think that the EU would like this personally, but yeah. So people are freaking out because it says contains AI generated people, basically. And there's a couple ads, there's a video. There's a video of a girl that's, like, wearing them and dancing. And at the beginning of the video, it says, like, this is not a real person. Like, and it's generated. It's an AI generated person wearing them. So that's weird and bad and I don't know. I mean, yeah.

[Andrew]

This also says it contains AI generated imagery. Any resemblance to a real person is

[David]

purely coincident, which means this is not a real. These are not real people. Which is just. We clearly don't love this already because of that. Like, they're not using real models. And that's kind of. But what's fun. What's funnier about this, like, ad campaign is they just Messed up in so many ways. Another way that they have messed up, they published this photo of a guy that's like floating with a CMF Clip Pro in his ear. But you should click the link.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[David]

If you click this link, look at the photos. Right. So he's floating with it in his ear. But if you zoom in on the photo, you can see that this is like.

[Andrew]

It's every Amazon, like white labeled earphone product you've ever seen. Where it's just like.

[David]

It's just literally they like cut out the background and they just slapped it on top of a preexisting photo. It's really bad. They quickly took down that one. But people are getting very angry at them for using AI People. I think fairly, rightly so in this circumstance. I also think this law went into effect literally like two days ago. So we're gonna start seeing this happen with a lot of companies.

[Marques]

This is so strange. Yeah. The thing that hits is like how they're putting it as like light gray text on a lighter gray background. So it's clearly they're trying to make it basically not part of the image. Which I get that it's an ad and you don't want it to be distracting, but they. It does come across as hiding it. And then. Yeah, the videos, it's. You kind of just have to assume that they're thinking people who buy these don't care about that. And.

[David]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Are fine with them. Yeah. Just not using real models or photography.

[Andrew]

My issue with this is, is like one, they're hiding it. I don't get what they mean by any resemblance to people as purely coincidental.

[David]

I think what they are saying is that these are not real models. These are AI generated people. And if.

[Marques]

If it happens.

[David]

Yeah. If it gets alleged that we are trying to like use a real person's likeness in this, it's purely coincidental.

[Andrew]

Oh, they're saying, like, when they say people, they mean like specific person. You think you're saying. Okay. Because the prompt clearly had to have written person. I mean, the other. The video is like a girl waking up a guy climbing, which you can tell is AI when he falls because it's so bad. A guy walking around and like chilling on the couch. Like.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

The other thing is, is this video, other than probably the rig on El Cap, which is him climbing, is like, this is not a crazy thing to have to shoot.

[David]

No.

[Andrew]

And you're a. I know CMF is a budget company, but they're a big enough company to be able to shoot their Own commercial.

[David]

Yeah. I have what may be considered a nuanced take about this. I'm not sure, but.

[Andrew]

Light them up, boys.

[Adam]

No, no, no, no.

[Andrew]

David, no.

[David]

That's a long clip. Do you usually.

[Andrew]

Adam laughing.

[Ellis]

We're usually laughing over that.

[David]

So. Okay. It is, it is annoying and ironic that everyone in the industry is. Is telling companies you have to use AI, you have to adopt this for your stock to go up. Right? Like, the only way for people to get funding for their stock to go up is for them to say, we are adopting AI. We're using this in more places at the same time. Now they have to disclose it. So people hate them for it. So you kind of, you kind of put in between these, this rock and this hard place. I think they should just go ahead and use real people anyway.

[Marques]

For many.

[Andrew]

I think those two things are many reasons super different. I think to use AI is like, for, like, this is competitive advantage, but also like as tools or you need to have like AI features on things or you need to be using it to study different whatever. Not to like make the advertising and. And like, I agree. Destroy the personal.

[Marques]

I don't want.

[Ellis]

Marketing is a big part of companies budgets and if they can save a dime by using AI people, they will 100% do so and tell their shareholders, oh, look, we used AI to save 3%. Like that is the same thing.

[Andrew]

That is, that is when marketing is the thing that makes you look good and it makes you look like.

[Ellis]

So they're stuck in the rock in a hard place. That's the market. Figure it out. Hire real people.

[David]

It is, it is weird. We talked before about how companies that don't use AI and use real people will point it out and it's sort of become like a luxury thing. Like Porsche uses real animators. You know what I mean?

[Marques]

We had to do that for the shrinking down video, for the 3 nanometer video where we were like, hey, I'm shrinking down to the size of the. This single transistor. I know that you're gonna think that this is AI watching this. So I just wanna make it clear. A lot of human hours went into making this. And it came across as like both a disclaimer and a statement of almost pride. Like, hey, just so you know. Yeah, A lot of hard work here.

[David]

Yeah. And I know that nothing saved a lot of money by using AI and not using full shoots and stuff. However, they also hired Charli XCX as their like brand campaign person and they're throwing a lot of money at another Thing.

[Marques]

So yeah, marketing also often feels like optional extra spend. Like nobody enjoys marketing in general. We're getting marketed too. It's just a fact of life. And we're like, all right, companies are going to market to us. So when they also cheap out on marketing to us and kind of hide that it's AI and do all these other things, it doesn't feel good. It feels actually slightly worse than regular marketing.

[Adam]

Yeah.

[Marques]

So maybe they, they could actually take advantage of this by getting a little positive sentiment once in a while and using real models and real people.

[David]

Totally. I think it's kind of crazy actually. Now that this EU law is in place, this is, this is going to feel like the new via Twitter for iPhone. Because every company that has AI in their marketing now has to legally in the markets in the eu has to legally label it clearly and immediately, which means we're going to see a lot of public backlash from a lot of companies.

[Andrew]

Well, and the thing that's weird about there is, is how much of it helped by AI. Like, like if I were scrolling on CMF thing here and if the, you know, some of the close up product, you know, renders use some AI to like make them move around.

[David]

Right.

[Andrew]

To me that's a little different than full blown creating new people.

[Marques]

It wasn't a human doing it before. Right. Like if you're doing the models or whatever.

[Andrew]

But it feels like, yeah, right.

[Marques]

Like the products. I wasn't going to see a real product anyway. Like when you watch spoiler Alert, when you watch those beautiful AI video or beautiful Apple videos of like products that are not out yet, that's a 3D render most of the time with some practical effects. There's a lot of work that goes into making those and to substitute it with AI would probably feel bad, but not as bad as these are not real humans in videos, that feels slightly worse.

