Phones Will Cost More, but This Camera Is Free?

0:00Apple has always charged this much for RAM like like now we're sort of like in an area where Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marquez. I'm Andrew. And I'm David. So this week in January, we've got a Xiaomi 17 Ultra in the house. We'll talk about that. We also might talk about why your smartphone might cost more, maybe. We also have some stuff to talk about with something called the Fuji X-Half, which I'm told is a total bust. We've talked about it on this podcast before. Well, we'll see. Obviously. And I also want to explain something to you guys in tech terms that I think would be really interesting to try to explain uh but first i have a but first of course did anyone see there was a best podcast award at the golden globes this year yeah are you serious yeah there was golden globes website by the way is very bad it's very broken i'm not surprised that's the least surprising sentence i've heard in a long time yeah yeah so well amy poehler won with good hang which is a great podcast um but i think as a podcast it's only fitting for us to ask for your help I had no idea how the Golden Globes work I actually don't really know What the Golden Globes is about If I'm being honest Or what form of media they award Because now there's a podcast But listen, it's been my dream Ever since I was a little boy To win the Golden Globe So I think we need Waveform To win a Golden Globe in 2027 How do we do that?

1:50I don't know who as the audience can help us But this is our plea You're supposed to apply I think it's on you We can apply? I think you're supposed to apply. My bad. You have to apply? We're applying next year. Yeah. First of all, these shows are always like, I'll be doing something on a Sunday night or whatever, and I'll get a news notification and be like, the Emmys are about to start. And I'm like, I don't care at all. Sorry. But that happened with the Golden Globes, and then I was made aware of the new podcast category. It would be so funny to see all the tables of celebrities and then just us twiddling our thumbs waiting to win Best Podcast.

2:25was nominated for best podcast for a Golden Globe. Was it actually good podcast or was it just celebrities who are at the Golden Globes who also happen to have a podcast? Mostly that. Good Hang with Amy Poehler, Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, Call Her Daddy with Alex Cooper, the Mel Robbins podcast with Mel Robbins, Smartless with Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes. And they're like an OG. An Up First. So Up First is in there. NPR. NPR. And then, I mean, Call Her Daddy did start as a podcast. The rest of them are pretty much. It's a podcast. It's a podcast. I know it started as a podcast Everything else What does it mean it started?

2:58I'm saying everyone else is a celebrity that made a podcast Caller Daddy is a person who got super famous Because she started a podcast I mean we're a podcast We're also a YouTube channel We're a talk show We're also a YouTube video We're going to be at the Golden Globes next year I'm not entirely sure what they are But yes Golden Globes, Emmys, Grammys Oscars And whatever the other ones are We should be in all According to Wikipedia we have to be one of the top 25 most listened to podcasts to have been on what platform i don't still the most nebulous yeah all right according to their data partner luminate uh that decides based on analytics podcast i think it's the top 25 podcast numbers are such a black box nobody knows what they are yeah and nobody's willing to show we'll be there let's just have amy poller on our podcast and then we'll be fine that would be awesome well i want to show you guys this uh this phone real quick.

3:51So I'm working on a video about this. We already reviewed the Xiaomi 17 Pro and Pro Max, which were, let's be honest, iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max clones. It's design-wise anyway, but then they added a bunch of other features and the theme was really cool because they one-upped the iPhone. This, very different. This, Ultra, it's basically just a camera. It's a camera phone. It's made by Leica. I unboxed this phone on camera. It came with a case, a lens cap, a microfiber to clean the lens and a lanyard to like use it like a regular camera uh it says the word leica more than it says the word xiaomi it says it over here it's a leica camera over on the back it's a leica camera on the lens it's a leica camera and by the way it's a xiaomi like that's that says a lot about what's going on here well leica did have a leica phone but it was notably really really bad they made two generations of it and it was terrible so that's what's cool about this phone is i am mostly interested in the camera experience.

4:45It has camera Leica modes and like obviously very high-end hardware and it takes really good photos and videos, but it also is a Xiaomi flagship phone. So the rest of the phone happens to be really good too. It's a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. It's got 6 ,800 milliamp hours silicon carbon battery, a really bright 6.9 inch 3500 nit display, 120 hertz, 90 watt fast charging. So it's a Xiaomi flagship still, but it's got all this camera stuff and maybe the most interesting part which i'm going to talk more about in the video is uh this ring around the lens does turn and it has function it quick launches the camera app and then once you're in the camera app it's probably zoomed in on my phone right now that is way better than camera control yeah it's a well at first you would think that it is it is but it i think might be a little bit of a novelty because i liked it at first i thought it was really fun but then i saw i've been using it slowly less and less except for certain cases it's it's fun you can map it to yeah you can hold it they can map it to like ev control or shutter speed or just zoom or whatever in different modes sure with it uh you could do that so in pro mode i think it's or in video mode it changes your exposure value in regular photo mode it just zooms in and out uh and it's just a smooth turning wheel, but there's a haptic click.

