The New Teslas Are a Bad Deal!

29:24Meh. That's fine. How much does the Buds Pro 2 fit in your ears? You're like 229, I think. Oh, you also cannot swipe to control volume on these, which kind of sucks. So you gotta use your phone. How's the live translation? Perfect. Also, the battery life is up to 20 hours, whereas the Buds Pro is up to 30. And the Buds Pro probably sound better. Probably. Maybe. Sound okay? Earbuds. yeah weirdly uh these say they have talked to gemini live whereas the buds pro have talked to gemini live in noisy spaces coming soon i'm just imagining on the 2a gemini's like it's a little too loud in here for us to talk right now some microphone can you go outside we go somewhere else i can't hear you bro let's get out of here yeah i like to sit in the table by the wall so it's easier for me to hear people yeah but these come in these purple color iris and also hazel when they asked me what color I want I thought iris would be um blue wait what yeah they are purple I don't know how purple means iris but also the flower not no doesn't there's the famous lady that has the purple eyes I thought your iris was just the color of your eye is there a flower called oh yeah the iris is iris is a flower but some of the irises are blue let's see tell you guys about the time I got traumatic iritis wait what is iritis iritis is a inflammation of your iris and it was traumatic just means it's because i got hit in the eye with a frisbee really hard ow i thought this was going to be a pun about how you're always right about everything uh i should have though i'm right of this opportunity wait so what did you have to do i went to the hospital and they put drops in my eyes and it really calmed it down and they charged you three three thousand dollars yeah something like that i got i got there myself i didn't take an ambulance or anything but yeah that would have been$13 ,000 exactly I also like the way you pronounce ambulance well speaking of purple oh I like that I can't tell if this is a thing to be honest I don't think it's a thing we can delete this at any point from the podcast if it turns out to not be a thing how about that well I want to open this up as a conversation of do we think this is a thing or not fair okay the lens is is this a thing is this a thing or is this not a thing the thing that could be a thing or not a thing is a slightly color changed iphone 17 pro max it seemed to go from orange to a weird off rose gold color there isn't really any other information about this other than it is i mean we know what the phone's made of and we know how long they could have possibly had the phone literally it's been a couple weeks since the phone came out and that's it it stems from a post on our apple that has 10 000 upvotes and 600 comments but other than that it's only really gone on twitter yeah it's a picture that someone says my orange iphone 17 pro max turned rose gold and they say didn't realize it until everyone asked where i got a rose gold phone from and then this person has one other comment in the thread in the last three days that says um someone said you when you turn it it changes colors dramatically based on the finish in the lighting and he says i could send you a photo from any angle it's rose gold that's the only comment and yeah i'm surprised on our apple a lot of people seem to be pretty like yeah this is weird i can't believe it's doing that but this picture looks off i don't know i don't want to turn this into like this is fake but it doesn't really feel like i'm not buying it i'm not really buying it yeah i'm not trying to hear to like defend that it's perfect there's no way this could happen but i've never seen as far as i know it's like leaving things in the sun that get stained i've seen cardboard do that i've seen plastic do that i don't think i've seen anodized aluminum in a week or two stain from being in the sun i just haven't seen that even if it was gonna like wear down as you use it it would it wouldn't wear down so evenly along all of the aluminum i've had it before where i've had like brand new blue jeans and you put things in your pocket and it stains the hell out of them stains the thing in your pocket yeah so it's possible that he had some sort of pants that stained the aluminum but i don't know part of me wants to go full conspiracy and say this is a photoshopped thing and he posted it on reddit to troll it's just like pink around the entire phone i'm gonna i'm gonna go with not a thing yeah i think we probably would have seen more people talking about i think like yeah a bit a verge or someone would have made a post about it if it was more believable but don't say we didn't talk about it but I don't think this is a gate.

34:08Could become a thing but as of right now. There's plenty of time for a gate on 17 to come out. We will cover it when it happens but I don't think this is the gate we were all hoping for. I mean Whoa. Wow. Andrew exposed yourself. How much did Google pay you to say that? I've had so many people call me an iPhone show when I've literally never owned an iPhone in my entire life. Classic. All right. Well, speaking of stains, my reputation, considering trivia, I am so low on points. I've stained my reputation. But let's take it. You're still riding that post-win high. That's true. Trivia.

34:51Welcome back to Waveform Trivia. Guys, today's question is about e-readers. Let's go. Because we talked about the books. in 1998 nuvo media released one of the world's first e-readers called the rocket ebook it had 106 dpi and four megabytes of flash storage that's enough wow according to the mobile read wiki which is an e-reader wiki nice how many books could it store price is right rules and just so we're all in agreement here. This is sort of like the way Apple, when they have the iPod, you know, there's no... How many songs? Yeah, how many songs, like, you know, whatever. Yeah, are we talking about, like, Goodnight Moon or the Bible?