[David]

I wonder if they had to use that, that full label because the mandatory labeling through the EU says companies must visibly mark synthetic or altered images. So if you use Photoshop and you use generative fill, this is the same problem that we had at the very beginning of Instagram, like trying to label and it said made with AI. Even if you just did like generative fill on a some dust on the photo. You know what I mean? So do you have to label AI even if you just use like generative fill in a photo? Like that's.

[Marques]

Yeah, the line is in a different place.

[David]

We need to know where that line is.

[Ellis]

You should have to label it if you are Creating new objects or people.

[Marques]

I agree. I think that's adjusting fuzzy.

[Andrew]

I would specifically say content aware fill. Is that that gray area where it's like, am I just trying to take the sign out of, like, the background of this? Did it make a new tree when I did that? Is this creating a new object now?

[Ellis]

I would say you're.

[Andrew]

That's like a tough thing.

[Ellis]

You're creating a new object. Sure. But if you're adjusting, fixing. That's not creating new things, that's removing things.

[Marques]

Sometimes it is.

[Andrew]

Well, if it creates to remove a thing. Yeah, that's the gray area to me.

[Marques]

Damn.

[Ellis]

We're getting too.

[Marques]

It is really. It is really a gray area. I think it's like, like content aware fill. If you're getting rid of the dust on a camera lens, you're technically creating new glass underneath it. I think we all accept that that's not creating a new thing, but when you move the line, you're like, oh, I got rid of like a rock in the background and it put extra grass back there. Okay, that's a little bit further. Oh, I used AI to get rid of a flag that was in the background of the photo. We don't want to have a flag there. But then it created a whole new tree in the background.

[David]

Yeah, okay.

[Marques]

It's still fine. It's just a tree. And then you just keep pushing the line further and further and it's all gray.

[David]

It's all gray.

[Andrew]

Companies want to push the lines to all of us on of different things. Like, marketing with AI is going to turn into something where you're going to have to listen to your audience and they're going to have to determine collectively what the line is, and you're going to have to play that game. And CMF just played that game and found out which is they crossed the line, which is 100% of everything for

[David]

creating, like, fake people. That's way over the line, obviously. But I definitely foresee a lot of asterisks about to happen where a lot of companies literally do whatever the EU says is barely over the line. Like you said, Adam, replacing a rock with some grass.

[Marques]

Right.

[David]

And then they have to mandatorily add the. Add the little marker, and then people are going to think that they. That the whole thing is generated or something.

[Ellis]

Well, is this just going to desensitize everyone to that asterisk? Probably, because every marketing thing will have it now.

[Marques]

That's a possible future, probably. And we're in the, like, forefront of it. So only a Few brands are doing it and getting seen and so it feels like it's rare, but it may

[David]

desensitize us and it'll eventually take away. Take it away once it's, once it's normalized. I just imagine that because this rule is now in effect in the eu, the next couple of months are going to be kind of crazy on social media platforms because we're going to see these tags all over a ton of marketing and people are going to be very angry.

[Marques]

It's going to hit very, it's going to hit slightly differently with each company.

[David]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Like imagine Google doing it. You're like, I could see that. Yeah. And then imagine like Apple doing it. You're like, hmm, that's weird.

[David]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Like there's, there's so many different. It's gonna hit every time where if

[Ellis]

I use Magic eraser in photo, in photos in the EU and then I share that image, will it have this water?

[David]

Well, it should. It.

[Marques]

Yeah. Because Google, remember Google's doing their watermarking. I don't know if it's compatible, but

[David]

that's, that's a hidden watermark, right?

[Marques]

Oh, sorry, not a watermark. It's like it's buried in that.

[David]

But Adam, it's company companies. Companies must do it. You're not a company.

[Ellis]

Companies are people.

[Andrew]

Right?

[Marques]

That's, that's.

[Andrew]

You know what, there's one thing to learn from this episode is companies are not people.

[David]

They're. They're not. Companies are not people in the EU though. But they are in the United States and we don't require the rule. Okay. Speaking of a company that's trying to pretend like It's a person. OpenAI. We talked briefly last week about this lawsuit, this crazy lawsuit that's happening where Apple is suing OpenAI for alleged trade secret stealing and all these like LMAO texts that they have sent. They'd be like, haha, I still have access to the secret information inside of Apple even though I now open work at OpenAI. So now OpenAI published this blog post which is kind of nuts. They're bringing it to the court of public opinion. The blog post is called Apple is getting this wrong. It's not a super long blog post. It's basically just talking about the lawsuit and how they think that Apple is wrong for, for bringing it. But they do share a bunch of imessage conversations and a bunch of email history to show that both. Apple says that it contacted OpenAI in February and got no response, but now admits that its lawyer contacted the wrong person and that the person at the company confused two last names so they emailed the wrong person because they had similar last names. The Apple claims it had a conversation with OpenAI's general counsel, but now Apple admits that never happened. That Apple's lawyer says that it told OpenAI it was resolving any issues, then went silent for five months until they randomly got hit with the lawsuit. This is all alleged by OpenAI. We are not saying any of this is true. Yeah, so they published the imessages and the emails and this is really weird. I don't think that usually companies come out and make blog posts about active litigation. In fact, the number one thing you're supposed to not do is come out and just make a bunch of blog posts about active litigation. So it's very irregular that this is happening.

[Marques]

It makes them seem very confident.

[David]

They seem very confident.

[Andrew]

Can I read to you my favorite message or part of this? Very, very long. I was like. They only allege the like. Couple quick things this thread is.

[David]

There's a lot of redacted.

[Andrew]

There's a lot of stuff but yeah, my favorite part is redacted Apple information will redacted Apple information prototype build but too late for redacted Apple information with the reply. Awesome. I was thinking redacted Apple information for redacted Apple information and redacted Apple information for redacted Apple information. But since redacted Apple information was pushed back then it should get redacted Apple information also. I think we are aligned. Smiley face.

[Ellis]

Same bro.

[David]

How this is supposed to.

[Andrew]

What's crazy about this?

[Ellis]

This is not unheard of for them to be publishing. Well, not unheard of but like you can publish these transcripts, right? We normally see that that from court cases and it'll just be text and that's. That says it's like redacted Apple employee number one whatever, blah blah. Someone had to photoshop into the form of imessage to make it look like imessage for the people reading it to more easily.

[David]

No, no, Adam, they had ChatGPT Photoshop. Okay, yeah, check also where's the indicator that says. That says AI generated image.

[Marques]

I think it's Photoshop.

