AirDrop Finally Comes to Android

Oh, hey, welcome to gift wrapping. Whoa, Zoe Saldana. Hey, can you wrap these, please? Wow, iPhone 17s. You splurged. At T-Mobile, you can get four iPhone 17s on them. It's the perfect gift for everyone. I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe. Well, it's better than socks. So...

I have to trade in my old phone, right? No, at T-Mobile, there's no trade-ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift. Incredible. In fact, wrap up my old phone, too, for my Aunt Rosa. Forget that. Aunt Liz will be jealous. Sounds like my family drama. Oh, I got it. I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with... Hey, where are you going? To T-Mobile! Thanks, Zoe!

The holidays are better at T-Mobile. Get four iPhone 17s on us. No trade-in needed when you switch. Plus four lines for just $25 a line. With 24 monthly bill credits and four eligible port-ins on essentials for well-qualified customers, auto pay plus taxes, fees, and $35 device connection chart credits and imbalance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel. Contact us. Finance agreement. 256 gigabytes. $830 required. Visit T-Mobile.com.

I'm pretty sure what they're doing is they are going to put it in all of Android like they always do. Sorry. Airdrop. Why would you airdrop it to the computer that runs the soundboard? Sorry. That's actually hilarious that that worked.

Yo, what is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. I'm Andrew. And I'm David. This week, we have AirDrop on Android. That's the news. That's the whole thing. That's all we're going to talk about for the next hour. And then maybe we'll have some time at the end for some hot takes. But first, a quick PSA. If you are watching this on the Friday that this episode drops, number one...

We are closing in on 500,000 subscribers, and one of our goals on this Waveform podcast channel is to hit that by the end of 2025. So if you haven't subscribed yet somehow and you're watching us on the day it drops, do yourself a favor and get subscribed so you don't miss it.

And number two, that also means it's Black Friday. Congrats. You've made it to the biggest holiday shopping day of the year. I heard the subscribing to the podcast was 50% off today. It's as good a day as ever to do it. I heard it was 100% off. Oh. Yeah. Damn, we really like those deals. It's free? Yeah. Sick. Normally it's a million dollars, so this is a steal. Yeah. But Black Friday PSA, we have some tips.

Chances are you're looking at a bunch of sales right now, and you have to ask yourself a couple questions. Camel, camel, and camel. Yeah, pretty much. Is this actually cheaper? Download camel, camel, camel, or some price tracker because it's probably not.

Do you actually need it or do you just want it because it's cheaper? And have you had your eye on something, but now you're trying to buy an alternative just because it's on sale? I think we've all gone down that path before. It's never worth it. Wow. Just. Yesterday I brought a kettle. What kind of kettle? A tea kettle. Be more specific. It was the alternate to the expensive one and it was on sale. Oh yeah? Have you used it yet? Was it actually on sale? No.

But it did have good, probably fake reviews. That's huge. I feel like every time I've had my eyes on something and then its alternative goes on sale and then I buy that. I then wind up buying the other thing eventually because I was mad at the decision that I made on buying the thing on sale. That is tough. Which is then just more expensive than it was to do it in the first place. Yeah. Just, just...

Take five minutes before you buy anything today. Yeah, contemplate if you actually need it because if it's $5 cheaper and you didn't buy it already, why are you buying it now? Why are you buying it now?

okay so let's talk about airdrop on android because this is finally happened i i never thought this day would come but apparently they've been working on this for a little bit yeah um the update is that last thursday we got this random email from google that was like a link to a blog post that was like hey guys by the way we did it we've made quick share on android starting with pixels pixel 10 compatible with airdrop

And the quote here is, well, you actually asked Google how they did this, and they give you a real answer. Because if you read the blog post, it's... They gave him an answer. They gave me an answer. They said a thing that you can...

You can read for us because the blog post didn't really say how they did it. They just said that they did it. Yeah. Well, OK, so they never actually announced how they did it. However, there is some European Union stuff that Ars Technica wrote an article about that is mostly.

likely how they did it okay uh so the digital markets act got put into place recently which forced apple to adopt this new standard called wi-fi aware So the way that Apple has done AirDrop in the past is that it has this protocol called Apple Wireless Direct Link, which basically uses Bluetooth to find other devices, sets up a little mini Wi-Fi network.

effectively between you and another iphone but it's again it's a proprietary protocol the european union as part of the digital markets act forced apple to adopt this other standard that Google has actually had since Android 8.0, which is kind of crazy. And it forced Apple to actually put a bunch of the AirDrop extra little protocol stuff inside of the standard called Wi-Fi Aware.

So that was sneakily added to iOS 26. Apple obviously did not advertise that they switched over to Wi-Fi Aware. Of course not. Obviously. Yeah. And nobody really made a big deal about it. I was reading that Google probably didn't make a big deal about it because Google has also been kind of trying to repeal the Digital Markets Act because of stuff that it is doing to them that they don't like. However...

Wi-Fi Aware is an open standard. So Google, who has supported Wi-Fi Aware for a very long time, basically just updated to the newest version of the standard, which includes Apple's little tiddly bits. Official term. official term and now you're able to quick share to iphones it's kind of weird because it still is called quick share on android and you can it's still airdrop on ios yeah the other kind of strange thing so crazy seeing max in here

Now, originally, this Ars Technica piece was speculating that it wasn't going to work on Macs, but it does. So now you can effectively airdrop to any Apple device from Pixel 10. The thing that is interesting is right now it is only available on Pixel 10 series. A lot of people were upset about this because they were saying like, oh, well, if Google is locking this to Pixel 10s for now, isn't that just as bad as Apple locking it to iPhones?

I'm pretty sure what they're doing is they are going to put it in all of Android like they always do. Sorry. Why would you airdrop it to the computer that runs the soundboard? Sorry. That's actually hilarious that that worked. So it's on Pixel 10 series right now only. I think the reason that they're doing this is because... Google kind of just dropped this out of nowhere. Oh, my God. It's the same one? No, I did the...

No, you, Marquez, did it. It's the pie. Oh, I dropped it to you. That's my speakers. Andrew just pixel-dropped me. I'm so sorry, David. The Mountain Dew Baja Blast pie. Oh, my God. Okay, well. I think the reason that they're doing this is because they own the Pixel 10. They use the Pixel 10. They want to basically prod it on a wider variety of people, right? So they're like, okay, we control the Pixel 10. We can take in the data logs if it fails.

for Pixel 10 devices. They don't want to push it to all Android phones because then that's too big of a swath of people. That's my assumption. But I did ask Google when it happened because, like you said, we got a random email on Thursday that was just casually like, by the way, guys, you can now. You can now airdrop. Quick little update. And the quote that they gave me, because I was like, did you work with Apple on this or did you do it solo? They said...

We accomplished this through our own implementation. Our implementation was thoroughly vetted by our own privacy and security teams, and we also engaged a third-party security firm to pentest the solution. Wow. So I don't know. People were saying they're going to kill it by the weekend like they did with Beeper. But this seems like it is just a standard that is that they cannot really get around. So, yeah.

It is. So now the update is out. Yeah. If you have a Pixel 10, you can make sure you're fully updated and go in and open any file, anything you want to do sharing with. Hit quick share and you will see. You got to switch it to everyone for 10 minutes. Yeah, and you will see a bunch of your Macs. Want to do a live demonstration? Oh, yeah, sure. Share something with me? Yeah, let me go share. All right.

We're doing it live. And then quick share. We did it live twice. And then send. And then I got to look for you. Is it David's M3 Max? David's PDA. Oh, let's see. I see. Andrew's Mac, Marquez's Mac, Waveform's Mac. I'm just going to do David's. Yeah. You can send in my Mac if you want. All right. Yeah. Okay. Marquez would like to share a photo. Airdrop. Mm-hmm. Save to downloads. Boom.

And it's a photo of the sky. That I took. And the site of a building that Marquez took. Let me use your phone before. And it's cool because it sends all of the metadata and everything. Yeah. It's very good. It's awesome. Yeah, I don't see your phone for some reason. That's weird. But yeah, I see everybody's computer in here. Have we tried the other way around? Have you tried sending something to this Pixel? I don't think...

You can do that. That's what I wanted to ask. No, you can. Rich and I, when this was going on Thursday, spent like a solid 20 minutes just setting each other things back and forth. Okay. So I have, I'm airdropping right now. Oh, here we go. I just missed it. There it is. Except. David's PDA is sending something to me. It's an image. Open. It's a Polaroid. It's a film photo. What do you think about that photo, by the way? What do I think of this photo? Yeah. It's pretty cool.

Is it cooler because an iPhone sent it to you? That's a photo of me, my dad carrying me. Is that you? The baby in the picture?

Just kidding. I generated that with Nana Banana 3. Yikes. Yikes. Nana Banana Pro. It's bad. It's bad that this is too good. This is so good. It's a problem. Okay, so... The misinformation is going to fly everywhere. We knew this was going to happen. Nano Banana Pro. This is part of Gemini. It's their newest image generation tool, if you want to call it that.

