Who Cares About Thin Phones?
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Thanks to the Spotify AI DJ. Wow. No regrets. What's up, David? Is that your impression? Now we're going to take it back to 1997. Your parents were arguing in the other room. You didn't know what to do. You started crying. It does. Here's Mariah Carey.

yo what is up people of the internet welcome back to a subscriber only episode of the waveform podcast you're only hearing this if you are subscribed and if you are hearing this and you're not subscribed

then there must be some kind of glitch. Definitely make sure you get subscribed as fast as possible just in case this glitch goes away. Anyway, we're your hosts. I'm Marques. I'm Andrew. And I'm Nintendo Switch 2. So you thought that was gone, but it was always going to come back. We're back. Today's episode, we've got a case manufacturer leaking iPhone 17s. You know, this sort of life cycle of pre-iPhone releases is...

In full swing. The S25 Edge, a new Google favicon slash logo, and also Whoop getting some massive backlash for their new 5.0 band. Whoops. But first, yeah, I was going to make that face. That is the first of probably 10 puns we will do with that joke. I already have that joke built into the soundboard. I've already, I made that joke months ago. I was first. But first, let's just dive into the stuff that we were looking forward to last week because we mentioned it was coming, the Android show.

Pre-IO this year, so we have Google I.O., but pre-IO, we had an Android-specific...

15 or so minute live stream from Google or they went over some Android 16 updates. They went into Material 3 Expressive. They went into some new Gemini features. Thoughts? Thoughts and opinions. Many thoughts and opinions. I think my first thought was I was wishing it'd be longer. Yeah. Like I was hoping getting this a week early, I was excited for it because it felt like maybe...

IOS realized it's going to be AI focused. Let's give the people what they want on the Android side and let's have an event event. Like it didn't feel like an event. No, totally. It was like a shorter, it was about 22 minutes and they did a little, uh, felt shorter. Yeah. They, they did a little, but also a thing at the very end where they brought Dieter out, which is kind of an homage just specifically for people who care about this stuff, the, to the level that we care about it.

They introduced some new stuff that will be in Android 16 and then also some new design elements and some new stuff for cars and whatever.

But it's all like later this year, which is very nebulous. Yeah. And I feel like the reason they're doing this is because all of IO is going to be Gemini. But the funny thing is half of this was Gemini. This has kind of happened with an Apple keynote before, maybe one or two years ago, where they had a section that they essentially cut out of the main keynote and it came at a separate time. Yeah. This feels like, oh, wow, we have an hour to give people about Gemini AI. Yeah.

Why don't we just take the Android stuff out and publish it for the Android audience who wants to see that? Right. So now we saw it. Yeah. It's, yeah, a couple of neat things here and there. Some new rounded corners and bold looks and obviously the stuff that we talked about last week. You know the thing that caught my eye that was interesting? I tweeted about this. I missed it. Well, we were working on a video about this, but they keep doing this thing where they will use a Samsung phone

to demo all of the new android features and i hadn't tweeted about this in a while so i did i put it on threads i put it on twitter and i got all kinds of different explanations as to why they're doing this i had maybe two or three things in my head i got maybe seven or eight people that were very sure about why google keeps doing this and they're all wrong and they're well i think they're all kind of right in a way like if you combine them all that's true you know there's people saying look

People recognize Samsung phones as Android phones. So this is a no brainer for them. It's a good collab. People were saying, oh, Samsung paid them to do that and just put it on stage in front of people, which I don't necessarily know if that's true, but maybe they have a partnership. Well, there was that report that went out recently that Samsung pays Google an enormous sum of money. Yes.

To put Gemini on Galaxy phones. So they have a relationship in some way. I mean, obviously. Like, for the last two years, there have been Google X Samsung ads on the side of the bus stop. Yeah. That have said, like, Google works best on Samsung. Yeah. There's also, I mean, Pixel devices are not popular in comparison to Samsung devices. In comparison. Especially most of the countries that we talk to. Unless you live in my neighborhood and then you only see Pixel devices for some reason. I think what's kind of weirder about it is, like, we're not...

We've seen plenty of Samsung inside of Google events too. Like a lot of, wasn't it like watchOS from a few years ago they were showing on Samsung watches because there wasn't really, there wasn't the Pixel watch out yet, but it's this not even mentioning it

s like galaxy series where they're just like demoing it and like very right into the camera like this is not a pixel device and yeah and this was the the edge right yeah for this show it's like the s25 ultra it was oh was it yeah they talked about the edge briefly at the end i think deter talked about it uh famously in the google pixel 9 event last year the first half of the event was demoed

on an S24 Ultra. That's the weirdest one to me. And even if it is like, okay, now you have your own Pixel phones, surely you'll use Pixel phones to demo new Android features and then continue to use Samsung phones. It's also crazy that they wouldn't demo it on a Pixel 8 and then be like, you thought that was the best of the best. Here's our 9. Yeah. Yeah.

Another explanation that I saw a lot of was Google is getting ahead of any antitrust sort of accusations by showing how rich and competitive the hardware landscape is, that they're surely not favoring their own Pixel devices because, look, we've shown so many Samsung ones. And then, of course, there was Dieter's section at the end highlighting like eight or nine others. Pixel has such little market share. There's no chance that this is going to be a problem. But, you know, that is like another angle that I saw in my replies a lot.

So, yeah, there's a lot of that. They also very clearly showed like the Android XR is launching on a Samsung headset, the Project Muhen thing. They very clearly show, you know, lots of other devices. But that just caught my eye. It is interesting considering Google's whole thing has been look at all your options. But most of the time they're like Samsung, Samsung, Samsung, Samsung.

They probably just know that people recognize Samsung more than they recognize other brand names. So it is a strategic advantage to be able to demo Android features on devices that people have recognition with. It just seems like an opportunity to make Pixel devices more recognized than they already are. Yeah, 100%. You know? 100%. Yeah, I guess the people watching this, would you argue 99% of the people watching the Android show probably have Pixel phones. Yeah, at that point, it's more of like,

give the like the people watching this are probably but uh yeah but I would still use it even if they know about it already I would still use it but yeah I don't know either way that's something I have to bring up but uh yeah there's some other stuff what there's some new color themes new physics in swiping away notifications I like asking physics do you want to just go through like the different sections sure yeah

Okay, we'll start with they started with RCS updates. It was just kind of a little fun blurb that they had where there are now 1 billion RCS messages sent every day. Thanks, Tim. I was going to say that. I would love to know how many of those is because all the iPhones suddenly got updated. That's very funny. But then we moved on to Material 3 Expressive, which we talked about before.

And obviously this got very leaked and we even got screenshots and stuff before from this, but it was nice to see a lot more videos of it in action. And it seems like the primary changes in material three expressive are really aligned around the expressive angle of it, where the physics are very different. They really talked about a lot of the snapping and the jiggle and all the stuff that all the windows will do on your phone. So when you're like pulling up, uh,

you're pulling it to the right, but you decide not to dismiss it, it'll kind of like snap and kind of like bounce back. And assuming the phones are fast enough to make sure this doesn't lag. CPU, CPU.

It will be great. You need high refresh rate to get the most out of your Material 3 Expressive. Yes, actually, yes. I would like to know more about Material 3 Expressive. And we had a briefing about this where I asked, like, do you have any more to share? Because they were just like, more color themes, it's more expressive, it has better physics. And that's all they said. And I would really like to know, like, okay, can you tell me everything else? Because you're saying that this is like a generational update in UX, right?

but you're not saying what else is new besides some dynamic physics stuff and some color. You say more colors. What does that mean? I don't know what that means. I guess to an extent, Android has matured over the years where in previous generations, there would be like a total overhaul on what it looked like and what it meant to be Android. It would go from flat to hollow, which is like glowing and like Tron-like, and then they'd try something else. And then they sort of have slowed down and landed on this more consistent color

rough look for what Android is. So I guess it makes sense that they're not doing this enormous change and it seems very subtle. It's physics and it's little buttons and circles and colors, but it also just kind of feels like we're

spinning tires a little bit, just kind of tweaking. I agree with you that it feels weird that they're saying it's one of the biggest updates when it's meaningful. I think all of these things are really good, but it doesn't feel like the bigger thing was introducing Material You a few years ago. And this is the really nice upgrade to that. I do think although physics and stuff are...

