Nothing Like a New MacBook!

12:07David Imel:You don't think they go up for people

12:08Marques Brownlee:who want stills the 6k apple display is now going to be like no more production it's limited edition i think people are interested in the mini led i totally agree with that and the refresh rate

12:22David Imel:now the only 6k 32 inch cheese grater monitor you can get is that weirdo knockoff that we got for the replica video if you haven't seen that on the studio yeah also the xdr model the 27 inch does

12:33Marques Brownlee:charge at 140 watts so you can plug in the full 16-inch macbook pro the other one that is not the xdr model charges at 96 which is i believe the charging speed of the 14-inch macbook pro right yeah or some something like that yeah and uh so that i mean that kind of shows what apple like who apple thinks is going to buy these they think the mini led ones they're gonna be the hardcore workstation macbook pros whereas the the smaller well not smaller the cheaper one is gonna be you know the lighter macbook pro yeah um but you know my summary is the regular the regular studio display is not that great of a deal please cross shop a bunch of stuff the pro display the studio display xdr is kind of one of one again yeah it's i feel like it's not going to be adding much to

13:17David Imel:people who are like the people who bought pro display xdr previously now this is just what you buy instead and it's not going to be like just because it's cheaper i don't think it's going to gain that many more users. Yeah, I think it's, if you

13:30Marques Brownlee:today were thinking about buying a Pro Display XDR and then this comes out, it's like, oh, thank God I don't have to buy a Pro Display, because that was going to be way more expensive for essentially two extra inches of screen, or five, or whatever, but this is way cheaper and a better display. 120Hz is pretty nice, though. That's really what I'm most excited about, to be honest. That's pretty good. You're going to rock in CS2? I'm going to edit 30fps videos and it's gonna be great yeah um okay we got to talk about the iphone 17e yeah so obviously last year uh review was called like who is this for or something like that because it just didn't make any sense at all it was a 600 iphone with a 60 hertz display with no mag safe yeah one camera with the single camera which is the worst of all worlds yeah and also last year was the year that they started making the base iPhone like really good.

14:23Marques Brownlee:So it just made even less sense. I reviewed a$900 iPhone 16e. Why would they give you the top model? $900? Nobody is going to buy the top model. You can get all of the phone for$900. That's insane. So okay, now we have the 17e one year later. And what did they change?

14:41David Imel:There's like two ways this could have gone. Either it stays exactly the same or it's horrible or it's best is we get what the 16e should have been. I think that's what we got. And I think that's what we got.

14:51Marques Brownlee:I think that's what we got. It has MagSafe now. Yeah. It has one more color, so it was black and white. Now there's black, white, and pink. I don't know if anyone's asking for pink. Everyone's doing pink this year, I swear. Yeah. And it has the newest chip, and it doubles up to 256 seats of storage again, and it's still the same$599 price. And Ceramic Shield 2. And Ceramic Shield 2, which a lot of people are very excited about. Yeah. So, C1X chip may be underrated, but it's in there too. it's their newest highest end modem cellular wireless chip. Yeah. So that may end up being like the most high end thing in here alongside the processor.

15:26Marques Brownlee:Yeah. But I think what's really interesting is they stuck with a single camera and they stuck with the same exact design and the 60 hertz display on the front. Yeah. So now the question is just how much do you care about a single camera and 60 hertz display? Lots of people don't care clearly. Yeah. And lots of people will just buy this phone. I find it still a little crazy that if you cross shop a little bit for$600 you can get 120Hz OLED you could get dual, probably triple cameras but a lot of people don't want the Android thing I'd rather buy a standard 16 refurbished for probably cheaper than this than the 17e yeah I wonder if there's refurbished 17s already that are cheaper that are like$600 probably not that cheap probably not that cheap yet but 16s definitely yeah I think a lot of these things that we're going to talk about today, it's like if you're willing to buy used or refurbished, the better one from last year is a better deal.

16:24Marques Brownlee:And I think that people should get into the habit of looking at used and refurbished things before they buy the new thing, especially because we're getting such incremental upgrades every year.

16:33David Imel:I was going to say, not even everything we talk about today. Every phone we talk about pretty much.

16:38Marques Brownlee:Even the MacBook when we talk about it, because a lot of people are talking about the refurbished MacBook Air from last year.

16:42Andrew Edwards:Well, I was going to say that going off of how Marques started his video is like, if you're listening to this, if you're like one of our, like if you're subscribed to tech channels, you just, this isn't for you. Just like get the regular iPhone 17 or an old like Air or like refurbished, like do that. Because this is not for the people that are aware of this. Yeah. This is like you walk into a store and you're like, give me the cheap one. I don't care. Whatever. Like those people, they're going to get.

17:10Marques Brownlee:But it's got a high buy message because my nieces and nephews have buy message. The same thing with the new computer.

17:15Andrew Edwards:I don't care. What's the cheap one? That's who this is for.

17:19David Imel:At least this year they get a decent phone, like a phone that makes sense in the lineup where last year it felt like they were getting scammed.

17:26Marques Brownlee:Not having MagSafe was like a big L and then like they're kind of mogging Google with the storage right now.

17:31David Imel:I don't know what mogging means, but get mogged, Pixel. Hey man, Alyssa Liu said it so I can say it.

17:38Marques Brownlee:They're storage mogging.

17:39Andrew Edwards:Apple frame-mogged Google in Miami Club.

17:43Marques Brownlee:Google with a massive cortisol spike. Google launched after being frame-mogged by Chad Apple. Google's 10A has 128 gigs of storage again. So yeah, if the 11 comes out, I'm assuming that'll be 256 base. It's got to be.

18:00David Imel:This just has to be. Yeah, you're right, because now they did the 17 over the Pixel 10, doubled storage, same price, and now they did it for the cheap versions on both. This just feels like they're picking on Google at this point. Google's picking on themselves. Yeah, they deserve to get picked on.

18:14Marques Brownlee:Apple's getting to the point where they're not releasing anything with 128 gigs of storage anymore because when we get to the Neo, it starts at 256 as well. There's not a lot of 128s left in the Apple ecosystem. Google's got to catch up. Otherwise, they're going to have a lot of cortisol this summer.

18:29David Imel:I know you're watching. I know you are. I know you've heard us.

18:33Marques Brownlee:You can delete that comment and just get to work on the phone. All right. There's one more thing that Apple announced, and it was the final thing that they saved for Wednesday, which is a MacBook Neo. New name. Cool name. We've never heard that word from Apple before. We thought it would just be the MacBook. So MacBook Neo is a$599 MacBook. It's a 13-inch display. It's powered by an A18 Pro chip, so not quite Apple Silicon M series chip. but that was a chip that was in the iPhone 16 Pro and it seems to be right around the level of performance of M1. Probably a little better in single core, a little worse in multi-core.

19:12Marques Brownlee:But anyway, A18 Pro inside, eight gigs of RAM, 256 gigs of storage and four colors. It's incredibly inexpensive and so they've done all the things they have to do to get a MacBook, which is still made of metal all the way down. Like the keyboard's not backlit anymore. It's only two ports, Both are USB type C. One of them is USB 3. One of them is USB 2. And they're not labeled. And they're not labeled. Which is bad. The back one is USB 3. The front one is USB 2. You probably figure that out sooner or later. I don't know if people will, bro. I don't think they will. Or you just don't care. If you figured it out, you should be buying this.

19:45Marques Brownlee:I think most people are just using these ports to charge and not using them for daily transfer. One to charge, one to plug something in, a mouse, a keyboard, some random accessory. But you just, I don't know. Everything is wireless now. It's true. It's true. Because this is for people that are doing every, it's the, like you said, you guys both said this, the safari book right so like people are using online services almost exclusively with this computer so like why plug anything in except for charging it that's totally true yeah uh what else is true oh uh so the keyboard yeah not backlit and the trackpad is not a four-star trackpad it's an actual clicking trackpad and it's a little bit smaller yeah you said it felt good though it felt good felt totally fine uh no issues with that at all and the last thing i noticed is the keyboards were white and they had so the on the side they had like moved the speakers to the side of the laptop side firing like side firing i got a couple demos to listen to them they do not sound good yeah that's okay they're just baseline at laptop speakers at this point wait before you move on

20:39David Imel:this is something i want to clarify on here because i asked you this question i was reading in the review before you even got back or what you were writing and you say all the keyboards are white but like on the picture they look tinted they're tinted but like on apple.com they look colorful. Very colorful. And then I did see some of your footage. You said the lighting wasn't great, but it seems like they're closer to white.

21:04Marques Brownlee:Yeah, so they're... To be fair, I think Apple.com pumps the color a little bit. I think they look light and tinted. So on the Indigo laptop, for example, the keyboard looks light, light, light, light, light, light blue. Close to white. Not quite white.

21:19David Imel:On the website, it looks like dark purple almost.

21:22Marques Brownlee:Yeah, it looks dark purple. Yeah, it's not quite that tinted. So it's like LaCroix blue. a breath of exactly yeah like a tiny bit a truck passed by with a blue in it somebody whispered blue at the factory yeah yeah so uh so slightly matching keyboards and even like matching wallpapers and ui elements by default out of box so like on the yellow laptop the menu items are yellow and the keyboard is slightly yellow and it's like okay you got the citrus theme i love the citrus one so much are you into citrus i was thinking about that they asked me what's your favorite color there's citrus there's that's the yellow one there's indigo which is the blue dark blue one.

21:54Marques Brownlee:Then there's the pink one, which I think is called blush. And then there's silver. Andrew, what is it with you and piss colored tech?

22:02David Imel:Yellow. I do like yellow a lot.

22:04Marques Brownlee:It's piss.

22:05David Imel:Yeah, they got them on the yellow. It looks good. Also, I just thought, where's Project Red?

22:10Marques Brownlee:Oh yeah, that would be cool. The red would be sick. I don't know. Product Red. Product Red. Yeah. In all the videos, I know the lighting was kind of s***. Yeah. The piss one looks like kind of, it looks like neon green. Yeah, because the lighting it's so tough in person it's giving lemon lime it's giving like the Gatorade yeah it's like the best Gatorade flavor so like a tiny bit of green but not really the other morning it's mostly yellow y 'all haters it's mostly yellow it's my favorite flavor Gatorade I don't want to hear that you probably should not

22:43David Imel:say my favorite flavor while he's saying wait lemon lime is your favorite Gatorade I like orange and yellow yeah it's such a boring pick but I think I agree with yellow it's so good Gatorade And then Glacier Cherry.

22:55Andrew Edwards:What's your favorite flavor of Gatorade?

22:57David Imel:Like the red one. You can't call it Boring and then go Fruit Punch. I agree with that.

23:03Marques Brownlee:Fruit Punch is delicious. That's the default. It's good. That's the NPC Gatorade. No, the blue one. Yeah, but... Which blue one? Oh, God, I hate that one. Light blue. No, the problem with the blue one and the yellow one is that they make my saliva glands fire. They all do that. The red one does. So full of sugar. Really? Well, are you drinking a zero? I'm talking because they're a little bit sour.

