Is the Pixel 8 Pro Worth $1000?

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1:05What is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. I'm Andrew. And I'm Tired. And Tired is here. Oh, hi Tired. Nice to meet you. Sorry, I just got off a plane. Ah, yeah. That's totally fair. Well, we've got a lot to talk about, so I hope you're ready for it. And it's kind of a nice, fun grab bag of stuff. We have Pixel 8 Final Thoughts, 8 and 8 Pro. Also, MetaQuest 3 is in the house. the video is not up yet but we have some thoughts and if you want to we can go over all kinds of thoughts we have on that also a video is up the pixel 8 video is up so definitely watch that if you haven't already um and then david has some stuff on the adobe max conference that he went to earlier this week is that where you were flying yes okay i went there was that 24 one day los angeles one day in la yeah that's a fun one yeah so you're not jet lagged technically no but you're tired yeah fair i'm okay okay we're good i'll make it it's gonna be great stay awake till the end of episode where you explain better than i anticipated i'll just say that that's good okay uh but first i i just want to highlight a fun twitter poll that i posted a couple days ago where i sometimes i post twitter polls and i kind of think that i know how it's going to shake out but sometimes i'm surprised a little bit and this one i was very surprised by i put in slack and i was just trying to see if people would guess before they clicked it what they thought the results would be yeah so i tweeted would you take a self-driving taxi slash uber no context about like the state of it now versus how much better it might get later.

2:30Just like, would you take one? And the results, I want you to just think about this if you're listening to the podcast right now. What do you think people would say? Would you take a self-driving Uber, yes or no? 55 yes, 45 no. I thought that was interesting. Yeah. Mostly because there's two ways to think about the answer to that, which is one, do you like the idea of a self-driving car? Which a lot of people are like, yeah. I really have had too many bad experiences with Ubers, lots of horror stories about you know can i stop at my house for a second can i yeah i just need to pick up a package or meet my friend somewhere and you're in the back of someone's car like what is going on yeah people just like the idea of that never happening again in a self-driving car solves that um but the other version of the question is given how good the tech is now would you currently ride in a self-driving car or maybe wait till it's actually a little bit better and autonomous vehicles are like fully as good as a human and i think that's another answer for a lot of people i think this could splinter for sure because there's the self-driving taxis that are going through um san francisco right now which is a small-ish metropolitan area you know san francisco is only seven by seven square miles so there's not a lot of space to cover but if you're in like los angeles area where everything's a highway like none of the self-driving cars in San Francisco are going 70 miles per hour on the highway.

3:55Right. That's a different story. There's still like so many variables though. Yeah. Some might say that's easier. I would be more afraid to take a self-driving car on the freeway. I would be less afraid. Really? Well, based on what I've seen about self-driving technologies, the highway, which is just laned line markers, is typically the easiest thing to do. And then the more variables you add, like slowing down and adding bicyclists and pedestrians and people walking and kids running into the street, which doesn't usually happen on a highway. That's when it gets tricky. So I feel like I'd be more likely to trust it on a highway.

4:29Counterpoint, you'll be fine when it hits a pedestrian. Well, I guess I just don't want to be in a car where anything weird happens. I think also L.A. highway traffic is basically just letting it roll. So that might be the safest out of everything. And then you don't have some creepy Uber guy trying to talk to you the entire time. So there's a benefit. I don't know. But I feel like I agree with you on this feels like who answered this question. I'm looking forward to it or I don't trust it right now. I answered not trusting it right now. Right. And I think a lot of people answer this thinking, do you like the idea of a self-driving car?

5:03Because I think if I ask, and this is also, you know, I'm polling my audience. So it's a lot of tech forward people that's going to skew it as well. But I think if you just polled like a bunch of average people, you get a lot more no's. Okay. So can we go over? Did everyone here answer this poll? Yes. Can we take a really quick poll of the pot? See what everyone answered and why they answered real quick? Yeah, we can get a percentage. So what'd you answer? I answered yes. I remember when I sold my Subaru when I was in California, I said, I'm not going to buy another car until they're all self-driving.

5:33Wow. Which didn't happen because I needed to buy a car, but it's kind of self-driving, but not really. But either way, I've had like this magical image of self-driving cars in my head for a very long time. And I like the idea of just sort of being driven around autonomously. Because if I could drive to work and like sleep more or read or something like that, you know, that'd be fun. That'd be dope. Yeah. Do some work. So let's say right now you just landed in, you were going to the Adobe conference and two taxis or Ubers showed up at the airport. One with a driver, one that's self-driving. Which one would you have gotten in?

