Is Humane's AI Pin the Future or a Flop?

0:00Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door. expertly cleaned and folded. So you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like tea time you. Mmm. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you. So did you hear about Dave? Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. Mmm. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great. Not all journalism is the same. Take The Guardian. Our coverage has something unique, fierce independence. Nobody owns us or tells us what we can and can't say.

0:41So we're free to report the whole picture. We connect what's happening in Washington to the rest of the globe, expose corruption wherever we find it, and give fresh perspective on everything from wellness and soccer to culture, the climate, and more. Read, watch, and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com. Yo, what's up, Waveform? Marquez here, back with another pre-podcast intro, which I think you already know where this is going. So I'm actually out here in a hotel room, this time coming at you from the 21st floor in Las Vegas for a certain Formula One race that's maybe happening as you're tuning into this for the first time, which is super cool.

1:20We might be working on something around this too. Wink, wink. Either way, this podcast episode you're about to watch was recorded again on a Wednesday, which means that it was right before we started to fly out on Thursday. And as we're in the air, Apple drops the news, kind of a surprising news, that they will be supporting RCS on the iPhone in 2024 next year. We didn't expect this. And shocker, I think we actually talk about it on the podcast, how we don't expect this to happen anytime soon. But now you know, this was recorded a little bit before that news dropped. But it is really interesting.

1:55This doesn't necessarily solve the blue bubble versus green bubble thing that we've talked about so much. Apple will still clearly prioritize iMessage alongside RCS. Maybe they'll change the color of green bubbles. I don't know. But what this does mean is you can expect when this finally launches next year, texting between an iPhone and an Android phone to be better. It will work over the Internet with RCS. It will have typing indicators, it should have read receipts, it should have all this new stuff. And I think most importantly, photos and videos won't look like they're from a VHS. It will actually be high-resolution files instead of blurry, grainy, pixelated messes.

2:36So all that is coming. We didn't know that as we recorded this episode, so what you're about to watch is us talking without that information. But figured I'd chime in before the episode. That's about it for now. Okay, see you on the other side. Peace.

2:56Yo, what is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marquez. 15 % of my diet is Cholula. And I'm David. And that was the soundbar, actually. Andrew's not actually here. Yeah. I mean, yes, his diet is mostly Cholula, but he's out teaching a little one the ways of the Cholula. I don't know. He's a dad. He's a dad now. So he's got to go do dad things, and that has rightfully meant that he's not here today. Totally fine. So now we've done the whole trifecta where you and Andrew hosted one without me, and then I think me and Andrew hosted one and had trivia questions about you while you weren't here, and now it's me and you, so we probably should have Andrew-related trivia questions, which would be hilarious.

3:43Yeah. Anyway, lots to talk about this week. We've got a whole assortment of just sort of random, but all tech related things that I have thoughts on. We all have thoughts on. Yeah. We should start by mentioning that this is not the first episode of the week. Right, yeah. Yeah. We had a bonus episode Cyan Engine Mod and the Death of the Android ROM long form bonus podcast episode went live on Wednesday. If you thought that it was Friday on Wednesday it was not. It was Wednesday but now it's Friday which is a benefit to you. Yeah. So go watch that if you haven't already. Very fun episode. It's great.

