Live at SXSW 2026: Can They Convince Marques to Shoot 24fps?

13:38David Imel:Yeah.

13:39Marques Brownlee:Yeah.

13:39David Imel:Well, here we are. I'm trying to shove themselves in the foot with the privacy angle though. They don't have any of that data. They can't just, you know, make it happen. To everything. Yeah. So, but if you weren't following along, what David said before is in January, Apple announced that Google Gemini will now be essentially what's running Apple Intelligence. So we did get a step further, closer, but also further away from Apple creating it, I guess. Well, we don't really know yet. I think until it happens, we're not really sure when it's, yeah, if it's going to happen. And then the thing we're wondering was, will DubDub last year just re-announce it?

14:12David Imel:I think they just glossed over

14:14Marques Brownlee:it completely right so 2024 wwdc apple goes apple intelligence is our new thing it's going to be amazing this is what ai has stood for the whole time we swear they delay it 2025 comes and goes and they sort of kind of re-announce apple intelligence features casually and sort of reframe it and and give us that some of the stuff has come out and some of the stuff is still coming WWDC this summer they may do that again and re-announce Apple Intelligence and explain the things that are now out, which is a lot of it but still that we're hoping to see this Siri thing soon maybe this year. Maybe they've learned their lesson to not make a promise on when that's coming out.

14:54Marques Brownlee:They should just drop it when it's ready. I agree.

14:58David Imel:Every tech company should just drop things when they're ready. I think the world would be under place. How would investors invest in them? How would they raise fake money? Next thing we talked about, and I'll go really fast on this, because Digg relaunched or got announced last South By. Oh, yeah. We thought it was going to be this cool thing of the, you know, the old arch rivals, because we had the founder of Digg and one of the co-founders of Reddit, Alexis Ohanian, coming together to relaunch Digg. And, you know, I was really mad at Reddit last year because Steve Huffman totally ruined it. And I was really excited for Digg.

15:32David Imel:And then when I was writing this, I was like, oh, yeah. What happened to Dig? And it launched at some point, I think, earlier this year, and I went to it. And the hardest part about trying to pretend you're doing well is when your whole website is based on votes and comments and activity is the minute you go to the front page of it, you can see how it's doing. I saw very few posts that had more than 50 votes and more than 10 comments. So it's basically just, I don't know. Are there any Dig users, new Dig users in here? I'd be shocked if I saw it. We got a hand. There was a hand.

16:08Marques Brownlee:We got one hand.

16:09David Imel:Okay. You'll have to tell me about it later. Because it didn't look like it was doing great, but the UI was kind of nice, I guess. Okay. Yeah. They haven't really advertised it at all. I haven't seen anything about it. They did the big launch, but then it was like$5 a month to use. I don't think it was a month. I think it was like just to, the invite was$5 or something like that. That's too much, man. You don't know how it's going to be. You don't know what it's going to be. It kind of boils down to... There's no community. That's the problem. It's community. And we talk about all these different social media platforms trying to take over other social media platforms because everyone keeps ruining social media platforms.

16:47David Imel:And the hardest part, no matter how good your UI is, no matter how good all the features are, is the people. Yeah. Yep. Shout out to YouTube. All right, let's go through some of the things we said in the question and answer. Someone asked if Apple launching a foldable is going to be what brings folding phones to the mainstream. We were all pretty convinced the folding phone Apple would do is flip style. So clamshell, kind of like an old folding phone. We are all now seeing pretty strong rumors about a passport style folding phone from Apple coming out later this year.

17:23Marques Brownlee:One, do you think it's going to come out later this year? Yes. The rumors are now much more confidently aligning for this year. It's not a rumor. Is there one in your pocket right now? It is technically a rumor. We don't know for sure until it gets announced. But yeah, we're pretty sure it's, now it's like kind of like Pixel Fold 1 or what was the first, the Oppo Find? Passport style. Yeah, the Passport style. So it opens like a Galaxy Fold, but it is a little bit more squat. So it opens to a widescreen. And I think that's going to be, it's going to make sense. What we're all curious now to see is what's the unique differentiating thing for Apple.

17:57Marques Brownlee:Is it an iPad-like OS when it's open? Is it a really, really impressively flat crease and a like, you know, creaseless display? Is it both? Is it the fact that they charge less than anybody else? No. What's their angle going to be? We're in a new era with Apple right now, okay? I have a sneaky feeling this is going to live at the top of the iPhone lineup. Yeah. Safe bet. Yeah.

18:21David Imel:Although all our bets last year were wrong, so.

18:23Marques Brownlee:Yeah. So yeah, we expect to see it this year. it'll be a we could probably place bets on the price but it'll probably be a$2 ,000 folding phone and we'll see what their angle is. It's okay, my uncle works at Apple so he told me.

18:39David Imel:Is this breaking news? He's going to ban you from Apple? Also talking about Apple last year somebody asked us if we ever thought we'd see a touchscreen Mac or Mac display and all of us were extremely confident we know MacBook Ultra rumors are out now touchscreen OLED, Dynamic Island later this year. Do they just always use the word ultra when they're like thinking that something's gonna come

19:00Marques Brownlee:that's not gonna come? Did that part make it into Pod last time? I don't think it made it and I think I just need to say it.

19:04David Imel:Okay.

19:05Marques Brownlee:MacBook Ultra is not a good name.

19:07David Imel:Yeah.