6:06Same price, same everything? I feel like if they are using it for consumers, it's got to be safe enough that I'm not going to get hurt. Because otherwise, it's just a complete PR nightmare. From what I've heard, they've had the ability to do general safe driving for a while. And Nvidia has shown off their technology. And Tesla has shown off their technology. And Qualcomm. Every single developer conference ever, they show off their self-driving technology for the last 10 years. but nobody wants to be first because you're first and you kill someone you destroy the entire industry but mostly yourself yeah i think that mentality works for this because especially with self-driving cars they have to be so much safer yeah that they're comfortable putting it on the streets and even though they're safer than human drivers as soon as one thing happens it all gets thrown on the fact that it's self-driving yeah yeah i think it still has like i get so i answered no because i feel like right now i no well no no i can just no i can no no i can loop off of what you're saying though is like i think like in general in a lot of ways it's probably safer than most drivers but i still don't know and i know it has at least a decade of information it's gathered but there are just still so many variables you don't know what's coming on in these like all these different road like scenarios out there like isn't there that one highway in san francisco where the line was painted kind of weird and there were like five or six teslas crashed in the same like couple months and they literally because of it because yeah they repaint this was further back like just to be clear this is much further back but there's just stuff that then happens i don't know enough about where i'm driving if i'm picking up a taxi or an uber i don't think i would feel and especially because in self-driving cars right now there's a person behind the steering wheel that it can be like whoa whoa you take over i don't got this if it's a taxi or an uber that's just an empty ass seat right there and i'm not pulling i'm not jumping forward and doing it like i don't think i've got the trust on that yet it's crazy that as a society we're like instead of just laying down a few train tracks let's try to recreate we've got a whole nother brain but stronger and better at driving that's a whole another topic we will climb to biology's greatest achievements and surpass them instead of like bus stop men will literally simulate consciousness before going to therapy before literally just building a train yeah okay so you said no yes i said no ella said train as the third option what what did you actually say alif uh i i probably would not like like if a self-driving car pulled up to this office to take me somewhere in today right now man I'm out of touch with the I've been in I've done it already driven it or been out of touch I've been in we did the self driving Yandex pre-mapped route in Vegas so I was in the back seat of a 10 minute ride with nobody in the driver's seat and I would do it again if you were driving from this office, and if I accidentally dox us, tell me to stop.

9:21But when you're driving from this office to to New York City, when you get on the freeway, there's this really tricky maneuver where you have to get on a bridge and you're merging into a lane that's sort of coming from your back. The fast lane also. I've almost been hit by that like 20 times. There's no way the car can see backwards around. Big line circle. All it has is a yield sign. Yeah, so here's what it does. This is the biggest downside I've seen with these out-in-the-world self-driving cars. The number one problem with human drivers is they're too aggressive and they will often crash. The number one problem with these self-driving cars is they sit at the yield sign and wait for 40 minutes until there's a big enough gap for them to go.

10:07And they will hold up traffic for a mile behind them because of it. and that's a that's annoying from the passenger seat but it's technically safer yeah and that's the biggest difference i found if you read a lot of the headlines in san francisco it's like it's not that these cars are mowing through intersections or whatever it's just that people like they come up to like a stop sign with like a car too far in an intersection and then they just freeze and don't do anything and then they they cause traffic to be holed up for like the entire day i care about my image just as much as i care about my physical body so i don't want to be the guy that everyone's pointing and laughing at why my self-driving taxi can't figure out why there's a basketball in the road and just stops for an hour it's more likely yeah but no yeah i i i still think the biggest thing here is that a self-driving the difference between a self-driving taxi uber and its current self-driving is a person in the front seat and not a person in the front seat and like taking over yeah i think even just the taking over part yeah scares me if that couldn't happen i don't think i want to be the guy in the back seat when that happened the one um waymo is it waymo yeah the one waymo that got in that really bad accident had a human driver that was supposed to take over but he didn't yeah so and that's also a lot that's why i say it's psychological it's because it's basically like how good does the tech get and how much do you trust it yeah that's like tesla bot in there well then do you trust tesla bot is the redundant like take over if something's a problem it's like we just need a button to stop like we have the the robot and we just have the big red button we just need to be sitting in the back seat with a button just like ready to press it at any point yeah that's kind of all i need would you get in a self-driving airplane for a cross-country yeah that pretty much happens yeah yeah but no no No pilot in there to do anything.

11:59Yes, 100%. I don't know enough about how much pilots do. I probably don't know enough. I know a lot about how we drive, but I don't know enough about how pilots are for. I could be more, I could be convinced. I don't know. Anyways, Adam, what is your thought process on this? In its current state, I would not do it. I could see it getting there in the future and I'll do it. I also did a BMW self-driving demo in Vegas. Yeah, in Vegas. And that was terrifying. It was, yeah. And it was like... But exhilarating. Like everything at CES. I got more exhilaration than Taylor. Well, yeah, because you were like, am I going to die?