6:08The haptic's really good. The haptic click is pretty convincing. Oh, yeah, wow. So it's nice. It feels like a little ratcheted click. Yeah. So it's cool. But, you know, when you just hold the phone and use it like regular, your finger sometimes bumps that camera ring and you feel some random haptic clicks sometimes, which is a little bit annoying. The other thing is like when you're generally adjusting focus or zoom on a lens, it's like the lens is long enough that you've got some room to play with. This one I go to use, I'm using my thumb and index or middle finger, and I'm immediately putting my pinky right in front of the lens.

6:45Yep, that's something I've noticed more and more. So I love the idea of just making a smartphone that is all about the camera, and that's mostly what I'm focusing on for this. But it is kind of funny that this is not the best camera. It does not seem like the best camera. And it's not the best camera experience, but it might be the most fun camera experience. Like having a lens cap that you can throw on the end of your phone, having all these fun modes, this Leica essential mode, and all this character and fun that you can throw into your photos and videos. It's very capable and it's very fun and versatile.

7:18And I've taken some fun shots already. I'm going to keep shooting with it over the weekend. But yeah, it's just an interesting Xiaomi 17 flagship, I would say. Yeah, just taking a couple photos. This is not a good camera. i think it's an okay i think it's a b plus camera i think it's weirdly maybe not as good as the shami 17 pro max yeah but it has way more fun stuff that you can do with the camera in photos videos in the camera ring right accessories and all that fun stuff right so that's that's what it's about and it's just like everywhere i'm surprised i'm not that surprised but i'm kind of surprised how much i think it's called the 17 ultra by leica okay and then there's like on the box like on the case on the accessories on the phone in the software so it has a live cinematography feature which is in the camera app and there are different things that you can do with it so one of them is red carpet where it slow zooms in on you nice there's a portrait uh there's freestyle which it doesn't really describe what any of these things are it just kind of shows little mini videos yeah there's ultra hdr live which sounds terrible yeah there's all kinds of features that are just kind of like them throwing everything at the wall the tooling on the rails is there's like grooves and just the etching of the like like made by germany is all really nice oh that's the side of the phone that kind of makes my back tingle oh i might do a short with asmr with this is pretty fire but yeah it's it's interesting so leica just put out that iphone app called leica lux yeah like lux that's the manual manual oh has been up for a bit well like a has an iphone app that is a manual camera sort of sort of thing which is very good but it's iphone only so i'm curious if this phone has some of the luxe functionality built into it it doesn't seem like it does this is like a central mode on the side like like a bunch of different like uh monochrome not filters but like literally image processing modes all right here's the thing that look like a like there are many different like wings of like arms of Leica right as a company there's like the licensing wing there's like there's when you go to like a Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit event and they're talking about the new chip they have someone from like the Leica software portion of Leica that comes on and says oh here's how we optimized for these Leica looks on this that's like a totally different wing of the company than the camera portion of the company because there's licensing there's this this this to me this kind of just feels like it's primarily licensing with like maybe one or two people that are like hey we can optimize this for the like a look but it's probably not like the main brand that's doing most of this well if you ever want to edit your photos apple just introduced apple creator studio well but you can't really edit photos in the creator studio yeah somewhere pixel mater have you ever used numbers oh yeah pixel mater yeah have you ever used numbers Like editing a photo where every pixel is one cell in a spreadsheet.

