Wrapping Up 2022 and Blind Smartphone Test
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Hey, what is up, people of the internet? Welcome back. It's your final week of the year, and we have another episode of the Waveform Podcast for you. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. I'm Andrew. And we got to talk about the blind smartphone camera test. It was a lot of fun, a lot of data collection, a lot of really interesting results. We did it scientifically this time, which was sweet.

But also, we've got a few keyboard launches we may or may not be excited about. I think Andrew is probably a lot. Yeah, I like keyboards a lot now. We also have a calendar app that I guess I should give a quick shout out to. That you're excited about. That I'm excited about. That's me. We're also going to revisit our 2022 tech predictions, which I actually don't remember any of what I said. There's some fun ones. I had so much fun watching the old episode. Okay. It's going to be fun. This should be good. But first...

I do want to give a big shout out to Adam Bobrow. I don't know if I'm saying it right, but he has a table tennis YouTube channel. I've been watching for a while, actually. And we actually got to collaborate with him because he's all over the world all the time. But he was in New York City for a couple of days. He hit us up.

and we couldn't resist the opportunity. I just wanted to go play, but I also wanted to find a way to shoot a video, so we got him to play table tennis using various tech items. He's extremely good at table tennis. Extremely good. So I'm not going to spoil anything, but like,

He's pretty good, okay? Go watch the video on the studio channel. For sure. He's pretty good. It's awesome. There's also a video coming to his own channel, so if you want to subscribe to him, I played against him and just like straight up matches of table tennis. So it'll be fun. I also want to, real quick, you said final week of the year. This is the final week we're recording table tennis.

quote unquote live. We have a prerecorded episode that'll go out next week, which is actually the last one. So there will be a streak continued. It's a long episode. Yeah. David, Adam, Ellis have been working on this for like six months. It's all ready to go for next week. So don't worry. There still will be an episode out next week. Storytime. That's what it is. Okay.

You got another calendar app because why wouldn't you get another calendar app? So I didn't want to like... I've told you guys about my addiction to productivity apps. I'll try anything at this point. I've been using this one actually for a little bit and I didn't tell you guys about it. I was just kind of like messing around as I usually do. But I really like it. It's a calendar app called Cron and...

just last week, which is why I tweeted about it, they released their first mobile app, which is the iPhone calendar. It's an iOS calendar app. So there's no Android version yet, but they keep saying it's coming, which is cool. But I mostly use it for the desktop app, which is a Mac app. And is it, let me check if it's also on Windows, but it is not. Okay. So that's one of the downsides of a lot of these niche apps that I try is there'll be like a small enough development team that they're only on one or two platforms, which is really a bummer. Um,

I use Google Calendar, so this syncs with Google Calendar. So sorry, Outlook people, this doesn't work for you, but if you use Google Calendar like I do... That's what you get for using Outlook. I mean, in the enterprise world, lots of people use it, but like... That's why I hate it. Yeah. My personal calendar, I'm a Google Calendar person, so I never use the Mac Calendar app. I never use Outlook. But this app is good. It's fast. It's good looking. It's functional. It's got the keyboard shortcuts that I like. I live in...

Like I said, like three apps. And I live in Cron now. It's really good. So if you're interested, if you use Google Calendar, I would suggest also dropping it on your iPhone too because it's better than the stock Google Calendar app that I've been using. Mostly because of the widget.

We'll get a shot at the widget. It's a nice widget. This is something where like, I've never found myself wanting anything other than just my Google calendar app. I just accidentally started a workout. Nice. Sorry. Just leave it going. Yeah, whatever. We'll check it back later. Cause like to me, a calendar widget just means, Hey, I want you to be stressed more. Every time you look at your phone, I want you to know how busy you are. Is it the upcoming event that it's just seeing it right there. Like I know when I'm clicking the button on my calendar, it's like, I know.

I know I'm busy. I know I'm already stressed. I'm going to look at why I'm stressed. If I just have it up every time, I'm like, I'm just going to check the time. Oh my God, this is going to be a long day. Also, I was wrong. It is on Windows. It's a small link all the way at the bottom.

But you can get it. It looks really good. It is also, I think it's invite only, so it's not exactly easy to use. I should have mentioned that. Yeah, no, dude, I had people, I had friends of mine messaging me like, yo, do you guys have any extra invites? Yeah, I don't have any. I haven't gotten messages like that since like,

The early Dropbox days or like the Uber days when you would get like free rides with early invites and stuff like that. It's a very tech company thing to do. There's something about it I love for some reason. People hated it when OnePlus did it. But that was just to be able to get invited to then buy a thing versus just getting an invite to use a thing. Like I got on the wait list for a Notion AI. That one finally got into Notion AI. And it's like I'm not paying extra for it, but I understand the wait list thing.

Builds the hype. Builds the hype. So, you know, check it out if you're interested, if you're a dickhead like me. There's another one, actually, I kind of want to try. Of course. Never mind. I was just going to ask you, like, do you think you can use this calendar app for one whole calendar year? Okay, there's another one called Routine. That's a no, if anyone was wondering. Routine.co. I went to the site. It's also in beta, and it's on a waitlist thing, but there's a macOS, a Windows, and an iOS app. And if you go to this website, tell me you wouldn't want to try this app.

It's got just like sunrise. It does, but it's got your task list next to your calendar, which talks to also we use notion and it has your notion tasks in their account. All of it is in one. I feel like if I could, I could use all three things in one app, that would be even better. You guys ever heard of the alarms app?

okay it's gone all right you have a keyboard you want to talk about yeah i don't know where i i was just i have a couple keyboards actually okay my uh my r button is slowly breaking on my current oh wow problems with macbook keyboard oh on your key oh man okay well okay then let's segue that into i'm in the market one plus is coming out with a keyboard that they're partnering with keychron actually interesting which when i first heard one plus keyboard i was like

Kind of weird. Not against it. Like I, I love keyboards. I think they're really fun. I think I'm slowly diving further and further down the rabbit hole of keyboards and I love it. Um, one plus making one, I was excited, but I was like, Oh,

I'm not quite sure. Then I saw it was with Keychron. I'm like, okay, cool. At least they're partnering with a reputable brand already. Yeah, and they almost feel like they match as far as their market positioning. I always feel like, maybe not lately, but OnePlus being the lower price competitive, but surprisingly good brand.

overall like product for the price yeah is and that's also what i i feel like that's a separate question is that still one plus or have we all just kind of given up on what one plus is doing anymore that's what one plus would like to think it is okay and that's also what i think of when i think of keychron okay is that fair that's fair yeah i'll call that fair um the thing is is we don't know much about it but i just wanted to talk about it because their page for it trying to find information is insanely confusing so i'm going to read you the

The first couple things you get when you go to their page about their keyboard. Okay. You get one picture of a silver key with a little red squiggly line. A couple things that say it's Switches co-created with fans, double gasket mounted design, custom made layout and profile. And then it says...

subscribe to get 30 red coins and receive product news updates back this product with red coins and get three times the amount invested during the product pre-order stage see terms and conditions and then a button to subscribe to news updates and become an investor an investor i'm very confused it feels like a kickstarter for it but like i don't it almost feels do you know what it kind of feels like it kind of feels like what nothing did to like

like invest into it way beforehand which is funny because nothing is Carl which is from one plus but not at one plus anymore yeah but also this is for a keyboard which feels kind of weird and that is odd I mean one one plus is they have money they have BBK money so it's not like they need to do a Kickstarter but that is kind of a hypey thing to do still yeah I'm wondering if more and more companies and I don't think this is like some revelation or anything but um

It's telling me my lap speed, which is not great right now. I need to turn this off. I'm sorry. What type of workout did you do? I guess a run. A track workout. But it's telling me every minute. Okay. Sorry, Adam. Sorry, future Adam. It

It feels like a lot of companies, which isn't much of a surprise, it feels like they're launching these Kickstarters more along the line of, it reminds me of like when you have a Teespring campaign and it's like rather than make way too much of a product, you want an idea of how many people are going to order so then you can make the exact amount of the product and not have too much overhead. Okay.

