Is Anything “New” with the Galaxy S25?
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I could answer this phone call. We can see what this is about. Okay, let's do it. Live on the pod. Is it Marquez? I don't know. Hello? Excuse me. Oh, they're gone. Okay. What is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We are your hosts. My name is Andrew. And I'm David. And it's going to be a little chaotic of an episode. I'm going to be a little chaotic.

Already Marquez is gone. He weirdly was in California playing Ultimate, then Golf, now it's Samsung Unpacked, and then recording something tomorrow. So yeah, but we're still holding down the fort. We are. So we have some quick updates on TikTok and the Switch 2, which we had some...

rumors and ideas about last week and a lot has changed. And then obviously Galaxy Unpacked was also this week. So we're going to talk about our first look at the S25 series and then wrap it up with some of our favorite apps. That's right. But first, did you guys see the new OK Go music video? I did. You didn't like it that much? What? I think it was very hard to pull off, so I appreciate that. Yeah, for those of you who don't know who OK Go is...

Hey, the treadmill guy. Hello, Gen Zers. That was 15 years ago. Dude, I remember. This is for the millennials out there, for sure. The treadmill video was 15 years ago, but they're a band who the majority of their popular songs come out with some crazy viral music video, generally involving one take. This one...

I don't think it was one take. I think there were some editing tricks, but essentially what it was, was shooting the video essentially 60 plus times on iPhones to have different sections of the screen and then playing it throughout 64 iPhones in the music video to sometimes create a grid, sometimes to create, you're looking at an iPhone and it pulls back and it's an iPhone and it keeps pulling back. It's,

kind of wild it was pretty crazy because they had to hit play at the right times and then they aligned the phones so they had to have really good timing to make sure that everything worked because people's hands would like go through the phones my question was do you think that they green screen this here's my so because it said they took over a thousand takes here's my my two questions do we think they fully hit play on every single one just because the ui was never quite there except for the play button

Which still doesn't take away from timing, where if it's a video and the play is fake. It could have been a special player or something. Possibly. Or do you think it was one take? I do not think it was one take. Because there were times where it would be zoomed in and you would think it wasn't the iPhone. And then all of a sudden you would see a little bit of that fuzziness of filming a screen pop up at the end. And then it would pull back to another thing. So I think there were a few cuts there.

in between the singular iPhones taking up the screen. - Interesting. - All I'm gonna say, and I wasn't there, not on the production team, don't know anything about this stuff. There is a, yeah, right, crazy. - Really? - There is a network protocol called NDI, that is low latency, high definition video over a network.

It works really, really well, especially when you have tons of monitors all on one network. It would be unbelievably easy to get 60 iPhones, record all these things, load all the videos into an NDI server, and just have them all triggered remotely and just pretend to press the play button. That's what I was thinking, too. I used to have to get the timing correct when you're pressing the screen, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, but I don't think that's the kind of thing that people would be like, oh, look, there's six frames. I do think they filmed all of it individually or something because it's not all perfect, which is what makes it kind of really impressive and cool. This is true. But yeah, go check it out if you haven't. They've been doing that for...

They have a behind-the-scenes thing. Okay, go check it out. Didn't catch it. There's a behind-the-scenes? There is a behind-the-scenes. I have to watch that. Well, now I might be about to be embarrassed by the NDI thing. But if you're into video stuff, go check out NDI because it's a really cool tool. Awesome. Neat. Okay, so we're going to talk about TikTok next because with all of the different outcomes we kind of posed last week, I don't think this specific outcome...

Was in any of our cards. In all of our omniscience, we missed. It may have kind of been all of our guesses put together. To be fair, there is still not yet an outcome. That is extremely fair. But like real quick, it is becoming increasingly harder and harder to cover tech without politics involved, especially with like a story like TikTok that we're about to go in right now. At Waveform, we are trying our best to be focused on tech and tech politics.

products and how they affect us as consumers, because we are consumers talking about tech here. There are so many great places to go to who know way more about politics, and we urge you to find those people. But our goal on Waveform is to focus on the tech, and that's where we're going to try our best to do here and from here on out. So I just wanted to say that because

Since Friday when this episode came out a whole lot of things happened. Yeah a lot happened and also nothing That's a really great way of putting it so I think like the best way I kind of wrote this down is I wrote a timeline essentially from The either the day after we recorded or the day we posted which was the 17th And we're just gonna go over what has happened in that timeline so

Pretty much right when the episode came out, the Biden administration set out a statement that said, given the timing of when things go into effect over a holiday weekend a day before inauguration, it will be up to the next administration to implement the

the ban that we had been talking about for those outside the u.s that don't know what we're talking about a new president came in on the 20th not only did a new president come in a new president came in on a holiday weekend where monday is generally off so the inauguration was on a monday the ban taking effect was on a sunday so the next day would be a non-working day

And this sort of thing has historical precedent in America. Past presidents have said, hey, I don't want to deal with this law. I'm going to let the next guy figure out how we're going to handle this. I'm out. There are also times where presidents do the opposite, where they're like, I'm going to try and screw the next guy before this guy comes.

this is not crazy it's just like a wild timing yeah of everything yep so previous administration said they were not going to enforce anything on the 19th despite that being the day we all saw as the band coming

And on the 17th, after that statement was made, TikTok had a statement that came out on their website. It said, statement on possible shutdown. The statements issued today by both the Biden White House and the Department of Justice have failed to provide the necessary clarity and assurance to service providers that are integral in maintaining TikTok's availability to over 170 million Americans. Unless the Biden administration immediately provides a definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers assuring non-enforcement, unfortunately TikTok will be forced to go dark on January 19th.

Again, January 19th is the Sunday that we were all expecting. Correct. However, comes Saturday night, the 18th, those of us on TikTok and Instagram

I'm pretty sure it was right around seven o'clock because of how many people in our Slack all messaged the exact same screen they got on TikTok, which was as you open to the app, you got a pop-up that said, important update from TikTok. We regret a US law banning TikTok will take effect on January 19th and force us to make our services temporary unavailable. We're working to restore our service in the US as soon as possible, and we appreciate your support. Stay tuned.

At that point, though, if you press dismiss, you just kept scrolling TikTok. Which is what I did. At first. At first. At first. At first. Okay. Yes.

Then maybe like an hour later, there was a little like, then people were going on and realizing I can't like anything. Oh, profile pictures are blank. Something weird is happening. And then a couple hours. So then in that time, then we all got the sorry, TikTok isn't available right now. Right. Around 11 p.m. So like not even a few hours later, then we got the official TikTok.

TikTok is down message again on the 18th. So not the day of the banning yet. It says, sorry, TikTok isn't available right now. A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the US. Unfortunately, that means you can't use TikTok for now. We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once...

to reinstate TikTok once he takes office, please stay tuned, close app. And that's when it locked down. Really quick, funny enough, some people said the Vision Pro app worked fine, which I just think is very funny. That is true. But for the most part,

TikTok was down at this point by the nighttime of Saturday. So I want to note that was around 11 p.m. Eastern time. And I saw a lot of people saying it's very sketchy that they took it down before the actual ban went into effect. And I want to note the reason that they did that is because as of midnight, TikTok

It would have been a $5,000 per user that downloaded the app fine on both Google and Apple if users downloaded from the App Store. So TikTok probably just wanted to be very, very careful. There was a potential for that to happen. Like if it all went to effect and was a force the next day. Yes. Yes. So that is the reason that they took it down around 11 or they stopped and stopped serving the TikTok service around 11. And that happened as well as TikTok.

