The Objective Top 10 Phones List
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What is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. I'm Andrew. And I'm David. And today on this episode this week, we've got TikTok introducing a paywall for content that includes 20-minute videos. Spotify's AI DJ we want to talk about. And we'll wrap it up with the objective top 10 smartphones of 2022. No disputing the list.

We'll get into that one too. It's fun. But first, usually we leave our huge breaking news segment for the middle of our video. But I think this is the biggest news to hit. It's too big. Probably the biggest story in 2023. We can't bury the lead. If people realize that we didn't talk about this at the top of the episode, we're in trouble. This is the biggest story probably of our generation. Yeah.

So let's just get right into it. New yellow iPhone 14. I didn't see this coming, to be honest. We've gotten these pale colors in the past of iPhones of like, what is it? We have the midnight and the starlight, and there's a purple one. Yeah.

yellow really like just shook shook the whole tech world up for a day there i figured i think yeah it's a it's a bold choice i appreciate their bravery but yeah we have it yeah you know green purple that was expected but as soon as the yellow hit i just i i didn't know how to handle it i had to i had to call my therapist i mean did you see the sides

The back is yellow, but the sides are like a different yellow. Yeah. What? Yeah, dude, you got to watch the videos. It's incredible. So they invited a lucky couple YouTubers and people with cameras to point their cameras at it. And I'm amazed that the cameras like actually were able to capture that.

what they saw. It's like a wider spectrum. In real life, I wouldn't have believed it if I saw it. It was hard to tell through the tears in my eyes of how beautiful it was. Oh, for sure. The vibrance of it. Sure. Would you say it's like more yellow than the sun? It kind of had like a gold look to it. I think it's going to replace the sun.

Like one of the most important product releases I think I've ever seen. I've never even seen it with my eyes. I mean, neither. I've seen it with my ears now that you're describing it. And I can't even, I can't even imagine what it's like. The articles are something. They're poetry. They're special. This is, I'm just glad to be alive. We should probably end the pod right here. Yeah. No, that's kind of it for this episode. I'm glad you tuned in. No, that, that.

Yellow iPhone mid-cycle release. I did a video like two, three years ago on like mid-cycle new color product releases. If you want to watch that, that's kind of the summary of the new yellow iPhone. It's yellow. Didn't the purple iPhone video last year get like 5 million views? Well, that's why I did the video. I was like, I usually wouldn't make a video about a new color of a phone, but if you just look down at the view count, you understand why this video exists. So yeah, that's...

That was a thing for sure. The purple iPhone was last year? Yeah, I think so. Oh my god. Because Ellis has it, the 13 mini. I have the 12 mini. I don't think the 13 came in. No, I think the purple's 12. And then there was like a red iPhone. Was it red? 7? 10? Not 10. It was the 7 I think then, right?

I just remember us getting that and doing an unboxing in like an hour and a half. And that video had like 5 million views. Yeah. That's crazy. The 13 was green. You know, it's actually funny kind of some of these new colors. Everyone's like camera settings and everyone's color correction is a little bit different. So you kind of have to like, if you watch three different videos on a new color, you might actually not really know what,

the color is because they'll look a little different in each video and that's especially true with the red because it was a really saturated red yeah and that notoriously will over saturate the red channel of people's cameras and it would start to peak and then look pink a little bit when it was not pink at all fun fact i can't prove that my red is the same as your red anyway though that's true in my brain i know what red is and i hope everyone listening and watching also knows what red is it's just a different red yeah

Anyway, TikTok. On the clock. We have a TikTok headline. So TikTok introduces paywalled content. Kind of a trend that we've seen on social media in general is enabling creators to make more exclusive content behind a paywall for smaller audiences. Like Twitter already does that.

Instagram actually already does that. And so now TikTok is doing that. I mean, YouTube does it also. YouTube, exactly. So I'm just going to read the bullet points here and maybe we have some reactions to it. So it's called series, which lets creators sell collections of videos that you can purchase. Each collection of videos can have up to 80 videos in them. And those videos can be up to 20 minutes long.

So creators can choose the price for the series. They can go between $1 and $190 to charge for their series. At launch, 100% of the revenue goes to creators minus the app store and processing fees. And there will be a new series website to publish and track performance,

That's it. It's just sell videos behind a paywall within the TikTok platform. Yeah, packs of videos, which is really interesting. Yeah, that's way different than what I was expecting. Yeah, and I mean, I'm assuming that they want it to be unique videos, but I'm wondering if creators would like sell, if they have like a series of videos that they already do, if they're just going to package them and then be like, you can buy. But what does it mean to buy a digital product?

especially on TikTok that you can already look at for free. It would have to be a unique video. It would have to be a new video. Yeah, maybe you do like a series and you have parts one through eight are for free on your thing, but then parts nine and 10 are behind the paywall or something like that. Or you could do like, if you're a cooking TikTok channel or something, you could do like, we're gonna do a Thai package and then it's like 20 Thai videos. Yeah, that's an idea. Yeah. I went from seeing the title of this that you posted thinking this is an awesome idea

to reading this and thinking, I don't think this makes any sense at all. It's kind of like quibble. Really? I mean, so it's really, it's up to the creators to decide like what this extra content is going to be. So like when Instagram did this, you can be a paying subscriber or supporter of an Instagram page

page or whatever and then there will be specific stories and posts that only paid subscribers see so it might be similar photography to your other photos or it might be special you know behind the scenes or something like extra content whatever same thing with YouTube youtubers can choose what they want to be just for the paid subscribers so I want to that's what I thought this was gonna be but this makes me think it's different now because when you're saying can charge between one to ninety dollars for a series it makes it seem like

You are going to create a series of five videos, charge X amount of, say, $10 for that. And then just that series is unlocked. Whereas YouTube and stuff is you subscribe for extra. And then you also open all the past stuff that was like that. So it was a little different. TikTok should do that. It's like buying a movie on Google Play movies or on Apple TV, basically. You're buying a digital product that only you have access to. It would have to be a really great video.

- Yeah. - To create an individual video. - Well, that's why it's there. I don't think they want it to be individual. They want it to be multiple videos. - Ideally it's multiple videos. - That's like harder. If TikTok did like YouTube subscriptions,

I think it would make perfect sense and allow 20 minute videos in there because then it can be like, I'm going to make my regular TikToks that got me popular, but I can also make some 20 minute deeper dives. Or if you could do paywall live streams where you could do paywall, like long Q and A's that are 20 minutes. And then whenever you subscribe for that month,

The creator gets that seems perfect. It's like the Patreon model. Yeah, I think like the cooking example that I said before, I think that could really work because you could do one TikTok video where like we're making pad Thai. I have a whole collection of like Thai food videos that you can pay for. I was just going to say about like travel. You could do like one TikTok to be like, I'm going to Columbia next week. And then 90 videos about like the cool things to do there.

And you just buy that series. I would argue you'd be better off making the TikTok that makes you popular and the YouTube long version of that. Well, I would argue you should just go on YouTube, period. I mean, yeah. They're trying to figure out a way to maximize the revenue that creators can make.

which is like if I was going to pay every month for it. I get that. I totally get that. Because most people don't subscribe to TikTok. Remember, it's like usually for you page stuff for most people. So paying to subscribe to a user might actually not feel as at home on TikTok.

I think it feels more at home than doing weird charged like video on demand things. I mean, like to pay for a one time. Yeah, I feel like if they went the YouTube, the like YouTube subscription series or Patreon like method or whatever, like that would make so much more sense. It's just that like you would be surprised at how many people will pay for people's courses on things that there's unlimited information about that thing on YouTube already, but people still pay for instructional courses.