[Andrew]

It does look like a screenshot even though it's one really really long heavily

[Adam]

edited and to make it blue bubbles even though it's clearly an iPhone Android interaction because of the reaction it goes

[Andrew]

oh yeah, yeah, liked Apple redaction.

[David]

They made it blue. Yeah. So they didn't even do it right. They tried to make it look like an imessage conversation. And they didn't.

[Andrew]

They did get the text correct. Actually, now that I'm looking at it, this isn't even as.

[David]

It's not the right font.

[Andrew]

No, but it's. I can select the text, which means this isn't even a photo. Like a screenshot. No, these aren't screenshots.

[Ellis]

That's what I'm saying. They rebuilt things. This.

[Andrew]

They built this inside the web page. Yeah.

[David]

Oh, inside of chat gbt. That's weird.

[Andrew]

All right, well, this is the weirdest thing I've ever.

[David]

I'm not a lawyer. I would not recommend doing this.

[Ellis]

I.

[Marques]

This isn't legal advice, but, like, I wouldn't do this.

[David]

I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I personally would not do

[Andrew]

this new sound bite.

[Ellis]

Just.

[Andrew]

I do love how it's like how the messages are liked this response. Like all of the reactions are text messages.

[David]

Yeah. Crazy that one of these people is using an Android phone when they're all Apple employees.

[Andrew]

Well, no, the thing is, one isn't an Apple employee anymore.

[David]

Well, it's an OpenAI employee, but it doesn't seem often that an OpenAI employee would be spend 24 years at Apple and then as soon as they get to OpenAI, switch to an Android phone anyway. All right, quick little hit. Just wanted to mention Fitbit data can now sync to Apple Health. Let's clap. Yes. Yes.

[Andrew]

I don't use. I don't know. I was told to clap. I clapped.

[David]

All right, I'm hyped about this because I'm still using the Fitbit Air, still enjoying it, and an iPhone. And previously you had to use a Bridge app. App to bridge your Fitbit Health. Google Health information over to Apple Health. Now it's native, so that's good because I don't have my iPhone in my pocket all the time, so I don't always have my step information or my heart rate variability or stuff like that. And I don't like wearing an Apple watch. So now my Fitbit can just give all this information to my Apple Health and I can still use Apple Health. I like Google Health. I actually like it quite a bit, even on iOS and I've kind of come around to the Dumb Gemini previews.

[Marques]

But can I ask, what do you like about Apple Health?

[David]

What I like about Apple Health because

[Marques]

I found that once I couldn't use Apple Health, I didn't miss it at all.

[David]

One thing that's useful about Apple Health

[Andrew]

is you can copy and paste universally.

[David]

One thing that's useful about Apple Health is that a lot of apps use Apple Health as a data source. Source, yes.

[Marques]

That means it's getting it from your phone. Phone or from whatever's dumping into Apple Health.

[David]

Like other apps that I use will pull information from Apple Health.

[Ellis]

Like what? Like if I use a Garmin and I go on a run, it all saves to Apple Health and then other things can pull that information. Like Strava from Apple Health.

[David]

Yeah, it's sort of a repository. So like I have a GE Smart Scale. The GE Smart Scale syncs to Apple Health and then my macro factor pulls my weight from Apple Health Health. Got it. So you're.

[Marques]

So this is kind of the copy and paste thing. This is an ecosystem thing still sort of.

[David]

Yeah, yeah. It's like Apple Health.

[Andrew]

Apple, I think. I don't know.

[David]

Apple Health is like the heart of my health data.

[Marques]

It's your data collecting hub.

[David]

Yeah. And then all the other apps are different organs that pull from it. Yeah.

[Marques]

Yeah. That's fair enough.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Marques]

I guess I don't have anything pulling from Apple Health, so I wasn't really missing anything.

[David]

Yeah, I have like three apps that pull from Apple.

[Ellis]

I was going to say this has already been super long, but I would love to hear your thoughts on not having an Apple Watch anymore. Cause you've been like the Apple Watch guy for years since I started here.

[Marques]

Yeah, true.

[Ellis]

And now the past couple weeks, you just have not had an Apple Watch.

[Marques]

I've had.

[Andrew]

I.

[Marques]

There was a lot of thought about like, what do I use an Apple Watch for? What will I miss if I don't have it anymore? And it was really kind of a short list of things that I use Apple Watch for. It's telling the time. I do still miss that. But then there is the notifications on the wrist. I don't miss that. That there's the closing, the rings every day, which it's like a fun thing to track, but it's not the most precise and I honestly stopped missing that. And then it's all the. All the other measurements and data collection and information that gets aggregated that I can then learn from health wise, which is literally replaced with the other wearable, which is in this case a whoop. We'll talk about the other one I'm wearing in a second. So I. Yeah, there's like. Like smother all sm. All other small things.

[Andrew]

Do you miss group challenges?

[Marques]

We. They never. Yeah, I gave up on them trying to add group challenges. I figured they'll never.

[David]

Why didn't they do that?

[Andrew]

Yeah, crazy I'll say. And this kind of ruins my whole shtick since wearing a watch. I don't miss notifications on my watch that much. I'll still scream from the top. And, you know, it still should be a thing that they offer because all of the functionality is there. But, yeah, I don't miss notifications that much. Yeah, your watch, usually. I'm also just confused because it's always on your right hand and now your arms are on bands on your left hand. And I'm used to watching your watch just blow up. The entire podcast.

[Marques]

It would light up. I definitely got you very used to it. Just like constantly buzzing and lighting up.

[Andrew]

And that's probably why you hate notifications so much, because just everything. It's 24 7.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

So get phantom buzzes. Like, does your right wrist just buzz randomly?

[Marques]

At first I did, but not anymore. Yeah, there was actually a solid week and a half, and I. I almost would make fun of people for that. I'd be like, what do you mean phantom buzzes? And then I would feel one and check it. I'd be like, oh, my God, it is real. So I'm glad I got over that.

[Ellis]

But.

[Marques]

Yeah, but okay. Speaking of other wearables. So, David, you're wearing the Fitbit.

[David]

Yeah, I'm wearing the Fitbit.

[Marques]

I haven't been wearing the whoop. Andrew, which. What was on your wrist a second ago? What was that thing? What is that? I haven't seen that before.

[Andrew]

The Garmin circa. Oh, it's here.

[Marques]

So you're how many days in.

[Andrew]

24 hours.

[Marques]

24 hours in. Any thoughts?