23:24Marques Brownlee:background. Anyway, there's just the flavors of Gatorade here with this MacBook Neo. The silver is the absolute best color because it looks just like the old 12-inch MacBook. It looks very clean.

23:34David Imel:Everyone buying the silver is why we don't get fun colors on things anymore. I know. Because they're giving us fun colors and y 'all are like, oh, it's silver.

23:39Marques Brownlee:That's actually, I want to see this distribution here. Because there's a silver one. You can get the boring one or a colorful one and I want to know what the spread ends up being for different colors.

23:48Andrew Edwards:Regular people will buy a color, schools will buy a thousand of the silver ones. Yeah.

23:52Marques Brownlee:Everyone I know that pre-ordered one pre-ordered the piss color, but I think it's just because they like have taste. Who do you know that pre-ordered a MacBook Neo? Three people. Do they know that it's a piece of s**t? It's really... It's Project Linda. It's a phone. No, think about this. The A18 Pro is about the M4 single-thread performance. Multi-thread it's not, but for single-threaded tasks, it's about the M4. We should talk about what this computer is going to be capable of right okay everyone sees it's the the the smartphone chip and to be fair it will be not as good especially with the eight gigs of memory i think that's actually the real bottleneck but it will not be good for video editing it won't be good for gaming they were bold enough to do a gaming demo for me on this on a 60 hertz display was it an iphone game though it was basically an iphone game it didn't look that great but this is not for that but if you think about who's going to be buying this, it's a lot of schools.

24:48Marques Brownlee:It's a lot of students. It's a lot of young people's first computer who you're getting them a Mac instead of a tablet or something, or like a cheap, a random HP or a Chromebook. Yes. This for those people is a web browser and it's a spreadsheets, word processing, texting, basic stuff like that. Email. It's going to kill it all that. It's super good. And most of these things are single core tasks that this chip is going to be totally fine for. When you ask more of it, that's when you're going to feel like the edges of performance of like oh wow i can't play fortnight on this laptop or oh i can't play you

25:19David Imel:probably play fortnight it's optimized great i mean you can play it on a phone so like you can

25:23Marques Brownlee:do a lot of stuff at 60 hertz on this laptop but i think us like looking at it like thinking oh no it's not thunderbolt oh no it's not like higher fresh rate like this isn't a this isn't gonna be for that anyway yeah so i think it's actually a perfectly reasonable performance envelope i think the eight gigs of memory is going to be like a time thing like how long before apps are just using too much memory for this eight I had an eight gigabyte m1 macbook macbook air when it came out yeah and it's great up until your storage starts filling up because it uses the swap memory yeah and the memory is very fast so it's like it's generally fine but as soon as your storage starts filling up it starts getting slow yeah so I don't know I go back to the story with my sister how she bought the uh she bought the mac mini and the next day the double storage model was the same price so i told her to return it she's like why would i do that i don't use storage i just browse the web that's exactly what she said what am i gonna do with storage yeah and i was like yeah just regular people like we have so many things on our desktops and like locally on our computer because it's video files and it's big photos and it's all this stuff regular people

26:32Andrew Edwards:just do everything on the web browser i know but that web browser is usually google chrome which demands 64 gigabytes of RAM. That's why this is the Safari book. This is why this is the Safari book. Safari book. Which you know how I feel about Safari. I'm like the biggest Safari evangelist of all time. But like, I don't know, man. Yeah, I love Safari. I didn't know that. I'll never use anything else.

26:51Marques Brownlee:Here's an interesting spec about like what might make this a Safari book. The battery size on this laptop is significantly smaller than a MacBook Air. MacBook Air has something like a 55 watt hour battery. This has a 36 and a half watt hour battery. but they are quoting almost the same battery life as a MacBook Air. I guarantee that's mostly like video playback and using Safari because the second you throw Chrome on this thing is going to tank through that half-sized battery. So this is specifically like you're using Apple's apps, you're using Safari, you're using iMessage, you're using Apple Music, and that's going to be great.

27:26Marques Brownlee:It's also lower TDE because it's literally the phone processor. But like an M processor is just a big phone processor. They're pretty much the same architecture. I think it also comes with like a 20 watt charger because it's such a small battery. It doesn't really a big charger. And that's total lower power envelope.

27:42Andrew Edwards:Wow. It is so crazy that you can run Mac OS on an A18.

27:47Marques Brownlee:Yeah, man. What's also crazy is we've been running iPad OS on an M4.

27:52David Imel:That is also crazy. Now an M5, right? No, no, no. Sorry.

27:56Andrew Edwards:M4 iPad. Yeah. Like what else could we be doing? You know? Can I run Linux on a toaster? Like are we?

28:03David Imel:Yeah. Yes.

28:03Marques Brownlee:isn't there an A19 Pro in the studio display XDR they just print these chips yeah they put the iPhone in that display just for the camera

28:15Andrew Edwards:this chip is so cheap for them to make it's unbelievable to Ellis' point though that was the one takeaway that I had from this MacBook Neo thing was like oh so you can run macOS on these phone chips they just choose not to for sure so you think I can plug in the iPhone Fold and have a macOS experience because it's possible clearly

28:31Marques Brownlee:they might do that I don't know, especially if Google's doing it.

28:34Andrew Edwards:That would be freaking awesome.

28:35Marques Brownlee:I think that's a philosophical thing, because what you're saying makes perfect logical sense, and we are the consumer, and so we're thinking logically about this. But if you're Apple, and I've thought a lot about this recently, the super, super powerful iPad is still not good enough to be your full-time. That's a$2 ,000 M4-powered iPad, and it's still not your full-time laptop. For some people. It could be. For a lot of people.

28:56Andrew Edwards:If I could plug in an iPad and have Mac OS, there it is.

29:00Marques Brownlee:It just depends on what you do. There's some evangelists and there's a small fraction of people who are like iPad sickos that are like, yes, I got rid of my laptop. Yes, this is a thing. And you can do that if you're really dedicated. But I think for most people, they're specifically designing these products to live alongside each other. Apple's like, please buy a MacBook and an iPad. Buy everything. Use sidecar. Use continuity. Use the sync across the devices. They are perfect for each other. Michael, our graphics guy, he uses an iPad. he said just for the pencil and to draw things and then for sidecar.

29:33Marques Brownlee:Yeah. Yeah, but he also uses a magic mouse. So like, I mean, if you buy like a used iPad Air for pretty cheap, having an external display that you can just have at any time is pretty awesome too. Yeah, for your Mac. For your Mac. So they're like, please buy both. Yeah. And so for as powerful as they're willing to make the iPad Pro, they are not willing to make it powerful enough philosophically to be your full-time computer. But that's I want you to use it alongside Mac. It's an artificial limitation. It is 100%. yeah so apple specializes i know it's their specialty but they also let you plug it into the display and they talk about how with the new displays i loved that yeah they talk about how with the new displays like you can plug the the ipad the new ipad pro into the 120 hertz display and it'll like run at 120 hertz and you can do all the things and i think if they're letting you plug the ipad into that display with the thunderbolt cable and like run ipad os on the display they will probably let you do that with the fold that's my guess have you ever noticed the demos though that they run, whenever they do that, I pay very close attention to the demos that Apple constructs to demo their products, right?

30:33Marques Brownlee:And whenever they do the iPad plugged into the studio display, they immediately open Procreate and they just start doing the artist thing. They never do file management. They never do multitasking. They're doing the very simple, like, oh, here's the big display so you can view your work thing. That's on purpose. I think if they wanted you to do all that computer stuff, they'd be selling you a computer. I will say really quick with the new display, the really good one, the XDR one, they have the camera in it now. True. You guys should just get rid of continuity camera. There's many times when I get on a video call and my feed is just black and I don't understand why.

31:10Marques Brownlee:And then I realize it automatically connected to my phone. It's in my pocket. And I'm like, oh, this is annoying. You don't have to get rid of it. I'm just saying it's not.

31:20Andrew Edwards:When I'm in the audio room and I need to take a call, there's no webcam in that room. right and i i am so peripheral up in that setup like i really don't want to add another one yeah but i recently added my ipad as a third monitor with sidecar you can use that camera no but i just close the the sidecar window and take the call on the ipad oh yeah that's cool it is cool yeah so yeah i guess you could get rid of it marquez i want to know because you actually

31:45Marques Brownlee:played with uh these laptops people were talking about the thickness yeah can you talk about that

31:51David Imel:sure so down with the thickness i think a lot of people will be totally fine with it so

31:56Marques Brownlee:technically it is a little bit smaller than the ipad than the macbook air it is a 13 inch display instead of 13.6 right but it is basically the exact same weight and it is actually slightly thicker because of the lack of wedge shape and that's not to hold more battery it's not even like a bigger battery it's just like this is a not engineered for maximum thinness air so it feels like an air to me when i'm holding it it does i didn't worry about like extra weight or thickness it's i think technically on paper a tenth of an inch thicker than the macbook air yeah so like

32:28David Imel:not a big deal yeah is it i'm assuming it's not wedge shape because now the speakers are down here right which if you wedged all the way down to there you can't have the speakers in the bottom corner and also the headphone jack there looks really strange yeah it is weird it is really low yeah it makes more sense to be honest i was trying to figure out why it makes more sense Because it's just closer to you. And when you have actual headphones you're plugging in, the further, I mean, it's like three inches closer to you. Eight inches, it would probably be the difference. But yeah.

32:56Marques Brownlee:I will say the refurbished 13-inch MacBook Air right now on Apple's website is$750. This is how I think I need to review this computer. Yeah. Is if you are thinking about buying a MacBook Neo and you want to be a little bit, like you want to like look into it a little bit there's actually two other things you could do for six hundred dollars is you could get an m1 macbook air m1 right that'd be really cheap that would be a potentially just as good computer for you but it's an m chip um you get more software support from buying in neo today because you're starting today at day zero and have years of software but you know maybe you think an m1 air will have a better display more multi-threaded whatever that's a choice you could make.

33:42Marques Brownlee:And the other is you could still buy like a$500,$600 Windows computer or a Chromebook for that price. And I think it's, we all have this reaction because we're like, well, why would you do that if you could get Mac OS? But I think that's the comparison that I need to put it all. I need to put these things all online and see like, what's the advantage? What's the best Windows laptop I can get for$599? For students,$499. That's going to be tough, but I want to actually figure that out.

34:10David Imel:I think it's like if you're watching or listening to this podcast right now that might be something you look into. Most people buying this and those people might find your regular channel review going to buy it. To me the MacBook Neo is a laptop. All of us don't have laptops anymore. We have full-blown workstations that happen to be in a laptop now because we got to that point. Maybe workstation is not the right word But like these are insanely powerful for this. But when you think about what we just used to do with laptops, we would never sat at a desk with them and like plugged it into something.

34:46David Imel:We would sit on the couch or a chair or a coffee shop. And like that's what the Neo is. It's just a laptop.

34:52Andrew Edwards:That's a world I've never known. Like my first my first laptop was like a plug into a workstation desk and like and do it. And I remember being like, yo, why are laptops not as powerful as computers until the M series? And it's just like, why would we go like Claire has a laptop?