19:07Marques Brownlee:Here's why. And it's not like it's okay like ultra makes sense for like the super high-end product that makes sense but they also have chips called Pro, Max, and Ultra. They do not put the Ultra chips as of right now in the laptops. That's in the desktop. So if you're going to name it MacBook Ultra, but you don't put the Ultra chip in it, that's a little confusing. What about the watch? Fair. But I just think if there is an Ultra chip available in the Mac lineup, the MacBook Ultra should have it. That's my number one confusion. And then, but yeah, it's supposed to be a touchscreen, which is all like, I don't really know what to make of that.

19:46Marques Brownlee:I'm assuming this is gonna be paired with the new redesign the dynamic island the OLED display all this fun stuff I saw a headline recently that it would be thinner which I'm a little bit nervous about because you don't put an ultra chip in a thinner body because you still think an ultra chips gonna go I just yeah I don't think it'll have an ultra chip anyway I think they should call it the studio that's my take but Yeah, we'll see it's supposed to be later this year and it's supposed to have a touchscreen Yeah, would you get do you want now that we're a year later? and we do think it is coming.

20:17Marques Brownlee:Do you want a touchscreen MacBook Pro? It depends on what the touchscreen does. I think you can touch it usually. I guess that would be a feature. I don't know. They said that the UI is going to be modular and change when you go to touch it. I still think that they should have just made the touchpad Apple pencil compatible and that would have solved like most of the problems and then it could have the trackpad pencils yeah the trackpad uh yeah because i don't know i like doing this on photoshop you know but yeah if that's the only use i'm not sure if that's worth uh you know nine thousand dollars yeah it's going to be expensive as well that's a theme uh but i do think apple is specifically allergic to making the apple pencil compatible with the mac and i know we were saying that about a touchscreen, but I do think this is very iPad related.

21:12Marques Brownlee:They want to sell you a Mac and an iPad, not or. So the more overlap in functionality there is with Mac and iPad, the worse it is for that double purchase. So I think, yeah, the pencil's always going to be just for the iPad. Next year we're going to find out. I'm going to find out. I'm wrong next year. It's going to be great. Yeah, that's going to be this.

21:33David Imel:I'll run through a couple of these pretty quick. People asked us how AI was helping us in our everyday lives and Ellis was talking about vibe coding something to where David responded, is vibe coding like a term people use? That's changed quite a bit. That was a year ago. Wow. I think vibe coding my grandma probably knows what vibe coding is now. Ellis downloaded a local LLM for the plane ride here to mess around with. He was quenning hard. Nobody gets that joke. It's a model. And then the last thing we just kind of, you know, got a very firm answer to a couple weeks ago, which is with somebody asked us if AI is coming into everything, glasses, pins, phones, how concerned should we be with data privacy?

22:19David Imel:And if for some reason you haven't seen the Meta Ray-Ban article about where your data is being sent and being seen by data annotators in different countries, you should really read that article. Lots of private stuff that you don't know fully is being recorded when you're using AI features are being sent out. And yeah, we did a breakdown this week that the pod just went live an hour ago. So yeah, you could watch it right now if you want it. You could be double potting right now. Kind of crazy. I would not want to listen to me two times at the same time. We wanted to release it live on stage, but then we'd have to make the pot is late joke to Adam again.

22:52So yeah.

22:53Marques Brownlee:All right. We'll take a quick break. But after we come back, Adam and Ellis are going to take some questions from the crowd that we'll try to answer. No pressure.

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25:08David Imel:Yeah, so I think that's everything from the initial thought we had, just covering a couple stories. We're going to, I think Adam and Ellis wanted to do trivia first. Are they out in the stage? Yeah, they just moved out there. Do we think enough people have filled out?

25:23Andrew Edwards:That's right. You hear the music. Thank you everyone for filling out our survey, which took a shocking amount of time to program that URL redirect. We asked you a lot of questions and we are now going to have our hosts guess what you guys put. Also, thanks for filling out the room. Listeners don't know, but it is packed in here. There's like 3000 people. Oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, I can hear it. Listen to that. Crazy. Yeah. Guys, also, 10 of you have never listened or watched Waveform before. Welcome. So thanks. That's cool.

25:58David Imel:Hopefully you subscribe after. You can hype us. Not anymore. Yeah, the comments today were saying it's done. For average listeners, or people who listen to us a lot, this is the one time a year that Ellis and Adam get their own microphones.

26:12Andrew Edwards:Oh my gosh, I didn't even realize that. I'm trying so hard not to talk over you. Guys, I love the port of you. Wait, but anyway, as I was saying. Guys, we asked the room, however many Waveform fans there are here, who has the best outfits on Waveform? Do you want to guess who this lovely crowd said? David. Ellis. I think they said David. Really? Yeah. I have like five pairs of clothes, bro. I guess, yeah, outfits is hard, but no, I think David's got the...

26:45David Imel:It's David or Ellis.

26:46Andrew Edwards:David was in second place with seven votes, but guys, it was not even close. Oh, shoot. Marquez, 26 votes. What? Wow. I'd be... Fashion icon Marquez Brownlee. Shop.mkbh.com? Andrew, why do you sound so surprised?

27:07David Imel:I don't know. There's been like four Reddit posts about Ellis' sweatshirt.