Yeah, like that guy Marques Brownlee. He has like all the course. It's how we then tie it to like trust of that particular instructor. Right. And that platform where I just like TikTok feels like not the same place. I just feel like the other one feels way more TikTok-y and creator-based than like

Yeah, TikTok doesn't feel like a place I would go to pay for content. Pay for specific content, not even just like extra content. Yeah, I mean, it's cool that it's an option. And I'm glad TikTok is thinking about ways to diversify a little bit in that way and offer it at least. And maybe somebody takes advantage of it and it looks really cool and people get ideas from it. That's why I think it would be amazing if they did it the other way.

You may be underestimating the power of parasocial relationships. I think you're overestimating. I feel like it feels less parasocial relationship if I buy a person's specific video rather than get like the to open the curtain behind the scenes of like extra videos that they will make.

I think that's a different... That is people paying for individual pieces of content because of the parasocial relationship. Oh, that is individual pieces of content, huh? Yeah, yeah. I think it's a tougher... There's a lot of different...

things going on there that are a tad different. Whereas like, like I think a perfect example is we've done, we've done member only live streams, right? Like that to me feels like now once a month I get this live stream where I am in a smaller category of people and a better chance to get in contact with this person. That is primo parasocial relationship. Whereas if I'm just buying an already created video that,

I just only get to open those five of them feels like almost like another step away from parasocial. I don't know. Maybe someone gets creative and like offers custom videos on TikTok that you pay for before or you like ask to be made and then pay to unlock. You know, they can get creative with it. It might not just be here's a pack.

Does anybody want to buy it? It might just be, hey, does anybody want to see a video on a certain set of things? Oh, okay. Yeah, you're interested. Okay, I'll make it. It's here for you to unlock whenever. That type of thing. I don't know. We'll see. People get creative with it. I do think it's funny that instead of just trying to figure out how to monetize TikTok with advertising the way that YouTube Shorts is trying to do it, TikTok is like, yeah, the creator fund isn't really working. Can we figure out a way for the audience to pay for it?

instead of actually just trying to figure out an actual ad model. I do think it's like especially 100% revenue like basically is agreeing hey we're making plenty of money by ourselves through our own ads. You also said for now though. Yeah yeah true. I like how successful it is. I like the Patreon model it lets smaller creators be able to turn things into a living because if you do have the super loyal base getting that extra. A thousand true followers basically. Exactly yeah like that's incredible. This is

Yeah. Yeah. But this is almost like the opposite of that's why I think it's followers. That's why I think it's weird. It's like you'll just find one follower every five minutes forever instead of a thousand right now for. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I don't know how much people stand each other on tech talk. You know what I mean? Yeah. That is the other thing. There is a pretty notorious drop off in how connected you feel based on the platform. Like when people follow each other on Instagram versus YouTube, like

Versus even something like Twitter or Patreon where you feel more connected. And then on TikTok, you're just sort of like scrolling people you don't know most of the time. So I feel like that does make it... That's a new wrench in the dynamic of like how do you monetize this. I'm effectively a boomer because I don't even have TikTok. So I don't really understand the parasocial relationship on there. And I mean, I have...

Instagram Reels so I understand I basically have TikTok but that's the most boomer thing you could have said is I don't like this newfangled thing but I do like watching it two weeks later well no I don't like watching it I don't like watching it just forced upon me yeah I'm just saying yeah I don't know I'm not really sure the level of parasocial relationship that happens on TikTok I

would bet that there are some people that are insanely obsessed with some of the creators on tik-tok yeah so most of the best examples of successful tik-tok creators that I've seen

have turned it into a following on a different platform yeah so that says this is true tiktok this is true yeah so i don't know i guess we'll see i mean they uh like they said they're taking 100 of the they're giving 100 of the revenue for now it's great to me that says we're gonna see how this actually plays out that's it ends up being successful we take 30 yeah like that

All right. Andrew, I had a question for you, actually. Yeah. Are you, you remember how you said you were going to review everything for a while? Are you still reviewing everything? Yes, but I'm like, I've found that I need to give myself way more time to review things. That's interesting. And I like, because if I'm going to be this specific, which I also think plays into, I don't want to go too ranty again, but yes, I'm trying things more often. I'm reviewing them.

And I'm also just returning things and giving them bad reviews. Actually, there was a pair of socks I bought the other day, and I got very upset. And then I got ghosted by the website. And then you left a review? Yeah, and then they refunded me another two weeks after that. Dang. So my review's probably deleted. Oh, yeah, for sure. My question, I have just been thinking, I have these...

several weird review scenarios happening to me at the same time that just made me think of like, how do I review this product? And am I just reviewing the product

Or am I reviewing the overall experience? Can I clarify real quick? You're not talking about like something we're doing for work. You're talking about like a more personal thing that you can review on a website. OK, so they are actually personal purchases that I've made. So so here's one of them. I bought a year and some change ago a table, a marble like a like a small counter height dining table.

from Wayfair. I'll just name and shame. I mean, I can already tell you two stars. Okay. So it was a great table and it lasted like that year and a half or whatever. It looks great. It was sturdy. Everything I liked about it pointed towards like, I never reviewed it, but if I did, this would be five stars.

And then a week and a half ago, it just broke spontaneously. Not quite full shattered like that tempered glass thing that we have, but I have a picture of it and we'll put it on the podcast where like the side of it just kind of like broke open. Like cracked. But like. Like big crack. Big crack, yeah. Like sharp, dangerous crack. Like fit your pinky up to your first knuckle crack? Yep. Nice. Pretty bad. So this table just breaks out of nowhere spontaneously. I'm like, whoa, that's.

That's really weird. Was it because it was sitting in the sun? I don't really know how to like how to diagnose the problem, but it clearly broke like, OK, well, I can't keep this table or keep using it. So I go back online and I start looking for other counter height, similar size tables that would fit the same look.

And for like an hour, I'm going through all these other options. I'm reading reviews. Oh, this one's built cheaply. This one's plastic. This one doesn't, it's square instead of circular, all these other things. And you know what I landed on? The original listing for the table that I bought. And I started reading the reviews for the table and everyone loves it. Nobody mentions it breaking. So I'm like,

Is it still five stars even though it broke? I called them. I was a year and a half out. So they were like, oh, yeah, it's out of warranty. So we can't do anything. Sorry, you're kind of screwed. And I was like, all right, well, I need to buy another table. Am I going to buy the same table because everyone had great experiences and it seems like nobody else is broke and maybe it was a freak accident? Or do I go with a different lower rated table? I don't know. I'd probably buy the same table. I might. Are you allowed to edit reviews on Wayfair?

I don't know. Maybe. I haven't left my initial review yet. Well, that would be interesting because if you're not, then that doesn't necessarily mean all those people didn't have that issue. It means they left their review really early. Exactly. It's possible a lot of people like built the table, set it up, and a week later they were like, I love this thing and left a great review and then disappeared. And then everyone's table broke and nobody can adjust their reviews.

Amazon does let you edit reviews. And I actually usually find those ones to be like, that's something I like to look for on Amazon. Three months later. Yep. And there'll be like update. And it's like, oh, that means something important enough happens that either it got that much better or that much worse. And if that happens down the line and you're willing to go back and review it, that feels like major green flag to me. Like I want to read that review. I'm submitting a review on Wayfair right now. So I reviewed this. You didn't originally review it.

right? I didn't originally review it, but now that I've done that... Do your deed to the people. Also...

If I would just not buy something off Wayfair, I would go for something else. Really? No, I was looking at a bunch of other tables online on a bunch of other different websites. Like I Googled this specific type of table I wanted and went through all these other sites and it landed me back on this one table that is on Wayfair. Yeah. I feel like Wayfair is just kind of like Amazon at this point where they're just bringing out a bunch of third party garbage and making it look incredible. And it's all just like white labeled the same trash. And if one of them gets really good, I don't know.