And you can just put your prompt in and it'll just generate an image. And it's like photorealistic images now. And they're quite good. What I noticed, because people started tagging me, is if you ask it to generate... a youtube tech reviewer somewhere around half the time it makes

someone that looks exactly like me. And it'll look like me and it'll say MKBHD on the thing. It's clearly trained on some sort of YouTube videos and has a good sense of what this is. It's trained on your YouTube videos. There's no denying. Right. And it's Google. So it's like they probably can just decide to do that. But it seems to alternate between me and then like three or four other somewhat like.

I was going to say Tyler Stallman-ish looking, sometimes Andrew looking, sometimes they'll look like slightly different characters we've seen in the YouTube universe before, and then you'll ask it again for a YouTube reviewer, and it's like, oh, okay, MKBHD, here it is. Yeah. which I thought was interesting. This is why they did not flip out when ChatGPT was doing it, because they knew they were working on it too. Normally, though, in the past, we've had to be like...

Oh, what is it stealing from tech? Like, remember when we first started seeing the little plant that all tech YouTubers use and we're like, okay, it's definitely using YouTube stuff. This is just, it's just you. Some of the other ones maybe are. a little bit of people but this is just straight up you the little profile says MKBHD yeah it just says it yeah also only gives you 1.8 million subscribers so nice disrespect you but like this is

Yeah. This is messed up. There's no other way to say this, right? This is just you. What is the generative part of generative AI again? Also, it uses the exact same wallpaper from the iPhone 16 Pro that it came with. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I don't know. It just feels like I thought you were supposed to use a wide swath of data to generate something quote unquote new. Isn't that the argument?

And like, sure, this isn't a new scenario, but it's just Marquez. Yeah, it's generating me in different random various environments. With a red camera, full logo. a samsung flip an sm7b which it's wrong about because you're using that it's the electro voices right guys come on yeah anyway yeah the interesting but disney's gonna soothe them into the ground Disney? Well, I'm waiting for that time. Yeah, I did. I'm going to Disneyland.

This is relevant. I promise. Go on. I am going to Disneyland. Thank you. I know it's exciting. Cool. It's not. I've only been I've been there once before. Anyway, I'm going in late March just for one day before I do this California photography trip. And why did I bring that up? Oh, yeah.

The profile, the photo of our group photo for the people I'm going with, I put a photo of all of us in the Nano Banana Pro and I said, make us all Mickey Mouse. And it just did. So yeah, the copyright is... it's out the window these companies do not care anymore i think we're at the never have where there is so much of this stuff that companies have just given up because they're like if we're gonna win this race we have to not care yeah

so don't ask for permission ask for forgiveness nobody's gonna forgive you yeah i promise you we will never forgive you we will never forget so uh what is that never mind I just typed in MKBHD reviewing a horse and hit enter and I just made it. Your haircut is exactly the same. It's not even horse review, the ultimate workhorse. No, it's you, a horse, and an F1 car. It says MKBHD on the camera. It's me. It's my hair. It's the black sweatshirt. And it is a horse.

It used to be like, what things did it get right when most of it is wrong? And now it's like, what things is it slightly getting wrong? And it's not really getting anything wrong. Yeah. Wow. We just, we just steal it now, folks. We are just stealing.

Just a couple days later, I think only like two days later, Anthropic did release their new bestest model, Opus 4.5, which is apparently extremely good at software engineering and coding. It probably will not make an image of Marques reviewing an iPhone 16 Pro. I don't think Claude can generate images at all. Wow. That's good because there is no utility to generating images besides screen people over. Yeah. I mean, sometimes it's...

For the meme. Like when I made that fake polymarket thing for you, David, that was pretty good, right? You generated that? You generated that? When I was making fake polymarket stuff, I was photoshopping it like a real man. No, no, I just googled fake polymarket generator. And then I got a good result. So yeah, no AI, but still fake. I'm just going to stop.

So Cloud 4.5 will code really well. Yeah. That's great. That's great. Are people who code? Yes. I've actually seen two versions of this. I've seen two versions. I've seen one version where people who code are using this. out of it and loving it. And then I've seen one version where they're like, oh, this is kind of just better than me yet. I'm trying to think of how we could respond to this as non-coders that wouldn't.

make everyone mad at us. It's kind of in the same way that when we see Sora making a video and people go, ooh, are YouTubers cooked? It's like, well, it's not that good yet. And that's probably mostly true about a lot of these tools. It's a good brainstorming tool. It's a good foundational like base before you actually build more on top of it. Sure. But it's not taking your job yet. But the trajectory is there. If I say the safest statement possible, it would be, I bet you most.

Good coders know how to use it as a tool to help them, but it's not going to replace them. Sure. Yeah, we talked about last week Google Antigravity, which is something they launched with Gemini 3. which is just an IDE that you can code in, and it can do almost all of it for you. So you just sort of tell it what you want, and then it'll make a checklist. They'll say, these are the things I want to work on. Here's what I did. Do you approve? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And it'll just code you an app.

Like I coded Pina Collocator with it. That's sort of my benchmark that I've started using. My friends that are like in the industry and software engineers and stuff, they've basically been using these tools to do all the grunt work.

And then what's more important for them now in their current roles is like the system design of it all. So they're like trying to figure out which services plug into what. But the actual like coding the API, you just or like running the unit test, you just have like an AI do that. Yeah.

So, yeah, I don't know. And with the acceleration that we're at right now, you know, the Will Smith eating spaghetti video was not that long ago. Dang. Wait, I should. It's much better now. Soon they'll be like making whole Coca-Cola commercials with it or something. Yeah. see what she did there Will Smith eating spaghetti sorry this is I'm doing a Gemini banana thing I just tried to and it said I

I can help with pictures of people, but I can't depict some public figures. Is there anyone else you'd like to try? And I said MKBHD and then just did it. It just made MKBHD? So... Why don't I get it? Why did it just steal my likeness? That's such a good burn. It's just like...

He ain't no public figure. It did Will Smith for me. What? It did Will Smith for me. Wow. So maybe it has no consistency. I literally also said Will Smith 80s spaghetti. It just didn't let me do it. Wow. Shout out to Will Smith.

DJI is possibly getting banned in the United States on December 23rd unless the U.S. government completes a security audit, which will most likely not happen. Under the FY25 NDAA, the Federal Year 25 National Defense Authorization Act, unless the audit is done, DJI will automatically be added to the FCC's covered list, which would effectively ban new DJI products from NDAA.

entering the U S new ones. Yes. Uh, but they also probably would not be able to sell within the United States either. Gotcha. And so this at first I was like, hasn't this happened 20 times, but that was only for drones, right? Sorry. So we try to run a show here and be professional and you guys usually Yeah, I was muted and I unmuted it that I could I thought one of you texted me Okay

I keep thinking this has happened already, but the differentiator here is this is just all DJI products and previously it was just drones, right? Yeah. Okay. So that is kind of like, they do sell a lot more stuff now. The Osmo is extremely popular. It's so good. The Osmo 2. So this is like actually...

I mean, yeah, people are going to lose good product from this. And you have a question in here. Yeah. So I'm wondering if this includes Hasselblad. I don't think it will, but I think that DJI is terrified of the U.S. government realizing they own Hasselblad. Don't they do a lot of scientific imaging and glass stuff too? Are they a NASA supplier? I do not know. Zeiss is like all over the place probably Zeiss um

But yeah, I'm curious about that. So we'll see. Considering it's over the holidays that the government would have to do this audit, I don't think they're going to. And they've been talking about banning DJI forever. I think they're just going to get banned. So if there's any hot DJI Black Friday sales, gobble them up. Get it now. Honestly, if you want something. Forget everything I said before and buy all DJI products. Yeah, so that's fun.

They will go the way of Huawei, I guess. Your X2D Mark II is... Way cooler now because it's contraband as well as a sick camera. It's funny because I don't have the one I bought yet. I just have the one. You still don't have the one you bought? That's December now, apparently. I hope it's before December. Before the 23rd? Really iffy. Really dicey on that one.

one yeah i have a review unit as of right now okay yeah okay um they sent me one to check out finally and uh yeah it's really dang good do you want to talk about how great it is it's it's the sickest so good it's so good yeah it's truly an incredible and do you have the 35 to 100 lens as well yeah okay yeah that combo is like yeah Did I get my hot take on primes yet? Did I say that here? Yeah, you did. So many times. Okay.

Perfect. This is a great opportunity to run that back. I love that this is a good zoom. I am so happy that this is the opposite direction of Hasselblad's in the past, which is fun, very deliberate. One shot at a time. Yeah. But it really removes like a big fun element of using cameras, which is just in the moment shooting. uh street shoots random things that happen that you weren't expecting to shoot and having a zoom and having that camera actually like autofocus well yeah

opens up a whole new possibility of things you can shoot with it. And it's great. For me, the big things are like the UI is so good. It's so fast. It has a terabyte of storage built into the camera. You can just connect it to your computer and transfer all the files really quickly. So good. Yeah, it's a pretty incredible camera. It's, yeah. How are we not at a point where a terabyte of storage is in literally... My remote should have a terabyte of storage built into it.