27:13Andrew Edwards:It's Abercrombie and Fitch. Yeah. people use circle to search to find that out wow people only talk about us on dig so that's why guys we asked this crowd to rank our niche tech interests that are paid weather apps samsung decks film cameras vhs tapes and mechanical keyboards what do you think the top ranked thing in this room was

27:38David Imel:are we all just going to answer our own one

27:40Marques Brownlee:I don't know I'm not definitely not I think this room would think David's film cameras is the best niche. Interesting. It's weather apps for sure.

27:48David Imel:It's weather apps for sure. Okay, Andrew? I'm selfishly saying mechanical keyboards.

27:54Andrew Edwards:If it's weather apps. At number three, Samsung Dex. That's right, baby. At number two, mechanical keyboards.

28:04Marques Brownlee:At number one,

28:07Andrew Edwards:David Amell. Really? Film cameras. I don't even think that's technology. We're living in the analog world, people.

28:13Marques Brownlee:I'd be racking up the points right now if we were counting these.

28:18Andrew Edwards:Guys, I think it's time for our new, I guess it's the second time, so now it's a tradition. We asked this crowd, who has the worst takes on Waveform? Last year, you all voted me. Which is the person who introduced these three people to vibe coding. You might be right. who do you think has the worst takes or excuse me who do you think this room has the worst takes on a wave for this lovely crowd of 3 000 people three million people yeah you know what's funny

28:57Marques Brownlee:about that i just want to interrupt real quick i think well i mean this room is what probably like 150 people or something like that which is awesome and i always hear uh like people starting off starting youtube channels will always say like oh you know i i made my first video i didn't get that many views. I only got like 200 views. Picture yourself making that video to a room of 200 people and it totally recontextualizes what you just did. Everyone's obsessed with scale and getting a million views, but like just if you're starting, think about that. Think about this room.

29:26David Imel:Anyway, I'm way more nervous on this stage right now than going into our podcast, which hits hundreds of thousands. I have no idea what to do with my legs. It's usually under a bed.

29:36Marques Brownlee:Anyway, I think I saw MSG like twice basically. I think Ellis got the votes again for worst takes. That would be... Worst takes? Yeah. It could be me, honestly.

29:47David Imel:I think everyone just wants to say themselves to be nice, so I'll also say David. To be nice. I'm being selfish.

29:54Andrew Edwards:Andrew, you tied with Adam for the least votes in this question implying that you actually might have the best takes.

30:01David Imel:Wow. I love you all. this is the greatest audience in the world.

30:05Andrew Edwards:Marquez, you only slightly came under him with six votes as the worst takes on the podcast. It's you, me, boys. One of the three of us. I, with my myriad of wonderful opinions, got a whopping 12 votes for the worst takes on the podcast, but I have been dethroned. The worst takes on Waveform now belong to David Amell. which is funny because they love your film cameras

30:36David Imel:but don't like your other takes I like your pictures but don't talk just be pretty you guys

30:48Andrew Edwards:offered a lot of hilarious answers to what the tech of the summer will be, everything from I don't know not the rapid R1 something that people think is cool AI companies offering open claw as a service whatever the Johnny I chat GPT puck will end up being. Metaglasses, the Neo, local AI devices for all my quenners out there.

31:13David Imel:Thank you, boss. Don't know what that means. I got you. Yeah, what does that mean? Wait, can you explain that? What? We don't have time for that. We really shouldn't. Okay, never mind.

31:21Andrew Edwards:It's a local AI model made by, I can't remember who actually makes it, but I think they just laid off like most of their team. So it's sort of unsupported and free-floating. Okay, forget I asked. Jelly. And it seems like, for the most part, you guys would not let OpenClaw touch anything in your lives, which is probably a safe move. But now that we've heard the opinions that we've forced out of you, I think we'd like to pass some of these microphones around and have you guys ask our hosts some questions. Does that sound like it would be fun?

31:58David Imel:I hope so, because we have 30 minutes and nothing else written down.

32:01Andrew Edwards:I'm coming over. Adam Molina is handing out the first microphone. First question. Hi, thank you guys so much for speaking. I've been a fan for almost eight years now, so it's kind of crazy seeing you guys in real life. I was kind of curious. I took a robo-taxi here, and it got me wondering between that. I see a lot of Waymos on the street. Would each of you be comfortable riding in an autonomous vehicle? And if so, does it matter on the brand? Are you waiting for it to get bigger, or have you done so since you've been in Austin? him.

32:30Marques Brownlee:Yeah. So when I first got to test the Tesla RoboTaxi, it was still in this sort of very early beta phase of only people with invites could test it. But I did get my first taste of the Tesla RoboTaxi there. That was also my first taste of the Waymos. I rode them all day. I don't know how many miles I covered, but we did a lot of shooting and a lot of testing and a whole bunch of different routes all over the place. At the end of that, my conclusion was these are fine. And actually, as someone who's typically like, I recently checked my Uber rating and I'm like a 4.9 passenger rating. I feel like I'm the perfect Uber passenger.

33:04Marques Brownlee:I get in the back and I just sit there and I don't do anything. And it would be even cooler if I didn't have to talk to anyone and it was empty. And I'm on the computer working and it's fine. And I think a lot of people's dream is to just get into a little car that doesn't have anyone in there. It doesn't have to, you know, you don't have to talk to anyone. So I was totally fine with it. I would ride in any autonomous car. They seem to drive kind of like a grandma a little bit. Like they're mostly pretty safe about things. And I was totally fine with that. Yeah. Well, I'm not supposed to talk because my opinions are bad.