10:22Or Marquez who edits his thumbnails in Final Cut Pro. Yeah, you know. So, okay, Apple introduces the Creator Studio Suite, which is not anything new as far as the apps you use, but it is bundling a bunch of Apple's apps into one thing that you pay a subscription for, specifically$13 a month or about$130 a year. and it comes with a bunch of apps that are pretty expensive as standalone apps which is cool i remember i paid i think four hundred dollars or so for final cut pro like a decade ago yeah and i've gotten all of the updates since then i've never paid more than once it's on every single one of my macs 300 bucks it's an incorrect for me that's an incredible deal for me for how much i use final cut pro right so if you use a bunch of these apps then it's maybe a good deal or something to consider the other interesting thing about this the more you look into it and i had to you know clarify some of this with apple and by reading the press releases there will be some features like ai features or or like premium content built into some of the subscription versions of the apps yeah that are not in the standalone versions of the apps specifically the productivity apps uh not the creative apps you'll get this this like premium content or ai stuff yeah keynote pages and freeform are going to get apple intelligence features that are that are specific to creator studio yeah so i was curious about like final cut pro because they announced a couple new things like beat matching cuts or like being able to search through an automatically transcribed video to go to a certain place on your timeline stuff like that all of that stuff is coming to both the subscription version and the standalone version so i was like okay are you gonna make me switch to a subscription for final cut even though i've been getting all the features for the last decade currently the answer is no it's going to be on both versions thank you for saying currently so i'm i'm giving apple the credit now because if you know you see a lot of companies go all right it's a subscription adobe uh well you you basically don't own the software you constantly have to pay for it and apple has had a pretty rare thing for a long time with apps like final cut pro where you buy it once it's on all your computers infinite updates forever that's amazing and they're not like shelving that like that's staying around yeah so if you don't need motion compressor keynote all these other apps if you just need final cut pro and pixel mater like me you can just buy one app and get infinite updates forever and that's still that's still a thing so i'm happy about that it's infinite updates for the one time they update it every five years yeah yeah they update final cut with every os basically with like a like one or two one or two features i think the the the magic mask thing was the last significant thing yeah magnetic mask they added was the last like impressive thing they added totally pro totally yeah yeah there's a lot of stuff in da vinci resolve that i think they really could compete with yeah i don't know apple really needs to get this going their services game they have been trying to beef up because they are terrified of the world where the iphone is not their main money driver anymore so they've been doing a good job in general of beefing this up and i think it makes sense for them to like want recurring revenue especially since these apps you know three hundred dollars um permanently one time honestly like it feels crazy that we are even able to buy software once anymore like that seems magical that you can buy final cut one time for three it is a lost art yeah but this does make it a lot more affordable and generally i'm like very against monthly subscription stuff but i think the really interesting thing is that students if you have an edu account or you you know are you're a student it's three dollars a month or thirty dollars a year that's a huge discount very cheap I feel like the student discount is usually like ten percent off or something yeah this is a massive there's some good ones this is also awesome because like if you're going to school and potentially doing this maybe you do it for a year and then you're like oh I'm going to go into this professionally I should buy the one time thing right because I'm going to be using this for a really long time that's a really good now that I'm thinking about it a great strategy for Apple like if the most important customer to you is someone who is beginning their life as like a working professional or they're about to start learning creative apps you want this to be the best deal the obvious go-to so that these people are like used to your apps and then they grow they grow up and they pay a little more but like you want the customer first well that value is even better because the iPad version of Final Cut is a five dollar a month subscription and so is the ipad version of logic so if you're only paying three dollars for everything and it includes the ipad versions the creative studio that's a no-brainer yeah so it is like you're saving a ton of money if you're doing that but even the regular version that's 13 a month like if you are already paying the the five dollars for i for the ipad final cut and the five dollars for the ipad logic that's 10 so it's an additional three i mean even this is still a great even the 12.99 a month like yeah you might just be like all right i want to start doing some editing stuff pay for two months is still better than three hundred dollars to try it and then figure it out and decide i'm asking someone who's watching this podcast to do the math for me add up the prices of buying one time all of these apps how many months and then how many months does this become a a bad deal like the subscription for the first month you win for the second month you win For as many months as you've paid less than it costs to have access to all these apps, you win.

15:43But somebody watching this has a calculator and they can find the total value of all the software and how many months it would take. 17 years. It's probably a pretty good amount of time. Yeah. As long as they don't jack up the prices every year, like every subscription service. I hope they keep it this way because Final Cut's been the same price for forever. Yeah. For reference, the Adobe Creative Cloud subscription is$25 per month for a student. So that's probably eight times the price. Yeah. Of the Apple one. And the regular one. To be fair, though, like, Apple does not really have competitors to every Adobe app in terms of quality and professionalism.