4:17The nostalgia was so strong with that one. Yeah. enjoyed it a lot yeah um but first yeah oh boy we got audio listeners david is reaching under the table oh my god this is so heavy and picking up a briefcase the lg stand by me go briefcase monitor that we've been talking about for months it's finally here um jesus this is a gigantic display i mean it's not a huge computer monitor but just to have in your briefcase uh yeah this is a tough one for audio listeners but i think i have a description yeah it's sort of like a briefcase which inside contains a jumbo sized like google tablet home thing it's 27 inch but it's made out of the same plastic that airplane cabins are made out of yes now it's vertical now it's vertical you can watch tiktoks free form freestanding you can play chess it's a touch screen yeah does it have a battery in it it does it's currently on battery power yeah it's on battery power right now it lasts about three hours how much does it weigh 30 pounds it's really 75 percent of the scooter it's very heavy 75 percent of andrew's diet is cholula but 70 percent of my strength goes to trying to hold this thing i think that scooter reference will go over a lot of people's heads unless they've seen the short but we also have a briefcase scooter oh yeah at the studio the honda um moto compacto yeah so briefcase display briefcase tech briefcase scooter we're off to a hot start yeah we're off to a hot start uh this is just a thing that we figured we'd show you guys that we have yeah when did everyone get together and decide that briefcase was the next form factor i don't know what happened i'm all for it dude i don't know i don't know about you what other things would work in a briefcase this by the way there's enough room for like a computer in there in there behind the display but it's just display stand speakers and speaker and battery big battery probably interesting yeah yeah so glad we got that in so that exists so that exists anyway we have real news coming up another thing that exists yeah is uh this happened right after we recorded the last episode this humane ai pin yes it's finally been unveiled and described and and priced we we know what it is now yeah uh so let's let's talk about it i have some thoughts i'm not really sure how many of my thoughts will be nice but we'll see we'll see how far we get so okay we didn't know how much it would be we didn't know what it would be but we knew chat we knew humane ai was going to do some ai related product and we'd seen these teasers it's like paris fashion week teaser of them wearing this pin this projector that projects something on your hand we're like talk what's it what it exactly is it is the post smartphone gadget yeah first time what do we what do we think this thing is so now it comes out it's a vimeo it's a 15 minute vimeo video whatever it is so it's the two founders explaining what the product is yeah i'm going to put aside the lack of uh on-camera presence because not everybody has it it's just you know not everybody has it a lot of other companies have really cringy presentations but they gave us a$699 pin with a$24 a month subscription service which gets you a couple things T-Mobile service uh title subscription a couple other things yeah also also$799 for certain colors sorry that's right$699 for the base pin but if you want the white one or if you want a certain combo of i guess it's like silver or chrome and chrome and black which by the way chrome on technology is just a terrible idea yeah but that that's an extra set that's an extra hundred dollars it's got a 13 megapixel camera that faces forward uh it's got a battery inside it's got a microphone inside and it basically has a large enough speaker and enough storage and processing power to run a local ai model primarily powered by chat gpt 4 and uh that's basically what you are mostly interacting with when using slash wearing this pin yeah and then there's a projector on the front where if you hold your hand up this is going to be weird again for audio listeners but when you hold your hand up right in front of your chest it will project that UI onto your hand and then you can interact with the projection so by moving your hand closing and opening your hand you're selecting things and scrolling through things that's the basic premise yeah it's an AI assistant that you wear and interact with and pay constantly for yeah yeah so the way that they the way you actually like charge it is that and that you wear it they call it the perpetual power system which stands for a magnet that has a battery in it yeah you get kind of clever with this yeah it's kind of the same way how you see like earbuds are like oh this has a 40 hour battery life but obviously you can't wear them for 40 hours straight it's actually that the battery in the earbuds is four hours and then when you put them back in the case you can charge them back up and use them for four more hours and put them back but you also with this ai pin i guess you don't want to take it off yeah uh so you have some way of charging it while you're wearing it Yeah, that's how it goes on your clothing in the first place, is that it uses a magnet between your clothes.

9:48Yeah. But that magnet also wirelessly charges the device. Cool. So that's clever. It gives it a lot of power. Smart. Yeah, clever. It's basically like an AI system that is routing you to other AIs. That's sort of how they're describing it. You interact with it with natural language and with, like, tapping and stuff. And then depending on your query, it will route you to the right AI platform to do various things. In their presentation, they got a lot of things incorrect because of the hallucination problem with AIs. So they both held out a small handful of almonds and asked it how much protein was in the almonds.

10:31And it uses the camera because it can use the camera to look at things around you. You can use the speakers to listen to things around you, and it's supposed to be able to analyze all this information. It looked at, like, five almonds that was in this guy's hand, and it said there were 15 grams of protein in it. Jesus. And then it added it to this, like, I don't know, this daily protein log that you can access via a web app. There's this weird— There's a web portal. There's a web portal interface that you can use to access all your human information. And for some reason, they want you to track all of the food that you eat by like taking photos of it.