33:39Give us your takes. I've not taken the RoboTaxi. I personally, I have a Model 3 and I do not trust its autopilot at all because it makes really bad decisions. Obviously, I don't have a newer version. It's like a 2019 one. It's very old. So maybe I would do that. But I have been writing Waymos for like three or four years now, and the ones in San Francisco are crazy smooth. I love getting into Waymo, and I love that it has my name like spinning on the top. It's kind of cool. I don't like the idea of this insane consolidation of power between like one to two companies that could completely just take over the entire taxi ride-hailing space if this tech gets more democratized.

34:20which there are really cool open-sourced car driving models now that you can install in your car with cameras and stuff. Whether or not that becomes street legal, I have no idea, but the Waymos are very fun. They're very smooth.

34:32David Imel:I have not ridden in either of them. I think I would because, like Marquez said, they're pretty slow, and they're testing in cities like this, which is gated, and they're doing a lot of... There's only so far you can go, and so as long as I'm not trying to get anywhere pretty quick, I'm fine with it, But also, a regular Uber driver, I think as we left South by last year, Marquez's Uber to the airport, when they got in, he said, I'm not your average Uber driver. And all of us went, oh no, are we going to see them at that? So, you know, there's dangers in both of them. But yeah, I would get in one and try it around the city.

35:11Marques Brownlee:I saw one near a studio a couple of days ago. And I realized there's an article, a Waymo, that they're testing them in New York City. Yeah, which is insane. Which I couldn't decide if that made me very confident in them or extremely concerned. Because I've seen, has anyone driven in New York City before? You know that that's the ultimate challenge for these things. So if it can survive there, then I guess it can survive anywhere.

35:35David Imel:Can I throw a question to the audience real fast? So with this CyberCab.

35:40Andrew Edwards:I was literally going to ask.

35:42David Imel:If you don't know, Marquez has a bet. if the$30 ,000 no steering wheel two seat cyber cab comes out by the end, who here thinks Marquez's hair is safe? AKA, do you think it will not come out? Okay, here's the bet. Here's the bet. Elon got on stage.

36:01Marques Brownlee:Well, the bet was, okay. Elon got on stage. He said, we're going to have this golden two door autonomous thing and we're going to sell it to the public before the end of 2026. And I was like, of course you're not. And if you do, I'll shave my head on camera. That's, I feel pretty confident that that's not going to happen. So, if you think my bet is safe, raise your hand. If you think I'm going to shave my head, raise your hand. I feel so good about that.

36:30Andrew Edwards:Has anyone here taken a Tesla cyber cab in Austin? Because they do run ostensibly in Austin. Robo taxis? No, you're robo taxi.

36:38David Imel:It's robo taxi. No, it's robo van. Thank you.

36:43Andrew Edwards:No, no, okay. We have another question back here. Cool. I have actually seen the RoboTaxi here, so I have a picture of it. It is definitely out there. My name is Will, big fan of the podcast. Thank you. I watch pretty much every single one of them, at least tangentially through shorts. So I was just wondering, what is your all's next big purchase, if it is tech or otherwise? I hope at home one day.

37:13David Imel:So you can have your Rivian? Yeah. I have an answer. I mean, we kind of teased one at the end of Year in the Life.

37:21Marques Brownlee:Oh, that's the giant one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mine was going to be a tech thing.

37:26David Imel:Okay.

37:26Marques Brownlee:This video is not uploaded yet, so this is an exclusive. I just did a video of sort of a desk tour of reviewing everything on my desk. And on my desk is a bunch of things, a computer, monitors, keyboards, things that I've been using for like, 15 years straight and and I know them really well and I really like them and I choose them out of all the choices I would have had but sitting on my desk right now is two pro display XDRs and a Mac Pro and the Mac Pro isn't technically discontinued yet but it's pretty close it's basically discontinued it's an M2 chip it's like a three-year-old chip and they've had three generations since then and the Mac Pro is not getting any updates.

38:09Marques Brownlee:And the Studio Display XDR just came out and is better in every way than the Pro Display XDR other than being slightly smaller.

38:17David Imel:And lower resolution?

38:19Marques Brownlee:Yeah, slightly smaller, but same pixel density.

38:22David Imel:Okay.

38:23Marques Brownlee:So I think my next big purchase is going to be those Studio Displays to replace my Pro Displays. And then I was talking about this earlier. I'm not sure if I'm going to become the MacBook Pro guy that takes it everywhere and then plugs it in, or if I still have a Mac Studio on my desk or something like that. But that's what I'm scheming right now, is my updated desk setup. Do you want to enter?

38:49David Imel:Mine's probably either whatever keyboard convinces me to pre-order and forget about next, or I don't know. I probably won't upgrade a phone for a while, because Google keeps screwing me over with this 128-based storage. It's annoying, so I'll probably hold on to this for a while. I actually don't have anything. It's hard. It's like my MacBook M1 Max is still kicking it pretty dang hard, so I don't really need to upgrade my computer. I have a little apartment. It's got air conditioning sometimes during the summer. I don't know. I would say, I mean, I've been trying to, it does have to be technology, because I've been trying to convince myself to buy a Leica M7 for like six years.

39:28That's technology.

39:29David Imel:Raise your hand if you should buy a Leica M7. do it thank you that's probably it honestly I mean I will probably get a Rivian eventually maybe a cloud subscription cloud max no no alright next question right back here hey how's it going guys big fan been following you guys for a while I was just at CES this year and I saw a lot of autonomous lawnmowers and stuff what was it from CES that really impressed you guys this year that you perhaps are looking forward to in the consumer space. Robot phone. That was mobile. That's MWC, isn't it? Well, they showed it at CES first. Did they? I think so. Yeah.