Yeah, that makes sense. That's what I get from this. Yeah, like if you're OnePlus, you don't really know how many people would buy a OnePlus keyboard. You might think it's a cool idea, but then like, all right, all our buyers don't necessarily own a product that needs a keyboard like this. So we'll just put the idea out there, give people a button to sign up, and then figure out more about what these people want and then make it later. Yeah.

And you just have to use red coins to do that. Whatever those are. Whatever the hell that is. But in terms of timetable, that's the only other thing we really know here. It says in January will be testing phase. February will be the product launch. But I'm guessing that just means the announcement. And then it says March to April mass production starts. So if mass production starts in March at the earliest, I can't imagine we're seeing this till May or June probably, right? Yeah, I have no idea what the life cycle of a keyboard is. Yeah. Like how it gets made.

But, yeah, sometime next year it's not opening. Because, again, it's going to be, like, probably limited supply. And then you'll have to get one super early. And if you don't, it'll be sold out. And then you have to wait again. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not sure. Interesting. I feel like, I was going to say, there's, like...

several different levels of keyboard enthusiasts. I haven't gone all the way to the bottom of the rabbit hole yet. You're segueing into everything I want to talk about this fantastically, by the way. I mean, I just... I used to be the just regular chiclet-style keyboard person on everything. So my laptop, obviously. But then when I got really good at typing fast on my laptop, I was like, let me just use that same keyboard on my desktop. So I just used literally the Magic Keyboard for a long time. And I thought mechanical keyboards as a category was...

a little extra and niche. And I didn't really get into it. Nothing wrong with that. So I finally got to try a few. And I think mostly it was because I was on a Mac at this point. And I had realized there weren't as many mechanical keyboards for Mac. So every time I tried one, I'd be like, oh, that's kind of cool. But it just has Windows keys and I can't use it. So I found a couple of good Mac mechanical keyboards. And I was like, all right.

I get mechanical keyboards over chiclet style. More satisfying, the sound, they're better built. This Magic Keyboard is obviously just a flimsy piece of, you know, the thin metal Apple made. So I was like, all right, I get it. But like artisan key caps and like crazy seven pound boards and like people gluing down, like making their own keyboards from scratch. I was like, that is far out. That is crazy far out. I get mechanical keyboards, but I'm probably never getting there.

Now you're opening a package right now. Now I'm at the point where I understand, I feel like the differences between different switches for different types of activities, I'm into that. Wired versus wireless, different keyboard layouts and things like that. I kind of miss having a number pad. I'm considering my next mechanical keyboard being a little bit bigger and having a number pad. We just got a couple of Glorious sent us their Bluetooth devices

that's just like an extra numpad on the side with a couple extra volume controls or like macro controls that's pretty sick. Potentially cool. But that won't work on Mac though yet probably. I'm not sure. Glorious is a weird thing. I'll plug it in and I'll try. You might be able to try it. We have them. We should try it. But like that's the kind of thing I like 10 keyless or like 60% and stuff like that without the numpad and then but sometimes it's just so nice to have the numpad. So to have it on the side that I can pull it over kind of like what I do with my trackpad on the Mac is really nice. Yeah. But

But you segued into talking about a seven-pound keyboard. What did you just put into that bag? So you said you've been enjoying mechanical keyboards more and more. I was lucky enough that...

After the typing test, a company called MonoKey reached out and wanted to send a board. It was not built. They sent us the PCB, the case, and some keycaps. We had a bunch of switches at home, and when I got COVID, I got very bored, so I built my first keyboard, and I'm insanely proud of this. Can I hold it? But feel this. It is a 10.

You couldn't... It feels like solid metal. Like, you can legitimately hurt people with this. Oh, yeah. It's crazy because the keyboard I was using before and I used in that video, the KeyCult 265, I thought was heavy. And I really liked it because, I mean, one, it's a beautiful keyboard. And two, when I'm playing games, it just had, like, some more heft to it. And I don't like my keyboard sliding around. This thing...

I can't move. I was going to say, there's got to be some diminishing returns. Like I have a pretty heavy keyboard. It doesn't move. If my keyboard is three times as heavy, I think the only thing I would notice is a general more thunk feeling. I don't think it would move less. I don't think it's like, yeah, it's not the feeling so much. I mean, it's solid. So I'm sure there's somewhat of a feeling coming through. I'm sure there's keyboard people out here who are like, you guys have no idea what you're talking about, but you're right. I agree. Yeah.

For me, and a perfect example you saw this morning is I get insanely competitive. I broke my ping pong paddle this morning when we were playing. And like when I'm playing games, I will like shove my keyboard and stuff. So now it's a lot harder. Being seven pounds, you'll actually break things with your keyboard. This is a beautiful keyboard, though. I mean, I think I have to give a little ASMR test right now. Sure. I'm just going to type subscribe to Waveform.

- Solid. - I don't know what else. - That was solid. - It's very nice. I don't wanna go too deep into this 'cause it's not the beautiful keyboard. - Look, I appreciate nice keyboards now. That's what I'll say. I appreciate them. I'm in the market for a wired, well, it could be wired, for a Mac OS compatible mechanical keyboard of any size, actually. - And I just wanna confirm,

We know you can use Windows keyboards on Mac. It is much nicer when you do have all the correct keys and all the keycaps and stuff like that. There is...

There are just ease of use to it. Exactly. I mean, I'm not against it. I love the glorious keyboards. That's this is what got me like I was using a glorious keyboard on my Mac after I was using the magic keyboard and I'd remapped all the control key, the Windows key, everything to like match up. But I still realize that I use the brightness and media controls a lot also on the magic keyboard. So having those just not work at all is kind of a bummer. So I really just want a specifically Mac OS compatible one. Yeah, that's where I'm at.

Yeah, okay. Well, okay. I have one more keyboard that I want to show you that just got announced. I want you to click the link in the doc. It's from Finalmouse. And I want you to tell me what you think about this because I will be up front. I don't like this company at all. So I am super biased looking at it, but I would like to see what you think. Maybe describe it a little bit. Is it the Verge one with a screen? Yes. Okay.