Yeah. What's the hold up here? I'm kind of surprised that more cameras... I mean, that's the funny thing, though, too, about the Hasselblad is it doesn't even shoot video at all. So you kind of already know what's the file size you're going to get from whatever people start to shoot with it. So yeah, terabyte is plenty for photos. It's like 36 megapixels per photo, though. Yeah. I mean, megabytes. But if it was a camera that's capable of video, then maybe you'd be not as sure.

But like also, just like iPads, just like iPads, I can buy a terabyte one if I want, or I can buy a lesser storage one if I want. They should just have an A7. with a terabyte built in or an a7 with four terabytes built in for the guy who wants to just shoot all the videos internal and it's fast enough to shoot whatever the highest bit rate 4k video that it shoots yeah that should just be a product that exists yeah

You're welcome. Very few camera companies are doing this. Leica in the regular M11 had 64 gigs, which is not that much when you shoot 60 megapixel photos. The M11P has 256 gigs, which is much better. But basically, no manufacturers are doing this. And I don't know if they're just terrified that eventually the internal NAND will break and they have to get it replaced or something. I mean, it still has an SD card slot, right?

Yeah, I guess they would still have to repair it. But considering it's super fast. I just want to say that Ricoh GR4 has 53 gigabytes of internal memory. Okay, so I guess everyone's... moving over to it because the gr4 is like brand new so x106 does not canon sony yeah yeah i'm doing it yeah we have an idea for a bonus camera episode coming up oh hopefully next month okay but we'll see all right oh right yeah

No spoilers. I'll keep shooting, though, in the meantime. I love the camera. Well, potentially rip DJI. One last thing. Pour one out. That I wanted to mention real quick. Threads just added the ability to add podcast embeds to your profile. That's true. That's good. This is good for us. It is good for us. It's a very random update. But now if you have a podcast or you just want to, I guess.

advertise a podcast that you like. That was my question. Like this one. Yeah, you don't have to verify that you're the one that does it. Yeah, you can just do it. You can just link it anywhere. Yeah. So you can link a specific episode. You can also link an entire podcast. My one... big annoyance with this is that you have to pick between Spotify, iHeartRadio, or Apple Podcasts. Like when you click on it or when you add it to your profile? When you add it to your profile.

Oh, it's not an RSS. No. Yes. This is very annoying because podcasts specifically are transferred over RSS. Yeah. And that is this open, really simple syndication. You don't have to deal with any of this. You should just be able to add the RSS link and then it opens whatever podcast player you use because I use Pocket Cast. A lot of our listeners use Pocket Cast. I do too. Yeah. And also, you know, Spotify is basically the only multi-platform one because...

Literally nobody uses iHeartRadio. Why do they even add iHeartRadio? I have no idea. This is just like the most threads way of implementing this. Like it's open, question mark, but not really. And this is not on Instagram, just threads? Just threads. I wish it could be on Instagram. So then all the people who steal our content, we could at least be like, yeah, put the link in your description so we get some actual views out of it. Yeah. So.

I don't know. It's a weird feature. Instead of focusing on this, I would really love if you just completed your Fediverse integration, which you have not done. Or let us do like anything. Like it would be cool to also put a YouTube channel there. Yeah. I would like that. That's true. Yeah. Good point. Anyway. Trivia. The edit on this is going to be wild.

What do you want us to say, Adam? When I wrote this trivia question, when I wrote my first trivia question, I realized I had written the exact same Black Friday trivia question that I had written last year. so we've officially been doing this so long that I it all blends together but I have a new question a banger because I am finally looking into and get this retiring

the 12 mini. I've heard this before. And so I was like, guys, Black Friday's coming up. I should be able to get a cheap iPhone. Turns out you can't. All of the iPhone... Black Friday deals are frankly pitiful unless you sign up for like a $100 a month Verizon contract. But they weren't always this bad. And in researching this trivia question. I found a Black Friday deal from 1994 from a retailer that doesn't exist anymore. For the cheapest iPhone? From a retailer that doesn't exist anymore.

called CompUSA that was offering this. Get ready, guys. Are you ready? An Apple Performa 630 CD with a 14-inch color CRT monitor and an HP inkjet printer. For how much in 1994 dollars? That's like a lot of things. That's a lot of things. That's many things bundled together. And if, you know what, I'll be kind.

If you can give this to me in 1994 dollars or you can give it to me in September 2025 dollars because that's the last that's the last month we have inflation data for. Do we have to signify which one we're guessing? Yes.

Trying to pull a fast one on me. Maybe. Pixel 10 is on sale right now. $200 off. I guess I could finally airdrop with it. It's the most Pixel thing ever. I think what I saw was... from apple if you spend like twelve hundred dollars on the iphone 17 pro they will give you a 75 gift card after the fact Nice. Well, AirPods 4 are $70 right now. All right. Well, we'll think about this one. Answers will be at the end like usual, and we'll be right back.

Hey, welcome to gift wrapping. Whoa, Zoe Saldana. Hey, can you wrap these, please? Wow, iPhone 17s. You splurged. At T-Mobile, you can get four iPhone 17s on them. It's the perfect gift for everyone. I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe. Well, it's better than socks. So I have to trade in my old phone, right? No, at T-Mobile, there's no trade-ins needed when you switch.

Keep your old phone or give it as a gift. Incredible. In fact, wrap up my old phone too for my Aunt Rosa. Forget that. Aunt Liz will be jealous. Sounds like my family drama. Oh, I got it. I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with... Hey, where are you going? To T-Mobile! Thanks, Zoe! The holidays are better at T-Mobile. Get four iPhone 17s on us. No trade in needed when you switch. Plus four lines for just $25 a line.

With 24 monthly bill credits and four eligible board ins on essentials for well-qualified customers, auto pay plus taxes, fees, and $35 device connection chart credits and imbalance due if you pay off early or cancel. Contact us. Finance agreement, 256 gigabytes, $830 required. Visit T-Mobile.com. All right, welcome back.

For more depressing content, we go to Ellis today. There are... Hey, I'm the sad guy. There was a big thing that came out against Meta again for the one millionth time, but this one's even more depressing than usual, so Ellis is going to break this down for us. Yeah, so this happens every now and then, like, there's a leak or... whatever and we find out that people at Meta

I'm trying to choose my words very carefully. Don't care. Allegedly. No, it's not that. No, that's the thing is they find out they do care and they're powerless to stop it, to stop the not caring of other people at the company. Careless people, as they say. Long story short, they're.

There is a law firm called Motley Rice. They are suing all the big social media companies. I think it's four of them. I forget which four, but Meta is one of them. TikTok is another. I think it's Meta, TikTok, Snapchat. One other one. I don't know. The important thing is that as they're doing on behalf of school districts alleging that these products are really addicting for kids, and obviously they are, and the companies knew that they were addicting.

and decided not to act on that information. So what happened is there's a bunch of filings, a bunch of... I'm not like a legal person. And a lot of these documents and pieces of evidence got unsealed. So we got to see a bunch of internal communications and deposition transcripts.

and other stuff from this court case that was really illuminating. And before you go read this stuff yourself, just know there's some like... unfortunately some like kind of dark stuff in here that like that we don't really want to talk about on waveform it involves like kids being hurt it's like not what we're interested in but there were some really funny quotes by meta employees that i did really

really want to share with a little bit of context. And before I share these quotes, I feel obligated to say that Meta has already responded to this. And Meta said, and I'm going to read the exact Meta spokesperson quote. The full record will show that for over a decade, we have listened to parents, researched issues that mattered most. and made real changes to protect teens. Most of this filing was from an investigation in 2020, right? Um...

It's an ongoing court case that has been going on for years. Some of these depositions were from as old as 2021, I want to say. I don't know when these DMs came out, but... They are investigating things that happened in Meta as far back as 2017, I believe. So there's some things that, you know, are pretty...

Easy to understand that I think we've all heard about before. For example, there was an internal study at Meta called Project Mercury. Meta hired the company Nielsen that does media research to investigate what the psychological effects of quitting. Meta products, specifically Facebook, were on users. The results were resoundingly people were happier, less anxious, less lonely, lived better lives when they quit Facebook. And Meta just sort of killed the entire project.

and made sure and hid all the findings. And their reason was like, oh, you know, like there's so much, there's this narrative in the media that meta products are bad. And so, you know, if you're going to quit Facebook, of course you're going to feel better because everyone already believes that meta products are bad, which is a crazy argument to make, in my opinion. But, you know, it sort of, I guess, works.

