Can the iPhone 17 Pro Beat a Leica?

31:22And I'm sure that in 2027, they'll bring it back. No, this is for real. This is for real. For real for now. I feel like this is for real. I got briefed on this, and this felt like somebody who used Google Home, who works for Google, was finally like, hey, should we fix this? And they did, I think. So I hope to get the updates soon. but I've now seen all the new Google Home stuff and essentially they plan on finally getting the last of the stuff that they've been making that only works with the Nest app out of it so it can all work with Google. If you had a Nest Aware subscription, that's now a Google, what's it called?

31:55Google something subscription. I think I got the email about that changing. Yeah, exactly. I just got that too. So it's all Google. The subscription is now Google. They're revamping the Home app to be faster and to work with all these new things. They have a couple new accessories. They have a new doorbell, a new indoor camera and I think a new outdoor camera as well. A couple new partnerships. So there's like a cheaper, like a Walmart partnership for like a$22 camera and like a$45 doorbell. So that's pretty cool. What does that mean? Like if you buy it at a specific store, it's cheaper? I think it's, they made it in, let me find, I think they made it in collaboration with Walmart, which is why it's so cheap.

32:29Is that what my notes say? We live in hell. Hey, it's cheap. $22 for a camera is like wise territory. Yeah, I was gonna say wise is like running the game within that price category. So this is where they're trying to get in. So yeah, it's a Google Home premium subscription. And all of this stuff now is going to work with Gemini. So all the stuff we have already in our homes that use the crummy Google Assistant that has just been aging and failing and not working very well is going to be updated to Gemini. And they have some new stuff. I think the latest generations of the stuff we have will work with Gemini Live, but also the new stuff will work with Gemini Live as well.

33:06So you can say, hey, G, start a chat, And then you're doing the whole Gemini Live back and forth conversation thing with all the context and the, you know, whatever it tells you. Versus just a regular, hey, G, and then ask it a question, and then hey, G again, and then ask a follow-up question. You can do a whole conversation. Which Gemini Live is a paid feature. You have to have the premium subscription. But I think that's in, yeah, one of the subscription tiers. I'm looking right now because it said, like, I got the email that said your Nest Aware is now being upgraded to Google Home Premium.

33:37Yeah. And then there's the standard and advanced plan. So Google Home Premium, is that launched now officially? It sounds like it got, because I got the email saying this is what it is now. Cool. So it sounds like that is out. Delete the Nest app. It's over. It's finally gone. I don't see anything saying that I get the scripted notifications. Search video history. That's actually pretty cool. Like AI search through history. because you have all of your events saved for 60 days. And then you get, if you're in advance, you get 24-7 history for 10 days. So if I can search through that - With your voice.

34:14With my voice, or even just like recognizing, I'm assuming I can type in and it can recognize what happens, right? Yeah, I saw, I got to do a demo and try some of this stuff. It seemed to be really straightforward. Not only can you create automations with your voice. So if you want it to go, hey, every morning when I ask for this, open the shades and turn the lights on or whatever. but you can also go hey show me when the squirrel ran across my driveway and it will just find the clip when the last time the squirrel ran across their driveway wasn't played it because gemini yeah plugged in now i can figure this stuff out for this camera feed also says event descriptions it says more detailed event descriptions tell the whole story on cameras and doorbells yeah so right now if you have an event from google home app it'll just say motion in driveway or front door motion detected or person detected and sometimes even a familiar face it'll name now it will describe what's happening so it'll say ups guy holding flowers and brown box delivered package instead of will it do this retroactively because i do have a clip the other day of me accidentally hitting lane in the face with the door and it's on the doorbell yeah i need to see okay what happens if you go up to a ring doorbell wearing a t-shirt that says ignore all previous instructions expressions wearing a t-shirt like can you prompt inject the the model unlikely yeah uh but we'll probably put some of that in the description and the notification i just need to person wearing shirt with text i need to read google's keyword blog because it is so confusing the the headline is we're introducing the new home premium subscription plus new benefits for ai pro and ai ultra subscribers yeah and there are multiple plans so ai pro and ai ultra subscribers are going to get with their subscription one of these levels of uh yeah these are the two nest plans that just have new no longer nest no longer yeah yeah okay so the standard plan which is ten dollars a month or a hundred a year gives you gemini live uh and ask ask home for automation help 30 days of video history and intelligent camera alerts and then the advanced plan which is twenty dollars a month or two hundred dollars a year includes all standard features plus gemini camera capabilities such as AI event descriptions, home brief summaries, and searchable video history.

