Should You Wear an Apple Watch to a Wedding?
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The number three. Okay. Okay, the number, there's a tie for second. So the number four is the iPhone 16 Pro Max with a 157. Jeez. Wow. Then there's a tie for second between the Honor Magic 6 Pro and the Pixel 9 Pro XL. No way. 158. Oh, bullshit. Those have bad cameras, dude. That's a cool looking phone. 163. That's the number one score. Damn. I know. I know.

hey what is up people of the internet welcome back to another episode of the waveform podcast we're your hosts i'm marquez i'm andrew and i'm david and uh we actually do have a lot of stuff back this week uh sora has officially launched and we took an exclusive first look at it we'll talk a little more about that in a second galaxy s25 rumors are catching our attention we have some rapid fire end of the year

brief reviews on some phones that didn't get full videos. And also, fun fact, Gemini 2.0 literally just got announced like 10 minutes before we jumped in here. So we haven't actually gotten to test or try it, but it's a thing that happened. That's some news that you should know about Gemini 2.0. It's an experimental version. It's cool. But first, I wanted to start with a thought exercise. I put this in the Slack because I was very curious to hear what you guys, what all of you guys would say about this, including Zeri, who's sleeping in the corner.

It's a tweet that reads, you received a wedding invitation that specifically said on the dress code line, no Apple Watches, please.

How does that make you feel? Do you, cause there's lots of takes about this now. Oh, Apple watches don't dress up well. Oh, I would just wear an Apple watch anywhere. Where are you on the spectrum of I'm going to a wedding that's no Apple watches allowed. How does that make you feel? It makes a lot of people feel something cause it has 9.1 million views on this tweet. It does. Um, I guess I'll go first. Yeah, go. First of all,

I just want to hear what you say so that I can say the opposite. If I'm going to a wedding and they asked it, I would take the Apple Watch. Yeah. Like, I'm the least, like, not argumentative or, like, least conflict-y person possible. You're not that attached to the Apple Watch. So I'm not trying to... It's their day. Yeah, it's their day. They're the one paying a ton of money for it if they ask me to not wear the Apple Watch.

I'm trying to figure out why. Well, okay. If I was in the middle of a workout competition, I would be devastated because dance floor weddings racks up the rings on that fitness app. That's true. You'd severely have to make up a lot for that or just lose the day. So that would be a huge bummer. I agree. They don't dress up very nice. I don't know about that. I feel like some of them do. I think if you throw a metal link...

watch band on a dark colored watch and throw a nice watch face on it. Like one of those simple watch faces. That looks fine. That's pretty classy. I imagine it's a pictures thing. They're taking pictures at the wedding and they don't want pictures of Apple Watch. I guess that's the distinction. If you're in the bridal party, you definitely just listen because you know them well enough. Just listen to them. I assume this is a general wedding invitation. You're just going. You're invited. I have a take. Okay.

Okay. Okay. My take is that things that can become dated, people often don't want in their content. And I think that makes a lot of sense, right? Like I heard a song the other day that was like, there's more to life than retweets on your Twitter.

It's not called Twitter anymore. Now you're like dating yourself, right? It's not this omniscient thing. Watches have existed for extremely long time. Watches, you could make the argument, are more of a concept than are a thing. And the more simple that you make your watch, the more timeless it is. So when you have that Apple Watch Gen 1 and you're really dating yourself, which is, you know, fine. But I think that a lot of people don't want to put themselves in a space where things could be potentially dated. Yeah.

I fully agree with everything you're saying. And my argument to the couple who is saying that would be,

Everything else in your wedding is going to get dated too. It's just a snapshot in time and it helps you better remember the time that it was. Your haircut will be outdated. Your suit will be outdated. All the cars in the background that you drive away in will be outdated. The watch is just a part of the times. That's all. I agree with you. I will say it would be smart to like

Turn your watch on do not disturb or something during the wedding. You turn the screen off, theater mode. Or that. You know. So that you could really experience the time, you know. But I don't know. I'll do whatever the hell they want. You know one time I bought dress shoes for a wedding? Yeah. Well, only. No way. What have you worn to every other wedding? My sneakers. Can I tell you a story? That's excellent.

I got yelled at by my roommate at one point. Actually, it was Michael Fisher. So I was going to my sister's wedding, right? Your sister's wedding. My sister's wedding. Pretty big deal. And Michael Fisher was like, well, I had just bought my first suit ever, which I wore to like 30 weddings and then I tore them in half by accident. I was like,

I was dancing really intensely. Yeah. Good rings. Thank you. It did happen. By accident. I tried to own it. Too many children and old ladies were staring at me, so I went and changed my pants.

Okay, but, so he's like, well, what about your shoes? And I was like, what do you mean? And he's like, you have to get dress shoes. And I was like, no. Yes. I'm not buying dress shoes for a wedding. I'm going to wear them once. And he was like, you got to do it. I didn't do it. I went to my sister's wedding, stayed at a motel with my parents. And in the morning, my dad puts on his flip flops. And my dad and my mom put on our sneakers. And I go...

Oh, so you're not wearing dress shoes. My dad goes, why would I buy dress shoes for a wedding? I was like, okay. You as a person make so much more sense to me now. Yeah. Can I, can I give my Apple watch at the wedding? Yeah. I think so. We, the five of us in this room, right? We're, we're into tech. We've been in tech for some time. Our brains have been slowly turned to mush over the last 10 years by being in this industry. Um,

For those whose brains are still intact, which still have wrinkles in them, I can understand not seeing your Apple Watch or any smartwatch as being fundamentally different from your phone.

And I could see it just feeling like you have your phone out the entire wedding, even though we don't see it that way. We see it as like a separate product category with separate use cases. You use it in a different way. I understand. And I have lots of friends that even if I go out to a bar with them and they see an email flash on my Apple watch, they're like kind of offended. They're like, yeah.

why do you, do you really need to have your email on your wrist? Like we're hanging out. And it's like, there's a part of me that's like, come on. But there's another part of me. It's like, yeah, you're kind of right about that one. Um, so maybe, maybe, maybe the, maybe just put it in the theater mode. I don't know. I could also see in the sense of like,

All of us here know how to silence our Apple Watches, but they're so popular that a lot of people who are not technologically advanced wear them. And the worst thing is just mid-ceremony, like ding, ding. That's what I thought it was. So at this point, I would rather just blanket statement be like, please just don't wear it. I've officiated two weddings and I always had to make in the beginning like,

put your phones away everyone there is a photographer here like they know how to do it and every single time there's always somebody with a phone out it's just pro tip because i just officiated a wedding have them give them two minutes right up top to take all the pictures that is what i did i was like take them all now and then put them away have you guys officiated a

- I've never officiated a wedding. - All right, so at least we're in the majority here. I was about to be like, this is the craziest statistic. - I've only been the photographer at a wedding. I've never officiated. - I think that's way more pressure. - Way more. - It was. - Yeah, that's a lot of pressure. - Especially because they didn't tell me that it was their wedding.

Well, then there's not a lot of pressure. And then into all of the pressure. You should come out for the weekend for this family and best friends party. They didn't say it was a wedding? And then I showed up and they were like, this is actually our wedding. Surprise everybody. And then I was like, and they were like, David, can you take the pictures? And I was like, what?

But luckily I bring my cameras everywhere, so it worked out. I have two notes on this whole topic. One, true story, Linus wore socks and sandals to Austin and Evan's wedding. Nice. There were black socks and black sandals, but it was socks and sandals. It was on the... Dressed up. I was going to say that's pretty impressive. It's on brand. On brand. Yeah, on brand. It worked out. It was a suit. It was great. That's dope. And two, I wore an Apple watch to the Met Gala. Oh, yeah. That's...

If anyone, you have the greatest answer to this question possible of like, is this bigger than the Met Gala? Is this more formal? I will add Marquez. Yes. You looked great. You did look great. I think so. It was just under the cuff. It wasn't like out, you know, it wasn't like a highlight of my outfit, but it was there and you can see it in pictures and it's not that bad. But I, all the pictures I saw of you with the watch and correct me if I'm wrong, you did have the screen off. I don't remember. Okay. It probably didn't show up on camera. Hmm.

Yeah, I wasn't. I for sure wasn't on my watch during it. Yeah, but it was there in case I needed the stand hours. Oh, my God. Or if I got an important email. OK, as a as a watch guy, I'm screaming internally. Yeah. I want your take. Because not only should you not wear Apple watches, I think they should go a step further and ban certain kinds of watches. Wow. Yeah, I'm saying certain kinds of regular. Yeah. Even mechanical watch. Like there are there are Rolexes that are like fantastic.

50 millimeters and they're massive. And it's like, I don't care if it's a Rolex, get that behemoth off your wrist. Like it needs to be a nice dress watch, classy, thin, slide under the cuff. There's a whole thing about when you're doing suits and tuxedos, you want like a nice watch that just disappears. Yeah, but then you're trying to like control the guest's look. It's dress code. Yeah. You already have to wear a certain color. Unless you're Hagrid, 43 millimeters max. No.