Then there were a bunch of stuff that came out of meta staffers sort of being like this Nielsen study really does show that. You know, people are there's an impact on social comparison. Yeah. Unhappy face emoji was the exact. Yeah, there's an impact on social comparison. Unhappy face emoji was the thing. Another meta staffer wrote, this is like the tobacco industry.

doing research and knowing SIGs are bad and then keeping that info to themselves. That is an exact quote. Another user experience researcher wrote, oh my gosh, y'all, IG is a drug. We're basically pushers, which is a crazy thing to write about the company that you work for. Another UX researcher was recommending that Meta release this.

info to the public and wrote, because our product exploits weaknesses in the human psychology to promote product engagement and time spent, we need to alert people to the effect that the product has on their brain. But we still give it out. But we still did not. It is worth noting that Meta does not study addiction. They only study problematic use. I don't know exactly what that means, but what they did consider problematic abuse is, I guess, up to someone. The lawyers. It's up to the lawyers.

Does anyone remember what I don't I didn't know this code name, but something called Project Daisy where Instagram hid like counts. Yeah, they I was one of the accounts selected to beta test that and none of my friends were and I sound. of like a crazy person being like, there's no likes on Instagram anymore. This is really weird. And the goal of that was to try to make teens feel better because teens were sort of being encouraged to compare themselves to others, which is...

Not easy when you're a teenager. And that got killed because it affected engagement and growth and time spent in the app. And one of the quotes that came out... I can't even, this one is so crazy. One of the quotes that came out was someone on the growth team insisting, and this is an exact quote, it's a social comparison app. F***ing get used to it. Incredible, incredible care for your children.

Um, here's, here's another crazy thing that came out as this. Uh, and I'm just going to read, this is from time magazine. I'm just going to read this exactly as time wrote it. Meta used location data to push notifications to students in what they call school blasts, presumably as part of an attempt to increase youth engagement during the school day.

As one employee allegedly put it, one of the things we need to optimize for is sneaking a look at your phone under your desk in the middle of chemistry. Smiley face. Just fantastic stuff right here. Time has a great article on it. Reuters has a great article on it. And if you're not okay, that's fine. To me, and I'm going to wrap up this very sad story. like this uh i feel like there's this narrative that meta's been pushing that time spent in app is not

the most important metric to their business. They've said this sort of roundabout ways that they value other things. And to me, all of these leaks indicate that that... does not seem to be the case that time spent is still the most important way meta makes money off of their products which i it's that

Every company has time spent on app because more time spent on app equals more time to sell you things. I'm actually going to push back on that narrative a little bit because of how big and I cannot believe I'm like. I don't want to sound like I'm defending TikTok, but the TikTok shop really does change that for that platform. I can't remember where I read this, but I've read a bunch.

a bunch of different articles about how the TikTok shop is so huge globally that they're able to make money off of that. And they don't, the ads part of TikTok is not as big. a part of their business in the same way meta is structured yeah but if you're on tick tock for longer you can get more things on the tick tock shop and make more money i need to find this research it was really it was really clear that while they do want you to stay on tiktok for a long time what they more prioritize is

you sending products to your friend engaging with products and not just being on the app all day whereas in this meta thing we found out like where what time are kids not on the app oh in class like we should optimize the app to get them on the app in class. Yeah, I guess last thing, I'll push back on that as being one of the main functions of TikTok.

is when you're kind of done and you hit back to exit the app it refreshes the feed and tries to hook you on another like yeah ultimately all of that boils down to like they might prioritize this specific way of making money but in all of those ways this is probably why meta says we're not our primary goal isn't time spent on app but it's like they have a primary goal that they put the way that goal gets hit better in every single scenario possible is more time spent on the app i think it's

just logical same with YouTube to an extent same with everything same with this podcast probably like more time I mean I know you want to spend more time with us because we But we will say conclusively, if you're in class right now, turn off the podcast. You got plenty of dishes at home. Chill. We'll be there later. Don't hurt. This is a dish podcast. Anyway, like I said, Meta refutes these claims. They claim they're cherry-picked. This is ongoing litigation. This is all alleged.

But I thought it was pretty crazy and I wanted to talk about it this week. Can I talk about a crazy, more lighthearted article headline I read today? Yeah.

This is from PC world. And I just thought it, this is very short, but I thought it was too funny. It says Ram prices are so out of control. Stores are selling it at market prices. So basically as a seafood lover, this is crazy. So a store in California called Central Computers, and people have also seen something similar like this at micro centers, but they're essentially not pricing RAM at stores right now because of...

how much the prices are fluctuating. They have to just put up signs that basically say, ask a sales associate or just... Bring it to the counter and find out. Catch of the day. Ram is seafood right now because of trying to get compute. Never heard of farm to table? Compute to table is not cheap these days. Yeah.

This just gave me a good laugh. It just says, due to a global shortage of memory chips, RAM and related components have recently seen an increase in 20-50%. They're fluctuating daily. Because of this, we can't display fixed prices on certain products at this time. Correct me if I'm wrong. Didn't Wendy's experiment with this? Oh, they did. Wendy's experiment with dynamic pricing.

Yeah, I think so. They basically did peak pricing. Yeah. First they came for our Baconators. It is interesting. In certain... commodities we uh like gasoline is like we are okay with market pricing in certain cases but when it's

For certain things, it seems ridiculous that it's market pricing. Also, I'm pretty sure this is a small company. Central Computers is probably small enough that they don't have a ton of supply and a very reliable... inventory supply they probably have to do something like this where if you're best buy or whatever and you have a ton of of suppliers and you can sort of account for that you probably aren't doing this ridiculous like market pricing thing and you can eat some of the

dips in profit but yeah it is fascinating i feel like they could just price it to a certain like price it a certain amount higher than they buy it for though right couldn't they just do that it does seem like central computers is a pretty local chain to the bay area and so yeah they probably don't have scale on their side and they're at the way of their distributor yeah i bet that's one is like it coming in and with

Not just like demand, but also potentially tariffs. I'm sure this could be changing literally by how much they pay for it. And also if you... everyone loves scalping these days i don't know why gary v but like everyone loves to just buy stuff and sell for more expensive because heaven forbid anyone gets a deal so like If they sell this at a normal price, I'm sure someone will come in, buy everything, and then just go resell it and make the money anyway.

I'm sorry, I hate scalping so much. I think you brought up a really interesting point, Marques, because if we're talking about oysters, you know, something that... And milk. I want to do oysters because oysters are something that... have like such a short shelf life like like you you you are eating them intrinsically like within a week or two after they came out of the ground you know you can't you can't stockpile oysters you know that's something i'm okay with being market price

A Baconator, which was clearly made three and a half years ago and stored in some underground bunker. I like how you could have used the Ram example. We have it right here. Ram gets... Don't we get a new DDR number like every year or something like that? I would argue that... DDR5 plus Ultramax? I... Anyone on Twitter, if you know, what is made sooner or like what has what spends longer in storage before being sold? Baconators or sticks of RAM? Wendy's is fresh, never frozen.

Allegedly. It's like their whole thing. They probably keep it at 33 degrees Fahrenheit. It's not frozen. It's not frozen. I'm not touching you. Never frozen. Never frozen. That's funny. Yeah.

We were thinking we got a fun game coming up in the next segment. So why don't we do like a little teaser? Let's do one of them. Yeah. Before we actually get into it. Yeah. So this is our tech hot tanks game.

Yeah, Marquez is doing his Tech Hot Takes video this week. I think it's a lot of fun. It's super fun. We do it like once a year at this point, but Harper and I just... collected way too many you usually do like five or seven harper and i probably grabbed like 50 so i figured why not bring some over to the pod yeah let's let's let us talk about it and wine for a little bit um and you can enjoy our whining

That sold it, right? Yeah. So we're going to evaluate these takes and see if they're hot or not and if they're good or not. And if we agree with them. And if we agree or not. So you want to do the first one? Pick one. Pick which one you like the most here. Let's go top to bottom. Let's go first. All right. First hot take from Gregory McFadden. Apple Vision Pro is still the most exciting tech product released in the last five years. Okay, so.

100% disagree. Well, that's what makes it hot, is it's very easy to disagree with, but let's go with... If you do agree, how would you justify it? Apple Vision Pro is the most exciting. I'll try and justify it semi-anecdotally. Yeah. It's already the most viewed video on the MKBHD channel. That's a fact. Yeah.

Which means it's maybe the most interesting. It has the most interest. I think exciting is the key word here. I think this is not most successful. This is not most useful. This is not necessarily... totally game-changing but in terms of excite on the internet okay it's hard to argue against it i have a slight counterpoint that we could maybe talk about apple m apple m series chips right m1

That is exciting. That's the past five years. It is the past five years, because it came out in 2020. Yeah, yeah, it came out in 2020. So, you know, I feel like the M-Series chips, Apple Silicon, is the most, like... It's exciting in there. I mean, it is exciting. It's a lot of superlatives. It's probably their best product. It's probably their most impactful, most improved product. Yeah. It's probably the most powerful product.