35:12David Imel:It's never she's never sat at a desk with it. She uses it on the couch or maybe at the dining room table or like in the like when she uses it at work. Sometimes I guess that's at a desk. But like those are laptop things to just do laptop things or we need to do like a studio video.

35:27Andrew Edwards:that's like a competition between a MacBook Air, a Neo, a Windows PC, and an iPad? Because I'm so curious where the edge cases that one of those cannot do.

35:41David Imel:I think this is that point, though, where if you're watching a video of like a competition between a Neo and something else, you're out of the Neo range already.

35:49Andrew Edwards:No, but like even for like genuinely. Just to wonder. What can you not do on an iPad that you can do on a Neo? You can get a keyboard.

35:57Marques Brownlee:You can Bluetooth any keyboard to an iPad. I know, but it's annoying. So that might be one thing to add to my discussion because the base iPads, 329, the keyboard and trackpad they make for it are$250. So that's$600 right there. It's$350 for the big one. So you could get that. And you can do file management and multi-window and most stuff. And then it's modular at that point, too. And you have a touchscreen if you want it. Yeah. And you could pop it off. Yeah, maybe that's one more option. Can't put it on your lap.

36:23Andrew Edwards:And I would also do this. That's true.

36:27Marques Brownlee:That's very true.

36:28Andrew Edwards:I would also argue that the people, the market for the Neo is more likely to use cloud storage. Yes. Just almost all web pages. File management doesn't matter really on the iPad. I don't know, man.

36:42Marques Brownlee:I think. I just like integrated laptops more than two-in-one touchscreens with detachable keyboards.

36:49Andrew Edwards:I also think we're overthinking this. Yep. I think if a parent walks into Best Buy and sees three laptops and an iPad that are all$600, they're buying the Neo. Because they're familiar with Apple.

36:59David Imel:This thing is going to sell. Yeah.

37:01Marques Brownlee:Also, education discount is$100 off. So it's$500 with education discount.

37:06David Imel:Can I ask a question if any of you guys might know? I asked this to Marquez. When I always think of getting an educational discount, it's usually with a.edu email address, which is college. But very clearly, this is great for high school and stuff like that. It might work if you have like a high school ID.

37:20Marques Brownlee:I'm not sure.

37:21David Imel:Yeah, I guess a high school ID, but it's harder to prove you are a student. And if you don't have to, then I'm just going to walk into an Apple store with a kid and be like, look at this student over here. It's been a long time since I was in that world.

37:33Andrew Edwards:But I believe Apple partners with a company called Unidays to do educational status verification. like for the past ever since i was in college like even my freshman year of college to get any apple edu discounts you needed to first go through the unidays verification and that's like high school students no that's why i'm saying like i don't know how you would do it as a high school student because you need to like you need to give them a bunch of documents like your your transcripts and like your edu i guess and like but also i wouldn't be surprised if a lot of high

38:04David Imel:schoolers are getting edu emails now yeah yeah possibly um i feel like also a lot of middle schools high schools are the ones supplying the computers for the classrooms at least in the u.s from what i've seen but i'm sure there's plenty of how do schools work in 2026 i don't really know how

38:19Andrew Edwards:your open claw teacher tells you some lies about george washington and then you go home and like play fortnight and drink caffeine all night right i remember in like eighth grade when

38:30David Imel:we got a smart board and the thing just never worked so they just used the whiteboard instead and we were like, damn, look at this technology.

38:36Marques Brownlee:You just had a smart board in eighth grade? It was called a smart board. It never worked, though. It never worked. It never worked. We just watched movies on the CRT, baby. That's all we did.

38:43David Imel:The smart board wound up just being the projector white screen, essentially, and they never used the fake markers on it. 70-pound TV on the car. The overhead projector, not a projector.

38:51Marques Brownlee:Wait, am I old? I might be at the end of people who had these transparencies. This was like maybe the end of high school. I had transparencies in middle school. Okay, yeah. What was it? Like the projector with the transparent thing. The overhead projector. That's what I just said. The overhead projector. Overhead? No overhead. It's on a cart. Yeah, it's on a cart.

39:08David Imel:But for some reason, it's called the overhead projector because I think the mirror or whatever that's above it is over top of it. So you could write it on a light. It leads into it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That thing. That was always funny when they erased and just wiped stuff all over the place.

39:20Marques Brownlee:That is an evolution of slide film, by the way, which was used specifically for slides like that so they could draw on it. Anyway, stay tuned for the Neo review. Yeah. I do think this is, yeah. I do think this is potentially one of the most disruptive products of the last couple of years. I think a lot of Chromebook sellers and Windows laptop OEMs who have been feasting in that price segment are very worried about that one. But we'll see.

39:46David Imel:Can I throw one other pro of this out here? Which is the pro to all Apple products in the US at least. It's not a pro, it's a new.

39:52Marques Brownlee:I was just going to make the joke and then I thought it was

39:55David Imel:No, it's just like when we're looking at cheaper products that are specifically not for tech people. The biggest pro of me suggesting this is when it breaks on you, I can tell you to go to an Apple store and get it fixed and I don't have to diagnose everything over the phone. It's so much easier to just be like, hey, you can get the help here.

40:13Marques Brownlee:I was thinking that because I've bought my mom computers before. I bought her a Chromebook before. I think, oh, it's Chrome. It's just Chrome. She can't mess it up. I was wrong. There are just infinite ways and she could just go to a store and I don't have to be her son. then I guess that, you know, it's great. Anyway, I want to make one more thing. The closest, like, analogy to this is the Surface Go. Do you guys remember that computer? Oh, they tried the Snapdragon one? It was not Snapdragon. It was Intel Pentium Gold 4415Y. Bless you. Yeah, thanks. And if you remember, Dave2D just shat all over this computer because it was so bad.

40:52Marques Brownlee:And it started at$400 just for the tablet, and then you still had to buy the keyboard and the pen, which were more expensive. I believe altogether was probably about the same price as this Neo device. And it sucked. It really did. It was seven years, it's seven years old now, obviously. And they made a better one that made it better, but it was still expensive and bad. So I'm just saying, look, all the tech PC channels, Linus Tech Tips, Linus is slowly, like has been making videos being like, oh no, oh no. Mac is better value than Windows in like almost every way now. Like there is no, it's very hard unless you're a gamer at this point to recommend yourself a Windows computer.

41:41Marques Brownlee:Also, like. Also, everyone's mad at Windows. So that helps. Yeah. Because Microsoft is a legacy corporation that doesn't. Anyway, I'm going to get so yelled at. But I'm just saying. That's okay. I'm just saying.

41:51David Imel:The Surface Go, if you look at it from the side, just looks like a bad math problem. There's so many angles going on. The keyboard is like slightly flipped up and I've got the stand and like everything about this.

42:04Marques Brownlee:I don't know. Again, it's seven years old. I get that. But there just hasn't really been anything except for like a Chromebook that is this price and can do this many things. And a lot of people, especially in the United States, own iPhones and the integration and all that stuff. Yeah. I mean, this is a pretty serious computer from Apple. I'm still, I'm very interested to get it in and have us like test it and play with it and see what it ends up being like. But being M4 single thread performance when that's what everyone wants most of the time, single thread performance is like, you know.

42:37David Imel:It's just yellow too. It's sick. It's piss, Andrew. It's so good. The silver is the best. I want the yellow keyboard so bad. I'm happy for you.

42:46Marques Brownlee:I think we have to take it to trivia. Yeah. Stay tuned.

42:53But first, I messed up.

43:01Andrew Edwards:I was so diligently researching when the Galaxy Buds actually came out because it was a more difficult thing to research than you would expect. You mean the Galaxy Gear Icon X? No.

43:11David Imel:Try AI Overview?

43:12Andrew Edwards:I would never try AI Overview. Dude, okay. AI Overview almost messed me up for this week, too. I spent way too much of it. If you saw me on my phone and on the computer, I'll... Anyway, Marquez, you stated yesterday that the buds came out before the fold or I don't know what you stated. Yesterday, last week. Last week. Last week. But you said the opposite of the other two boys and you were actually correct and I was wrong.

43:40David Imel:Who... I just want... Whoever put the comment correcting them, please unsubscribe. That was the first point David and I got in what felt like weeks.

43:51Marques Brownlee:Hey man, I got another point last week. Wow, that's a huge sum. One point up and y 'all are both one point down. That's huge for me. Huge for the program. I got the other question correct though, so it's okay. I know, but you both have minus one point and I have plus that point now. Two point spread. I just want to say shout out to Alex Waddell

44:10David Imel:who sent us that on Blue Sky. Appreciate that. You can admit. We need to nuke Blue Sky.

44:15Andrew Edwards:You can admit that there's value to Bluestack.

44:18Marques Brownlee:Make a way for my... You just got a point taken away. Make a way for my...

44:21Andrew Edwards:Yeah, okay. I'm just trying to take care. The trivia question for this week is one that I hopefully cannot get wrong. So I wrote a crazy question that honestly, let's go for it. I will give each of you one point for every tech product that you can name that has the word Neo in it. Okay.

44:41David Imel:Assuming MacBook Neo does not count.

44:43Andrew Edwards:MacBook Neo does not count. and um and the word it doesn't need to have the words like a space between the neo and another thing just have n-e-o in it somewhere okay yeah sure honestly i don't yeah it just has the letters n-e-o consecutively in the product name the reason i was going to say a over must be up is because i was just making sure that there were enough tech products with the word neo in the name to even have product yeah it has to be a tech product and tech product can be really broad like uses electricity broad oh i don't even oh nero never mind i don't even know no that doesn't count there's an r damn um but what was really funny is that when the macbook neo got announced a bunch of ai slot videos came out um that were fake samsung product announcements for a phone called the samsung s26 ultra neo that doesn't exist just because as people would google macbook neo this this would also get served.

45:35Andrew Edwards:See, back in my day. Of course, AI Overview does not know that those are, that's AI slot videos. So when you Google Samsung Neo to see if that ever existed, you get this really in-depth overview with specs of the Samsung S26 Ultra Neo,

45:50David Imel:a phone that does not exist. It's slop now, back in our day, it was just small channels making the Pixel Ultra instead.

45:58Marques Brownlee:All right, well, we will learn or we will know the answers. They'll be at the end, like usual. We'll be right back.

46:32Marques Brownlee:We'll be right back.

46:34Andrew Edwards:Hang on. Let me see that. And a five-year price guarantee? Oh yeah, we're switching.

46:39Marques Brownlee:That's what I'm talking about. Do we clap now or... I'm thinking high five.

46:44Andrew Edwards:At T-Mobile, get savings that keep stacking up. That's value you can feel every day. Switch now at T-Mobile. Savings based on Harris X billing snapshots from Q3 2021 to Q4 2025 among accounts with three plus voice lines compared to AT &T and Verizon. Excluding discounts, credits, and optional charges. See HarrisX.com slash T-Mobile. Price guarantee on talk, text, and data. Exclusions like taxes and fees apply. See T-Mobile.com.