12:32Yeah, I don't know. I enjoyed that. So it was a fun experience. But then thinking about like if an Uber just pulled up right now to take me home and there's no one in the front seat. Take me home. Don't you feel like if it's like publicly accessible and on the road and going to pick you up that it's safe enough to take you home? No. I guess we have many things that are on the road right now that are not safe. Like people. Like the Hummer EV. Well, yeah, like the Hummer EV. it's a great point but yeah there there is an element of like are we being beta tested on like sometimes there are real technologies that are out Cisco yeah yeah in the world where I'm like just because it's out doesn't mean it's good they're absolutely racing to be first and I don't want to use this just because it's out and I think yeah it interestingly with the self-driving cars it doesn't feel that way it feels like they could have been out a while ago and probably been just as good as they are now but they have to be so sure careful that they're really careful to not ruin everything with one mistake that they probably are even safer than you think it's kind of like how tesla takes the heat with all the negative for all the negative press that electric cars get yeah right like anything anytime anything happens to a tesla every car fire yeah every car fire yeah i mean there's a million car fires but anytime it's a tesla the headlines are tesla catches fire and it's like yeah i do think we'll see more evs just in that light in general now that there's more of them yeah yeah big oil i just want to throw throw one more idea out there maybe let let this idea marinate in your brains i don't think people are unsafe i think cars are just inherently unsafe like as a concept that is tricky oh yeah just throwing that out there i feel like the only problem with posing that question is it makes it feel like all people are safe where like there are plenty of people no there there are plenty of drivers i hope to never encounter on the road yes don't get me wrong i just want to clarify that i think but it's not fun unless it's a one or the other yeah no context cars are it's not that they're unsafe it's that the way that we drive them around right now is unsafe like if you flip the switch tomorrow and every car became a self-driving car i think that would be a lot more safe yeah then if that's this every car if every car was a self-driving car it would be way more versus a mix of people and that's the real challenge we're i was just on another podcast talking about this i'm not going to spoil it too much but the idea of every car being a self-driving car i'm pretty sure we've also talked to nil degrasse tyson about this possibly but you can picture like a super highway of just cars going 100 miles an hour and they all talk to each other and they all can like immediately make moves all computer controlled and just like get you as fast and as safe as possible to your location but there's no way to get to that future yeah without getting through all the complexities of some cars are self-driving and some are 10 years old and they're humans and and you can't get there without going through it.

15:18Ironically, this analogy is like the Windows versus Mac analogy or the Android versus iOS analogy, mostly Windows versus Mac. I'm listening. Because, so Windows has to be like backwards compatible with a ton of enterprise software, right? And government software and all this stuff. So none of it, you can't really like switch to a whole new development platform and be like, everyone has to change. but Apple can literally be like if you don't update your app to support this or like be based on this we will just take you off the app store so you can't take every car and be like you have to retrofit your car to have this 5G thing so it can talk to all the other but I do love the theoretical where every single car is a self driving car because you can literally like not have roads and just have like one big plane and everything's just weaving through each other at like 150 miles an hour yeah it's awesome seems pretty sweet where would the buildings go you can't just have one big plane you could and the buildings are on the perimeter that sounds like a terrible place to live a big ring of buildings filled with a autonomous car the point i'm making is that you don't have to have everything go like straight or sideways it can just kind of they can weave between each other without slowing down at all i hear that theoretically yeah but we've also we've also built lots of roads already yes so we kind of just we don't need anymore yeah aim to fit the roads we've built also david this is america also marquez hasn't given us his answer on this yet i would take a self-driving uber okay well no one cares

17:01but you didn't say it and i didn't want to find it so it's 40 60 me and marquez versus all you interesting freaks well freaks okay see you on the perimeter of the plane mad max over here okay wait i did also post something else to twitter that i thought was interesting i'm super interested in finding out more about this so i posted an entire video to to x i guess i could call it x twitter to twitter i posted a whole video on twitter I put the entire pixel Can You Trust Google video on in its entirety on Twitter now in the past I've done like all these fun interesting things where like you post a clip from the video and then link to the full video or you post a short we've done all that in the past this time I just posted the entire video and as of today if you were to believe the numbers on Twitter that are public facing which don't but if you were to believe that if you were to believe that then this is the most viewed piece of content that i have ever made ever on any platform stop stop it's not stop it's not i'll never take anything away from our lg wing our lg wing tiktok tiktok greatest video 35 million views something like that this video uh is less than a week old on x and has 38.3 million views there's like 29 million in like the first 24 hours like the first 24 hours the thing though about that number is it's not views it's just impressions it's just how many times it appeared on your timeline and the reason i know this is because i'm going to screen share this so you can see it on the video version of the podcast if you open up the analytics of the person who posted it and look at the numbers it says impressions which as you expand it says the number of times this post was seen on x and just before you get to that the new feature that they added on Twitter was a views number that shows the thing.

18:58But when you hover it, it says views. But you say when you click it, it says impressions. So on a post, like if you just tweet some text, that number you could argue is the number of times it's been seen. And so however you want to phrase that in the timeline, is that impressions? Is that views? Like what do people think that is? If I post it and someone is just flipping through their for you page or their timeline and it it flies by technically is that a view i guess so it's an impression but it's an impression like that's what the ad agencies would all call an impression it showed up on your screen once and had the opportunity to be viewed or consumed or engaged with in some way that's an impression and i'll give some credit here is that on twitter it is very hard to distinguish for just at least a text like a regular text tweet who if it got scrolled by in red or if it just like or if it did get read because if you're not clicking on it, which half the time I'm on Twitter, I'm not clicking on things.

19:55Yeah. It is tough to tell that. Here's a good way of understanding this. YouTube does tell you views and impressions. This same video that I posted on YouTube has about 2 million views. If you go look at impressions, which on YouTube, you know what an impression is, it's this showed up somewhere in a recommended, on a homepage, in a sub box, in a notification. How many times did it just show up on someone's screen? That's impressions. and this had about 20 million impressions on YouTube, but it has 2 million views. And if you go down to the video metrics for Twitter, I'm just gonna keep calling it Twitter, it has 6 million unique views.