Am I right? I just want to know, in this scenario, if someone was wearing their smartwatch and the bride comes up and says, I said no Apple Watches, and they go, this is the Galaxy Watch 5. Ma'am, this is a whoop. This is just a garment. How does that play out? Well, it's the same thing as when you have your Android phone and you go to the bodega and you get a pay and they go, oh, Apple Pay? And you're like...

Yeah. I could become difficult here, but there's no reason to do so. Good move. Definitely a good move. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I think it's funny. One other thing I want to bring up real quick related to this is like,

The Apple Watch is the most popular watch in the world. It is. I wonder how many people only started wearing a watch at all because they wanted an Apple Watch versus the people that replaced their existing watch. A lot of people. A lot of people. Yeah, a ton. So in that way, it could be considered more of an accessory, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm pretty sure if any single one of us here got that wedding invite, we would just not wear our Apple Watch. Yeah, because I'm respectful. I would for sure dress up the Apple Watch and put it in theater mode and then be like, do you still want me to take it off? You should have it on a chain in your vest. Like flavorful.

Wait, do they make? No, I mean like the... Yeah, they do. Pocket watch? Pocket watch, Apple Watch. They do. I thought you meant like how he wears a clasp. No, no, how it's like in your vest in the little pocket. They do. I'm not getting the rings though if I do that. That's funny. No, it can... Fun fact, the Apple Watch can track your heart rate through your upper thigh. It's a thing. But...

Oh, you're wearing it. I'm lying. Yeah. I was like strapped. This is if it's like in pocket watch config in the front pocket next to your phone. You know how in the movies they have like the assassins that have like the knife on their upper thigh. You do that, but you just strap the Apple watch there so they can track your steps. Yeah. Gotta get those steps, man. Yeah. All right. Yeah. We got to move on. Yeah. Fun headline. You can now buy a Hyundai on Amazon in the U.S.,

I see this headline and it's Amazon autos and I'm familiar with eBay Motors and other ways of buying a car online but there's something funny about the idea of like buying a car and then like 24 hours later they just like deliver it to your driveway. Well they don't do that. That's not what's happening. But that's what you picture when you see Amazon and this headline but it's Amazon autos. They don't deliver it to you. I bought a lawnmower with Amazon Prime. Yeah.

That's pretty close. I feel like we're not that far off. Yeah. Can you get a car-sized drone on Amazon? No, they're too busy flying in our skies right now. Okay, so yeah. So basically they are launching Amazon Autos. It's this new push that they're doing in the United States thus far. They partnered with 48 different cities and specifically Hyundai right now.

But effectively, you put in your zip code and it tells you this is the closest Hyundai dealership that has the car you want. You select your make, model, and trim of what they have available. And then you can do everything that you would normally do with an actual car dealership. Like you can trade in your car through the Amazon portal. You can also sort by prices. I'm pulling up cars in our area right now. There's a ton. What did you search?

How did you actually search this? I clicked on the Amazon Autos link in the article, and it took me to the hub. It's not great that I can't figure this out exactly from their actual page. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, no. If you type in Hyundai, then there's buy your new Hyundai on Amazon. Shop available cars. Yeah. Oh, what? Yeah, it is crazy. It kind of looks like when eBay launched eBay Motors. It's a weird idea to see a car on Amazon. Yeah.

But right now it only works, it's only with Hyundai, but they're planning on expanding to the manufacturers next year. And they're also going to expand the amount of dealerships that they work with. What I'm interested in is the button says begin purchase, not purchase. Well. Which like, well, but like,

Every single auto dealership has a price and then you go there and it's a different price. True. And then you have to play that dumb game. There is no heckling on this. Yeah, is this price listed as price out the door? Yes. That's great. Are you sure? Yes. It says that? I read that in an article. I can almost guarantee you this would not be the price when I got to the dealership.

Whether they say that or not. I've had dealerships straight up lie to Claire. You check out on Amazon, though. It says begin purchase. Yeah, but you go through the process. The price says price, excluding government fees, taxes, and $187.50 dealer fee. Oh. But then...

Then that should be it. You're not haggling anymore after you lock this price in. Which you never should have ever had to do with cars. That was the one thing that Tesla really changed the world with. Can I just pay for the thing at the price that it says? But the price changes every two weeks. That's true. And you have to win some, lose some. But yeah, you can just sort cars near you. There's a bunch of Ioniq 6, Ioniq 5. You know what they have to do now?

they have to bring back the Amazon Dash button. - No. - Not only should you be able to buy a Hyundai on Amazon, you should be able to hit a button in your pantry. - Yeah, and get six of them. - For those that don't remember this, in like 2017 or so, they released the Amazon Dash button, which was a little sticky button you could have in your house.

that when you pressed it, it would just automatically order the thing that you assigned it to. It's usually like paper towels or dishwasher tabs. Yeah, and people's kids started just smashing them, and there were these stories of like 30 boxes of toilet paper would just show up at people's houses. It's wild to not have two-factor on that. Just like, give me a notification on my phone. Don't just order. Someone could just...

I ordered 12 boxes of Tide Pods just now. That's crazy. Two-factor. That's the only... There was a really fun hacker community going on with that, though, where people were reassigning them to things, like opening their garage and doing routines and stuff with them. That is sick. It was pretty cool. Because they were free, actually, I think, if you...

I think they were $5, but they gave you $5 off your next purchase of the thing they were assigned to. Why would Amazon not want a button that just gave them money every time you pressed it? Yeah. Wow. So that's fun. Maybe you'll buy your next car on Amazon. Dystopia. Maybe your next Hyundai. Okay. Here's another interesting one that's come up this week, and I haven't tried this, but I really am curious to.

And maybe you'll be interested too. Instagram trial reels. So hear me out. Typically when you post a reel, you want to make sure your followers see it, right? But what if there was a feature...

And yes, the irony is not lost on me. But what if there was a feature where you could publish a reel where none of your followers see it, but it does populate to the feed and the algorithm can pick it up and non-followers can start to react to it? I thought that was just called posting on Instagram. That's what the comments are all saying. But the idea behind this trial reel is you're not really sure if your audience will be into this one.

But you do want to sort of test the waters and see how people are reacting to it. And if it turns out to be a good one, then you can sort of unlock it and it will then show up on the homepage and the feed for your followers as well and on your profile. They can still have it sent to them. Like if it gets shown in someone else's reel, it gets sent to you. It's still visible, but it's a trial reel. I kind of want to – I think it's interesting. It's an interesting feature to me.

My first question, I don't want to throw this off topic too hard, too fast. This seems like it would take a lot of work to develop and creating a way of posting something that goes to an algorithm that doesn't involve your followers. Like this wasn't an easy task from Instagram. I actually wonder check all of your followers from people who could see it. Yeah, it just feels the only thing it's doing is it's not populating in the home feed.

For the people who follow you. Yeah. So like only like swiping reels pretty much. But it does show up when people swipe reels in explore. So if I'm following David. But not the people who follow me. Yeah. But still so like that means it's a it's sending it to the feed but now I have to have a feed. It just says exclude from followers of David. Yeah. That's pretty much it. Okay. I was going to say they did this before an Instagram app or iPad app. Yeah.

That is, I just got the iPad. I'm allowed to complain even more now. Have you tried it on the mini, the Instagram app? No, I didn't. There is. Oh, it's just like the shrunken. I haven't even downloaded it. Fair. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to try this. So the idea is if you're like a beauty influencer and you're mostly doing beauty videos, but you want to do like a comedy reel or something, and you don't want the people who normally only subscribe to you for beauty things to, to see it. Cause you want to experiment.

then after 24 hours, you get to see how all the rest of Instagram liked it. And then you get to decide at that point if you want to put it on your followers feed and on your page, or if you want to archive it immediately, which is kind of weird. It's a trial run. Yeah. But the thing is like,

It's going to go out to the random people, but then you have to decide if you want to delete it or put it on your page. And if you put it on your page, then your followers will see it. So they're going to see it anyway. Well, it also automatically posts to your page after three days. Oh, it does? Yeah. Interesting. There's no way to keep it private? It would be crazy to make something that's viral...

That your audience can, like, never see. And, like, create this secondary feed of whatever you're doing. I have... Okay. I've wanted this for YouTube for so long. Where, like, you have a YouTube... You know how people make multiple YouTube channels for different interests? It's like, can you just...

subscribe to someone's interest on their YouTube channel. You know, like if I wanted to have a photography section of my YouTube channel and someone could subscribe to that and I wanted a video essay section and people could subscribe to that, I would much prefer that to just making separate YouTube channels. Google Plus was so ahead of its time. Can you follow a playlist? Was that part of Google Plus? Yeah. You just share it to your photography circle. Oh, yeah. Or people who follow you would put you in the photography circle and then the things you share would just be in photography. You can't follow a playlist on someone's channel?

you can you it would mean they would have to correctly yeah put it in the playlist i would have to keep only following the playlist which yeah that would be kind of strange and also they've just deprioritized subscriptions anyway and the algorithm just does everything now so it'd be nice if instagram had this too you know yeah it's like david dot beauty david dot

I just want to like what funny things could you do with these reels that aren't going out to your audience but going out to other audiences? Gaslight your audience. What content can you like put out there that you're specifically like because you have a huge audience, right? So like you could say don't show this to 4 million people essentially on Instagram. And like what?