I submitted a review and it says pending review. So it's not even on the listing yet. What did you review? I just I just submitted like a blanket that I got. Just put a five star thing and hit submit. And now it says pending. You just five stars reviewed the table that broke. No, no, no, no. Just a random other thing. See if I can edit a review. They have to review your review. It sounds like they're going to review my review. Oh, you review there. What if you review their review? David, no, no, we were in the same loop.

It was suddenly back in February. Like, what happened? I bought something recently, period. And I'm probably going to review it because it was way worse than I was expecting. Okay. What happened? So I bought some exercise clothes because I have traditionally only had one exercise shirt and one exercise pair of shorts.

And I need more. So I bought some random like no name brand on Amazon because it came with three pairs of like shirts and shorts. How do you pronounce that? I think it's by. Yeah.

Nice. Okay. Yeah. It's B-U-I-J-Y-A. All caps. Whoa. All caps. Always. That's good. First off, red flag. Immediately. Amazon listing. All caps. Company name, red flag. Yeah. Immediately. So it comes with three pairs of both a shirt and shorts. Red flag. For $38. I could have told you this. I could have reviewed this already. Well, look, it's workout clothes. Like how bad could they possibly be? No, that's comparable to Old Navy pricing. Red flag. Red flag.

You don't buy socks in bulk? The last pair of pants I bought at Old Navy, I wore them immediately to a wedding and my whole crotch just split open and I had to do the whole rehearsal dinner with the pants just ripped down the center. I think coming in a pack of three should be a yellow flag.

Yeah. Not a red flag. A pack of three. I thought value because like, look, I'm just going to the gym. How bad could these possibly... I just need to get them sweaty. Like that's the only thing I'm using them for, right? So I open the package and I wear them and I go to wear them and the pants are literally backwards. Like the drawstring is coming through the wrong side of the pants on the back and

and the pockets are backwards too. And I was like, I walk into the gym, I walk into the locker room and David's just like looking at his pants. I was like, cause I put them on and I tried to put my hands, I tried to put them on the way it looked like it should be. And I tried to put my hands in my pockets. I'm like, these pockets are backwards. And then I realized, no,

the drawstring part is backwards. So I was like, that's weird. This brand makes weirdly shaped pants. Hold on. Can I cut you off? And I think it's just a question we all have here. Yeah, the drawstring and the pockets are facing opposite directions. Oh, okay. I thought you just had them on backwards. It just sounded like you had them on backwards. No, no, no. The whole pants are backwards. Okay.

My feet are facing this way and the pants are facing the other way. Okay, look. So I put them on. And the drawstring is in the back, on my lower back. And I'm like, that's really weird. So I just dealt with it. And I thought, I guess this brand just puts the drawstring around the back, which is confusing and strange. Cool, modern, chic vibe. Yeah. But then the next day, I opened the next pair.

And they're the right way. So I'm just like, they literally made that part of the pant backwards somehow. I think, see, what you need to do is use the backwards pants for core day. Because when you're doing sit-ups, the backwards facing pockets will prevent your phone from falling out when you're lying down. Then your tailbone will be on the drawstring. No, no, no. Because if the pockets are backwards, then the drawstring is the right way front.

Oh, if I flip it around? Yeah. Well, if the pockets are... Oh, that's a good point. Are they side pockets or back pockets? Boom. They're side pockets. I think I've turned this one star review to a five star review. Feature. The other problem is that... Feature or a bug. Every single... Yeah, feature or a bug. But it's only one pair of the pants because I bought six. Right, because you only have one corde per week. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Feature. Feature.

And then every single shirt just has tons of like threads hanging out of it. Like it is the lowest. Oh, and I got a medium and they're like extra large. They did look pretty. They're so big. So anyway, I'm going to, I'm going to review. I just, I review this. I think this, this is a learning experience here because the name of this, this listing is just the ultimate Amazon red flag. And I think we can, we can connect this to tech here. I'm going to read it for you. Right. Okay. So,

Boyja, men's workout clothes, athletic shorts, shirt set, three pack for basketball, football, exercise, training, running, gym. That's every Amazon listing. Exactly. Yeah. The more words in the title...

The bigger the red flag is, I feel like. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of things about that. I think I would probably be like, this is an Amazon listing. But when you bought it, it was a 4.4 star listing. It still is. Which is not that bad. Compared, like I was looking at value versus like,

Right. How many ratings is it? There are 1,346 ratings. I would take a shot on that. Yeah. I would use that. Like the value versus rating scale, I was like, yeah. But then it's 4.4, but then when you expand...

the five star there's only 67 five star reviews and then is it like stratified evenly or is there a bunch of two and one stars so it's 67 and then 16 oh it's like a percent yeah so but there's a you notice there's more a little more recent reviews actually though the reviews are pretty positive so this is a tough one all this year did you get a fluke backwards elastic package and with like crazy oversized like you just got a weird bad one but that was only one pair of pants and then

All of the other ones were still terrible quality and super oversized. This person only got the shirts. They didn't even send them the pants. Oh my gosh. Okay, you gotta... So what are you gonna... What is your star rating? I'm gonna give this...

I was thinking two star because the sizing is completely wrong. Like the backwards pant thing is like funny and weird and I don't really care. But like the fact that it's super oversized and the shirts just have threads like hanging out of them constantly, it just feels low quality. Like I think two star. Even though, again, they're just exercise clothes and I really don't care. But they managed to goof it up that bad. And if I could get it for the same price at Old Navy, then maybe I'd do that. Yeah.

I'm thinking about this table. I think I'm going to probably... I think you should go to a furniture store and look.

Yeah, but it's going to be $20. That's a lot of work. I know it is. I know it is, but it's also a lot of work to attempt to return this table or get rid of it and get another one and set it up. Yeah, I mean, I could go to a furniture store. I just won't know if the table's going to explode by doing anything different. You might get a better warranty, though. Yeah, oh, this time I'm going to probably get the warranty that's more than $100. You can buy it. I'd skip the warranty. I always skip the warranty. That's my thing. I take good care of stuff, but this one just exploded. One other thing.

Wait, is this another review? Another review. Okay, sorry. Yeah. I bought a set of wheels and tires for my Tesla. Oh. So it's a site that just does wheels and tires for Tesla. Just wheels, actually. And they happen to sell a wheel and tire package. Okay. And so they ship you the wheels with the tires mounted already.

I got the wheels. I went to a shop. They jack it up. They put the wheels on. And one of the wheels, one of the tires is flat. And I go, oh, you got to air up this tire. It's not, I can't drive home unless you air it up. They air it up. I drive home. Next morning, tire's flat again. Ah, that's weird. I air it up.

I come home from work, it's flat again. Oh, it's leaking. That's like the obvious answer. I go have it looked at at a tire place and the cords, like the seal around the rim is just leaking as if it was ripped during installation. Everything else about the rims, gorgeous wheels. I love the wheels. The tires are installed. Everything else about them is great, but I can't drive because it has a flat and I have to literally, and I probably will end up having to get another tire repaired

what is the, what's the star rating? Well, you're all, I mean, it sounds like a fluke, right? I mean, they'll replace it, right? What's their return policy. I think that's what it will depend on. I would wait until the customer service. Yeah. Are you going to need to get two tires? If you have to get new ones, he's going to, I know they're all matching. Uh,

I will have to, I'm guessing what I'm going to need to do is they damaged the tire when they mounted it. So I'll have to get one new tire and get that installed. That's the second time you've had work done on a vehicle where they kind of damaged it a little bit. Wait, wait, but you said the tires were installed already.

Yeah, they mounted the tire onto the wheel and then shipped me the four wheels with the tires. Oh, yeah. So the company, not the place you got it installed at. Right. Okay, sorry. I thought you meant they did. The company that installed them just took them and put them on the car. They damaged it, for sure. They didn't do anything bad. It's the shippers who put the wheel and tire package together. Those are the ones that I need to- I would go through the customer service policy and wait for that. And then if they return it and it's good and it's easy and they're doing it for everybody- It's five stops?