20:36If I scroll down even more, however, there is an audience retention graph. And I use the word graph lightly, but it is a nine minute video. So does Apple. Yeah, it's a nine minute video and the retention graph shows that by two minutes and 20 seconds into the video, how many, what percentage of people do you think were still watching? You've pictured like the retention graph, like a 50 % average view duration is pretty good on YouTube. If you get to the end with still 40 % of people watching, pretty good video. Two minutes into a nine minute video, how many people do you think? 2%. It's exactly 2%.

21:12Is it really? 2%. I'm a guy. Bingo. Let's go. And so, Wow. if 2 % of people are still watching by two minutes yeah that's not really do you consider it a view i mean it's two minutes it's not two seconds i guess they viewed it like okay youtube isn't fully clear but we estimate it's anywhere between three to 30 seconds right yes but youtube is way more information they give you a graph yeah of like yeah a little more retention a little less and you can fast forward and find spots as an actual view on you but in general you're clicking on that usually too right i guess i don't know how autoplay is working exactly but yeah if i you could click on something and then immediately hit back before it goes to like three seconds yeah that's up to youtube youtube youtube to prevent gaming the system will never explicitly define a view i'm sure there's many parameters that will define a view but i think like between us if someone watches two seconds of a 10 minute video don't count that that's not a view right if people got to two minutes then it's they're watching the video yeah two percent of people got that far so two percent of the six million views got that far what is the what is the that metric on youtube do you have it uh got to two minutes yeah i will open up that right now also i should have published the pixel review nine minutes ago oh no you just might as well hold on to it yeah no i'm gonna find the analytic and then publish it so okay analytics analytics and i'll go into reach you know it's crazy 12 minutes ago i was like oh in three minutes we need to do that i'll make sure to make sure to remind mark two minutes into the video on youtube 63 of people were still watching wow so there's a big vast difference okay one second i'm gonna publish the pixel while you're doing that i'm just gonna say what i think perfect i think the funniest part about this though is just how you hover on the initial post and it says views then you click in and then it recalls it impressions instead and calls something else views and then unique views and then shows the retention graph which the graph is very funny because like it's hard to without a visual so for audio listeners rather than just a straight line graph where you can see like every single second within the video is that what a line graph is right yeah it's a bar graph where it says like zero minutes with a big thing and then says two minutes where it's really small again and then like increments of two minutes so you can't tell if all of those were on there for one second or two minutes wow yeah it's insanely hard to tell what's actually going on some so they can actually understand that what a reman sum i don't know what that is it's the let me define it boom get dunked on reman sum is how you find an integral with trapezoids under a curve that's what i meant trapezoids?

23:58no it's rectangles actually I wanted to find the actual yeah wow everyone was wrong I'm just glad I pretended not to know it's how you find the area of trapezoids under a curve oh get dunked on again trapezoids it's rectangles yeah rectangles but those are rectangles it's bar graphs but huge I still don't understand it it's way too big of rectangles as a point the difference between can you show David the graph it's very funny so the difference between didn't make it to two seconds and didn't make it to two minutes and twenty seconds is you cannot tell on the graph because it's all in one rectangle.

24:29So it just looks like one bar. Yeah, you can't tell. So while you're pulling that up, let's just say maybe we wanted to make this segment into a short. How would you wrap up what you think about Twitter video views and posting on the Twitter platform? Take the remit set and ask. Here's the graph. Wow. Hello. 100 % of people got to zero minutes. Washington's zero minutes. That's helpful information. 2%. and then it goes one one zero zero people finished it zero percent finished oh so probably just below i mean between zero and one doesn't even show up wow yeah can't even that's brutal that's probably because you're the only one to ever post a video that long on x no you know what i to be fair elon has been like encouraging everyone to do it because he wants to believe that the future of content is also on x so i this is literally just me trying it with this video he retweeted it and he retweets lots of other people who post content on x that's i'm sure especially exciting for him especially they use new features like yeah threads and all that kind of so like yeah it has 38 million views because someone with 100 million followers tweeted about it so yeah it's just gonna blip on lots of people's timelines but like this just reminds us all of what happened with facebook not that many years ago where they decided creators Facebook video is the future.

25:48Oh, God. You want to be on our platform. Matter of fact, look at how many views you're getting on all your content. And then advertisers went, whoa, wait a minute. Look at how many views are over here. I think it's time to spend. And they all went to go. I just got so triggered. I know. They all went to go spend. And then they all found out that those weren't views. And here we are. Oh, I totally forgot. That was when they turned on autoplay and just a million videos showed up on your feed. That was like 2016, 2017, right? I want to say like 17, 18 era. Wow. So pushing it so hard back then. So we're just, we're going through the same thing now.