47:11Marques Brownlee:Right now at the Home Depot, shop Spring Black Friday savings and get up to 40 % off, plus up to$500 off select appliances from top brands like Samsung. Get a fridge with zero clearance hinges so the doors open fully, even in tighter spaces in your kitchen. And laundry that saves you time, like an all-in-one washer dryer that can run a full load in just 68 minutes. Shop Spring Black Friday savings, plus get free delivery on appliance purchases of$998 or more at The Home Depot. Offer valid April 9th through April 29th, the U.S. only C-Store online for details. All right, welcome back. Let's talk about nothing.

47:44Marques Brownlee:Damn, I make a pun every time I talk about that company. Nothing came out with - Not say anything for a while. Yeah, sorry, I had to. It's okay. But nothing's coming out with three things. Nothing Phone 4A. Nothing Phone 4A Pro. And nothing Phone Headphones. Nothing Phone? Nothing Headphones A. nothing A headphones headphones A headphones A headphones parentheses A yeah god their naming is still kind of tough not gonna lie nothing's a weird name for a company it is anyway so the 4A is the the one that most of us are interested in it's a 350 pound aka that's a really heavy phone I know jeez that was a joke $350 phone coming out in a bunch of markets I think it's this is the one that's going global uh new design wait which one the 4A is 4A.

48:30Marques Brownlee:UK, Europe, India. Okay, so the 4A Pro is a global one. Got it. 4A is in those markets. I guess. Blue and black. Yes, it's a slight spec bump. It's got a couple new interesting things. I think people in this room have called it the best looking nothing phone ever. We talked a lot about the design last week. It's got pink. Do you still feel that way? I need to look at it again.

48:53David Imel:I'll go. It's hard to say compared to the Pro. The Pro looks really nice, but not in the colors. just the regular silver pro looks really nice okay um i think 4a is still nicer looking 4a i think is

49:07Marques Brownlee:a more general nice looking phone the 4a pro is really cool and kind of almost gamery but in like a subtle way well i don't we can get into that soon yeah i think yeah true so i guess i'll just

49:21David Imel:jump into the specs real quick though but last week we only talked about the pink and the white there's also a blue and a black one so there's four colors for it the blue looks good too the

49:31Marques Brownlee:blue looks really nice yeah so this is running a snapdragon 7s gen 4 it has a 5080 milliamp hour battery with 50 watt charging ip64 a pretty bright display it says 4500 nits peak brightness i almost never know what to make of that i kind of want to know just what the regular 4500 yeah like then peak hdr like one pixel will be at 4500 nits and then you can put that number one of the glyph leds

49:55David Imel:on the back?

49:56Marques Brownlee:Yeah. Gorilla Glass 7i. It's got triple cameras. It's got a pretty good looking set of specs for a phone that is this cheap. I have a question for the audience that maybe you guys can answer. People still seem to care about processors. Hard stop. I understand the gaming aspect of it, I suppose. Although I'm not really sure what mobile optimized games don't run at high frame rates anymore. Maybe like Genshin Impact or something. That seems to be the benchmark. But I still see people caring about the processors. And I'm like, if the processor is lower tier, quote unquote, but it enables things like super bright, 120 hertz, 50 watt charging, like all this stuff, why do you care?

50:42Marques Brownlee:This is my question. Yeah, great question. I think this is another thing where in the bubble that we're in of people overanalyzing every little detail about a phone, like the enthusiasts, they care about getting the most for their money and so when a slightly better available part is out there they want that one instead of the one they got but I think for most people a lot of people especially even sometimes watching these but who are just more casually shopping they are not thinking about the difference between the Snapdragon 8 Elite or the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 or the Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 4 Galaxy like they're all a good chip and the phone performs well therefore I'm not getting ripped off.

51:24David Imel:I agree with you. I use a Tensor chip so clearly I don't give a shit about performance. But I think like what Mark has said in like this more range of things when you're probably cross shopping if I'm looking at two phones at the same price and one chip is better then I'm probably going to go that for the longevity route. That's when I I'm hoping that's when people care about it more so here but I also as much as I love speaking for the audience I'm probably wrong when I do it.

51:51Andrew Edwards:No, I have two audiences. I think it's less like the people that care about the frame rates on the newest game. It's more so how long would this phone last me? I'm spending like$500,$600 after taxes.

52:02Marques Brownlee:Like, I want it to last a while. Well, Apple would say that running at a lower clock speed actually makes the phone last longer, which is why they force lower clock speeds, but they can't really do it anymore. I think that's a perfect example of the two different audiences. Yeah. There's one audience who's like, how dare you? I want the highest clock speed so I have every single frame. I want the maximum performance. And then there's the other audience who wants just the phone, hey, it works, so make it last as long as possible. So if you were in the first bucket who's like, I want to maximize and get the best possible performance, especially when you're buying a higher end phone, I think it makes way more sense to pixel peep and to really want the most out of your phone, then that makes sense.

52:38Marques Brownlee:But if you're buying a$350 phone and it just works, and especially with, I think Nothing software is pretty good. Like it's smooth enough. I don't think it would even feel that different on a Snapdragon 8 Elite versus a 7S Gen 4. Yeah. So it's like, yeah, as long as it lasts me a couple years and doesn't fall apart, seems like it's a good enough chip. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? So that's the regular 3, the 4A. And we also got the 4A Pro, which I have to say, it got announced this morning. Surprise. You probably got some early stuff about it. But I did not know anything about it. It didn't leak online.

53:12Marques Brownlee:This has got to be one of the first tech launches that hasn't leaked. They played us. a very long time.

53:18David Imel:I feel like they the design video last week was to be like look over here. Yeah. They literally like slide a man. Yeah. And they did a good job at it. Yeah. This morning I came and I was like, we have a lot to talk about the pod. I have a lot to write this morning because we also had to shoot S26 review. And then I sit down and there's two new nothing products I didn't know about. I was like, oh my god. We didn't know about it technically.

53:40Andrew Edwards:Marquez told us last week.

53:42David Imel:Marquez did not tell me about. I asked earlier.

53:45Marques Brownlee:He told us on the podcast. I left it He did ask, is there a 4A Pro? And I was like, yeah, probably. He said, yeah, but I thought you were just speculating. Me too. Why are you hiding from us, Mark? I only say what I'm allowed to say.

54:00David Imel:Earlier this week, I said, hey, I'm writing podcasts. Can you send me the 4A specs so I can write it down? And you're like, sure. And didn't send the Pro or the headphones.

54:10Marques Brownlee:Well, I didn't get the 4A Pro info. That was the thing. So the event was in London. the literal hours after the Apple event in New York. So I couldn't physically be at both. So I made the decision to see the six Apple devices in New York and I wasn't able to teleport to London fast enough to also see the 4A Pro. Bummer. Dude, what's wrong with you? Yeah, I couldn't, I actually looked, I was like, is there a flight that takes off and gets me there at like three o 'clock in the morning so I can just show up and make a video? But no, there were no flights I could make that happen. That boom plane.

54:43Marques Brownlee:Don't, yeah. Do not to vote that. We're cutting that.

54:46Andrew Edwards:Why? Dude, because that's not f***ing real. We talked about it, though. It's true. That s*** is not coming out. Are you kidding? That's why we couldn't take it.

54:54Marques Brownlee:That's why we couldn't fly on it. That's true.

54:55Andrew Edwards:Yeah, no.

54:56Marques Brownlee:But yeah. So anyway, this stuff was sort of held in London for us to see from those who are actually there with cameras. Yeah. And it looks pretty good. The specs also look pretty good. So the 4A Pro, again, it's a 4A Pro, not a full flagship. It's not a 4. So because it's a 4A Pro, it's got a Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chip. I'm going to kill myself. I think this is just them coping that it's like, hey, if you want to put a mid-range chip in this, you can't call it a flagship. If this was a Snapdragon 8 Elite, then they could call it a flagship. But since it's not, all right, we have to call it the A Pro instead of the flagship.

55:32Marques Brownlee:Fine. So Snapdragon 7 Gen 4, 6.83-inch AMOLED. It's a 120-hertz display, but it will sometimes get to 144 hertz, depending on the app, kind of similar to some other gaming phones have. 5 ,000-lit peak brightness, which means nothing to me. 5 ,000 milliamp hour battery, 50-watt charging, triple cameras again. Better cameras, though, than the 4A. And better looking. It's got the glyph on the back. It's got the nothing phone 3 little display thing.

56:00David Imel:Yeah, in a better way. So like if you haven't seen it yet, it is an all metal body, which is awesome. It's beautiful. Except for wireless charging because it doesn't have that because it can't. Oh, I didn't even think of that. Yeah. Poopoo. It has like a large camera bump similar to an iPhone in terms of footprint. But this is proof that you can do that like everyone else and make it unique because this is actually sweet. Essentially, one main camera, top left corner, dual camera. What are we calling them again? Pills? It's a pill. The pill? The bean. The bean. We got a bean, a double camera bean under that horizontally.

56:35David Imel:Then to the right of that, a large circle glyph interface, which I believe has 137 mini LEDs. It's 57 % larger and twice as bright compared to the phone three glyph interface. Wow. Yeah. And we still have the red recording LED on it because that should be on every single phone ever. Yes. But then encased in that is a full metal silver, pink, or black body. Yeah. And it looks great. It also has the like It has like the little circular like indent on the bottom that matches the new Pixel Buds Sorry, not Pixel Buds Nothing Buds feels like that It just like

57:13Marques Brownlee:It matches all together really well The pink I will say Okay, so like in the camera bar it is color matched on the silver and it's color matched on the black but the pink is still silver so it looks really weird I kind of wish that they made that pink

57:30David Imel:here's my problem is look at this picture on the verge that looks this is the black phone but it looks like a silver camera bump and the black metal looks like it got like plasti dipped instead

57:41Marques Brownlee:of like the silver version of this phone is the best looking it's 100 it looks great yeah i will say like i miss the htc full metal body phones and um if you're not gonna have wireless charging which i still really love wireless charging all metal is pretty awesome i'm curious about uh heat and how that ends up working out. Maybe because this chipset is, you know, a little bit lower performance, it's not going to get as hot. Is there a vapor chamber in there? Probably. I don't actually know. I don't know. I don't know. The renders might look better than these in person. I'm very curious to see them in person.

58:15Marques Brownlee:It's definitely more gamery than their other devices. It's a little more, I don't know. I'm not getting gamery as much as, I'm getting like R2-D2. Yeah. It's like a little playful pill morphing.

58:28David Imel:It feels like a phone that they took the nothing buds and just put it in the camera bump. Like that's where all the nothing design aesthetic is. The clear and kind of like red accent and whatever. And then there is a little bit at the bottom, but I kind of dig it because it's not trying too hard while also trying too hard.

58:46Marques Brownlee:Yeah. Which is a hard thing to do. Do we see the price yet? $4.99. $4.99. So not flagship price? No. I think a pretty good price actually. It's cheaper than the Pixel. It is interesting, though, because it's$499 USD,

58:59David Imel:499 pounds, and 479 euros, which if you do the... They've done this before, where they match the price, but when you do conversion rates on that, it's wildly different.

59:08Marques Brownlee:Yeah, it's a better...

59:09David Imel:It's the same price as the Pixel 10a, right? Uh,$4.99. Yeah. While you guys are looking, my favorite thing about the video was it says world's first 140x zoom asterisk and then says claims are based on publicly available data at launch. Which I think is the claim that it's the world's first 140x zoom. Which again, just. Which is useless. It's going to look really bad.