They're cool to see. I think they're actually super helpful for people who might not understand phone UI that well, because when things are a little more meaningful of where it snaps to, I'm sure every one of us have had a parent or a relative who are like, I just swipe something away and I don't know what it is. And now if it's a little harder to do that, or a little more obvious of when you're like accidentally moving something, or like you said, if something like wiggles, you're like, oh, that probably means an actions available here. How do I figure that out?

That's a really, really simple way of making something more intuitive, which is like Android needs probably. I actually, I saw something on blue sky this morning where someone was like material through expressive is, is Android senior citizen edition because all the buttons are way bigger. Everything is a little bit harder to accidentally do. It's more obvious than in your face. The sections are more sectioned. I mean, that's something we talked about last week is like,

in an email, you now have like sections for what's going on. You've got the compose window, you've got the keyboard section, you've got this section and everything's like cut out and kind of floating.

And that does help you delineate like where am I, you know, on the phone. - Some people in our comments did not like that apparently. Why would my email look like a chat log? It's like-- - 'Cause people understand chat. - Yeah, I didn't think that was, I thought it was a great change. - I think it's great. I think the haptics is underrated. I've seen, there's a couple devices in the past couple years that have come out with like extremely clever little haptics things. I don't know if you know on OPPO phones, if you have a bunch of notifications and you hit clear all, it goes like .

and you can feel all the notifications swipe away at once. That's awesome. Just little things like that. I want more of that built into Android. Remember when nothing made a huge deal about the fact that when you hit airplane mode, it had a little animation of the plane taking off? Yeah. They had a whole press release for that. It's funny. Really cool haptics.

In the Android ecosystem is really funny, though, because then when you get that phone with the terrible vibration motor or something, all of that just feels like garbage. But I'm still happy they're making it. Yeah.

So some more universal changes on that. They're going to have more customizable quick settings, and there's a subtly blurred background, which honestly kind of looks a little bit like the iOS update that we are anticipating where everything's more Vision OS-like. They did have more, like, translucency in the Android OS with this update, which seemed interesting to me.

They're adding a new live updates feature, which is the Dynamic Island live updates. When your phone's locked, it looks just like iOS. Is it Dynamic Island or is it more like live activities? Live activities. Yeah. But Dynamic Island and live activities like play together. Yeah. If you're waiting for an Uber or some ongoing action is happening. Yeah. Yeah. They look almost exactly the same, which I'm okay with because it's a really great feature. Yeah. It's so funny. Sorry. The good stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

It's so funny seeing all this when I just got the One UI 7 update, and it's very different but also confusing. I'm just trying to get something to play, and now I have kind of a live thing. That looks like the live activities that Google showed off. But it's to the left side now, and there's... I've...

My thoughts really quickly on One UI 7 so far is I've actually really enjoyed it. It's just a little bit of getting used to things. And I think for a big visual change, that's a really good thing to say. Everyone needs their time to get used to it, but I'm not immediately hating it. So, yeah. Yeah.

glowing review for one year. Small learning curve because you don't want to change too much and have it take forever. But it is really funny seeing all this and being like, damn, there's all these cool things and then my phone completely changed to something totally different. Well, I mean, that update kind of looked very similar to the live activities coming to this. So maybe there was some cross-pollination there. We're talking about Samsung developing things with Google. Maybe they were in there. Also, apparently, Material 3 Expressive is more battery efficient than Material U.

Somehow. Somehow. Which I'm down for. Okay. And it's coming to Pixels later this year. Yeah. Which probably just means it's launching on the Pixel 10. Yeah. That's a very fair guess. Yeah. But we'll probably see a beta in the next couple weeks considering I.O. is in one week. I'm keeping my eye out for that. Yeah. Six days. If anybody sees the Android 16 beta with this stuff in it, both of you.

Before I see it, tweet it at me because I want to install it on my Pixel. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Wear OS 6 is coming out, which adds Material 3 Expressive as well, which is just kind of a visual refresh of Wear OS. Big buttons. Big buttons. Big buttons. Shape morphing elements, as they call it. Yeah. 10% better battery life, which is always welcome if that's true. They are also adding Gemini to the watch.

Yeah. They added Gemini to all the things. They added Gemini to all the things. That was actually a bigger... The one thing they didn't add it to was their home products, but they went Gemini to the watch. Then they also went Gemini to Android Auto. And TV. And Gemini to Android Google TV. Isn't that ironic? Yeah.

Which is great. We'll get there in a minute. It deserves to be in all those places. If you bought a Google Home and it's still Google Assistant, that's the one place where I'm like, are they going to update those to Gemini or are those forever Google Assistant? Which is the irony because Google Assistant came out first on the first Google Home. Yeah. So is it doomed? Do they have to buy another one with Gemini? That seems terrible. Yeah. But you can software update those things. It'll probably update it to it. I hope so. They'll just explode.

Our resident Pixel Watch user wants to say something. Oh, boy. I'm so excited. It's going to be so good. All of it? Just the watch. Your shape-morphing elements just really... Yeah, I'm excited for new shapes, new sounds. Different colors. It's going to be great. Fun buttons. Honestly, it seems like it's a nice little upgrade for the watch. Do you trust Gemini on your watch, Mariah? I trust nobody. It's not personal.

it's not gemini or not well because at this moment if you want to trigger uh assistant on the watch it's google assistant on the watch so if you have a phone assistant and a watch assistant that are two different assistants with different capabilities that's annoying and then you got bixby on the you know yeah so so at least having gemini be as many places as possible makes sense i really do wonder though about google homes

Yeah. We'll see. Okay. I'm very excited that is coming to Google TV, that Gemini is coming to Google TV. There is actually a lot of natural language use cases with Google TV that make tons of sense where you can say, show me a movie that's, and then just describe the type of movie you want to see. Yeah. Assuming it works.

Could be cool. Not only that, but more importantly, which freaking platform it's on. Yes. Because Google TV has all the different platforms integrated into it. You don't have to be like, sometimes we pick the movie and then I have to Google what streaming service it's on. Well, when the Chromecast with Google TV first came out, that was probably the best feature. I agree, yeah. Is that you can say the movie and it shows you where you can watch it. That's ideal. It's so ideal. Yeah.

So that's really nice. You can you can ask for a type of movie that you want to watch. You can also like look up more info about certain characters. You can ask just Gemini random questions where we'll pull up web info. So it kind of makes your TV this like catch all portal where you can watch content and also sort of surf the web with your voice in a way.

which is going to be useful for kids, obviously, because they're just going to have a million questions about Cocomelon. Hey, Cocomelon. You know. How do I tell my TV to ban Cocomelon yet? But I think the worst part about smart TVs is controlling them. So the more we can use our voice in a better way than just like finding the...

the microphone icon, pressing the microphone icon and then trying to get it to actually listen to you. Like being able to control it a bit more should make smart TVs a better experience. Possibly hot take, but Google's ecosystem of like other stuff that's running on Android, like Google TV is like so much better than Apple TV in my opinion. I don't use Apple TV and I agree with you. The remote is the worst thing in history. And even the new remote is like,

But not that much better. Yeah. From an F to a C minus. Yeah. Pretty much. It's also coming to cars, which is going to be really useful because it can read things back to you. You can send things back. You can just do Gemini live in the car, which is very. Whoa. I.

I kind of hate myself for this, but I really like Gemini Live now. Welcome to the train, brother. I love Gemini Live. I've been talking to it a lot. Me too. And if I just like wanted to Google something and probably will have a follow-up question or two, I just default to Gemini Live now because I'll just think of my question and just keep talking versus having to go, hey, G, again, and then phrase a new question about the thing I asked about before. It's just better. I had, okay, I just want to give this example. So I was biking somewhere two days ago and my chain came off.

And I was like panicking. And I was like, I have no idea how to get this chain back on my bike. And instead of, you know, Googling a step-by-step guide that I would be like guided to WikiHow or whatever, it just told me. And it was like, most bikes have this spoke thing. You just pull back on it. And I was just, I just did. And then it worked. And I was like,

And it's so funny that you mentioned WikiHow because they were getting all the traffic from that query before. I know. And now it's just Google telling you the answer, which is a success for the user because I got the answer. But it destroys the rabbit hole. Yeah, we talked about that before. Like, who's going to write the content? Yeah. So that's a whole nother thing. Can I say something really quick? Please. Did you notice that they said coming to Android Auto or cars with Google built in?