26:21For sure. It is what it is. So you're quitting YouTube. Why? You got 30 million views. I did, but I know that that's only impressions. And that's also because of a couple of big retweets. So I'm going to go with still working on it. Still working out the bugs. Full time Xer right now. Still working out the bugs. We should talk about the pics a little bit more. We should take a quick break, though, before we do that. But I'm sure we'll have some thoughts on that, some thoughts on the Quest 3, and some more on Adobe. So before that break, let's do a little trivia. Trivia. Okay. First question. We were talking about Uber a little bit ago.

27:00Uber. Uber. Travis Kalanick and Garrett Kemp founded Uber in 2009. I thought that was the Taylor Swift guy. No, that's so much, dude. How dare you? Can you get a minus point? Travis Kelsey. King Travis Kelsey Oh my god But Kemp Is also the co-founder of another Popular app slash search engine What was it? If you want a hint The logo was an orange S-U Like the letters S-U It was very popular back in the day Back in the day? What counts as back in the day? I feel like all the old search engines now are just like clickbait gallery websites. Like really bad news websites. I'm just trying. I'm thinking of all the search engines I've ever had.

27:50Yeah, I don't. Remember Alta Vista? Yeah, baby. I lived on Alta Vista Drive for a bit. So it is technically a search engine as well, but don't get hung up on that. I used it more of an app. I thought of it as an app. It should be, right? But it is a search engine. An app? Yeah. It was an app. It was a Chrome extension. It was a website. That's a tough one. We'll think on it. It's a wigwam. It's a teepee. We'll figure it out and we'll be right back.

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29:42With 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. All right, welcome back. Let's talk about the Pixels. We can finally talk about them. We've been using the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro here at the studio for a little bit now. The review is up. our thoughts are live have you you haven't watched the whole video yet andrew actually i don't know nobody here i only saw the intro because brendan and i brainstormed it for a while but i wasn't able to help so you had a little bit of my thoughts based on my direction on for sure where the video would go but now we can talk about everything pixel i'm gonna give my high level version of this which is i am i'm thoroughly enjoying using the phone and i think it's finally feeling like a flagship especially because of the new display and then there's just a whole bunch of googly stuff all throughout this phone that the more i use them the more i get used to them and miss them in other phones and some of those are just like the the photo features and they're like fixing it in post stuff some of them are just like call screens useful like just classic google stuff i like the lock screen and material you blah blah there's a ton of that stuff but i think it really finally feels and this is the 8 pro that i'm mostly using it finally feels full-on flagship and i'm happy about that very very bright screen yeah love that super actual super actual display 2400 nits on that bad boy it's every bit of that too uh i have gotten good battery life i'm happy to say so i've i've gotten between my normal days of using it in the past week like six to eight hours of proper screen on time which is a good battery life on a smartphone on this 5000 milliamp battery so that's great on the pro um the cameras are pretty good i think video shows more improvement than photos i think photos look all right um they kind of have a little bit more watercolory tendency and a little bit more over hdr tendency sometimes which i've noticed uh but there are big new displays and video i shot the whole autofocus video on the corvette super detailed sharp maybe over sharpened but very very good video the color is great awesome color um the dual exposure pixels are what make the video better yeah so so autofocus is fast it's accurate yeah it's been reliable for me i keep flipping it back and forth between the car and myself and like this is why i shoot the autofocus videos on a phone and so i get that experience with it the microphones are not as good and i think i was trying to use the some of the audio eraser features to get rid of the wind in the background and there's only so much you can do it did okay with that but i i really like these phones uh this is probably what's going to be staying in my pocket i do have some more phones to test this year so i can't speak this prematurely but i really like the phone yeah yeah so some of the more interesting things that people were asking about that i think are worth diving into a little bit more are one what is a photo who knows i don't know is it real is any of this real nothing true and then two is tensor g3 meaningfully different from our our complaints with tensor in the past kind of i would say yeah kind of um especially because i've had now i don't know how long it's going to last but i've had pretty good battery life and i think that a lot of that is because of tensor yeah um software optimization of course will play a part android 14 has been breathing new life into phones after they fix all the bugs i'm happy to say that um but i don't think it's that much of a difference otherwise it's not like some super mega powerful new chip they're more focused on tpu and ai features and they've got a lot of that going i think a lot of the crazy stuff with this phone is just all the crazy camera stuff they're doing with the software editing and the magic eraser and magic editor and audio eraser and endless features about like manipulating your photos as soon as you take them if they released all of these camera features on the pixel 7 and 7 pro as a feature drop it would be insane it would be like a whole new phone i'm pretty sick uh one thing i want to say about like the whole lineup of phones is like they they move the prices up this year each phone is more expensive the pixel 8 is 120 hertz now it's gotten its upgrade new new tpu new cameras and all that but it is now 700 to start and then this is now 900 to start so they just bumped them both up i honestly think yeah 999 to start yeah i still think the pixel 8 now that we've used them is a good phone for the price i still believe that yeah um and i think it's harder than ever to justify the 8 pro and you can see google even trying to justify the 8 pro by artificially gating some features to just pro yeah even though they're the same computer i mean it's extra ram but it's the same tensor g3 yeah and the same primary camera and the same selfie camera but only one of them gets pro mode the pro only one of them can actually take 50 megapixel photos the pro yeah only one of them gets the generative fill auto magic eraser.