40:12I'm just kidding.

40:13David Imel:I'm trying to remember what happened at CES this year. CES is the perfect example of when I say we don't remember timelines because I could mention something from eight years ago and it'll feel like this year's CES because it probably stays at CES for years at a time.

40:27Marques Brownlee:I will say that this kind of ties into my weather thing, but the autonomous lawnmowers were interesting. Oh, God. We've got several major blizzards on the East Coast this year, and someone that I've been following, every time there's a blizzard, he posts a video of his autonomous snowblower clearing his driveway actively while it's snowing so that he wakes up to a clear driveway. And one of them went super viral, and the whole world found out about autonomous snowblowers. and then we got another blizzard and it was too much snow for the snowblower and it was like kind of it had to go back to the dock and charge it was interesting like seeing like a real use case of that thing and i thought that was that was kind of like the best case scenario of like an autonomous vehicle that just silently while you're not thinking about it goes out and does work earns you some time and then goes back and charges and goes to sleep and i thought that was pretty sick.

41:18David Imel:There was one thing I'm remembering now, which was the Seattle Ultrasonics kitchen knife that is like essentially vibrates to help cut things better. They did wind up sending us one and we tried it. There was a short Marquez did on it. It was, I wanted to love it, but it just did not quite accomplish what I wanted it to. And I talked to the team there and they were super nice and they're going to keep trying, but I was a little bummed out by it, unfortunately. We learned that everyone in the studio has bad knife handling skills. I learned that very quickly. Almost everyone. Yeah, Ellis being number one worst knife handling skills.

41:55There were some really weirdly shaped cool phones there this year. I think that the Clix communicator was very, very cool. Oh, yeah. So I want to try that. I want to have a little weekender phone that I don't have to... Disclaimer, David. Disclaimer. Okay. The person who launched it was my old roommate. That's a crazy disclaimer.

42:18Marques Brownlee:I don't know what to say about that, but yeah, true. I also saw that at CES, or saw that from CES, and I was like, I want to check that out. I'm actually interested, and I did actually put$400 down for a pre-order, and not only to support him.

42:32Andrew Edwards:We have another question right here. Hi, guys. So this is the second live episode that you guys do, and the studio year recap, like getting cameras all over, was great. so my question is like is there going to be any more live episodes like this something that I've been looking I'm from Puerto Rico and like one of the big things that we live in a little bubble in the U.S. and it's just going out to other countries and seeing technology over there could be something different like I'm going to Japan in October and I'm like super excited about the tech over there now so like is that been any thought or like having more live episodes mostly if something else out of the country too sure we've what's awesome about Vox

43:12David Imel:setting this up is we get to do it without they handle all the hard work. Seriously, the people at Vox here who are setting all this up, kudos to you. You do an incredible job and we appreciate it. Thank you. They deserve an applause. It's really awesome. We've talked about it. Having Harper on the team now gives us a little more flexibility of possibly being able to set something like that up. It's just a huge undertaking. Maybe Year in the Life, If you have not seen it, it's an incredible thing. Our studio channel put out just covering literally everything we did last year. It's an hour and a half long.

43:48David Imel:We run on a really efficient and tight schedule. I mean, most of us, our flight's at four today, and we got in at 10 p.m. last night. So, like, we do things really fast. So a show like that takes out a huge chunk of what Marquez ultimately loves doing, which is making YouTube videos. so as much as we'd like to do it I think the first ones would probably be around New York City or maybe at a CES or something like that or near an event on the west coast I mean I'd love to go

44:19Marques Brownlee:out of the country and do so I will be campaigning hard for Puerto Rico I'm just saying I do I like what you said about like we're ultimately in our own bubble of like location wise kind of no matter what and uh I I got like a super huge dose of this last year I went to China to play at ultimate frisbee tournament but ended up like as soon as i landed i was just like this is a there's first of all 90 of the cars are electric this is insane and like being immersed in that culture in that space and realizing like this is its own bubble but there's nothing in common it's incredible and so then we came back here and i reviewed uh the xiaomi su7 which was an electric car from china in the u.s just to sort of shine a light on that and people were super curious about it and i feel like we should do that more often is sort of poke out of our own bubble and into others and understand like the tech that's running in other places and that's like more advanced than what we see in our own bubble.

45:11Marques Brownlee:So I hope to do more of that and maybe we'll go back to China. Even with smartphones it's pretty wild like all of the European phones that we're not even getting here that have insane features like the robot phone that we just talked about a couple minutes ago. Maybe not getting a global launch. So there's just a lot of weird interesting technology in these other countries that we don't even like it's It's kind of hard to even talk about it because we're not even going to be able to utilize it here. Yeah, that is actually the hardest part is importing a Chinese car into the US and getting a plate on it and register to actually drive it and test it.

45:42Marques Brownlee:That same problem is true for every piece of tech that's not built for this market from phones to computers to cars to everything in between. And the bands and the maps don't work. Yeah, it's like half-rogan. The entire language, one of the length, it's in Celsius and kilometers, I don't know what's going on. But it is worth the challenge to experience the tech that those places have to offer. Yeah. All right. We'll take one more quick break. And when we get back, even more of your questions.