59:31Marques Brownlee:If you zoom into 140x, what are you doing?

59:33David Imel:Have you watched the video? No. Even when it zooms in on the like perfectly rendered video of everything, this looks terrible.

59:41Marques Brownlee:yeah yeah i mean yeah hey at least they're honest here real quick it's 499 for the 8 gigs of ram

59:46Andrew Edwards:128 storage yes another hundred dollars for the 12 gigs of ram 256 storage those are the only two

59:52Marques Brownlee:options just do a thousand x and just make it look really bad yeah what's stopping you from going to 2000 yeah exactly you could just brand it that way 2000 x zoom world's first world's first yeah um yeah i think it looks pretty good i think the nothing uh design team has been really cooking recently. I think they also did the thing where they kind of made the previous stuff worse so that we'd go, wow, they cooked this time. Look at the improvement. Probably not. We made it worse. The iPhone 16E was so bad that when the 17E was what it should have been, we were like, wow, they really cooked. Can you do that with design?

1:00:28Marques Brownlee:It depends how quickly you have turnaround. We hated the 3.

1:00:33David Imel:We hated the 3, but not the 3A, so I guess that depends on theirs.

1:00:36Marques Brownlee:I mean, the analogy I'm making for the 17e to the 16e is the iPhone 12 mini to the 13 mini because the primary problem was the battery, and that's the primary thing they addressed in the next one. And with this one, the primary problem was the lack of wireless charging and the storage, right, for the price. Versus the 3A Pro? I was talking about the 16e. Oh, the iPhone? Yeah, MagSafe. So now with this, I think this is more analogous to the 3 than the 3A because it uses the same kind of glyph interface even though it's bigger and better now apparently. The 3 still had a chipset that people were not that happy with.

1:01:17Marques Brownlee:It was also super expensive. It was also super expensive. Like I don't see a reason anyone would buy the 3 when the 3A Pro exists, which is kind of funny. I feel like maybe they should have just called this the 3 Pro, but I guess they couldn't because the chipset is technically not as good. I just hate, this is the thing, this is my thing why does everything rotate around the freaking chip set? It's just because of the super super like the nerds among us would be like are you seriously making a new flagship with a worse chip? Yeah but like, we've all said it and we've all

1:01:44David Imel:done it also. So it's like

1:01:46Marques Brownlee:they cannot name this a flagship because everyone will say that about them so they have to leverage this naming scheme of like okay it's not the A because the A was the 4A but it is better than the 4A but it's not a flagship chip So we'll call it the 4A Pro. That's how they get away with this specific set of specs and this price. And when they inevitably try a flagship sometime later, all of us nerds will go, well, you better put a flagship chip in it. Otherwise, I'll spend my money on something else with a flagship chip. Can't wait for the CMF Phone 3 Pro Lite that is better than a nothing Pro 4A.

1:02:17Marques Brownlee:Yeah, it'll be tough. Yeah. Yeah. I think they did a great design job. I love this phone.

1:02:23David Imel:I didn't even think of no wireless charging, though. That makes me sad.

1:02:26Marques Brownlee:It makes me sad, but I don't know. If you're not going to, I mean, I want it for sure. I always want it. I kind of want it. But if you're not going to do it, Metal Body is sick. True. Because I missed my HTC Thunderbolt, even though it burned my hand. What about, there's so many better metal phones you could. The HTC Thunderbolt? The Thunderbolt was the worst one. What are you talking about? The Thunderbolt was the worst battery life of any phone I've ever used. Yes, I agree. They were like, let's do 4G and then burn it to the ground. What about the HTC One or the HTC One M7 M8? I guess, yeah, those are more legendary.

1:03:00Marques Brownlee:The Google Play Edition. I know. Those phones were... Nexus 6P. Yeah. Yeah, we had a good metal jackass. Oh, Nexus 6P. Good metal phones did exist. Yeah, I guess, yeah. I only made that... It was my first smartphone, so I guess that's why. Yeah. You didn't know better. Yeah, I didn't. Well, they didn't have anything better at the time. Yeah. So they also made headphones. Nothing headphones A. Yeah. So now they have two tiers of headphones again. we can assume based on the name that the headphones A, again I haven't tested them, I'm seeing the design and the$100 lower price, we assume that this is a slightly lower end set of headphones, but it still has all the nothing design philosophy, there's some colors as well they still have some of those clever buttons too, that the original nothing headphones had, I think a lot of people forgot how interesting the nothing headphones were, they had like a I use them every day, yeah okay, so you know they have the paddle, they have the roller as well and the software that talks to them So these headphones still have a lot of that stuff, and they have, seems like a pretty decent, well, eight hours of playback.

1:03:58Marques Brownlee:Oh, in five minutes of charging. Sorry. We don't know what the battery life is total.

1:04:02David Imel:Battery lasts for five days.

1:04:04Marques Brownlee:That doesn't mean anything.

1:04:05David Imel:Which could mean a billion different things. How many hours of playback?

1:04:07Marques Brownlee:This is the one thing where you can't tell us the battery.

1:04:08David Imel:The battery literally dies after five days, and you cannot use it. You can't charge it.

1:04:12Marques Brownlee:Yeah, I guess that's a mixed-use stat. But with headphones, you can just be like, I turned them on, I hit play, when did they die? Yeah. That would be a useful number. These, in my opinion, look significantly worse than the Nothing headphones. I think I kind of like them more than the regular Nothing headphones.

1:04:26David Imel:I think I just like the clear part on the outs. So if you remember the other Nothing headphones, they're square and circle. Square, outside, circle, bump on the inside. That's what this is too. Yeah, yeah, but the circle part on the Nothing Ones, the headphone Ones, is where the clearness is. And then on this, the circle part on top of the square is where the color is. and the clear parts the square. I just think it looks way worse. So it's like opposite. I think it's just trying to do less.

1:04:55Marques Brownlee:Yeah, but it looks way cheaper in my opinion.

1:04:58David Imel:I mean, I think both of them look pretty cheap. I don't really love either of them. I love my Nothing earbuds.

1:05:05Marques Brownlee:I will say I use the Nothing headphone ones pretty much every day because I've been using them as earmuffs.

1:05:10David Imel:Well, you just use them because the Stranger Things guys use them. Yeah, that's true. They're fashionable.

1:05:15Marques Brownlee:No, but I get stopped by a lot of people asking what they are and people are like, oh, it's cool. It looks like a cassette tape inside. What color do you use? And then they put their AirPods back in and walk away.

1:05:24David Imel:The black looks bad because it's glossy.

1:05:26Marques Brownlee:I disagree. The black is the way to go because they're so minimal. You can see the fingerprints so much more.

1:05:31Andrew Edwards:Yeah, but no one knows you're wearing a crazy pair of headphones. The white ones are like, woo, I'm here. The same way with all these colorful ones. It's like they're so pick me energy.

1:05:39David Imel:The black ones are the ones. Just the color doesn't change the pick me energy on these headphones. I disagree. I think it totally does. Bro, I don't know.

1:05:48Marques Brownlee:I think we're all contributing to phone companies only releasing black and white at the moment.

1:05:53David Imel:These are four different colors.

1:05:55Andrew Edwards:You're telling me. No, it looks beautiful. I just would never wear them in public because it's like going to get double takes. Like people are going to look at you and then look away and then be like, wait, what are those? Because up right there. The black ones are just headphones. People will look at you and be like, oh, he's wearing headphones.

1:06:07Marques Brownlee:But you really think that the A looks better? Yeah. It looks like nothing. Nice. I kind of dig the yellow one.

1:06:14David Imel:Fun. Oh, my God.

1:06:15Marques Brownlee:Their website is infuriating. Oh, God. Okay, what I didn't even know was that there's four colors. Oh, my God. What is that? Holy moly. Show Adam. He saw. Did you see? You haven't seen the yellow and pink are just in the center. So that's what I'm saying. They're just in the center.

1:06:33Andrew Edwards:The yellow and the pink ones, I think, I like the colors, but I do not like the headphones. They look so bad. The white and black ones are fine. They're unbelievably ugly.

1:06:42Marques Brownlee:Also, I just want to say, I just went to the PCMag website where they have an article about these headphones, and they're saying the five-day battery life is 135 hours straight of play time. That's what it says on The Verge, too. So just for some context. With ANC off. It would die in five days. Just for context, a normal... Does this have ANC is the other question. Yes, it does. So a normal ANC set of headphones flagships are getting 30, 40, the really good ones, 50, and in some insane cases, 70 to 80. Like I think the Dyson headphones had a crazy big battery and did 80. 135 is unheard of for ANC headphones that doesn't seem like a lot i need to investigate that's only with the AAC codec though if you as soon as you switch to LDAC or any other lossless thing that

1:07:26Andrew Edwards:it has built in you're going to cut that yeah okay so they cherry-picked 135 hours with the

1:07:31Marques Brownlee:lesser codec and ANC off that's how they got this number if you do LDAC and ANC on it's 62 oh that's okay that sees how the context yes okay that that okay got it yeah so if you're willing to have it sound like ass, then you can get a lot of bad luck. You can't. David, I guarantee you, you cannot. I know.

1:07:52Andrew Edwards:Okay. I've been pumping AAC into your headphones this whole time. You sound like ass. You're listening to AAC in your headphones right now, David. I almost brought this, and I wish I did.

1:08:03Marques Brownlee:I'm kidding. Fender released a bunch of new stuff recently. I don't know if you remember this. A year and a half ago, you had me take a Fender briefing for you. These guys? Yeah. Okay. And they released. My cut's just an air guitar. Air guitar. I've heard of Fender. They were announcing like new headphones and some new speakers, like wireless speakers that are also amps. And they got bought by like a Chinese company or something. And they decided to make the brand like way better. And they said a year and a half ago is when I had this briefing. And then yesterday on my front porch arrives an enormous box.

1:08:43Marques Brownlee:enormous like huge and i was like what the hell is this and one of them was a pair of headphones wireless headphones from fender and inside of the left ear cup they have a dongle a usbc dongle that you plug into any device and it allows you to do uh it allows you to do lossless audio when you say inside the ear cup you mean like like you take that you take the ear plush thing off and then there's a dongle inside that you can take out and you can put it in your laptop or in your phone okay and it allows you to listen to lossless audio oh and there's three modes there's like there's like aac there's lossless and then there's um aura cast which allows you to basically transmit the same signal like audio signals on multiple headphones it's actually kind of interesting it's interesting and then they're also insanely repairable like the other side has a you can take this off and replace the battery.

1:09:36Marques Brownlee:They're sort of trying to be like the Fairphone headphones, the Fairbuds XL in a lot of ways. Why did I bring this up? I brought this up related to these headphones for a reason. Is it because they're lossless and wireless? The battery life?

1:09:50David Imel:Because of the audio codec. Because of why you talked about it?