How many TikTokers were making M5 and series videos when it came out when the Vision Pro was like the only thing on in like. broken outside of the tech space on TikTok. I don't know, man. As someone who is like... Y'all are in our niche right now. I was getting completely throttled by the last generation of Intel. macbook pros and i remember when they announced that that m1 macbook pro dude it was like define exciting it was like every single thing you've ever wanted

Yeah. Cool. I don't think any of us are disagreeing with that. I think to your point, in smaller communities, there are more exciting products. But if you want to go by total mass, I'm trying to think of a product that... came out in the last five years that's new that more people know about and know exists like our parents all know about vr headsets now

You probably don't know anyone who's been sentient for the last five years who hasn't heard of the Apple Vision Pro. Where I think even some of the most popular and best products from the last five years... aren't quite on that level, which is crazy to say. So... I think this might be a valid hot take. I'm trying to think of a more exciting tech product to the masses that actually hit. I'm asking Gemini right now. Most people that bought a MacBook in the last five years at GBT.

Don't know what chip is inside. ChatGBT did come out in 2022. ChatGBT is a tech product. Yeah. Is it exciting to people? Kinda. That's true. And who knows what I'm about to say. It's more controversial. Motherf***er. bird buddy. True. Oh, so Gemini says that ChatGPT is the most exciting new product. That's pretty Gemini said that. That's hilarious. That's really funny. It said that the most exciting hardware product is the Steam Deck.

That's not even... You shouldn't have said that because it doesn't help your first point by being that wrong the second time. Number three says Apple Silicon. Okay. Number four, it says Apple Vision Pro. Uh-huh. Number five, it says the maturation of foldable phones. Foldable. Some people, yeah. Is that that exciting? So it's a summary verdict. Most transformative chat GPT. Most fun Steam Deck. This Steam Deck?

I think might give Apple Vision Pro a run for its money. I feel like so many people in total generated excitement for humanity. I thought gamers were like so stoked. I feel like you guys keep saying like, this is so cool. This niche right here that goes against everything we're talking about. I would argue outside of the tech bubble, like if you just go up to random people on the street and you said...

Apple Vision Pro, they'd be like, oh, that stupid, useless thing that nobody has. And you'd say, and what about the Steam Deck? And they'd be like, no, no, no, no, no. A regular person would be like, the Steam Deck? A regular person plays video games. A regular person does not care about a $4,000 VR headset. A regular person knows about that headset and...

is like Steam Deck, is that Xbox or PlayStation? No, I'm pushing back on that. I think, I don't think you, I think you underestimate what. I just did Google search trends. Apple Vision Pro is about 3x the search volume of. I don't think there's a single metric. Maybe I'm wrong. Although, look at this. Look at this. Wow, this actually shows how badly Vision Pro failed. So when Vision Pro first came out, it was stupidly popular, but it died immediately.

and had no search volume until the M5 version came out. Oh, no, no. Is that... No, no, that's announcement and release. Oh, announcement and release. Wow, the M5 version didn't even make a mark. Didn't register the Richter at all. So they, like, the search volume for, like...

a week was 3x what Steam Deck has ever been however Steam Deck has continual interest over time much much higher than Vision Pro I take 18 steam decks before i would buy a vision pro i think it's way better you sound pretty excited It says, oh, it does say average Steam Deck is way more popular than Ninja Pro. That's what it says over time. I guess that's one metric. I'm just trying to think. I'm trying to quantify this as total excitement generated for humanity.

And like how many, that's a combination of total exposure and total excitement per person that sees it. By that definition, then I would go chat GPT over the Apple Vision Pro. yeah because it just has hundreds of millions of people the whole economy is moving on everyone right now i think that's it that's actually probably the real answer i want to think of it i guess i i definitely thought more gadget physical gadget

Exciting means, by Oxford languages, causing great enthusiasm and eagerness. In this essay, I will. I wouldn't say that Vision Pro causes enthusiasm. But it... eagerness maybe eagerness in a cheaper version like there's a there's yeah yeah it is definitely interesting an exciting breakthrough yeah yeah it's definitely i think it's gonna be chat gpt ChatGPT is probably the correct actual answer. But, Greg, that's a good hot take.

It's a good hot take. Yeah. All right. We'll take a quick break. We're going to have way more hot takes after the break. I'm excited. But that, of course, means we have time for one more trivia question. Trivia dude. It's trivia dude. It's trivia dude. him i just want to say someone potested in the mkbhd subreddit i feel like ellis would like this video and it got zero upvotes i just want you to know that i watched it and i did like it

Wow. So thanks. I don't have a Reddit account, so I can't. It's about AI Overview. It was about AI Overview and... It might have also been about hot dogs. It was like two of my interests. It was about an all-you-can-eat buffet. That was it. It was an all-you-can-eat buffet. That was not that far off. Yeah, exactly. So, man, I feel seen. Thank you. Nice. Okay.

sorry i'm watching right now the ai overview is it's they searched all you can eat buffet near me the overview says you can use online search engines like google can you I just did! I guess you can't. Alright, so before the podcast, before we sat down to record, David and I were talking about Aluminum OS, which is Google's new project to bring Android in.

like desktop computers Chrome OS Chrome OS thank you um but we're not going to talk about that this week because it's just a rumor so it's not a rumor they have a job listing it's a job listing who knows if it'll ever come out like I mean, projects are canceled all the time. There's also a job listing for the Tesla Roadster. That's true. Is it really? Yeah. Got him. Shouldn't have that done by now. That's what I'm saying. You're just now hiring. You should be firing people after it's done. Yeah.

uh so i forget why david made a joke at my expense and i was like okay every question on today's trivia will be about aluminum aluminum aluminum so this question is about aluminum that's not it but Nice. 42 electrons. Close. What is the atomic number of aluminum? 42. Can I ask a follow up question?

Depends what it is. What is an atomic number? It's how many electrons it has. Protons. Weight of protons. Yes, thank you. Yeah, protons. Which actually is also the electrons, the electron number. Unless it's an ion. Yeah, exactly. You knew that. you know like it's a little number on the little box yeah you know about like the period okay you've seen breaking bad right all right well we'll think about that one too we'll be right back

Oh, hey, welcome to gift wrapping. Whoa, Zoe Saldana. Hey, can you wrap these, please? Wow, iPhone 17s. You splurged. At T-Mobile, you can get four iPhone 17s on them. It's the perfect gift for everyone. I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe. Well, it's better than socks. So I have to trade in my old phone.

Right? No, at T-Mobile, there's no trade-ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift. Incredible. In fact, wrap up my old phone, too, for my Aunt Rosa. Forget that. Aunt Liz will be jealous. Sounds like my family drama. Oh, I got it. I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with... Hey, where are you going? To T-Mobile! Thanks, Zoe!

The holidays are better at T-Mobile. Get four iPhone 17s on us. No trade in needed when you switch. Plus four lines for just $25 a line. With 24-month legal credits and four eligible board ins on essentials for well-qualified customers, auto pay plus taxes, fees, and $35 device connection chart credits and imbalance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel. Contact us. Finance agreement. 256 gigabytes. $830 required. Visit T-Mobile.com.

Alright, welcome back. We got some more hot takes to talk about that didn't quite make it into the MKBHD video, but that are still hot takes that were sent to me when I asked for them. Next up, we can talk about this one from Hey Pollock on Threads, who says... User-defined customization makes everything worse. I picked some of these because they're like, man, I want to agree with you so bad, but I feel like I can't. I think there are definitely two sides to this camp.

There are people who look at whenever Apple allows you to customize their home screen more, everyone's home screens get uglier. You've noticed that? Yes. Like they used to all look the same and they looked fine. Okay, but they also, the options they give you are horrible. They give you like tinting now. They give you like the ability to put the icons everywhere. They give you widgets. They start to let you do more stuff. And I've seen some of the worst home screens.

in the history of the iPhone in the last two years. So there's a valid argument for this, but also it gives you the ability to make everything better. It's hard to ever want to take things away from the user. but i also agree that sometimes i'm like that's yucky look and i don't like it be cringe be free that's all look makes everything worse it makes everything look worse absolutely yeah

But I would argue that it makes it better. Could you make the argument? I've tried liquid glass. Oh, yeah. It's terrible. You can't use it. That's not user-defined software. But it's not customization. It's not custom. Yes, it is. Hair OS. The only thing I like to customize is, do you want it glossy or do you want it kind of not that glossy? Yeah, you could change when you do customization, make the glass where they're all see-through and everything. You can't even tell what the icons are.

That's from Apple. I wouldn't say that's user defined. That's like Apple's. I think they're talking about like Android. No. We're talking about like you get to pick. Because you're saying basically that Apple's direction is good.