Which is the Polestar. But are we, so it used to be Android Automotive was a car that specifically had the UI running Android versus your phone running Android. I do agree that that's like a little confusing, but I don't know why cars with Google built in sounds worse. Yeah, it doesn't roll off the tongue. It's horribly branded, but it is a very useful feature. Yeah.

We're testing a Cadillac Lyric right now that has Google built in. It has a Play Store. You can just download Spotify right in there, download Waze. It shows up in the car. It's all built in. Those cars all have Google Assistant right now. Throw Gemini in there too. Yes, please. Wait, that brand new car has Google Assistant? Yeah. It'll probably be updated to Gemini. Exactly. That's what, yeah. It'll be in, and obviously Android Auto is beaming from your phone to the car. That will obviously get the new Gemini as well. So it's all useful. This is everything I ever wanted. Yeah.

Yeah. Also, Gemini's coming to Android XR, which we already knew. I don't know why they showed that again. Yeah. And it seems like at the end of it,

They said, like, we'll be... Didn't they, like, make a little tease to showing off XR? The glasses. They did. They showed him putting on glasses, but then the video they showed was what we saw in Project Wuhan. Right. Yeah. At the very, very end, they teased a pair of glasses, which I guess they haven't ever actually shown yet. They have. Have they shown the glasses? Yeah, there was a whole section where there was, like, a Google person, like,

Using the glasses to talk to her grandma in a different language or something. So they used him putting the shades on to signify that there's more coming on that front. Yeah. And then that was it. So we don't know what more is, but we're going to keep talking about it. We've seen some weird glasses stuff in the past. I don't know if we've seen like a specific model or anything. The Samsung event had the timeline where it showed glasses next to Wuhan and also next to a triple folding device. Google has shown actual glasses off though.

I know they did the thing where all the reporters got to go to it, but they weren't allowed to show photos or anything. That was muh-hon.

That was like an early move on. No, because we were the first people who saw MooHan, and that was before that. I read about there was people who did demos of the glasses as well. It was in like December, I think. They couldn't show photos or videos of it, but they could describe it to people. Oh. It's very confusing. The way they seem to be rolling this out seems really confusing, but we were the first people to see or show MooHan, at least. Well, there were reports that the new Google Glasses are going to be at I.O., and that reporters are going to be able to test them. I will be there.

So I'll give you my hot takes. We shall see if they let you record it. Definitely. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. We can break your embargo. Yeah. Let us know. Google also made a find my hub. Yeah. So they had, they had one, they had find my device. Yeah. Yeah.

But they updated it. They updated it. I mean, we all know or you've probably seen what iPhones have, which is this hub where you can find my friends, find my devices, find air tags all in one place, basically. And that's what they put together here. So you can share all of your contacts, locations. You can find these in one place. You can also find any of the things that are in your devices like trackers, Chipolo cards, whatever it is.

And it's all in one place. And that's nice and convenient. But it's cool because you can also do Find My for your friends, which you could name Find My Friends, but that's already taken. That's taken. So it's... Find My with friends built in. Yeah. Or friends with Find My built in. Find My built in. Find My Google friends. Find My Google friends. Yeah. Yeah, I think it's cool. I think Google is really trying to mirror Apple's ecosystem. And they're finally getting to that point where...

The main problem for them right now is nobody wants a Chromebook. And that's really the main problem. Is that the main problem? They've got pretty much everything else. And they have arguably more because, you know, they have stuff in the cars. Because Apple never launched their built-in CarPlay thing that they talked about. Yeah, but CarPlay is so popular. Yeah. Like Apple, even without launching the built-in CarPlay thing, is still on a lot of people's touch screens. For sure.

Either way, this is definitely an effort to sort of match what Apple's doing there. I did like there was one and I don't because I don't use Find My Friends. So I don't know if this is available in it, but it was like you could share your tracking for a time limit, too. So it could be like because like maybe I don't want someone tracking me all the time, but I want them to make sure I get home OK.

So it could be like share my location for one hour. Which they have on. Do they have that on there? Yeah. Great idea. Yeah. They're just copying all of the stuff, which is great. I'm it's good that they're doing it. Also with the find my stuff.

They announced some collaborations with some airlines. They didn't say what airlines it was, but they said that you could share your Find My tags and Find My devices with the airlines. So it was easy for them to find your back up. Which I'm never doing. Never doing that. I agree with you because they're going to lie to you. Yes. And you have the info. Like, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Why would the airline... The airline...

already know where my bags are because they tag everything and scan it every time. But if they somehow lose it, then I have the information of where a GPS is. I'm not sharing that with anybody. And also, why do I want, I'm sure there's some sort of cutoff for it, but why do I want the potential of United knowing where my bag is at all times? Now it knows where I live. Now it

where it's been to. You do not need to know that, United. Yeah. And they announced a collaboration with a couple of actual suitcase partners that are going to have Android's Find My built in as well, which is interesting. The airline should be finding a couple new air traffic controllers for Newark instead of My Bag.

Okay, Grandpa. Be nice. That's facts, though. When I fly out of Newark today, we'll see if I even fly out of Newark today. Godspeed, David. Thank you. Keep us posted on if your delay is over or under. I'm setting it at five and a half hours. It's already at one hour, and I'm supposed to leave at five, so we'll see. Like I said, five and a half. One last thing for Google. Yeah. There's a new logo. Kind of.

It's not actually the new Google logo so much as, you know how when you have a tab with Google Open, there's a little icon that represents the favicon is what it's called? Yeah. It's just a new one of those. Because this logo doesn't really appear anywhere else. I believe they updated it in the iOS for Google search and potentially the Android app as well.

- The singular G logo. - The singular G logo. - Okay, that has-- - The places where that appears. - Yeah, it's four different colors. It used to have a hard cut off. Now it is a gradient between the colors. I hate it. - I think it's beautiful. - I hate it. - It's beautiful.

Gemini, like they're adding all this brand cohesion and Gemini is already this really nice like aquamarine sort of cyan blue that kind of melds into green. And it's very cool. And so they're sort of just blending that with the...

- Yeah, Google blends too much. They already screwed up all the other app logos by making them all look exactly the same. Like maps looks exactly the same, photos looks, like they're all too similar. - 'Cause they feel compelled to use all four colors in every logo. - Which is funny now 'cause Gemini is not that. - Right. - Yeah. - And it's fine. Yeah.

I think it's, yeah, I could talk for a while about it. They didn't have to go that hard. We asked Michael and Tim about this because we're like, oh, designers, tell us what to think. And then we realized that the old logo itself also doesn't really make a lot of sense. It is not equally portioned off. None of the lines really...

connect to each other like the line between green and yellow connecting to the end of the top of the G there's like a bunch of extra space on the G and I don't know interesting to me now is how do you say what the official hex value colors of this is and also also they seem to be different like it seems like they upped the luminance values of all four colors so that they're not lighter all of them are lighter

Even the green is lighter, unless that's one of those optical illusion things. For some reason, I think this specific image is a little lower quality than the other one. So I don't know if that's part of it. But the gradient is long and makes the red feel a third, like 30% shorter. Yeah.

I love it. I hate it. I want to say one more thing really quickly before we take a break. Speaking of Google, they are replacing or at least testing replacing the I'm feeling lucky button, which if you don't know what that is, it's it's a callback to the original version of Google when you could just press this button and it would send you to a random Web page, which was very similar to or a random search, I think.

which is similar to the Wikipedia random article button. And they've just kept it there forever, which I found very funny because it probably got almost no use, but they're replacing it with an AI mode button, which is basically like when you put in a search query, you press the AI mode button and it's just Gemini, but in a separate UX mode.

where it kind of looks like a search, but you're talking to it. And I really think that, 'cause originally remember what happened is they basically made AI mode like default and they would put the AI answer at the top. People got mad about that. They've kind of been messing around with it, but now they're giving you the option to just like, do you want to chat about this query instead of searching for this query?

If that takes away it defaulting to the AI right off the top and lets me choose, all for it. Yeah. Also, the I'm feeling lucky button was a little different. It was you typed in your query and then it took you to one of the random results of what that was. So rather than having to scroll down. That's a horrible idea. Yeah.