What funny cryptic thing could you do on the side of it? There's got to be a... If you're saying this, it's too late. A joke I could play. I don't know what it would be. Yeah, yeah. That's what I mean. There is a possibility that that could be really interesting. I don't know. This is why... Well, I'm sure I'll have this feature at some point soon, but yeah, I want to try this. And I'm going to probably do it with a throwaway reel that...

I, you know, wasn't going to publish anyway, but just to see what happens. So now to properly follow your favorite Instagram influencer, you need an account that follows them and an account that doesn't follow them just in case they post something. But you have to randomly see it. Yeah, you have to get lucky enough to find it. Dang. True fans. Why is it different once you've shown it to random people and it performed well with random people that you're willing to put it on your page?

because your followers are still going to react the same way that they always have. Well, maybe, okay, I'm trying to think, I hear what you're saying, but maybe there's something you're trying that's like a little bit outside of your comfort zone and you want to try it first to see if regular people, because the goal when you publish a reel is to grow your following anyway. You want it to be shown to people who don't follow you.

But sometimes if it's shown to the people who follow you and they don't react to it Well, then it kind of hurts the chances of it being shown to more people So you want to start with it being shown to those more people just to see if they like it if they do like it Okay, my regular audience probably will like it too. But if they don't like it, never mind. It was just a trial That's a fair point. It's like

if I wanna do something else but I wanna have a better chance of it doing well in the algorithm. - Yeah, something a little different my audience probably wouldn't immediately love. - Also quick clarification, it auto shares after 72 hours if you click the toggle to allow it to share if it performs well. - So there's a potential that you can post something and permanently leave it on only the non-follower feed.

There's some potential to do something silly here, and I need to figure it out before someone else does. You should be brainstorming this. This should be incredible. My winter break. Sorry, I can't celebrate Christmas, Lane. I have to figure it out. I need a crazy real. There's a joke here somewhere. Yeah. All right. Well, we've got to take a quick break. We've got a bunch more phones to talk about, stuff that's come out this year and that's coming next year, and even more after that. So before we take that break, trivia time. ♪ music playing ♪

Today's first question is, we talked about buying a car on Amazon, but this is not the first time really expensive stuff has been sold on Amazon. So today I'm going to read you three real Amazon listings, and I need you to tell me which one is the most expensive. I like this. Are you ready to hear the listings? I'm going to read the titles verbatim from Amazon. Okay.

Product number one. Quick, simple, easy, SEQ, fully equipped, double two-story, or excuse me, double-story, two-bedroom, free prefab, expandable container house, 40 feet by 20 feet, luxury home, stairs included, free bed set with terrace. I would love that. The most Amazon listing possible. I know, right? So just for clarity, this is a luxury prefab two-story home with 40 by 20 feet ceiling.

Stairs included. Stairs included. Item number two. Queen Victoria, Banco de Londres y Mexico, 1,000 pesos, 1905 dated, stock certificate with dividend coupons attached, uncanceled.

A bond? I thought it was a painting at first. Those are vintage peso notes from Mexico from 1905. Item number three is a painting. It is the painting titled The Way by expressionist artist... That's a really hard name. I apologize. Leave this in. Gaffur Tamirianov. Gaffur Tamirianov. The painting is called The Way...

And it is an expressionist painting. You're looking at what it looks like? No, because if you look at what it looks like, you'll probably see the price. Oh, I was trying to make a joke. Oh, Dewey. I didn't see any price, right? You didn't see any price? I didn't see any price. I was trying... Never mind. I was doing Dewey, like show me Dewey, the Sonic the Hedgehog thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Knuckles the echidna. It didn't work. Anyway, so think about which one of those is most expensive. Old money...

A big small house? A small big house? Stairs included. Stairs included. Or some painting, some paint on a canvas. By a person. By a person that I personally have never heard of, but maybe they are a world famous artist. It's on Amazon. All right. We will think about that. Answers will be at the end, like usual. We'll be right back.

Support for Waveform comes from AT&T. What does it feel like to get the new iPhone 16 Pro with AT&T next up anytime? It's like when you first pick up those tongs and you know you're the one running the grill. It's indescribable. It's like something you've never felt before. All the mouthwatering anticipation of new possibilities, whether that's making the perfect cheeseburger or treating your family to a grilled baked potato, which you know will forever change the way they look at potatoes.

With AT&T NextUp Anytime, you can feel this way again and again. Learn how to get the new iPhone 16 Pro with Apple Intelligence on them and the latest iPhone every year with AT&T NextUp Anytime. AT&T, connecting changes everything. Apple Intelligence coming fall 2024 with Siri and device language set to US English. Some features and languages will be coming over the next year. Zero dollar offer may not be available on future iPhones. NextUp Anytime features may be discontinued at any time. Subject to change, additional fees, terms and restrictions apply. See att.com slash iPhone for details.

All right, welcome back. We've got a bunch of phones that are next to me here now. You can kind of see them if you're looking at the video version. But the idea behind this is we reviewed a bunch of phones this year, but there's also a bunch of phones that come out that we don't review. And a couple of them I still think are at least noteworthy in some way. Spoiler alert, the smartphone awards are also coming out, depending on when you're watching this, either soon or it's also just come out.

We love the Smartphone Awards. That's like the big flagship video to end the year. We recognize a lot of phones and a lot of phones get mentioned that didn't get their own videos. I think this is a good time to highlight some phones that have come out in the last few weeks of the year that haven't gotten a video, but that are interesting in some way. I saw a lot of phones that come out this time of the year. We realized because we like started doing this at the beginning of November and then looked at our email and we're like, OK.

There's a lot of things we still need to see. A big thing is that Qualcomm used to release their new flagship ship in December, so the first phones would come out around January, but they keep moving it back, and now they did it in early October. Yeah, so this year we got a whole wave of phones in November and December. Yeah. And that was really interesting because I put together my award winners like mid-November, and then I thought, what?

Hold on. Wait, there's like two or three phones that might actually be worthy of checking out. And we like hold back on some of the trophies and like on some of the awards and actually got to test some of these phones and have now put together the awards accordingly. So anyway, I got four phones in front of me here and we can do them in any order. I don't know if we have a theme for how we want to start, but they're all they all have the word pro in the name. They do. That's the one thing I noticed from here. They're all very expensive phones. But anyway.

i think we can just go through one by one yeah maybe let's start with the vivo okay okay so here's interesting phone number one this is the vivo x200 pro there's also a family of x200s there's an x200 and an x200 mini um this phone is complete it's got it all it's the ultra of vivo's lineup

I think the most impressive part of it though would be the cameras. So they work with Zeiss. It's got a 50 megapixel primary camera, 50 megapixel ultra wide camera, and then a 200 megapixel telephoto camera. And what that means is you can crop in a lot and ideally still maintain sharpness. And it's a really good set of cameras. I think this is the closest to a real camera that I've seen a smartphone camera shooting experience get from the results to the actual shots, like shooting them.

And you can tell by looking at it, it's a very camera-focused phone. Yeah, thoughts? Any other things you want to know about it? I just think that the funniest thing about this line is that the Vivo X200 Mini is still 6.3 inches. Yeah, Mini, yeah. What does Mini really mean? We'll talk about that in the Smartphone Awards, but there's not too many small phones these days. Yeah.

This phone also has a giant battery and super fast charging and wireless charging, and it's got a pretty high-end chip that enables a lot of the AI features. It's not the Snapdragon 8 Elite, but it is MediaTek Dimensity 9400. There you have it. And it's, yeah, it's a rock-solid phone. It's actually a really, really, really, really good phone. Wait, this...

Street photography mode is kind of cool. There's a bunch of modes that are crazy in the camera. You should also try... So there's a portrait mode lens emulator. I'm assuming it's emulating half of these. That looks so good. It actually has contrast. It actually has contrast. Oh, and there's different...

Oh, wow. There's different like... Are they got the portrait modes? Yeah. So the lenses, you can emulate the background bokeh swirl characteristics of different lenses as well, which is really... And it still has like a cutout and you kind of can tell it's a fake portrait mode, but it's cool that it works and actually looks like a real camera. We're in the like street photography mode. That makes it kind of look filmy and has like different...

textured yeah there's it says textured and then it says like a zeiss one it seems like natural looks like any other smartphone camera and then it just jacks the shadows a ton but textured actually gives it textured was contrast versions not the it's one of the luts luts vivid is just more saturated than natural with brighter highlights and

Then there's black and white. And then texture just is more contrast. MARK MANDEL: So as you can see by what's happening here, this is a phone that you would get if you're really into photography. If you are very into the different looks you can get, the different customizations you can mess with, the different lenses or pseudo fake AI helped lenses that you can play with on a camera, this is all of that. There's just a ton of stuff in the camera here. And then it happens to be an awesome phone outside of the great camera.