There was an Axios report and there's lots of things you can see. Saturday night, TikTok goes dark and disappears from app stores. That's when we saw it started going off and places like Oracle hosting. Yes. Right. Okay. So TikTok is down. Everyone's kind of freaking out. It actually happened. But because it came the day before, we can all assume TikTok is the one shutting it down. The government didn't force any hands here. Then I think less than 12 hours later,

If you happen to be a, you know, when you have your phone and you're just like so used to pressing buttons without even doing it. So I opened TikTok, even though it was closed. And then all of a sudden I get a thing that says, welcome back. Thanks for your patient support. As a result of President Trump's efforts, TikTok is back in the US. You can continue to create, share and discover things on TikTok. But this was still before the inauguration even happened. This was Sunday. Yeah. Okay, cool. So TikTok's back.

So sort of it's still not in the app store. Correct. There are still some app stores it's not available in. I know Google Play Store is still not available in at least as of recording. And Apple. And Apple is also not in the app store. Yeah, I lightly thought about downloading it before they took it off just in case because I've never used it before. But I decided to not do that. And now I can never do it. So I think that's for the best for me.

- Not never, it'll probably come back. I mean, you could still go to like TikTok.com and see them. - I don't want to use TikTok. - That part is for the best. - Yes, okay. - And so like kind of where we're at right now is since then the inauguration has happened. There has been an extension, I believe a 75 day extension

I don't even know. This is saying that ByteDance should be giving 50% of equity to an American company, I believe it has to be, in order to get through. This is the part where things get very unclear. This is the part where things get unclear because there's a lot of possibilities being thrown around and there's nothing substantial right now. So we're going to have to wait until we hear actual things that are actually happening.

people say things. And until actual things are actually happening, you know. For us, TikTok is up. There was panic. It was kind of fun watching it on Saturday before like the imminent shutdown and the people on TikTok kind of freaking out. But yeah, we're kind of in a place where we'll see what happens. I do think one of our predictions was, and I think a lot of people assumed there would be like a push and like give it some more time. We just weren't expecting to

Lose it get it back and then get the prolonged nests of yes, but I have a feeling I wouldn't be surprised if in 75 days We still have no idea. What's really going on. I also want to note I think on Saturday over the weekend Instagram decided to change the shape of the profile grid from square to the shape of a video and

And they force that on everybody. I saw someone posting about that like last week. And they're clearly foaming at the mouth waiting for their opportunity. Of course they are. And that Clips app that they announced, it's like a video editing CapCut competitor. That was the funniest. I saw, so like everyone knew this was happening at TikTok. I saw a bunch of people on Instagram freaking out. They're like, I lost CapCut. How am I going to edit? Like, I don't think people realize how many...

social media influencers, big or small, are just editing on their phone in something like CapCut for things outside of TikTok. There was a funny thing where someone from The Verge posted on threads, like, I bet Instagram's only been working on this CapCut clone for like a couple of days and they're already announcing it. And then Adam Masseri replied, we've been working on it for a couple of months, actually, which is like, okay. So we're going to leave that there, see what happens. The next week will probably be enlightening.

Maybe. Or we'll know literally nothing. Or we'll know literally nothing. We'll see. On a less terrifying note, Switch 2 actually got announced! We have Peach! We have Mario! We have Kirby, maybe? I don't know. I don't really keep track of these things. I don't know. Yeah, okay. So if you guys will remember, we were extremely...

confused last week because it was the day before maybe the switch 2 was maybe gonna get announced maybe and that did and then Adam used a bunch of the footage in the actual video so if you were watching the video version of this podcast last week you did see the actual trailer or bits of the actual trailer going over what we were talking about because we were mostly correct we were mostly correct I think

I think there was a comment that was like, it's so funny that they said they don't exactly know what it is, yet everything they said was pretty much what it is. Which, to be fair, it's not like we did the reporting. No, not at all. It was a real... Usually leaks a day before an event are pretty accurate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Often. I think the couple things that we're not quite sure about still, I'll do not sure about, and then we'll do things that we are sure about. Okay. I don't... Mario. It was very much a...

like teaser trailer. So we didn't get really any hard specs. So we don't, there was, it's larger. I don't think we got exact screen size. We did not get exact screen size, but people have been doing a lot of digging and people are guessing it as eight inches based on the scaling stuff. Okay. I love to think that there are people out there mathematically figuring out. Oh, they are doing that. I love that. They are doing that. One thing we did not figure out is,

exactly how the magnets work. There are... Society still has not figured that out. What are magnets? It seems like there's this small...

piece that goes inside of the switch and then there's also we did find out the buttons on the back are the magnetic release yes so whether this is a fully polarizing magnet whether this is i liked your idea of like it's a magnet with maybe just something that kind of pushes it off to yeah connect it disconnected or not people are kind of speculating that when you press this button it basically pushes it just far away from where the magnetic field really latches it in that it kind of falls off

Who's to say? That would be a simpler mechanism. It would, and either way, a thousand times better than the slide mechanism. Yes, yes. We don't... Oh, one thing. That little protruding part from the inside, you know? So for those that didn't see the trailer yet, basically, the Switch 2 is the body, and then it has this interior part where the Joy-Cons attach, right?

But there's sort of like a USB-A type looking thing on the inside. And many people are concerned about this. I think we had a minor conversation about this last week. Still don't really know how that connects to the Joy-Cons as well. That's sort of an unanswered question. I think it almost goes in like a plug. And I was wondering if it is polarizing magnets, if there's just a small...

place right there that holds on to that little protrusion and that's how it kind of holds it in there or if it's a connection of some kind it looks like do you know the usba thumb drives where they're really thin and you take them apart and it's just the contact part yeah it looks like that on both sides yeah so that's interesting um but yeah if the actual ellis did you watch the actual trailer hmm

The sound design in it is so good. It's so good. I will watch and provide feedback next week. I would love to hear your thoughts on it because it's just like, it's so satisfying, the clicks. I think Marques, Eric, and I were watching and they did the first Joy-Con snap

oh man yeah that was so nice yeah it's very nice yeah i probably should have watched it but i just don't play games like that it's pretty good it was just beautifully done they did a great job but just like it's the switch and then it like kind of pops and gets a little bigger and then the joy cons like fade over because they're black and we have these pops of color on the interior where it connects and also right under the joysticks yeah um

I saw people talking about their way of saying that. So we didn't get the actual, if we know their Hall effect...

um right but somebody do you know the part where both of them kind of snap on and race around yeah someone thinks they're a mouse well people were saying also that it's drifting around so that's their hint at that it's they're fixing the drift that would be a deep cut which would be very funny somebody thinks that you're going to be able to use it as a mouse in certain games i saw something with that as well but it was a little confusing weird because it seems like it would be easier to just use a pointer but you know yeah they definitely have uh

IR blasters on them. So I was too deep into the edit last week to really take in any of this Nintendo stuff. I was just grabbing footage and dropping it in. But did we...

learn anything okay this is what we did learn well we know it's bigger we know the general design of it we know some upgrades physically on the exterior of it usb ports what we also know is that april 2nd will be nintendo direct that presumably announces it and then that there's a couple other days in some larger cities with experiences that you can go to about like a week at

fifth sixth and seventh I think it's different weeks depending on the city so it's April for New York and then later on in the month they're doing LA and then they're doing Dallas later too as well I signed up for a ticket for all three for a few more days you are able to put in for one of these slots you can only sign up for one slot per city so I imagine that the very first slot in New York because it's the first experience in the

world is probably going to have the most people signing up for it. It's a lottery system. So you can still sign up until I believe early February. So go do that. If you live in the United States, I will be flying wherever I get a ticket. If that even happens.