[Andrew]

I have my extremely brief impressions because it was only 24 hours and I haven't even done a workout with it. But I will try and quickly go through this because this is a long episode. Um, okay, so it's big.

[Marques]

It is.

[Andrew]

It's thick. It's. I want to see it next to your whoop, because now it actually doesn't look that big compared to the whoop.

[Sponsor Voice]

It's just.

[Andrew]

I thought the whoop was a little slimmer profile.

[Marques]

Dimensionally, it's a little bit taller than the whoop.

[Andrew]

Whoop off the wrist. I don't have a big wrist, but I'm using the large, extra large band, and it fits fine. I. But, like, this thing is wide. Like, if you look at it directly at my wrist, I look like Mega man pointing my. Or Mega Man. Like, it's hanging off almost the sides of my wrists.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Which I think is too big. I don't love this. I immediately Want the Fitbit air after this if I want to keep, keep it. So I don't love that. Especially because it's a screenless tracker. This is supposed to feel like something that just melts in. My Casio watch right now is a smaller, slimmer profile than my activity tracker.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

So the auto sleep tracking. Now this has only been one day bang on per like perfect day one day one. So awesome what I would say. So I set my sleep schedule like you do in the Garmin app. I put 10:30 to 6:30. I laid down in my bed around like 10:20. And I remember scrolling on my phone for a while and thinking to myself, I need to see how well this works. 10:43, I put my phone down, says I went to bed at 10:45. At 11:45, Owen woke up. So I got up, helped for a minute, went to the bathroom, went back to sleep. It nailed a six minute wake time at 11:45.

[Marques]

You went to sleep that fast?

[Andrew]

I get, I mean six minutes. I just woke up up, put his binky back in, went to the bathroom, went back to sleep. I was pretty tired. Um, then I, my alarm woke me up at 6:30. I was like, wow, that's really good. That's all automatic because like it could have just said, oh, you're laying down and you set your sleep time to 10:30, therefore you are sleeping.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

But it didn't actually clock it till presumably right when I fell asleep. It also recorded a nap that I took when I fell asleep on the couch watching a movie with Lane right after dinner last night for like 15 minutes. And it is in my daily report that there was a rest time and counted it towards my body battery. So spot on with that. Um, now the other thing to sleeping comes with the button which is to stop the alarm that's going off on your wrist. So it's 6:30. Buzz, buzz, buzz. I press it, I'm hanging out. I'm like pretty lazy not getting out of bed 10 minutes later. Buzz, buzz, buzz. I thought I stopped this. Oh, I must have snoozed it. But in a panic just press it again. Now I'm awake and I'm like, this thing's gonna go off again. I need to figure out how to do it. The app is not very good. Every Garmin user knows their app is information dense but pretty poorly laid out when you want to find things. So I actually googled how to turn it off, which is kind of hard. So you have to hold it apparently. So 10 minutes later, it's like 6:50. I hold it and I turn off my alarm. Cool, we're good. Halfway through my commute this morning with my music playing on the car, my wrist starts beeping and just over my speaker just goes 60 minutes. And I'm like what? And apparently I had started an activity and that was Garmin does. Like if you have it turned on, which I guess by default it does after an hour it alerts you that you've been working out for an hour. So it had connected to my Bluetooth speakers through my phone to tell me that it was, I guess in your headphones it would tell you.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And it told me that it was 60 minutes. So I'd been running a 60 minute activity because I thought I had turned the alarm off. All you need to do on that is the little light on the side should either blink or stay a color when an activity is active. I think that's so simple and so easy. If you want to torch me on the notification thing, I think just an active activity should be. Anyways, last night I was in my backyard for like 20 minutes just putting on my disc golf basket and it auto added that as an activity. I thought that was pretty cool. It wasn't an intense one. Yeah, very much. But it did put it in there. I have my default to just do activity so it doesn't try and assume what it is and I can just edit it. Cuz I mostly only care about heart rate and time. Um, so that was pretty good. However, DC Rainmaker did a blog, a really, really good blog. Comparing everything.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

And he found that the circa, one of its biggest issues was not auto detecting during warmups when Fitbit Air and or Whoop was doing it correctly. And because the circa to save battery life is tracking heart rate at a much less frequent time outside of an active activity, he can't then go and adjust the times because there's not enough information there. So with the Fitbit Air or the Whoop, if it did happen to miss 10 minutes or you know, sometimes if you have a cooldown period in between, it'll say he can just adjust all of those things and gather all the information that it missed. Where this just doesn't have heart rate data.

[Marques]

Reminds me of the Pixel Watch.

[Andrew]

Yeah, yeah, Pixel Watch.

[Marques]

Pixel Watch would sample like, like every second or something.

[Andrew]

I think that's. I think this is doing. I don't say, I want to say every minute or something. It's very infrequent in comparison to when it is tracking. Gotcha. So in my eyes you know, 24 hours with reading a lot of different stuff.

[Ellis]

Stuff.

[Andrew]

The size of this, the band is awesome. The colors are great. I think it's really comfortable. I just think it's too big. This feels to me like Garmin was creating this to be a whoop competitor before not knowing Google. And then the Fitbit Air came out first because if this comes out without the Fitbit Air, it looks so much better.

[David]

That's a great point.

[Andrew]

When the Fitbit Air is out, even though it has all their software issues and bad whatever.

[David]

Like it's gotten better. Better.

[Andrew]

I. I've heard it's gotten better and even, I mean DC Rainmaker has said even a lot of the Garmin things in the couple week it's been up. They've been taking feedback and trying to fix some things. It seems like him and does fit are like.

[David]

I meant the Fitbit Air has gotten better.

[Ellis]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew]

But so is the Garmin as well. But like this to me, especially being twice the price. Feel like the Fitbit Air has better tracking in terms of the heart rate stuff in that it's. It's lighter, it's smaller, it's less of a nuisance. It's just like overall the better product and it's half the price.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

So this feels like a really bad buy when that's out. I do like that they're integrating the button into this. I think they could do some stuff with the lights. I think if Garmin could somehow put standalone GPS in this, it would feel like the Garmin product in this new screenless fitness wearable category. Yeah, for sure. And I think this is a wait for gen 2 and hope they improve.

[David]

No GPS was kind of a shocker to me on this product.

[Andrew]

Yes.

[David]

Especially since it's garbage.

[Marques]

Interesting.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Marques]

I, to me, I don't know how. I don't know how difficult it would have been to add GPS and still get good battery life.