16:21Yeah. You just, like, Pixelmator is Pixelmator. And it's really good for what it is. And they bought it. Motion is not After Effects. Motion is horrible. Yeah. Motion is not After Effects. Motion is not After Effects. A lot of these are very, very pro. Like, a lot of people use Logic Pro. So, there's that. But many of these are not true competitors to Adobe's app suite. logic pro is a weird one because it's i like i use it for almost everything here but there's definitely a lot of professional work that it does not have the features that required that being said it's the only app on here that adobe like does not like audition yeah yeah you're using audition yeah for sure yeah final cut is is is kind of in a similar place like it's really good for what i use it for we use it a lot here at the studio but there is an adobe equivalent i mean premiere is premiere and after effects is in a totally different league from motion so like you could be swayed to the more expensive one if you need after effects but yeah i kind of wonder what kind of person uses a bunch of these apps like i only use two of them me personally yeah i use final cut and pixel mater yeah somewhere out there there's a creative professional who also uses logic and motion for some reason and keynote does anyone use motion shout out to that creator well that's the funny thing is like doesn't keynote and don't all of those apps like keynote and what is it numbers those come pre-installed on your computer yeah i guess you get the like so you just get the aiification versions which we don't even know what that's going to look like yet i want to know what they're added to freeform yeah what is free i love freeform i like between free for i think freeform and reminders are the two like apple included apps i use the most now yeah freeform this is oh yeah freeform it's apple figma yeah we don't i do you do i love freeform oh my god i love i thought you were sarcastic no no no this could be for you then because you use logic and it's two apps right there i own logic yeah do you use pixel mater no do you use keynote no final cut no well you know speaking of subscriptions there's also some news in the subscription world uh mostly it's just that tesla fsd is now going to no longer i think on february 14th no longer be offered as a single payment it will only be a subscription so i think it was a it was a i don't even remember it was a couple thousand dollars to add it onto the price of your car if you didn't want to pay the subscription to have fsd it was many thousands yeah i think a couple thousand was like it went like eight like it was it was up to like 15k at one point yeah it fluctuated a lot yeah it fluctuated way more palatable for it to be 99 a month but also it's you have to pay every month so again you'll do the math on how long you have to own that car for it to be not as i mean it doesn't matter anymore because you can't do the one-time payment but that that is a new subscription one thing i saw is i guess one positive this is if you're paying for subscription it quote unquote transfers to cars right because previously if you're doing a one-time payment and you sell that car it goes with the car for whatever stupid reason it was so stupid yeah it was like if you bought it permanently it was locked to your car so if you sold the car you couldn't get it on it if you bought another tesla right but it would it would mean you could sell the car for more yeah which is what tesla does with their leases because they don't let you buy out out a lease so what they do is like you lease the car you give it back to them they activate the full self-driving and then they sell the car as like a pre-leased car, but with full self-driving.

19:50Which costs more. They sell it at full retail value. Got it. Yeah. Sick. Yeah. I love subscriptions. Subscriptionize my life. Well, speaking of things that may or may not have subscriptions, we're not really sure yet, Apple has formally come out and announced that they are going to be using Gemini to power the new Siri. Woo! Yeah, if you guys remember properly, two years ago now when they announced the new Siri that we all got very excited for. We didn't really know how it was going to go, but then they had the OpenAI partnership where you can ask ChatGPT and you can send queries to ChatGPT. People are like, is ChatGPT going to be on device and is it going to power the Siri features?

20:34We're not really sure. Now, Google and Apple have issued a joint statement that say that Apple did a blind test and that Gemini provides the most capable foundation for our foundation models, which is ironic and funny. Yeah, they're also going to be running on Apple's private cloud compute, so queries won't get shared to Google and stuff like that, which is nice. They get deleted off Apple servers. We're still apparently supposed to see it this year. The rumor is that in the spring, some of the features will start to trickle out, and then the full-fledged this is what it's doing is going to come out at WWDC only two years late.

21:09and I hope they also roll back liquid glass but that's another conversation. Let's talk about this a little bit. You made a whole video about this. I made a whole video about this. There's a lot of interesting thoughts floating around about what this could mean and what it definitely means. I think the most interesting one to me is Siri, okay, it's actually going to finally have because we keep talking about Siri. There's a whole bunch of Apple intelligence stuff. We're just talking about the LLMs and the foundations behind Siri. siri bad now siri could be good soon exciting and it will be it will be able to do all these things that gemini is already doing and is already good at which is very exciting uh what else will apple add on top of it because i don't know it's not going to just be a one-to-one clone it's a foundation model and then they build a bunch of stuff on top of it to obviously build things like that uh feature from the commercial they deleted where you ask siri about some appointment or whatever and it remembers where you were at a certain time on your calendar whatever that was happening like they got to build stuff on top of it and make their own features what are those going to be we'll see um the other one is what else aside from the llms would this help with because i brought up in my video circle to search which might touch this might not touch it at all but as of right now the apple intelligence feature where you do a visual search of what's on your screen just does a google image search which is pretty basic but what if it had all the Gemini goodness and you did like true circle to search just like Android and it could search anything.

22:41It could search an image and know what type of dog breed it is or what map location that event is happening at or all these other things. I think that would be really interesting to keep an eye on. Yeah. And then the other question is what happens to the open AI integration with ChatGPT? Because as of right now, the way it works is this is like very bolted onto the side. Siri does Siri things. And if you ask Siri a question that is too complicated or have multi-step or whatever and chat gpt would be better for it which is lots of things it will literally ask you hey can i can i use chat gpt to do this and you say yes and then it does that query but if if you're getting the gemini foundation model and siri gets this huge lm reboot it will theoretically not ever have to kick out to something it can't do anymore right so why would we have the open ai partnership anymore at all yeah so that we'll see what happens with that i don't think we ever really discussed how insane it was that in the settings menu of your iPhone, you could open a login portal to the OpenAI ChatGPT login website.