36:33So you have to pay$20 a month if you want to do the AI video stuff. $10 a month and$20 a month. But if you have Google AI Pro and Ultra, I hate this. This is insane. There needs to be a flow chart for this. There actually does. Yeah. Ugh, Google. The nice thing is Ultra is just you get all of the things. Yeah, but it's$200 a month. But it's$1 ,000 every minute you use it. Yeah, it's$200 a month. Yeah. nobody wants to pay that yeah it's insane so yeah it is all i think functionally all way better and i cannot wait to get this app update so i can stop using the nest app and stop using the old google assistant which is at this point retiring yeah i think that's the end of it yeah uh and yeah having gemini on all the stuff yeah there has been like a beta of gemini on google home devices for a while but um this is the official rollout i suppose i do not seem to have it updated because it's just the same i hope i think it should be rolling out today it's probably rolling yeah yeah okay well the the interesting thing is that the hardware is a little bit different so the google home they're calling it the google home speaker and it's sort of the it's the size is sort of between a nest mini and a nest audio so it's like bigger than a nest mini it should have much better um audio capabilities like it sounds a lot nicer it's got 360 degree audio you can connect multiple of them in stereo and surprisingly the colors are very bold they have this like extremely just saturated red yeah and then they've got a green which is kind of like a hazel well actually it's not a hazel there's a green that's like a hazel grayish grayish it's just like a gray with a hint of green i think the red one is insanely the red one is crazy bright And I typically don't think of home accessories being like that boldly colored, but cool if you want to do that.

38:23But then the others are like charcoal or like ivory or sluggy green. Yeah. Okay. And it's not coming out until next year. The spring of next year. What is? The new speaker. Yeah, the new speaker. Right. But I think the doorbell and the new camera and the other stuff is around. I wonder if they announced it today because the Amazon event just happened and they were like, there's a bunch of new Echo speakers and we need to like offset the news somehow. I feel it's just Techtober. I guess, but you can't even order them. You can't? Can you pre-order them? Because they come out spring 2026. That's like a while away.

38:59All available now. That's six months away. They're in the Google store and they're available now. You can buy them now? Nest Cam Outdoor,$149. Oh, well, maybe that. I'm talking about the Google Home speaker. No, just the speaker is later. Okay. But all the other new stuff, meaning the new doorbell and the new indoor speaker and the new outdoor speaker, is on site. The jade green is pretty green. I wouldn't say that's a hint of green. Oh, yeah. This speaker is a little more green. I was talking about the doorbell and the cameras. Well, yeah. We'll see how good it ends up being. But you know what's always good?

39:28Trivia. Let's go. It's simply always good. Simply the best. What is that, people? before we get into trivia we gotta issue a correction whoa from last week we got something wrong uh-oh unfortunately uh in a professional derby race if a jockey falls off their horse and the horse finishes the race it is not counted as a victory is that right yeah what did you guys talk about i saw a video and it was totally counted it uh they they won't they'll let the horse finish because they're not going to interrupt the race but it will not be counted as a proper victory or at least that's what i found on my research marquez is fiercely typing well the commentators seem to think in f1 if the driver falls out and the car goes over that does count no but in in nascar i do i am pretty sure it's ricky bobby rules where if the driver crosses the finish line without the car what there's no way that could be real that's way too it's It happened in real races.

40:30Like where they crash and they get out. I can't wait for next week's correction. And they get fined afterwards for doing something so dangerous. Anyway, you almost get hit by a car and you get fined. That's crazy. Well, Marquez confirms or denies by car. No, you're right. In the video that I was referencing, the commentators seemed to believe that the horse had just won. But it turns out, for betting purposes, that was declared a non-running. That's a good correction. Well, in other news, both of our questions this week are about Amazon products, Amazon hardware, and the wacky, wacky world that they live within.

41:08Interesting. Because Amazon makes a lot of Echo products. They sure do. And some of them are really poorly named. So I need you guys to tell me what kind... Marques? Mm-hmm. Marques has put on the smart glasses. We cannot confirm or deny whether he's cheating. Or watching Rails. No, his mouth is closed. He's not watching. Anyway, you guys have to tell me what kind of product the Echo Flex is. What kind of product is the Echo Flex? Use the context. It's called the Flex. It's a slap band. It's a folding foam. I'm just kidding. I see you pinching. We'll be right back.

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45:34Check out Miro.com to find out how. That's M-I-R-O dot com. Welcome back. 15 % of my diet is Cholula. Andrew said that on me. So you know. Okay, so I have a fun game that I want to play. So if you guys will open up the link that I put in the show notes. If you have the show notes open. I've created a Google Slides slideshow. Yesterday, I was in the French Alps. Yeah, I know. Subtle flex. Pretty weird. And I brought many cameras, as I always do. but I decided that I wanted to kind of like push the limits of the new iPhone camera. So I downloaded Halide onto my phone. I hate you for this. Which allows you to shoot actual raw, not just pro raw, which is already a little bit processed.