[Andrew]

Can I see your Woo. Probably fast.

[Marques]

This to me feels like the slightly less elegant version of the Fitbit Air. Like, I like that it has a button. Button that's nice. But like the way the bands attach and like having to remove them and reattach them. I like the band, but I don't know that I would do it like this. It is a little thicker, a little taller, a little bit. The app is a little bit worse. Like the data is a little bit worse. It's just like, like you said, Andrew, slightly less elegant version of the Fitbit Air. But I kind of do wish the Fitbit Air had a button.

[Andrew]

I wish the Fitbit Air had a button. I think the button is a good thing. I'll say this. Whoops. It's just as tall as the whoop. Which I thought that. But the whoop is less wide, therefore feels like it's sitting on top of your wrist, not kind of tower or bending over your wrist. And I do think that feels better. I still don't like the whoop mechanism,

[David]

but funny that you guys are arguing over those devices when this thing is.

[Andrew]

So try this next to your.

[David]

Next to it.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

I still think we are forgetting the most important part, which is that this does not have a subscription.

[Andrew]

Well, I think that's like part of the. I think this whoop is its only competitor at 200. No subscription. With all this, it looks like an incredible.

[David]

Which is why the Fitbit Air is incredible.

[Andrew]

Yes. The problem is, is the Fitbit Air beat them to the punch at a better price point.

[David]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

Also not a subscription.

[David]

I mean, it has.

[Ellis]

Has a subscription.

[Marques]

You really.

[Andrew]

No, no, the Garmin has a subscription too.

[Ellis]

Yeah, but it's for, like, nutrition stuff. It's not like, for action data. Yeah, same thing as a Google one. That's what I'm saying.

[Andrew]

That's what. Yeah. That's why comparing to all of its subscriptions are similar to the Google subscriptions. Therefore, the. The Fitbit Air just beats it to everything.

[Ellis]

The Garmin subscription is the Garmin subscription for all of their products. It's not just for this one device. Like, if you have a watch, you can get the same subscription.

[David]

Are you supposed to wear this to sleep?

[Andrew]

Yes, I wore.

[David]

I feel like the thickness of this would be very uncomfortable.

[Andrew]

It didn't bother me sleeping. I just like. I don't know, the fact that it just should be like a bracelet feels like it should be way smaller.

[David]

It's a really big puck compared to the Fitbit Air. Yeah.

[Marques]

I think the Fitbit Air nailed the form factor.

[David]

Yeah. Really?

[Andrew]

So it's. Yeah, it's like not even close. Yeah.

[David]

Yeah. Fitbit, really?

[Ellis]

The.

[David]

The Fitbit needs to make material that doesn't look like ass after like a few weeks, though.

[Marques]

Yeah. I want to combine. I want to combine all three of these. I want the form factor of the Fitbit Air with the band of the. Of the Garmin, but with the connection method of the Fitbit Air. So I wish I could just do the Velcro thing. Yeah, but this material, this band is nice.

[Andrew]

This band.

[David]

The material is nice and the colors are nice.

[Marques]

And give me the battery Life of the Whoop. Give me the data collection of the Whoop. But the UI of the Fitbit.

[Andrew]

Yeah, yeah.

[Marques]

Like mixing them all together.

[Andrew]

Which is funny because I think just Fitbit needs to work on their UI because the data collection's all the same. It's just how you throw it out and be. Are you body battery? Are you strain? Are you Google's. It's just like a score, right?

[Marques]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They all have a slightly different score.

[David]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I will say so. You're supposed to be able to wash these bands. And I have. I've washed it twice and it has also taken out the. The blue color. Like the blue has washed out of the band. And I know that they never said that these bands were particularly lux, but it's pretty sad that I washed it like twice by hand by just scrubbing it a little bit and the blue pigment has, like, come out, you know.

[Marques]

Damn.

[David]

I'm really waiting for some much nicer bands to hit the market. Which they will. They will indeed.

[Marques]

Patience.

[David]

Well, before we get off of the health tracker thing and take it to break, I just wanted to point out there's a new Casio ring watch, so.

[Marques]

Ring watch.

[David]

Yeah. So Alex has the Casio ring watch.

[Andrew]

This is so funny because I saw a watch ring.

[David]

I guess it's a watch ring.

[Andrew]

That's the confusing part is I saw this on a Verge headline, I think, but didn't read that it was a ring. And I was like, this is such a weird, chunky watch. You watch people.

[David]

So it's a. It's a watch.

[Andrew]

This ring.

[David]

It's a ring. That shit. That is a watch. It's like a Casio watch they wear in your finger.

[Marques]

And it's.

[David]

No, they sell it.

[Ellis]

I wish it was.

[David]

And it's.

[Marques]

This is a real.

[David]

It's amazing.

[Andrew]

I think it's so 100.

[Sponsor Voice]

No.

[Marques]

Hey, hey, hey.

[David]

It's cute. It's adorable.

[Marques]

Am I being pranked right now?

[David]

Alex has one. Alex has one. You can check it out later. But they just announced that they are now making one. It's China only right now, which is really sad. But they're now making one that is a full on, like, health tracker device. So it's like an aura ring competitor, but it's a watch that you wear in your finger.

[Marques]

This is not a joke. Are you serious?

[Ellis]

I don't.

[Andrew]

Why. None of this is fake. Why didn't they just make a smartwatch? Like, if any company could just put a smartwatch tracker under like a G shock with yeah. Would make so much sense.

[David]

This is very. It is crazy to me that Casio has not made a smartwatch that just looks like a regular Casio.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[David]

Because a bunch of companies are making third party attachments for it that allow it to be a smartwatch.

[Marques]

I can't believe this is real.

[David]

Look how sweet it looks. It's so adorable.

[Marques]

In the pictures, they have, like, their hands all spread out like this so you can tell it's like.

[David]

And there's, like. It's mini versions of their watches, but you wearing them on your fingers.

[Ellis]

Casio owns G Shock, which makes watches

[Marques]

I don't know if I can beat.

[Andrew]

But G Shock does have a smartwatch.

[David]

I didn't even know that.

[Marques]

Just to be perfectly clear, for audio listeners, picture a G Shock watch.

[David]

Yeah.

[Marques]

Around one of your fingers.

[David]

That's literally what it is.

[Andrew]

Well, and scale.

[David]

Not just G shocks, but, like, all the Casio watches, they basically made this

[Marques]

ring versions of Am I. And they all work.