No, it's horrible. Well, that's what I was saying. But the further you stray from a defined aesthetic, the more even worse you can make it. That's a good point. If the bass is bad and then you let people... color on top of already bad floor is lower yes exactly the floor drops out from underneath yeah and like the ceiling gets a little higher because you can make it a little better but like how many times have you looked at someone else's home screen on their phone and been like

I'm happy for that. Every time I look at Andrew's phone. Okay. What? Maybe hot take, but, like, we need... Ugo stuff, you know, we need stuff to be ugly. You can't appreciate the beauty if you don't know what the ugly is. Damn. Then why are you hating on the boo-boos all the time? Because they're f***ing ugly.

Oh, my God. This is why, okay, I honestly think this is the best one out of everything because it's just, like, it is the perfect amount of argumentative. Like... LaBuboos are not user-defined. The boobers were defined by a designer who had awful taste. But, like, okay, think of a crock, right? A crock is just a blank... horrible looking shoe yeah right if you couldn't add anything to a crock it would just be like wow another ugly shoe whatever yeah but

Then you open up user customization to it. Yeah. How many Crocs do you think look better after customization or look objectively worse after you customize them? Worse. They all look worse. Have you seen the Squidward Croc? They are worse, but they are personal.

And that's exactly what this is. It's user customized, and it's personal, and that one person will feel it's better, and everyone else will go, we don't talk about the Crocs. Who cares about my Croc? I don't care what you think about my Croc. It kind of applies. You can tell everyone on this podcast is form over function. Because there's so many people create, like, it's pretty obvious that all the user-defined stuff...

Even though people make what we subjectively think is ugly, probably works really well for them. And I shouldn't be putting them down. But here we are on a podcast saying... Just look at the screen one more time. Is that really what you want people to see? But they don't see it, you see it. You know what other user customization we need to get rid of? Car wraps. No.

Highly disagree. I don't know, Marques. Highly disagree. Especially because when the Cybertruck came out and they all just look like a dumpster refrigerator. You definitely had a higher ceiling from being able to wrap that ceiling. The floor, of course, went down. No, the floor went down. I admit it. No, I have. I've seen lots of like gray and black and like other regular colored trucks that look better than the state.

stainless steel dumpster that it looks like without the wrap. But how is that different than the iPhone tennis ball phone? Well, like putting a case on your phone, you're saying? No, no, no. Remember when they announced the... i like customization they were like if you love tennis balls so much you can make your own tennis ball just like human beings do yeah well it's funny because it wasn't if you like it was if the photo of your dog likes tennis balls so much

It took the color from a dog with a tennis ball in its mouth. And it made them all yellow. And it made them all yellow, which I kind of liked. It looked horrible. It's pretty hilarious. It made them all limoncello. I think this is a great take because...

you can probably we can probably all agree that user defined customization always makes the floor lower yes and sometimes it also makes the ceiling higher but because the floor always goes lower you can say god it's just worse but i'm also happy for the people living in the basement Yeah, do what you want. I agree. Do what you want. Yeah. We all agree that this is a great take because we kind of agree with it, but would never, ever want.

people to lose customization i can't publicly yeah i will never like i was pretty funny yeah yeah i especially as like a kid like an electronic needed to be customizable for me to enjoy using it otherwise we're all probably sitting here today because we Probably customized too close to the sun. You know how much they've taken from us?

You know how much they've taken from us. I'm sure like at least 40% of the people listening to this podcast right now got yelled at by their dad because they changed the cursor on their own PC and gave the computer a virus. 100%.

That's right, yeah. That AeroGlass theme on Windows XP went so hard. Okay, that's a good one. Well, we got another one from Threads. Okay. From JDWAYT. A lot of these are Threads because all the ones on Twitter were just like... crypto is not at its full potential yet yeah i made the mistake of

asking people to upvote their favorites, which I thought would make like the hottest takes go to the top. It actually made the coldest takes go to the top because it had the most people agreeing with it. Oh, yeah. So you had to kind of dig a little bit in threads. There was plenty of like... Ask on Reddit and then...

And sort by controversial. Exactly. That's the hottest. That's the real way to get it. That's the real way to get it. Okay, so this person on Threads says, I don't get why people are so upset that tech companies no longer ship chargers in the box. You do not need to get a new one with every new product. I still have and use the USB-C charger from my Nexus 6P. What are you all doing with your old chargers? Yeah, agree. 100% agree. Okay. So this is hot.

I 100% agree with that. Really? Hard disagree. This is hot because, at least to me... charging has gotten way better in the last few years, and you need the new charger to take advantage of it. The companies that are shipping the 100-watt phones give you a 100-watt charger. Agreed. They do. Well, not even that. The new iPhone doesn't have new watts. What is it up to 45 now? 45, yeah. If you have the old charger, what are you going to do? That's actually valid, I think.

the ones that have changed the most in charging still include the charger. Yeah. And the ones that have changed the least in charging are like, eh, you can use your old 6B charger and be fine. Actually, that's true. Yeah. Damn. This, I agree. This is one of those ones where like- 100% agree.

I agree with this. It's where a company can make a statement saying this is for the environment in e-waste, which I agree with, but I also think the alternative motive is it's... make it's money more money for them and so like i want to agree with it without giving them the credit of thinking this is some spinning yeah like some gift to us i yeah i think every new phone

should not come with the charger, but should have a redeemable code. So if you really need the charger, and if you need it enough, you'll go out of your way to order it or go to a store and get it. You should be able to get it for free. And then that eliminates all of...

this debate if i ran a phone company that's what i would do you know apple would say they'd say we'd have to ship the charger in a box to you and you know how much waste that causes you know how much pollution that creates but it's for those who need it you know tim cook

I know you're trying to optimize your palette sizes by shrinking the size of the phone box, but only 5% of people are going to order that charger. It's going to be great. I love that with the new Apple Watch. They were like, we can add 50% more Apple Watches per shipment. And it's like... So you're saying that's for the environment, but you're just saying we can sell more app. We can save more money. I think it's kind of interesting that when you buy music gear or a lot of audio gear, it...

They never come with any Kate like obviously look with power cables, but there's no If it has like USB-C power. No, no, no. Not even like if you buy like an audio interface, it won't come with mic cables or if you buy a microphone, it'll never come with a mic cable. You know what I mean? You're like expected to buy that stuff inside. And the reason I say that is because...

I was thinking about the most mad I've ever gotten unboxing a tech product, and it was when I spent over $1,000 on my Blackmagic Ultra Studio 4K, and it didn't come with a Thunderbolt cable. I recently did that. Holy... Oh, you bought a... black magic ultra studio 4k so similarly i was having issues with my apollo twin with the old thunderbolt 2 at home and i finally upgraded and i spent nine hundred dollars

on an apollo twin with the new thunderbolt and i opened it and there was no thunderbolt and i was like thank god i have a thunderbolt cable right now and thunderbolt cables are expensive it made me so mad dude i say yeah but then it's funny it's like i've never ever bought a mic had been like why no xlr came and frankly i wouldn't trust to include i feel i think that's exactly where the distinction is though because there are certain products that are expected to work out of the box

And there are certain products where everyone buying them is expected to customize it to their liking in some way. And you let them like a microphone. If you're buying a nice, expensive XLR microphone, that's the exact type of person who knows which XLR cable, which preamp. Yeah, they have their brands they like. Or in length. If I get an SM7B and it comes with a three-foot cable, it's like...

There's a 90% chance that cable is now wasted. I'm going to push back because since XLR cables have jack and pin or pin and hole, you can daisy chain them together. Is that what you would do if you then needed to buy a longer cable afterwards? We have daisy chain cables in here. Yeah, but never mind. And if you're getting mad at me about grounding or whatever, then f*** it. You know the email. You're too smart for this. Question. Did the Game Boy Color come with batteries? Like AA batteries?

I think so. Because a lot of products that you buy that take batteries, which is not that many because most of them are rechargeable now, come with generic Amazon brand or whatever. That's fine, though, because that's expected to work out of the box.

Well, if it didn't come with batteries, though, in like 1995 or 2000, I agree that people shouldn't be upset about not getting a charger. But I do think if you're buying a peripheral, a thousand dollar plus peripheral and it doesn't come with a Thunderbolt. Yeah, that's different. that's that we all have a million chargers but we don't all have a million thunderbolt cables fair enough so still be mad but still be mad at all the companies for pretending my mom has one charger

Jess, my fiance, has one charger. We have 600. Regular people do not just have chargers lying around. They take them with them from place to place. But regular people in the U.S. generally because of how carrier systems work upgrade their phone every two years so in the life cycle even in an apple life cycle right now most people have a usbc charger already yeah so like you

I would argue regular people have a USB-C cable. Also, one. Counterpoint. Yeah, and that's all you need. I could not find a lightning cable in this office this morning. That's because I threw them all out. Really? Yeah, why would we need lightning cables? The trackpads. Oh. Yeah, I'll throw those out too. Also, also, me and Maxine. That's lightning? Oh. Yeah.

All right. I would say that I agree with it. I'm not sure that it's super hot, but I do agree with it. I think it's fair. Yeah. All right. Another take from Ross Hahn underscore one on threads.