See? Wait, that zoom seems kind of nuts, actually. The zoom is really... It goes to 100, right? 135mm. 135x. Oh, no. It's converting to millimeter in the street photography. Sony needs to take notes because like... This is the exact opposite of Sony. Sony is like...

It's like in between. But Sony's is like really hard to understand. And this is like, let's take pro features and make it fun to look at and like a clean UI. Sony already announced something like this. It's just coming out in two years. No, I mean, it's got all these pro features like white balance and aperture and shutter speed that you can control manually. And then it's got these rapid focal length changing features. But like this is considered basic mode.

Yeah. Which is crazy.

C1, C2. Oh, there's presets. Oh my God, this is awesome. Yeah. Like a fun UI that like feels filmy. Anyway, sorry. That's just the camera. That's just the camera. It also is a great screen. It's also got these nice flat sides and it's got this brushed metal look to it. It's nice. It's got this ring. Vivo X200 Pro. That's the first one. Any other questions about it? Any other ideas? Yeah, that's the first one. You gonna swap to that, Ellis?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is one where it's got an ultrasonic fingerprint reader, too. This is one where the camera bump is so big that you kind of feel it when you're holding it. It weighs the phone. I will say the Oppo Find X8 Pro is kind of like a cousin phone to this.

but it's similar except it has, I think this phone has two different telephoto lenses. So it's all 50 megapixel sensors, but it's like a 50 megapixel primary ultra wide 3X and 6X. So that's what they do with this instead. It's got this nice, I'll let you hold it. It's like a marble feeling back with this particular color.

It is. Let me double check. But I believe this is the first Snapdragon 8 Elite phone we're looking at. So let me. The marble back is really nice. No fingerprints, although the marble texture almost just looks like it's already smudged. Yeah. This feels nicer in the hand just because it's like thinner and less top heavy, despite still having a huge camera bump. Yeah. It seems like the Oppo one is a little bit more about style than

than functionality necessarily. Even though the Find X phones have always been really, really amazing. Ever since the first one came out, it's just been... I've reviewed a lot of Oppo Find X phones. This is not a Snapdragon 8 Elite phone, by the way, so this is still the Dimensity 9400. It is...

It was in consideration as well for battery because if you look at the specs, it's a 5910 milliamp hour battery with wireless charging, with fast charging. So that was another thing. This thin? Yeah, in a phone that looks like a regular thickness. So there's a lot of good things going on with that phone too. It has the word pro in the name for a reason. You know it's got high-end stuff happening with the screen. It's bright.

Hasselblad branding. Hasselblad branding. Pretty classic. That's the thing they keep doing. But does it have AI? Yes. In fact, when you go to the website, it just says powerful camera, powerful AI. It has the slider, the alert slider. That's the OnePlus calling of it. But the volume slider switch on the corner as well. Alert switch, yeah. Alert switch. So that is the Oppo Find X8 Pro. That's also out. Oh, it's called the alert slider too. Okay, cool.

Then we have these two phones over here. These are both Snapdragon 8 Elite phones. So I just want to say what that means. So that's the new Snapdragon chip.

the new Qualcomm chip. The Snapdragon 8 Elite has started coming out, and I think Dave2D did a really good job with his video about this. Somehow this chip has made like a really big leap from the previous generation of Snapdragon chips from Qualcomm to the point where it's both more efficient and has higher peak power in a meaningful way. So you can get better performance in a way that doesn't throttle with games when they make good cooling solutions for these phones, and they get longer battery life.

Like 20, 30, maybe 40% longer. That's a crazy jump for one year. So really looking forward to seeing a lot of phones with the Snapdragon 8 Elite chip in them. These two we have here are very much gaming phones. So they have focused on the performance aspect, but also happen to do a really good job with the rest of the stuff too, because gaming phones are great media phones. So here's the first one. This is the ROG Phone 9 Pro.

So a couple things about this one is they have the screen on the back that you saw me make the short on, but also still has wireless charging, which is higher on the back of the phone. You have a 185 hertz display at the front.

There's still a headphone jack at the bottom. There's still the two USB-C ports. They've kind of tamed down the aesthetic overall, but you still have the front-facing speakers. It's still very much a gaming phone with the high refresh rate and high brightness in the Snapdragon 8 Elite, but that's that. There's something funny about going from the...

the X200 Pro with the Zeiss branded camera to the Oppo with the Hasselblad branded camera. And then this one just says like the good luck, have fun. Yeah. The difference in cameras between the gaming phones and the other daily flagships is this is sleek though. This is like what the ROG phones should have always been in the sense of like, it's still a gamer phone, but,

it's got somewhat of gamer aesthetic but not the like make fun of me on the subway gamers because last year they kind of took away a lot of the things that made it feel gamery at all and then now they brought back like the texture and the like this those like rapid triggers and stuff yes right and then the side usb c port if you're

really gaming all the time. Awesome. Because then it's not in the way on the side, although the headphone jack still on the side. So that feels counterintuitive. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. So you can play if you're on the subway playing games on the back of your phone, you're probably still going to get looked at. But yeah, it's great for that.

5,800 milliamp hour battery, 65 watt hypercharge. Yeah. Good looks. It's funny because like the percent doesn't seem that big. It'll be like, oh, this is a 5% or 10% larger battery. And that might not make headlines the same way as the experience difference. But I think people just don't care why their battery life's longer. They just want their battery life to be longer. So that's also true. I mean, we get into the details, but this is the last phone. This is the Red Magic 10 Pro. This has a...

cut out in the back or in the side for a an active fan which turns on anytime temperatures get up anytime you're gaming or anytime you plugged in charging and when you plug it in you hear the fan i wish i had like a usb i would hold it up to the mic so you could hear it but like the fan spins up and it makes like a whining noise uh so this phone is very much concerned with performance and thermals oh do we have do you need a charger i just figured your computer yeah

Let's actually plug it in so you can hear the fan. All right. This is plugging in a Red Magic 10 Pro. Oh, my goodness. I would not want that to happen every time I plug my phone in. You can turn the fan off, but that's a default because it wants to maximize your charging speed, which is a 100 watts peak without overheating.

It has a 7,000 milliamp hour battery, 7,050. Okay. So it's combining the new Snapdragon Elite chip with the 7,050 milliamp hour battery. It also has the air triggers. It's very squared off. This is much more in the gamer aesthetic. I dig it. Yeah. For some reason. I think it looks really sick. It's a good looking phone. It's pretty clean on the front, pretty minimal, not much to the bezels. You've got a front facing or you got a headphone jack at the top.

which is cool uh yeah this is a this is a gaming phone for sure it's got all of the fun graphics on the back that you'd expect those fans on both sides yeah

So I'm assuming this is, you can literally see the fan. Yeah, this is not going to be a waterproof phone. No, this is not waterproof. Yeah. Pretty crazy that this is a phone with a 7,050 milliamp hour battery and it just looks like a normal phone. Yeah. It's a big phone, but it's a normal looking phone. Yeah. A few manufacturers recently switched from lithium ion to silicon carbon batteries and you can pack a lot more energy density in that same package. Yeah.

That was a very quiet update that we didn't really hear a lot of fanfare about, but that's actually a pretty major thing. It's probably because a lot of manufacturers, instead of actually giving you more battery capacity, will just make the phone thinner and have the same battery capacity, which is probably what's going to happen in the iPhone 17 Slim or whatever that ends up being called. Yeah, I keep seeing that. The Air or whatever. Yeah. But I do appreciate that they're improving battery density in a meaningful way because there's always all the hype about

The graphene battery or some crazy breakthrough battery. That's not really usually how it works Usually it's just slow improvements over time and this is maybe a three to five to eight percent improvement in battery density but that's the difference between five thousand and Fifty eight hundred right you could get a six you could get a seven thousand million power battery in a phone now So it's wild they put a seven thousand I buy better in here. Yeah and a fan 24 gigs around 24 Wow dang, yeah, that's wild

And a headphone jack. They have space. Look at this. They've always had space. Just 7,000 milliamp and a headphone jack. And a fan. They've always had space. They've always had space. Andrew, something crazy. I would maybe switch to that for a little bit. It's kind of sick. I just think it's one of the prettiest finishes I had seen on a phone in a long time. It's just like very industrial, kind of like Gundam-esque. And I like the battery life. And I would miss literally everything about this.

my current phone. This is as opposite as your iPhone purple mini as could be. I think in spirit it's kind of the same. You know what I mean? I need you to explain that. This is the iPhone mini spirit animal. I...

I'm not using an iPhone 12 mini because it's better than any other iPhone, right? I'm using it for two reasons. I'm using it because I already have it and I'm using it because I love the finish. You know what I mean? Like if I really cared about my phone to that extreme degree, I would just get a better iPhone for at this point, like a hundred dollars. Cause I could get a better iPhone and get an iPhone 13, you know? And that's the spirit of that thing. You know what I mean? Like it's got a great finish and,

It's already in the office, so I wouldn't need to pay for it. And yeah, so I think spiritually, that is the 12 mini purple finish of...

bizarre Android phones. I'll just point out all the differences. The 12 mini is one of the smallest phones in the past decade. Facts. This phone has a 6.85 inch corner to corner 144 hertz 2000 nits OLED display. Yeah, that's pretty big. It's gorgeous. It is huge. Yep, yep. It's about the size of the battery. I think that's about where it would fit in the corner of the phone. Jeez. I will note the iPhone 12 mini also had a decent camera.