35:34That's a great question, David, because actually I have the number. This is calling a book 400 pages. How many 400 page books? Okay. Okay. I'm trying to think what would be an impressive number back then. I guess I just read a novella because the book I just read was 297. Those are rookie numbers. It's got to be at least 400, right? Yeah. Top of a book. Yeah. All right. We'll think about that. The answers will be at the end, like usual. And we'll be right back.

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39:22Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash mkbhd. That's linkedin.com slash mkbhd to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. okay welcome back uh all right we got a new product to talk about and i want to break this product down for you guys and i want to know what your thoughts are uh this is not a brand new product this is a variant of a product you may already be familiar with the pixel already similar uh no this is the new tesla model y and tesla model 3 standard so in case you're keeping track there are a bunch of other trims of the model 3 and model y which are very well known cars they're selling all over the world uh but owners of those cars have woken up to the news that their cars are now premium versions because there's a new low-cost version called the standard uh and a lot of people were talking about this because there were rumors for a while of like oh are they finally going to do a low-cost super cheap version of the model 3 and model y is it's going to be like a 35 000 car or something like that like that was a rumor people have been talking about for many years and then they started teasing something on twitter and we saw some silhouettes and some headlights and now here it is it's the new low-cost standard model 3 and model y so i'm going to go through the list of things that they cut out of a normal model 3 or model y and tell you the new price and i want you guys to tell me if you think it's worth it okay so you could get a regular model 3 or model y today or a premium a premium rear-wheel drive or let's go with model y i'll share with you all the things that i found just from watching the videos that are different about this new model and how much you save okay so this new standard model y starts at about 42 000 so that makes it roughly five thousand dollars cheaper than the existing rear wheel drive based model y okay okay so for five thousand dollars less you get single motor rear wheel drive but a little bit less power so about 300 horsepower so instead of a five second zero to 60 it's about a seven second zero to 60 the battery is about 10 smaller but it still gets 320 miles of range with the new smaller 18 inch standard wheel and aero wheel covers it'll charge up to 225 kilowatts which is almost the same as a 250 the headlight bar is gone it is just a normal looking split pair of headlights and the taillight bar is also gone it is a normal looking split pair of taillights the only free paint color is gray okay the only available colors by the way are you can spend$1 ,000 to get white or$1 ,500 to get black.

41:55The steering wheel doesn't adjust with the motor anymore. It's a manually adjusting steering wheel. There's no more seat adjustment buttons on the front seats. You have to do it all through the touchscreen. There is no more ventilation for the front seats and no more heating for the rear seats. There is no more touchscreen in the back. You have just vents and USB-C ports. There's no more HEPA air filter. There is no more heated windshield wipers. There's no more ambient lighting except in the footwell. There's no more, there's half the speakers, seven instead of 15. There's no more FM radio. There are single pane laminate windows instead of dual pane.

42:29And you manually put the second row of seats down instead of that button that used to be in the trunk. And they removed the frunk liner. So it's a smaller and not lined frunk that could get water in it. And last but not least, they have removed the glass roof, except not really. Explain. I'll get to that in a second. But just on pure price to performance, do you guys feel a certain way about this new base Model 3? So are all of these things... All these things. You can get all of them for$5 ,000 more. $5 ,000 more. You can get all of that. It feels worth it to me for$5 ,000 more. Yeah, this feels like a great way to sell a bunch of them for rental cars.