We don't need a third camera in phones 90% of the time. Disagree. First of all, I think it's a cop out to say 90%. I think you gotta own this hot take and be like, we don't need a third camera. But, okay. He says we don't need a third camera 90% of the time. Why do you disagree? Because sometimes I need long, sometimes I need wide, sometimes I need regular. 90% of the time, do you need all three? Yeah. I think so. Marques, commit on your...

Yeah, I think I agree with this takeaway. Yeah, Mr. Zoom Lens. I would say the 90% is pretty accurate. I also recently, by the time you watch this, was working on my What's on My Phone video, and I'm a two-phone person.

on my right pocket i have my main phone it's an android phone and in my left pocket i have my secondary phone it's an iphone and for months i've been trying to make the iphone air my secondary phone really months i've been trying to do this and the two things that always hold it back are the camera and the battery i can overcome the battery because i'm meaning the other phone i can't overcome the lack of an ultra wide and a telephoto i just can't it's impossible

and the OnePlus 15 I'm maining also has a pretty bad camera, so I'm just without good cameras, and that's just too much for me. You're apparently not alone because the reason that they are shifting production away from the iPhone Air is because the lack of the second camera is making people not want to buy it.

Yeah. I think more than the battery. Wait, I thought you got nine cameras with the iPhone Air. You've got the equivalent of 27 focal length cameras. All anecdotally fight back. I was so excited that the Pixel 10... The base versions have three cameras now because they haven't. Every time I take a zoom or an ultrawide picture, I hate it. Yeah, I mean, it's bad.

It's just so bad. But if you didn't have those cameras, wouldn't you be more mad? I think I would be upset that I don't have them because I wouldn't be able to take the picture and then realize I'm never going to use that for anything or really like every time you zoom.

It's like, dang, this is not that good of a zoom photo. If you didn't have that zoom camera and you zoomed, it would be an even worse zoom photo and you'd be more mad. Unless you give me a good zoom lens because you got rid of the third lens. So you just want two. That's a good point. Just give me two. No, I don't need three. Yeah, I'll... Who needs an UltraWide? An UltraWide is just for fun. You know what's funny? There's like a generation where I think that...

totally change i saw a i think it was an instagram reel but it's probably a tiktok where there's a kid holding his phone and then there's a photographer who's doing like this really high-end sports photography i saw that too and the kid goes yo switch it to 0.5x and the guy says 70 to 200 and he's like no, I can't. What are you talking about? And he's like, man, there's no .5. This thing sucks. And he's like, this is, I can't, I can't talk to you. I mean, if he was at 140 mil.

and he could just switch it back to 70 and say it was 0.5 yeah i like the ultra wide it is a fun lens but as far as like the one that i need every day i need a regular lens just to like quick take it take a picture and then i need a good zoom lens so you can see things from far away even if it's not a good picture just like it's a tool remember yeah as a tool like i need the lens in my opinion the 0.5x is the worst the most pointless camera

I have two specific thoughts. I think anytime I'm trying to take a good photo, I definitely get them out of the zoom way more than the ultrawide. But anytime I'm trying to, like, functionally, like, take an ultrawide because I need it for this photo, it's never about the quality of the photo, but that's when I need an ultrawide. I can't fake an ultrawide like I can with a zoom. Right.

Also, ultrawide is objectively hilarious on the iPhone. It is bad. I want them to make a .2 cam. Why stop? Just put an Insta360 360 cam. Yeah, 360 cam. So anyway. All right. I think this is a reasonable take. It's not particularly hot. I think we all kind of agree with it. But if they'd gone all in and said we don't need three cameras, that would have been pretty spicy. True. All right. Next take.

Dennis on Threads says, wireless charging is overrated. You still on that? We still talking about this? Because it's right. It's not right. It's awesome. It's overrated is the specific quote. It's underrated. I agree with you. Yeah. I will defend this take. I love losing heat. You'll defend this take. I recently... I love... I love overheating. Spending 45 watts to get 27. I love it. I recently received, as part of my employment at this job...

A channel sponsor, channel partner, Ridge Portable Battery Bank. Pretty incredible. Which, because of my phone, never leaves my side. In fact, it is glommed onto the side of my phone like a remora. Nice. And I just love that your iPhone mini has to live with something twice the size of it all the time. It literally looks like a barnacle. It's so funny. That being said, now that I'm charging my phone all the time.

I have seen how inefficient wireless charging is because I can either choose the wireless charger or the built-in lightning cable. And I thought I was like, oh, yeah, it's just like a little... less efficient, you know, no, no, no. It's like, like I can, I can, it's the difference between, I'm going to get these numbers wrong, but it feels like the difference between being able to charge my phone twice, like dead to full on the, um,

the wireless versus like six or seven times with the lightning cable um and i it's like now it got to the point where i actually feel bad when i charge my phone wirelessly like that because i'm like i'm just I'm wasting this battery. I'm wasting this lithium. I'm wasting electricity. Yeah. I'll counterpoint two things to that. Yes. One, your phone fucking sucks.

Like, why are we comparing it to a phone that dies four times in a single day? Of course it's not going to be beneficial for that. Two, I don't think anyone is wireless charging for efficiency. It just becomes...

the placeholder on a desk or a nightstand. It is a thing to just rest a phone on and happens to be charging. And at any point, I can just... pick it up or put it down without having to undo a wire that is now hanging on my desk or nightstand, falls underneath the bed, falls behind in all my cables.

like i have one of those mats on my desk at home that has the wireless charger built in and like while i'm working at my computer i just have my phone on it and it just happens to be charging it otherwise i'd just be sitting there right

And yes, I could, like, I guess, get a cable and do that. God forbid. No, this is my thing. It's just sitting there. This is my other thing that Ellis didn't say. But the most... Sorry, I'm... amped up about this one i think it comes from like four trivia extravaganzas ago where it was like what's things you need in a phone and wireless charging wasn't on it and i'm still salty about it but

everyone's always like, it just takes one second to plug a phone. It's like, we are in the tech space where literally every single thing we do is to shave milliseconds off of things. I'm sure the person saying you can just plug it in also bought. 50 90 so they can play old school runescape like we are at a level of i am also the person that said recently that the best product apple has released in the last five years is uh no standby mode

Which is part of MagSafe. Yeah, which is a wireless charging feature. So I get that I'm being a little hypocritical here. But I think overrated is acceptable. I just don't think that many people rate it. I think a lot of people underrate it. People like to hate on it. I overrate the shit out of it, maybe. I think people rate it because when a phone comes out that doesn't have wireless charging, it's like a knock on it. That's the main thing. I think... I'm hypothesizing that this person...

who is saying wireless charging is overrated does not have or use wireless charging. Agreed. And I think once you have the convenience of wireless charging and then you get rid of it, then you're like, ah, I actually really like wireless charging. But if you never have wireless charging, you look over at...

the other side of the fence and you're like just plug in bro it's overrated yeah that's my hypothesis about this yeah anyway on my bedside table i love when i officially stop doom scrolling and go to sleep four hours after i was meant to I can just like lean over and drop it and then fall asleep instead of like, where's the wire? It's over here. Well, you need the magnets to line up. Yeah, but it's MagSafe. So it just slaps it. That's why MagSafe is awesome because then you never have the...

How do they work? Yeah. Takes me away. When I put this phone on the charger, I go. I mean, there is a case, right? That has Chi Ready? Yeah, it's a pain. And you have shakes a little bit. Yeah. And then I wake up and it's 50%. Dang. That is old. If that was the case, then yeah, maybe it's overrated. Fair enough. All right. All right. This one might age some of us a little bit.

Once Secradu on threads says, AI is just Silicon Valley's libubu. I don't even know what that's supposed to mean. It's a weird new sentence that I can't believe you are saying out loud. AI is just Silicon Valley is labubu. Can someone explain what a labubu is in like three sentences? It's that lovely little doll. Do you know what Pop Mart is? is? No. Okay, so Pop Mart is this company in China that sells toys that are

primarily delivered via blind boxes. So you buy a box and you don't know which one it is. The boo-boo, and it's very big in China. It's very big all over. Korea, right? I thought it was most popular in Korea. No, it's definitely most popular in China. But there is a K-pop group called Blackpink. They're K-pop, right? Demon Hunters.

uh called black pink and lisa one of the members of that group i think publicly had a labubu which helped kick off the whole thing but i'm not an expert in any of this stuff but yeah so pop mart is a big chinese toy company they sell lots of different lines of toys that are

primarily delivered via blind boxes. Lububus are the ones that have taken off internationally. Thank you, Ellis, our K-pop... correspondent i can't wait for the comment that's like it's just so painful hearing these guys try and talk about labubu based on an artist who grew up with nordic fairy tales and made some fairy tale books

that look like Labuboos. That's what they're based on. So how does this relate to AI? I was just going to say, my only connection that I'm drawing is these are extremely trendy. Maybe AI is extremely trendy. That is what they're going with. I'll take it in a different direction. The boo-boos primarily come in blind boxes. And a blind box is an experience where you put lots of money into something and then you don't know if it's going to pay off. Damn.