Because the Verge title is this mechanical keyboard has a whole ass screen underneath its keys, which is amazing. Yep.

Final Mouse has a $350 keyboard, which appears to have transparent keys and a video playing on a screen underneath those transparent keys. So when you touch keys on the keyboard, the video actually reacts. This is more than just a video. It's actually, it looks like you're, it's like an overhead view of a, like a koi pond. And when you hit a key, the fish all scatter away from the key that you pressed.

that's that is that's over my head that's well okay this i don't know if all of them do that because they've showed a few examples and i believe the fish one was the only one that kind of interacted correctly um but yeah it's it's a keyboard where essentially there's a screen underneath the keys you have full transparent keycaps and then rather than just like rgb and kind of like

In RGB keyboards, you can have things that like the lights pulse or you can have them rainbow slide. And like if you press keys, it'll like puddle from out from that. This is taking it to another level with video, but... This is nuts. I'm looking at the video on right now. There's like a marketplace for buying videos that play under the keyboard. This is like, yeah, this is clearly the level that I'm not on with keyboards yet. I think of this like a PC, like when you buy a computer...

75, 85, 95% of people don't build their own computer. They buy a computer and just use it until it doesn't work anymore. Yeah.

And for the few percent that do build their own computer, there is a massive enthusiast market for all kinds of subtle things that only you would notice and be very proud of in the thing you built. Your RAM sticks have RGB that you can coordinate the colors of as you're gaming. And all these little things, you have the glass and you can see it and that's cool, but that's a very small amount of people. And this is kind of the same thing with keyboards. Most people just get a keyboard. Yeah.

But the small amount of people that are building their own keyboards are going to think this is crazy cool, I think.

But that's a small amount. I will counterpoint that a little bit. And again, I'm biased. I inherently don't like this keyboard because I think Final Mouse is a pretty terrible company. At $350, I don't think it's at the price point of the people you're talking about for reference. I believe the case to this keyboard is $500. Just the case and the PCB. Just the red heavy piece. Mm-hmm.

Like, keyboards get expensive. So, like, at $350, I wonder what really the, like, build material is on all of this. And then... I thought you were going to say the opposite. I thought you were going to say, like, a normal board is, like, $80. And I think they're just overcharging people. I think there... I mean, there are... Like, if you bought a gaming laptop from, like... Or a gaming keyboard from, like, SteelSeries. Mechanical gaming keyboard. Like, pretty cherry switches. $150. Yeah. $150 to $200. Sure. And then, like...

glorious gets a little more expensive but i think they're in that like sweet spot of it's like you can buy a full keyboard that will just work out of the box but it's got hot swappable switches it's got like different keycaps that you can buy a bunch of customized stuff that you can upgrade later so it's almost like buying a pre-built pc but knowing you can change the graphics card later it's a it's a foundation it's like the it's the the um

Oh my God, what's it called? - What's the word? We're both thinking of the word. - I don't think we're thinking of the same. - It's a platform, it's a platform. - I was gonna say it's the gateway drug. - No, no, no, no. It's the platform that you can swap things out on later. - Yeah, and it's like the entry level into that. You can start pretty entry level, but you can go pretty deep on a Glorious Keyboard, which I think is why they're in a really cool marketplace.

But that's a little more expensive than that. And I'm assuming there's not much you can change because all of it needs to be those clear pieces. It's proprietary. And I just, as good as people are at typing, I don't think I would ever want a keyboard with none of the...

letters or anything on the keycaps. Yeah, I'm a pretty good typist, but I do check my hands once in a while. All the time. Like there are so many times where I have to check my hands for certain things. There are keys you just don't hit all the time. I had a matte black keyboard for a while. I remember that, yeah. It got pretty tough. I don't think we ever used it to actually type on. We used it for like a prop. Yeah. So yeah, I don't know. I don't love this thing. I think it's kind of weird. It's pretty wild. And I think Final Mass kind of sucks, but...

- Well, we'll check out, well, I'll keep my eye out for keywords. I'm sure you guys will be tweeting them at me as I say this. So I do have to take a quick break and come back and we will talk about the 2022 predictions and the blind smartphone camera test. But first, a little bit of trivia.

All right. So trivia finale was last week. So this week we're still doing trivia, but it doesn't count. Think of it like a friendly or. The numbers don't matter. The numbers don't matter. Yeah. Whose line is it anyway? Okay. So Facebook was launched in 2004. Twitter debuted July of 2006. But in 2011, which celebrity jointly bought MySpace? I think I know this one. I don't. Yeah. All right. Okay. Be right back.

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All right, we're back. And so last year, right around this time, we made predictions for 2022 and...

specifically said let's make sure we revisit these predictions so that's what we're gonna do today I remember none of what I said it's fun I went back and watched the whole episode and it's there's some good predictions there's some really bad ones and some really good ones and the cup some really funny things that were just go over what people said and then maybe react slash summarize yeah do like future predictions a little bit maybe we'll do a full episode of those later but

I'm curious what we actually said last year. I'm just going to bring it up. If you remember last year, we brought the team in and everyone kind of had a prediction. Some of them kind of overlapped with each other, but we'll just go over everything, see who was right, who was wrong. Let's start with Adam, everyone's favorite producer, Adam. He, so he predicted something and then funnily accidentally predicted something. So I'll explain. He was looking for the OP2 from Teenage Engineering. Yeah.

But in that process, you and I didn't know what it was. And I still don't know. Do we? Did that happen? Well, OK. Tell us if it happened or not. We didn't get an OP2, but they did release the OP1 field, which is an updated OP1.

So they fixed the things that I wanted fixed about it. In the episode, you were like, you wanted USB-C, you wanted just some like, it was pretty like a refresh. Better 3.5 millimeter. Yeah. Yeah. So they did kind of do that. Yeah, they did do that. It's just not called OP2. Exactly. In the process of asking for that, I asked you, since we didn't know, we asked you what the chances of that happening and your words were,

not very optimistic and said about as good of a chance as a pixel watch coming out which funny enough oh funny you say that yeah we did get it we got the pixel watch yeah so you so you know both this is why i don't gamble you technically were right with your gut you're like probably the same chance as a pixel watch and then they both happen yeah exactly yeah we'll call that

A win. I think that's a win. I think definitely you got that one. Unintentional win. Unintentional win. Hayato said what I think a lot of us agreed with. And after he said this, I think almost everyone kind of agreed. But more EVs from legacy car manufacturers and from startups. He did specifically mention Canoo.

I'll give the L on that one. But I do think it's fair to say we saw a big influx in EVs this year. Yeah, if you guys aren't already subscribed to the Autofocus channel, we're checking out a lot of them. I mean, we've had our hands on a lot of them, but now we're able to give thoughts on individual models and a lot of the strategies that we see from these companies. So, yeah.

Yeah, I want to give a lot of credit to Volvo and GM, who I feel like have been quietly doing a pretty solid job. Volvo, I just think their website is incredibly future. They just showcase their EVs, which is cool. And they also do Polestar stuff. But then GM's got Cadillac's got the Lyric. The Hummer's got the...