43:11And then also price ladder people when they go to buy one into being like, wow, I get all of that for another$5 ,000. i'm glad you said that that's exactly my take on this is it kind of feels like a price ladder uh first rung where you see this cheaper version and you look at it and you're like oh for only five thousand more dollars i could get all of this stuff for quality of life and it will only be a little bit more expensive that seems like this people are reacting initially to this thinking this should have been a 30 to 28 000 car which would have been nice and you can get a used tesla for that but instead it's not as cheap as people thought it would be things like removing the heated windshield wipers and also the like ventilated seats yeah stuff like that i'm like that's stuff that you should just have you're gonna say that instead of the fm radio yeah yeah i'm saying that's so much more default than heated oh you know i'm saying if you're buying a brand new car it better have an fm radio that's what i'm saying why the hell not that's like three dollars it's gotta be like five cents in parts and time that's true so here's the here's the thing about this list and we were talking about what's that truck that we were talking about earlier this year the slate truck no this is a like this is a good idea in theory is to take a bunch of the expensive extra stuff out this is what rivian r2 is like take the extra expensive of stuff out of it and make a cheaper version make it a little smaller i mean the r2 is a little smaller but they took out a bunch of like the speaker and the flashlight and and the extra like super high-end motors and they make a cheaper version and it's still almost as good and hopefully you don't notice the things that are taken out and it's fine for most people like that's a normal process to go through to make a cheaper vehicle but some of the things that they've taken out are so strange to me like they're really odd i'll go through some of the notable ones right so obviously a slightly smaller battery makes sense smaller wheels a slightly smaller motor and less power totally makes sense the expensive light bar get rid of that cool um the headliner in the glass roof is added in while the roof of the vehicle is still made of glass can you explain what a headliner is so when you look up in your model 3 it's like the biggest artist that a music festival god a headliner in a car they went in the roof a headliner in a car is when you look up and the material of like what the borders around your glass roof are made of yeah like that and like the the pillars the pillars all that like material right when you look up in this standard model 3 and model y it's gonna be just a cloth headliner but the roof of the vehicle is still glass so what they did was they just added a different like a cloth headliner instead of keeping it open glass to make it cheaper which is a little confusing did i actually make it cheaper that's wouldn't that make it more expensive that's a great question it seems like tesla's saying that it makes it cheaper instead of just adding like re-engineering a new just metal but it's whatever so you can't see through it you can't see through it it has a glass roof but they've added headliner to it instead of re-engineering a new metal roof.

46:26Could you theoretically take that headliner out and have a glass roof again? I guarantee someone's going to try it. Guaranteed someone's going to try that. We'll see. It's probably just glue. I don't know. It seems like they see it as being more fancy to be able to see through the glass and they're just like trying to make it feel less fancy. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Have we seen a video of that? Mm-hmm. Because like this is on their website right now. Standard. I'm looking at the inside and I see a roof. That's misleading because there is no glass roof. I don't know why that's the picture for the standard Model 3.

46:55It's so funny because it changes all the things when you go through, like premium performance. Like it adds the extra lights and stuff. It changes the seats. They just forgot to even edit out the glass. So even when you're ordering on the website, it looks like it has a see-through roof. Yeah. A couple other weird things about this list. I watched a bunch of the Tesla Influencer videos about these cars. All of them had this blue Model Y in their videos. and then at the last second, Tesla went, by the way, blue's not available for this vehicle. So all of them have this like shiny blue Model Y in their videos, but they can't get a blue one.

47:30That don't, it doesn't seem like that's on purpose, but that kind of sucks. The other one that was weird to me. Potentially getting water in the frunk. Yeah, okay, the frunk liner, if you watch one of these videos, they open the front trunk and instead of having a normal looking like lined front trunk, there's just a bunch of exposed wires and metal and then a like kind of i mean the front trunk itself still has lining but there's just way more exposed car part and i thought that was i linked it if you click the liner uh link that i put in the chat uh you should link to the time stamp like five minutes 30 seconds into this video wow isn't that that seems sketchy how much are you saving oh yeah there it's literally like light plastic yeah also the hepa air filter like isn't it really good to have that and also making it buying a hepa filter is not expensive it's more expensive to get a hepa rated filter than just like a basic air filter yeah but like not by a lot right and that's something like so i haven't had one that is a helpful filter but you replace those filters right like throughout the car's life uh no well the hepa air filter i don't think you replace nearly as often there are some air filters you do replace i've replaced one of mine but that was because my car had a problem where water was dripping down into the air filter area and so mold was a lot going in there i've had model s have that problem yeah yeah fm radio i have no idea yeah i see what you mean about this roof i'm seeing it this is a video from everyday chris and i see it in there but every photo i've seen from tesla or sourcing tesla that's true shows the glass roof on other websites yeah which either means they're wrong or well it's this one's on tesla's it's probably tesla that's wrong that's why it's interesting yeah i don't know man five thousand like if you're buying a thirty five thousand dollar car it yeah i i agree with your assessment andrew of it being like made for rental companies and then also price laddering i think price laddering price laddering perfect for this like if this is a really appealing price people would get it if it's not a really appealing price people will see it and go if i only spend a little bit more i can get 256 gigs of storage it's also a way for them to say look we finally did it we delivered the 35 000 model 3 which they talked about a thousand times and have only done for like a day at a time every now and then and they still didn't even do right it's 37 000 well in yeah in new york it's 35 000 because there's certain states still have on wednesday yeah there's a new york state credit yeah yeah yeah Yeah, this is almost certainly revolving a little bit also around the$7 ,500 in tax rebate going away.