Then that's on you. That part's on you. If the customer service is good, then it's five stars. To be fair, they probably shouldn't have sent one that was messed up to start with. I agree. Yeah, I would do four. Four? Mistakes happen, though. Yeah, but if you're not lucky enough and you don't have another car, you could potentially be missing days of work now or having to rent a car. That's quality control. Yeah, I would do four. I can't give it a five. It's also not...

It's not subtle when you tear a tire and there's a leak in it. You know what I mean? Yes. I'll give them benefit of the doubt. Yeah. Maybe something weird happened. It's tough to say because it's a slow leak. And so they could have like put it all on and then everything looked fine. They aired it up and then they shipped them. Yeah.

And then they slowly lost air during shipping and they never noticed. But I mean, I'm not a mechanic, but like, I'm sure there are a litany of tools to make sure that the air pressure on a tire is constant. I bet the person who did it in the back of their head is like, I hope I didn't rip it. But they probably knew. Fire them. They probably know.

Well, that's the end of my segment of exploring weird review scenarios. I think we should keep this up because I think we constantly have questions about, like we review things professionally, but there's also like random things that we buy where we're like,

How do you review this? Backward pants. Could we do a segment at the end where people send us in things that they bought they're wondering about reviewing? That was going to be my joke. I was waiting for the trivia section to say that. Well, too bad. My idea now. Check me, Adam. So, like, people send in ideas of things that they want. People bought something and they send us what they liked and didn't like about it. Oh, that'd be fun. Maybe on a slow week. End it.

end of the off the rails only weird things though not just like I bought a toothbrush like if you bought a toothbrush and it came backwards yeah like I bought three sets of pants and one of them was backwards and the other one had like the shirts were too big yeah I want to hear about all the weird stuff like that yeah I like that idea alright well let's get into trivia

All right. Trivia time. Yellow, like the new iPhone. Lights are back. Speaking of the new iPhone. Biggest story of our time. We were just talking about the yellow iPhone 14. Biggest news story of our time. We can't stop talking about it. What was the last yellow iPhone? I knew that's what you were going to ask. Damn it. Oh, I know exactly what it is. Did you look it up, Andrew? I know what it is. No, no, I just know it. I have no idea. I think I know what it is.

- I'm gonna write it. - Yeah, I'm gonna write mine down. - You're gonna write it down now? - While we go to break. - Are we that confident? - Either way, ad break now. You don't have to watch us write it, you know? - Does anyone else have my pen? - Anyway, we'll see the answers at the very end. Let's take a quick break.

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All right, welcome back. Let's talk about this AI feature. The yellow iPhone? This is a... This AI color. No, it's a... Spotify has a new AI DJ feature. I have...

feelings about this i have thoughts i don't actually have this feature yet i've been trying to i've been reloading spotify you're the only one that doesn't i'm somehow yeah the only one who doesn't have this beta feature it's like the opposite of what normally happens but hey okay i didn't have it until literally 35 seconds ago and you have it now yeah so like maybe i'll get it soon but here's what it is okay so you know what ai uh synthesized voices can be

AI DJ is basically like it'll play through a playlist, which Spotify can curate playlists, but it'll also include like a radio DJ voice that like talks you through the playlist as if you're listening to the radio or something. So it'll just be a guy going like, hey, I'm your Spotify DJ. Your first few songs are from your high school days because you listen to this artist a lot, plays a few songs.

Then it comes back and it's like, time to change up the mood. I have some more songs. It's just like a radio AI thing, whatever. It has some scripts that it reads. I'm not going to use this ever, but it's AI. Everyone who has a company has to do AI in some way. So here's Spotify's AI. I'm going to let David go on it. Let David talk on his. So I was in your DMs. David likes it. Adam likes it.

Marques and I were super skeptical of it. I think Ellis was skeptical too. No, no, I tried it all last night and all this morning. So I have notes, but I want you to talk about it. I want you to talk, and then I'll show you my notes. Okay, so the voice map of the guy that is talking to you, there's only one voice, but it's based on one of their early employees.

So they got like a lot of his voice and then they he's got a voice. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds like a DJ. And they got script writers and a bunch of other people to like kind of decide on how he was going to talk, how he's going to mix it around.

But I really enjoy it because like I was just listening to it this morning and then it's like, yeah, we're going to throw it back to the music you were really liking in 2018. And I was like, damn, this is kind of nice. I mean, how about you just play the song? Yeah, but it does it for me. I mean, yeah, I think this is my like my initial thought was

That's cool, but it's because you have a playlist called My Top Songs of 2018. I do. And it's just playing that. And I can go back to that playlist. But the fact that it's jumping around to a bunch of different stuff. That is the thing I like about it. And I think that we're always on a sine wave of wanting more control and wanting less control. The reason that people watch, there are like, what is it called? That TV channel that just cycles through TV, but it's streamed.

I don't remember that. Do you remember stumble upon the website? Yeah. That sounds like that. We're like, yeah. Wow. Yeah. I think that people are in a phase where they kind of don't, they have over too much choice and overabundance of choice and they just kind of want to be served stuff. And the fact that like regular radio, right. Has no mapping to you. It's like a billboard, right? It's like you're going by a billboard. It has me probably has nothing to do with your interests, right?

Radio is the same way, and it's probably, if you're listening to 96.9 The Eagle, it's only going to play classic rock radio. But this one is tailored to the music that you've liked over the years, and you can hit the DJ button to be like, I'm not really into this. And over time, it will better match your taste. So it's like a better version of what Spotify already does. Okay, so...

I would like all of this without the DJ voice. Just like an endless playlist without the DJ voice. Yeah, there's lots of good playlists. It's got a hip-hop mix that's tailored to my hip-hop listens. So it's got a bunch of hip-hop artists I listen to and then radio sprinkles in some more. Then there's a pop mix. Then there's a Kanye mix. Then there's a Drake mix. Then there's a Deadmau5 mix, a Muse mix. And they're all like, because those are things that I've listened to.

And so it'd be cool to have like a throwbacks plus modern, whatever, like, but I don't want the voice at all. Context too. And it's like, so I like, I think we can, we all agree that Spotify is really good at making these playlists, right? Like discover weekly, all that kind of stuff is incredible. Like I, they do a great job at that. And the tailored to you part is super important. I do like the fact that he jumps between them. I kind of wish I could just say like,

here's a bunch of playlists I have. Can you shuffle between playlists and then like do that without the voice? That'd be cool. I think that would be cool. He sometimes talks a little long. He sometimes is a little quick. He like, he, okay. Some of the things he's saying is basically just like, like the,

The scriptedness of it is just essentially explaining the name of the playlist. Because it's like, here's the songs you liked in 2018. It's just popular 2018 songs that you listen to. I also have noticed with a couple bands or like artists...

He's got a very grocery store self-checkout vibe where it's like, you really liked songs from 2018, so you're going to listen to Banana. And it's just like, it says the name of the artist really poorly. Some are totally fine. Some of them, they tried to pronounce Foo Fighters, and I thought they said Fire Fighters, and I was very confused. Which, this brings me to my next point.

The immediate thing I thought of this was this is like radio. How are they going to bake ads into this? Oh, no. Because it's only for premium subscribers. So now I already got something. I think I could kind of relate to an ad, which is it was like,

You've listened to the Foo Fighters. You seem to enjoy the Foo Fighters who are going to be starting their touring again, blah, blah, blah, soon, and then giving me close by tour dates, which I can only assume gave me nearby tour dates because they're starting a tour again. And then that was the intro to this next five songs. It played one Foo Fighters song and then four songs that were from a completely different genre. So it really felt forced. Sorry, just to interrupt.

and nunciate the force, I'll slam the microphone. But it really felt like pigeonholed in there to be like,

Foo Fighters are playing near you and Foo Fighters are probably paid to put their tour dates on Spotify. Well, that's exactly why I enjoy this so much. Because right now it's cute. It's cool. There's a voice. But with location data, with all the data Spotify has about you, with if I want to start a running playlist and just be like, I'm running. Give me the DJ hyping me up, playing with tempo songs that match my pace. Yeah.