I don't think this phone is going to have that good of a camera. It's just a hunch. I haven't tested it that much. You can't use your camera when you're ripping subway surfers with your fan on, so it doesn't matter. There's also no bump, so I imagine small sensors. No camera bump at all, which is cool. Make the phone a little thicker and do that, but that is another difference.

The iPhone has, I mean this is a nice purple finish, a pretty lilac color, not too offensive. This phone has text all over the back, it's got a big X logo. I don't know why, it's not the Twitter logo, and it's not the Snapdragon 8X Elite logo, so what is the X? - Is it? - X Games mode? It's probably X Games mode. It says cooling system on the back, it's got the ROG, or it's got the Red Magic logo. It's got a lot, it's busy, I would say, is another difference.

seeing you hold it up like that it reminds me of how the battery of like the hummer ev is the size of yeah yeah that's exactly what i was thinking yeah yeah it has a headphone jack yeah and it has a hellish like headphones it has a headphone jack yeah but what do you do about your apple watch ellis how much ram does the head see this is the this is what this is this is why they're being sued by the u.s government

But, yeah. Honestly, AirDrop would be the thing I miss more than the Apple Watch. Because then I can start going to weddings again. True. It's true. The iPhone 12 mini had 4 gigs of RAM. How much does this one have? This one has 24 gigs of RAM. Does this really have 24 gigs of RAM? Mm-hmm.

gamers can't afford this if you're a gamer you cannot afford this i'm sorry this phone might not be too expensive i gotta look up but yeah that's that's what's going on big new batteries new higher battery density new chips massive new interesting camera stuff those four phones all came out in the last month basically in the u.s which is pretty cool um

And there's also a phone we're expecting to come out next year, which some rumors are starting to spill about a little bit, which would be the Galaxy S25s. Number one, I would also expect those to be Snapdragon 8 Elite phones, at least here in the U.S. But number two, there's a rumor about this keeps coming up.

chi 2 yes what is the what is the deal with chi 2 in this phone is this happening or not probably there's well it's kind of weird because there's an a rumor from ice universe but ice universe didn't tweet it someone else tweeted that ice universe said it so i'm very confused about that part but there are so many articles saying ice universe says chi 2 and the s25

But all of them are sourcing it from a tweet from someone else. So I'm just going to take that as you may. Okay. What? Um,

This is not the first phone with ChiTu. That's the HMD Skyline, which I'd never heard of until I was looking. It's really weird. It looks interesting. It's a badly rated phone. Okay, cool. All you need to know about it is that it tries to do the curved aesthetic in the front, but then for some reason, it's also square. Oh, this is the Windows Phone aesthetic. Yes. Yes, exactly. The Lumia aesthetic. Exactly. Look at the screen of it. Wait, what the?

which wait i think oh doesn't hmd own uh nokia yeah and they did the nokia lumia so this is just the same company i guess so it looks like the front of the pixel fold yeah the first one oh that's but with like the side yeah you're right you're right but just the side of it yeah yeah it was not rated very well okay yeah um but yeah so two we've all been dying about chi tu and then

There was a bunch of questions. So what was confusing is the GSM Arena article about this said that we don't, there's two profiles for ChiTu, one called EPP and one for MPP. But then David found a Wired article that explains the difference. Essentially, that's extended power profile or magnetic power profile. Biggest difference is one has a magnet, one doesn't have a magnet. So everyone on Reddit's like, is it going to have the magnets? Is it not going to have the magnets?

The magnets is what we really care about here. Yeah. Um, do you want to read the quote from the article? Okay. So WPC's Paul Golden, which I did an interview with when we did our ChiTu episode, actually, he was quoted in this Wired article and this is a quote from him. He says, "EPP refers to a device that complies with the specification, but is not officially ChiTu and thus cannot use the logo or be referred to as a ChiTu device.

Golden told wired in an email that such devices would carry the Chi logo not Chi - and Packaging and/or marketing materials have a required statement that the device not does not contain magnets any device labeled Chi - is MPP which is magnetic power profile and must contain magnets So I remember actually when the HMD skyline came out at first and I was everyone was like is this Chi - is it not - because It has the magnets

But it doesn't work with some Qi device, Qi chargers. That's because the magnets are in like a different arrangement or the charging coil is in a different place. It's confusing. Effectively, if you have the QiTube branding, if there is the little two right below the Qi logo, it will have magnets. Okay. So magnets does not mean QiTube, but QiTube does mean magnets. Correct. Okay. Okay.

And so I guess what we're going off of this as is based on what Ice Universe saw. So if this was... Which we don't even know because he didn't even tweet it. Allegedly. Possibly. That...

If they saw the logo somewhere on the phone or the marketing materials, if it said Qi 2, then we should have magnets. Yeah. Is what I'm getting from this. That's what the Wireless Power Consortium who standardizes Qi says. And it seems like most leakers are seeing things that are marketing material, boxes, like filters.

CAD renderings and stuff like that. So I'm assuming the reason Ice Universe is saying Chi 2 is because of seeing one of those things inside of a leak, which makes me think they saw the logo, which would mean magnets. That would be good. I hope so. I got plenty of magnetic accessories. I just want to use... Still think it's one of the best things that every single phone needs, not just iPhones. Yeah. For every car out there that doesn't have CarPlay, where you put your phone up on a magnetic dock, it's just been iPhones on those docks so far, but I would love to put my Galaxy S25...

Or a phone with a case. Or a phone with a case while it's on there. That would be huge. That would be fire. Okay. Well, I hope that comes out. All right. Well, we do want to take one more break. We'll be talking about Sora and some other stuff right after. But before we take that last break, we got one more trivia question. Trivia, dude.

So we were talking about the Apple Watch earlier being allowed at weddings or not. But do you remember the Apple Watch Edition? Yeah, the gold one, the $20,000. The 18-carat gold Apple Watch. It ranges in price from $10,000 to what? What was the most expensive version of that watch? Too expensive for a thing that will become outdated and get slow. It already is outdated. It was outdated less than 12 months after it was released. Yes, indeed.

i remember that because i almost did a video i was researching about the fastest outdated products of all time and i read that the apple watch edition was just it was discontinued like 10 or 11 months later and that was discontinued well they stopped doing the edition gold thing with the next apple watch like the next year

So, it's like you just bought a 10,000 up to some crazy number very expensive watch. Wow. And yeah. You literally could have just gotten the gold colored one for so much cheaper. I think they very shortly started making gold colored ones. That's tough. I'm trying to remember the price. Okay. Well, we'll think about that. Answers at the end like usual. We'll be right back.

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All right, welcome back. Is this video real or AI generated? Who knows? Who knows? I can prove it's real. You can prove it's real?

Five fingers. All my fingers are moving around normally. It also has audio. Physics is working. Audio is a really good sign. Physics moving things in realistic ways is a good sign. Okay, so we're real, for sure, guaranteed. That's what an AI would say. But we just got Sora's official launch this week. Sora being OpenAI's AI video generating model.

And we got early access to it. We got to publish an exclusive early review of it. I prompted it probably 300 times. I did all kinds of stuff. I was trying everything I possibly could, messing with the features, diving around and digging in. There was a Slack thread that had like 200 plus replies in it. Yeah. And it was all of us just sending you random things. Do you remember when Blue Sky first started and there was like the hell thread?

Yeah, that's what that was for us in our slack. It was just one slack thread of like hundreds of videos. I was messing with it and I just put in the slack like, hey, if anybody wants a video from Sora or wants to like try something, just let me know. Mariah's keyboard started smoking. We were prompting like crazy. And we learned a lot of things about it that it's, you know, we got the hand selected videos before that OpenAI showed us. But now we got to try our own stuff and really figure out what it's good at. You can...

You can make all kinds of stuff. There's obviously the parameters that you have an OpenAI, you have a ChatGPT account, and it comes with the ChatGPT Plus account, right? So if you're paying the 200 bucks a month, this is part of it now, which is, I think that's what it's called, ChatGPT Plus? I think it's,

for the 200, but let me make sure. Oh, pro. Pro max. But anyway, yeah, we tried everything it was possibly capable of. The headline is that for the $200 a month that ChatGPT Pro subscribers are already paying, Sora is just now a part of that. It's just looped in, which I think a lot of people... Sort of. Well,

I'll just give you this first and then we'll do it. So plus you get 50 videos a month with your $20 a month like chat GPD subscription up to 720p resolution, five seconds duration pro, which is the $200 a month. You get up to 500 videos. Yeah. Unlimited.