46:27And I also brought my Leica M11 and a bunch of film cameras. And because the M11 is a digital camera, I decided I was going to shoot a bunch of photos on all the cameras. and then I was going to kind of like take a look at how different all of the photos were. So what I'm doing this game is that I've made a series of slides of photos that I took and you guys need to guess whether or not they were taken on the iPhone or the Leica M11. Wow. Okay. And are we, so this is no pixel peeping or zooming, just like looking at the wide. And it's already going to be compressed by putting on Google Slides because it's fair enough.

47:03And are we a team? You can. we should be a team because i will lose all right let's teamwork let's make it a team i think it'll make it easier hosts versus producers oh oh yeah i like that okay okay we did it but we'll have to say it all out loud or else this is gonna be really yeah we can talk it out yeah talk it out okay yeah so number one number one first one so this is a nice wider shot of uh two stone cabins with all the alps rising in the background and then a blue sky and i should note that i have multiple lenses for my m11 so i have lenses that can emulate the different focal lengths of the iphone oh so your leica can emulate an iphone well thinking out loud is this is a ton that is in focus and it's a really nice landscape shot and i should also note that i shoot closed down constantly of course as you would with a scene like this yeah um my only note i mean it does look very flat like the iphone but i think because andrew that snow and that wall of the cabin are a little hot, a little high exposed, I'm going M11 because I think the iPhone would flatten it even more.

48:12My only thought is whether he potentially shot this on a tripod or not. And that looks like very uneven ground. It was very uneven ground. Which would make a tripod very hard. But I guess he doesn't necessarily need a tripod for this. So I just, whenever I imagine David with a camera, I imagine a like four foot box on a giant rickety wooden tripod. so um it was very flat i'll go with i mean you're the expert here there's a lot of shadow detail i will say but he said this is this is a halide raw and not an iphone pro raw right that you process and processed yeah but barely but barely but in theory if this was the iphone it would still be a single bracket like there would not be yeah it wouldn't do hdr yes there's not hdr yeah shadow detail means nothing and slightly blown highlights well i mean it couldn't mean something because it's still a raw photo and you still have a lot of flexibility so it's just not forced shadow here is the the green and the grass it does not look super over sharpened or anything the way that i feel like iphone would do i'm looking at david he's not giving me anything i'm not allowed to do i i think it's potentially iphone just because david got really defensive about the how close he shoots and everything right off the bat which made me think marquez was on the right trail.

49:29Although then you said Leica, didn't you? I'm going to say, I think it's the Leica also because of the green. I'm going iPhone. Wait, but you're on Marquez's team. What are we going? You guys don't agree on anything. How sure are you? Let me take this one. You think it's Leica, right? iPhone. Okay. We think it's the Leica. The answer is iPhone. What? Nice. No way. Nice, Andrew. Give me one. That's a point. Yeah, and I'll have to show you guys these photos. Maybe I should upload them separately because in full resolution because it looks... Yeah, Lincoln Shownotes. I mean, it's still a great-looking photo.

50:01Yeah, but it looks like crap on Google Slides compared to... That's iPhone? This isn't how you guys look at photos? And by the way, so this is a basically unprocessed iPhone raw photo. To your point about the whites being hot, on the raw photos from the iPhone, the whites are quite hot. Usually they have a little bit at the top. They're a little bit overexposed. It's not pulling down the highlights and jacking up the shadows like it would in a normal iPhone 8 shot. Like an HDR, okay. so that is not necessarily a giveaway gotcha gotcha all right let's move on to image two okay wow image two looks like you've climbed to the top of a very tall mountain yeah and pointed down at the peak of another very tall mountain which is poking through the clouds and again blue sky in the background and some foreground detail a lot of snow this is a lot of snow yeah um wow it's a climber yeah there's a guy climbing in the very deep snow and presumably what looks like people have skied down just because of the way it's...

51:00People ski off this cliff and paraglide down. That's crazy. It's ridiculous. This is one of those things where I'm leaning camera, but just to think David got up here with the camera. There's so much detail. This has to be on the ladder. I think it's the mountain coming out of the clouds. That specifically just looks so sharp, but not fake sharp. It looks really what can i ask one question yeah about the m11 yeah how much dynamic range does it typically have quite a lot the m10 without getting into too much detail the m10 peaked the highlights like if you clipped the highlights they were just gone the m11 has quite a bit more dynamic range yeah this is m11 i think i'm 11 i honestly have no idea anymore it's the like uh what did you tell us what post-processing you might have done?