It also, if you press it without a search query, will take you to a random search query. Then it just went to random? Okay. That's dangerous. But it's also a random. It's curated. Well, yeah. Okay. It's kind of a horrible idea to take you to a random link based on that search query, though, because isn't the point of Google that they rank things and that's their whole thing? I feel like WayVolume is specifically a top ranked. It might be the top.

rank I thought it was the top you're feeling lucky you feel like the number one thing is gonna be like you don't even have to look at the list it just takes you to the first one yeah that would make sense yeah I'm seeing some people say it was a random result based on the search query

r slash zillennials where i get all my information nice i think i have an answer folks i'm i'm trying to find a second source that confirms this but if i ask gemini my preliminary research indicates that it would take you to the top ranked result for your query oh makes sense so it's just a faster way to get to your web page if you trust google that much or if you're uh if you're lucky

Go to the casino. Let's... Oh, well, actually... And I was going to say, by that, I mean... Trivia. Trivia. Was that... I was sort of flirting with the idea. Yeah. I decided to just send it. No, you should have sent it. Always send it. Hey. All right, folks. Google's logo has changed a bunch over the years. Mm-hmm.

But one thing has always stayed consistent. Their logo has always been six characters long. G-O-O-G-L-E. Six characters. But what I just said was a lie. Because from October 30th, 1998 to May 30th, 1999, Google's logo had seven characters in it. What was the seventh character?

Seven. Sleepy. Oh, I think I know it. Sleepy. Scrappy-Doo. Is he actually the seventh dwarf? Wait, that Scrappy-Doo's not a dwarf? I'm just naming like peripheral. Oh, I was talking about the seven dwarves. Sleepy, Scrappy, and

Wait, you weren't talking about Sleepy-Doo? You know, like all of the different personified Scooby-Doo expanded siblings? Expanded universe. That's the next one. Grumpy-Doo. Grumpy-Doo. I don't know any of the other two ones. Squirtle. Squirtle. Name. We'll be right back. Support for today's show comes from Liquid IV.

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The water fountain? Is that what it is? It's the watering hole. It's the watering hole, the local watering hole. And we do it multiple times a day, but water is boring. Water is boring, yeah. I found that having a drawer full of different flavors has me more likely to actually drinking all day and keeping the optimal hydration. And, you know, northeast summer temperatures and humidity is starting, so it's pretty much a necessity. It is terrible outside. It is a necessity when I'm playing disc golf or going for a hike.

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Support for the show comes from Shopify. Starting a business is hard. We're not going to sugarcoat it. I mean, when we first started doing this podcast, we faced our fair share of challenges. We're not audio recording experts, but I remember recording in the smaller room where audio from my mic would bleed into your mic and audio from your mic bleed into my mic. And we didn't want to sit further apart, but we still wanted to have this conversational setup. It's hard. We just have to figure this stuff out.

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with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash waveform. Go to shopify.com slash waveform. That's shopify.com slash waveform. All right, welcome back. We got one real phone and one not yet real phone to talk about. Which one should we do first?

The real one. I agree. I think we should do the real one first. The real phone is we got first hands-on impressions with the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge. I saw you wouldn't go to reach for it. I have here the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, which by comparison is a mega thick phone at 8.2 millimeters. It's crazy. So we got to see it. We got confirmed specs. We got confirmed dimensions for the first time when we saw it. And...

I still like even looking at it right in front of me before they let me pick it up I was like it's it's thin but it's not that much thinner and then I said the dimensions they said 5.8 millimeters thick and I was like okay yeah it's thinner but whatever and then you hold it and you're like oh whoa this this is really really thin really yeah it's weird it even on video of my own hands holding it it doesn't look that much thinner but it is very noticeably thinner to hold and

So that's what Edge is. The Edge is a phone that lives somewhere between the S25 and S25 Plus and the S25 Ultra. It's $1099 US. It's more expensive. It's more expensive than the Plus. It's less expensive than the theoretically brand new Ultra. And it's just thinner. It has the camera from the Ultra, the primary camera from the Ultra. That's weird. It has a 12 megapixel Ultra Wide. It has no telephoto.

And it has a 3,900 milliamp hour battery. Titanium rails. Yeah, it's just a thin, thin phone. So question. Yeah. It's not silicon carbon? It's not. Yeah. All right, let's play the sound. Which, what? I don't know, like a sad one. Just do one. Any sound? No, like a sad one, like a trombone. Bad. Bad.

No, don't do that. Thank you. That worked pretty well. That was good. Yeah, it's not silicon carbon. And people asked about this, and we got a no from Samsung. And I kind of wonder if it was how much bigger the battery could have been. Because the obvious comment is, hey, Samsung, we all just want a phone with better battery at the same thickness.

and all of your new phones don't have silicon carbon. If you did do this ultra-thin phone, if you did silicon carbon, it could have had the same battery life, and that would have been fine, but they didn't. So that was a little bit of a head-scratcher. Really weird. Maybe the next version, maybe some, I don't know when they plan on moving to that. I think it is a scale question. If you ever look at the numbers and how much volume...

These silicon carbon battery phones are the Samsung would be by far the biggest so maybe they can't quite secure Quality batteries at that scale yet I have so many things that I want you to test during the review because like I want to know does it get hotter when you're charging it because there's less so that yes, yeah, so I said so I I would say watch the watch the impressions video if you haven't already seen it will link it in the show notes and

My main questions, I mean, obviously there's less room in the phone, which means, okay, less battery, probably less room for thermal, I mean, not probably, obviously less room for thermal solutions. So is it gonna get warm? It charges at 25 watts, which is the same as the S25+.

But the S25+ had a 4,900 milliampere battery and this is 3,900. And it is, yeah, it's just, it's so thin. - Silicon carbon is the perfect opportunity for this. - Yeah. - Seems like a big mess. - Sounds like their easy upgrade for next year. - Yeah, I wonder about scale.

So that is the edge. I'm curious to review the phone. It's going to come out. I know for a fact the battery will be worse than all the rest of the S25 lineup because it's the same chip, the same screen. It's the same everything else. It's just a smaller battery. So how much worse is TBD? And then the other question is like who is this for and will they actually be okay with this phone?

And that part is tricky. I think there's a theoretical person out there that does want the camera from the Ultra, the main camera, and does want to upgrade from the base S25s. But...

doesn't want a thick, large phone with a stylus that they don't have to carry around. It's not even thick. I don't know who this person is or how many of this person exists, but it could be a good fit for them. I just think if you weren't sacrificing arguably one of the most important things in the phone, if they were able to fit the same capacity, it would make sense because it would be like, I'm paying the extra money for the extra flashiness of it being thinner.

but I'm not really sacrificing much. But now you're sacrificing a lot and you have to pay more money for a feature that nobody asked for. - I think this is, the big question is gonna be does Apple have the same angle and do they secure silicon carbon at their scale? - That's a great question. - Because Apple's gonna ship a lot of iPhones like they usually do, probably more than Samsung will ship this S25 Edge.

Are they going to have silicon carbon in that or are they also not going to have silicon carbon? I don't think so. You don't think so? They never say anything about their battery size. They're consistently the smallest battery sizes. They seem to not care. They have software efficiency. That's what makes it a hard sell for me because if you're Apple, I feel like the magic of that is you have to be able to go, we did this amazing magical Apple thing where we have a thinner phone that has the same battery life. Which you could do with silicon carbon and not say silicon carbon. Yeah. You could just go, we have this magic. You could. I still don't think they do it.

And I think you're probably right. We should bet because I think they do it. If I have to go pure logic on Samsung couldn't, I know they would want to, right? It makes too much sense. Samsung couldn't makes me think that Apple also can't. Here's my other reasoning why.

This has a 3,900 milliamp hour battery. The iPhone 16 has a 3,200 milliamp hour battery. So if you can fit a 3,900 milliamp into this small one, you can also fit a 32 milliamp. I don't think they're going to want to make the battery that much bigger. So they can already fit what they had. Is that 16 plus or is that... No, there's a regular 16. This is a tall phone though, right? Like the Air...

the edge sorry the edge is big the edge is the same size as the s25 plus plus yeah yeah it's still 32 between 39 like what is the iphone 16 so i think you're right about battery size but

iPhones have always had relatively small battery capacities compared to Android phones because they're so optimized that they don't have to have that raw capability. So I think it will be smaller, but I still think relative to the larger iPhones, it's going to be a smaller battery. And it has to be because of how thin it is. And I think that's going to make the battery life worse. And I think they have to either justify that or fix it. Yeah.