[Andrew]

They all work.

[Marques]

This is like, the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

[Ellis]

No, I also hate this. This.

[Andrew]

This is.

[Ellis]

When it came out, I was like, this is stupid. But you guys each their own.

[Andrew]

You guys hate buying Adam one.

[Marques]

You hate whimsy. You're gonna hurt your. Your fingers. Why?

[David]

It's just a ring.

[Marques]

It's. Yeah, but you. You remember how the aura ring was? Like, people thought it was really chunky, and they finally made a thinner, smaller one. They were like, all right, I'll finally wear a ring. This is the opposite direction.

[Andrew]

Yeah, but you can't tell time on an aura ring.

[Marques]

Well, then don't get a ring.

[David]

You don't need to wear a watch. You don't even watch on your wrist. If you can just wear it on your finger.

[Marques]

This is.

[Ellis]

Are people.

[Marques]

And this is one of the pictures. Are people doing this? Are they wearing the watch and the

[Andrew]

ring at the same time?

[Marques]

Is this not ridiculous?

[David]

Casio?

[Marques]

Am I. Am I going insane?

[David]

That's amazing. I love that.

[Marques]

This is crazy.

[David]

It's. It's amazing.

[Marques]

What time is it? Hold on, let me just. Yep. It's still 10:45. I can't wear gloves with this on.

[David]

Can't wear gloves with any ring.

[Marques]

I can't. Handshake.

[Andrew]

No, your glove just has a little hole in it so you can see.

[Marques]

Yeah, you can't make a fist anymore with any ring. The battery life is one day.

[Ellis]

The Original G Shock DW5600 is only 100 bucks. Just get. Get that.

[David]

I bet the battery life for this is like 20 years.

[Marques]

This is the tiniest thing I've ever seen.

[David]

Yeah, but a regular CASIO Watch lasts 10 years and it uses a coin battery.

[Andrew]

So I weren't married.

[Marques]

I would coin battery in this.

[David]

It's probably the size of a coin. Of a coin battery. It's probably about the same size.

[Marques]

I'm not sure if I ever meet anyone wearing one of these.

[David]

Alex has one.

[Andrew]

I'm imagining Marquez walking up to a guy on the bus. Yeah. Actually is holding their light phone flip with their Casio ring on the. Holding the flip. And Marquez just launches himself out of the bus dripping.

[Marques]

Just the opposite. Just dripping sweat to me. You know, to each their own.

[Ellis]

Alex says he does not have. Have one.

[Adam]

Oh, get on in here.

[Andrew]

I like the lore.

[David]

You literally had one last week.

[Andrew]

What are you talking about?

[Marques]

You've never worn this. I don't have a ring watch. Ring watch. Right. Okay, good.

[Andrew]

No, he has the cigarette ring.

[David]

Are you. Are you being so. For real right now?

[Andrew]

I'm being so. I've talked about that.

[Marques]

I think they're cool.

[David]

But I saw you wear it last week.

[Adam]

What are you talking about?

[David]

Is this a dream? Did you fascinate me wearing a ring? I remember walking up to you and you're. I was like, you have one of the Cassie ring watches. You're like, yeah, I got it. No.

[Adam]

Was it rich?

[Andrew]

I said, I have a G. Shock.

[David]

Nah.

[Andrew]

Dream beans made it up. You know, I heard my name.

[Marques]

Alex.

[Andrew]

There's a certain.

[Adam]

There's a certain philosophical hilarity to. If you make. If you make a ring. Excuse me. If you take a. Make a watch shaped like a ring, it becomes a combination of two things. It's a ring watch. But if you make. Make a ring in the shape and size of a watch, it just becomes a bracelet. It just sort of.

[David]

That's true. It's a property.

[Adam]

And I say that because I want to stop talking about this.

[David]

Yeah. We gotta be done. This is like a long episode. It was a long episode.

[Andrew]

Trivia.

[Adam]

Right?

[Ellis]

Trivia. Dude.

[Marques]

I'm doing a Hall of Shame at the end of the year of my least favorite product.

[Andrew]

We do. We are working on waveform.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[Andrew]

For the end of the year. So that might. Yeah.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

A little teaser for December. Okay. We spoke about BMW earlier. Way earlier. Like three hours ago. But which automobile manufacturer operated the car sharing service Reach now back in 2016?

[David]

I don't know.

[Andrew]

You don't know?

[Marques]

I don't know.

[Ellis]

Take a guess.

[Andrew]

Casio.

[Marques]

We'll have to think on that. We'll find out answers at the end. Be right back. One more time. If you're looking to hire, you need Indeed. With Indeed Sponsored Jobs, you can spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves@ Indeed.com podcast just go to Indeed.com podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com podcast terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

[David]

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[Andrew]

hey,

[David]

it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now I was looking for fun ways

[Adam]

to tell you that Mint's offer of

[David]

unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back.

[Adam]

So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial.

[David]

Give it a [e-mail] switch upfront payment

[Marques]

of 45 for 3 months, $90 for 6 months or 180 for 12 month plan required 15 per month equivalent taxes and fees extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy.

[Sponsor Voice]

See terms.

[Andrew]

All right, welcome back. Gonna go fast. Skip ahead 35 minutes to get to the end of this. Just kidding. We only have 20 minutes left on the card. Okay, I just want to say Keychron, the keyboard company kind of cooking lately. They, for whatever reason, their Twitter game, they just tweet in every day and they're releasing stuff and they're showing off prototypes of things. And something about it just looks like Key Cron's on the up and up. They just released a new really lightweight gaming mouse with a magnetic swappable battery which is like something I've seen in a couple random Chinese mouse companies. But like, like this is really cool.

[David]

Is this the full mouse no.

[Andrew]

Dave is looking at a prototype render that they're working on. That's. Oh. A lot of like mice enthusiasts have built things like this where it's a fingertip grip only mouse which is essentially only the front half of the mouse. It is like 30 grams or supposed to be 30 grams. That has the magnetic swappable battery as well. They're posting that and they're like posting all these things about like, what are some things we should change. They have something they just released called the Nape Pro, which is this really sick mini wireless trackball device.

[David]

Oh yeah.

[Andrew]

That even Ellis came to me and was like, dude, did you see this thing Keychron's doing? It has six customizable buttons. It fits kind of right at the bottom of your keyboard by the spacebar. To now be a trackball with all these different buttons. I think it's sweet.