I doubt that's gonna happen, but you know so also at the very end of the video they showed Mario Kart surprise But one interesting tidbit about Mario Kart is that it looks like there were 24 lanes for carts So people are speculating 24 player Mario Kart Okay Can I pitch you my favorite game type that me and my friends play in Mario Kart and how much cooler would be with 24 players?

Okay. Don't tell me what I think you're thinking. Baby park. Okay. You know, that map, the small map with more, it's just an oval with, and then everyone plays as Roy just because it's a funny character and everyone the same and you play only green shells. So you're just racing around this oval and you're just launching green shells. So imagine 24 players with that. Just chaos. That will be the first thing that I want to do. My Royal car. Yeah. Royal. What do I think the C button does?

What's the C button? The button that has a C that no one knows what it does yet. Oh, that's a good... Oh, I think it's probably... It probably stands for capture and I bet you it's a screenshot button. There used to be a screenshot button. No way. It has a screenshot button on the Switch. But it's probably the capture button. That'd be my guess.

Yeah, so we don't really know a lot more about it I don't love this the stand looks a little bit different and I feel like it looks a little it's not squared off anymore It's kind of rounded. Yeah, and I feel like that's gonna load the dock the dock. Sorry not the standard the dock looks a little bit rounded I don't think that's gonna look as nice with most TV consoles I'm guessing the reason they did that is they didn't want to physically make a bigger dock to take a

up for it and so just the roundness makes it look less weird that it's sticking that far out of the top that's a good point that's all i can think of that's a good point uh yeah i'm excited that there is a usb c port on the top now um yeah i would go watch donkey's video on the switch donkey did one already i can't believe donkey's still around he dude i haven't seen him he's cooking minute so yeah um we were right

We did it. We did it. No original journalism, but we were still right. Okay. If you do want to read some great original journalism about the Switch 2, Polygon has an article called All of Our Guesses About the Nintendo Switch 2's Mysterious C Button. And it is...

so funny. It's not serious at all. Like one of the things is Criterion and it just opens up the Criterion collection for you to watch. One of the things they put was Columbo, like the 70s TV detective. And like it just gives you a Columbo cratch. Anyway, go check out the article. It's hilarious. All right. Last thing that we just want to mention before you head to break. David, do you remember last year when Sam Altman said, I'm going to raise seven trillion dollars? Yeah.

Well, he fell short. Yeah. What? Well, there's $500 billion now, which is a percentage of $7 trillion. Anyway, right after the inauguration, it was announced that $500 billion was being invested over the next four years to build the Stargate project to build AI infrastructure in the United States.

It is a joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX. Other partners include Arm, NVIDIA, and Microsoft. But effectively, they are building all of these crazy AI data centers in the United States. $100 billion is being immediately invested into the project with the other $500 billion coming over the next four years. So is that just like, I don't know, 100 NVIDIA 4060s or 4090s, whatever? Yeah, 5090s, yeah. Yeah.

This project was actually kind of already announced back in April, but back then they were talking about a $100 billion investment. So I guess negotiations are changed or the number ballooned or something like that. But we'll probably be hearing more about it. OpenAI did officially put out a press release about it on their website. So you can go read that if you want to hear more about that.

kind of interesting considering there are many AI competitor companies right now and none of them are involved in this. Also, I just want to point out, you know, we make that joke about that tweet that's like,

That the book don't use the murder machine and then someone names. Do you guys know the plot of Stargate the movie the plot of Stargate is these scientists use technology to essentially activate this portal which takes them to a world ruled by a fascist just saying not a good thing to name this project probably not a good thing to name this project terrible thing to name this project.

Well, on that note, everybody, we're going to go watch Unpacked. We're literally going to go watch Unpacked and come back and report on it. And we'll report on it and we'll talk about it and we'll have some fun things to say, I'm sure, and it will not be 75% AI. We'll be right back. Can't wait till the clip back in is like, it was 75% AI. Welcome back, everybody. It was 75% AI.

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it was 75 a.i okay um we're going to talk about unpacked here but actually marquez has recorded something for us so we're going to listen slash watch that really quickly so adam kick it off uh i am pre-recording this and sending it to the pod folks because it's a few days before normal recording and i have now seen and held and used briefly

the new S25 lineup from Samsung. All of the ones that we know about anyway. S25, S25 Plus, and S25 Ultra. And I have some thoughts, so I'm gonna leave them here for y'all to react to. First up is the designs.

They're the same. We've had some talks about this on the podcast earlier, some leaks and rumors and stuff like that. But it turns out most of it was true. From the outside, these phones are almost indistinguishable from the last ones. They have these new colors that are like gray, blue, silver, and black. Like they're extremely tame colors.

And dimensions-wise, shapes-wise, materials-wise, for all intents and purposes, they're the same phones. I think for the base two phones, the only way to tell them apart is they moved the 5G antenna to the other side of the phone. Really subtle. For the Ultra, there's bigger rings around the cameras and slightly thinner bezels, so it's technically a 6.9-inch screen now instead of 6.8. But otherwise, new colors and that's it. Little boxier.

You know when phones used to do S updates and they were totally shameless about how, hey, this is just a spec bump with the same design and that's what we're doing this year? That's basically what's happening. This is a Galaxy S24S. So that's the first part.

I'm curious if you guys have thoughts on designs not changing because I've always thought about change for the sake of change kind of getting annoying and like you end up losing your identity. You want to sort of narrow in on what you like as an aesthetic and repeat it and iterate on it. This is just – it's just the same. So I'm curious about that. But anyway, number two –

is there are new specs. They're also pretty minor though. It's just the new Snapdragon 8 Elite 4 Galaxy chip across all of these phones. And there's 12 gigs of RAM in the base phones now, so all of them have 12 gigs of RAM across the board, which is nice. Obviously these new AI models will need more RAM.

And the Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy, I have to do some benchmarks. We've got to test and get the phones into review. I don't know how different it's going to be versus the other Snapdragon 8 Elites, but I assume it's going to be a pretty great chip because we love that chip. But no IP69, no ultra-fast charging, no bigger batteries, no silicon carbide, no brighter display, no new cameras, no nothing. It's just a new chip and more RAM. So those are the new specs.