Give me the weather while I'm driving to work. What's the traffic on my commute to work? And I just hit the AI DJ and it does all this? Yes. Like that is where they're headed. I want this. I hope. I don't know. Because that. I get it. I could see. I get it. Because they're never going to replace a human DJ. Yeah. Like David was saying, it's like a human DJ is broadcasting to everyone. But if they could get an AI DJ to do the same things but be very specific to you and your routine. Yeah, tailored to you. Yeah, it's over. It's like the Google assistant of your podcast.

audio world yeah listening yeah I get it I have two more things that I noticed sorry do you have anything else to say because I feel like I just I took a bunch of notes because you told me to try this alright so one so I had two things back to back that were kind of weird okay it brought up hey here's an artist you used to listen to but they've seemed to fallen out of your rotation let's bring it back

It was some like lo-fi playlist that I must have played when I was working once. So it was like really strange. So I immediately skipped all five songs and then it like, I must have skipped them too fast and it got confused because then there's just 15 seconds of dead silence with the, but like my Android auto said the DJ was up.

And it just like didn't know what to say. And just waited. The DJ was speechless. And then he just like came back. So it was like clearly processing what it wanted to recommend me next. And that I thought was kind of weird. But I have been trying to think of like what I think this could do. You're talking about like running tempo. I think it would be cool. Like I'm going on a 30 minute run. Can you pick songs that will...

end at 30 minutes like so you're not ending a run at a certain point or like a warm up tempo then like right in the middle get really intense yeah yeah yeah and yeah and basically but so here's here's a pitch that I have that I think could be cool we've all played pod quiz right mm-hmm

Do you know how the first five is always music-based and it's like play a clip of a song and you guess? I think it's always my favorite part of PodQuiz. If the DJ could somehow do something like, I'm going to pick 20 songs that you might know and I'm going to play you clips of them and you can play this in your car of guessing the song and the artist...

I think that would be really cool. That's what I'm saying. This is limitless. There's so many things that could be used. When you tailor things specifically to the user, it makes the possibilities a lot bigger. Okay, let me propose another version of this to you and see if it sounds absurd or not. YouTube has a recommended page. Let's say in a theoretical world, YouTube can put together a quick AI-generated 10-video playlist for you based on what it knows you like watching, and it's usually pretty good.

But then also insert a video AI DJ. Alex Trebek. All right. Next video for you is going to be a throwback to you used to watch when you were younger. Okay. It's me at the zoo. And you skip a few too fast and then you get to the end of the playlist and he just looks at you like, I wasn't ready for that, man. Hold up. New video. It's every medium. I feel like the playlist just minus the the.

guy i know i would like that here's my movie theaters yeah but music you listen to over and over and over again videos you probably don't here here is my counterpoint and another thing i think could be interesting is i wish it was more interactive potentially with voice or it could be with forward and back buttons because in your car it you should not be controlling your phone yeah i wish the dj in some sense was like hey uh

we can either play oldies from the seventies or stuff you listened to in 2019. And I could like give it the direction or like scoot it in a certain direction. Cause right now it really is just going all over the place. Like sending me summer 2018 into lo-fi beats into Dua Lipa is like, yeah, that's wild. Crazy. It's,

It's an interesting vibe. I do think that eventually they'll introduce some sort of natural language processing where you can interact with it and you can be like, I'm kind of thinking of more like I want some island vibes right now. And then it just is like, yeah, island vibes. We heard you loud and clear. You were listening to those in 2018. I heard you on island vibes. It's just...

- Yeah, I don't know. It's very beta. - I think there's potential. - It's very beta. I think it has a lot of potential. It's based on a company that they bought only a year ago, so they implemented it very quickly.

And I could see them doing a lot of like chat GPT style natural language processing injection pretty soon. So I'm down on the DJ as it exists now, but you've talked me into its potential future. I think it is a success. Look at the success. We did that. We convinced Marques of something. Yeah.

Too bad he can't use it. Let me use the feature. I'm just going to throw this out here solely out of pettiness. When I was applying to college as a high schooler, I applied to this fancy business and technology hybrid program at a university I'm not going to aim. And I wrote an entire essay about how Pandora's music genome project was worthless because all the important data as far as music went is

is going to be user data and listening data. Because you never like a song because you liked another song that sounds exactly the same. You like a song because of the time you heard it and who showed it to you. And I was like, whoever can collect all this data and use it is going to be the biggest player in the music industry. And I didn't get into this school. Yeah.

Wow. Shame them. Right now. Name and shame. But somewhere there's a professor who read that who's like, I'm going to teach this. So I won't name them. It rhymes with University of Schmother in Schmalifornia. I love naming and shaming. Yeah. I like, I love shaming the schools I didn't get into. It's my favorite. Stanford. Cornell. It's whatever. It's no big deal. Harvard. Northwestern.

So there's one other thing we wanted to mention, which is a not it's not AI, is it? It's a machine learning machine learning. So slightly adjacent super resolution, super resolution video. Yeah, this. OK, well,

Well, I pitched this to you this morning about talking and you had some strong thoughts. Do you want me to read the, the, the, and then you can. Sure. Okay, cool. Yeah. So very quickly edges introducing a new feature that can use machine learning to upscale online video content to create higher resolutions. The videos have to be seven 20 P or lower. They can't be DRM prevent protected. So Netflix, Hulu, HBO, stuff like that, probably mostly YouTube videos. Um, and you have to have some certain, uh,

hardware requirements so like 20 series or higher or an RX 5700 or higher um and it also says Microsoft has not mentioned if VSR can boost 720p resolutions to full 1080 which we're just like what out there yeah um I know David's worked with video resolution upscaling stuff before yeah

So that's why I kind of saw it interesting. And in an ideal world, if I can play me at the zoo at a higher resolution or hold stuff like that, sounds cool. Before you, I know you really don't think this is ever going to happen. How's your...

- The video upscaling stuff? - Yeah, how is it? - It does really bad with hard edges, so text is terrible. It kind of looks like if you put into Dolly to make a sign that says something and you know how the text is just random letters all scrambled and kind of like they don't really have hard edges. I remember upscaling for a video we were working on the original Apple iPhone keynote because it's only available in 240p. - Yeah, you've done it for me before for a couple podcast things. - Yeah, and I upscaled it to 4K and like,

Steve Jobs looks great. The theater looks great. Everything looks kind of great. But all the presentations on the screen are just a text is just totally scrambled. Yeah. So we've upscaled a few of the videos we've posted on the waveform Twitter from 720p to 4k and no one's like noticed or said anything. Yeah. And also it's gotten way better recently. Um,

I used Topaz video AI for that before. And I think that within the last year or so, all of this video upscaling stuff has gotten way better. Like NVIDIA has dynamic super resolution and all this different stuff. I'm just throwing this out here. I have no proof of this, but I think one reason they might be closing the edge upscaling to older stuff is because I find when I try to upscale things that were shot on film or shot on analog video, it doesn't

can't make sense of what it's seeing like it try I think it's really noise instead of well I think it's probably trained on high resolution like 4k digital video so like the soft lines and the noise and the subtle color banding it just freaks out because it has no reference to what it's supposed to look like yeah that makes sense

Yeah. Yeah. My take on upscaling is it's generally not good. Generally. So I've used various, and I think also this is source dependent. So upscaling, like I've seen a lot of really, uh,

interesting demos of upscaling video technologies on a TV. And it's like, I will play a 720p video on this TV with the TV's upscaling technology turned on and it'll look like 4K. And then I play it and I'm like, it looks like sharpened 720p. I know what that looks like. So I've never looked at the result of upscaling and thought, wow, mission accomplished. It looks like the higher res version of

And I think that also applies to audio where like the worse your sources, the harder it is to do a good upscale. So like me at the zoo, 240p, 480p video, whatever it is, will never look like new models

modern digital video because of the way it was captured. It just, there's, other than like really severely altering it, there's no way to make it look like normal 4K video. I think with diffusion you can do that though. Because like, they didn't. then you're like,

generating and adding. Yeah. Versus just like sharpening. And that can look good. Yeah. The old upscaling, I would completely agree with you that like a few years ago, upscaling looked pretty trash. But some of the most recent examples that I've seen have been actually quite good.