[Adam]

Sweet concept. Terrible name.

[Andrew]

It is a weird name.

[David]

Nape is a weird name.

[Adam]

You know what your nape is? It's like the back of your neck.

[Andrew]

It is the back of your neck. Those under nose for some reason.

[David]

Yeah. True back of your neck. Professional.

[Andrew]

Keychron actually responded to random Frank P tweeting that like it seems like Keychron is just kind of going wild lately. And they responded by appreciate it. We made some big changes internally this year. I'm the CEO and I've been personally leading our new product development. We also rebuilt our product team. You're only seeing the beginning. We've got a lot more innovative products on the way. So it seems like the CEO may have just taken over Twitter and it's just like he's tweeting anything from.

[Ellis]

Or did the social media manager become the CEO?

[Andrew]

That also could be true. It but they're just. They're should be showing off new products. They're showing off designs of products they haven't even thought about making yet. Or like to ask for different buildings building in public yet. They. They actually to go back on something we talked about earlier when they released that fingertip mouse. They got the made with AI tag and then everyone was talking about it to where they were like, we don't know why. Found out that it was through the render, like coloring. They used AI to color it and then they were like, I guess this is what does it. We'll like not do that in the future. They're just being like super open. And it feels like Keychron's done the one plus route of be like we're getting mech keyboards to be this actual accessible thing now. We got built big and we're just building a billion things to sell you. That feels kind of cheap. And now we're going into a little more the like, enthusiast space again and getting community feedback. And I mean, I still haven't tried any of these products, so I don't know if they actually are that good. But they're building some cool stuff. And the Nate Pro looks awesome. It's cool that I feel like ellis could have 20 of those on his desk and just flinging balls all over.

[Adam]

Leave it.

[Andrew]

I feel like Ellis could have like 10 of the nape pros and just a million customizable buttons and track balls and everything.

[Ellis]

But it doesn't have a knob though, which is what he loves, so.

[Andrew]

Oh, yeah, it's around the ball.

[Ellis]

Yeah, there you go. It has everything.

[Andrew]

They're also working on a Thunderbolt Doc.

[Marques]

Yeah, I saw that.

[Andrew]

Why not? They're just like becoming the peripheral.

[David]

The CEO is literally responding to every single comment on Twitter.

[Andrew]

Yeah, he's just locked in.

[Marques]

How do I feel about CEOs on Twitter?

[Ellis]

I was just.

[Andrew]

That's a fair point. It leads down the wrong path, so chill.

[David]

But at least, at least he's posting just under the Keychron account and then under his like, personal one. Trying to have a personality.

[Andrew]

One of the things was him. Just like it's him with this little four button macro pad that he put a mouse sensor in and he can use it as a mouse while having four customizable macro pad buttons on top. And he was like, if 500 people can. Well, do you know what a macro pad is?

[Ellis]

Yeah, I had multiple. But like if you put a sensor on the bottom, it just becomes a mouse with buttons. Like a Logitech mouse that you can have different macros on the top.

[Andrew]

Yeah, but they're mouse shape. This is macro pad shape. It just like seems like they're cooking up fun things there. And I think he wrote like, if 500 people all make like pre order this, I'll make it or something like that.

[Marques]

So.

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

What was their first keyboard?

[Andrew]

Keychron Cooking q. Nope, no. K1.

[Ellis]

There it is.

[David]

Yeah, it was last week. Like someone commented, how much are you planning on charging for this? The market really needs a fingertip mask that's cheaper. Can also compare to G Wolves and specs. And he just responded, how much would you suggest Price, Inspect, Reverse Uno?

[Andrew]

And he's obviously not going to like do all of the things, but yeah,

[David]

it just tell me how much to charge for this product.

[Andrew]

That's kind of Then he just one day. Anyone else obsessed with carbon fiber keyboard cases lately? And then just is like him flinging around a random carbon fiber keyboard case that he has.

[David]

Kind of amazing. My new Twitter king David.

[Ellis]

Relax.

[David]

Sorry.

[Andrew]

But yeah, we should get to trivia.

[David]

Yeah.

[Adam]

Okay. It's kind of crazy that you asked. What? Look how cool this is.

[Andrew]

It's a mouse. I know, but like, is it a ring?

[David]

Is it a ring?

[Andrew]

It can be a mouse.

[David]

Is it a ring?

[Adam]

Is it? And it's showing us like things that progressively look less and less like mice. And being like, you can control your computer cursor with this, that weird like two button finger pad you showed us earlier.

[David]

This can of chi forest is also a mouse.

[Adam]

You can.

[Andrew]

Yeah. Oh, wait, actually, is this. Where's this other thing he's.

[Adam]

Because I was saying, you know, you're quite the person to ask us about having your. Your company CEO on Twitter. Because my company CEO is on Twitter.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Adam]

And YouTube.

[David]

That's true. He is trying to have a personality on Twitter.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[Ellis]

Marques, relax.

[Marques]

What video do you guys think I should make?

[Adam]

Dude, guys, we can't talk about YouTube or tech. We have to talk about old timey nautical measurements. Which of the following is the farthest unit of distance? A, the fathom, B, the league, C, the shackle or D, the twas?

[Marques]

Can't even spell the last one.

[Adam]

Twas.

[Andrew]

Okay, I really wanted to make sure

[Adam]

I pronounced it right.

[Marques]

TWAs sound like a smoker.

[Ellis]

You gotta leave that.

[Adam]

I literally can't take it out.

[David]

Or just French one of the two.

[Adam]

All right, which one is the farthest? Flip them and read. And all two of you wrote fathom. I fathom.

[Andrew]

I wrote shackle.

[Marques]

Damn.

[David]

Can't be league.

[Adam]

A fathom is three feet.

[David]

Really? Yeah, that's just a meter.

[Adam]

A shackle is 15 fathoms.

[David]

A yard is three feet.

[Adam]

Sorry, let me finish.

[David]

Sorry.

[Adam]

A shackle is 15 fathoms and a league. Different countries have different exact measurements for what a league is.

[David]

That makes no sense.

[Adam]

It is between 1 and 3 miles depending on what country you are in.

[Andrew]

It's a league.

[Adam]

That is a league.

[Marques]

Two to three miles is an enormous range.

[Andrew]

Wait, so what's a twas?

[Adam]

A twas?

[David]

Feet. The entire point of a standard is that it's the same.