Hummer the truck whatever but it's an electric pickup trucks that exists and there's some stuff in the pipeline f-150 lightning Ford is out that came out just barely correctly on time if waited till like maybe the last month, but yeah, see the words out the Mach-E and f-150 lightning out There's some startups like Rivian's real really killing it. Oh these okay. We're kind of close to an Amazon Yeah, or whatever's going on back there

And the other day I was coming into the studio and I couldn't like get the angle or like shoot it with my phone as I was coming in, but I was stuck in traffic and I looked up on the bridge and there was like 12 Amazon delivery vans in a row. And it was like Rivian, non-Rivian, Rivian, non-Rivian, Rivian. And it was like, they clearly like started updating their fleet or whatever. That's awesome. And I wonder how long it'll take before they just go fully electric, but those things are everywhere now. Yeah, and the R1S is starting to like,

What is it? It's coming out for reviews, it feels like. I don't know if delivery started yet. I saw the first one on the road on the way to the studio a couple days ago, so it's in customer hands. Not in big numbers, but it's out there. It's hard to tell sometimes because isn't there a Rivian place in New York City? And we started seeing a couple of trucks. Yeah, probably test drives and stuff. But still, yeah, Rivian's doing great. Canoo's not one of them. We did also, we had a bet going of...

who would make the first sub $30,000 EV with at least 240 miles. Ooh, is the Bolt over 240? Yes, 259. Okay. Starting, you can get one at 259 miles for around 28 or 27, I think. So that's officially, back then, the Bolt was starting at like 32. So we did get it. The funny thing is, is we all said like, this is a bet we'll come back to in five years. And then Chevy just decided to like,

dropped the price by $5,000. - It's tough. Cars are not cheap right now. - No. - That is impressive. - But you got to test drive the Bolt. - Yeah, I did a whole video on it. It is, I think it's basically the baseline for a good acceptable EV. There's a couple other cheap EVs, but I think the Bolt has a good baseline. It's really solid. So, that was good. - We'll just say, a couple of us guessed which company we thought would do it first. You thought Tesla, Hayato, Adam, and David thought Hyundai.

The worst guess was me. I thought Toyota, and I thought I had a reasonable, but I am... They're still making any electric car. One, the Easy 4X or whatever, which is terrible and way too expensive. Yeah, I took a massive loss on that guess. But yeah, we did get the sub $30,000 240 mile EV. I'm very proud of that. I hope that starts a lot. I hope that's...

Next year, I hope we see more things like that. I hope the Bolt's not the only one at the end of next year. Exactly, yeah. David guessed more folding phones. This is true. Yes. And this is a bit of a spoiler alert, but I'll just say it. We were considering adding a best folding phone category to the Smartphone Awards this year. We ended up not doing it because they're still sort of burgeoning. It could still die off.

but I think there's a good enough variety that we could have done it this year. The Find N2 just dropped. It's really nice. We're expecting a Pixel Fold around the corner. We still have the big ones and the crazy Xiaomi ones and the Fold from Samsung and the Flips. All of them do the Flip thing. The Razr. There's a bunch. I love seeing all of them because it feels like a lot of companies are doing it kind of a

a piece of it right like samsung's clearly the furthest ahead and like it all works so well but like the xiaomi one is so thin i picked it up the other day on the table and i was like there should be a xiaomi folding phone too and david's like you're holding it i was like oh my god i'd like i didn't even notice i was holding something that thing the find n2 the for the size of it is

fantastic like i absolutely love it so yeah i guess once samsung loses its lead a little bit then a folding phone category will make way more sense it's still funny because in the u.s like most people aren't buying a xiaomi they're not buying the oppo find n they're not really able to buy the rate the razor is just if you're on verizon it's like you basically just have samsung as your options outside of verizon so it's gonna be tough but it is true that we have more

theoretical folding option and when pixel comes out yeah that could be who knows what that will actually come out but all right let's go on to Tim Tim's was fun he was wrong and also kind of dead on so he said he wants an iMac Pro 27 inch with Apple silicon yep we all want that so that's wrong but he said specifically

More range of products for professionals from Apple. And he says he needs something for professionals between the Apple Silicon regular iMac and the Mac Pro, which he kind of was dead on. The Mac Studio. The Mac Studio was kind of exactly what he was talking about. That is pretty close. There is a recent report from Mark Gurman on Bloomberg of...

It's basically the saddest thing I've read in a while. I know. I have this later in here because there's... Yeah, it's like, hey guys, remember how Apple said there would be a two-year transition and that was two and a half years ago? Yeah, so they kind of missed the boat there. It looks like they're canceling the M2 Extreme, which would have been like twice the size of the M2 Ultra. Which is already like four times the size. Which is already huge. Like they're canceling this super mega chip thing and they're just going to do Mac Pro with the next...

They're gonna do m2 stuff across the board so we have a two in the iPad now and we're gonna get an m2 Pro m2 ultra and that ultra will be the highest end chip there won't be an even bigger chip in the Mac Pro and I was very sad to read that and then I also read that they appear to have cancelled the iMac Pro which is also very sad oh I missed that part and I also believe I read that they remember we're writing about this like upgraded 7k Pro Display XDR yeah you that's also delayed oh yeah

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's clearly delayed because it's not out. And we were hoping by the end of two years, it would all be out. But Apple, they've got to eventually drop it. Some sort of modular desktop Mac with Apple Silicon at some point. That is what Mark Gurman's article said, right? Is that there would be an M...

an m ultra chip in a package that has more like ram and gpu slots and i forget i don't know more upgradeability yeah like modular upgrade because you people don't open up the mac studio and and add ram like that they don't do a modular computer outside of the mac pro basically right now do you think it'll be in a

in the same form factor as the current Mac Pro? Because that seems... I think it can be much smaller. I was going to say that would seem ridiculous to be that big for... Yeah. If the M2 Ultra chip can kick ass in the M2... in the Mac Studio, then if you just do a...

a Mac studio that like looks like it like gained a few pounds I feel like it can be an on the desk computer instead of an under the desk computer okay it can be like the it can be the size of kind of what Apple was hoping they could do with the trash can Mac Pro they can actually finally do it in that size now because they were out of their minds to try to do it with an Intel chip and all the Radeon stuff but now they can actually do it that size I hope they bring it back and they're like told you so anymore it's funny because like when they say that on stage and then that product just just bombs but like

They could do it now. Yeah. They could do it now. In terms of XDR, Vin actually predicted a Pro Display XDR, but with 120 hertz. I guess it's almost like an iMac Pro because he wanted a Pro Display XDR casing, 120 hertz refresh rate, but then a chip inside that then you could plug into an external GPU for extra power.

Oh, so it's an iMac. So it's pretty much an iMac Pro with the capability of plugging in an external GPU. That would be really nice. That would be pretty cool. Yeah. It definitely did not happen. Nothing close to that happened. It didn't happen. No. But I can still dream. We can still dream. We can still dream. Yeah. So Michael's prediction was...