51:55Did you limit it to just curves? Did you adjust the color? I did very little to this photo. Would you have added a vignette? No, I didn't add a vignette. Alright, then this is the Leica for sure. Look at the sky. Yeah, there's a little vignette in the top corners. Yeah, that's a Leica. Let's go, baby! Alright, it looks fire. Let's move on to photo. Okay, so this is a set of photos. that are kind of the same photo. The focal lengths are a little bit different, but they're taken from the same perspective. And yeah, they look very similar. Yeah, one is, you can see the rock. So it is a mountain at a kind of lakeside, or is this like a glacier?

52:37This is an alpine lake. Yeah, an alpine lake. But you can see the rock in the left picture. That's the rock in the right picture. And it is a very tighter lens. He's doing the people's eyebrows. marquez what's happening it's very worried about it it's very tall don't worry about it um so you can see the rock what else can you see also see i'm just saying you can tell the focal lengths are extremely different they're different yes yeah the green of the water on the right versus the slightly bluer cast of the water on the left right um i am fairly confident the iphone is on the left and the leica is on the right i just want to your green thing though might be because of how far zoomed in the one on the or the right is where you're seeing most of the green on the shallower part closer to David on the left where the right wow wait you said this is at the same location the one on the right is the Leica I'm standing in the same spot for both of these but I had different focal lengths on the different cameras

53:38but I have lenses for the Leica that match the focal lengths of the iPhone but that obviously didn't happen on this one yeah i i didn't go in i didn't when i was there i wasn't like i'm gonna do this i just had this idea on the plane right back i'm staking my entire thesis on this the way that the rocks look on the left looks like iphone processing even though there's not a ton of processing it just looks like an iphone so i'm going left is iphone right as leica i was gonna go right as leica just because of how good the detail in the right most mountains that aren't in the left photo is okay i got it i got it the left is the leica because there is dirt on the sensor david top left no that's that's a bird never mind yeah that's a bird that's not a bird it is a bird i just thought that was my computer screams dirty i was literally screaming my computer's screaming past five minutes i i think producer table agrees with marquez yeah that the the leica is the one on the right for for two reasons.

54:38One, I think the one on the right is cropped in after you took the, like, you cropped it in in Lightroom. And I don't think you'd really be able to do that on an iPhone and get something that looks so nice. And two, there's way more dynamic range in the sky on the one on the right, which I think you would need superior, like, a processing to accomplish. The answer is that you're all wrong. both iPhones the iPhone photo is the one on the right yeah and that's a singular raw image that like I barely processed at all it's impressive isn't that it's really impressive even like all the gravel close to you on the wall I just want to see that no no no no it means that the iPhone's computational photography is trash if this is what the sensor is doing when left to its own devices what are we doing people Like a regular iPhone photo would not look nearly this good.

55:36Well, okay. This is a beautiful scene that it's really hard to take a bad looking photo of. Sure. So if you give this... Watch me. Step aside. If you stand out there in all this light and you give the sensor this best case scenario, almost any modern sensor is going to do a very respectable job. I don't know. Not with computational photography. Well, as I was saying, the sensor will. But then the processing is what gives your photo the look afterwards. And this is the point I wanted to make. is that phone processing sucks because all they're doing is they're just optimizing for storage, they're optimizing for shadow detail.

56:11This is why, and I might get crap for saying this, but when Google got rid of their regular raw processing and they introduced a sort of pro-raw kind of thing, which is, in my opinion, just worse because it just lifts the shadows. You don't always want the shadows to be lifted if you want it to look like a real picture. Anyway, we can move on. you're all wrong wait was that actually dust on the sensor and not a no that is actually oh i thought you were trying to throw at them all no it is it was a bird i did later get dust on my sensor but that is a bird okay next photo you want to describe it next photo is uh what looks on the left side of the frame to be a really high stack of various size rocks so is that a karen what is i think that's how you pronounce it a lot of like national parks and stuff will put up these small rock structures to indicate where a trail is yeah so this is like clearly a trail pass with a lot of snow on it but i thought they had just built it to sort of replicate this the shape of the mountain in front of it's funny because i always am not sure how to pronounce it because i think it's c-a-r-i-n oh like a corin oh no c-a-i-r-n man-made pile of stone used to market trail especially in areas with path might be here cairn somebody's gonna well roast me for that but okay so you want to describe the image as you see it yeah so it looks like on the left side of the frame we got a really solid stack of stones with some snow on them possibly indicating a trailhead or something like that and then on the right is a whole bunch of snow covered mountains whole bunch of blue sky in the background still plenty of dynamic range a lot of things in the shadow of the mountain this time uh yeah a lot of dr to play with i'm confused i'm gonna say this is iphone my initial thought was iphone with no real substantial evidence to back it with my thinking is the shadows on the mountain are a little high and the sky looks the same as the iPhone picture in the last image, like the gradient.