Relaxed videos. I have no idea what that means. There's a little. Oh, yeah. Relaxed mode lets you queue additional videos to be completed when the traffic is low. Oh, okay. Okay. Up to 1080p, 20 second duration and five concurrent generations. Yeah. Download without watermark. Jesus Christ. Yeah.

And learn more about everything. Okay. Yeah. So those are the differences. Yeah. So I essentially had unlimited free reign of like a maximum capable version of this. And so we're putting in our own prompts instead of just looking at what was provided from the last early look we got early in the year, which was handpicked from OpenAI. And so we got to figure out more of what it's good at, what it's bad at, and what it could actually be used for today. Yeah.

So watch that video. That is the best way of getting all that information. I think the TLDR is it's good at abstracts. It's good at really, really crude, like basic title slide type stuff. What it's bad at is...

generally physics. Now, videos have moving objects in them. That's the important part. And I think when you generate a photo, you can get increasingly good at high-resolution photorealistic images. But a video...

has things that have to move in different ways and that is usually the giveaway of an ad generated video is it doesn't know how fast to move something or how to fold things on top of each other or have them like overlap in front of each other often things with legs moving the legs will switch between each other object permanence is not really that good like it's not it's not amazing at that stuff but

It's still crazy that it's making 1080p 20 second high resolution videos.

So, yeah, it's been interesting to watch, and it started a lot of conversations in various departments. Number one, about still the sources, where is it trained? How does all of this actually come together, and is it stealing from people like me who have uploaded YouTube videos? I made a prompt that just asked to see a tech reviewer sitting on a desk with a phone in front of two displays, and it had this...

this plant on the desk the and we've called it the tech reviewer plant like the classic tech reviewer plant it's not just us but it's tech reviewers yes so maybe not 100 our stuff yeah but i asked for a tech reviewer you asked for a tech reviewer to put the plant all of us use and uh that video was just publicly available so my car is publicly available on the street but you can't steal it

Challenge accepted. There's a lot of questions around that still. The other question is, would you even want this to be good? Like, is this a tool that we're ready to unleash upon the world in the year 2025? No, and the fact that you get to remove the watermark with the pro subscription is so ridiculous. Yeah, this is funny. I was testing this, and it was evolving right under my nose as I was testing it. The minimum resolution was 360p, and I had that in my script, and I was writing that down, and then it was suddenly 480. Yeah.

Oh. So the lowest resolution is 480 now. And you can do up to 720 with that account. But 1080 is still the max.

And the lowest resolution videos take 20 seconds to generate if you make a five second low res video. The highest resolution 1080p 20 second videos can take three, four minutes to generate. I think to some people it wasn't exactly clear that this is all in the cloud. It doesn't matter how fast your computer is. You can queue up three, four, five different ones all at once and it doesn't matter. They're just happening on open AI servers. And

it's just there's like this little moment of thrill when it's done and you get it back and you watch the video that it made and you're like this is crazy this is not a real video it's also interesting because most of them the first one second is always like impressive and then it like devolves from there that you did the one where you uploaded the photo of me playing ultimate frisbee right and it's like me catching one and at first it's like

He caught it. Oh, he's coming down. That's kind of... Wait, he's rolling on the ground. Now he launched 20 feet in the air. Three legs? What's going on? Yeah. Yeah. So there's a feature where you can upload a photo and then tell OpenAI to make a video out of this photo.

And so the video that you, the photo you upload will be the first term in the video and it'll start to move from there. So you can upload a video of a person like standing still giving thumbs up and it will make a convincing like video of somebody giving the thumbs up. But if you give it a moving object, like a person flying through the air or even a car or a bird flying or whatever, immediately the physics go nuts and it's typically not very accurate and it looks crazy.

So we did see that in our testing as well the one thing that I was most impressed by I would say is Simulated drone shots. That would be my number one most impressed thing yeah, where if you gave it a landmark or even just a Terrace that you that you describe and ask for a drone shot of it. It can give you a high up of

slow moving high resolution landscape drone shot yeah everything you just solved the new jersey drone mystery it's open ai knowing they gave you the exclusive look at it getting real they wanted to get as many new jersey landmarks as possible for those who aren't aware there's been mysterious drones spotted over car sized drones have you i haven't seen any of them yet

I saw them. You saw them. I was the total non-believer. I was making fun of them so hard for a whole day. Andrew's over at my desk and he's like, those are planes, David. What are you talking about? Because everyone's videos of them just look like planes. And they are propeller-less planes.

unmanned. I was making fun of everyone. I was like, this is so stupid. Everyone's an idiot. And then I'd drive home and see three of them go right over me. Pretty low down. I'd guess a little lower than helicopter height. So way too low for these plane-esque things to be flying. Did you hear it? I didn't. I was in my car. Plane-esque.

I don't want to call it a play. Yeah. No, no, I did. I know. I know. I am. I am egg on my face. I am. I got crushed that day. Wow. I don't know what they are. I'm also FBI is still like, Oh, I'm not scared by any means though. Cause the lights are bright and on there and not trying to hide themselves from it. I, something in our, whatever. I don't want to go like conspiracy theorists here, but I'm, I'm not worried about them. I'm where you were now. I'm like, yeah,

I haven't seen them. I don't know. It seems kind of like a plane to me, but okay. Aliens for sure. Maybe I'll see it. Anyway, yeah. So you can make drone shots. You can make drone shots with Saurus. Open AI. And we'll pull that off. You can watch the video. The one with Mount Fuji, the one with El Capitan, the one with the bay. What was that called? I forgot. This is a California landmark, but...

Did you try with like cities by any chance? I did one. So yes, I did one with the Golden Gate Bridge and it looked decent, but the cars on the bridge were going totally wrong speed. So that was a giveaway. But the bridge looked incredibly accurate. They always drift into the other lane and just like- And like disappear. Disappear, like dissolve into each other. Totally. The physics-

Dead giveaway. The other one, I did New York City in the fog and I had the Empire State Building poking through the clouds. And I think I showed you that one. That one, the Empire State Building looked accurate. And as I panned out a little bit, I think David pointed out the Chrysler building nearby also looked accurate. But then the rest just looked like New York City. I couldn't tell you what direction we were facing, but...

It seems to be able to do that too. So there is plenty of blowback from people who are like, this sucks. I don't want this to exist in the world. And I totally get that. Especially the fact that you can, this is another thing they added mid-testing is the download without a watermark button. That was not there when I started testing it. That's such a sh** move, I feel like. Super weird. You have to have the pro account to do that.

The fact that you can do that at all and you're just – this is – we're going into a year where let's just say fake news is a thing people are talking about. It's a concern. The fact that that's real at all is very concerning for a lot of people. That was one of the first videos you sent was like the two newscasters talking and I thought it was real at first glance. I was like, oh, what video clip is this? And you're like, no, this was –

The AI. Dude, that clip is... We don't... They still... They have a safety team. They have the AGI team at OpenAI. Wait, they don't?

No, that was the joke they fired all of them So here's what I'll give them credit for and I know this is gonna sound like very little to a lot of people But I'll give them credit for this They seem to be able to identify and refuse to do certain types of videos So anytime anyone's likeness is involved They won't do it if you ask for a prompt with someone's likeness It will modify your prompt if you upload a photo with someone's likeness it will refuse and

If you upload a photo with someone who appears to be a minor, just by a visual identification, it will refuse. If you ask for any violent or disgusting acts, it will refuse.

And generally, I mean, I haven't gotten it to do anything that I would consider objectionable in a way that would like, like literally making an actual fake news clip. But that clip that I, that was early in the video that we're talking about is such a perfect representation of this, which is at first glance, it looks like a real video. And then in two seconds, you're, oh, all the text is garbled. Like none of this makes any sense.

But and there's no audio so it's like they're not saying anything It's just a two second video of some news anchors, but it's immediately in this uncanny valley of I know that this isn't real But if I wasn't checking I might not have noticed and this is the worst it's going to be from here on out and that's a lot to digest I have a question for you. Yeah, I

Remember when they first announced Sora and they were just, you know, showing all these clips that they were generating? And obviously OpenAI is going to showcase its most believable clips, the ones that it's really collected to make people think, wow, this is amazing. Yep.

Would you say that it feels like they've improved it since they first announced it, especially as a user? It's hard to say because we didn't get to use it. So I don't know how long those videos took to generate versus now. I don't know what their prompt looked like then versus now.

Or if they handpicked things behind. Because we gave them prompts back then, and they gave us stuff that they said was just what it created, but we don't. We don't know how many times they adjust the prompt. Exactly. To me, in general, it seems like it's gotten marginally better at some of the basic stuff. We did see it make...

like one or two landscape shots before. I got to try way more landscape shots. Turns out, yeah, that's a huge highlight. It's like pretty good at those. But yeah, it's hard to see a trajectory. Yeah. It's kind of just launching now. It kind of feels like they got pressured into releasing it because Runway was getting better. Google's Imagen was coming out. Right. So that's the thing. There's a bunch of other, there are other image generators and video generators now that exist. Yeah. And this is one of them. This is, you know, there's a bunch of channels that cover this, like AI tools as they come out. And,

Sora, if I've watched enough videos and I'm judging this correctly, seems like one of the most capable video generation models. But it is like brand new. So yeah, TBD if there are other better ones coming out. We should also mention that OpenAI had given early access of Sora to specific artists and a lot of them had gotten together and leaked the model online about a week and a half ago.