23:42It's pretty crazy. In the settings menu of your phone. That's crazy. Yeah. You still can. Yeah, I know. I'm just saying like it's an insane thing that they did. When they announced all this and the ChatGPT integration, am I remembering correct that they said there would be other models that you could choose to answer some of the questions in the future and that that would be a choice you could have? So at the event at WWDC, there was a Q &A afterwards and they said Gemini will be an option in the future, which never happened. Yeah. But if they're using it as a foundation model, theoretically, you wouldn't even need to do your whole model picker thing.

24:20I wonder, well, I guess my wonder was if they're trying to portray this choice that you have, would they keep a ChatGPT as an option to throw out to or have other options in the future? I doubt Google wants that to happen. I think most people think right now like ChatGPT OpenAI is going out the window. Yeah, probably. It's just too much complexity. I think that they just don't want consumers to have to go through the whole model picking thing. Yeah. It's a lot. It's better if it's just behind the scenes and it just does stuff and you don't even have to think about it. Yep. That's how it is ideal for most people.

24:53Yeah. I'm sure Apple wants it to be as behind the scenes as possible. They'll make this announcement. Dub Dub will mention it and they'll probably never mention Google's name ever again. It was about a small of an announcement. Oh, my God. This wasn't a newsroom post. This was like they gave one quote to one outlet. It was on the Google keyword blog. But the blog was Google made their post. And then Apple didn't make it. There was no Apple post. We agree. Yeah, there it is. Yeah, it's a joint statement from Google and Apple on the keyword, and it was two paragraphs. Yeah, it was as small of a splash as you could make.

25:21Yeah. So, yeah. And then I made a video about it, so there it is. It is crazy, though, because, like, you would assume Apple is very, very used to making their own versions of things because they don't like relying on other people. And the most that they've relied on other people is using Google search for things, which they, you know, notably, there was a lot of money that was flowing between those companies, which then they got sued for. so it seems like they would be less likely especially for like the future of the iphone to be powered by a google model is going to be a recurring deal that they're going to have to keep making with google until the end of time like it doesn't seem like apple is investing in making their own llm so here's this is the the last thought i had about this is how much does that really matter like if we i know we can't do this but let's take the money out of the equation Okay, you're using Siri.

26:10It's falling back on a device, a model on the device that happens to have been made by Google. Cool. That doesn't mean new users for Google. That doesn't mean new info or data for Google. It just means that that's where it came from. Yeah. And Apple still retains the user. They still have the, well, they control the user interface and everything. And so if one day it happened to switch to ChatGPT, and if that's just as good as Gemini, the user shouldn't notice. It will still not have any of your history because it's not like feeding any data to that company. It's not any flow of users from Google to OpenAI.