Everything else that's new about these phones is AI and software. So I'll link the video below with my first impressions where I demo some of these features. And maybe if you guys want to watch that, then you'll see some of them, maybe insert a clip. But there are some that are kind of useful. There's this new assistant that is only triggered by holding the power button. There is no voice command for it, but it's sort of a combo of Gemini and Bixby.

There's also a new AI Select tool, which if you forget about it, you could just never use it on your phone. But if you do use it, there's some cool stuff like making GIFs of videos instantly and summarizing articles instantly if you want to select them with AI Select. But in general, like,

This stuff is going to come to the S24 series. I'm pretty confident. Samsung wouldn't tell me that, but just based on what I know about how good those phones have been and the history that Samsung has with, you know, seven years of software support, which is great, by the way, that's a pro of getting a Samsung phone. I feel like, yeah, a lot of this stuff is going to come to the S24s and maybe even S23s.

Now, I hope that's true because Apple didn't do that with Apple Intelligence. They would say that their new chip unlocks this stuff. And I'm sure there's some part of the Snapdragon 8 Elite 4 Galaxy that Samsung is going to tie to this AI stuff. But hopefully as much of this as possible comes to S24. And so that's basically it. A pretty minor update of these new phones. And, you know, if you're Samsung...

How can you really blame them, right? Like the S24 has sold really well for them. They won awards. My smartphone of the year was the S24 Ultra and a lot of people liked it. But also that phone was kind of close to the year before that, which was honestly pretty similar to the year before that. So it does kind of feel stale. It's a good, boring phone. It's zero risk for Samsung and therefore zero risk for most of the target demographic for this phone. But-

I'll leave it at that. Let me know what your thoughts are. Were you hoping for more? Were you expecting more? Or honestly, just not really surprised that Samsung's playing it safe. When will they ever not play it safe again? That's a question to think about.

Take it away. Maybe with this edge model. I feel like Marquez started that off as like podcast-y talking to us and then just turned into a video. Like that could have been the video. It felt like his video script by the end. Like, let me know right below that like button. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Marquez, I will let you know in person. Can I do my first really, really quick thought right from one of the first things he said? Okay.

The S25 Ultra is very slightly different looking, and he said more boxy. And I would argue, especially looking straight on, I think it feels less boxy. I think what he's saying is that now that the rails are more squared off, that part feels a little boxier. But looking straight on, the old one pretty much had 90-degree angles in the corners, where this is much rounder on the corners. And I do think it looks nicer. It is...

so minimal, but it kind of has... I liked the box. ...iPad-y vibes to it. I really liked the box. I like this new one better. All right. Super, super minimal. I would like to say it in person. I would like to respond to Marques Brownlee, who said...

Maybe change for change to sake is a bad thing. I disagree with you because In the golden age of Android phones, especially with Nexus devices who the hell know what it was gonna look like the next year, you know, we got LG we got Huawei we got Samsung we got all these manufacturers making random stuff and

It was great. It was amazing. I loved it. And I don't think anyone is excited about these phones. This is, you know, I understand why Samsung's doing it, but if you live in the United States...

It is so dominated by Apple and Samsung, and both of them have released the same phone for four years now. And we just really, really need some mix-up in here. This is a perfect example of when you kind of become the default phone, especially to the people outside of all of you listening to this podcast. You can be safe. And I'll be honest, even someone...

I listen to this podcast. I live this podcast. I bought the S24 because it was kind of the boring safe phone and I just knew it was going to do what I wanted it to and I decided not to take a risk and the price was good for it and also Samsung's trade-in deals are always like some of the best trade-in deals. Always look for those. So it's not the worst thing but it is the safe thing and it's

far less fun to talk about. Right. Yeah, it's difficult. So like Marquez kind of already went over the high level details of the entire event and all of the phones, but we can talk about them briefly. It's just so hard to talk about because the S25 and S25 Plus are...

are basically the same phone as the S24, S24 Plus. You're not really getting a lot new. You're just getting that new chipset and some of these new AI features. Something to note that The Verge put out an article about is that the Ultra, the S Pen no longer can be used to take photos. And they also got rid of the little magic wand feature. And they cited that nobody was using them. Correct.

I could hear that. I think that taking photos with it was still very useful, although I think a lot of people probably just use the gestures because they have a lot of ways to take selfies. I feel like every year they need to come up with a new way to take a selfie. You can do it with a Samsung Galaxy Watch as well. Yeah, or you can like

put your palm out and it starts the countdown. So, you know, I get it, but it is a little bit sad to see. - Yeah, it does seem like the main, so that's one thing that's changed. The changes are mostly in S25 Ultra. And what that is is very slight visual change,

Because of that visual change and smaller bezels, we do go from 6.8 to 6.9, Quad HD, AMOLED, 120 hertz, cool. The ultra-wide camera goes from 12 megapixels to 50 megapixels, and they talked a lot about that and how it's better macro photos, better ultra-wide photos and video. That's all fun. I believe there's the new glass on the front, ceramic, glass-ceramic glass.

Corning Gorilla Armor 2, whatever. So at that point in it, they had said like, this next gen glass is the most durable ever. And I realized that every tech company out there needs some new vocabulary because we can't just say most advanced ever every single year for every single update.

- Sure as hell can. - Well, a lot of the time there's an inverse relationship between shatter resistant and scratch resistant. And a lot of the times on a TikTok cycle, they'll just make the next version more shatter resistant, but not talk about how it's less scratch resistant and vice versa. And they just go back and forth forever.

So, you know, I don't know. I think a big part of the reason that it's probably more durable as well is because of the shape and because there's less of the screen bleeding over the edge. When Apple switched the phone to be square with the iPhone, they also said like, oh, ceramic shield. And sure, you might have some of those ceramic elements inside of it, whatever. Most of that durability came from the fact that now it was squared off. So, you know, uh,

Uh, okay. We can talk about some other stuff. Pricing. We've got $799. Yeah, that was something we didn't have. I don't, I don't believe even in the briefing for Marques's video has pricing in it. I don't think so. So the base model of the standard S25 starts at $799. The Plus starts at $999 and the Ultra starts at $1299. I can talk about one thing that I know you'll be interested in. And I only know this because of fellow, um,

Chi-2 ally, Ben Shoon, on 9to5Google right before this came out confirms that S25 is ready for Chi-2 but not Chi-2 inside of the phone. He had a great article called Galaxy S25 is ready for Chi-2 but there's a problem with MagSafe accessories and just about a bunch of different accessories. It looks like they have the very typical stand that can hold your phone, your watch, and charge your earbuds or your ring. Actually, wow, this can do all four, it looks like. But...

Yeah, so Chi-Tu Ready, which means, in case you haven't listened to us complain about this for the last month, it means there will be accessories that are Chi-Tu slash MagSafe, whatever, magnetically compatible, but it does not mean that the magnets are inside of the phone. So they'll have Chi-Tu Ready cases.