It wasn't really a prediction. He just wanted to know, like, are we going to stop seeing as many desktops in the, like, creative world? And kind of bang on on that. We didn't see a new Mac Pro. We didn't see a new iMac Pro. We didn't get as many desktops. The studio obviously is a desktop, but it feels like it's going to that, like, 50s.

form smaller form factor which is obviously still a desktop but also that the macbook pros are really good exactly and i feel like for what we do like so michael has a macbook one of the new macbook pros now and it's like it's great for the workflows the apple silicon advancements for a lot of the third-party software is all catching up like those machines are great and it does feel like he was right that the desktop is less necessary than ever i think his like

example essentially was that like he does very intense motion graphics and he's using a laptop so if he's at the point of not really needing like a desktop and can go around and then do stuff like this at a coffee shop or something is pretty wild like how many more people in this space are going to really need desktops and I think

proving it, but even still... I'm still a psycho, though, for that. I mean, almost all our new hires, when they get their equipment, they're picking MacBook Pros at this point. Mariah's got a MacBook Pro. Hayato's got a MacBook Pro. It's one of the best Apple products in a long time, those things. Yeah, I'm a fan of them. I am still the crazy one waiting for the super overpowered desktop because I still see a little bit of headroom in my workflow that I would like to take advantage of.

But generally, yeah, they're great. Yeah, we did also very specifically mention this is for creative workflow like this, not for gaming. Desktops will never die when it comes to gaming. Just for all you commenters who are already typing up that, that's what's going to happen. Very specific here. All right, your predictions. What did I say? Let's see. Well, okay, we'll just...

You were hoping, you were very adamant about the Mac Pro and I was hoping for you and an iMac Pro actually. But yes, unfortunately Apple did not complete their 2022 predictions. I was hoping the biggest tech company in the world could follow through on a two year prediction, but they unfortunately were unable. That is pretty rough when you think about it like that. They've had a lot of time to do this and no dice. But you also did

predict more collaborations on all of our channels and I think especially on waveform I would totally say that for sure waveform we had some fun ones studio we're starting to do a little more obviously it's it's tough to have you know traveling happen but we're getting back to it uh yeah that is definitely a goal just as much as it is a prediction yeah but waveform we had like

tech people like Jerry Rig Everything come on. We had Hassan Minhaj come on, which I don't think any of us could have ever predicted last year. That was not on my 2022 bingo. Wasn't on mine either. Yeah, very happy it happened, but wasn't on my prediction. So yeah, lots of new collaborations. Let's hope for more in the future. I think we really, really like those.

And then me just on the predictions L list again will come down, I guess, a drone with a battery life of 40 minutes. I don't think drone battery life changed at all in terms of consumer drones and stuff like that. Yeah, I think there's one DJI drone that has a super long... Let me just double check this real quick. I will say the...

The DJI Avada or Avata, whatever it's called, is probably my favorite piece of tech of 2022. It was so much fun, but it still has the exact same battery life that it feels like every single DJI consumer drone has. Like it's all like 25 minutes. Yeah, there's like a couple niche ones. Like there's one called the Autel Evo 2 Pro has a 7000 milliamp hour battery and is rated for 40 minutes.

There's definitely a lack of long range drone batteries in the consumer world. Still makes me sad. But, um, and then my other prediction was that I was going to get you on a live stream teaching you how to play a video game. And that also didn't happen. And that was a pretty easy one. So, um,

I'm going to try again in 2022. I mean, there's still time. There's still time. We do not have time to do anything this week. Yeah. So, yeah, I pretty much failed every single one of my predictions. Good job, Andrew. Same. No, you had the collaborations part, right? Yeah, yeah, decently. Okay. Yeah.

Yeah, no, I think there's going to be a lot of good stuff for 2023 along the same lines of our 2022 predictions. I think there will be more foldables again. I think there will be, hopefully, a Mac Pro. And more EVs, for sure. I think there will be even more EVs. I think probably, what did I say? Basically, every year for the next 10 years will be the most interesting year yet of EVs. And we're in like year three of that. So there's going to be more next year, for sure.

I am also still hoping for like a nice pro display XDR equivalent, some sort of sweet display that we can use for the desktops, but also MacBook Pros are still really good. There's a lot of good stuff that could still happen that we predicted last year that may come true soon.

in sort of a part two in 2023 okay i thought you were gonna say the last week of 2022 and i was like we could just be super early with our predictions yeah i think that just means we're wrong yeah well what if i play a video game on stream and we get a 40 minute drone battery life and we get the mac pro all next year i mean that'd be awesome we were right just like a little early i will get you to play a video game somewhere i think we talked about me teaching you how to play something so whether that's a studio live stream or a studio video i will

I will get you on that. Yeah. I usually learn off camera, like table tennis. Okay. Yeah. Fair. But we'll see. Yeah. Let's do it. All right. Well, we'll take a quick break. We got to come back and talk through the blind smartphone camera test. But first, one more trivia question.

All right. So I've personally been using Notion for a while. And when we switched to Notion for work, I was super hyped. But all of my notes are spread between a bunch of different apps, including Google Keep. So the question, when did Google Keep launch? We want a year. I'll take a year and a date. The closest one gets the fake point. Okay. All right. Okay. I also have notes in Google Keep. All right. I'll think about that one. We'll be right back.

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All right, welcome back. Let's talk through the blind smartphone camera test 2022. We did it science style this year, which I think was a super fun project. Shout out to the Discord for helping us test this stuff. Shout out to Zach for helping us build this stuff.

What we did this time was we had an entire site built. So instead of doing social media polls of 16 different phones and like it's kind of up to whatever matchups we load up and maybe this like people suggested maybe do double elimination, maybe make it a little more scientific because like something could happen on the first picture. Seeding and stuff. But it's hard to do all of that. That is tough. So we did full science mode. We took 16 different smartphones. We took the same picture with all 16 smartphones.

We fed them into a site which would randomize and show you matchups of all these combinations of the 16. And then instead, well, so that first of all, that's like, that's pretty sick. So we have the side by side of the same picture. We did a standard photo, a portrait photo, and a low light photo. So you could go through and vote on all three of these categories. And then you would get a winner at the end of your voting. The challenge was...

16 phones is a lot of pictures. So if we want you to give like a theoretical fair shot to every single camera, that would be at like at least 120 votes. So we actually we ended up going with an ELO rating system, which is kind of the same thing you might see in kind of any ranked video game or like table tennis or anything like that, where you have an overall ranking where your rating goes up based on the winnings against players.

who you play. So if you beat a highly ranked thing, that's worth more than if you beat a lowly ranked thing. It's weighted because a lot of the organizations or games or stuff that use it is like you don't get the exact same amount of matchups. So like in chess or tennis or even just like video games, it still needs to match you against someone who's played 10 games versus someone who's played 50 games. So you weight everything and then wins and losses are weighted differently. So this means...

The person that went on, voted for five minutes and did 40 matchups is getting a similar score, but maybe not as specific as a person doing 100 votes. Yeah. So the more votes you do, the more tight and statistically accurate your results will be. Yeah. And that was basically the concept. And so we went through it. I blind tested myself.

which was really fun because now I didn't know which photo was attached to which picture. So my winners when I blind tested myself were for the standard photo, Pixel 6a was my winner. For portrait mode and for low light, Pixel 7 was my winner. Really interestingly.