26:48It's just the user keeps using Siri and it just keeps working. So how much does it actually matter outside of the financials that they picked Google? Yeah, there's a lot of question marks because they have their private cloud compute thing, which is supposed to like not keep a lot of your queries and all that stuff. But at the same time, part of the new Siri features is that it remembers things about you and then it dynamically like suggests you things and puts things on your calendar for you so that's something in which it's going to have to like retain a certain level of information and then the question mark that I have is like is that information just retained locally on the device and can that easily pass to a new model that gets pushed to the device probably not passed to a new model but I think that will be the idea is like Apple builds all their functionality on top of this model that happens to be gemini but the point of it being gemini is it's just way more information and way smarter so then yeah they can build their like look into the user's apps and and this have all this data happening locally and be really helpful but like that's not showing up as like a google user or anything like that it's just a statement that google is the best one and that's the one they picked yeah which is like a big deal for people who follow the race and which one's better which one's number one but after that it's like yep okay siri's gonna be better now great it is interesting that apple didn't decide to invest in this this whole ai race compared to everybody else everyone thought they were going to buy anthropic for a long time that would be an investment they should have done that like two years ago i don't think anthropic would sell to them at this point but yeah it's uh it's a statement about how much apple believes that this ai race is actually a meaningful race to be involved in correct yes yeah i mean if they they never decided to build and ship a search engine that just means they figured it was never going to be worth it to apple that doesn't mean they don't think search engines matter that just means they don't think it's worth it to be involved in that business well and the metaverse remember like and they were like they already got fire half or didn't meta just fire a huge amount of people yeah they they because they're just like cut a bunch of funding to the metaverse division and there's like 100 people that are still using it yeah yeah yeah but i mean apple didn't notably did not invest in that for because they thought it might just be a fad and then they notably did not invest in ai because they thought it might just be a fad or at least the llm like hype wave uh now i think that they are like okay well we have to do this but it's still surprising that they haven't tried to build up their own infrastructure it's also on the back of like it's not just a fad it's a fad that could potentially help a product that they've had that's been terrible for a while so like i guess it links a little closer but at a certain point people are still buying iphones and using garbage siri is it easier to just continue to be like no no siri will be good one day yeah and how many regular users actually are like uh siri's bad and that's why i'm gonna buy a google phone like i don't really know how much very few people but i think apple at least sees the writing that there are people who are like look at all these cool things that circle the search and Gemini and all these AI like built-in features on Android phones is doing at least we can match that just to make sure that's not a reason why you're leaving the iPhone and the fact that they announced it very publicly and made advertisements around it and then haven't been able to deliver that's true very embarrassed clearly planned on delivering yeah yeah yeah so the only other connection I can make between businesses slash fads that Apple has decided not to invest in which at this point is search engines and their ai foundation models and multiple wireless chargers in one and the metaverse oh yeah well i guess between those two is air power they those two are reliant on all this data and apple's thing yeah is privacy privacy and not sharing user data for sure and so if you're apple and you're going should we invest a ton in building our own foundation models and competing with open ai and all these companies that are just inhaling data no because that's not in the wheelhouse of like how they make money or what they do and same with a search engine like apple could build the ui to a search engine sure but all the other things that make a search engine good are not things that apple really does yeah google makes money on data they don't care about the pixel apple makes money on the iphone they don't care about the data yeah and that is that is basically it boiled well said yeah yeah we got more to talk about in the future including why things are more expensive maybe probably welcome to every day of the week but before that trivia

31:32also mariah is here hi hi she spoke a couple times i'm assuming trivia might might be coming from mariah today but not yet okay uh this question is inspired by a listener of the show i ran it to in the city yesterday named sam who is an architecture student so everybody say hi sam and in researching possible architecture questions i found something really funny not just about architecture but about the great state of new jersey which is that new jersey is home to many, many, many different styles of architecture, but there is one that is actually only found in Staten Island and North Jersey. What is the name of this two-word alliterative style of New Jersey architecture of which the first word is a city here in North Jersey?

32:26Oh. Carnicore. That's kind of the answer I'm looking for. it's not carny core and it's not carny at all I was like can we get an example of what like what it looks like will that be too obvious I think I can describe it do you want to try to describe it frankly I don't think anyone's going to guess this but I will say for a clue can I give a clue a clue is I would say it's within a 15 minute drive of here so let that sink in I want to know what we're talking like like commercial or like a house residential okay and it's alliterative which means it's like i have a guess but in houses or something yeah like carnicore carnicore my guess is literally maple wood mansions one of the things is something else somewhere else in the northeast so i'm pretty sure i'm wrong on that one staten sweetness but isn't staten island isn't that in new york yeah but he said it's not really in new york though can we by the way can we just agree that staten island is just part of New Jersey.

33:33No. Nope, nope, nope, nope. We don't have time for that. We aren't taking that. I went there for the first time and it was just New Jersey. We, it's New York. It's literally. You guys, we will take the Statue of Liberty if you want to give us. Well, because it's ours. No, no, no, no. Give us next to each other. Answers will be at the end like usual. We'll be right back.

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36:47All right, welcome back. we got to talk about why your next smartphone well according to some people will cost more i was gonna say might cost more but will definitely cost more and i'm saying it that way because uh we're mainly basing this on a carl pay tweet he posted this really long tweet which i mean okay we could have kind of figured this out by context clues but we know that memory is getting more and more expensive and smartphones use memory so maybe your next smartphone is more expensive but Carl's tweet is much more definitively like look smartphones forever have relied on prices going down for these things so every year you can expect a spec bump and the price doesn't have to go up but this year 2026 that's not true memory has gone up so much in price that it is impossible for your next phone to cost the same amount thanks for the same specs and so yes if you haven't already heard memory shortage like this is it's have you tried to build a pc lately dude it's really hard to get around memory it's all super expensive every tech trend just really screws people who want to build a cool pc i feel like crypto is like you want a gpu suck it i ordered everything i ordered a little nas enclosure thing because again i was trying to do the photo photo stuff and just buying storage yep i'm like holy this is like four times as expensive as it was like six months ago it's all happening in fact in his tweet he has he's his numbers and i credit to carl he's always super transparent about uh component pricing that's like the one thing that i can say the one thing that he is always very transparent about that so he says that we know yeah he says uh brands face a simple choice raise prices by 30 or more in some cases or downgrade specs he's saying it's something that cost 20 a year ago could exceed a hundred dollars by year end for top tier models he also thinks that uh entry to mid-tier markets might shrink by 20 or more logically all of this makes perfect sense but as we were like entering this into the like we should talk about this today in the podcast i remember we we had this same discussion like eight months ago around tariffs right there was a sudden and sharp increase in prices among not just components but like entire brands like their whole like top to bottom uh supply chains and so we assumed that there would be no choice but to raise prices of certain things but to my memory that didn't really happen the way we thought it would it happened with some things with a couple of things we will talk about the fuji x half soon sure the pricing of that device is notably a tariff device.