1:09:55Marques Brownlee:Just wanted to flex on us? No, I had a reason. Well, of course, because he's wearing the white headphones all the time. so I had a reason for this well anyway that it was interesting I'll bring it in next week I'll show you sure yeah that's cool that's kind of like yeah you can do Bluetooth on the MX Master 4S or you can plug in a dongle and get like yeah connection right right right right so it was interesting

1:10:16Andrew Edwards:I got something to say say it last time we talked about the nothing headphones like when they came out and I wore them on the podcast and I was just sort of like come on guys who cares you know I sort of gave him I have revised that opinion because I I personally feel that the wireless over-ear ANC headphone space, since that conversation, has turned into such garbage that actually I find myself recommending the nothing over-ear headphones more than most other things.

1:10:51Marques Brownlee:They're$500?

1:10:52Andrew Edwards:They're$300. Oh. And that's the first reason, is that most things in this space are crazy overpriced. overpriced the headphones that i use every day the focal batiste i mean dummy overpriced sure but that's like my maserati the bowers and wilkins like p x8 whatever those are like yeah way overpriced they do not sound significantly better than these yeah i think every single year the sony whx whatever sound progressively worse and worse and like the newest ones whatever number we're on, I just think are like borderline unlistenable. They sound so bad. Whoa. That's a hot take. That's a hot take.

1:11:35Andrew Edwards:He's been whining about it for years.

1:11:37Marques Brownlee:I consistently choose them over AirPods Max despite the worst connectivity because I think they sound better.

1:11:41Andrew Edwards:I think if you're looking you think they sound better than AirPods Max? Especially for flying. I think whoa, we got to talk about that. To me, the Sonys are so mid-forward and they have so much distortion in the mids that if you're trying to use them for like any sort of clinical listening. They're like it's the equivalent of like rubbing Vaseline on a lens. Yeah, is that your problem? Like a doctor podcast? No, no, no, no, no. If you were trying to like listen to something and be like, does this sound right? You know what I mean? For any sort of like, obviously I'm coming at this from a different thing, but like I don't enjoy listening to them.

1:12:22Andrew Edwards:I think you enjoy listening to music differently than people. Sure. I think the Sony's probably sound exciting. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is like for the money yeah the inexpensive too for the money and the feature set i think that nothing's actually like some one of the most competitive offerings and you know something really funny because i obviously get asked way too often like what headphones should i buy and so i've been recommending the nothings more and more and more and i have not gotten a single person to buy them oh interesting because of the aesthetic they look every single person i've been And I think this is the best bang for you.

1:12:55Andrew Edwards:Also because Bose quality, obviously the noise-canceling Bose offers is still really, really terrific. Sound quality, I can't really say the Quiet Comforts aren't super competitive anymore. So it's like, yeah, this is kind of the jam and no one wants the nothing.

1:13:11Marques Brownlee:The two thing I hate about the nothing headphones is that the ANC basically does not exist. It is a feature that I don't hear it almost at all.

1:13:20Andrew Edwards:The Bowers and Wilkins are the same way and the Focals are the same way and those are both twice the price. Okay. So it's like.

1:13:26Marques Brownlee:I don't love the audio quality on the Nothing headphones either. It kind of, it feels like everything is like a very, it's like, it feels like it's trying to force like a spatial audio thing all the time. Okay. And you can't turn it off. If there is a, sometimes they do. Do you have the Nothing X app? Maybe it's in the Nothing X app. It's probably.

1:13:43Andrew Edwards:I feel like with the Nothings, it's like you get clear highs that are not piercing. you get clear mids that are not like blurring everything else in this in the the sound the sonic field and then you get good decent enough lows and the transient response is good and music sounds like the way it mostly should on those things um so show me a graph right i don't believe you no no no no all right right and uh shoot i wish i brought in these these yeah these uh I was going to say the other headphones that I haven't tried but people I trust say are like pretty decent are the Marshall headphones the Monitor 3's which are about the same price as these anyway this is all to say that I'm excited to try these headphone A's just because the longer I've like observed the space the more I've been like damn I was really not fair to the original nothing headphones they really are a cool

1:14:41Marques Brownlee:offering yeah I'm going to bring in the Fender next week for you to try because they look very normal and they also cost$300 and they have lossless audio and AuraCast and all this cool stuff. ANC is way better

1:14:53Andrew Edwards:than the other headphones. The Sonys the Sonys sound so bad that when I finally confronted Rich and I was like you have to stop editing on these because you're missing so much. You're not hearing so much stuff and I gave him the Bowers and Wilkins which are not that much better headphones like they sound pretty bad in my opinion too and he it was literally like oh my god like I can hear the room I can hear these qualities in their voices like the Sonys literally are unable

1:15:30Marques Brownlee:to recreate these sounds yeah interesting yeah I would definitely not edit on them I usually think of like the types of headphones I think of like the the music listening fun headphones v-shaped graph all that fun stuff and then like the more reference headphones and i've i firmly put the sony ones in the like music listening fun headphones yeah i guess my my brain is different

1:15:48Andrew Edwards:because like what like picture me telling you the video equivalent of this marquez like picture me being like dude i have this display the blacks are bright as hell the whites are not bright there's no color accuracy but it's just so much fun to watch movies but that's actually how tvs

1:16:03Marques Brownlee:are touch movies that's how i would never edit on a tv i would never edit on a tv no we but i would Watch this.

1:16:10Andrew Edwards:We all think this looks, everyone thinks this looks bad. There's entire subreddits that are like, here's how you turn off all the stuff on your TV. But if you walk into a store and they all have all those settings turned on, you buy the one that has all them turned on because it looks better.

1:16:24Marques Brownlee:Yeah, the punchy one.

1:16:25Andrew Edwards:Yeah. That's why they turn it on. That's what people do. That's why it's turned on.

1:16:28Marques Brownlee:Am I just like so off base here that I don't know how to listen to me? No, this is classic. No, you're too plugged in. Yeah, yeah. You're complaining about phone chips right now. You care too much. when you've listened to 30 pairs of headphones and you know the nuanced differences between them it's easy to evaluate

1:16:43Andrew Edwards:I know what I like

1:16:45Marques Brownlee:there's that too, there's some personal but I think there's a lot of people shopping for headphones that are just like, alright I'm gonna fly with these so I need step one good build, step two good battery, step three good noise cancellation and as long as they sound pretty good and happy. And that is kind of the Sonys, you're right

1:16:59Andrew Edwards:but are the Sonys like 500 or 600 bucks now? They've gone up but they're not that high

1:17:03Marques Brownlee:I think they're under 4 still I think they're under 4 still I still think getting the older versions is a better deal I agree with that but they stopped folding for some reason for the last gen and I hated that 460

1:17:16David Imel:460

1:17:16Marques Brownlee:yeah remember they went up in price this year 460

1:17:23Andrew Edwards:for headphones that sound like the music is coming out of a bee's a**hole I remember when they were like

1:17:31Marques Brownlee:330 then they were 350 I want the folly for that

1:17:34David Imel:that is not what they sound like

1:17:45Andrew Edwards:they do not sound that bad they sound pretty good someone I guarantee someone is listening to this podcast on a pair of Sony's they'd be like I can't hear the difference that's just what wait that just sounds like what it sounds like all the time

1:17:59Marques Brownlee:oh my god you are so hard on these I did forget that there were$460. I thought there were more. Because, again, the AirPods Max are like$550, and they don't lose the price. And then all the others start to creep up in price because they're all competing. And then Apple comes out and seems to enable$500 headphones. Now the$350 ones are$400 and$450. So it's all creeping up, which is valid that the nothing headphones are only$300. That's really nice. But, yeah. And the headphones, they are$199.

1:18:25Andrew Edwards:The headphones, they are$199. And they. We got to see how they sound. It's hard for me to tell exactly from the website, but it seems like you can bypass a bunch of the digital stuff with the 3.5 millimeter connection, which is something that a lot of headphones actually you can't do anymore. I'll just not have one. I just want to say, if you want to yell, at Ellis Roven on X. I'm so sorry. I'm like genuinely so sorry if I offended you and you like the Sonys. I do really believe the best headphones are the ones that you like. that's so true for headphones and earbuds it's like the best don't let anyone tell you that the ones that you like are bad you just did I personally just feel like

1:19:07Marques Brownlee:you're missing they sound like a bee's a**hole

1:19:14Andrew Edwards:but if they sold them for a hundred dollars I'd be like that's amazing you have to go buy these

1:19:21Marques Brownlee:I will say I'm on a lot of flights and I tend to like look around and notice all the headphones people are wearing and there's first of all tons and tons of AirPods and I know they're$500 headphones and I'm always amazed at how many AirPods there are and maybe that's because I'm flying out of Newark but then two there's a ton of Bose and Sony and I know they're not the Bose especially it's like I know they're not the best sounding but they sell them in the airport vending machine and they're designed to be for flights and they have tons of ANC and they have the adapter in the box apparently the newest ones actually sound pretty good

1:19:51Andrew Edwards:yeah yeah Bose is a historic like Bose is an R &D company first.

1:19:55Marques Brownlee:I know. I mean, like they put a lot of effort into this, but like the old quiet comforts had pretty ass audio quality with just really good ANC. Yeah.

1:20:01David Imel:But were they bees ass audio quality?

1:20:03Marques Brownlee:I don't, I don't know if I can co-sign that,

1:20:05Andrew Edwards:that statement. You know, there's a, there's a, there's a funny thing in audio where like, you know, the, like the, like Mimi bell curve with like the angry dumb guy on one side and the angry genius guy on the other side. And like, it's with everything. Well, no, but with, with headphones, it's like the, I don't know anything about audio. Use AirPods. And then you have everyone arguing in the middle about what's best. And then like everyone I know who's like a super esteemed, knowledgeable audio engineer, like super techie, really knows their stuff. It's AirPods. And they wouldn't even consider using anything else.

1:20:39Marques Brownlee:No, it's the same in pretty much everything. In note-taking apps, same with photos. I'll have people that are like, oh, look at this awesome picture. And it's like the worst picture I've ever seen. Like the HDR is just like, bleh. Did you shoot this from a bee's a**hole? What is this?

1:20:54Andrew Edwards:I said bee's a**hole because it sounds like the sound is coming out of a really skinny tube. That's what I was trying to. I'm just saying. I can't wait for the new merch.

1:21:05Marques Brownlee:Bee's a**hole merch? The area under the curve of people that really like ass is high as f**k. It is.

1:21:16Andrew Edwards:That's a fact. People are not going to understand what you just said because it's getting bleeped in time. I'm going to leave whole so people don't

1:21:25Marques Brownlee:all of the most but you're right every category all of the most mid products in the middle are all fighting each other and then they're just like thoughtless product on each end is probably the one most people should get yeah and that's fine because you don't want to think about it yes

1:21:37Andrew Edwards:Ellis is just saying that thoughtless product on each end should be the nothing headphones no Carl Payne will clip that I'm saying I'm saying I'm saying Carl you know I got on I got over there right where Andrew's sitting and did not give you a fair shot. And I apologize. And I have since come around. I still don't think they sound very good. But it's a great, it fits in to the product lineup really well at a competitive price with competitive offerings. I don't know about all that. You got to use the app stuff. Okay.

1:22:12Marques Brownlee:The new Nothing Headphones A, it looks like you have a pair of AirPods that are glued to the side of a square.