11:06And then it's supposed to analyze that and then put that information into this web portal. Anyway, a small handful of almonds does not have 15 grams of protein. That would be sick if it did, though. I would love that. It has like two grams of protein. Yeah. And a lot of people are going online being like, that is completely incorrect. and I think the GPT was basically accessing the data of how much like a cup of almonds would have, something like that. The other thing is he asked it when the next total solar eclipse was going to be and where the best place to watch it would be and he said it would be in April and the best place to watch it was Australia.

11:42A lot of people came out being like, no, you actually can't even see it in Australia. You can only see it in North America. So yeah, because these large language models are sort of just predict predicting the next most like likely word um you're not always going to get accurate information and if you are using a device that has no screen and that you're just supposed to be using ambiently like getting incorrect information like all the time is probably not the best not great yeah yeah i guess now that i've seen the announcement i was we were kind of wondering what it would be but now that we've seen it i feel like i have two main thoughts on humane humane humane humane humane thoughts two main humane thoughts one is you know i see the videos but i haven't tried it and this gadget has the potential to be a really big or really small gap between how i think it's going to go and how it could actually get totally like i am watching these videos i'm like this does not seem great like i don't believe that a projector onto my hand is going to be great UI.

12:50Is it going to track my hand around when I move or do I have to have my hand in the perfect place? Is it going to sag on my clothes because the weight of the pin and the computer and the battery is too much? Probably. The material, do I have to put my hand in a certain spot when I'm outside and it's sunny? Is that going to even show up on my hand at all? If my skin color on my hand is different from normal, is that going to work? If I don't have a hand, how's accessibility for that? All those questions are real. And then the actual interacting with the the AI thing like I want it to be cool but I just I have my doubts so this could turn out to be just as bad as I think or it could totally blow my mind yeah my other thought is if you zoom out a lot I think the idea of an AI assistant that you kind of just ambiently have around you is is a cool idea and I wonder if we're gonna feel like this is something that's ahead of its time because the tech just isn't good enough to accomplish that yet but if you think about it you already sort of have an ai assistant around you and like your apple watch or yeah siri and your headphones i guess i just mean the natural way of interacting with an invisible assistant like we have the ray the ray band smart glasses which have a language model in them yeah and there's a camera on the front of them yeah they kind of have this similar potential where it's like i'm just walking around looking like a normal person and to an invisible person i will just ask my assistant how to fix the broken sink in front of me right and it will tell me how to fix it yeah because it's a smart invisible assistant that nobody else has access to but it's personalized to me that's sick if it works but the tech is so young that right now it kind of doesn't really work and i feel like this pin is the same way where like the idea i love the idea of like having a plate of food in front of me and being like log my macros and it just does it yeah i've wanted to log macros even in an app manually for years yeah it sucks my fitness pal and it's horrible yeah every if your food doesn't have a barcode like good luck yeah so the idea of just having it intelligently look at the food and figure out it's cool but like the tech is not that good yet like how how was the steak actually cooked or were the fries deep fried or is it just like potato wedges like what isn't what is in front of you it's like really hard since there's no way to like interact with the display or anything you're not actually sure what information it's logging and then you look at your like macros later in the day and it you just have no way to authenticate that information yeah yeah i think that google glass was like 15 years too early and probably more yeah probably more probably 20 to 25 years too early and if uh you know that seems like it would be a better use case than this humane thing i think that they wanted to avoid smart glasses because you kind of look like a glass hole uh quote unquote if you're wearing smart glasses unless they're sunglasses which people are used to seeing now you're going to be a pinhole yeah oh yeah or uh um or if you have a prescription and you just have smart glasses but with a prescription then you wouldn't be able to notice yeah the pin is a kind of a weird thing and i think that they're trying to make it like it's sort of fashion but it's not necessarily making it look like it's ai um their angle internally could just be like not everybody can wear glasses all the time but anyone can wear a pin yeah all the time yeah the weird thing too is they showed the pin attached to like a handbag they're like you can wear it anywhere you could put on your purse you could put it on this projector thing won't work exactly okay and i didn't even realize that that's a great point Yeah, like if it's on your handbag, the projector won't work, and then you'd have to bring it up to your mouth if you wanted to talk to it.