And by that logic, I would say AI is definitely the libubu of tech. Everything is gambling. I have another parallel that libubus to those not in that world look pretty silly. I'll be honest, so does talking to a chat bot to a lot of people who are not in this world. I rest my case. You're absolutely right. My girlfriend is having trouble. doing this like complicated microsoft word formatting thing and i was like do you want to ask my claude and she shot daggers my cloud yeah

I think this is a wonderful analogy and encapsulation and perhaps not a hot take at all. Perhaps a totally reasonable take. All right, I'll do one more. Camera control is actually very useful. very useful um it's the most annoying feature apple has put out in a long time

I use it to open the camera. That is it. That makes it useful. That was exactly what I was going to say. That's what I was going to say. But you know what else you could do? You could long press on your screen. You could, but how often do you do that? Well, not now because I have camera control. Exactly. So you're saying you use it.

I mean, sure. Making it useful. I would prefer this was a Touch ID button. That'd be a weird place for it. But what are your two long presses on your home screen right now? It's Flashlight and Gemini voice mode. Those are also mine too. So it's not a camera anymore? I could get rid of the flashlight. Or you could do the pixel twist, you know? Camera control also, okay, so you use it to open it. The camera is open.

Once you've opened it, do you ever use camera control to slide tone? All it ever does is interrupt things, yeah. Accidentally, and then I'm like, oh, 2.3x, horrible image quality? Yeah, that's what I want. Yeah. It sounds like if it was just a button, you would be okay with it.

Not a capacity. I just want it to be touch ID. That's all I want it to be. I think this person made it a great flaming hot take by calling it camera control but really all we find useful is the ability to open the camera quickly once you open it the rest of the camera control features are kind of annoying they're they're just in the way

I think that a lot of smartphone companies have made like a million ways to open your camera faster. Well, so for the longest time, you just double press your power button. On like 97% of Android phones, double press power button would open.

There used to be the double tap accessibility. Is that still a thing? It's still a thing. It doesn't work for me, though. It's kind of finicky. It's kind of finicky. But then there would be Android phones where they would add a specific camera button. That would also be a shutter button.

like sony phones did this for a little bit i think an lg phone had a custom like a g5 or something back in the day so there would be like a hardware button to open the camera which is cool if you take a lot of pictures yeah um nowadays it's like

I kind of still just double tap my power button on most Android phones. And then on the iPhone, the action button came along a few years ago. And that's what I would map it to. Open my camera. Oh, yeah. Action button. Yeah. What the heck? There's so many buttons. Yeah. You don't need this button. Yeah.

It's not a button, it's camera control. My action button is one thing. My camera control button is the camera. My two shortcuts on the home screen are two different things. I have my flashlight. So I got all kinds of customization going on. Maybe we're back to the customization. Quick customization. As a non-iPhone user who's never used camera control, I think we have one piece of evidence.

From someone who knows quite a bit about iPhones of how useful camera control is. And that is Apple because it seems like they've completely forgotten about camera control. Also true. They didn't even mention it a single time in the last. It's because they just one-shotted it right out the gate.

You know what's the best indicator that it's not very useful? Oppo in the Find X9 Pro. Didn't copy it. Did a perfect clone of camera control on their phone. And nobody talks about it or cares because nobody uses it. Because it's not that useful.

Yeah. Because you can still double tap the camera button or double tap the power button to open the camera. What would it have to do to become useful? Like what would make you be like, okay, now this is cool. Not be annoying is what it sounds like. It would have to have more functionality. Like granular.

not granular I don't know what the word is but like when I swipe and it goes from 0x to 2.2x or whatever that's annoying to me if I could have more fine control over just notch me over to 2x notch me to 4x If that worked better, I would be happier and probably use it a little bit more. Yeah. But I think it's too late to save itself. I think I just used this screen because it's a huge, beautiful screen. Why would I not use the screen? Yeah. Decent take.

Is it? Well, it's hot because no one agrees with it. Exactly. It's hot because no one agrees with it, but it's decent because we actually all use it to open the camera, so it's arguably useful. Just make it a regular button, not a capacitive whatever the heck. That's what we really want. Cool. Trivia. Well, that was it. Trivia.

Trivia, dude. I don't want to argue about this, but I saw a really funny hot take on Twitter this weekend where people were talking about nuclear energy and how silly it is that nuclear energy is just a new way to boil water. And the hot take was... that it's crazy that humanity essentially one-shotted the best way to generate electricity in the 1700s. And we've just been figuring out slightly better ways to do it since then. Guys, trivia, as I open the trivia document. 1700s?

Yeah, the Industrial Revolution. Oh, yeah. The steam engine. The steam engine. Gabe Newell's been cooking for a long time. True. No one? No, I got a steam. And he bought the cruise ship. I mean, the yacht company. Guys, in 1994, if you wanted to go to Comp USA... and buy an apple performance 630 cd with a 14 inch monitor and an hp inkjet printer on a black friday deal how much would all that cost and you have to let me know if you're giving this in 1994

Or September 2025 dollars? I don't have a pen. Does anyone know why September 2025 is... The last year there's inflation data available? Because they decided to just pretend it doesn't exist. Pretty interesting, huh? Wait, September 2025? September 2025. Right before October 2025. I just assume the website's not updated well enough. Oh, because the government shut down. I was trying to be cheeky and infer. Wow. Read them.

Wait, I never said, I guess we're doing Delta because I never said Price is Right rules. Did anyone think we were doing Price is Right rules just in the interest of fairness? I think I, even when we're doing prices right, I go Delta anyways, because I want to be dead on. We're doing Delta. It's going to be slightly complicated math, but someone read me an answer. I wrote $2025 September. And you wrote $3,000. $3,000. Okay, cool. In 1994 dollars, $700. And I put in 1994 dollars.

$294. And the winner is Andrew Manganielli by about $100 off from David. It was $2,000 in 1994 dollars. You were $1,300 off. Oh. And it was... Wait. It was $4,340 in today money. So close. Which was $1,430 off for me. Yeah, dang. What's the inflation on the Delta? Yeah, that's it. I mean, you shouldn't have to do that. I should get the point.

But the smarter move was to guess the 1994 price because the money smaller, smaller delta away from it. That's where my head was at. Strat, good strat, good strat. Quick update on the score. Marquez with 10. Andrew with 12 after that correct point. David with 9. I'm catching up. It would be embarrassing if I got passed. It would be a shame somewhere to happen to those points. All right. Aluminum, what's the atomic number?

Go. Just visualize the periodic table. Where do you think it is? Aluminum. Aluminium. The periodic table is in alphabetical order, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why it's periodic. Do you guys want to hear a fun waveform fact? Sure. Is this closest delta? Sure, yeah. What? Did you know that the waveform podcast has 0.8 mics per host? Wow. That's pretty fun. All right. Flip him and read. What do we got? We're all exactly even for each other. My goal is to not.

Name a number that's not on the periodic table. So we are actually periodic. Yeah. Because I put 12. Okay. And I put 16. Mine's not periodic. No, we are periodic. No, what's your number? Because we're periodic with a delta of four between us. Oh, 20. 20? The correct answer is 13. So the closest is David. David gets the point. I am now getting past.

What is 12 to be? Magnesium is 12. Well, anyway, that's been it for this week and all of our hot takes and airdropping various files between Android phones and Macs and iPhones. It's been a really good time. Let us know what you think in the comments. But of course, make sure you're one of the people who subscribe before we get to 500,000. It's very important that you do this because once you get to 500,000, the door shuts. No more subscribers is what I heard. So make sure you get in now.

And I believe it's free as of Black Friday. So appreciate you. Thanks for watching. Catch you guys in the next one. Peace. Happy Thanksgiving. Oh, that happened already. If you're in America. Leave it in. Waveform is produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Rovin. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and our true outro music is created by Vainso. Bingo! If you don't like and subscribe, I'll never get back to the producer's table. Do it.

At T-Mobile, you can get four iPhone 17s on them. It's the perfect gift for everyone. I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe. Well, it's better than socks. So... I have to trade in my old phone, right? No, at T-Mobile, there's no trade-ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift. Incredible. In fact, wrap up my old phone, too, for my Aunt Rosa. Forget that. Aunt Liz will be jealous. Sounds like my family drama.

Oh, I got it. I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with... Hey, where are you going? To T-Mobile! Thanks, Zoe! The holidays are better at T-Mobile. Get four iPhone 17s on us. No trade in needed when you switch. Plus four lines for just $25 a line.

for eligible port-ins on essentials. For well-qualified customers, auto pay plus taxes, fees, and $35 device connection chart credits and imbalance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel. Contact us. Finance agreement. 256 gigabytes. $830 required. Visit T-Mobile.com.