So that could also be another reason why open a I decided to release it like if it's already available in a hugging face repository It was temporarily available got taken down, but it's out there on the internet And you can never completely erase something from the internet so yeah They're doing this like 12 days of ship miss thing where they're announcing a bunch of new features So this is like day three or something like that right so yeah, it's it's launched. It's out into the world We'll see how it goes

That's the famous last words. I will say, I looked up some of the different places on Reddit people posted our video, and it really feels like there's two camps of how they're reacting to this. This is terrible. It shouldn't be released into the world. It's so dangerous. And then the other half, a bunch of us, I was like, this product sucks. It's censoring so many things. I can't even do this and this and this, so why would I even use it? It seems like they're striking out on both sides. Yeah.

Well, if you strike out with, if you are successful with one of them, you will guaranteed fail with the other because those are the polar opposite sides of the camp. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, they have to be safe as best as they can. I'd be worried that there's no way of making the side that's like, this is dangerous. They're never going to please those people. So they're going to want to please the people that are saying you're taking away too many of our things. Yeah. And make it very capable. Yes. Yeah. That's terrifying. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting.

Okay, I have a question. Yeah. So you were saying that you were trying to like get it to do something questionable and it wouldn't do it. Those are restrictions that open AI has placed on it themselves, like with their UI, I'm assuming. It's not like an inherent thing in the model.

That's a good question. This was, yeah, as far as I can tell, because I'm just a user using the end that I've been given access to, this is a UI thing. I don't know if that means, I assume the model is capable of lots of things. It's just Sora is the UI that is restricting what it's able to do. Yeah. I'm sure that when you put in a prompt, like the,

the language model knows what words it does not want to work with and so it just changes that to something else or says you shouldn't be able to do it because the whole thing about large language models is it relates words to each other anyway so you probably don't have to do that much work to kind of like blacklist certain types of words and people are gonna try to break it yeah it's only been a couple days at this point but I guarantee someone is gonna find something crazy that it can do and then there's gonna be an article and then there's gonna be an update that's what's gonna happen yeah so we

We will see. Yeah. We'll see what that ends up being. All right. Speaking of AI stuff again. Updates. Yeah. Reddit has just launched its own sort of AI chatbot in a way. It's not really a chatbot. It's more like a search engine and a chatbot had a baby. And effectively what they're trying to do here is they're trying to stop people from Googling Google.

blah blah blah reddit because then google gets to eat up that ad revenue and reddit obviously wants to keep people on their site as soon as possible already make that deal with google though so they made a deal with google where chrome was the only browser that's able to index reddit after august of 2024 which

in my opinion, should be the most antitrust thing that they're going after right now because Reddit is like the number three website in the world or something. So anyway, what this new Reddit AI Answers Engine is, is it is a thing called Reddit Answers. And you go on the page and it gives you a bunch of examples where you can just ask different questions like, what's the best vacuum cleaner? Or what should I do if I want to change my hair color to this, etc.?

You go on there and it basically gives you a list of generated answers, but with direct hyperlinks to the conversations. And it doesn't say you should do this. It says in this thread, people say that this, this, this, this, this. Yeah. So Reddit, I think, okay, whether or not this is like a good, I don't love chat bots, you know, but whether or not this is a good thing.

I think Reddit went about it the right way, actually, where they're not actually saying, "We, the Reddit chat bot, we, Reddit, the organization, says you should eat five rocks a day." - It's gonna source its answers. - It sources the answers and says, but in a very direct way, and says, "People in this thread say this," and then you can click that button, go to the thread, and it'll talk about all those things.

Very smart from them, honestly, if they can get people to actually use the service. It is actually quite well formatted, and I

I think it's more like a competitor to Google than it is a chatbot. It's not available yet, right? I have access to it. Can I see it? Well, you're special. Or at least I did earlier. I don't think I'm special. I have a button that says keep me updated. They take it down? They didn't give you access because you're a data. No, I have access to it right now. I mean, is that just because you're a tech reporter, though? No, no. I don't know anyone at Reddit. But they know you. Well, they don't know me. Sometimes they just know you.

I don't know. Well, that's weird. I have access to it. Can I try real quick? Yeah, sure. Can I ask you guys a question? Wow. Because this is something I've been thinking about lately. When you're on Reddit, when we are on Reddit, how do you determine how trustworthy a comment should be? That's a great question. Like when you're reading a Reddit post and someone in the comments is like, here is information. Yeah.

What is your personal veracity test? I mostly take everything with a grain of salt and then I do Googles off of that information. It's the same way that I would use like Gemini or something like that. It'll tell me something and I use that to go Google other things, but I don't just believe what it says. Right. And if they don't provide links, that's not necessarily a red flag for you. That's a red flag. Okay.

it helps if they provide links it helps i would say the more discourse there is based on the comment that i found like because it's really easy to just have a comment that's upvoted that can be botted who knows it's a small thing it could just be like a comment and then a bunch of people saying that's great that also could be botted but if there's like legitimately like multiple trees of conversations coming off of it

Then I at least get like a gauge of knowing that that's 15 or 20 people that might be part of a conversation. Or even if it's not 100% true, there might be useful stuff. Information in there. Yeah, for sure. Totally. That's another really good point. That's generally how I look at Reddit threads. You guys should give me a prompt and I'll do this. It wouldn't do, is Steve Huffman a giant loser? I guess it's too easy of a question. It's yes.

I was going to say, typically, if it has a lot of upvotes, I just believe it. Ask it. Ask it. When is the correct application for a multiband compressor versus a dynamic equalizer? Okay.

Mark, what about you? How do you determine what's true? So, okay. Yeah, context is everything. If I know enough of the context already, like if I'm in a subreddit I've been in a lot and I know the poster or I know something about this already, then it's kind of like asking AI. It's like a confirmation of what I already knew. If it's something totally new, then I'm with David. I'm taking that information and then either following the source links or going and Googling myself.

almost all the time subreddit is really important um yeah because like yeah with seo having links on reddit is really important and there's lots of subreddits out there that are literally for people to just post links to increase seo so if you can get into a subreddit you know is already like active it has upvotes in that it has comments in that that's a good sign that it's real people talking also know how to sort yeah

Because if you're looking for something that is like the best recommendation for something, then often the most upvoted one is a good place to look. But if you're looking for something that has not been tried before, then sorting by controversial might be better. Yes. No, I remember in like 2012 when I first got on Reddit and I was so excited about it because I was like, this is such a good system. If people are upvoting it, it'll bubble to the top and that just means you get quality information.

But there's a thing called the hive mind on Reddit, which is where if most people think a certain way, you are more likely to think that way. So I have I have experienced this myself before where I have gone to some sort of question and I see something that's very highly upvoted and I go to upvote it without even really reading much of it. And then I go, whoa.

Hold on. Let me read this next couple. People want to be part of groups, and so they go to think and do the way that the general group of people thinks and does. So you really need to make sure that you're taking your time there. I just did Ellis's question in Reddit Answers.

When is the correct application for a multiband compressor versus a dynamic equalizer? Is this one that has a definitive answer? It has a pretty definitive answer, but I thought it would be a good one because there are things that are like absolutely true about that question. And then there are finer flavor, like taste, skill, very niche trade stuff.

So I only wanted to ask that question also because my answer to the question I asked you guys, how do you determine? I don't have a great answer and I thought you guys had really good things. But one hard rule that I follow on Reddit is that if someone ever begins a comment with

insert occupation here. Answer, you are lying. Like I have never, ever, ever. Doctor here. Exactly. I've never, ever, ever read an audio thing where someone began a question, audio engineer here, or answer audio engineer here, and then gave even one correct piece of information ever. And I just feel like there's a lot of people on Reddit. I feel like actual professionals will...

Would never do that. Yeah, you know what I mean? I would never be like hi. This is my job so So I'm just I worry about this bot being unable to Determine the difference, but they I mean it wasn't terrible again at least it's not just an LLM that is making up a bunch of random stuff right on a giant data set like at least it's taking from reddit itself and

and then directly linking to everything that it says. So I think that's an inherent strength because it's Reddit, so it's only looking at Reddit. Yes. So if you're Google and you're looking at the entire internet, that could be a pro sometimes, but it's actually harder to sort through. And if you're Gemini and you're not linking back to sources, it's...