34:43Yeah. That's the Pro. Wait. Later this year. Yeah, the RAWs are 12 megapixel on the regular one too, which is weird because I think the Pixel 6, the RAW on the regular Pixel 6 non-Pro was the full 48. The full 48. It's weird, yeah. Which is the generative fill magic eraser? So you have regular magic eraser on Pixel already, on Pixel 7 and 8. but there's a new improved generative fill magic eraser yeah where you can like select things to it works the same way it's just the quality of what it fills in is better yeah they used to do in painting and now they do generative fill okay yeah that's weird yeah why are you getting that i don't know i imagine google always eventually just moves this stuff exactly photos and i think they will because there's sort of this trend in the tech industry right now where everyone's trying to get you to use more storage so that they can sell you storage in the cloud oh really interesting yeah i don't know if i've picked up on that oh yeah you think they're everyone's doing it okay because apple just give us gave us high resolution by default but it was only one and a half times the file size it wasn't like double the file size per photo well but think about this though like if that's another way to gate you into an ecosystem if you use one drive and then Microsoft makes you have like way more files and the files get bigger you have to buy more storage and then it's even harder to move to another cloud storage solution so everyone's sort of trying to make you do that and then pushing you towards the higher and higher tiers interesting yeah I mean Google used to give you free photo storage unlimited and now they don't anymore I know that was a long time ago and obviously like things are getting file sizes are getting bigger but sorry my Google went off karma hit real hard right there you played yourself um but yeah like file sizes are getting bigger but like storage is also getting cheaper except we're the ones paying for more storage size and they're not um but yeah that the whole i just wanted like an anecdote from this weekend i was doing some like i went out with some family and there was a couple cousins that all have kids and I mentioned the face swap feature when we were trying to take a group photo with all of the kids and every single one of them was like, what phone does that?

37:02What is that? Oh my God, that would be amazing. So I think for the masses, that feature is gonna hit real hard. I wanna go through each of the crazy camera features and explain how well they actually work now that we've used them. Because we saw the commercials, right? Oh. It's different from the commercials. Yeah, now they're actually out. So the one you're describing, which is called Best Take, works very, very well. I think I called it Top Shot at one point. You could call it a bunch of... Okay, that's what it was called. Yeah, but it's called Best Take. But what happens is it sees your gallery has a burst of photos of the same group of people.

37:37And it goes, ah, there's like nine of these here. Any one of them you can pick as the base photo, go in to edit. So pick the one where you like the body positions of people, go in to edit, and then hit Best Take, and then it will go find all the other copies of people's faces, and literally give you a selector for the faces for those people. And it works very well at merging people's face and neck to match. Unless you zoom in really tight, you can't tell. Yeah. It's been edited. Genuinely, 99 out of 100 quality edit. That's really, really good. It makes sense because you can only do it within a burst photo of things, right?

38:10That's how it finds them. It's not just a burst. You can take one photo, wait a couple seconds, take another, wait a couple seconds. So yeah, I guess I'm thinking burst so not much movement can happen. but as long as it's in the same general general area yeah scene yeah okay so there could be plenty of movement and it's still there could be plenty of movement but the like the shadows are generally the same like you're not moving your location yeah yeah okay that's all we tested how far apart those pictures need to be for this to work yeah we should push it too yeah let's we might let's make two people in the studio sit in the same spot for 24 hours and take pictures between them add a bunch of shadow in one photo and then make it really bright in the other photo and see if it we'll still merge on the bright face so it looks weird yeah we might have to play with this a little more yeah yeah but just you know that one feature really well amazingly well that's why the ads are all about that yeah so then you have i'll do audio eraser next um this is the one where they gave the example of like pointing it at like a street musician but there was like a siren in the background and you could just like erase the siren while keeping the street musician And I think that exact example would probably work really well because the frequencies of a cello being really low and the frequencies of an ambulance being really high can actually be probably separated a little easier than my example, which was basically wind just like distorting and peaking the mic.