But my God, we got a ton of data out of this. So we had to fight up for like three days or so, ended up accumulating well over 20 million votes from over 600,000 voters.

And I don't know that there's a collection of unbiased data like this anywhere else on the internet. It's really, really interesting. - Yeah, I wanna throw in there too, like you mentioned you didn't know which is what, like you were blind testing it. You knew a little more just because you knew which phones were in it, but in order to make sure that people couldn't cheat,

first of all it would be really hard to cheat in this because you have to vote so many times that if we didn't take the measures we did you would have to like open each picture go to the x either see the file name or the exit data then vote and i mean like most people were voting you would only be cheating yourself yeah because even if you were to go through and vote

400 times and just make sure you only vote for one phone at the end. There were 20 million votes and people were just bam, bam. I think there was something like a peak of 35,000 votes per minute. So people were really just bam, bam, just clicking through reacting, gut reaction, left or right, left or right, and just going through them.

And that's how we got so many pieces of information. Even on top of that, we still took the extra steps and we cleared all exit data and labeled everything with letters. That way people don't know what phone it is. It was, I actually didn't see a single person

with a post that says like, I know this is this phone because you guys left something behind, which I'm very surprised at. We definitely, we took a lot of extra time to make sure this did it. We cropped them all to the same resolution. We compressed them all to the same file size. We did a lot. We did a lot of things. And I'm,

I'm super, super happy, like you said, about how it came out. I think it was so much fun. I like the fact that it was like you voted quick because you could pixel peep if you wanted to, or you could just very quickly be like, this one looks better. This one looks better. And like you're subconsciously picking the things, the traits in the photo that you like.

and therefore quickly picking them because when you're scrolling through Instagram, very rarely are you zooming all the way in. - Exactly. - And it's cool too because people were saying make sure you tell people to turn off true tone, make sure they're looking at it on a color accurate display. You're not. When you're on your phone, true tone's probably on. Night mode might be on past 10. You're looking at these pictures how you would look at them 95% of the time. - That was the goal, just glanceable photos on the internet.

So with all these 16 phones There are various ways that I could determine a winner but also way more interesting things that we could determine so I want to get through all of them Yeah, first of all the winner

I determined the winner by the one with the highest average ELO rating across all three categories. So a high ELO rating for standard and for low light and for portrait, highest average. That winner was the Pixel 6a. It won the entire test against all their flagships, against the Pixel 7, its bigger brother, but also against the Huawei Mate 50 Pro, the iPhone 14 Pro, against the Sony Xperia 1 IV. The $1,600, yeah.

the Galaxy S22 Ultra, the Vivo X80 Pro Plus that we used. There are a lot of heavy hitters in here. And the 6A, which is incredible because do you remember what won the blind smartphone camera test last year? I do. The Pixel 5A. So this is not a fluke now. We have millions of votes. No. And people really like the photos across the board out of the 6A. Yeah. I do also want to give honorable mention, and some people might consider this the winner, but...

The reason we didn't go with total overall winning votes was because through when we were looking at our votes, because standard was the first category and

potentially because it might be people's favorite categories, but we don't know that, it got about three times as many votes versus low light in portrait. So I think it was like 12 million votes in standard, 4 million low light, 4 million portrait. Total amount of wins, the Oppo Find X5 won. If you consider yourself somebody, and I don't think this is an unreasonable thing to say, somebody who finds just regular standard pictures way more important than portrait mode and low light mode,

The Oppo Find X5 may be the winner of this. So the Oppo Find X5 Pro had the strongest ELO in standard photos. Yes. And it had a solid 100,000 more votes than second place Pixel 7 and third place Pixel 6a. So if you just care about standard photos, Oppo Find X5 Pro was up there. But guess what? That was second to last in portrait mode. Yeah, I don't know what happened. It was real far down in portrait mode. Yeah.

So the Pixels were very consistent and the Oppo had the strongest ELO. The biggest win, though, was in portrait mode, the Pixel 7 Pro demolished. It was by far the strongest ELO. It had way more wins than second place, which was the Pixel 6a again. Sneaky third place.

Realme 10 Pro Plus in portrait mode. Realme 10 Pro Plus might be the dark horse winner of this whole thing because while it didn't place top... Oh no, it did place top three there, I guess, but it didn't... It was probably sixth overall in total votes or something. But when you look at... We did a little math of votes per dollar overall, and while Pixel 6a won, Realme was right there, and both of them, in terms of how many times they won for how much they cost, were just...

far, far ahead of everything else, which everything else was flagship. So like, yeah, the fact that so many people blindly voted and really found the real me 10 pro plus photos universally better than iPhone photos across the board is really interesting.

And yeah, as far as how many dollars you're spending on these phones, it's a much less expensive phone than most of the others. It's the cheapest phone we used in this entire test. I think so. There is the nothing phone, which did terribly in most of these categories, which is still a little more expensive. But there were a couple other mid-range budget options, but the Realme did fantastic. I was not expecting that. My biggest surprises. I'm going to go with my biggest surprises across the board. Okay.

Number one was that the Sony Xperia 1 Mark IV in auto mode just couldn't pull any wins. It just lost to everything. Number two is that the iPhone 14 Pro was kind of middle of the pack. It was fine. Nobody really... It didn't come at the top. I think it was sixth, tenth, and fifth in the three different categories. So it didn't really lose at all or win at all. Yeah, its low light was okay. So that was interesting. And...

Another fun one, which is the Vivo X80 Pro Plus just dominated low light, but the biggest overall individual matchup dominance, right? Because people saw all kinds of matchups, A versus B, C versus F. The biggest overall matchup dominance, the biggest dunk, I would say, was the Pixel 7 Pro over the Sony Xperia Mark IV in portrait mode, in which...

It was a 98% in favor of the Pixel. Only 1,500 people out of several tens of thousands voted for the Sony. That was an accident. And I don't know what they saw in that Sony photo because it wasn't close. The reason you said Sony in auto mode is because Sony clearly can take some crazy pictures in manual mode and that seems to be more what it's for, like

more quote unquote pro mobile photography. We did force bokeh mode, which they called, they don't call it portrait mode. I think it would have taken, and I actually think for a lot of these phones, a regular photo in the correct distance, tapping on a face would probably give a better depth of feel and roll off than these portrait modes. I think we're getting closer and closer to just seeing portrait mode kind of fade away because I think most of these phones would take a better quote portrait picture in standard mode.

It's funny. Portrait mode kind of feels like a cultural feature. 100%. Like it sort of comes up and goes away in the zeitgeist. Like people just use portrait mode a lot sometimes and then it just kind of goes away for a while. And I feel like I know people who will like go on a hike with their friends and they'll just flip to portrait mode and take everything in portrait mode. I don't know. It's just a thing that just happens sometimes that I've noticed. Yeah.

But yeah, you know, you can you can wait that super low and just like take that out of the test completely and just look at the other results. So but we have all the numbers and there's just so many so much so much data. I think my we all know Aces phones have done pretty well in these tests before and they did all right here. I think the Zen phone may have been third in portrait. No, no, no, no. In portrait Zen phone was like fourth is seventh.