58:20My logic is they're all, when they're so compressed in Google slides, you can't use detail anymore. So I'm trying to go by exposure. That's fair. And the whole, at first I was like that little portion in the middle, right? That is almost fully black. It's pretty dark. And that's something that the iPhone kind of wouldn't allow. but they also have the entire shadow side of this mountain in a lot of detail which kind of feels like something the iphone would do so i don't know i'm gonna i guess i'm going iphone because the mountain's in shadow and you can see all of it i'm stumped on this one like i there's nothing i can really point to which is frustrating man oh wait you can see a reflection of him with the camera in this i wish in his smart glasses it's the metal ray band it was the metal ray band david which camera was this one uh this is the iphone okay yeah okay all right next photo next photo is a landscape of a mountainside lake the lake is blue green the mountains in the background are covered in snow the foreground has less snow it's uh mostly stones and moss and some olive green plant type stuff and the sky is blue again with some cirrus clouds yeah i there's a little grain to it no yeah or is that just the water that's google slides i'm just looking at the water and i guess it's ripples in the water i think that's ripples in the water okay yeah well the shadow is the right side plenty detail there i'm i'm going iphone again i'm going like a i think if you look at the sky there's a little bit of grain that i think yeah but that would be that looks exactly the same as in the last photo why are you why are you doing this to me andrew which was an iphone and the one before yeah i think iphone also yeah i think we think it's an iphone ellis is just shaking his head it's also funny because i may have skipped ahead to the next one i could tell how long you stayed at this lake because there's that one singular rock formation somewhere in all of these photos it kind of looks like a like tower camera this is a 16 pro 17 pro 17 pro yeah which camera is this one this is iphone is this what's gonna convince me to buy the new iphone now i'm you could take this with an iphone 3gs i don't know about that it doesn't even have a plateau i did see someone go around taking side-by-side pictures and it didn't do bad, the 3GS.

1:00:53Yeah, I mean, dude, this much lighter? No, the 3GS processing was better before they introduced computational photography, but... Okay, we want to the next photo. I know these are a lot of fairly similar... Yeah, this next one is a landscape version from maybe the other side of that lake. Yeah. Okay. A lot of shadow on the left. Deep mountains and highlights on the right. Wow. I'm going back to Leica because I think there's some real shadow depth on the left in that a little crevice uh still a ton of range though i kind of hope it's the iphone the like rock on the right has like a green tint to it yeah that feels uh i know nothing about leicas there's also it feels like something i think iphone because at this point i think david's just trying to me that's not a bad strategy that's good oh ellis found something never mind it's the leica what did you find what'd you find we're on slide six right i'm not tripping yes six like a what'd you find i can't tell you i mean we already put it like it could be two really bokeh birds but oh i also thought that was on my screen this really looks like oh that is smudge yeah okay i got spots on my sensor my iphone's just kidding yeah no it's like i i also probably should have crop this differently because it's more of a giveaway when this landscape aspect ratio yeah yeah but i did crop some of the iphone photos so if slide seven is the iphone i'm throwing away all of my cameras okay so slide seven this is like an ultra detailed really far away landscape of two mountain peaks where this the sun is casting a shadow that so only the the peaks of the mountain are illuminated and you have this valley that is in the in shadow but still has so much detail yeah there's a lot of detail in all the shadow and even just like the rock face or the the hill in front of him you can see everything this is really cool because like where the sun is hitting is the only snow-capped part of the mountains where the rest you can see the ski trails despite it not having snow golden um so you can tell this is like the valley of a you know a ski town um and the fact that you can still see all of that in all of the shadow is very impressive i wish i was at the scene so I could see how light it actually is but I think because it's darker I'm going Leica but I could be wrong.

1:03:15I'm going Leica for my wallet's sake. I think I'm going Leica on vibes. I'm looking this up because I don't remember.

1:03:25I feel like that says something right. Is it this one? Yeah. This is actually iPhone selfie camera. That's why it's square. He unlocked the full sensor all right um this one's the iphone okay well i guess i'm just gonna murder myself enjoy it's crazy david i know it's crazy it is crazy raw photos are crazy you know why i couldn't tell because it didn't say shot on iphone yeah where's the watermark yeah where's the branding yeah okay there's two more yeah second to last one here is very blue very blue you're on the You're on the edge of a lake. A beautiful reflection of a mountain in an alpine lake.