16:31It's supposed to have these beam-forming speakers that make it sound like only you can hear it, but I don't know. I mean, I want to hear it when we get it, or if we get it, obviously, but there are other examples of that that work. Yeah, totally. Like the Bose neck speaker. The Bose neck things, yeah, those are really good. Incredible. Yeah, there are little slices of technology that kind of work already for some of the applications of this. And that's one of them. Like some of the audio tricks that it can play on you can work really well. That's cool. Even occasionally just asking the GPT model probably basic questions.

17:04There's probably one or two use cases where you're just walking around some random park and you get to a landmark and it's a statue in front of you and you just tap the thing. And you're like, what is that? And it tells you. And you're like, holy, that's awesome. This tech works really well. there will probably be little slices of that that make you believe that this is the future but today for 700 bucks and 24 bucks a month that's a tough sell yeah i gotta say it feels like a tough sell i do want to try it i did buy one oh i probably shouldn't say that so they don't like treat my order special or something i don't know it might not matter i don't think it'll matter i ordered one i don't even know when it's going to come out you can pre-order it now but they don't have like a release date that's a really good point you know maybe it'll be the roadster situation again so you guys think that the demo was real because you're saying like the peanut in the hand thing like because to me when i watch those demos i assume it's all like made in post yeah it should have been it's clearly real because they've messed it up it's a good it's a fair question i think if you uh i would guess that they're actually real i think a lot of them they take the pride in like the we came from apple thing and apple always does real demos and they're and Google always does demos.

18:14And I think certain companies are proud of always doing real demos. So, yeah, they could have done a prerecorded thing. But I think in order to feel like you're not lying to the public and the tech actually works, I want to believe that those are real demos. I mean, if they weren't real demos, they probably would have gotten the information correct. Well, I don't know. I assumed that when everything was getting, like when it was going around on Twitter that certain things were wrong or an X, excuse me. I assumed it was like a copy editor that like missed a fact. I don't think so. That sounds like a GPT mistake to me.

18:44It does, but that assumes that the demo was live and accurate, which I never assumed for the pre-recorded stuff. But I'm not sure. That's why I'm asking. The funny thing is they issued this note when everyone was talking about how everything was incorrect about it. And they were like, that was a bug and we're working on fixing it. It's like, you can't fix the way transformer models work. It's not a bug. Watch me. It's chat GPT. You can't just fix chat GPT. Yeah. Interesting. So there's been a lot of hype around this company for a very long time, specifically because of their, you know, two people that worked at Apple, worked on the original iPhone interface.

19:23Dream Team. Yeah. Kind of this Dream Team scenario type thing. But it'll be fun to watch the reviews of those go live when they eventually do. Yeah. But until then, we don't really know much. And they only showed demos to like a couple of journalists. And none of those journalists were very impressed with it. Interesting. and weren't even allowed to use it did they ever yeah that's the main question they're allowed to see it being used that's tough because you know how apple vision pro like a red flag yeah i was gonna say apple vision pro we also aren't able to shoot any videos of our demos but we did try the thing got to use it instead of watching someone use the thing you know so that's like a separate layer of like okay this is probably real uh so if no one's gotten to use it yet yeah that just makes me really the fact that there's pre-orders but no one could actually use it yet is just a huge red flag to me yeah they did get a lot of money out of me for not using it assuming the demo from the keynote if you want to call it that like was real one thing that it far exceeded my expectations in is uh something called keystoning with a projector which is where when you're projecting onto a surface that's not perpendicular with the plane of the lens oh different parts of the image both focus and size because the different parts of the image You have to travel different distances to the lens.