Well, I lost that bet. Well, it's funny though, because these ones that they have are clear. And there's also like dbrand, which is a channel sponsor, by the way, has a clear case with a magnet on the back. Marques and I made the joke that pretty much the only way you can tell people you have the S25 lineup is by buying a clear case because the colors are the only new thing that really looks any different from the series before. That is true. So go on and grab one of those. I just...

mini rant about Chi Chi Reddy. We've already done this, but I just want to say, like, now it's just a way for them to make more money on the cases. Yeah. Well, and...

And accessories. So does Qi have to license this two cases? Qi, are you ready, right? Yeah. Seems like a good way for Qi to make even more licensing to all case manufacturers. Yeah. And et cetera. So many bait and switches. I'm sad. Cool. So. Can I just say that the S25 Ultra looks so good. I think it looks good, man. I think it looks way better than the other one. With the titanium railing, the two-tone. Woo.

Love that. The two-tone is nice. Like I said, I like the curved corners more and the flat edges. I think it looks really nice. But it seems like most of the stuff we're getting is AI-based. Yay. Which they spent...

There was a, the Samsung Unpacked went out of order of how we're talking about it. It was like straight into Galaxy AI, talking about Now Brief and the Now Bar and a lot of different AI tech summarization. And then right into Gemini, there was a point later where they started talking a little more about like pricing and stuff. And Adam goes, hold on, we can't record the podcast. They haven't talked about the phones yet. And like three of us turned around to him and said, no, they did. They did. It's like, no, they didn't talk about like the cameras or anything. I'm like, no, we talked about the cameras, Adam. They did.

I completely missed it. It was like in the middle. I just wish they would start off with it. But let's get into some of the AI stuff. I think, would you agree that the TLDR of the AI...

features on this phone are a lot of the stuff we've seen in Google and Apple phones, at least what they've announced, but now in a Galaxy phone and some of them having slightly updated features. But some of the slightly updated features were also Google announcing features that this just happens to be the first phone that releases on, which we have seen from Samsung and Google every year for the past like three years.

Yeah, it works good for Google. It lets them announce early without having to have their hardware out early, but also lets Galaxy have a selling point of like a couple extra features that you didn't have before. I think one of them specifically is Gemini Live being multimodal so it can talk about things on your phone screen. Right. That wasn't available before. Now we have it. And I think that's kind of neat. Gemini Live is also pretty good. Yeah, I always go, this sounds pretty cool. And then I hear Gemini Live talk and I go, I want nothing to do with that.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, since it's AI, you still have to verify literally everything it tells you, but it's kind of cool that it sounds like a natural conversation, at least.

They had a new feature that they also announced where it can now take action across multiple apps. So you could say, like, add this to my calendar and send a text to this person that we're on for the day. In the Galaxy AI portion before Gemini, we had things called the Now Brief, which is essentially personalization of...

different information that you might find useful throughout your day based on what it's seeing on your phone. Also something called the Now Bar, which is a lock screen widget that shows the most relevant piece of information available to you. And looks a lot like... What was it called? Live activities on your iPhone. Live activities. Can show you scores, can show maybe how far your Uber is away from you, if a flight's getting delayed, stuff like that. I wonder if that's going to need APIs because the Live Activities API is a thing that...

developers have to implement. Wouldn't be surprised if it does. That would make sense. Also, like natural language actions. One of them, I think this is going to be one of those things that's good for accessibility for people who aren't tech focused like us. An example they used is

telling your phone my eyes are getting tired and it adding the like night blue light dimming onto it um or i hated that though you hated if your eyes are getting tired stop looking just stop looking at your phone fair but if you can say stuff like that that's a little more natural to your phone to be able to change some settings around or things in the phone it's

That's going to, all of us family IT people out there, it's going to save us a few phone calls. That's true. As long as people actually use the AI features. That's true. It all depends on, I guess, how easy it is to get to those. Right. Well, now you can just hold down the side button. Right. So that's another interesting thing. Like Marques mentioned, now if you hold down the power button, it doesn't open necessarily Gemini nor...

Bixby, but it's like a combination of the two? It seems like kind of like a combination of like using Gemini, but then also using...

He said Bixby. I don't remember them saying Bixby in the show at all. But what he's talking about is from the briefing. And I don't know exactly what they said in there. But it seems like holding down that button gives you Gemini until Gemini needs to physically interact with your phone somehow. Then it goes into galaxies, AI, whatever they're calling it. Do you guys remember how we had most of this with Google Assistant?

When you get on the power button. So scared of just what I was thinking. Google Assistant just going away soon. I mean, they barely ever talk about it. I know. They had the similar situation to the Spixby thing in the Pixel event. When they barely really talked about Google Assistant at all. It's just Gemini, Gemini, Gemini. And then at one point they said, and Gemini can use Google Assistant to turn on and off your lights in your home. And it was like, where...

What is this branding? I'm not really sure. I don't know. It feels like Google Assistant and Bixby are kind of like in the retirement home together.

And Gemini and Galaxy AI are their newborns. So, yeah. Yeah. A couple other quick things. There's being able to ask your phone to find specific photos. So it's basically like gallery search, but with voice. They use an example of a dog in a bathrobe. But the more you ask it, the more it can use context to think like, that was in October because you're asking about a Halloween picture. We're already able to do that in Google Photos. Now with voice. Cool.

Cool. Awesome. Okay. Circle to search, which was a great example of you mentioning like, here's something Google AI is doing, but it's launching first because I believe the S24 launched circle to search. Now the new features are, if it sees in that circle, a URL, an address, a phone number, it'll be able to like let you click on those and go straight into whatever you need for them instead of just a web search for them. Right, right.

Awesome. They just get to announce new AI features every six months instead of every year. Google does? Google gets to have a second event that they have to do zero work for. Although ironically, at the Pixel event, because they didn't announce the Pixels for like the first hour, they used a Galaxy S24 Ultra to show off all the new Gemini features. I'm sure that was part of the deal. Yeah, probably part of the deal. So with AI stuff, the thing that kind of made me the most upset

was saying that by purchasing these phones, they all come with six months of Gemini Advanced and two terabytes of cloud storage for free. Yeah. Which means... Why does that make you upset? Because then eventually we will have to... What is the difference between Gemini and Gemini Advanced? Are we losing Gemini? Gemini Advanced is like the paid open AI thing. Okay, so we'll still get all of these features without paying for it.

That's what makes me upset. Great point. What in here will I potentially lose if I don't have Gemini Advance, which is a monthly subscription, correct? That is a good question. It's a good question. $20 a month. Yeah, what if you stop paying for it after six months and most of these features stop working? That's terrible. I don't think that's...

True. I don't think that's how it's going to be. Are you willing to put your name behind that statement, David? I will bet on it. I could be super wrong and I could have missed something. So please tell me how wrong I am. Gemini Advance is just a more advanced model and you'll probably still have access to the regular Gemini control stuff and searching stuff. So if you don't pay, your phone gets dumber.

That would be horrible. It would be terrible. Man, are we really moving towards a world where your phone is a subscription plan outside of the already subscription plan that you already paid for it? To use it? Outside of the carrier plan that you also pay for? Yes. Outside of your texting plan? The fact it took this long is actually surprising. There's like four layers of subscriptions, though. Yeah. Wow. It's a good question. We'll have to figure that out.