39:31You remember last year we were thinking, I think the iPhone might get affected and they might have a higher priced iPhone because of tariffs? Yeah, because everyone on Twitter was like, the iPhone's going to be$2 ,000 now. Yeah, and that obviously didn't happen. Matter of fact, we got one of the best deals of an iPhone of all time last year. That's true. Tariffs were also super confusing because every time we talked about it, by the time we released the episode, it was different. So that was really hard. Who's exempt, who's not exempt. A lot of it comes down to market predictability and I think the fact that the tariffs were changing every single day, a lot of companies, especially the ones that could afford it, just decided it's worth it to just not change pricing and just wait it out and see what happens.

40:10And if we need to in the future, maybe we will. But we don't want to do this thing where we just are fluctuating our pricing like every two days. Yeah, I think when you sell to consumers, like the number one thing you can do is be stable and predictable, but that's only easier as you get bigger of a company. Yeah. If hopefully that sentence made sense. And so if you're smaller, like if you're nothing, then you maybe deal with more fluctuating supply chain pieces. And things like this memory shortage are a giant blinking red light on your radar because how can you build in enough margin to accommodate this crazy change?

40:47It's a combination of that and your ability to sustain those changing market dynamics. Like Samsung, for example, notably, does not make a ton of money from its mobile division. that's not its main source of of money actually probably most of its money comes from the ram it makes for other people displays so they're probably doing really well right now um and i don't think that samsung will change its prices for its smartphones at all so in a way carl is kind of just like we're gonna perfect it because we can't do this and i think that there will be some larger companies that'll be like hey don't speak for all of us yeah come on come on carl i wanted to ask So, guys, do you think that because we again, we looked at this with tariffs and we saw kind of what was happening there.

41:29Do you think that we expect smartphone prices to go up because of RAM shortages? Or do we think that these huge companies are insulated enough that we again, well, they'll just eat that cost and try to be as stable as possible. And hopefully that goes down next year. I think they're going to eat it for one more year. And if the memory prices are still insane next year, because the main reason the memory and storage prices are so insane right now is because of the data center explosion. and like open ai buying up all of the ram uh so if that you know if that capacity changes next year if either the companies that are building it build more fabs that can make more capacity or if open ai just doesn't need as much next year the prices could go back down so i think it's still kind of seen as a market fluctuation it's just a little bit longer term than the week-long market fluctuations of the tariffs sure i have well i agree with david even though he ends this whole post with um we learned early on we couldn't win on spec sheets alone instead we focused on perfecting the user experience proving how phone looks and feels matter more than its raw numbers great quote after everyone hated the nothing phone three um but like i think carl just taking the time to write this super long paragraph that could have just been uh ram is expensive phone like yeah it's proof that the nothing phone is going to get more expensive this year and he's already making excuses for it yeah i have another question though that ellis and i were kind of talking about beforehand that might prove that i'm an idiot for the 8 000th time on this podcast um but we were talking about new macbooks and i guess when i'm thinking of ram i'm immediately thinking of ram sticks right like that we're all used to but when the memory is integrated onto something like apple silicon is that going to be something that's going to would be affected by something like this and now i'm not exactly sure how ram is working inside of phones if we're talking about it so where is the question what ram are we talking about you know we saw before because of like micro centers throwing it up which is the ram sticks we all know is apple silicon going to be hit by this at all because it's all integrated into their chips that's a good question i don't know the answer i kind of assumed everything that uses memory whether it's a ram stick they put in a pc or if it's memory that's in the Hasselblad camera or in apple silicon it's all affected so it has to come yeah everything that has memory cars like this happened with chip shortage when like people realized cars use a lot of chips because they all have computers in them yeah the chip shortage affects everything because everything has a chip and depends on how much like your supply chain obviously and what percentage of your device is memory which is why we think cheaper smartphones mid-range smartphones are most affected because memory is an important and expensive component in that.