1:22:20David Imel:It would be sick if you could pull a pair of earbuds out of that. That would be cool.

1:22:24Marques Brownlee:That's what they look like. It's a free dog. All this to say, we should get these here. We should listen to them. We should put them on Ellis' head and have them live react to them. Yes. We should see if we can get 135 hours of listening. Yeah.

1:22:35David Imel:I want to try them because I want to see how often people stare at me with them and then just take them off and don't want to be the person being stared at anymore.

1:22:43Marques Brownlee:Yeah. They're$100 cheaper. I don't know if we said that. Yeah,$200.

1:22:46David Imel:Somewhere in there, we did mention it.

1:22:49Marques Brownlee:Yeah. Probably got lost. Alright, well we do have a little bit more to talk about after the break. So before that break, trivia. I feel like Nothing's Design Team simultaneously cooked and like got cooked.

1:23:03Andrew Edwards:Question two, speaking of Nothing. The first video ever uploaded to Nothing's YouTube channel was uploaded when? Close this without going over.

1:23:14David Imel:Wasn't it just like a prank? It was a hype video. Like a ladybug and a prank.

1:23:20Marques Brownlee:It was like 8 to 12 months before they launched their first product.

1:23:23Andrew Edwards:What it was irrelevant. When it was relevant.

1:23:28Marques Brownlee:Is this the closest Delta or closest without going over? No, closest without going over. Fuck. We'll brainstorm that a little bit. We'll be right back.

1:23:44David Imel:All right, welcome back. Really quick here because we spent a really long time talking about bees there. I got bees, boy. We've talked multiple times about how like AI overviews and whatever are going to really screw up page views and journalists getting paid and reviewers getting paid. And we saw that happen this week with the website ratings or artings is how it's spelled out. But they had to kind of make a huge change to their website. They're known for doing super in-depth reviews on a lot of things, tech included, one of the largest.

1:24:17Andrew Edwards:But like so in depth that when you're shopping for a printer, you can compare printers by cost per page or like pages per hour or cost per hour at max flow. You know, like, yeah, like they're the ones.

1:24:29David Imel:Yeah, it's deep. And it's like they're doing it with different equipment on a lot of different things to be able to test these. So that obviously costs money. But previously it was free. And now they had to make a pretty large change to make the full in-depth reviews of everything behind a paywall. uh it is now ten dollars a month or 45 a year but the most interesting thing about this uh announcement was an up a section of their release saying why we're making this change says ratings dot com has historically relied heavily on organic search traffic from google and affiliate links that model is becoming less reliable fewer people click through google organic results than they used to at the same time ai actively scrapes and reuses our test results often without a attribution and without the context needed to interpret them correctly that's like a huge thing by itself interpreting things correctly yeah meanwhile performing lab-based and in-depth testing is expensive we buy every product ourselves like normal consumers no paid or sponsored reviews test them using standardized repeatable methods and publish the full test results transparently a membership supported model reduces our dependency on google limits unrestricted ai scraping for our test results and gives us incentives that are more sustainable and aligned with our customers so this sucks but is necessary i guess is the easiest way of putting it it stinks for all the people who want to just go to their website and support them but also like i don't know not many people are gonna pay ten dollars to just go for a month or pay 45 a year for a reviewing website because you don't buy things that often lots of times you're just like in the pinch of comparing things and want to go check it yeah so this is a tough look this is

1:26:12Marques Brownlee:part of the inevitable death of seo and the web i mean every website for the longest time adam and i used to work at android authority and we were privy to a lot of the seo bullshit that the people would have to talk about all the time and it it basically equated to google makes all of these changes constantly that you have to adapt to oftentimes when you're adapting to it making these changes makes your website worse. But if you don't, then Google will derank your website because you are optimizing the way that you show up in Google Search. And with the speed of which this stuff is changing, especially with AI overviews and all of this stuff, now you have the additional factor of having to adapt to what the AI overview shows.

1:26:52Marques Brownlee:If it chooses your website to show in the AI overview, if it chooses to show in Gemini, when Gemini gives sources and stuff like that. And I mean, there's a reason a lot of websites are moving to pay the The Verge moved to pay it about a year ago. That was a pretty major change. It made their web traffic really sink a lot, but they are making a lot more money on subscriptions. I just think the entire internet is moving more towards direct-to-creator payments because SEO is just kind of dying very rapidly. So I think, I'm like thinking out loud here, I think this is my real beef with AI overviews.

1:27:26Marques Brownlee:I know, Ellis, it's the accuracy and there's a bunch of other things that are wrong about it. But I think it's because it so fundamentally removes the incentives to make good stuff. So before, and the ratings video kind of illustrates this perfectly, but when you make good stuff and you optimize for people to find that good stuff, Google and all the search engines, when people are in the buying process, will funnel those people to find your stuff. And so you make the stuff because people find it and you get paid from the ads and the cycle continues. So you're incentivized to make good stuff so that more people find it.

1:28:03Marques Brownlee:Now you make good stuff. That stuff gets scraped by AI overview. And when people start to go through that buying process, they find the AI overview and they never find your stuff. So the only incentive you have to make good stuff is to be the source for the AI overview to be good. And you don't get any credit for that. You don't get paid for that. So the incentive is effectively gone. Yeah. So think about that. The effect, the incentive to make good stuff is gone. Now, why would you make any more stuff? It's almost like we've decided, all right, the entire corpus of human knowledge is complete.

1:28:37Marques Brownlee:We need nothing more to be new. We will just be trained on the old stuff. That is, that is my, that's a bummer. This is a concern that we talked about at the very beginning of this. We literally said, what happens when there is no incentive to go to a website because the answers are all on Google? And like, why would you make content if people are not going to go to your page and you can't get paid for it? And then the AI has nothing to grab from. Like that is the question that we asked three years ago. And now it's actually hitting websites really hard. Yeah. So we're seeing like the verge and ratings and like adding membership programs because there are still enthusiasts willing to support the creation of good stuff.

1:29:15Marques Brownlee:And, you know, the membership program is maybe the most ideal way to do that. I subscribe to the verge. I read a lot of these things. But it's often like like Wirecutter, for example, I brought up earlier or off camera. But like when I'm about to buy a blender and I'm doing my six hours of way too much research to buy the perfect blender. that's when I'm deep in the ratings and the Wirecutter and the Verge and reading Blender reviews and then once that's over I'm not going to read another Blender review for years that stuff I'm not going to do that so it's hard to get people to support and to spend regularly on something when it seems like the incentive is gone

1:29:50David Imel:this is specifically hard because I don't think a lot of people are reading ratings for fun we are part entertainment so people see our reviews but we're also entertainment so that's not getting hit as hard but like this kind of stuff that is just like numbers and what prints per minute or Marquez's smoothies per hour and his blender like this is not the stuff you read for fun this is the stuff you read for a purpose and when you don't have that purpose it's really hard to pay monthly or yearly on it even though I don't know if you were like buying a new house and equipping it for the next year maybe 45 bucks for the year wouldn't be bad but that's not a great business model to be like cool every time someone buys a house we'll get one year of uh yeah a subscription so this i feel bad for ratings this is for sure absolutely probably tanking it's very tough for stuff like this there's um there's an interesting

1:30:38Marques Brownlee:graph and also a chart as mark has liked to call out yes that shows the decline of peak traffic on tech websites year over year and it's it's pretty nasty like all these numbers are really high it's It's only a one-year graph.

1:30:54David Imel:2024, yeah, to now, I guess. A year and a half. A year and a half.

1:30:57Marques Brownlee:So March 2024, Digital Trends got 8.5 million peak traffic. January 26th, they got 264 ,000. That's a decline of 97%. That was a rounding error in their previous number. Their entire traffic is crazy.

1:31:14Andrew Edwards:I mean, this is going to decimate websites on the internet because the same way that Facebook video, when it decided to not be a thing anymore, like ruined BuzzFeed basically. This is what Google SEO is doing to all the internets that have built businesses being the source of information.

1:31:29Marques Brownlee:Well, and what's crazy is like, I think a lot of these websites like, well, services like Google, they just sort of think social media is free information. And I think in their head, if you take the average of all information about one topic, you get closer to a source of truth, right? Because there's signal to noise. Hopefully you have more signal than you have noise. and if you take a billion sources, hopefully you have the right data. And I think all of these services and websites are just kind of like, why do we have to pay websites when social media is free, like quote unquote journalism or information and you can just theoretically get closer to a source of truth.

1:32:08Marques Brownlee:But that really just, it destroys the internet as we know it currently. So it's not good.

1:32:14Andrew Edwards:It also doesn't give good information for the most part. There's a reason why there are certain trusted sources because they have processes in place that will take away the noise.

1:32:22Marques Brownlee:I agree with you. But I think that they just think that on a numbers basis, if you have one billion people talking about a thing, the average is always higher to truth. That's exactly what poly markets like. All of these guys, they say like, oh, we can predict what's going to happen because people are putting their money towards this thing because this many people think it'll happen and that means it will probably happen. I don't know if that's true or not. there's a zillion problems with that but either way the average number of arms per human is less than two that's taking all the data about all humans ever the average number of arms just saying sometimes that logic can be flawed

1:33:02David Imel:I just don't think that was a fire example they don't all just think hard enough about stuff like this because they just want to get their

1:33:12Andrew Edwards:I disagree I think they know I think they know dude

1:33:16David Imel:I think at a certain point though this is going to screw themselves when their AI can't scrape things anymore because no one's making no one can get paid to make the.

1:33:23Marques Brownlee:Everyone is making stuff all the time for free on social media.

1:33:28David Imel:I guess but now that level of what we get is worse and then. Oh yeah. And then it just all turns into nothing when the free stuff is that's being made is doesn't mean anything. Nothing was the last segment. We're on our team. I just remember we talked to somebody who made an AI product I won't name them but we brought this up to him and he said I don't think you guys should have any worries you make really good stuff and I was like I'm not talking about us I'm talking about like these people the people who are doing the in-depth web text based reviews and s*** like that and it felt like he'd never heard that before

1:34:05Marques Brownlee:it's gone this stuff is going to be gone This feels similar. I went to ClawCon last night. You know ClawedBot? We talked about ClawedBot. Open Claw. Open Claw, sorry.

1:34:19Andrew Edwards:Is that the one where everyone dresses up as Santa and goes around the city?