[Adam]

Well, these are old timey measurements. Like we don't use leagues anymore. And also earlier when all three of you were like, I know it's not league because they were 20,000 them under the sea. That is a common misconception. The Jules Verne novel 20,000 Leagues Under Discreet describes the vessel traveling 20,000 leagues horizontally while they happen to be under the sea. They are not actually 20,000 leagues under the sea.

[David]

That's a bad name then.

[Adam]

Correct. That is way deeper than the ocean goes.

[David]

That's what I thought.

[Adam]

You thought right.

[Marques]

You can't do 20,000 miles under the sea.

[Adam]

You can. It would just be about twice the circumference of the earth.

[David]

You. Yeah,

[Marques]

you can.

[Ellis]

Also, this was rich talking about standards as Americans. All right, so.

[Andrew]

Hey, wait, wait, wait.

[Adam]

I have to tell this story real quick. Mom, I love you. I'm so sorry, but I was talking to my mom once and I just. I described some. Some unit of distance and like something, and my mom goes, I'm sorry. Like, how many football fields is that? Like, Cuz everything in America is like, measured in football fields. And I thought about my. My like, brilliant academic mother, and I was like, mom, you've never been to a football game in your life. Like, you don't even know how far. And she was like, you're right. I have no idea how far.

[David]

Football fields. She has an idea in her head.

[Adam]

She couldn't tell me how many feet or yards it was.

[David]

I couldn't either.

[Andrew]

I think it's actually more confusing because are you including end zones or not?

[Adam]

Thank you.

[Ellis]

I don't know.

[Adam]

Adam, here's your trivia question, but we watched this.

[Andrew]

Wait, before you do that, real quick, quick. Can I read? I forgot. This is the funniest tweet the keychron guy did. Yeah, yeah, we're good. It'll be really fast. He tweeted a picture of a mouse with a bunch of macro buttons. And he wrote, 8 side buttons, 88 grains, latest magops switches, blah, blah, blah. More buttons than a typical mobile mouse, but lighter and simpler than a traditional MMO mouse. Would you be interested? Someone tweeted, MMO gamers have waited years for this mouse. And he responded. You're kidding. We don't actually have that much confidence in this mouse, actually. What?

[David]

Okay, that's weird. Multiplayer online battle arena.

[Andrew]

Was that bait?

[Marques]

It wasn't bait.

[Adam]

I never heard of a Boba.

[Ellis]

Okay, we still got BMW. Which automobile manufacturer operated the car sharing service Reach now back in 2016? That's the wrong button. I'm gonna wait and then press it again.

[David]

Reach now.

[Ellis]

Reach now. Do you guys want a hint?

[David]

I have no clue.

[Ellis]

Don't overthink it. That's my hint.

[David]

Is there a comp. Is there a car company called Reach?

[Ellis]

Maybe Maybe it's another language. Maybe it's not. Who knows?

[Andrew]

Stellantis, Halo, Reach. It could be Warthog.

[Ellis]

This.

[Marques]

What?

[Adam]

Isn't Stantis a US Company?

[David]

Stellantis, did you not.

[Andrew]

He didn't say.

[David]

He didn't say non US Company.

[Andrew]

He didn't say any region for the company.

[Adam]

I was just laughing cuz he was like, maybe it's not in English. And you went, stellantis, flip him and read.

[Ellis]

What do you got? Who wrote what? I can't see.

[Marques]

Oh, no.

[Andrew]

Who wants to go first? Marquez.

[Ellis]

Marquez. What you say?

[Marques]

I wrote. I thought Reach now is like RN was like something with.

[Ellis]

I'm gonna stop you right there. You're incorrect.

[Andrew]

It was. He wrote Renault.

[David]

Renault. Renault.

[Ellis]

Andrew, what'd you write?

[Andrew]

BMW.

[David]

David, would you write BMW?

[Ellis]

Correct.

[David]

Yeah, that's. Yeah. Yeah, sorry.

[Adam]

I'll give you. I. I wrote like 50 bonus questions because it was such a long episode. I'll give you a bonus question real quick.

[Ellis]

Quick.

[Adam]

Just.

[David]

We have time for this.

[Adam]

You've got 30 seconds to answer. And if you can't come up with anything, that's on you.

[Marques]

I'm going to try something.

[Adam]

Guys. Name a single phone that you can buy in the United States in 2026 with a physical QWERTY keyboard. That is not the minimal phone 01 or the clicks communicator.

[Andrew]

Buy from where?

[Adam]

The store.

[Andrew]

Ph.

[David]

Physical keyboard.

[Adam]

Physical QWERTY keyboard. It has to have buttons. It has to be be on sale new from the factory in 2026. You can use it on US characters.

[David]

What was it called? Like the exact model name?

[Adam]

Yes. If you get the iteration wrong. Like if you say the blank blank 3 instead of the blank blank 2, I'm okay with that.

[David]

I didn't.

[Adam]

That's okay.

[Marques]

I don't got it.

[Adam]

Nothing. You all put nothing. Our correct answer was the Unihertz.

[Marques]

Peyton.

[Adam]

All right, no more points awarded. Thank you all for listening to the longest episode of the Waveform podcast ever.

[David]

Is it really?

[Adam]

I don't know. Might be close. What do you. What else do we say? Make sure you watch and subscribe.

[Marques]

Yeah. If you made it this far, I really appreciate you.

[David]

The European Union is going to mandate that we have shorter episodes for competition

[Andrew]

purposes unless you all comment right here.

[Ellis]

Now.

[Marques]

Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew]

Save us for interoperability.

[Adam]

We actually have to tell you guys to subscribe to the Verge cast.

[Marques]

And that's where we cut.

[Andrew]

That's where it ends.

[Marques]

That's where it ends. If you made it this far, you got the joke. So there it is. Thanks for watching.

[Andrew]

That's so funny. I thought you were going to say like on Spotify and Apple Pie. Okay.

[Adam]

Waveformers produced by Ellis Adam Molina and Ellis Roven. We're part of the. We're not part of the Vox Media podcast.

[Marques]

No, we are.

[David]

We are.

[Andrew]

We are.

[Adam]

We are still part of the Vox Media podcast network. Intro at. Your music is by Vane Sill. We'll see you next Friday.

[David]

Bingo. Let's go.

[Adam]

Normal episode.

[Marques]

Yeah.

[David]

Press the button.

[Marques]

In a very different place.

[Ellis]

Yeah.

[David]

We might be.

[Andrew]

You have to leave that part in. Just like Marquez whispering. We'll be in a very different place.

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