20:38And you can see the keystoning chasing his hand moving and changing angle. It's a lot of processing power. It's a ton of processing power. And there's a lot of really interesting grad student papers on the most efficient way to do this and stuff like that. But just like watching it sort of chase the plane around from just a projector point of view, I'm like, pretty cool. Pretty good. Assuming it's real. Assuming that's not something a computer renderer. Assuming it's not a CG. yeah yeah we did have one projector that we did in a dope tech video a couple years ago at this point but it it did it really well and live and it it also made it a touch surface so it was responding to what it saw in the reflection yeah the the nebula series of projectors do this pretty well and and so does the samsung the samsung the freestyle that's the full name of it perfect but those all sort of like you move and then they go like oh i see that you changed one sec yep yeah but this is like because the projector doesn't have to be yeah i think those might be those might have a built-in delay on purpose where if like someone walks in front of the wall you don't want it to immediately mess with the video so it's like let me just check are you sure you're gonna you're gonna keep yeah because it's gonna stay okay let me change it yeah so that could be really cool yeah i'm i'm fascinated by this yeah i i will say that uh in a lot of the people like they in a lot of the people that were wearing it it looked like it was sagging their clothes quite a bit i think that might be the most underrated light it's not super light yeah especially with the battery it's also metal right yeah it's gotta be heavy yeah anyway yeah so anyway that'll be interesting um we can't really comment on it much until we actually get a thing in i don't even know when we will but yeah we'll make sure to we'll keep you guys posted keep it posted figure out anything yeah um something else that's also not coming out for a minute to the public but that we did get to try well technically it comes out today oh yeah okay as of recording or as of as of right now as of publishing okay yeah so nothing bringing iMessage kinda to the phone too only specifically for some reason okay so this is a this is a whole thing it's very interesting it's like this nothing company is willing to try some stuff you know yeah they're willing to try some stuff so i kind of set the table with this video and i made the whole video about it if you want to watch it it's on youtube it's on x um it's if you're a company trying to break out and and make a new smartphone and gather market share and grow sales around the world you can kind of follow a pretty reasonably predictable approach and start to do that maybe you differentiate with price or specs or design carl pay has done it before with one plus right man but there's something about the u.s where you kind of have to do certain things to break out like you need to be in carrier stores to pass me two percent market share you just can't get people like there's not enough enthusiasts to buy your phone online you need a carrier deal and what you also need is to compete against the iphone and actually get people to switch from the iphone which is a staggeringly dominant phone in the u.s like stockingly so yeah and i talk about in the video like everybody in every other country is like this is so dumb like you guys why do you even use iMessage like nobody even uses what bothers with the default texting app where i come from and that's totally fair uh so i always have to explain yeah in the u.s people just open the texting app and text each other yeah and on on the iphone that's iMessage and there's enough of a process built in where apple realizes that they can lock people into the iphone with it and most people that use iMessage or um just the apple messages app on their iphone don't realize that it's like that iMessage is not the app.

24:26The app is Apple messages. iMessage is a protocol that gets used between iPhones, but it has SMS fallback. Yeah. So people are not used to realizing, oh, this is like an internet based chat service, whereas regular SMS is just regular SMS. Yeah. All they really, really thrown off. Yeah. All they really realize is this works good when my friend has an iPhone and this works way worse when my friend doesn't have an iPhone. Yeah. So So that pressure is real. So if you're a new startup company trying to sell a phone in the US, you're gonna be up against people who are like, eh, I don't really want a phone that can't work with iMessage.

25:00So nothing's genius idea is to literally just try to offer iMessage for Android. And the way they did this was they collaborated with Sunbird. There's a couple of companies we've talked about that are kind of doing this in some way, but Sunbird is one of them that is offering a iMessage pass-through service that will give you some of the features of iMessage on an Android phone. So that if your iPhone friend texts you, it's gonna show up as a blue bubble to them. If you all send messages with pictures back and forth, it'll be high resolution, typing indicators, reactions, et cetera. And all of that seems kind of cool, but you should also know that you are signing in with your apple id and just giving it to a third party yeah like i i don't know how else to explain it like you're signing in yeah you're you're typing your username and password to your apple id into a mac in the middle of nowhere into well into an app that is not apple and that's totally cool you can do that but that just means that they're going to get your information and they've actually broken down what they're going to do to try to mitigate all the possible security concerns they don't want to ever store your login information they don't want to ever store your messages everything should be encrypted but i just you kind of you have to know that that's what's happening right there's that risk right and so that's it's out there now they're gonna it's i guess today start offering that um for nothing phone to users i don't know that it's going to work meaning i don't know that that's going to get people to go, ah, I was gonna get an iPhone, but now I'll get this one.