50:11They just went away, yeah. So they want to continue to sell these. And obviously now that that rebate went away, everything just got$7 ,500 more expensive. So this is somewhat correcting for that a little bit. But yeah, it just doesn't feel quite like a good deal. I will say the one way you can paint it in a good light is this is probably the best range per dollar you can get for an EV. For a brand new EV,$36 ,000 or whatever it is,$39 ,000 for 320 miles of range. That's pretty good. What about the Prius that has the solar panels? Well, if you're not, I mean, that's not an EV. Have you heard of Aptera?

50:48I actually don't think that gets 300 miles of range. So I think, yeah, you can paint that in a good light. And as far as just basic like point A to point B commuting, if I don't really care much about my car in that way, then this is 300 miles of range for not very much money. and this would probably depreciate in a couple months i was gonna say i would simply buy a used premium one for probably cheaper that's currently the status of the lineup the used premium ones are are a better deal in a lot of ways yeah and also since these don't hold their value like they used to because yeah certain decisions yeah um the glass roof thing that's weird very funny i can't wait till someone just rips out the cloth i'm sure i keep wanting to think like there must be a reason for whatever it was around the glass roof to maybe be more expensive.

51:35But it feels like even just creating the new skew or like new part must mean it's more expensive to take that away. Here's how I think the logic actually works out. They have this manufacturing process, which has the Model Y, which has a glass roof. And then they have the part inside the car, which is the headliner with the cutouts around the glass roof, right? For this cheaper model, and it would have actually cost them more money to re-engineer a version of the Model Y with a metal roof. And so to us, it feels obvious to just leave the glass roof, but I guess Tesla found a way to make it cheaper to engineer a new, even cheaper headliner that just glues in cloth into the top that is cheaper than the headliner that cuts out for the glass.

52:24So that is some way that they found a way to save some dollars and give people no glass roof but the glass is still on top of the car right so uh yeah someone's gonna cut it it's funny because they're using more material more headliner material in some ways the headliner does look pretty cheap so i think that's a very good yeah yeah and now what if they like thank you didn't try to make the car drive itself oh that was my next save 20 000 yeah so does this have all the hardware on it if you but can you can you buy full self driving on the website says you can yeah the website it says you can well the website says it has a glass roof also so that's fair enough that's fair that's the thing that would make i want to know how many of these are sold with people buying full self-driving the might be coming soon feature yeah i don't for the last 10 years people buying this should be spending thousands of dollars so couldn't you have just taken the software out of it and kept fm radio or the sorry the cameras and everything and just like had a non-potential driving version of this and that doesn't save tesla any money to not put the cameras in all of them oh the no it still needs well it still has the cameras anyway for like the blinkers and the backup and parking and all that parking it's but it has like extra cameras that are specifically built for full self driving right i don't think there's a distinction i mean maybe there's one or two extras but i think in general you have all the cameras around the mirrors and the sides and everything and then you use the cameras for normal driving activities and then they also use those cameras for self-driving software even like ones pointing forward yeah i think so i think what are you using those for normal driving activities when you build the 360 image around the car and like throw in a reverse and that stitches them all together and you can park and see like your that still seems like a more premium feature than a lot of stuff i agree i agree yeah but would you buy a car with no cameras on it if i wanted to save money i'd probably rather have heated steering wheels and just like how no there's not a chance it drives itself i have like stuff like that my car i mean i do really like my reverse camera but it has one reverse camera on my car yeah that's all i have to parallel park every single day and i need that yeah i think there are some features that if you ask somebody in 2025 in the year like brand new car would you expect to be able to buy a brand new car that doesn't have insert feature here yeah and i think for some people cameras are like a non-negotiable you have to be able to have that in a new car but i think there's a lot of things on this list that are skirting that line i don't think manually adjustable steering wheel is normal a giant ipad in the middle is probably not something that people say is non-negotiable uh yeah but that does everything for the car like they took away the they took away the adjustment on the side of the seat to change your seat you have to do that on the steering wheel still which by the way mine broke within like the first month so maybe it would be better if it was on the screen wait what broke the like a seat adjuster handle things yeah they just snapped off oh yeah well now that can't happen it's funny that it's it's funny that it's just the buttons and not just that it made it like the typical you know the sliding bar and the like uh oh just a full lever to go back and yeah yeah i i wonder if that's a similar similar case of glass roof would it have cost them more money to re-engineer a new seat that slides on a different set of rails or do they just keep making the same rails they've always made but remove some buttons i guess i don't know how much different the rails are or if it's based on like what's sitting on the rail it's also so possible that none of this made it like some of it just didn't make it cheaper but they just wanted to make the price ladder.