Yeah. So it will probably be a 2700 milliamp hour battery in the iPhone air.

Then what do they do? Well, if we want to talk about the iPhone Air, one thing they're already getting rid of, according to this case manufacturer leak, they're getting rid of one of the cameras on the iPhone Air. Yeah. So there is more room in there already. Back to one camera. One camera and a Pixel visor. Okay. This is the also thing. Literally. The thing that I'm trying to figure out is where will they position it in the lineup? Because Samsung just put the Edge right in the middle of their lineup. Okay.

Apple has used the word Air before to mean the bottom of the lineup. Yeah. And I think they might do that considering what we've seen from these leaks, which is one camera. It feels like it's the bottom of the lineup. Wait, isn't Air for the iPad in between the regular iPad and the Pro? So with the iPad, it's the base iPad, then the iPad Air, then the iPad Pro. So it's like it's not the Pro, but it's the shape of a Pro.

right? That's what they usually do. Like it's fancier and it's flashier, but it isn't as powerful as the pro model. But with the Mac books at the bottom is the air. And then there's the Mac book pro above that.

So the air is the bottom and it's the thinnest and lightest. And that's what air meant. And then you have pro above it is you need more power. And so the baseline that most people buy is the air, right? So which one of those do they do with me? When I see single camera, I think baseline, I think, I mean, the SE has, or the 16 E is the only one with one camera right now. So if the air is going to have one camera and then the base has two cameras and the pro has three cameras to me, that hierarchy makes sense. It makes sense. But if you think about it as less of

how many cameras it has and how many cameras did it take away. Samsung took away a camera, but put it above a phone that has three cameras, which is weird. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny that you went to how many cameras does it have? One feels like the bottom. And I first thought of how many cameras did they take away and where can it go? I guess Samsung is less clear about like pro has the most cameras because

well, the Ultra has an extra, extra telephoto. And then the S25s have a single telephoto. And this Edge has no telephoto. I have a take. Okay. So I think that Apple is way more fashion forward and like, do you have the new thing forward, right? Like the Samsung people who...

The people who buy Samsung phones are either people who just need a phone and just go to the carrier store and just buy the Android thing because they know Samsung, the brand, or they're like the power users who want to buy the ultra. And they know that the ultra is consistently one of the best Android phones of the year and they want the most powerful thing. And so the air for them is like, there's not really that big of a group of Samsung users who are like, I want to show off to people that I've got the thinnest, newest thing.

Whereas Apple consistently tries to slightly tweak the look of something just to make sure people know you have the new one. Like with the Ultra 2 watch, it's just black. Yeah, exactly. Right? That's how you know. And so I think the Air for Apple, they can charge more for.

because people are going to be more willing to pay for something that is clearly newer than Samsung users are who just want something that is better and don't care as much about it being newer. What I'll fight back on that is, is according to this other, they show this case manufacturer, Autofly, also showed the iPhone 17 Pro, which is a totally different back as well. So it kind of feels like the entire lineup is going to be newer. For sure. For showing. So then...

No matter what you buy is the newest thing. I think that's the take because if the iPhone 17 Air, the only things that we know about it is it has less battery and less cameras. How do you charge more for it?

So I think because all of the new iPhone 17s have this new visor aesthetic, then that's their aesthetic thing to be like, oh, you have the new one. And then it'll be single camera. Thin one is the base. Dual camera is the mid. And then three cameras is the pro. Can you believe that they just released the...

and now they're going to do this and then they're going to have the fold next year. How many iPhones are we going to freaking have? I keep hearing that, but like Samsung has 17 million phones. Like we never complained, but it's like, oh, the iPhone is usually only three phones. So now when they have five, it's like a, it's a lot. I feel like arguably part of the reason that a lot of people who don't want to think about their purchase by iPhones is because it's like,

The lineup is you don't have to use a single brain cell to decide what phone you want. That's true. Yeah. You just go and it's like, here's how much I want to spend. Exactly. And then, okay, they've got a phone at your price. Although with Samsung, it's like, do you want to spend $99? Do you want to spend $119? Do you want to spend $149? Do you want to spend $229? Because they have a phone at every single price. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where with Apple, you walk in and you're like, all right, we've got $500, $600, $700, $800, $900, $1,000, $11, $12, and $13. So pick one.

Right. So they're going to have like a folding one that's even higher and maybe the air slots in. I feel like I think that they are going to say it's going to have the same battery life. And because they are going to do that, I think it is going to be more expensive than the regular iPhone, but less than the pro. So you're going silicon carbon. Yeah. OK, that's my guess.

Oh, I just wanted to say I'm constantly confused as the person editing these videos trying to figure out the hierarchy of what phone is which is a total nightmare. Yeah. And if you skip a year, you don't pay attention. Suddenly there's something new. Yeah. Yeah. Air has more than one meaning in Apple land already, which is why it's not like a guaranteed sure thing where they're going to put this one. Yeah. Do you know the...

We're not allowed to make basketball references on the podcast anymore. Why? I thought we were only allowed to make basketball references. Everyone likes that except for me. Yeah, everyone sure loves when we make basketball references. There's a lot of comments. But to reference another sport that no one said we're not allowed to talk about yet. Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus. What's Lotus? A car company that competes in F1. No, they don't. They don't anymore. Lotus? Yeah. When did they stop?

I don't know. That's Gemini. Fake fan. So it's the guy who said the wrong thing to start? No, no, no, no, no. Anyway, he has this quote talking about the Lotus F1 cars of the 60s where he says...

He talks about his design philosophy and he says, simplify and add lightness. It's never take stuff away to make the car lighter. It's always add lightness. And I feel like that is the Apple philosophy with what they put air on. Like we're going to add more and it's going to be less. Huh? The Renault Sport Formula One team, which became Alpine.

Yeah, it said the Lotus stopped in 2015. They got sold to Renault. It was purchased by Renault, and then Renault is Alpine. I'm a big fan. I'm the real F1 fan here. Taking the chicane back to Jason. Oh my god, what is that? What is chicane? An attempted F1 segway. Is that a racer? I got it. I understood it. Chicane is actually the most winning F1 driver in history. His name is Chick Ayn.

Chick Ayn. Yeah. And he's just stellar. Yeah. 68 championships. He's going to believe this. You have to stop messing with me. There's no way that I can tell whether or not this is real or not. He's going to believe this. 68 championships. We're just kidding. We've been talking about basketball the whole time. Yeah. Chicane is a basketball player. I literally would have believed that if you had not. Back to the iPhone. Kevin Durant, baby. Kevin Durant. Yeah. I agree with David that I think this will be a middle of the lineup. I don't think this is cheapest. I don't think this is the cheapest.

And I also think it will have the same battery life, but not be silicon carbide. But that's because...

The battery life's just all day battery life. Stop asking questions. It's all day. The day might be December 25th and it only is the day till five o'clock, but it's an all day battery. What if it is worse battery life, but they just still say all day. That is so real. We all know that's what's going to happen, right? I would just be insulted if I was an Apple customer and they were like, yeah, here's our much, much thinner phone that has much less battery.

But it's the same all-day battery. If it is worse, though, what older iPhone are they going to... You know how with the 16E, they're comparing it to the iPhone 12? Are they going to be like, compared to the iPhone 7, it blows it out of the water. Compared to my 2000 milliamp hour 12 mini. Speaking of old iPhones, I was trying and failing to switch back to Android this weekend because iMessage is just the worst thing ever and trying to deregister it.

Yeah, it's a great service that is horrible in every other way. I was trying to deregister it and get RCS working. And anyway, Apple has a manual, like, deregister your account from iMessage page on their website where you can put in your phone number and it theoretically puts it through the servers, even though it didn't do it for me. I don't trust that. The phone they show on that is an iPhone 5. Really? They've intentionally not updated that page since the iPhone 5 because they're like, yeah, we'll give you the resource, but...

We don't want you to use it. Yeah, we don't want you to feel like we're prioritizing this. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I have two phones. I need to ask you about that later. Anyway, that's a whole nother thing. I'm surprised that page doesn't have the like, are you sure you want to go away from this? It's scary out there. You cannot control what happens on Android. And then it texts like all of your contacts automatically. Like, David's a loser. David's a loser.

Okay. Well, we're going to take a hard left turn just like you would. Through the chicane. Just like you would if you were on a run while you were wearing a whoop. A whoop. Did you guys follow this at all this week? I did. It's pretty funny. It is really funny. If you right now search on Google whoop 5.0, you get three...