26:44Did you watch the Nothing video that they put out about it? I did. Yeah, so they said that most of their Nothing customers own like ear sticks or ear ones or ear twos or whatever, and that they, most of those people own iPhones. Yeah. So they were like, why are we selling these cool headphones, but why aren't we selling more phones? So they did a bunch of market research, and it's not hard to deduce that iMessage is like one of the main reasons in the United States why people won't switch off the iPhone. So they thought, what if we could just put iMessage on an Android phone? And they say in the video, we made an app.

27:21They didn't make this app. Sunbird made the app. They put a skin on it. It's a skin version of Sunbird. It's a nothing skin. Yeah. Yeah. So it worked for me. It was a little slow, a little janky sometimes. It's not as smooth. there are animations that don't look amazing like when i when i get a new image i have to download it to be the full res version but like it's it's working and it shows up as a blue bubble to the iphone so there's that um but yeah it is like a it's a weird thing that only this company would probably try right yeah yeah it's it's kind of crazy that they're willing to do this um i know that nothing doesn't have a lot to lose sunbird kind of has a lot to lose but also sunbird still hasn't come out of like of like super closed down beta uh whereas beeper is like pretty much out there for everybody i've talked to people from sunbird and beeper and they've said that they're not they feel like this is the perfect time to do it because with apple and google being put under so much regulatory antitrust scrutiny they feel like if apple just like turned a switch that was like you and made it not possible to do this then they would get like in a lot of trouble yeah so So I still don't really feel like it's going to last a really long time.

28:34I was trying to figure that out. I don't, based on my understanding of how this works, I don't know that Apple could decide. I mean, maybe I don't know exactly how it works, but could they actually shut this down? They could probably figure out a way to not. Really? Yeah, to make it not work. Like if you're, I don't know, if the Mac that you're associating your iMessage account with is in a different country to the one that you're in currently, then they'd have to run it through vpn yeah i don't know they could they could do a lot of like they did not actually shutting it down but we're making it way harder kind of thing so nothing told me that their mac minis are going to be in whatever region you're in so there are a bunch of different mac mini server farms whatever in different locations okay they'll probably be in your region and as far as i can tell it's just routing through your computer the way any other iMessage would yeah so it would be up to Apple to detect somehow that this is one of the specific Mac minis or VMs or whatever that they don't want to use it's just yeah it seems like harder than expected to shut it down I think they're just gonna do nothing nothing literally nothing yeah sorry I didn't want to make a pun today but just came out sorry yeah but yeah I don't think they're gonna do anything yeah probably true probably true I don't know there's this is spurring another conversation all over social media and i think this conversation gets spurred like twice a year at least just about uh iMessage's like hold and like should we just have an open protocol that everyone should use or a hot take i was seeing on twitter a lot yesterday was people were saying apple should just be forced to put iMessage on android because that way like they're not necessarily being forced to open up their proprietary protocol forced to put iMessage on Android.

30:16Yeah, but they're allowing other people to use their service, which is arguably a better service than most than a lot of other messaging protocols. Yeah. And if Apple was just forced to put iMessage on Android, then they're still getting all the traffic. And they've almost put iMessage on Android many times. There were like a bunch of leaked documents where they were going to do it. And they were like, you know, I feel like this is the only reason people are staying on the iPhone. Yeah. Like, like Phil Schiller and like all these upper manager dudes. They definitely have an Android iMessage app just waiting.