39:31And that was really hard to remove. And I think I should expect that to be hard to remove. So there's going to be situations where it works well and situations where it doesn't work well. sometimes it will legitimately save your video from some weird random seagull noise in the background sometimes it it will not be able to fix your video so it's like a 50 50 for me i would have i had low expectations for that one and i felt like in that sense it was more of a like i captured this random moment i'm not looking to turn this into a video or like put actual real production and editing behind it but i just like am sad that i tried to get some sort of noise and there's another another noise blocking it yeah and maybe i can salvage enough of it so when i'm trying to like show this moment to people you can understand what's happening also interesting note and this is um a little bit sneak peek but we're going to talk about later in the podcast but adobe also just announced an audio eraser feature in premiere and it's uh it does the analyze and the analyzing thing but it's just a slider you can't break like the pixel will break it apart into like this is wind noise this is animal noise this is this noise you can't do that in in the adobe one but i suspect so i'm very curious about that yeah google's ui is amazing for this it's a feature that i don't think a lot of people are gonna like dig in and find that often but if they do it is it is really cool just like going oh noise delete yeah wind delete yeah animal noise we'll leave it no you know what delete it let's go slider too so you can leave it a little bit in if you want it to feel like more organic because sometimes if you slide something all the way down it kind of it puts a compressor on it and it makes the voice sound really compressed yeah yeah so i give that like you know five out of ten works okay yeah um magic eraser still works really well it's still pretty good at recognizing objects magic editor is a crazy one yeah um it's funny because you go into edit a photo and it's like all black and white ui and then it's like this colorful glowing rainbow button in the corner that's like click please use me i'm over here yeah so you click it and it opens this whole new UI and there is definitely some latency to this where it's like all right you're going to make a big edit here and it's going to take a few seconds to generate some new versions and then spit them out but basically you select something with your hands and then do something to it whether it's moving it growing it shrinking it you know changing the sky changing the atmosphere all these features and then you hit go and it takes some time and then generates like four versions of hopefully fixing your problem yeah this one's incredibly silly to be gated wait is this gated no this one works this one's across the board a magic eraser good good and magic editor magic editor sorry right the thing that i found interesting is there were some examples in the commercial that we talked about on last week's podcast that i was very curious about you remember the the kid on the bench with the balloons where they move them to the middle yeah and it like generates the rest of the bench and the balloons yeah so i just downloaded that picture and tried it really and it didn't quite get it like it got it added some of the balloons back but the bench it didn't really figure out very well like it was it was like a c minus edit like if i saw that i'd be like oh you messed up the edit like it's very visibly bad but there are some other things where it was just like perfect and you could just move like objects around the frame i moved a car around the frame i moved all kinds of things but then the other thing about the commercial is they had they're like moving people around yeah and i think they moved the one kid like higher over the basket to like make it look like he was dunking i took some pictures i have some pictures on my gallery of like me jumping and i said let me try that and i highlighted me and tried to move me almost every single time i try to move me it wouldn't do it it refused oh yeah and it gave me an error that said this may violate the gen ai terms yeah for google i tried it on tim's tongue and it did the same thing i don't wait i don't know that i was gonna say like have you ever seen the videos where people will like take a picture of their significant other and like edit their eyes just like a little bit further apart and say like oh you look so great in this picture i just took of you and they'll be like is that what i look like i was like this is magic editor is the way to just troll all of your friends but for sure i guess the funny thing about this too is because it's gen ai it's different every time right so you could take the same image and try it multiple times and it's going to give you different results like dolly yeah like dolly so you just kind of have to like keep playing with it wait when you say different results not only that the results are different but also the potentially skirting around like what it will so like if you're trying to move marquez to jump higher and it says it might be like another in violation another photo of marquez jumping might work right that sounds totally it's like it works perfect i tried a bunch of photos it seemed like the number one way to get it to trip for me was to try to just move me far in the photo like laterally or higher it would freak out and not do it so i would just like select myself and move me but i can move all kinds of objects and other stuff and it would be totally fine what if you select everything around you what if you color in the entire thing instead of around you and push it down.

44:43Make everything else small. Okay, so it didn't work with that. But what I will say is I did find a picture in my gallery with a watermark and I selected everything around the watermark and hit erase and it perfectly erased the watermark. And that's just not against their gender terms apparently. Totally fine. Heaven forbid you jump higher. You want to steal some artwork? Yeah. I got you. It's a fascinating feature. I have a feeling it tries, it like doesn't like skin or just things that could be manipulated in a weird way. that's like i tried to make i wanted tim's tongue to be really long but it's funny because in the commercial they're moving people around yeah like several of the examples are moving people for you i don't know like i try like i tried a bunch of photos of people i was like oh that's funny i can lie about how high i jump in photos and then i tried a bunch of photos of me jumping and none of them it would let me it's so weird but it would let me move the frisbee it would let me move like the background in a tree and the and i erased the people behind me but that that tripped it a lot for some reason.

45:41There's also a new feature that they never talked about called camouflage in the magic eraser, magic editor thing. And it just takes all of the color out of the thing that you highlight. I'm not sure why. It just makes it black and white. Did we try more of it? We were trying it the other day. Because when we were trying it with Brandon, we were all just confused to the point where we thought we were doing it wrong. It's like reverse color pop, basically. It's like, hey, you want to color pop this photo? Rather than selecting what you do want to color pop, how about you select everything you don't want to have color so maybe there's like uh something that's too hard to delete and it would look weird so you're trying to just turn it black and white if you're like taking an artsy photo and like everything is like yellow and blue but there's like one kind of annoying thing that's like red you could just like desaturate it so that the colors still look nice but then that's black and white in like a totally color photo yeah sometimes you wouldn't notice though i'd like to see an example of somebody who's used this well like what if my shoes what if my shoes were like yellow so i just turn them like black and white and shoes could totally be black and white in a normal circumstance yeah maybe it's interesting i still think it would look it's a weird feature yeah it's right next to magic eraser in the settings yeah yeah yeah it's just like a slide consider and that's just weird considering it's a minor feature but it is strange yeah but yeah that's that's the fee i i'd i give magic editor like a six out of ten for the times it works and then the zero out of ten for the times it says it won't do it yeah but i also think it's google and there's got to be some sort of limits so yeah i'm sure people are going to try way crazier things than i tried with lying in photos so it's probably good that there's some boundaries on it you know yeah uh so yeah that's the that's the story of the pixel the video is the video quality is way better yeah um my understanding of this is effectively this is kind of like how they do HDR.