And I don't know whether they're using diffusion or whatever, but I think that there are new AI models that do it a lot better. Yeah. I have yet to, I would really love to see like some of this in action. I should, we should try it on edge. Yeah. We should try this. This isn't out yet, but we can try it on some of the other, the NVIDIA or Topaz you said you were using. Yeah. But yeah, I don't know. I want to try the, the, no, I do want to try the edge one when it comes out. Um, it's not out quite yet. Yeah. One thing to think about though, I think though is like,

I don't think 720p is going to look as good as 4K, but if 720 can look 70% as close to 4K, it'll still look way better than 720. Like we should test it with your HP laptop video. We should upscale that bad boy.

Cause that's rough lighting. And I think the tonality is still going to look exactly like that quality. You won't get more dynamic range. You won't get more. Yeah. It'll be like a, like a nice sharpening filter. Yeah. With like a little more detail in some of the finer lines maybe.

So now we need your YouTube DJ to play old YouTube videos upscale. So then we can just flashback YouTube. Remastered. Here's when you were watching a lot in 2007. HP Elite Chromebook Remote Review. Minecraft tutorials. Tutorials are good. That's funny. All right. We're going to take another quick break to talk about the top 10 phones in the world in 2022. Objectively. Objectively. But first...

All right. So last night, Andrew, Adam, me, a few other people went to a hockey game, a New Jersey Devils game. Thank you. So I thought today would be a fun week to do a tech hockey game.

hockey collab question. Let's go. I finally might have the advantage. The NHL has an official app for players and coaches. It's called SAP-NHL. It runs on iPad and it gives all sorts of live statistics, live insights. It's actually like the kind of data it provides is super duper cool. But the trivia question today is on game day at the arena, how

How many iPad Pros is each team allowed to have? Okay, maybe I might have an answer. That's also an interesting question because the Flyers coach banned all iPads off of their bench. So are the Flyers paying? Off of their bench? I don't know anything about hockey. I know nothing about sports. Yeah. We'll be right back. Support for Whiteform comes from Coda.

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I mean, most unit sales globally of the year. Number one is the yellow iPhone. I mean, no doubt about that. Yeah. 100%. Well, we have 20, 20, 20 years lost already. Yeah, we already know how this year is going to go, but this is 2022. So this is some data gathering from a site called CounterPoint, and they've actually broken it down into a pretty interesting chart, which is every single month,

We have the top 10 for the year, but then for every month, where on that list each one of them was. It's rank, yeah. It's rank for the year. So it's really cool. So I think we're just going to put this chart on screen so you can see this real quick. And for our audio listeners, I'll just break it down. Our top 10 smartphones starting at number 10 is the Samsung Galaxy A03. Number 9 is the iPhone SE. Number 8 is the iPhone 14 Pro.

Number seven is the iPhone 14. Number six is the iPhone 12. Number five is the iPhone 13 Pro. I'm sensing a trend here. Yeah. Number four is the Samsung Galaxy A13. Number three...

is the iPhone 14 Pro Max. Number two is the iPhone 13 Pro Max. And number one is the iPhone 13. This was surprising for a couple reasons to me. Number one, this is global. So this, I mean, this is, I would expect this in the US, right? For sure. But there are a lot of other markets and a lot of other regions where I don't expect to see much on the premium iPhones, like at all. Like a lot of countries, a lot of regions just don't buy premium iPhones like that. Um,

And that also we don't see premium phones from other manufacturers that are competing with the iPhone. So then you look at the month-to-month, and it gets even more interesting. Obviously, the iPhone 14 series didn't come out until September, so they don't have anything listed on this list until September, where the iPhone 14 Pro Max debuted at number one, and it was number one for September, October, and November, and then gave up its spot to the iPhone 14 series.

And it stayed at number two. So the Pro Max is the one that's actually selling the most volume. And it sold so much volume in those four months that it became the number three best selling phone on the planet for the entire year. That's insane. That is a lot of volume. I mean, obviously, Apple sells the most volume right at the beginning of the of the release. But that's gigantic. Yeah.

Then the 14 Pro sells a lot. The 14, the 13. People are still buying the iPhone 12 in such mass that in January it was the number four best-selling phone of the entire month. In March it was in the world. And March and April and May and June and July was all top five every single month. People just buy iPhone 12s regularly. That's insane. I mean, the iPhone 13...

1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-2-4-4-4. So people continue buying the iPhone 13.

Crazy, yeah. This is like also really disheartening for like Samsung. Yeah. Because if you're Samsung, first of all, you wish that your premium phones would sell in the same mass and be your most popular phones. But clearly here, it's the A13 and the A03, which are like $190 phone and $100 phone selling most volume. And number two, instead of buying a cheaper Android phone, people are buying...

old premium iPhones, which is really interesting. Like people would actually go buy an iPhone 12 at what I presume is not a very steep discount from what we know about Apple's pricing. Yeah. They'll keep it in the lineup, drop it by maybe 50 to 100 bucks, you know, when they put the like graphic on stage.

So, yeah, this is eye-opening. It feels crazy because the amount of phones that reel me and read me. A lot. All of these guys make so many variants of all their phones, and you would imagine that they would ship hundreds of millions of units. And in some markets, they do. They do. Yeah, like in India, they sell crap loads. Yeah, in China and Huawei phones. That is probably part of it, though, is like,

Because this is by model, when Samsung and Realme have like 30 models and then those 30 models each year or whatever. So one interesting thing about this graph is between the third spot and the 10th spot is 1.7% to 1.1%. So like 10 to 20 could be neck and neck. And that's where we could see a bunch of other Samsung phones, a bunch of other Realme phones.

The other thing here, though, is the number one spot is 5% of total market share globally was the iPhone 13. And then the next closest was half of that. Apple totals about 15% of all global market share with these charts. So this is a type of chart then that favors Apple because they have so few models and that they're not the number one global market.

manufacturer of phones by volume. They might be like number three or something like that. Huawei surpassed them for a while a number of years ago, but now I'm sure they've dropped by a lot. If it was by volume, I almost wonder if they would even be top five. I wouldn't be surprised if they were, but you think of like Huawei, Honor, Realme, Oppo,

There's so many phones, Samsung. But they have so few models that in order to get a model at the top of this list, it's easier when they have less models. So, yeah, it's still like Samsung still has like clear flagships like S23, 23 Plus and 23 Ultra are kind of like their flagships in the same vein as these iPhone flagships. But they didn't crack the 1% mark, so they didn't end up on this list. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it does still seem like Apple has a huge amount of market share. Like Samsung is above them with, let's see, Q1 of, let's see.