30:48Just on ice for whenever it has to go out. It's ready. I think that they'd probably have to figure out another monetization strategy for it, though, if they were to add that many more users. Because they would literally, like, the amount of users they'd add if it got added to Android, not just because of the U.S., but because of the entire world, would be so high that their server costs would just explode. So they'd have to figure out a better monetization strategy for it. couch cushions for some change over there at apple park yeah yeah yeah so yeah i found the comments on the video really funny which is every time this happens there's tons of comments about in the country i live in here is what it's like it's like we know i've been told this by you guys a bazillion times we know seven out of ten comments are like in my country most people don't use the iphone because everyone uses whatsapp so we're all just competing on hardware and the iphone's not that competitive with hardware i found one really interesting uh They said in Japan, a lot of people use iPhones, but they all still use WhatsApp on the iPhone.

31:47That's amazing. Which is like... Golden, golden. Wow. Wow. Perfect scenario. Japan reigns supreme once again. 2050 over there, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, that happened this week. It's out. If you have Nothing Phone 2, you know, you've heard all of our red flag warnings, so we can't say we didn't warn you, but you can try it. It's kind of a bummer they're only putting this on Nothing Phone 2. and a lot of people were upset that bought nothing phone ones because a lot of people didn't feel like it was worth the upgrade to the phone two from the phone one. Why wouldn't it work with the phone one?

32:15Not that it can't. I think it's just that they want people to buy phone twos. They probably aren't moving enough phone two units. It's like how Apple released the M3 because they sold no M2 devices. I was going to say, do we know anything technical about how this app works? No, it's Sunbird. It works on all of my Android phones that I've used it on. Yeah, but how does Sunbird work? sunbird works by um because beeper was like an open source protocol remember like what is sunbird you do sunbird is just a closed source protocol so it's just their version of beeper yeah interesting uh-huh so there's no like technical as far as we know technical reason why you can't run on a phone one i think you could run sunbird today in beta on a phone one yeah yeah i mean i i i didn't get official access to sunbird i got the apk whoa and then i just sideloaded it onto my phone david david don't admit that that's not illegal sneaky side load wow that's sort of a cyanogen mod throwback anyway yeah well yeah it's out there yeah so if you got a phone too try it out if you uh have any other phone try it out grab an apk let us know how it works i have you could get the apk for this yeah maybe yeah the nothing one yeah i have used both beeper and sunbird and i think that sunbird looks a little bit better but it has less functionality than beeper right now so but does that even matter if it's nothing skinned yeah it looks fine it looks like a nothing app yeah it's called nothing oh the benefit of it though is that it'll detect whether or not you're uh texting in another android user or an imessage user and if you're texting android user it goes through rcs if you text an iphone user it goes through imessage so that's a benefit it doesn't just fall back to sms everything is encrypted yeah wow everything's Wouldn't that be the perfect 2050 world we could live in?

34:03Yeah. Anyway, let's kick it to trivia and then take a little ad break.

34:11All right. So as we mentioned earlier, this is... Please be about Andrew. The Andrew round. Let's go. So. Let's go. Question one. dbrand, our good friends at dbrand, have been in business for quite some time. but one year before their launch taylor swift released a phone skin as merch along with her third studio album no way speak now really what year did speak now come out in 1979 what year did speak now come out again this is one year before dbrand launch what year did speak now come out and it was the third studio album and it was the year before dbrand jace all right I don't know. I'm going to have to make an educated guess on that.

34:59Answers at the end of the episode. Yeah, let's kick it to break. We'll be right back.

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36:29With Thumbtack, you don't have to be a home pro, you just have to hire one. You can hire top-rated pros, see price estimates, and read reviews all on the app. Download today. Welcome back. We got a few new stories for you here today. The first one being that we finally found out how much Google pays Apple to be the default search engine on Safari. I have a hot take about this. Oh, do you want to do you want to disclose? First, tell us how much you're spending. OK, so it's always been known that Google pays Apple a lot of money to be the default search engine on the iPhone. Yeah. And that's sort of a way that a lot of browsers make money now is sort of like a ransom thing.

37:12They're like, hey, we could make Bing the default search. And Google goes, no, you know, all these things. So during this antitrust trial, it was Google versus Epic because we already did Apple versus Epic and now we're doing Google versus Epic, I guess. It came out that they pay Apple 36 % of search ad revenue to use Safari or to be the default search engine on Safari, which is a lot. So what you're saying is Google makes all of their search engine revenue and then they take 36 % of what they make and give it to Apple. Specifically on Safari. Of what they make on Safari and give it to Apple to remain the default search engine for when you just type a phrase into the search box.