Almost less useful. Yeah, where with reddit you are just looking through reddit So if you're going to give me an answer or even summarize it with an LLM fine But link me back to where you got it from because I know it's from reddit right find me where you got it from Yes, so it's doing that and again You should take everything you read on reddit with a giant grain of salt as well Yeah, but you should also just feel that way about most of the things that you consume on the internet No is the part of this that's AI just the language like I?

you're typing into the box for the search because the rest of it just seems like a search engine like if it's reddit notoriously basically hasn't had yeah it's entire existence so it seems to me like google search engine for a long time and just it like just narrowed it the beginning of reddit they had a search a search bar when you would search something it would just do a google search but narrow it narrow it to reddit.com yeah so which is how most people use google anyway i'm sorry adam i cut you off not most people that was it that was my question okay

Yeah. Yeah. It does feel more like a search engine with some answer engine stuff in it. Potentially helpful. Potentially interesting. I think that if they mixed this in with their search bar and

they also like gave you suggested subreddits and stuff based on what you were searching that would probably be the way for them to go can you type in there why do you have access and none of us do why do I have back well what if it revokes my access I mean there's a strong possibility that like eight months ago I signed up for early don't remember

All right. Speaking of more AI stuff. Again. Remember when we used to have to talk about regular things.

We talked about like going to weddings and stuff before in the past iOS 18.2 is officially out in its stable version this brings things like genmoji Yes, yes chat GPT integration image playground So if you have been waiting to use genmoji or chat GPT integration, this is out very cool I have

an immense amount of thoughts about Genmoji that we do not have time to talk about on this podcast. Really? About Genmoji? Yeah. I have thoughts about you having thoughts about Genmoji. What's that? How could there be that much to... Oh, okay.

Because it's not an emoji. It's a sticker. It's a sticker. Do you want my rant about this? Okay, here's what I think Genmoji is. Okay. It's just an AI image generator who adds in the style of an emoji to the end of every image prompt. Wait, but it doesn't come up as an emoji. It's a sticker. So, okay. All right. One minute. Get him on the clock. I can probably do this in one minute. I can probably do this in one minute. Yeah.

Okay, so an emoji is text, right? It's basically a pointer to this giant database that Unicode standardizes. Okay, now a Genmoji is actually what Apple...

labels as a sticker. Apple stickers are things that have existed in iMessage and other things in Apple for a long time. But now, Genmoji are also stickers. They reduced the size of stickers to be the same size as Gen... That was not a minute, right? That wasn't a minute. No, it wasn't. That was 30 seconds. But this is still part of it.

Okay. They reduced the size of stickers to be the same size as emoji, and so Genmoji are also the sizes of emoji. And Apple used a special type of image generator that basically only is trained on the Apple emoji character set. Right. So it skews everything to look like an Apple-style emoji. Mm-hmm.

They also introduced a new API called Dynamic Image Glyph API, which makes emoji, Genmoji, and stickers all act the same way. Previously, emoji are the only things that could be used in line with text because they are text. Now, with this new API that they're introducing, Genmoji and stickers can also be used in line with text, unless you are texting an Android phone. Perfect.

In which case, RCS just got borked because a Genmoji, because it is trained on the Apple emoji character set, is inherently looks like an Apple emoji. Yeah. When you send that to an Android phone, it just appears as a giant PNG.

Yeah, it's actually a tiny PNG. It's a horrible tiny PNG. It's bad. Well, it's a big PNG. Is it? Yeah. I've gotten it from, I guess when I did my text sample thread, it was just like a tiny little, at least I didn't click on it and zoom in. Maybe it was bigger, but it was a small PNG. It didn't look great. I texted my sister, Jenmoji, of a pumpkin devil.

and this is how it came out on her phone. - Wow. - Just enormous, taking up the entire-- - Maybe they've changed it since then. I guess the 18.2 update has come out. - Well, this is when it first came out. - Oh, when I did that video, it was like I sent it to an Android phone, and it was-- - But on your iPhone was it? 'Cause on the iPhone-- - On the iPhone it's huge.

It's bigger than usual. Yeah. But then on the Android phone, it's even bigger. Oh, my Android phone had a tiny with a black box with a black background. Well, either way. OK. Yeah. You can. It's it's another way of hooking you into the message thing. Yeah. So but I also think that being able to generate more images to express yourself is better. So there's sort of this there's sort of this back and forth. You know what I mean? Yeah. That was a good solid 90 seconds.

Thanks. Times four. That was not, okay. That was not not six minutes. Anyway, whatever. In the video, I'm going to have a real timer going and the viewer and listener will know. Place your bets. How long is that timer? Anyway, if you want to try that out, you should update your phone. You should always update your phone anyway. If you're my dad, please update your phone. Update your phone, y'all. Well, I think that's it for this week. We talked about everything and then everything in between. There's only one thing left to do. What? Trivia. Trivia.

2025, that pause is going to get longer until the last episode is going to be a two minute one year pause. Get it. If you can get it like two minutes long, we can just put an ad break in there. Yeah, exactly. Question number one, you can now get a Hyundai on Amazon or soon can get a Hyundai now, right now, right now, right now. I know what I'm doing after work today. Um, but, uh,

- This is not the first time really expensive stuff has ever been sold on Amazon. So I'm gonna lead you three Amazon listings that are real. They are links you can visit right now. And you have to tell me which one is the most expensive. Hit it, Adam.

Number one, quick, simple, easy, SEQ, fully equipped, double story, two bedrooms, prefab, expandable container house, 40 feet by 20 feet, luxury home stairs included, free bed set with terrace. Listing number two, Queen Victoria, Banco de Londres y Mexico, 1,000 pesos, 1905, dated stock certificate with dividend coupons attached, uncanceled. I don't know what uncanceled means.

The way of Bashkir artist expressionist Gafur Tamirinov. Which is the most pricey? And I think for this one, I'm going to have all three of you read your answers, and then I'm going to tell you the prices. Are we ready? I'm ready. Flip. All right.

Who would like to read first? Damn, we all put different answers. That's exciting. We both put the same. Oh. So I put the fake money. No, it's real money. It's real money. It's just old. I think the old money costs a lot of new money. You know how much that's depreciated by now? Or... Or appreciated. Yeah, I put that. Yeah, but it's really old.

I also put the peso. Peso. Peso. I put the way. All right, everybody. The house. The quick, simple, two-story prefab house. With stairs. With stairs included. $44,200. The Hyundai cost more than that. One star. The pesos. The pesos. Cheap ones are $23,000. $250,000.

Is there only one quantity available? What do you mean? Is there only one in existence? Available on Amazon. Can you buy three or something? Yeah, well, because the house, there's probably multiples of those available. Axe, Axe. How many are in stock? Axe. Somehow, this listing has 11 ratings.

And does it have a quantity? Yes. We left in stock. Oh, yeah. You weren't joking. Okay. Wow. Our painting, The Way by Gafur Tamirianov goes on Amazon. There's a buy now button for $32 million giving David the point. Closest thought going anywhere. Buy it now. So you can just click that.

Not a prime item so you will have to wait till after Christmas Just shows up with USPS so Just a quick quick side note a few weeks ago two weeks ago Maybe Adams switched back to iPhone and he texted me like at night like I

hey just to be like it's a blue bubble and i like free i was like oh my god you're back like i can finally send you and so i was doing all the like inline message animations and sending them all sorts of stuff and i was like and i could finally do this too and i sent him like the venmo widget request for a hundred thousand dollars thankfully i did not click it okay quick update on the score marquez with one

Andrew. Zero. One, two. Yeah. We back. With zero. We're so back. We're so back. David with two. It's so over. Oh, man. So, next question. Speaking about the Apple Watch, the Apple Watch Edition was gold-plated? I think it was just gold-plated, right? I don't know. I don't know. Whatever. It was ranging in price from $10,000 for the base model to what? How much? And...

Closest without going over. Let's make it interesting. They probably have the same amount of gold. So they're probably not that different in price. It's probably like $10,200. I do think that the differentiator between this model was like a special band. Like a leather clasp with gold or whatever. Okay.

But how much was that entire package? I honestly don't know if I'm way too high over or way too low under. Same. Exactly what Johnny I've wanted. Flip him and read. What do you got? I think you might be over. I originally thought it was $120,000, but I put $28,001. Nope. Nope.

I bet $20,000. Nope. I put $80,000. Nope. All the way over. It was $17,000. Oh my God. We found a way for no one to get the point. So it probably came with an Hermes band or something like that. Did it come with an Hermes band?

I don't know. Probably. Sure. Yeah. Probably. Sounds like it. Cool. Damn. Yeah. Well, there goes my chance to catch David. I got really excited when you made David answer second. I was like, I nailed it. 80 grand, baby. Okay. Well, that was a lot. That was a fun episode. It was all real. I promise. Nothing was ad generated this week. This week.

But next week. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. If you haven't seen the videos that we talked about, they will be linked below. Sora Review, Smartphone Awards, all sorts of other fun stuff. But until next week, see you later. Bye. Waveform was produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Rubin. We're partnered with Vox Media Podcast Network. Get our intro, outro, music. It was created by me and so. Bingo. Good save.

Can I sort all items on Amazon by price? Support for Waveform comes from AT&T. What's it like to get the new iPhone 16 Pro with AT&T NextUp anytime? It's like when you first light up the grill and think of all the mouthwatering possibilities. Learn how to get the new iPhone 16 Pro with Apple Intelligence on them and the latest iPhone every year with AT&T NextUp anytime. AT&T, connecting changes everything.

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