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47:04Hi, super cool to see you all. I watch your guys' content all the time. I really appreciate it. Thank you, David, especially for all the film, camera, camera stuff. You've let me to get my own camera. But the question I wanted to ask was actually about form factors. I grew up in some of my favorite pieces of technology growing up, were things like the iPod Nano and the very first iPhone and stuff like that. Seeing how much bigger things have gotten year over year, I remember I have a Flip now, which is the closest thing I could find to a small phone. But when I was searching, I was hoping that the trend would continue towards what the Asus Zen phone was like, but then the next version got bigger and bigger.

47:41I'm wondering if you guys predict or think that the market and tech space will come back towards smaller form factors or whether the trend to get bigger and bigger is just going to be matched by like slimmer and slimmer to save our pockets.

47:54David Imel:Can I ask Kim a question real quick? Did we do, was Flip compact phone smartphone award this year? I believe it was. Do you agree with us that like the flipping phones can start being in our compact form factor? I was definitely wondering about that because it's, I mean, it's a square now, but it's still a chunky square. But I wonder if like Apple's design choices to go towards passport styles are going to start encouraging the rest of phone makers to start looking at smaller phones or whether that bigger iPad space opening is going to be more the direction people are going to head.

48:25Andrew Edwards:I have something to say about this. Because I used a small phone up until about three or four months ago. Mini. Yeah, the iPhone 12 mini. And I was constantly shocked at how many things just didn't work on it. Like how many developers did not take into account that a screen size even could be that small. Even when the Apple Sports app first came out, it didn't load because things were off screen and I couldn't scroll the page. And so I want to see these things come back. But there's a part of me that's like we're already over the cliff. Things would need to get re-engineered beyond just different screen sizes.

49:06I don't know. I mean, Android is changing a lot to be adaptable to many different types of displays right now. and there's actually a little bit of an Android revolution going on in the small phone form factor world right now. There was a startup that just launched like a square Android phone that everyone's been talking about for the last couple days. There's the Clix Communicator. You know, I have to give my little - Disclaimer, David. Disclaimer, disclaimer, it was my roommate. And then there's just like a number of weird form factors that are starting to come out in the Android space. And the current version of Android is specifically tailored to just kind of like grow and shrink and change.

49:40And I think that there's always gonna be a market there. The question is, is it enough to mass manufacture a product like this? That's why we always see these companies releasing a small phone for like one to two years and then like, oh, well, same result as last time.

49:54Marques Brownlee:Nobody wants to buy it. I think that's the key, is how big is the market? Because I think when you talk about small, especially small smartphones, it's one of the most interesting segments in tech because if you ask people, they all say yes, we want a small smartphone. we all want we all want a smaller smartphone and then when they put it on sale the bell curve is all people trying to get the biggest phone they possibly can yeah and so it will be startups it will be small market stuff but the bigger companies are finding out that it isn't worth it to develop a separate small phone when such a few a lot of people actually buy it so it's a sad thing but But I agree, I want that Zen phone back.

50:37Marques Brownlee:I love that phone, but it does seem like it is more niche than the super big companies are willing to put that effort in.

50:45Andrew Edwards:I want to try and rapid fire a few because we've got a lot of people who want questions and might guess.

50:50David Imel:13 minutes.

50:51Andrew Edwards:13 minutes. Okay. Sorry to cut you off, Andrew.

50:53David Imel:I miss small phones too.

50:55Andrew Edwards:Yeah. And you own Zen phones, so you're the worst person I could have cut off. That's fine. Sorry. Anyway, one up here in the front. Hey, guys. Hi. Nice to meet you. By the way, Mark, I thought you are way shorter for a while because of the photos you take with Justine and Saf at the Apple Podcast. And my question is... Oh, the Saf photos. I forgot. Did you guys ever notice or did you guys ever have an inconvenience or notice a bug that was so small and so inconvenient, but you still remember and it still annoys you to this day?

51:27Marques Brownlee:The podcast went live an hour ago, but we just got done talking about this. there is i've tested 300 cars at this point and andrew's car has a feature that i've never seen in any other car which is when you change the volume a full screen volume knob takes over the entire screen to show you your volume so whatever navigation music whatever was going on disappears and it says here's your volume that's insane i've never seen that before i brought that up

51:57David Imel:on this week's episode, hopefully you all listen to it after, to talk about for like two minutes. And I think half an hour into the episode, we're still complaining about it. So that's like my biggest annoyance right now is that. Yeah. I have an Android TV, but the way that it works is it's a projector and then there's an Android TV box that goes in the projector and they have two separate volumes for some reason, but you can only access one. And it's kind of just like quantum, which one decides to get picked. At one point it's like, oh, the volume's max, it's at 25, but you can't hear it at all, and then you have to turn it off and turn it back on.

52:32And then maybe, if you flip a coin, maybe you'll be able to turn the volume up. There needs to be a unified system there. Just put Claude on it, bro. Yeah, maybe Claude can handle it for me. All right, next question. Hi, thanks for what you're doing here. I actually wanted to ask about phones, accessory phone devices. I think I was trying to search what the name of the latest one was, but I just saw an article about how people are getting devices with their phones. They don't have to pull out their phone. I don't know if you've heard of those devices. Like an accessory phone. The Clix Communicator was the one in that article.

53:11Disclosure. What do you think of them?