56:02Yeah. I would love to see, I want to see a list of how much per unit each of these changes save them. Yeah. Like in order. Yeah. Because FM radio had to cost nothing. I don't know why that's. Probably just like. It's like a radio, like a single part. Yeah. And this already has like wireless capabilities. It still has satellite radio. It still has other like internet radio. It just is missing FM radio. Yeah, sure. Receiver. I doubt it. Probably like that. Radio shag. You probably plug it in. Maybe they didn't want to put an FM antenna on it. yeah the antenna the 30 million dollar antenna that goes on the car no no but like then you have to design it for a place to go and you know it's already there to go it's every fm radio every car already has the fm radio they are just removing it from the standard one meaning they're saving him does have an fm yeah all of these teslas already have fm radio they're just saving parts i know this is just parts money parts money that's it yeah so yeah i don't know i don't think i'll recommend this yeah this segment's gonna do awesome somebody in the comments on that one yeah is definitely defending it for sure do we know if it ships with hardware three or hardware four or is that a stupid question to ask the tesla ecosystem sort of confuses me that's a good question i would assume it's hardware four because hardware four is the newest all the cameras and stuff that are always in i guess that was main that was kind of the basis of my question on does this have autopilot because are we doing like the older cameras or the newer cameras that felt like a port i would assume cameras were more expensive than fm radio if we're still on that so so the reason i ask about hardware is because earlier this year tesla came out and said hardware three will not be compatible with full self-driving which is what that whole lawsuit was about like yeah because they people bought cars with hardware three and then paid for full self-driving and then they're like oh sorry you're not gonna get it do you know it's gonna be funny when hardware four isn't compatible with full oh yeah yeah in a year and then then also they're not they still haven't said how they're gonna upgrade people from three to anyway but i was curious and then i asked it i was i'm on tesla's website right now i asked the grok chat feature in the corner and it was like i don't know yeah i can't find that information i think the two funniest things about this are the liner and all the creators getting a blue one and there's no blue one available the one guys that you could tell he changed the thumbnail to be white because it's a white car you click on it and you go into it it's a blue car yeah oof okie dokie super fun do you have any final thoughts on that david no okay i will also shout out that if you were extremely unimpressed by all this tesla stuff that we actually coincidentally on the autofocus channel just dropped a top tesla alternatives video this is a subject i get asked about a lot as a car reviewer so i just decided to make the video 10 years ago the video would have been very short i would have just been like you should just get a tesla but now the supercharger network is open and there's a bunch of alternatives that are actually really good so i rounded up model three competitors model y competitors model s competitors model x competitors and cybertruck competitors so go watch that autofocus video it's out now by the time you watch this anyway it's time for trivia

59:21trivia dude dude all right so i was so appalled by them removing the fm receiver that i went to see how much it would cost right now on aliexpress if i was to buy just the piece fm antenna no just the receiver the receiver like little module thing price is right rules without going over and that's one part just one because if you bought in the millions exactly basically so just one how How much do you think it costs? That's, it's gonna be no money. It's USD. Can I just go zero? Oh, yeah. Price is right? Price is right rules, yeah. 53 cents. I'm guessing one cent. There's just no way. Well, it's, but it's only one piece.

59:58Yeah, I'm buying one of AliExpress right now. Three cents. How much did I pay? 53 cents. Well, we'll think about that. We'll think about how much we really think Tesla saved. I thought it was gonna be an e-reader question. No, that's a different one. Okay. We'll be right back.

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1:02:19Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts. All right, welcome back. That was an extra long ad break. I mean, it was the same length for you guys, but for us it was really long because what we just did was... Clicked publish on the Pixel 10 Pro folder view. It's out. It's live. It is out. We're live. Confirmed. It's been live for two days when you're listening to this. We love it. Phone of the year. Spoiler. TLDR. Spoiler. Wait, I meant it's trash. I mean, I mean. Somewhere in between. All right. Well, the last segment here is something we've been doing lately, which is explaining mainstream news in tech terms.