Uh, the Zen phone was sixth in low light. Okay. And the Zen phone was fourth in standard. Okay. It might've been third overall. Oh, I think it was third overall and average ELO. Average ELO. It is right behind the pixels in third place. Yeah. Zen phone and ROG phone six. Uh,

portrait cutout i thought was immaculate it was like i think it was right there with the s22 ultra the problem one is the s22 ultra blurred the background more which made while the cutout was perfect you know how in photoshop if you perfectly nail a cutout but if it's on a very contrasted background it feels like a sticker on like yeah yeah if you feather the edge in the wrong direction it kind of it looks like it's like melting a little bit it just feels like it's cut out

Whereas the Zenfone just rolled off the background a little less intense and felt more blended in like a real photo where the S22 Ultra... It also didn't nail exposure and stuff, so it had a good cutout, but it felt fake and just wasn't a great picture. But the Zenfone...

Nailed it. It's one of the best cutouts I've ever seen. And your hair is not easy to cut out. Yeah. All these had a challenge with my hair and with the not a flamethrower that I'm holding. Yeah. The iPhone SE, I also want to point out, does not have night mode. And it is the only phone on our list that does not have night mode. And what?

We'll chalk that up to Apple's fault and that it still should be in there because it's going against phones that are cheaper than it in some cases and have night mode. And ones that did well in night mode too. Yeah, so it got dominated in the low light because it doesn't have night mode, but it does have a nice sensor with OIS, with a wide aperture, with a new processor.

It why doesn't it have no reason so that's it just got crushed in that unfortunately Yeah, that's you know those are kind of the highlights I feel like we now know a lot more about the unbiased nature of people voting on cameras There's there's many more observations in the full video which is like if you put all of the the pictures in a row next to each other in order from least votes to most votes and

Remember what we said about, you know, brighter photo typically wins. Yes, I love this. You would expect to see like a gradient of like dark to light. What we actually found was the best photos were a correct exposure at the top. Yeah. The worst photos were the darkest ones on the other side. And then in the middle were the too bright photos. So you can actually be too bright and lose out to the correct exposure. And that happened in pretty much all the categories. In every single category. Which was really interesting. Yeah, it's not an absolute, which is like,

previous brackets that we've done a lot of people are just like the brightest and most saturated is gonna win and it's like in in the case of a good photo or even in the case of a bad photo yes but like but you can't just crank it all you can overdo it and this really showed if you are going if you're a camera company out there maybe a low budget one you're gonna have a crappy camera go

go bright and go saturated. It's a good way to not come in last place. A bad camera, it looks nicer when it's brighter. Yeah, the Moto Edge is a good example of if it's dark, it will just lose. It's just going to lose all of its matchups. And so like the super bright, like Samsung, I think tends now to be a little bit overexposed more often.

Yeah. And I think I noticed that in the review, but like it's very clear now when you see them in that lineup. It's like it gets to the brightest ones and then it's the Samsung and then it's the good exposures over the Samsung. So Samsung did brighten everything, but it didn't win because of it. So that was interesting to note.

Yeah, the night mode had some of the craziest photos. Okay, I want to like and kind of go on that. Just something I saw a lot of comments and I have a couple just like pieces of feedback that I saw that I just want to talk about because the reason we made this test this year is because of feedback we got in previous years and it just finally came to the like, like, we want to do this different.

As we were talking about it, Zach actually reached out to us early this year and we started talking with him. He's pretty much one of the people who was like, I think you could do this in a cooler way, in a more scientific way. And again, shout out to him. But let's just go over some of the feedback. And the first one is, I think people thought some of the pictures we took were very easy, but we were very specific on photos we took. And they are awesome.

Every single one of these pictures is a hard picture to take. Okay, yeah, I'll go over that. So every picture we take for these tests intentionally has a bunch of different variables because we don't want one of them to win just because it does one thing well. Exactly, yeah. Right? So if I just take a picture of me in front of a blank white wall, what you will learn is which one takes a picture of me the best. Yeah. And you can vote on that. And that's cool.

But what if the subjects you take pictures of don't all look like me? So, and then you add, what about if dynamic range was really bad on one of these phones? You would never know that if it's just me in front of a blank white wall. So the bottom line was add as many

not variables, but as many facets for it to do well or poorly as possible so that when people vote, they can just vote on whichever one they instinctively think is better without thinking too hard. So it's me and Adam in front of a window with a deep background, depth of field, with lights overhead. So you're getting dynamic range, multiple skin tones, sharpness of a subject, overall focal length,

Drop off of like how shallow the depth of field is with a normal photo. All of this stuff in one picture. I had to change my shirt so we had different colors. We had a blue shirt on and I had a red shirt. Yours is a knitted sweater. And like one thing we really noticed is when...

phones weren't doing great with exposure. One of the problems was the blacks and the collar of your sweater had a lot of stitch marks and in good exposed ones, you could see every single line and if you looked down the list, it just looked like a straight black collar. - The bottom three or four, you could not see any detail on the black collar. Yeah, that was a specific note that we'd noticed because of the sweater I was wearing but then also you'd see that more in the hair and then you'd see that the windows look different. It all kind of tied together.

So that's all very intentional. Very, very, yeah. The low light photo. Again, you can take a low light photo anywhere. What we did this time was a softly subject lit low light photo in front of a nighttime nightscape that is far away. So what you have now is you have me, which is just like, can I get the subject in focus? Almost all of them did. They did a pretty good job. I would argue like half of them missed you in focus. A couple of them missed.

I think only one of them truly missed focus, which was the Samsung, but a lot of them slightly missed or would have just a little bit of motion blur. Okay, I guess that's what I was talking about. Which kind of looks the same because it's soft. Feels like you missed it, yeah. So that was number one, which is like these are all going to be longer exposures and you hit that button and that's one of the variables is how well can they isolate hand movement.

It'll have a subject in focus. It's going to have to do it's going to have to make a decision about exposure. So does it want that dark, dark background to be bright or not? And if it did, you would see it brighten everything in the foreground, too. It would brighten the floor that was right behind me. So it had to make an exposure decision.

And then it had to make like a, it's just a depth of field thing, which is like some of them have a bigger sensor and the skyline behind me and the moon right above my head would either be a little bit more blurred or a little bit more flared or something like that. So all of this stuff was noticeable in just that one low light photo. And then lastly, the portrait mode photo

This is, again, a tough one because there are a lot of variables with portrait mode photos. From the focal length they decide to use, 1x, 1.5x, 2x, 3x, to the amount that they blur the background, to how good the cutouts are, to how good the rest of the photo is. So we, again, I had that sweater on. Yep. And you had me as a subject. You also have me with a wall on one side with a close-up background and the rest of the studio on the other side with a faraway background. So you can sort of judge...

the fall off of the amount of blur. You also have me holding an object that is not a human. So you have the face cut out with the hair, but you also have a non-human cut out with not a flamethrower. And the flamethrower had a hole in it as well. So you can see if it decided to include the piece that is clearly the wall that should be blurred, but is not because it might think it's part of the object. They all did different levels of good at that. So there's a lot of data other than just me...

and how well you cut me out so we we did a lot of thinking about like how to do all of these tests with one photo because what we didn't want to do is have you do three portrait mode tests yeah and three low light tests exactly that was and we didn't want to be like we know every single person is going to vote because the cutout is good in this or we know everyone's going to vote because like the skin tones in this are good you like photos for different reasons and that's part of what we tried to figure out when we saw all of these because when we were looking at portrait mode it was like

all right, cutouts seem to be super important here. And like the focal length of things didn't seem like that much of an issue or, and just, we can look through that and then see like, oh, the top three things had this in common and the bottom three things had this in common. And then we can kind of guess why people, yeah. From the patterns, yeah.