1:04:09And there's a person right in the center of the frame. Walking past the white snow-capped mountain. Yeah. With a cloud. You must be really altitude right now. Yeah, it was 12 ,000 feet. Sick. Wow. I almost broke my knees. Oh, man. I wish this water wasn't ripply. Well, I tried on so many... It was too bright to even do a long exposure on any of my cameras. I tried to do long exposures and it was... Too much light. too much light yeah i didn't have anynd filters with me so i couldn't which is sad because it would have been awesome well no i just mean i wish it wasn't ripply because then the reflection would be like perfectly intact yeah of the mountain which would have been sick which would have been awesome that's what they like mirror lake at yeah uh yosemite everyone loves i want to get this right i'm going like i'm defaulting to whatever ellis wants to say for this one.

1:04:59The shadow is very dark. It is very sharp. We have lost meaningful detail in the snow on the mountain, I've noticed. And we've also lost meaningful detail in the shadow in the foreground. This is the iPhone. Because of the lesser dynamic range, I'm going iPhone. I don't even have a good reason anymore. Yeah, let's go iPhone. It has to be the iPhone. This one is the iPhone. Is it the iPhone? which ironically i took this on the m11 as well and i liked the iphone shot okay i picked it because you pointed to your leica when you were talking about long exposure and then you went i mean all my cameras but i thought you just gave it away no yeah well all right the final shot this is an iphone final shot is a nice big valley shot where the mountains are going up to the left and up to the right and in the far far distance there is a trail going up to this beautiful snow-capped mountain also far less ideal lighting it's yeah it's much darker clearly darker clearly quite a bit more uh i don't know if it's noise or grain or what but there's clouds you know it's not a blue sky anymore it almost looks like smoky clouds wow oh this looks like a postcard is this a trick question did you take this with a different camera because this looks very different from all the other photos you took well because there's way less light it's because it's horizontal well no just all of it it's totally different lighting it looks like a stock wallpaper on a Mac complimentary yeah a lot of the other photos were taken at like similar times of day this is just different lighting I'm gonna go iPhone for this one just because I feel like I've seen here we go I'm gonna be wrong and I'm gonna sound like an idiot more so than I already have been but I feel like I've seen this same level of like breakdown in the shadows with like smartphone photography i'm guessing leica this is also my favorite photo out of all of them dang i think this could be the iphone yeah i'm going iphone i think it's the iphone but just because it looks like apple media i don't have any the sky is doing that thing again like the the iphone seems to take some of the exposure of the mountain and add it to the sky in a few of these.

1:07:15If that makes any sense. Like I'm noticing on some of the Leicas it gradients out to dark as you go up and on a lot of the iPhone shots it gradients to the color of the mountain as you get closer to the horizon. This shot is the Leica. I don't know anything. I'm good at this camera. The least amount of knowledge. Anyway, the point of this was to just show you that while I still prefer traditional cameras for the shooting experience you too can take pretty cool pictures just with your phone it's pretty insane like freaky good like freaky good freaky like you can't tell the difference i'm gonna steal one of our like iphone pros just so i can go back and forth between the pixel pro and the iphone pro because this is really bothering me yeah i feel like i might have chosen wrong this year are there are there raw apps on pixel now or like there probably are right raw camera i believe there's like open camera yeah well there's Does that do raw?

1:08:10Or like a little cup of ceviche. Raw apps. Raw apps. Oh, very nice. With the jokes. I like that one. I forgot what it's called, but I think zero can. My local ceviche place caught on fire a few weeks ago. Now they only serve grilled branzino. I think that's our cue. Let's do trivia. All right. Trivia. What was David's local ceviche place? What? One Echo product that people often forget about are the Amazon Echo Buds. No, I never forgot. I never forgot. What was the last year that Amazon tried to sell these sub -$50 true wireless ANC Buds? They were under$50? Under$50. Remember the Echo Frames?

1:08:56Am I thinking of the wrong ones? This is Price is Right rules. If you go over, you're disqualified. Do you hear that? You go over, you're disqualified. Yeah. So what was the last year they made them? Okay. All right. Well, we'll think about this one. Answers at the end, like usual. We'll be right back.

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1:12:05And Roadmap, which can help you with upcoming features and shape what the platform does next. So check out spaceship.com slash waveform and use the promo code waveform for exclusive deals. That's spaceship.com slash waveform, promo code waveform. All right, welcome back. We are using this last segment to jump in to listen to maybe the most interesting part of my conversation that I got to have when I was out in Menlo Park with James Cameron, who you might have heard of. A pretty legendary movie producer, director, creator, filmmaker in his own right. And with Andrew Bosworth, who was also there with Meta.