Q4 of 2022, oh, Apple was above them. I don't know. Yeah, they sold 70 million phones of Q4 of 2022 and Samsung sold 58.3 million phones. You know, also another stat that just keeps blowing my mind more and more is in the US, how dominant they are among young people. So like you think of like, what's a dominating market share for a smartphone in any one country? You'd think like-

50% for one company is pretty crazy. 60% is crazy. 70% is like dominant. And then the numbers of like people in the U.S. ages like 18 to 24. 18 to 24. 75%. No, it's like 90 plus. It's like an insane number.

of people who specifically get pressured into the iPhone and the ecosystem because not only do all their friends already have one, but their parents have one. And it's just like the communities have them. It's just the phone in the U.S. Well, it went up from, I'm trying to remember the years, but within a five-year span between I think 2014 and 2019, it went from 40% of 18 to 24-year-olds in the U.S. owned an iPhone to 75%.

This is just a recent article I pulled up from Phone Arena. According to their survey, nine out of every 10 teenagers in the U.S. own an iPhone. 87%. Nine out of every 10. 87%. Nine out of every 10. That's insane. Most people in like that age bracket, like 13 to 19 or whatever. So,

It's crazy. It's crazy how dominant they are in this one country, but then it is kind of eye-opening to see a global chart where it translates. I think the global thing is what surprised me the most here because I know we talk about Apple a lot because we're US-based, but we clearly get a lot of comments that's like, Apple's not big where I am. They're way too expensive or import fees, all this stuff. But

I think it said they're most popular in US, UK, Germany, France, and China. And like, if you just really can dominate a few markets, you really can dominate global sales. Like,

It's pretty crazy. I think that really shows the power of the ecosystem lock-in, especially in that age group. If you're not able to use the thing that the social dynamics of the other people your age use, you're going to get outcast. And that's the worst age to get outcast in because you're trying to make friends. You're growing as a person. It's a Ouroboros. It eats its tail because...

the more people that get pressured into getting an iPhone, then they become part of the amoeba that pressures other people to become part of their amoeba. And eventually the smaller amoebas just get completely eaten and it turns into one giant. And they grow out into.

Into craps. We're all back to craps. That's a deep cut. But yeah, I don't know. It makes sense that in the last five years, the market share has grown that much in Apple's favor because they're the most ecosystem forward brand. And because they already have a dominance, that's just going to keep getting bigger and bigger. And there's going to be a day where there's like,

99% of teenagers have iPhones in the US. That's always been an interesting question is like, can any other brand crack this? Because you can obviously emulate the same pressures with your own ecosystem, but you also have to get switchers. So like Samsung can build a really strong ecosystem and they have, like you can get a Samsung laptop that talks to your Samsung phone and has Samsung services and it has their own version of AirDrop and their own, all this stuff like works really well together. Huawei does the same thing. Oppo does the same thing. But you also have to

balance the people who are already in a different ecosystem and get them to switch into your ecosystem, which is way harder. So I think it's tough to pick...

someone cracking this and like actually starting to turn over market share and get into what Apple's doing. Well, in the fragmentation of the fact that like, yeah, you can have a Samsung phone and you can have a Samsung laptop, but it's actually a Microsoft laptop because Microsoft makes the software. This is true. And just the

The level of parity between those devices, if they're not made by the same manufacturer, is just always glitchy and buggy and never really works that well. Because what is Microsoft's incentive to make this random Samsung pairing app any good? Yeah, and it'll be a Samsung laptop with an Intel processor and the other, yeah, Microsoft's OS. And it's like, you look across the aisle and it's an Apple chip with an Apple keyboard.

computer with an Apple piece of software on it and like an Apple phone. Of course they all work great together. Like Apple architects things within the hardware to be software features that work well with their other devices. Yeah. You can't do that if you're fragmented as a device. Yeah. So it's tough anyway. They're pretty good at this, huh? Yep. People always ask like, oh, wow. Well, there's always a, there's always the like, wow, you guys do a lot of iPhone videos and then you look at, uh,

We were joking about the iPhone, the yellow iPhone being the biggest story of our time. Joking? What? I mean, of course, it is the biggest story of our time. But it's like you wonder why so many... We were talking about the... This is another thing I could make a video about if I really got... If I really wanted to. Do what you want. I don't actually want to. But about YouTube channels, because there are so many YouTube channels, there are now...

increasingly fewer ways to differentiate yourself in the YouTube ecosystem. And so you see like back when I started, if you were a tech YouTube channel, that was enough of a differentiator for you to be like, oh wow, you do tech, you do videos, but you do tech videos. That's really interesting. I haven't seen that. And now there's a bunch of tech videos. Now there's people who just do

smartphone videos or people who just do software or just do productivity inside of tech. And now we're so saturated that there's just like, what can you latch on to to just, you know, sort of drag yourself above the noise and all the saturation? And I think a lot of people find that just making Apple videos is just, yeah, people are interested in Apple. There's always a popular Apple product around. We might as well

just hook onto that. We're like the menorah fish on the side of the shark, you know? So I don't know if there's a video essay in there somewhere, but that, that's a real... I think that's even too saturated at this point. Apple channels? Now you need to unbox iPhones while jumping out of a plane. It's true because there's going to be a bazillion Apple videos and if you're not on the first page of search, you might as well just

I mean, is Bing AI ever going to find you? Nope. Probably not. Steal your content. Quick check, by the way, it's not a menorah fish. What is it? Remora. Remora. Sorry. Thank you. I can't believe I got a bio from Gronk. I can't believe I got. I'm sorry. Thank you for that. Thank you for that.

So, yeah, it's a real thing. The iPhone, turns out, is a pretty popular phone. I can't wait to tell my grandkids, like, in my day, we had Android phones. Shut up, Grandpa, it's time for bed. All right, girl, let's get you to bed. Two different charging ports, and you had to pick one. Android's not real.

Go to bed. There are ancient manuscripts that detail the Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. There is a super, super old carcass of a video idea in the video board, which is, is the iPhone the most successful product of all time? And I started writing down others that could possibly compete with it. One of them is... Slice bread.

Well, so it has to be a company who's made a product. Ford? I was going to say Ford. And then tech is one of the things that iterates every year. So you have newer and newer versions of the product. So it keeps getting sales. Ford F-150. So Ford Model T is...

doesn't really have a modern equivalent that I can say, oh, it's one of the most like successful products ever. It turns out Toyota Corolla every single year is one of the best selling cars on the planet for a long time. Yeah. You can make an argument for that or F-150. You can make an argument. Some others I saw Lipitor, a drug product that's just been popular and useful to people for a long time. Penicillin. And then some other random dark horses like the Harry Potter series or

Just another rant. It's just like a one-off thing. Pokemon. Like one-off media entities, which are really interesting. But I ultimately kept going back to the iPhone. I think the iPhone is probably hands down the most successful individual product ever. Yeah, I love Harry Potter.

I love Harry Potter. It is like my thing. I have tattoos for it and everything. It doesn't hold a candle to the iPhone. It's just like cultural impact was probably a higher spike for Harry Potter. Than the iPhone? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know.

I still meet people that are like, oh, I've never read the books. Oh, I've never watched the movies. Blah, blah, blah. So maybe in its heyday, Harry Potter in its absolute heyday was like every kid. Like Pokemon. Was standing outside the store waiting for the book to drop. Or at least. Just like the iPhone. Or at least knew about it.

Right? Because it was like a book instead of $100, $300, $500 thing. Everyone knew about it. But then it's got to get translated in all these languages. And it's got to be international too. I'm just like the iPhone. I think it starts new economies almost. Right. The iPhone started so many new sections. It is the reason Apple is what it is. And then they have all these other businesses that are built on top of the iPhone being popular. Which is just like the iPads. Apps.