I think the last thing I kind of had here is a couple AI photo video tools. Okay. I guess not all of them are AI because they did introduce vlog video. Even if they're not AI, they'll call it AI.

Okay, AI log video. They did introduce the face swap, which we've talked about on Google Photos before. There's an audio eraser that we've seen a couple different times that allows you in post to erase wind noise, background noise, increase regular talking noise to make it more clear. Which was the one time Ellis went to use the bathroom during the audio feature. I know, he was really sad to miss it. This event in general,

Yes. Was really boring. It was horrible. They've been horrible for a while. Most tech events, not just Samsung. Yeah. Most tech events. Yeah.

But I feel like the fact that they refused to change how the phones even look kind of like is mirrored in the boring level of the event. It's fair. They also showed a render of the AR glasses again. So not only did they show the render of the glasses, it started as... It started as like this weird timeline. They showed this like...

hypothetical timeline of what could be going forward with how all of this AI works in it. And it showed a phone, a folding phone, a multi... They called it multifolding. Yeah. Then goggles...

or vr headset yeah then glasses yeah which implies that a trifold is going to come out before that's a really good point that i didn't think of because all the rumors right now yeah it was a timeline it was a timeline i guess i don't know if it's timeline of release date or timeline of technology maybe i don't know but then they did show timeline of lies a time lies but

But then right after that, they showed a render of the front of a Google... Google XR. I'm calling it Google headset because we've been... They called it Google XR in the... Android XR. Android XR? I think it's Android XR. Yeah, I think it's Android XR. But there was a name. It was Project... Yeah, I have Android XR. That's all right. Okay. But it's Project something. And then later, again, though, in a graphic about AI, they showed something that said...

headset and said glasses. So not only are we talking about

They mentioned glasses twice. They definitely mentioned glasses. Or they like alluded to it. They actually talked about the headset a little. They alluded to glasses. When Google releases their Gemini glasses, it will probably be at a Samsung event. So, you know. Yeah. Okay. Something that was at the very end that makes no sense. We have briefly mentioned the existence of a potential iPhone 17 slim. And then we mentioned the existence of a potential Galaxy S25 slim. Um,

obviously to beat Apple to the punch. They did the credits, which was two screens very quickly so that they could one more thing us. They are calling it the Galaxy S25 Edge, which if you don't know is a callback to the S6 Edge, the Galaxy Note Edge, the Galaxy S7 Edge, which is when they were first starting to figure out how to bend displays. So they sort of had this like it would bend over the side of the right side and they would display information on it.

They are just reusing that brand name to make a slimmer phone is what it seems to be. They showed a very quick splash video and a very quick render of

And at the event, they have a few units, but you have to stand like 10 feet back from it. So you can't really see exactly what it looks like. Marques took a little video for us. Oh, did he post it? You did. It's a random channel. We're seeing this. It's in waveform. Yeah, we're seeing it right now. It is extremely hard to tell what's different about it, really, because they sort of have this like...

exploded it's not even exploded view it's just hanging hanging they're hanging it i don't know it just looks thinner i don't know yeah so it was it was like uh they tried to pull the like marvel end of credits but they knew the minute credits rolled people would peace so the credits were boom six seconds long and then then they said um now you think you've seen it all and then like s25 edge which

I will give them credit. All of us looked at each other and said, this didn't leak. Are we actually getting surprised? It may have been a little boring, but I am hyped anytime there's something that genuinely surprises me in one of these events. At least the name. So kudos to Samsung. What if it's an S25 without the AI features? Like if you're like... Slim, we slimmed out the AI features. Yeah, you're like, I don't want any of this. One thing I can see from this, and you could see from the render is...

It's definitely not just like the S25 because it only has two cameras. It's an oval camera bump on the back, which looks very similar to like a regular iPhone, but slimmer. I hate to compare everything to iPhone in this, but like... I know. It's just kind of where we're at. Yeah. Yeah, you can see in this one clip very much so. Just two cameras and like a flash or a microphone underneath it. Right, right.

And it's like hanging on this bar and there's just an absolute sea of people reaching over trying to see it and people sticking their cameras over and security guards like shushing them back. Do we think this is potentially like the new version of the S series FE? So like...

Could you see this coming out approximately the size of the S25 Plus? Very similar features, maybe slight spec bump down and in that like $700 range? I think it's going to be $1,000.

I think that would be a terrible move because the FE has such great brand recognition. It's probably going to be more. I wonder if it's going to be $1,100. I feel like they're going to pull some sort of like, it took a lot of intense special engineering to get it to be this slim and still deliver this level of performance.

So you're paying for the extra, you know, because I think that you're getting one less camera, too I know but I think that the iPhone 17 slim that is rumored is also rumored to be way more expensive. Yeah, so we know nothing else about it The verge asked for comment and a Samsung representative said they had another nothing further to share other than the teas that unpacked Which was clearly planned cool. Thanks guys

Obviously the hands-on video that Marques did is out now on the YouTube channel so go watch that if you want to know more information about these phones.

Otherwise, that was basically the event. That was. I'm sorry that sounded pretty down, but the event was pretty boring. I think everyone can admit that. That doesn't mean these phones are going to be terrible. They're probably going to be some of the best phones of the year, like they always are. Samsung is this wild phenomenon where they release six months before everyone else. It's generally a pretty boring event, and then you get to the end of the year and you go, nope, that was probably one of the best phones of the year. Yeah.

I don't know how they do it. Did we mention the TV thing? The TV watch thing? Oh, can you mention that? I thought this was the coolest thing. They announced it and I wasn't even, I was packing my car. I don't even know how to feel about it. It's like if your watch knows you're asleep and you also have a Samsung TV and they're both set up on smart things, your TV will turn off because it'll be like, oh, this dude's asleep.

You might have to do that over. - There's a pizza party happening on the floor with all of us folks. This is not a drill. Yeah, your TV will turn off. And on the one hand, saving electricity,

Pretty cool. I think it'll be good. You know, save electricity. It'll be interesting. There's an entire generation of children who remember waking up at 4 a.m. to the George Lopez show and just being confused. It'll also be interesting because I do feel like there's a decent amount of YouTube AdSense revenue generated by autoplay while people are asleep. Absolutely true. I was just going to say, like, the way...

I'm assuming TVs still have this, but TVs have had this for a long time. It's called Sleep Timer, which is you knew you were going to fall asleep to this. Turn this off in one hour. YouTube even has a sleep timer. Do they really? The problem with that is I feel like every time I was...