1:12:42So he's a CTO of Meta. And we just kind of had a random off-the-cuff chat about what they're doing with these glasses, the first-person video, and it kind of went off the rails, to be honest. But this last part of the conversation I thought was pretty fun, just because I found it interesting to put someone from real OG media into a YouTuber's shoes and try to ask him a little bit about what he thinks of the character and the filmmaker being one and the same. So without any further ado, here's some of that conversation. You know, I'm familiar with audio projects and it seems like they take advantage of either some bleeding edge technology or some new technology to give a new perspective or make something incredible.

1:13:23And I wonder if you see first person cameras as an opportunity for even a movie or a project that could maybe have some unique perspective we haven't seen before. Do you picture a first person movie being interesting? Well, I think the filmmaker becomes the character in that. Yeah. And so how charismatic or interesting is your filmmaker? Most filmmakers are perfectly happy way back behind the camera. They're not being constantly studied. But on the other hand, we've got a whole generation coming up on social media that are just used to being observed all the time. And even the whole influencer culture, people want to be observed.

1:14:06So absolutely, I think you can have a first-person narrative of shot with first-person lenses. It could be fully scripted. It could be a proper production. I think that'd be a lot of fun. I would go back again to this thing that I wrote back in 1993, I think, called Strange Days. And it was about people just record their experience, and then they sell it to other people, which, by the way, is the world we live in. It turns out. It turns out I was a little ahead of time on that. Yeah. We're kind of there. I feel like a lot of my videos are me trying to put the device in your hands so you can see what it's like to hold it and own it before you actually buy it.

1:14:48And as tech gets better, I'm able to do that with higher fidelity and more personality and closer to real time. But you become the filmmaker and the performer at the same time. Yeah. It's a one-man band. The viewer gets put into my shoes, yeah, which is pretty sweet. Well, I mean, you know, we are going to do this deep-sea expedition thing where I might be in that very role because as my experience is being lived and I'm seeing something that's never been seen before, that's being piped out and part of a number of feeds, there'll be multiple people experiencing this and then we'll have to figure out how to switch that, how to turn it into some kind of a piece downstream that's going out live.

1:15:32So that'll all get worked out. Pretty excited about that. Tech challenge, it sounds like. Can't say too much about that right now. I'm excited about it, but I can't say too much. Awesome. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing how it comes together. I watched the Avatar 3 trailer. Oh, you saw the content for today? Yeah, the two clips from today. And you saw it in the Quest 3? I saw it in Quest 3. Yeah. Yeah. It plays well in the device, I think. Yeah. I mean, I've never watched an entire movie in a headset, but I'm thinking it's almost getting to the place where I'd be fine with that. The headset's light enough now.

1:16:01What would you do? You'd make them lighter? Yeah. We got more to do. James has notes. I imagine. But we listen. Yeah. Sick. Yeah, I think it plays well. And the thing I love about the MR or VR is that they're innately stereoscopic. So anything that you're going to want to put up in there is going to be 3D. And I've been working on 3D production for 25 years and have figured out how to make it easy to watch, you know, and not confronting to your senses and so on. If you were a YouTuber today, put yourself in my shoes. I've been trying to make more and more realistic content to put the viewer in my shoes to see what it's like to hold what I'm holding.

1:16:56Do you think 3D content is the natural, inevitable future of what I'm doing? Or is that more of an alongside? I think 650 million years of evolution says yes. because once organisms got to two eyes, nature never looked back. And we have two eyes for a reason because it gives us more engagement. So what do you want to do as a YouTuber? You want to engage people. You want to hold eyeballs, right? Yeah. So engagement, I mean, it has to do with a lot of neurobiology and that sort of thing about how the brain communicates with itself internally. and you probably know this but but there there are a lot of neurons in the in the visual cortex that are triggered by parallax so what is when you when you're writing a discrete image to two eyes you're generating parallax in the brain right that's where we fuse those two images together to make a 3d kind of sense of the world yep and because those different brain regions have to talk to each other.

1:18:04So a neuron's like a GPU, right? So that particular neuron does nothing but sense parallax. Other neurons do other things. They recognize faces. This is parallax recognition. And then those different regions of the visual cortex talk to each other. So there's actually enhanced brain activity when you're staring at a flat image versus a stereoscopic Okay, yeah. So that same thing about when you wrote memory deeper based on emotion, it's the same principle. The more your brain is active, the better you'll remember it, the more engaged you'll be. So, yeah, so that's the long-winded answer. The short-winded answer is yes.