1:34:23Marques Brownlee:Somehow worse. Somehow worse. Everybody did have lobster hats on. But the people I talked to primarily were like, oh yeah, well you can just create your own apps and blah blah blah and everything. And I was like, okay, but what happens when all the service people don't need to use any services anymore because they can just spin up their own services they're like well that's fine it's like okay but then how do people make money like well you can sell your apps that you make and like but no one will buy it because they can all make people get money so they can pay for housing and food those are the primary things i think you're forgetting that people need yeah i feel similar to this how often did you run into

1:35:00David Imel:that the like meme of like you should try open claw it's awesome cool what do you do it's really cool I use it every day oh yeah but what are you making you're gonna get behind exactly why I went

1:35:11Marques Brownlee:to the conference and I did find some pretty insane use cases that people were using with for I did have to actually talk to people because the actual event where they talked about everything that was going on they had a bunch of speakers all of them were just open claw rappers to try to sell you like an easier way to use it which is very ironic yeah and they also did have a wrapper there they did have a wrap it was very silicon valley i will tell you anyway um there were some use cases either way i'm sort of just equating that to this because it's like i understand the revenue generation angle but you're not thinking far enough into the future where it's like why would people buy use your service and buy your thing if you're taking away if you're giving everyone the ability to have the service and the thing yeah you know what i mean democratization in a way is like good but also bad sometimes

1:36:08Andrew Edwards:this is not I guess it's sort of a unique situation but I do have sort of like faith that god forbid like we do lose things like ratings in the verge and like these places that do give these like really important honest reviews Tom mashable that the pendulum will swing back in the other direction I'm mostly thinking about consumer reports, which I think is a little bit more safe because they're a nonprofit and they get a lot of money through donations. Um, and you know, a big part of the founding of consumer reports in the late twenties, early thirties was like this period of time where corporations could just, we're literally killing people with their products.

1:36:52Andrew Edwards:And, and there was like not really any like consumer protection ability. And I'm not saying like, we're going to go all the way back there where like you don't know if you're the product if you this blender you're gonna buy is gonna end your life or not um but i you know we we could get close to back there and and it'll necessitate like we'll need some way to know i think google would probably say enough people are truthful but i don't they're not well no no i'm saying what i'm saying what google would say especially like if you know god forbid did you guys watch the hank green video know the hour long yeah i like the thing that he said about how like there's a world where we we lose access to like all of google and all of and all of our information is gained through some sort of like llm interface and at that point there's literally no way to know what's true because you'll have three sources of truth you know anthropic open ai and google and whatever they want you to believe there's you'll have literally no way to fact check it you know so when you're like is this the best blender you know Google will decide what the best blender is and tell you that

1:38:01Marques Brownlee:nobody I will serve you an ad there was like a period of time remember where like auto

1:38:05Andrew Edwards:car companies were genuinely telling consumers like your car will be worse with seatbelts in it like remember like that was like like we've been there before there's nothing stopping us from going back there and so I do have faith that eventually like this is just a thing that we need in a developed society and somehow some way we as a populace will hopefully figure it out.

1:38:27Marques Brownlee:People still do value quality and this has been sort of the ultimate debate that people have been talking about. With AI slop, will that actually make quality more valuable and people will gravitate towards the quality? We don't really know yet. We're too early in the stage. I think that obviously people go towards the lowest friction generally, so there will be a lot of slop that will be consumed. But the big question is, will people also seek out the quality stuff, which will still find a way to exist. Either way, it seems like most of these websites really are going to start moving towards subscription models.

1:39:00Marques Brownlee:I see the value in The Verge moving towards a subscription model. I think a lot of people like to read news. This is like the moneymaker for them. I don't know how Artings or Ratings has a subscription model and uses that to exist.

1:39:13Andrew Edwards:Do you know how farm co-ops work? I feel like this is how we should figure this out. We're like, let's say, I'm not a farmer, so please let me know if I get some of this wrong. But my understanding is like if you live in like South Dakota, right, and you live in this place where like there's a bunch of independent farmers and you all grow corn, you know, you could try to set up business deals with corn distributors and people who are going to use your corn. Or you could establish a co-op and all the farmers drop their corn off at this mutually owned place. And then the co-op is the one that handles selling all the corn.

1:39:44Andrew Edwards:and you just get paid off with the co-op consortium decides on how much they're going to sell the corn for and then you divide the things. That'd be a cool way to do these sort of reviews, right? You have one place you go for all of these sites' independent testing and you pay for that collectively. We all pay for that and then that money can get distributed.

1:40:05Marques Brownlee:There was a cool service that Twitter owned before it got bought. Vine? No. Well, I don't know if that was cool or not. It created the Paul Brothers.

1:40:20Marques Brownlee:Regardless of that, they had this service where you could pay like a$5 fee. And it would allow you to, if you clicked a link on Twitter for a website that had a paywall, it would let you like read it without the paywall or like it would remove all the banner ads or whatever. And it was a super cool idea. And I don't know if it was working or not. they had this scalable thing where it was like the more websites that gone on the more it would distribute the money so obviously the more websites the less money

1:40:46Andrew Edwards:Apple News is another great I don't know if either of those services took advantage of these platforms but to me like instead of being like like with Marques it's like dude I don't need to pay for Blender honesty 24-7 but I do need to pay for product honesty 24-7 and so if there was some sort of consortium here yeah yeah

1:41:09Marques Brownlee:it's sad that we have to start thinking about these things like this is what Sam Allman's always being like is like in a world without money how do we give people UBI or whatever it's like I don't like to why are you forcing this world on us right now um yeah it's sad anyway you should subscribe to I you should subscribe to news that you care about and websites that you care about I think that's kind of the crux of it if you're willing to subscribe to like Netflix or HBO Max like think about your like the quality of your content consumption and what actually matters to you in your regular life and it's important to give news sources

1:41:44Andrew Edwards:we were a few days away from those being the same company we were and yet something worse happened Oracle is now Oracle's son dad yeah son dad I'll throw one more sad

1:41:57David Imel:thing in here in the sad part of this but if you own Meta Ray-Bans you should probably read the article that just came out about them and the video camera on it. We definitely don't have time to talk about it. In fact, the ratings thing I thought was going to be the least depressing thing we could have talked about. Definitely was not true. But yeah, if you have these, go read them. Maybe we'll talk about it next week.

1:42:19Andrew Edwards:You probably cover the camera.

1:42:21David Imel:Yeah. But we probably should get your trivia because Adam and Ellis need to edit this very fast to come out by tomorrow.

1:42:32Andrew Edwards:You need one. Trivia. Ah, dude. I've got a marker. When the death bots come for us, I'm going to do a trivia question like the band on the Titanic going down with the ship. That's going to be my final gift to humanity. Guys, the MacBook Neo is here. None of us knew it was coming until it came. And, you know, so how many other tech products can you guys name with the word Neo in it? You get one point per product. You guys got mad at me. because I made the questions too hard and you weren't scoring. So this is literally a waterfall of points available for you guys. You could literally bathe in the points.

1:43:12David Imel:I only have one and it's the toughest thing possible.

1:43:15Andrew Edwards:It doesn't matter. I'm going to be really lenient. Hardware, software, if it uses electricity in any way and it has the letters NEO consecutively in it, I will be fine. Oh my God.

1:43:29David Imel:You guys were running pretty good. You definitely don't have the same thing. have? All right. I want to bet. Flip him and read.

1:43:36Andrew Edwards:What do you got? Okay.

1:43:37Marques Brownlee:All right. Who wants to go first? Who wants to go first? Um, I'll go. I wrote Neopets. I'll accept that answer. I wrote

1:43:46David Imel:the Nothing Headphone 1. N-E? O-N-E.

1:43:51Andrew Edwards:Dude, you know, at this point, whatever. It's yours, bro.

1:43:56Marques Brownlee:Clever enough to deserve the points. I wrote four things. Let's see it. I wrote the Surface Neo. The point's yours. Thank you. Great. All right. I put A-NEO, that like phone company A-NEO or whatever it is A-Y-A-NEO A-NEO, yeah

1:44:10Andrew Edwards:They make portable gaming consoles Yeah, yeah, yeah Okay, I'll give you that point Even though you spelled it wrong

1:44:15Marques Brownlee:Neo Win, which is the tech website Yep, that exists You get it And Neon If you can tell me Just like the It's a technology If you can tell me what

1:44:25Andrew Edwards:No, it's a noble gas Yeah, it's a noble gas

1:44:28Marques Brownlee:No, I can't give you that What? You're gonna be Really?

1:44:34Andrew Edwards:If you could tell me how many electrons are in its outer shell, I'll give you that point. 47. No. A-N-E-N-O. Guys, do you want to hear some of the ones that you missed? Sure. You missed the 1X Neo robot that's coming out soon. You missed the LG Neo Chef, a microwave. The Samsung Neo, which is a QLED TV.

1:44:56Marques Brownlee:I should have just written Samsung Neo. LG Neo, Samsung Neo?

1:45:00David Imel:The DJI Neo, a pocket-sized drone.

1:45:03Andrew Edwards:The Realme GT Neo, a budget phone. No, a smartphone. The Motorola Edge 5G Neo. That's a budget phone. The old Kyocera Neo, a flip phone. The Nubia Neo, a budget smartphone. The Xperia Neo from 2011. And the Vivo IQ Neo 10R.

1:45:24Marques Brownlee:The Vivo Neo. Wow. I like it. All right. So not neon though, you're sure? David, if you can tell me

1:45:32Andrew Edwards:how many electrons are in its outer shell I will give you that point because Ellis said it's a noble gas It is a noble gas It has less than 10 If you can tell me what neon smells like I'll give you the point Sulfur? No, it's odorless That was good You had two chances Marquez gets 16 points He doesn't get it He had 16 points. Andrew with 18 and David now in the lead with 20. That was a free for all.

1:46:03Marques Brownlee:Oh, baby.

1:46:03Andrew Edwards:All right. Next question. The first video ever uploaded to the Nothing YouTube channel was uploaded on what date? Closest without going over. Use your maths.

1:46:20Andrew Edwards:Think. Think.

1:46:26Andrew Edwards:I guess this would be oldest without going newer wait sorry month just year I'll take anything

1:46:33David Imel:like pick a date alright

1:46:39Andrew Edwards:flip them and read what do we got oh wow

1:46:48Marques Brownlee:oh wait

1:46:50David Imel:no I definitely wrote down incorrectly?

1:46:53Marques Brownlee:I wrote June 8th, 2021 at 5.55 a.m. London time.

1:46:59David Imel:Okay. Andrew, you did not write London.

1:47:01Marques Brownlee:I wrote March 2023.

1:47:04David Imel:Okay.

1:47:04Marques Brownlee:I wrote March 1st, 2021.

1:47:07David Imel:Damn, no one got the point. We all went too new. Damn. It's funny I accidentally wrote 2020 and then put three over it without having been okay. Dang. It was February 18th, 2021.

1:47:20Marques Brownlee:Oh. Yeah. That was close. I know you guys got close but you went over yeah you're like one day off I started here February 1st 2021 and I remember it being soon after I started but I didn't know it was like within two weeks

1:47:34Andrew Edwards:well good game alright take us out Marquez

1:47:38Marques Brownlee:so Ellis and I can start this edit hey long week it's techtember slash March which means there's probably going to be much stuff next week too so get subscribed if you haven't already hit that like button down below leave us a comment and comment iceberg lettuce if you made it this far in the episode thanks for watching catch you later also if you're at South by Southwest see you there next Friday Merry Tarchmas peace

1:48:01David Imel:We have a movie produced by Adam Alina and Ellis River and we're partnered with Vox Media Podcast Network and our chart for your music was created by Vane so bingo

1:48:07Andrew Edwards:bingo let's go should we

1:48:17Marques Brownlee:it's not a graph it's a chart okay a chart is there is a moving graph I would like to see a graph. There's a graph near the top.