There's nothing like just closing your eyes and going to sleep when you are the most tired. If that happens to be out, like it's the worst when you're on the couch and you're like, I need to make it to my bed, but I'm not going to be as sleepy as I am right now. But if you're watching in bed or if you just want to fall asleep, if I were cognizant enough to set my sleep timer, I would always make it to the sleep timer and then it would turn off and I would turn it back on and then fall asleep with the TV on. Being able to just

Watch and be like you're asleep. I can turn that I can safely turn this off Yeah, well I think anything ever but I think is good because I often will fall asleep to like YouTube or something and I wake up at 4:00 in the morning to YouTube playing and it's I get a worse night's sleep because I woke up in the middle of the night Yeah, because I was coming out of some sleep cycle or something so and and we had this whole event and this this was

That was the cool part. Yeah. That was mean. I take it back. It was a beautiful event. The production was great. It sounded fantastic. They always do the sweet screens on the stage. Like, Samsung's so good at that. A plus for effort. Are we allowed to say that Marquez is seeing something secret while he's out in California? I can say that I will...

not be on the rest of this episode because I have to leave right now to go meet Marquez to shoot something top secret. Looks like you guys are stuck here with me. So that's our little teaser. That's also why there won't be trivia this week and why I said it was a chaotic episode because we didn't fit everything in on time and I need to run, but there's still a little more of the show left. Will TikTok be gone? Who knows? Also, Andrew, not to make this episode even more chaotic, but...

Earlier this episode, we reported on Project Stargate, the $500 billion effort to open AI. Larry Ellison launched some AI stuff. Since we said that, like three hours ago, we saw headlines that Elon Musk was saying, nah, it's not real. They're not going to do that. He's not involved in this. But he says they have not raised the money and it's not going to happen.

And him and Sam Altman are duking it out on Twitter. It's funny because he said they don't actually have the money. And then Sam Altman says, I generally respect your accomplishments and I think you're the most inspiring entrepreneur of our time. And that was it. And then he went on to say, wrong, as you surely know. Want to come visit the first site already underway? This is great for the country. I realize what is great for the country isn't always optimal for your companies. Oh.

But in your new role, I surely hope you'll put America first. And then in a separate thing, I saw Satya on the news. And Satya got asked. He was like, so Elon just said that this ain't real. Oh my goodness. What's up with that? And Satya, in the most goonish way possible, was like, I'm good for my 80 billion. And I was just like, I hate...

I just want to say by the time you, dear listener, are listening to this, a lot has changed. But this is as of recording on Wednesday, January 22nd. Yeah, that's been the case for the past week. So we'll see what happens. Anyway, if you've made it this far in the podcast, I salute you. We're going to take it to a quick break. Andrew needs to get to the airport for a very secret project he's flying out for. And we'll see you after the break. And then you'll be stuck with me. And I will hopefully give you a really great 20 or so minutes. You will. I can't wait to listen to it later. Okay.

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It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with Miles Bryan. Senior reporter and producer for the program. Hello. Hi. You went to public school, right, Miles? Yes. Go South High Tigers. What do you remember about school lunch? I remember sad lasagna shrink-wrapped in little containers. I remember avoiding it. Do you remember the nugs? The chicken nuggets? What?

Yeah, if I had to eat school lunch, that was a pretty good option. I actually liked them. But in addition to being very tasty, those nugs were very processed. And at the moment, America has got processed foods in its crosshairs. It's true. We are collectively very down on processed food right now. None more so than Health and Human Services Secretary nominee Robert Florey Kennedy Jr. I'll get processed food out of school lunch immediately.

About half the school lunch program goes to processed food. Penn, the man who once saved a dead bear cub for a snack, fixed school lunches. Today Explained, every weekday, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back. Andrew, like we said, had to go do some top secret stuff via airplane, but I'm here. That's right.

That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Have you ever seen me on this side and Alice on this side? Actually, I think this might be a first. Audio listeners, they have switched chairs. Okay, so what were you about to say? I was about to say we are coming back in this very good third segment of the show and we are going to talk about some of our favorite apps. But before I get into the app that I really wanted to talk about, I just wanted to say Honorary Mention app

Goes to Blue Sky. Thank you. No particular reason. How many people said... Just, I think everyone should be on that platform. How many people said Blue Sky is never going to happen? I might have said that. I think you said it. I don't know if it's happening yet. It's happening. They have 28 million users. I just put a sick meme on there. That's right. So you know there's funny stuff waiting for you on that platform. Yeah. No reason. Just, I just think...

I think now's the time. I don't know. Just anyway, David, would you like me to share my favorite app that I'm using on my phone or would you like to go first? Go for it. I just want to say before I do this, I have gotten now five or six DMs that I'll read the same way they go. Ellis, I know where this is. I was so sure I saw you on the subway in New York City. Well, I wasn't sure. It might have been you. It might have not been you.

And then you pulled out your purple 12 mini. And I was like, that can only be Ellis. And I just want to say, every time I get one of those DMs, it warms my heart to know that my...

And I'm going to say it here first. I'm admitting it, guys. This phone barely works. Over the holiday break, I was getting lunch with Adam, and he saw me pull out my phone and attempt to type a text message. And I probably pressed my phone seven times before one of the key presses registered. And that's how every day is for me, actually. And...

And Adam was like, oh my God, I did not know it was this bad. I assume that it, like Apple's usually very good at keeping their older devices alive. And I didn't know that that was that old. I assumed it was still functioning. It is still functioning. All the components work. My theory, my working theory is that it, I have the base storage model. I have 64 gigs. I don't know how much RAM is in this thing, but I'm sure it's not much. And again, I'm basing this on assumptions. If you're an iOS engineer, please tell me how wrong I am on Blue Sky. Okay.

But I have a feeling a lot of memory swapping happens in this thing, like from the storage to the memory to the storage to the memory. And I think over the years, the RAM is getting worse.

I'm almost out of storage all the time because iOS is just a bloat machine. And I think what happens is the RAM just fills up and that is what you're seeing. Because if I'm having digitizer issues like that and I lock the phone, unlock the phone, don't switch apps, like stay in that app,

The RAM refreshes and it's back to like working perfectly. Yes, super annoying to have to lock and unlock my phone almost every time I want to use it. - I'm glad you admitted that. - But I am so dedicated to this thing not ending up in a landfill. I don't need a new phone. There's not a single feature on any new iPhone that I absolutely need. - It's not about the features. It's about having a working phone. - I respect Ellis's choices. - Thank you. - I think they're both wrong. - My favorite app that I'm using on my phone

right now is the NTS. NTS is an online radio station. They have two stations, NTS1 and NTS2. Very fun. Wait, does NTS stand for something? NTSC? NTS stands for Nuts to Soup, which was the name of a previous blog run by one of the guys who founded NTS.

Anyway, NTS is really cool. They have two stations, one of which is usually more hype music. The other one is typically more chill music. It's a lot of dance music. It's a lot of international music. It's live DJs. You get cool personalities. They also have these really great playlists on their website. And typically they're called Infinite Mixtapes. And they have things like Memory Lane, Poolside, Slow Focus, The Tube, Labyrinth.

I just think NTS is a super duper cool way to listen to music. Oh, and then another thing I do that I think is just like so awesome is they'll do these curated playlists, which I get every streaming service does curated playlists, but theirs are just so awesome. Like it'll be like a spotlight of a Cuban artist you've never heard of, or it'll be like

a deep dive into music of Detroit in 1997 or like just like they're just so good about caring about music and caring about culture and so yeah go nts.live is the website the app is pretty good if it works on my terrible phone it'll probably work on your phone that's right um

Yeah, if you like music, I gotta go with that. You like jazz? Ooh, and right now... I listen to NTS. One of my favorite DJs, Ans, has a playlist up on NTS as we speak. I'm probably gonna go bump that after this. That's cool. I wanted to shout out the PixelFed app once again. We talked about it very lightly last week. If you don't know what it is, it is a alternative to Instagram that is federated over ActivityPub. If you don't know what that is...