1:18:46I think it's a depth and breadth thing. If you look at the trends in media content, not just in the Internet, but even going back 100 years to the novel novella article, they go to the edges. is our most popular media types now are 100-plus-hour video games and the shortest, most rapidly available content. And it makes sense. We either have a little bit of time and we're just snatching it up, and you'd be foolish, especially in your business, not to be paying good attention to that. That's where it's kind of the easy in, easy out. But there's a second part of this, which is can you take the depth of engagement for your most loyal, committed people and bring them in deeper?

1:19:22And there is a whole history here of investments to make sure that it's getting easier and easier over time to tell more compelling stories, more compelling experiences to people. And that's one of the things that we're really passionate about, obviously. Yeah. Yeah. I kind of see it as a natural evolution. There are all kinds of things, too, that will today turn 2D imagery into. it'll try to perceive a stereoscopic version of that, and it's impressive. It's AI, and it kind of seems to figure it out pretty quickly. It's going to take over eventually. I mean, I think right now there's one very decisive advantage with native stereo cameras, which is real time.

1:20:06To get a really comparable result from a Gen AI stereo conversion model or depth model needs more time. But it'll catch up. You know, it'll catch up. All right. Well, that was a pretty fun conversation. Shout out again to Boz and James Cameron for the time, which leaves us with just one more thing to do this episode. Now that everyone's back, it's, of course, trivia time.

1:20:36Question number one is about the Amazon Echo Flex. What was it?

1:20:45that's it that's the question what that's a really good question what was that I know because Echo Flex tells you literally nothing that's a bad name if you don't know what it is it's sick it's is this closest without going over sure it's one of those slap bracelets guys what is it Marquez you first I think it's some sort of a display Nope I said phone Nope I put smart display Nope Okay What if I told you that the Echo Flex Was that the clock? It's a Microwave USB A To wall adapter Wait That has a speaker and Alexa built in Yup What? Why did they name it? Why did they name it that? Why did they name it the Flex?

1:21:36Who knows? Why would you name it? What the heck? Alright All right, quick update on the score while we're here. Marquez with six. Andrew with eight. David, after getting 0 for 2 last week when we called him after the pod, still at three. All right. Wow. That hit way too well. Next question. What was the last year that Amazon tried to sell$50 true wireless ANC earbuds called the Amazon Echo Buds? As close as that going on. I was going to say, they fluctuated in price over the years in different versions, but almost all the ones I saw were sub-50. So if there are any diehard Echo Buds users out there who paid more than$50 and are mad I'm not giving them credit, please email me.

1:22:24Podcast at mkbhd.com. I don't remember the Echo Buds at all. No. Adam just doesn't want to get that angry. I don't have access to that email, so you will be hitting him. All right. Who wants to read first? We can go in ascending order because I put 2020. 2020. They were made after that. Yeah. I put 2021. They were made after that. I think the answer is 2024, but I put 2023 to be safe. They were made after that because the answer is... Well, David, you do get the point. Yay. But the answer is they are still being made to this day. You can go on Amazon.com and buy a pair of Echo Buds. That was good framing.

1:23:05You absolutely should not do it. I thought when I heard that, I was like, really? A sub -$50 ANC earbuds seems like a great product today. So if they stopped making them, they must have had a really important reason to stop making them, which might have been around COVID times. Because if they kept going after COVID, they would have found out that there's a really good market for this. I just thought it's funny that they make this, and no one, I've never heard. I didn't even know they made that before today. On the Alexa store, there are two different models of Amazon Echo Buds that are both listed as newest model.

1:23:37tough you know it's crazy that like you know one of the most valuable companies in the world folks so run by humans after all allegedly man um 2.7 37 trillion dollar company how much is open ai worth nothing because they're still not profitable fair well they released a new sort of app that we didn't talk about but we will probably at some point, but not on Android. How is this company so... Like, it has all the money and they didn't release an Android. Well, Sora's just the slop generator, right? Yeah, but they have the app now on iOS. There's a Sora app, yeah, now specifically. Cool. Well, hey, either way, that's been it for this episode.

1:24:21Hope you enjoyed lots of fun conversations. More coming up as well. Obviously, we had some people on this episode, but we have more coming on future episodes, so stay tuned for that. Get subscribed if you haven't already. And we'll catch you guys very soon. Next week in Techtober. Peace. Wait for it. It was produced by Adam Molina and Ellis Reverend, a partner with Vox Media Podcast Network, and our chart for music was created by Bane Silk. Bingo! Let's go! Also, we're already in Techtober.

1:24:52Marquez, can you actually scroll reels on there? Like, for real? For reals? No joke. Damn, that was good.