1:03:01Yeah. And if you haven't guessed already, I'm going to be explaining to you guys Taylor Swift's new album, Life of a Showgirl. in tech terms. Finally, one of these where I'm not the only one that's a f***ing ass. It's going to be a long bleep right there, but... For the non-Swifties in post, do I have permission to move this discussion into the left ear of the podcast and then play something else in the right ear of the podcast? Everyone should listen to this. That would be incredible. Okay, listen, I know when I did the Christian Horner getting fired from Red Bull Racing, I did a very bad job at comparing it in tech terms also not as big of a cultural event no we did the basketball trade one that one was great that was a huge cultural event so i i found a couple ways that i think i can explain to you guys this this album that i think will be the best way to show where it is in the taylor verse can i tell you where i'm at with this album sure i have not listened to it okay uh i came into the studio one day and someone said oh are you celebrating taylor day and i said what are you talking about and it's because i was wearing a taylor made golf shirt and someone said taylor dropped today and they thought I'd coordinated it.

1:04:07I had no idea. Yes, it was rich. So I heard that the album came out. I then proceeded to not listen to it. But then my timeline on Twitter was filled with this unusual amount of hatred or at least negative reviews about the album. And then I started seeing like a day or two later Instagram reels and memes about how bad the album is. Yeah. So that's where I haven't, I still haven't listened to it. Okay. But I assume that this is a culturally big deal and I'm excited to learn in tech terms what this is. Every Taylor album release is culturally a big deal. She's just, it just doesn't matter if it's good or bad.

1:04:51She's just at that level of fame. I think we can all agree on that. But so yeah, the way I'm going to describe it inside of the Taylor verse is I'm actually going to do two things. Okay. I'm going to rank this album the same way that YouTube ranks the last 10 videos, which for those of you who are not familiar, the way YouTube ranks or shows your ranking of your videos is when you publish a video. It compares them to the last 10. And at the time, those last 10 were published. So it's a ranking out of 10 based on the last 10 albums that Taylor Swift put out. Now. In quality? In my enjoyment of it.

1:05:29Okay. So this is more personal. To clarify even further, if we drop a video and it bangs, that would be a one of 10. One out of 10 is the best. 10 out of 10 is the worst. 10 out of 10 does not mean terrible. It just means out of the 10 we are comparing. How many albums does she have? More than 10. So that's why we are just doing the last 10. The most recent 10. I am including Taylor's version re-releases, but I am not including the random sets at different recording studios. Okay. That's a whole other discussion. There's a lot to go here. so I'm trying to be as specific as possible. I would like to describe myself as a above average Taylor Swift fan and a below average Swifty.

1:06:08I think that paints my picture of where I'm at in Taylor fandom. Okay, so. I mean, you've listened to the last 10 albums, so that's already a pretty high level of. And after I do the YouTube ranking, I am then going to compare it to a Pixel phone based on the Pixel lineup because there are 10 pixels. I like that. So I have two ways to try and describe to you guys where I think this album is sitting. okay all right so first of all i think this is a five out of ten life of a showgirl is a five out of ten so it's mid okay it's it's in the middle of her last 10 albums no you said it's my eyes i did not say that i did very distinctly i'm printing that quote on my website nope not a chance if we publish a video and it does five out of ten do we not describe that as mid uh you know maybe she We should work with some title changes.

1:06:56To give you credit, to give you credit, like we in Tech-temper, we notably, I think we talked about this last week, we had a video that went up as a 9 out of 10. And if it had published in any other month of the year, it would have been a 2 out of 10 because the last 10 videos were all such bangers. Is this the case with Taylor where this album is bad, but her last 10 albums are all so bad that this is just mid? Or... There are some very good albums in her last 10 albums. So it's a big mix. It's a big mix. I think the bottom of the 10 is a little weak in my eyes. I'll give you the whole list right now.

1:07:31Oh, I put it out. Trust me. Give it one through 10. Okay. For anyone who knows Taylor's albums and wants to see where my rankings of this is, this is my list. One to 10 based on YouTube rankings. I have Red Taylor's version, 1989 Taylor's version, Lover, Speak Now Taylor's version, Life of a Showgirl. Those are very close. Four and five. And that's one through five. That's one through five. Then I have Evermore, Fearless Taylor's Version, Midnight's Folklore, Tortured Poets Department. That is my ranking of last 10 albums. Didn't people really like the folklore one that was well-received? I personally like Evermore way more than folklore.

1:08:04But both of them are pretty slow in general. But long story short, might just straight up put Evermore above them. Doesn't one that came out last year have like 34 songs on it? I forget exactly what it is. I am not a big fan of Tortured Poets Department. I'm excited when people clip this and have hot takes about your rankings because I just know that that's what happens with this. I think the scripty audience is very reasonable and will at least give me credit for having an opinion on it. What is the Venn diagram between the Taylor Swift people and our audience? There is enough to whenever an album releases, people saying, Andrew, what are your thoughts on the new album?