Three links all one day apart. That goes, Whoop wants everyone to give a whoop about their new band. Then it goes, Whoop angers users over free upgrade promises. Whoop backpedals on its paid upgrade. Whoops. So, whoops. Whoops. Sorry. Let's just define what a whoop is for people that might not know. It's a smartwatch for people who don't want the watch. Yeah. Smart bracelet. It is a smart bracelet. Sure. Which...

I say fitness band. And it's specific. I don't wear one, so correct me if I'm wrong, but it's specifically focused on recovery. Right. That's what sort of sets it apart. That's sort of its headlining features or recovery score, basically. The body battery, that's a garment. No, that's a garment. Body battery is garments. Same idea, though. I think whoop.

I'm sure they didn't start it, but they were very focused on recovery and training to start. And I think a lot of ones caught up, which I'll talk about later. But yes, that's their whole thing. Everyone thinks Whoop kind of has the best performance metrics. Yeah, right. But yeah, there's no time. There's no anything on the actual device. It's a bracelet. But I like seeing the time.

It kind of looks like a slap bracelet. It does look like a slap bracelet. Andrew, do you want to break down the drama? Sure, I'll go. Well, let's start it off with what they released, which is the Whoop 5.0. Actually, they released the Whoop 5.0 and the Whoop MG, which stands for medical grade. These new devices, what? Milligram. Milligram.

They offer new bands. There's leather options, which are not backwards compatible with the old devices. And one of the big things they release is new tiers of subscriptions. So Whoop is like famously because the device itself is pretty simple. So much of it comes in the software and the algorithm that they're playing with all the different metrics. And it's super expensive. You usually are buying like one or two year subscriptions to it, paying in advance to get discounts on that. And you upgrade as you go with the subscriptions and they're not cheap.

But notably, you never needed to buy a new Whoop if you had the subscription. So if you had a Whoop 1, Whoop 2, whatever, when the new one would come out, you were supposed to get the band for free because the subscription is so expensive. Yeah, the little, not just the band, the actual tracker too that connects into it. Sorry, I meant the band. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so there's different tiers now. So there's, depending on the tier and depending on which device you have, since there's two different ones, they all do different things. They're either $199 a year, $239 a year, or $359 a year. And they include different tracking or whatever you want to say. I'm sure if you're really into this, you like all the different ones. But yeah, I don't really care about anything other than the lowest tier. And then...

So like what David said, or actually real quick, I wanted to say something because I think it's very funny. When you look at these memberships, there's a little link that says additional medical information below, which basically just brings you to four different asterisks about how all these different things are not actual for medical use, which we all agree on. But then calling something the medical grade version and then immediately saying this is not for medical use felt weird. Just don't call it the medical grade version. Right.

Right. Anyways. We're using the same components as they use at the hospital, but it hasn't actually been certified. And the stuff we're giving you doesn't necessarily mean we're giving you all the correct information. Right. Actual doctors. This is not financial advice. Yeah. Basically. Basically. It's literally that. Pretty much that. But the backlash comes from

When they announced this, they showed that you could extend your membership for 12 months and receive the new hardware, or you can pay a one-time upgrade fee, which was either $49 for the 5.0 or $79 for the new hardware.

The issue is right before they announced this and up to within, I think, two months of when like the Verge posted this screenshot from their website as late as it's like March 28th. So not that long ago. And on their website, it says, just like other memberships, Whoop is committed to releasing new and regular updates constantly without requiring the purchase of a new device. All updates are available within the app. Um,

Additionally, instead of purchasing new hardware every time an updated model is produced, Whoop members receive the next generation for free after having been a member for six months or more. Yeah, this was saying you need to...

Renew for 12 months. So totally different Yeah so they removed this verbiage that said that you got new hardware for free as long as you were a member for 12 months six months or more Like a couple of months before the new one came out and then required an upgrade is what they're saying which required either you had to buying 12 more months or a one-time fee and

of buying the actual device. The reason this is like really important is because a lot of people, the way they sell the Woot membership is you can buy within, you can buy a year or you can buy two years. You may even be able to buy three years, but they make each month cheaper. You get a discount by doing that. So there are a lot of people who are six months into their Woot membership and still have a year and a half left who don't want to add

12 more months on top of that or pay 50 bucks it's just straight up not what they were promised right um so you know whoop post this to reddit their whoop reddit to get a bunch of feedback and immediately just get annihilated by the comments because shocker of course yeah it's the internet it lives forever people immediately found where it promised and everyone in the comments was like i'm canceling this is literally the exact opposite thing of why i purchased whooped

I was going to get free upgrades on devices. I only ever had to care about my subscription. Now you're charging me $50 or $80. The number one rule of the internet is never charge for something that was previously free. Yeah. Yeah. This was, this like semi reminds me of like the Rivian, like, oh, you guys all made your pre-order and now we're charging more for it. And then adds a backtrack on it. I'm glad we're at the point where the internet's big enough where we can make companies pay

Give us what they actually promised. Well, a lot of people were canceling. I'm sure they were. This is a community that's like, you know, the Apple Watch. If Apple did something like this, it probably wouldn't. It would cause a backlash, but not as big because like there's a lot of people are just not connected to the news whatsoever. But this is like a specialty fitness tracker. And most of the people who own these things are probably like on the subreddit, like talking about this thing all the time. Yeah. So.

they have a lot more power. They fixed it. They went back to, um, if you have 12 months remaining on your membership, uh,

Or if you extend another 12 months, you'll get the device for free. So they did go back and they did fix it. Yeah. Yeah. Other than that, it's a new Whoop device. I still have no idea why anyone would want one. I think most smartwatches give all of the things that... Yeah, but they don't want smartwatches. Okay. I will agree there. If you want to wear like a regular watch and still want all the tracking, this is great. I just don't think... It's not a regular watch though. That's the thing. Yeah. What do you mean?

Like it's a band. Yeah. So you wear like a real watch, like your Casio on your left hand and then the band on your right hand. On your right hand. Then you get all of the... Or your bicep or somewhere else. Can you put it on your bicep? Yeah. I mean, you can wear it. There's attachments to wear it around your chest strap or to wear it around your bicep or whatever. They have underwear.

That you can put it on. I don't know about that. They do. I'm just saying. I'm not saying. There is underwear where it has a little thing and it like clips into there. That's funny. But yeah, I guess the point of it, the point of a whoop that I've seen is people who want to do the fitness tracking, the sleep tracking, don't want a big bulky smartwatch, just want the band and that's it.

I think my issue is I think a lot of the people early on were like their metrics blow everyone else out of the water. And I think a lot of people still think that, but I don't know how much I believe it anymore with so many other smart watch manufacturers really diving into health metrics. I can tell you right now their step tracker is doo-doo water. Is it really? It's trash. It's beta doo-doo water. It might be out of beta by now. It miscounted. I did the thousand steps thing. With the loop? It was like 10% off. Oh, it was...

really far off oh my gosh you can watch that short if you want i take a thousand steps in every type of wearable i remember that and it is kind of insane how bad a lot of these things are actually tracking accurately yes yeah i think the whoop was so bad we didn't even put it in the video i think if anyone wants like to know watch our dr mike interview if you want a little more about how much you should take into account what these trackers are it's mostly it's

for fun and entertainment and sometimes a good motivation and look at trends versus looking at... Right, it's all trend data. Like you're not, you shouldn't be looking at the exact, just like how calories are definitely not accurate. Like the FDA allows you to be like 20% off when you list calorie counts on things. Yeah, as long as you're the same 20% off every time.

Vaguely. And that way you can track your trend instead of the count of the calories. Yeah. Which is, yeah, that's what Apple does with temperature. Yeah, right. So, yeah. That's what Pixel does with the thermometer on the phone for some freaking reason. In case anyone was wondering, spoiler alert, a thousand steps with every wearable. The iPhone...

measured 1,033 steps. The Pixel phone measured 1,021 steps. Are you talking about watches? No, I'm doing all the wearables. You can wear a pedometer. It counted 1,074 steps. I wore a Pixel watch. It counted 1,012. I wore an Apple watch. It counted 991. I wore a Galaxy Ring that counted 1,006. And the Whoop counted over 1,200 steps. Oh my gosh. So we went, eh, probably didn't pick that one. Another W for the Pixel watch? Yeah. Yeah.