What are you doing? I feel like I've mentioned this 50 times, so you should go watch our Activity Pub and AT Protocol episode. We'll link it in the show description. However, the reason I want to shout out Pixel Fed right now is because, one, Instagram changed the aspect ratio of all of the posts.

Which I don't think that we've mentioned yet. Something very, very frustrating happened. I'm opening Instagram right now. Over last weekend where your profile grid on your homepage. Oh, wait, no, mine's still square. Sometimes some people's are still square, but they're moving it. Everyone's been being moved to like, it's not four by five. It's something similar. They introduced some sort of way to sort of crop in your images, but it just makes it look worse.

Anyway, it's just it's frustrating and it feels like meta is just going to continue to do whatever the heck they want to try to make Instagram just a video app like they really just don't seem to care about photography anymore so

I understand that it is frustrating to constantly move apps every single time the app starts getting just destroyed because they're trying to make more money off of you. Pixel Fed, federated over ActivityPub, the whole point is that it's decentralized.

Something I wanted to call out about it is that the developer which yes the developer the one guy that is developing it Are you serious? Yes single guy that's developing it yesterday Upgraded the infrastructure and it was down for a little bit while he was doing this because he said they were getting an influx of users So now it is way faster. Like when I first started using this the actual app last week. It was Extremely slow. It was lagging like crazy. It was glitching now. Everything's going really well again. It's super basic and

But, you know, the federated social web is really important right now. And I think everybody should be moving towards these platforms that give you more control of your content.

So if you want something like Instagram, but it's much simpler and will not change into a video platform in the future, get on Pixel Fed. My account is at David Amell at PixelFed.social. Wait, I have a question for you. Follow me there. Because you've recently moved your entire website to Ghost. I did. The open protocol, open source protocol. Yes. Posting thing. Open source. And now this Pixel.

Pixel Fed. Pixel Fed. If you were to publish a post on one, would it show up on the other? So Pixel Fed is only images. Okay. So if you were to post like an image on Ghost on your website. Yes. That would ideally pop up on Pixel Fed or vice versa. I believe I would be able to follow my Ghost account. Yeah. Something that's cool is the Bridgy Fed people, which we also talked about in our federated content episode. Yeah.

You can basically create a bridge between ActivityPub and the AT protocol on BlueSky so that it creates sort of like this ghost account that mirrors what you posted on other platforms.

So on Pixel Fed, you can follow the Bridgy Fed account and it will create a Blue Sky account for your Pixel Fed account that you don't have to do anything on. You can just post on Pixel Fed and those posts will show up on Blue Sky. And the benefit of that is if you're on Blue Sky and you just want to follow my photography, you can follow my Pixel Fed account through Blue Sky, which is very cool. Interesting. Anyway, I just...

I think we're moving towards this world where we really need to start thinking about decentralized social media. So try out Pixel Fed. It's really great right now. A lot of people are joining it. It's having a good time.

Yeah, that's what I wanted to shout out. Nice. Good one. Mine this week is an app called Rooms. It is an iOS only, I believe. And I remember when they launched it, I was on the S24 Ultra and I was very upset that I couldn't use it. And now I'm on iPhone and remembered that, oh, wait, this app exists like a couple, maybe two weeks ago. So I downloaded it and it is basically TikTok, right? Yeah.

for pixelized rooms so you can make like a pixel room oh wow and this is sweet it's really dope it's really creative people have been getting very artistic on here there's different like tags you can do so there's like featured trending you can do an art one that just shows like dope things people make you can do games education experiments fantasy it's

It's insane. I tried my hand at making one of them, and as basic as it is, I'm very proud of it, and I made it like the wallpaper on my phone just because it's like, wow, this is really, really clever. Definitely check it out. I'm going to check this out. This might... I mean, obviously, I haven't tried it, but I think I'm going to go ahead...

and previously my favorite 4U page style feed belonged to Bird Buddy. Oh, yes. Terrific, terrific algorithmic feed. But I can see this taking the cake. Dude, I'm telling you, if ever you get the urge to just like swipe and not do anything with your time, this thing at least will inspire you and make you want to build things versus just like consuming for the sake of consuming. It's really cool. That's pretty cool, man. And people in here are so...

talented it is crazy the things that they are building look actually beautiful like they're works of art oh and there's a web client yeah and you can do it on the website too i just want to i want to say are you did i cut you off no okay so this is exactly what being friends with adam is like as he goes he goes guys i just got a new phone for the seventh time this year i've i've switched once again and then you're hanging out with him and then three weeks later he's like

dude, I just discovered this really sick thing, but it's only on the phone I'm not using. And then he'll be bummed about it for like three days and go like, you know what? Nah, I'm doing it. And he'll do some, this is the other thing about Adam that's so crazy is this man is the master of the trade-in.

That's true. This guy will be like, dude, you already have an S25 Ultra? Where did you get this? And he'll be like, oh yeah, I just went under my bed and I found three chocolate chip cookies in a Nexus 8. I gave it to Samsung and they gave me $17,000 and I bought a new phone. The Nexus 8 is psychotic. But it's just like, this is, bro, I've known you now for like three or four years and like,

I feel like I'm always watching you do this crazy acrobatic trading stuff. Yeah, it's a lot. I think, I don't know, we'll see. I think I've settled down now.

Because now I have like a shortcuts routine and so many little things that are just like such a core part of my life. Adam, why are you lying to us live on the podcast? You can say whatever you want. I'm in denial. It's not going to be true. I do think you could totally start an entire blog based on blog, like TikTok account, YouTube, whatever. Yeah. Just like,

like Adam's trade-in corner. I don't think it would go off. David's Fediverse corner and Adam's trade-in corner. Yeah. Oh my gosh. This is what happens when Marques and Andrew leave. Yeah. We gotta say... We all have a corner now. When the cats are away... The dogs come out. No, that's not...

Okay. That's what it is now, baby. The dogs are out. All right. Well, it's been a week. Lots of stuff happening on the internet. You already know. There's things ongoing right now. Many things are ongoing. It's hard for us to be a definitive podcast, especially when it takes us two days to edit this thing. So...

If you're in the Northeast United States, stay warm. It's freezing. It's eight degrees Fahrenheit. It's cold. That's been it. Thanks so much for watching. Thanks so much for listening. We hope you catch us next week or we hope to catch you next week on the Waveform podcast. We've been your hosts. I'm Ellis. I'm David. And there will be trivia next week. Next week. So. When everyone's back. Catch you guys in the next one. Peace.

Way from our producer to Adam Molina and Alice Robham. We are part of the Vax Media Podcast Network and our intro action music is produced by Vainsell. This is so crazy. David, what are we going to talk about? Oh, I know what to talk about. What? I don't, there's nothing in the script.