1:08:40I think Taylor's reached a point where it's almost a circle. I think a lot of people listen to Taylor Swift albums. Just because Taylor Swift is that popular? Just because she's Taylor Swift. like she is everywhere yeah did you listen to it i have not but i plan to because it's that big of a like cultural event here i'll tell you why i have it at five i think why it's mid in tech not in tech i'll do a quick i think the reason i enjoy it right now is it's poppy and it's upbeat and it's kind of what i like out of taylor's stuff i think after being really salty about not getting errors toward tickets and definitely not holding a grudge at all around tortured Poets Department.

1:09:19This is the album. I was like, there's a lot of really fun catchy music. I don't think anything's that like totally mind-blowing. I think it's impressive that she can make me sing along to a song about Travis Kelsey's Ding Dong in the car. Wood is a great song. Life of a Showgirl's great wish list. Fate of Ophelia. Opalite are all bangers. Really good fun songs. Shut up!

1:09:50it's a it's a it's a fun album okay i'm liking it um if i can bring it into pixels which i think you guys will more understand yeah i'm going with no folds no a series we're just doing pixel one to ten as the full lineup no pros i mean pro intent they're like in the same level you know Are the Taylor's version the pro models? No. They're just their own albums. I think Life of a Showgirl is the Pixel 6. We got our debut. It's kind of like it's bringing it back. It's new Tensor. It's a fancy chip, but it's not really as good as the other chips that we've liked in the past. We were excited for it, but it kind of paved its new way.

1:10:34Taylor's engaged now. We got a big, fun album of that. The Pixel 6 was like the new Bolts. It's kind of broken a little bit. It's in the middle. You don't think of it as the peak of pixeldom. Yeah. For sure. It was like flashy and new, but it was also like pretty good. It made you kind of excited about pixels again, but you were still longing for some of the older pixels. I get that. Okay. You know, like what would both of you guys say is peak pixel? Like if you had to. Pixel one. I think I'm pixel two. I think Panda felt like. I liked the shape of pixel one. that's fair Pixel 3 was fire Soli and bathtub notch bathtub notch Soli and bathtub notch Soli was pixel 4 I think 3XL was it pixel 4 yeah okay then I 3XL was bathtub notch pixel 4A was peak pixel 4A is probably the best pixel but you said no A's no A's um yeah okay cool I for reference I had red TV as pixel 2 because I think that is like what is it what's TV it's Taylor's version sorry that's the re-release album of 10 it's the one that includes the 10 minute long version of Taylor of All Too Well I'm trying to think of if I can describe this album it's like a straight late manifesto song yeah except it's good excuse me I'm about to go to my 6th I'm about to go to my 6th show this year that actually will be pretty fun I think Pixel 2 felt like peak I think Panda Pixel felt like Are you saying Taylor Swift's writing is better than Streetlight Manifesto?

1:12:12Probably. No, we're not doing this. This discussion is not. I thought about this when I saw it in the script yesterday. And I'm glad you chose Pixel. Because the tech terms that I got ready to explain this record is, I think, Taylor Swift is like Google. I don't know if there's other pop stars that you compare to other tech companies. But when I mean that to say Taylor Swift, you literally could not get more famous than Taylor Swift. Yeah. You also, as a musical artist, really could not get more wealthy than Taylor Swift. Like she has done it all. She's sold more records than anybody. She toured for two years.

1:12:55There were literally a global shortage of Taylor Swift tickets. She's a billionaire. In the same way that Google, while they're not the most valuable or profitable company that ever was, in a lot of ways is the most privileged company that ever it is. They have access to more information than any other single human source in history. They have offices all over the world. They have talented people everywhere. They were some of the first people to deploy transform models, you know. And also, both Taylor Swift and Google love, despite their pedigree at the top of their respective fields, they love to play the victim, right?

1:13:34They love to be like, Apple is being mean. They won't let their users text our users. And they won't even adopt our stupid open source RCA. Remember the Pixel? Was it like the 7A or the 8A when they brought back the headphone jack? and they were like, your favorite phone company doesn't even have the circle. And the same way that Taylor Swift will... Yeah, what does she do? Write a song calling another artist who said something actually nice about her a drug addict. And so I think a lot of the negative reaction to this album isn't actually about the quality of the music. I think it's in the same way that Google this year, after years of being like, guys, we're trying to do Gemini, but we want to make it safe.