And the Samsung Ring. Yeah. I'm surprised about that. The more you know. The more you know. All right. We'll take a quick break, which means trivia. Scooby-Dooby-Doo, where are you? You know, not to toot my own horn, but you guys notice that it's been like months since the lights broke. Why would you say that out loud? Because I'm proud of myself, man. Well, when they don't work for the dancers later. Can I...

For the what? Oh my gosh. Anyway, so earlier in the episode, we talked about a phone case company leaking a new iPhone, which is not the first time we've seen it. But guys, if you ask me...

We're living in a boring timeline. You know, okay, like, yeah, someone got the specs and accidentally... Remember back in the old day? Remember when Apple employees were leaving iPhones at bars at Redwood City? Yeah. Oh, yeah, brother. What iPhone did that guy leave in a bar? Oh, I almost just said it out loud. Do you remember when...

Was it the iPhone 10 that slipped out of Tim Cook's pocket on stage? Yeah. That was awesome. Yeah. You don't remember that? No. Yeah. It slipped out of his pocket while he was giving an interview on stage.

And we all saw it. At the Code Conference or something? Yeah, iPhone X. You remember this. I am very proud to have seen an iPhone 5 in the wild before it was released. Are you allowed to say how? Yes, because this was so long ago. I, in high school, took the subway to school every day. And I was getting on the subway. In LA? Yeah. They have subways in LA? Get out. Leave right now. Literally. Yeah.

Yeah, I just remember seeing a guy with a tall, skinny metal iPhone on the subway and just thinking, that's definitely an iPhone. Like it has the home like that is unmistakably an iPhone. But I have never seen that before in my life. And he's just using it. Yeah, just using it. Like, yeah, I'd like David said, you know, the subway is not a particularly used thing in Los Angeles. Yeah, there are many other good sandwich options there.

This is the video real quick. At the start of this video, it is already halfway out of his pocket. It's like... And it was the double camera. Like, you could tell it was a totally different phone at that point. It's being birthed from his pocket. And it just slides out and goes on the... I totally forgot about this. And then he, like, picks it up kind of nonchalantly. Oh.

I forgot that that happened. Yeah. I'm surprised Tim Cook didn't pull out the men in black flash thing and just hit the whole audience with it right there. The secret Apple police like breaks through the windows. It falls onto the chair that he's sitting on and it falls so that it's face up. And I think he realizes like, well, if it's face up, people won't be able to see the camera bump. And that's the number one thing I'm worried about. So he doesn't put it back in his pocket. He just like leaves it there. Yeah. Yeah.

I just I'm surprised they would let Tim Cook go on stage with an unreleased product, especially in his pocket, especially like just just give it to your assistant backstage while you're out there. I just I'm surprised they let him do that. I wonder if this was like a turning point for Mr. Cook, because watching this video, this is pre sneaker Tim Cook.

He's wearing what looks like Oxfords in this. And I wonder if this was the moment where he was like, nah, I can't be possible. He had his Zuck glow up. Interesting. All right, well, we'll think about that answer, about the iPhone that was in a bar that one time. The question that we did ask. Answers will be at the end, like usual. We'll be right back.

Put us in a box. Go ahead.

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All right, we back. Last story I wanted to talk about real quick is Spotify AI DJ.

I've been a long time user and I'm curious to hear you guys thoughts on Spotify AI DJ, but it just got a new feature. Oh, not a fan. - Not a fan. - What? - It's not a fan. - Not a fan, thank goodness. - And I wanna hear why. But it just added a feature that lets you talk to it and actually request things. So as of this moment, before this feature got added, you open the DJ and it just does its thing. It decides what the vibes are.

It starts with a bank of five songs or whatever, and it just moves from beat to beat and narrates in between, and it does its thing. And then sometimes it hits, sometimes it doesn't. You just skip, skip, skip if you don't like it. But if you want to specifically request a specific type of song or a certain song, like you would with an actual DJ,

That's now a feature. And I think that's fire. I just did about a 15-hour road trip that was a whole bunch of cities in a row, and I listened to a lot of songs thanks to the Spotify AI DJ. Wow. No regrets. What's up, David?

Is that your impression? Now we're going to take it back to 1997. Your parents were arguing in the other room. You didn't know what to do. You started crying. Here's Mariah Carey. It does know what you... Because it has your entire listening history as well. So it'll be like, this is what you were listening to in 2010. Which I really like because...

subtle flex. I was the 53rd person in the United States to use Spotify. Oh, so you got a lot of listening history. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So yeah. When you said you could request a song, my first thought was that's what the search bar is for. But I wanted to test it this morning and I listened to the DJ the whole car ride in and I think I've changed my mind on it. Oh my goodness. And I think I like...

X now. It's great. No, no. I think I like X the DJ, not X the website. Xavier. Yes, Xavier. Xavier. I want to make that very clear. But I think I'm pro Spotify DJ, even though I don't have the request button yet. Yeah. But it played some bangers. It went from Bleachers to the Demon Slayer theme song pretty quickly. And I was like, oh, and then it did Higher by Creed.

Back to back to back. So I was like, you just know me. Xavier was like, how do I get him? How do I get him? I know just the thing. Ellis, why don't you like the Spotify DJ? I am so glad you asked Marques because it's not about Mr. Xavier himself. Can I take a guess? Sure. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah. The cross fading between songs is like, I hate that. I do hate that. It's too much. It's too early. Well, it's too early. Yeah.

it is not good. And it's, there's this sort of like extra rub it in factor of like,

I'm one of those people that really appreciates like the skill of DJing. And I don't mean just like scratching and doing all that. Just like a DJ's ability to pick good music in an age where there's so much music and then creatively blend all that music together. I just think is a really great thing. So you say that, but have you tried? Yeah, all the time. It does some interesting things and it's not like I, it's not like every single recommendation is bad, but,

But compared to what could be, I think it's pretty trite. Mostly what the DJ seems to do for me is that it just plays music that I listened to like a couple of years ago. Yeah. That's nice because it gets me out of my current loop. Agreed.

but it doesn't really introduce new music to me. And then when it does introduce music to me, it's usually music I absolutely hate. Well, I think the two things I've found it does is it's either basically just like, here's your most played playlist from X amount of years ago, or it was doing...

here's an artist you like, but a song from them you don't listen to. And I thought that was interesting. That's a good way to bring some music in. But again, that's very user database. And I agree with Ellis. I don't necessarily know if they all mesh together. I think this request thing, though, I'm hoping can be like,

Play me. I just all I've thought of was the Android thing the other day of like, make me a playlist for a 10 minute one mile run, which is just two songs. Yes. But anyways, but like, play me music that's like more low key or maybe something that's more upbeat for pump up because I'm going to play an ultimate Frisbee game. I'm hoping it can bring that better. I just want to say also, like, I do think this works.

on YouTube because for two reasons. One, we're still in the wild west of YouTube, right? There's no like, there's no for sure way that you know how to classify a YouTube video and assign traits to a YouTube video. And the things we get out of YouTube videos are very different than music. With music, we have like 300 years of academic data on like how we can describe music and classify music and assign traits to music.

And a strong curator can use that 300 years of data to make really insightful and moving and cool recommendations. And so I think the idea of just throwing all of that away for retention maxing is like...

What's the point? I will say so something that Spotify has created over time is basically these smaller artists that will now tour with each other because they know that when you listen to a certain artist on Spotify, it will recommend you another artist that is like similar in the user data metric of like, oh, people who liked this artist also liked this artist. The problem with it is that it's a circle. It's a flat circle of like,

six artists. So in 2017, I was like listening to cake.

And then I got recommended Lawrence. And then I got recommended a couple other artists. But they only recommend each other. It goes in a circle where they only recommend each other. It never peaks out of that contained bubble. And this has worked for Spotify because then they introduce these features where it's like artists near me and it can recommend shows that are playing. And I'm sure that they're getting a kickback from that, right? And so it created this kind of micro market where they can tour artists together and

that maybe wouldn't have enough of an audience on their own, but because people that like that artist like other artists, they have more incentive to go to these shows. That's a kind of cool thing, but it doesn't peek out of the bubble. So now it's like the artists that I'm listening to are the same artists that I discovered in 2017 off of that one-off thing that Spotify helped me with. But I want to keep learning about more music. And then it also creates...