47:36So usually when you do HDR, you're stacking frames and then you just take the average color of each pixel in that frame so you get rid of the noise because noise is random. In this one, you're taking like a high gain and then a low gain pixel and stacking the pixels. And so if one has more noise than the other, then it averages it out. High gain, low gain, meaning high and low sensitivity? Sensitivity. So if one peaks in high gain but doesn't peak in low gain, that it's kind of like HDR as well? Yes. Okay. Yeah. Oh, and speaking of HDR, something that we didn't mention, these now support Ultra HDR.

48:10Yeah. I read a really good Android Police. I'll put, we should have a link to this article about like explaining Ultra HDR. And I guess it's coming soon because we haven't been able to test. Because what is it? I've seen it on my phone. So I've seen HDR, but I don't know if it's the new Ultra HDR, which is like baked into JPEG, if that, like I can share it. I can show it to you. Okay. Yeah. So I'll share the article below, but essentially it's like a very compatible, file format that's not just tone mapping and blasting certain pixels but it's actually just like it's not hdr when it's not on an hdr monitor and it is hdr when it is on an hdr monitor yeah which is pretty sweet that's like the biggest issue with hdr is most people don't have an hdr monitor yet so yeah i was happy to see that the fact that you can see it's working so it's cool and you you can see it just when you take photos on the pixel if you take a photo of like a bright area yeah if you look at that photo it like it kind of you're like is that area that's really bright yeah hdr is crazy sometimes i'll be on like a totally dim web page like scrolling and then an hdr image comes up and it's like all right this pixel full brightness like we're cranking it right now hdr is really sketchy sometimes so i'm glad that compatibility is at least being focused on yeah i think it only works with the rear camera but yeah it is kind of like things are very bright there's also a temperature sensor on the pro oh right i forgot about that huge how many times have you used it i have not used it a single time other than filming it so that tells you how much i care about it um perfect it measures the temperature of things oh yeah that's what that wait it has a thermometer yeah new thermometer app too what it's pretty cool i'll end i guess with some of my my biggest downsides of the pixel this time around with this pixel 8 generation um number one i will say is fingerprint reader did not improve and it's fine but in the world of a bunch of other 900 phones with much better much faster and more reliable in different conditions ultrasonic fingerprint readers this one being the same size and still being optical like they couldn't pull off the software magic to make this one better it still needs the extra second to get it but red the software magic that they did pull off was ai in the front-facing camera to enable face unlock and banking apps and stuff which is awesome that's really nice so that's two contrasting things one they were like we don't need extra hardware we don't need infrared we'll just do more with software to get more information here yeah and with the ultrasonic fingerprint reader they were like sorry yeah same thing classic so that's that's a you know slight bummer um the back material i think is actually really good it doesn't really show as many fingerprints as i would really like for a matte black phone i would expect more but I was bummed that there weren't more color options this year.

50:56The only really colorful one is blue. It's funny because in some lights at an angle this almost looks like a really dark blue and I was like that would be sick but I mean matte black's nice but a really dark blue would look nice. That does look really good. It's kind of just like dark grey or light grey like what do you want? Like the sage? Is that the other one? The greenish one? It's like a little bit green. Camouflage. It's basically grey. it's great so that's that's basically my that's my two downsides like there's not that much bad about this phone so i'm happy it's pretty solid yeah yeah it's all i still consistently miss the pixel fold when i'm using it though personally i just like the size that is interesting because i came from the pixel fold yeah and this is straight to the pro it's a much bigger screen yeah but i also felt like i was using the pixel fold mostly closed yeah and so i got really used to the smaller aspect ratio and now just i just have like a huge canvas now yeah and i feel like this is great no good thing it's good i like really want to go to the pixel 8 but i do like the small zen phone size but pixel 8 is a little smaller than the pixel 7 yeah 6.2 i'm probably gonna ask what are you guys to use yours for like a day how big is the zen phone screen i want to say that's like six smaller than an iphone mini i'm just kidding i'm kidding i'm kidding zapon 10 display diagonal 5.9 inches oh wow 5.9 so 5.9 to 6.3 it's it don't got that doesn't look that crazy though that actually doesn't like pro this is 6.7 so imagine 6.3 it's not that much bigger than your phone yeah i might have to steal the eight review yeah yeah but that's that's pixel uh do we want to take a quick break and then do meta and adobe is that what we should that's what we should do sure so i think before that quick break what should we do um let's see one two carry the one

52:53always taking strays over here welcome back to trivia all right question two from ellis in 2016 microsoft acquired what is now the eighth largest social media network in the world and And before you come at me, I know that stat could be read in a bunch of different ways. But I'm calling it the eighth largest social media network in the world. Okay. With almost a billion users. Yeah. Which social network is it? Cool. I already know it. Microsoft? Microsoft. Microsoft's the social network? Microsoft bought the social network. Yeah. It's the movie? Bing. Bing. It's called Binggle. Bing is kind of a social network because you can talk to it now.

53:39We'll be right back.