So yeah, I would say check out the video. It has all of the summarized thoughts and organized versions of these conversations as we get into the weeds. I also want to give another shout out to Zach who built this system that helped us serve these different matchups to you. It turned out that across the board, it did a really good job of evenly showing you a random series of matchups. The

Total votes for the phones across the board are all pretty much 2.7 million. The absolute minimum that any phone got was...

2,737,148 votes. And the absolute maximum that any phone got was 2,742,474 votes. Yeah, that was something I saw a couple people worried that... I think people were taking the personal test and seeing like...

phone B got 17 chances and then like one of the other phones only got six and they thought well B had more chances to get wins and maybe in your personalized results like there might be a little more if you didn't vote that many times it's a little less quote unquote scientific but when it comes to the full data set that we got I

that was within 5,000 votes and the average was 2.7 million. So like crazy, crazy, crazy close in terms of evenness of votes across it. I don't think any phone got an unfair advantage at all. Yeah, so we got really accurate ELO scores from that, which is sweet.

So shout out to the Pixel 6a. People's choice. Winner for... I'm going to keep saying Oppo Find X5 also did fantastically. It did. And Pixel 7. Yeah. And the shout out to the Rumi 10 Pro Plus. Bang for the buck. Winner. Yeah. Alongside the Pixel 6a. Good stuff. If people still want to take the test also, we're going to leave the site up for personalized results. We're not collecting data anymore because...

It's a lot of data. For people who were wondering why we compressed, in the first four hours, it was two terabytes of bandwidth just for people voting. I mean, that's a lot of smarts, but also a lot of data.

So yeah, that's why we compare. But you can still get your personalized results. I do think we're going to make a switch so it won't show letters anymore. You can just straight up see so you don't have to reference the video. Yeah, take the test. Take the test. It's a lot of fun. And like the test doesn't mean I like take it with a grain of salt. Look at it. Look down the list.

your number four on the list could still be the perfect phone for you. That doesn't... Use it as a reference. It's great. These are always fun. There's more things to a smartphone than the camera, but it is always fun. You will go into this with an expectation of what you think will win, and you will very likely be surprised by where that expectation shows up on the list. The best part about this every year is

finding people who absolutely hate a company and realizing that that's their winner. So that's always a fun part. I can't wait. As of recording this, we haven't launched the video yet. It will be out by that time. So I can't wait to read the comments and everything. It's going to be great. One of my favorite videos of the year every year. Fun time. Well, we've talked for a long time, so we should probably wrap this up. But I think we do have some trivia questions to answer before we do that. So let's do that. All right. Trivia that doesn't matter. Yeah.

Facebook was launched in 2004. Twitter debuted in July 2006. But in 2011, which celebrity jointly bought MySpace? That is the question. Do you know the answer? And it's not Tom. Can we ask who they jointly bought it with? You can. It's not going to help. Doesn't matter, Andrew. You can write whatever you want. I still want to win. No one's going to judge you. All right. Ready? I mean, they might. And flip. What did you guys write? I wrote Matt Damon. I wrote Justin Timberlake.

Wow, you knew that. Yeah, it became like a music site. Yeah. Like MySpace just pivoted. Oh, I should have known the music thing. I still probably wouldn't, would not have guessed. They pivoted super hard. GT, you put. Super hard. All right, next question. Bring it back. New Twitter. MySpace, new Twitter. Let's go. Justin Timberlake, buy Twitter, please. Oh, God, no. Okay. When did Google Keep launch? Okay. Okay.

I've been using Google Keep since it launched. Same. Because I've been a Tasks user, but I needed a separate place for my notes. I was going to say, but do you, yeah, how many different Google Tasks apps have you used? And can you make a difference? Did you write your answer already? Yeah. Okay, I'm going to think out loud then. Okay. I was using it at the end of college for sure. So that was 2015 at least. So it's got to be before 2015. Okay.

Now I'm trying to picture, I think it was on like a Google Play edition HTC when I was first in that apartment, which was like 2012. I think what? 2012. Like, I forget. Yeah, because I was using Samsung for so long and I think I was using, oh, actually I was using the Note and I was, my Notes app was just the,

Wherever it would go when you just scribbled it on the front screen. S Notes. Samsung. Yeah. So I was using Samsung Notes for a while. So I have no real reference to this. That was probably 20, I don't know. And I don't even know when I went to a Pixel if it had Keep or Notes or both. Pixel has it. Pixel definitely had Keep. Yeah. Pixel has always had it. Was there another one that it had at the same time? Did I not take Notes? For Notes. Alarms app. Set an alarm for remembering. Yeah.

All right, I'm sticking with my answer here. What do you mostly do and keep right now? I have a couple pinned notes, which is just like things I need to remember. I have all my stock yardages for each of my clubs, golf clubs. Oh, interesting. So I have carry distances for everything from my lob wedge to my driver. I have a lot of recipes. My pinned ones are all, it's basically pinned for every different type of coffee shop.

Gadget that I have so like my Chemex recipe my v60 recipe my what notes app do you use besides keep? I Keep the notes on the cars reviewing as I'm driving the car. Oh, I'll pull over and take it take a note on what I've noticed Okay, I'm always so mind blown by like how many people actually use keep because I find it horrible. I

- It's super basic. - It's so basic. - It is all temporary for me. There are probably 50 grocery list notes in there that are all blank because I delete them as I pick the thing up at the store, so it's just like Costco. - Oh, it used to be that if you asked Google Assistant to write something down on your shopping list, it would write it in Google Keep. - And then they got rid of that. - But now they got rid of that. - I'm totally wrong on this answer. - All right, my answer's 2012. - I said 2016.

Yeah. Is it 13? 2013. I knew it. March 20th, 2013. Okay. That was close. Yeah. I got the imaginary point for being closer. Yeah, closer.

Either way, happy holiday to those of you listening. It's probably around the holidays and I wish you could see Mac wearing his holiday sweater right now. We'll probably put a picture up. Yeah, thank you for an awesome year. The podcast itself has grown tremendously. The video podcast views have probably doubled, which is awesome. So,

Seriously, thank you all from the whole team here. Even audio is up like 10%, so lots more people listening to Waveform. Yeah, keep sharing with your friends. We seriously appreciate everything and I'm super pumped about 2023. On that note, catch you guys in the next one, which is a long-form episode. See you later. Peace. Waveform is produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Roven. We're partnered with Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro-outro music was created by Vayne Sill.