And then it also creates an issue in like the economy of it all, right? Because on YouTube, when a user clicks on a video, in theory, there is money waiting in escrow that a corporation has put forward into the AdSense auction is going to go to...

that creator, right? The Spotify platform where there is a bulk of money that is then divided amongst all the streams. There's only so much pie each artist, only so many shares of the pie each artist can get. And when there's no data to explain why something was recommended to you, there is nothing to stop

Yeah. Right. There's literally no way we could stop it. Which is why espresso was the song of the summer. We're not going to, we're not going to get into conspiracy theories. Listen to the today explained episode on it, but also, or it's like, it's,

Anyway, I think it creates all these issues. I think it's not, it becomes not about music and just about retention maxing. And so yeah, Spotify, Spotify, DJ Xavier, I'm sure you're a lovely guy, but the robot incarnate of you, I really am not a fan of. It's funny because everything you said there about retention maxing Spotify is like,

Yeah, I mean it's also why they're making the AI generated playlists and songs and stuff so they don't to pay out anybody Yeah, I think I think there's like levels to how much you can randomize like music discovery is ideal You're saying like it's a flat circle. So there's no way out of the circle Yeah, there's also no way into the circle like if you listen to other stuff You're not gonna get recommended into that. Yeah, but I do think

In general, people want to be recommended some extra music outside of their current bubble. For sure. And if you just...

Literally, I'm feeling lucky all of music you're gonna get random crap that you don't care about. Yeah, there's so the whole idea is how to Spotify find just the right mix of things that are just a little bit outside your bubble that it can bring you into and start to expand your horizons and Pure Shuffle wouldn't do it but I think the AI DJ is a little bit better than just my own music and

well i also imagine that like all of those metrics that ls was talking about earlier like music can be defined as a gradient right because you could have all of these characteristics of different bands and different songs and if you've got a band and song that's very close in most characteristics but have one or two different you could slowly transition a user to an artist they've never heard of before that has very similar style and characteristics that's what i would love so

On my ridiculously long road trip, I had several instances of, oh my God, I think I've run out of all of the music. Because I've just listened to all of music. It's been 12 hours and what am I still doing here? I think I've heard every song. And so if I go in and I think I randomly just went in, just give me greatest hits by Michael Jackson. So I typed in Michael Jackson and went to his artist page and started with the first one and just let it go. And once you get past the top 10, then it starts shuffling in others that are

other Michael Jackson songs or other hits from related artists to Michael Jackson and it starts moving. And that's not the A.I. DJ, but that's the same type of behavior I'm looking for, which is take my music library, shuffle that a bit, but also once in a while poke out of the bubble a little bit and give me some new stuff. So I plan on asking the A.I. DJ for all kinds of random genres and beats for next time I'm driving. I think A.I. DJ is just

It's like their new smart playlist at this point. Calling it a DJ makes it a little more personal and feel more like AI, but I really just feel like they fixed their playlist because I've never loved their playlist because it's either so short that, like you said, it starts bringing in other stuff or it's so long that I feel like,

all listen to the same songs that never get to the half of the other songs that are in my playlist. Yeah. Well, people have different opinions on this and it could be good or bad, but I created something many moons ago that is much better than this. You can just go to bangersonly.net and you'll get all the best music. That's all you need to do. Good plug. Still hosting. We're still streaming 24 seven. Can I say my qualm with Spotify DJ? He gets stuck in loops.

Where if you only exclusively listen to Spotify DJ, he'll just keep giving you the same exact playlist over and over. Oh, yeah, true. I hate that. And he needs to figure it out because I asked him for my Bratz Summer playlist and he'd played me the Bratz Dolls movies. So that's all I want to say. It's the most seery thing ever. So work on it a little bit. Was that a request you did or a DJ request? Yep. Oh, really? I said Bratz Summer and he said, Bratz Dolls, you want it.

So there it is. Did you listen?

Did you listen to the song? To the Bratz movie? Unfortunately, I did. You did? Soundtrack? It was kind of good. I'm not going to lie. I mean, six days. That sounds like a win. It sounds kind of like an old DJ where you have a crappy cell phone connection. You wait it out and hold for 10 minutes. Ask them for the request. They didn't hear you correctly and played something completely different. It could happen. I think this is a perfect place to put the train back on the rails with some trivia. Absolutely.

Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam, Adam. Alan. Adam. Alan. So guys, question number one. The Google logo has always had six characters, except for one time between October of 98 and May of 99. Google's logo had seven characters during that period. What was the seventh character? Look at those working lights. Look at them. Look at them go. Don't you dare.

Goblin strikes again. Oh, yeah Goblin also, this is the market that doesn't work at all. Do you want it works? Barely well, they're not legible kind of All right boys flip those boards around and read I Know something different Marquez. Why don't you go first? Yes, the different things I said an extra Oh, thank God. That was gonna be my guess I said a period

I said an exclamation point. That is correct. For that brief period, Google was what they said. No, the brief period, which is what an exclamation point is.

Google having an extra O does sound kind of familiar. No, no, because when, well, yeah. I feel like. At the bottom of the page, there's all of the O's. It has a bunch of extra O's and the O's are just links to the other pages. We live in a time right now where no one's made it that far down the Google search. Yeah, it's been a while since we were at the bottom of the page, huh? Actually, do they even still do it? They do. Get on that point? Actually, no, they just infinite scroll now, don't they? All right, guys, question number two. Take down their website.

boring iphones like the 17 air get leaked via case websites but which iphone was accidentally left in a bar in redwood city california in which tim cook called the reporter and was like we are going to sue the hell out of you sorry not tim cook uh steve jobs steve jobs

What's the difference? I'm sorry. If you put Google with 42 O's in the URL, it doesn't bring you to Google. It brings you to a WordPress page that says something new is coming. Are they saving it for the Pixel 42? All right, guys. Who would like to go first? Me. Andrew. Six. There we go.

Twas the iPhone 4. It was indeed the iPhone 4 that has one point for David and one point for Marques. All right. Guys, the scores for trivia right now are getting pretty crazy. I think we might need to extrav this pretty soon because Andrew...

What's like the opposite of pole position? What is pole position? Oh no, starting from the pits. You're going to F, so don't worry. It means I'm out of lies to tell. I've told too many. DNF stands for did not finish. It's a race. I'm starting from the pits. There you go. Andrew's starting from the pits. Also, just so you know, a chicane is not a basketball player. It's like an S-turn in a racetrack. Chicane O'Neal? Yeah, exactly. That's where they get the name from.

I can't stop lying. Shaq Fu. So, Andrew, you are starting in the pits with 12 points. Yeah. Pretty, you know, pretty competitive. 12 is a good number, though. Because Marquez is only one point ahead of you with 13. I'm just kidding. He has 23 points. He is 11 points ahead of you. And David is in first place with 28 points. Sheesh.

28 points. So we're definitely going to need to do some ginormous point offerings in Trivia Extravaganza, which I'm still accepting ideas for how we want to do it. Give me an opportunity, Ellis. I still haven't won any of them. Really? You've never won a season of Trivia? No. Mark has won twice and Andrew won once. Well, you know, mathematically we'll make it possible for anyone. Yes. Google lost once because they got negative one. We'll just have like, we'll just have it a hundred point section about the X-Pan.

and uh sounds a little rigged if you ask me but thanks for watching and listening this week we appreciate well my google lit up that was random uh we appreciate you all for subscribing and also if you have suggestions for what we should do with the trivia extravaganza feel free to leave in a comment next week is io week it is

And many more things, of course. Feel free to request your Spotify AI DJ plays more waveform in between your hype tracks. It just starts a waveform episode. That is the hype track. That is maybe the hype track. And then it plays the weird song that Ellis made to play every three songs. And then loops all three of those things. It'll be great. And then someone gets in your car. And you have to drive them somewhere. See you next week. Peace. Goodbye.

Way From Home is produced by Adam Molina, Ellis Roven, and Mariah Zink. We're... You don't want to be part of it? I didn't do anything. She did everything. You said some words. And we're partnered with Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro music was created by Mariah Zink. Just kidding. Vain Still. Dang, she's a music producer. Have you ever seen Vain Still and Mariah Zink in the same room? Oh, shoot. Bingo! You guys want to hear the only Spanish language joke I know?

Yes. What is in English? Pollo is chicken, but repollo is not rechicken.