53:16David Imel:Yeah. The Palm phone, baby. It's a hard sell for me. Well, Steph Curry had the Palm phone, so it was pretty sweet. I don't know. I kind of like the Clix community heater. It's just a phone. It looks interesting. I don't think I'm, Marquez is a two-phone person already, so maybe that's something you could do. That part of the accessory is meant for working and more keyboards. And as a keyboard lover, you'd think I would like it, but phone keyboards don't interest me that much. I think the most difficult thing about this is text message forwarding. Is that like, if I'm taking a phone for the weekend, generally it can have data, but it doesn't have my phone number.

53:52and if everyone would just get on telegram then it would be easier signal yeah probably signal is better I know but telegram has animations and stickers so yeah I mean I love the idea of being able to take something for just the weekend but if people can't communicate with me and that's even my concern about the clicks communicator too it's like it's a communication phone yes it's great for signal and it's great for telegram it's great for slack but if people are texting me which in the United States people still text you a lot. It's kind of hard to justify something like that. Totally agree.

54:27David Imel:I think it has to be your same phone number. Yeah. Just use WhatsApp. No. No.

54:32Andrew Edwards:I was using a minimal phone for a few weeks last year until I met my girlfriend and then decided to switch back to my iPhone because I thought I was less funny on a physical keyboard. That's my opinion. We have one question right here. We should redo that worst takes question. Yeah, I think we can shift two votes over to me for that one. We get it, Alice. You got a girlfriend. Hey, y 'all. It's lovely to meet you, y 'all. Thank you, Alice. I love y 'all and the entire studio. Thank you. I have a couple things to say. I think I will let OpenClaw access my ex's text messages. Maybe it can do something I can't.

55:12That's just me. I want to know what your pre-production pipeline looks like, because I find that pretty fascinating. and also from me to y 'all, from filmmaker to content creators, could we, the film industry, sway y 'all to change from 30 FPS to 20 FPS? He will get off the stage.

55:30David Imel:No. Because I think, by default, it is the best FPS and should remain the default and best. Mario, let's talk. Let's talk. Let's talk. Let's talk.

55:41Marques Brownlee:Can I just get why? It's just, to me, it's just most natural. It's just, you have films that's 24 fps it's just one more natural to me that's just i just like it like valid valid okay all right you know well okay so the pre-production stuff our pre-production is uh we've gotten it pretty streamlined over the years which is very exciting to me someone who loves efficiency um i talk about the octopus analogy all the time i don't know if you've heard it before but i think everyone who starts a youtube channel or really any creative endeavor kind of turns into an octopus where you're doing a lot. You're on camera.

56:20Marques Brownlee:You're also the editor. You're also managing the thumbnails and still graphics. And you're also doing all of the backend and the emails and the accounting and you're doing everything. And our job as a creator, our dream is to be able to like cut an arm off and like hand it to someone and have a small team around you that can kind of help with doing the things that they're really good at. And we've done that, which is really exciting. So I can do my job, which is writing, testing the tech. So I find that that's been, you know, my best way of visualizing it. That said, 30 FPS is definitely the move, and I'll tell you why.

56:56Marques Brownlee:It looks, so I used to do a lot of slow pans in my videos and a lot of little slow orbits in videos, especially because I'm trying to show you a gadget or a thing so you can see it before you hold it. and anything under 30 to my eye when I start doing those slow pans I start seeing a little bit of shudder a little bit of stutter and that was enough for me to go okay I can't do 24 it's got to be at least 30 then the argument for like 60 and above 30 comes in and that looks a little bit surreal and video gamey to me so that's how I land on 30 being the like ultimate perfect tech review frame rate.

57:37Marques Brownlee:If I ever do a short film, I might reconsider, but I'm probably going to default to 30. Probably going to stick 30. I started doing 30 for the exact same reason, because good fluid heads that were affordable for a college student did not exist. And I just saw this kind of jumpiness. And now my take, which I heard from someone else, I'm just jacking it from them, is that TV is 30 and YouTube is TV. So YouTube should be 30.

58:02David Imel:I'll throw one more really quick thing in there. Pre-production, we're really efficient with just because we've all been doing it for so long now. Post-production, one thing we're really trying to work on lately is we have so many videos coming out of our studio because of the different channels. We're really trying to have multiple eyes on it as much as possible because just when you're hitting upload, it's going out to millions of people. We just need to catch things. And one thing we're really trying to work on is fact checking, making sure we're not breaking embargoes and stuff, just lots of different things in there.

58:32David Imel:Other than that, if you haven't watched Year in the Life yet, it definitely has a lot of our pre-production stuff in there.

58:37Andrew Edwards:It's been in, because we don't make a lot of those mistakes period, but as we've ramped up all the different channels and we're making so much more stuff, it's been as unexpected like, oh, this is actually going to take a lot more time than we would have expected. Can I just get a quick time check, guys? 5.23. Perfect. Question back here. Sweet. Thank you guys so much. I've been a fan since middle school and put things in perspective. I graduated college four years ago. I guess I'm on now. My question is, what's your guys' thoughts on how successful Android XR is going to be? Do you think it's going to have a similar marketplace like MetaRayBang or is it going to be something like Vision OS, which no one really uses?

59:21Andrew Edwards:They just did the flight simulator thing. Anyone see that? No?

59:25David Imel:XR, are we talking about the whole OS and thinking of going into glasses and stuff like that later? Yeah, I think the Google Glass 2, 3 actually, because they already did Google Glass 2, is going to use it. I think Android XR is just going to be similar to Android where it needs to be able to fit a number of different form factors. I think there'll be a very small use case for the VR goggles, but ultimately what they want to look forward to is the regular glasses. That's what everyone is realizing now is going to be the future use case. I think the reason that Google has not actually released anything yet is because it wants to skip over the whole step that Apple kind of stumbled over.