The app store. The entire app store. Like all of that is from iPhone. Yeah, exactly. I think it's hard to compare product to like

story-based entertainment yeah that was like a dark horse like the apple watch is the most popular watch on the planet it's an iphone accessory yeah it's what it is yeah so that's true yeah i think the airpods are like one of the biggest companies in the world on their own right if you were to map out all headphone companies like sony makes headphones so we consider them a headphone company uh audio technica makes headphones among other things um

I think AirPods would be like a top five like headphone company and Sony makes movies. Yeah. Like they make a lot of stuff. And you just bigger than all of Sony. AirPods as their own standalone business are about as valuable as Netflix in its entirety. So I think if they were their own company, they would be actually one of the biggest. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's insane. Yeah. And they're an iPhone. They're an Apple product. Yeah. Yeah.

So the more you know, I think we've talked about it. I was thinking about making this video, but it also kind of felt just like if I make a whole video about why the iPhone is the most popular, the most successful product on the market. It just feels like I'm just patting them on the back like, congrats, guys, you did it. You really did it this time with the iPhone. Take a victory lap. Make a yellow one. Yeah. They wouldn't dare. So it is what it is now. It's a podcast thought. I think that's appropriate. Pod thought.

Hashtag. Yeah. David wants to talk about. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's kind of a quick thing. Yeah, I guess this is perfectly what we just talked about. Realme shipped its first phone that has it's like extremely dynamic island ripoff that it's like it's not just like a ROM that you can download or an app that you can download. It's literally a feature on this Realme C55 phone. And you know what?

The thing is, Apple can't really stop manufacturers from making software things. It's just a software thing on the screen. I can't imagine. It looks... It's cool. It's a good idea, right? Yeah. I think that the hype behind Dynamic Island is probably one of the reasons that the iPhone 14 Pro Max sold so many units. It's a very simple feature that got a lot of people invested. Now, what I wanted to talk about with this specifically is...

is that one, people have been complaining since the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max launched that still not that many apps take advantage of the API.

But even less apps are going to be made like this because this is not like this is not like there's an Android API that can take advantage of dynamic on. It'd be like real me would have to be like, hey, guys, Uber, the calling all the real me see 55 like every single time a company releases like a

a fringe product there they always go like and we opened the api so anyone can make anything like razer's done this a ton of times with like their weird products and nobody makes anything it's tough and the fact that apple can't even get enough manufacturers to make stuff for that dynamic island it's like yeah real me is just gonna there's gonna be system information charging animations whatever the charging animation looks it looks dope terrible wow

Wait, I haven't seen it, so I don't know what to think right now. Look at this. Tell me this isn't...

a tenth of as good as what Apple's is. And I'm saying that because they wrote SuperVOOC in the charging animation. How could you? It says SuperVOOC. Why would you put that on the top of the phone? You know what's funny too is it says 99% right next to the battery icon that says 99%. Exactly. This is what I would call in my day a poor use of space. This is crazy. I mean, the space is there, right? It's a software feature. This is funny because it's just a regular webcam hole punch cutout.

Yeah. I do like having stuff at the top as basically like quick switch. I think that's what was cool about Dynamic Island. They needed to do it more so on the full pill cutout. If you're going to do all this for charging, why is this also here? Oh, I'm not talking about this. I'm not talking about charging. I agree with you on that one. But I think to what David said, and it's not even necessarily real me's fault. It's not Samsung's fault.

it's Android and a million different specifications where to ask a developer to do that is like, please hire an entire new branch of this development in order to get it to work. So if it's not working on Apple, which has two models that are exactly the same, where it's so much easier-- and we see this in a million different apps, and it's just an unfortunate side effect of the Android. Yeah, I mean, I'd say the reason that there's still not that many dynamic apps that take advantage of Dynamic Island is because

yes it's Apple yes it's the iPhone but it's still only two models of the iPhone I would bet you that when the iPhone 15 comes out especially if Dynamic Island comes to the regular model of 15 we're going to see every app manufacturer taking advantage of app developer yeah there's a couple cool ones now my weather app does it Uber does it Spotify does it so we'll see we'll see more yeah super super teaser

We kind of have some of our own firsthand experience in this now, too, which is kind of interesting.

So, it is what it is. It's a shameless clone, which is what The Verge called it, and I agree with that. But that is it. Okay, that concludes our iPhone section of the podcast. Wait, but did we talk about the yellow iPhone yet? Oh, right. I almost forgot. There's a trivia question based on the yellow iPhone. Oh, is there? Well, then let's do trivia. We read it already. Oh, right. I did that already. Okay. Anyway, the last trivia question.

All right. So trivia time. Quick update on the score. Of course. Marquez has eight. Andrew has seven.

David has 10. That's right. David's in the lead. That's right. That changed. Yeah. Andrew, you got to get on it. Yeah. Catch up. And also, before we do trivia, we did hear feedback and we are going to make this much faster. We are doing very strict time limits and we will try and cut out dead space. So you will just hear the question and you will hear the answer and you will like it and you will rate it well and you will not listen to my rating restrictions and you will give it five stars. Yeah.

You're welcome. Thank you for that very concise explanation. Okay. You're welcome. We're making this longer than it needs to be. I've already written. We could have just had the delay in the trivia, but now we delayed the entire show. It's future-proofing. I've written my answers. First question. Yeah. So, just got the yellow iPhone. What was the model number of the last yellow iPhone? Model number? Yeah. The model. The model. Oh, wait. Not number. I mean, same thing. What was the last iPhone that was yellow? Yeah, okay. Yeah.

So you have until the end of this music to write down your numbers or answers. Okay. They're not numbers. I just may have confused myself a little. But yeah, we wrote it down. No, Adam. I did not change mine. You changed yours from before. I'm just saying. Mine's still what I wrote the first time. You're changing it? You better hurry up. We got about three seconds. Okay. All right. Flip them and read. Okay. I had to really think about that one. Oh, I know. Yeah. Okay. iPhone. I wrote iPhone XR.

No. That's not the latest. iRode XR. Really? Nope. iPhone 5C. Nope. Is there a 12? iPhone 11. 11. Was it yellow? The last yellow iPhone. The last one that came with the iPhone. Okay, because the 11 was when they first, didn't they basically, the first time they made the Pros quite a bit better, so the 11 was almost just like an 11R? Yeah, that's why. Oh.

You know what's funny? I thought about that too because the 11 always skips my mind. I always forget it exists. The 11 was basically the 11R, but they just like shifted everything forward. It was the 10RS. All right, next question brought to you by Ellis. No. In a regulation NHL hockey game,

How many iPad pros is each team allowed to have? What is it called, Andrew? Is it a bench? Bench, yeah. So like in one team's bench, how many iPads are allowed in that bench? Not assuming it's two because there's two benches, right? Not in the arena per bench, per team. Per team. Okay. How many iPads are allowed on game day in the arena per team?

In the arena. On game day. In the arena? No, no. In the bench, I thought. Wait, per team or not per team? Per team. Okay. On the bench? Or is this including their... Because they have analysis people outside of the bench. This is on the bench. Okay. Okay.

Final answer. A bench? If you guys want context, a bench holds three coaches and 20 players. Here's the reason it's important. Because during the week, outside of game day, they are allowed X number of iPads per team. All right, flip them and read. What? Did you write O2? So I wrote zero because I thought it was a trick question because the NFL doesn't allow any iPads because they do surfaces. But then I changed it to two. Okay.

You wrote two. That is the kind of question I would write. That is a great. I wrote three. I wrote four. Let's go, man.

So on game day, they're allowed four, and then the rest of the week, they're allowed two per team. Yes. Interesting. That's exactly what my thought process was. Did you know that, or did you just get a nice little guess? Well, I originally wrote two, and then Ellis said they go up on game day. I almost changed to four when he said that, but I didn't know. I assumed one for each side of the bench and one for the coach, one of the coaches. Marques, take us home, please. Thanks for watching. We appreciate you guys. Please suggest topics for future questions so that we can catch up to David.

Yeah. Catch you guys in the next one. Peace. Bye. Waveform was produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Roven. We were partnered with Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro outro music was created by Vayne Silk.

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