44:15But yeah, I do think it, I mean, I don't know the answer, but I do think it would affect Apple and Apple Silicon, but I don't think they're gonna raise prices because it's not a big enough component. Yeah, I don't think so either. Yeah. I think I see it both sides. Well, I think one thing that we failed to consider in our earlier conversation, Andrew, is that Apple probably pre-negotiated their RAM prices. I don't know when their contract with the three big suppliers ends, but I would have a feeling that they're locked in through some, to a price through some period of time. The other thing that we didn't really discuss was that, I guess maybe we sort of touched on it a little, but is that Apple has always charged this much for RAM.

44:56Like now we're sort of like in an area where now we're like. Their origins were insane already. It's like I was looking it up like now like sticks of RAM cost about as much as the actual RAM upgrades cost for. Dude, like, you try doubling the RAM in a MacBook. It's like, that'll cost you another MacBook. $800. No, going from 64 to 128 gigs of RAM on a MacBook Pro is an extra$800. You know, so it's crazy. So maybe they can just be like. They built it in. Yeah, they priced it in. They priced it in. The market priced it in. You know, on the other hand, everything is getting more expensive. So. Yeah.

45:36So I don't know. I feel like Apple probably already purchased this capacity ahead of time and it probably won't affect them for the short term. I just don't know how long that lasts. I believe it was Lenovo that said publicly that their price contract thing ends at the end of 2026. And, you know, Apple's worth a few Lenovo's. So, like, maybe their contract goes. I was trying to think of a company that I think might be affected that's not Apple. and Motorola came to mind because they sell a lot of two, one, two,$300 phones. They're a Lenovo company. They're like small. They don't have a ton of, to my knowledge, like super premium stuff like balancing it out where they can eat that charge on the smaller price things and they'll be okay.

46:26So I kind of feel like Motorola phones could be more expensive than their previous generations this year potentially. Yeah. That's a total guess for me. Well, speaking of these things being a lot more expensive and now a lot cheaper, there's a camera we've talked about a few times called the Fujifilm X-Half. This camera is the camera that was made to be bad. It's Fujifilm's response to the Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids buying Digicams, which are like early 2000s point-and-shoot cameras. And Fujifilm thought, we really need to get in on that. So they made this camera called the X-Half. it's got a one inch sensor uh it intentionally adds light leaks and all this hey it's you you must have not been here when we brought it in yeah adam had it such an interesting camera it's an awesome camera it is both awesome and terrible at the same it's awesome i it's the opposite of what i look for on cameras it has a portrait viewfinder like the the viewfinder on the back is portrait by default because half frame cameras x half always were a portrait because they just shrink the film um the film gate half as wide so they become portrait it was like also plastic but it looked really nice and it had this like the pictures weren't great but it had this really cool like secondary lcd screen where if you're doing film simulations it would swipe it would look like the roll of film was in it yeah this camera feels like the r &d and like design people all of the money went to that because the app is also very good when you transfer the photos to the phone you can see the negatives and then they develop and then they turn into positive this is the type of product where you're just like hey this is fun yeah yeah it's not gonna be the best quality thing but you're gonna have the most fun absolutely and then it's like so yeah give me 800 just have fun you're like i ain't trying to have that much fun this is the problem launch 850 i remember when i did the briefing for this camera it was like the day after the tariffs got announced and they like wouldn't say the price and we were like so are you guys gonna be affected by the terrace and they were like uh yeah and then it launched at$850 which is just$850 yeah it's just crazy man it's so expensive um really cool camera really fun really cute but$850 so now um Adorama is selling the Fujifilm XT5 which is their flagship prosumer camera that is not the medium format GFX cameras.

48:53If you buy the kit that comes with the X-T5 plus the lens, you get an X-Half for free. Which is funny. The X-Half also on B &H, everyone thought this was just a Black Friday deal, but they never put the price back up. They never stopped. The X-Half you can now buy for$650. On B &H it still says $200 off. It's clearly not the MSRP yet, but everyone's still selling it for that. The X-T5, it makes sense that they're trying to move units of that because that came out quite a while ago i think it was like 2022 or something and uh there are rumors that the xt6 is going to come out in september so it's clear a lot of these retailers are clearly just trying to move those units but it's just very funny that they are they are uh giving away a 650 used to be 850 camera with it it kind of makes sense because it's like move this but also like these cameras are quite a bit different the x half is like a more fun like yeah toss in your pocket this the xd5 obviously it's pretty serious camera it would be a fun thing to have as a side yeah totally it's just so funny it's like totally buy a camera get a mini camera with it for free doesn't sell for free yeah because it's not selling so yeah i mean again it's just like they need to move units because the xd6 is going to come out soon so that's really the reason um but just getting them out of the inventory.