1:00:06Apple thought, oh, we can just put you in a VR headset that's sort of also the world around you, but we should just have a clear glasses display with extra ambient information. What Google Glass 1 was in the first place, just want to say, they were 10 years too early. But yeah, I think, I don't know, as a platform, I think it's going to be more about that singular use case even though Google is always about making one platform able to jump around to multiple different circumstances.

1:00:35Marques Brownlee:Yeah. I think just for that reason alone, the ceiling for it is higher than Vision OS because there's the philosophy of like, make this incredible headset that you are in all the time and then make it smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, or start with something like glasses and then make it more and more capable, more and more capable. And it turns out the glasses thing is what people are more gravitating towards. So I think we're going to see more of that.

1:00:57Andrew Edwards:Do we have time for one more? Yep. Three minutes. All right.

1:01:00Marques Brownlee:Maybe two. Hi, Nitish. Nice to see you again. That's a whole different deep cut altogether. Yeah.

1:01:06David Imel:Good seeing you again. Yeah. First of all, I wanted to say that you guys said a lot of stuff about the vision, the MacBook Ultra last year and the other Siri stuff. So you said that last year on SouthbyStage, it happened this year. So maybe I think you should say things for Apple add that to the development pipeline for next year. So that might be a thing. What I wanted to ask is that we have a lot of phones with AI now, almost every phone, and every company is trying to do different things, mostly with Gemini. And yesterday also, the Gemini integration for phone use came out yesterday morning.

1:01:38So how much of that stuff do you actually use in your day to day and has it helped you or made things worse for you? Yeah, I think Gemini is quite useful in kind of all of its context right now. The actual phone use thing is only on the S26 Ultra right now, so only people who have that phone can even try it. And I think right now it's still limited to like calling an Uber and doing Uber Eats. Pixels 2 I think. Is it on Pixels as well? Pixels are going to get, or it might be out for Pixels as well. Yeah. So I think Gemini is just kind of trying to entrench itself into all of Google. Like they've said multiple times that Gemini is basically the new OS.

1:02:17And I think we're seeing that every new Android launch is just about Gemini and it will become the entire platform. So whether or not you want to start using AI in your phone, it's just going to be the phone at a certain period of time. Whether or not we actually, you know, just go let it buy something on Amazon for you without actually checking it first, that's going to be a whole different story that we're probably going to cover in length once we get there. I think I'll have to talk a bit about the M &I. Yeah. Yeah.

1:02:46David Imel:I don't use a lot of AI stuff. I'm still, I feel like it's making my regular Google Home worse. because I just feel like they forgot about all of that stuff.

1:02:55Marques Brownlee:I use the Gemini stuff a little bit to brainstorm. It's just fun to chat with a brainstorm, like an early video concept. Can we give one more in 115?

1:03:04Andrew Edwards:The action button on my phone does a claw chat. Do we have time for one more in the back? One time we got. Rapid fire. All right, let's rapid fire. Let's go.

1:03:13Marques Brownlee:One more.

1:03:14David Imel:Quick question. What are your guys' predictions for the PC space by 2030? How are people going to use personal computers? It depends on pricing probably at this point. It's kind of wild seeing how much Apple has gained ground in the last two or three years. Microsoft is, you know, they're kind of just forfeiting a lot of the personal computer space to Apple. And Microsoft is really, really entrenched in the business communication side of things and with server sales and things like that. And obviously Lenovo issues tons and tons of computers to different industries. But I don't know. It just seems like they don't care as much about the consumer side.

1:03:54And there's a huge shift that's happening in the personal computer side overall. What? One minute warning. Can we do one more right here? Okay. I think this is the last one. Really quick. Last one.

1:04:06Marques Brownlee:Yep. Okay. Hello. So YouTube and other platforms have been trying to push more AI production tools into their platforms. Yeah. And I think the general consensus of actual content watchers don't really like to engage with AI content. So my question is, who do you assume is actually consuming AI content? I know that we've seen OpenAI try to make slop content of a platform. So who do you think is actually watching this AI content? or are they just trying to grasp at straws and hoping something sticks? I can sort of end it with my take on the AI content thing. I think the shape of AI content is one of these, of like viewership of it.

1:04:57Marques Brownlee:I think right now it's ramping up really quickly because the tools are super available and the barrier to entry is super low. And it's super novel. So people see an AI video and they go, oh my God, this is AI. And they actually watch it and they share it and it's interesting and it's spiking. But I do also think, and maybe this is naive and it won't play out the way I think, but I think that people will ultimately want to watch human-made stuff. They value the human connection. They want the effort that a human puts into something, and they want to reward that and watch that. And that's more interesting.

1:05:28Marques Brownlee:And I think once we get over the novelty hump, I think content, whether it's vlogs or reviews or whatever it is, starts to be prioritized as like, I want to watch the human version. And then it goes to the other side of that. That's what I think.

1:05:41David Imel:The personal connections. Yeah.

1:05:43Marques Brownlee:Yeah. Woo! All right, take us out, boys. Thank you guys for watching and for tuning in. If you haven't already subscribed to the Wayform Podcast, you can find us online, watch us, and hopefully you enjoy the next show that follows. Take it easy. Thank you.

1:06:12drinking and brown hot water,