37:56Yeah. That's a lot. Yeah. That's a lot. It's also kind of a situation where it's like, it's only a lot because they are the default. And so that 36 % means it is a lot of money because they are the default. If they weren't the default, that 36 % would not really be that much. Yeah. Yeah. Ready for my hot take? I'm ready. It's all wasted money. Do not pay them a dime. there's no way google switches it to or apple switches it to bing yeah to bing apple would switch to bing i wonder about this a lot no way i've seen that hot take on the internet quite a bit um i don't know if that many regular users would be able to like tell the difference or be pissed off that they're using bing i think if one day you typed a phrase into the search box and Safari and it pulled up a Bing search result, the entire internet would lose its collective minds.

38:51Even regular people? Yeah. Not just nerds? I think it would spill over pretty fast. That is definitely a hot take because I disagree hard. Really? I think that the same way everyone knows that Siri kind of sucks, the same way everyone knows Bing kind of sucks. But do regular people know that Siri kind of sucks? I think so. The thing is with search, the more people they get making searches, the better the product gets. So if you make Bing the search engine for like a month, it'll eventually be fine. That's you would think that's true, but it didn't work with Siri. It's not 100 percent that way, though.

39:26It's not like a learning model where it just gets way better, way like automatically. Would they like? OK, let's say theoretically, hypothetically. Yeah. Google stops paying today. Uh huh. Do you think there's a path where Apple goes, OK, we need to because also if you switch it to bing that assumes microsoft is now paying yeah what if microsoft yeah because apple needs to go to somebody and be like yeah give us 30 and how much do you want to pay yeah so microsoft currently not paying google decides we're not going to pay anymore who are they going to switch it to if they don't have a default willing to pay are they going to switch it to bing and just give it to them for free that would be if nobody was willing to pay though yeah yeah because i mean there's this whole antitrust conversation going on with google google's being sued by the federal government about whether or not they should even legally be allowed to pay off people like apple to be the default um i honestly i feel like if you couldn't do that apple would just implement a thing when you set up safari for the first time that would say what search engine do you want to use and i agree with you that probably 98 percent of people would pick google search because like why would you just pick why wouldn't apple make their own i mean they could they probably have it ready just like they have iMessage on it speculated for a while they almost definitely do but if they make 23 percent of or 36 percent of all google revenue it's probably in their best interest to just use use that it's like a so this is interesting yeah on one hand you you like the money you're apple you should make a lot of money yeah but on the other hand they have been known to like take big leaps to like forego some of that default like when like switching from intel to apple silicon it kind of took that leap not that intel is paying them or whatever but they took that leap to go from the easy default to making their own thing and that made it better over time and they have not made the leap to serving their own search engine ever yeah and i think there's a probably a pretty good reason for that which is it's probably harder than they think and you need a lot of volume, a lot of business, a lot of things to work for a search engine to be good.

41:35One thing too is that Apple is like one of the only companies that does not make nearly as much money selling your data. Like Apple makes most of its revenue on hardware and services, but almost every single other tech company sells data to make most of its money. And so a search engine for them is not that useful, right? Because a search engine is mostly tracking your habits. It's mostly tracking what websites you're going to. and if Apple is keeping that super private on device because that's their whole thing, that's their whole shtick, then what's the value of that to them? If they could just point a gun at your head and say give us 36 % of all revenue or we literally pull the bottom out from under you, I feel like that's a much better revenue generator from them in the long term.

42:17I think their only argument would be we can just make it a better product. We can deliver the search engine that the world wants which doesn't sell all of your information but learns from all of your searches and can give you better features that work for you. That's true. Which would be cool. They would have to really, really, really assume that that would be a selling point for people. Yeah. Yeah. They just have to look at how many people use AltaVista today and assume that they can get that amount of people to switch. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it'll be interesting to see what happens if this trial goes through or if the federal government wins this case.