1:14:22I know it's worse. Or like, guys, Apple's so mean to us. It's like, all right, Google, cook. See what you can do. And what did we get? We got Jimmy Fallon yelling tensor. Tell me if this is accurate or not. I'm trying to feel like I understand this, the implications and the overreactions and underreactions from both sides. I think you should take Twitter reactions out of it. I think we know the Twitter audience these days, and I don't think they're the ones who are going to go talking about Taylor Swift. I'm going to loop both in. I'm going to loop both yours and Twitter's in. I'm going to say that the Taylor Swift album, was it Life of a Showgirl?

1:14:55Yeah. I'm going to say that Life of a Showgirl in this year's iPhone lineup is the iPhone Air. Hear me out. Sure. Apple, incredibly popular company, arguably the most popular in a lot of places in the world. Anything that they do, everyone hears about it and sees it and has some reaction to it. In some ways, when they release new stuff, not only do people compare it with their past work, which had some peaks and some valleys, but people always look at it when it first comes out with an extremely critical eye, looking for a gate, looking for something that could be a big headline that's wrong with it.

1:15:31And so they will overanalyze every little piece of it. And so if there's a piece of this lineup that came out, like the iPhone Air, that clearly has some upside, but also clearly has some downside people will pounce on and react very strongly to the downside because it's easy that's the obvious thing to do and then in time it may age better than the current storm of twitter reactions so this album while it seems pretty mid now in the lineup like the iphone air seems pretty mid now in the entire lineup it may be appreciated maybe further down the line for being at least a little bit different or at least a little bit better than the hatred that it got when it first launched is that accurate yeah i think that's super fair i think like uh i don't think anyone's saying this is an album that's like blowing it's like blowing other albums out of the water it's not it's clearly not every fan would say that like there's a majority of albums but we also had iphones that bent in half and that you could hold wrong and wouldn't get signal and it's clearly not the worst one either.

1:16:35I think my version of this album is like, I like it because it's fun and there's nothing really about it that's the standout of it. But I'm enjoying listening to it. It's got one camera. Because it's the... Yeah. No vapor chamber, but it's fun. No vapor chamber in this album. Jack Antonoff is the vapor chamber. I don't think Jack Antonoff worked on this one. That's why. It's the air, doesn't it? Oh, the air does have a vapor chamber. Vapor chamber team didn't put it. No, I don't think it had a vapor chamber. Okay, so yeah, my joke was a play. See, I'm in the Swiftiverse, bro. Me and you, I'm in your head, dog.

1:17:04Jack Antonoff spreads the heat around, you know what I'm saying? There you go. So I am convinced that this album is fine. I have not yet listened to the whole thing. I've listened to random little segments of it. But I'm convinced this album is fine. But because of the way that social media algorithms are structured and everyone wants to be the tribal leader of opinion, people are just more extreme in either direction. and then that makes the people on the other side of the aisle more angry a thousand percent so yeah the discourse i saw on threads was like oh taylor swift must go hard if you're stupid and then there was other which is pretty funny to me none of this is none of this discourse is actually real it's just that the the algorithms fuel people being more extreme in one direction or the other because you get more engagement because you get paid.

1:18:02That can't be true. They don't have a monetary incentive for that. They do. Threads does, yeah, they pay people. What is it I started this section off with? The pixel is amazing. It's photo of the year. No, wait, it's trash. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, saying that the album is fine doesn't get a lot of engagement. So saying that the album is amazing or terrible gets you way more. Exactly. The structures of the internet, and we barely have in-person discourse anymore. So then we need to change our five out of 10 to either a one out of 10 or 10 out of 10. If we want this to be more awful, I'm going to make it a click.

1:18:33Well, no, because the thumbnail will be a blurred out number out of 10. You know what we should do? Because we can do A-B testing. The title of one of these should be the Taylor Swift album is amazing. And the other title should be the Taylor Swift album is trash. And just see what happens. And see how many people click on which one. Some people just want to watch the world burn. Yeah. So anyway, I don't know. I agree with you, Marquez. I think that over a longer period of time, people are going to realize that it's fine. And people will appreciate it over time. Plenty of people will like it and plenty of people will dislike it.

1:19:03I think the discourse is fake. That's just all I'm saying. I think it's not real. I think that can be said about pretty much everything. Will that make it like the S25 Ultra or S24 Ultra? I think that makes it like the S25 FE. We didn't even review it, but it's like low key. It's fine. It's fine. It's probably a good phone for you or for me. Do you think we got it, Andrew? Do you think that was... I have no idea where we are anymore. I think I got it. I think Marcus did a good job with the air. I think the air is a good analogy. Perfect. Then you know what it's time for? Trivia! Oh. All right.

1:19:41What are we titling the episode? Probably? Taylor is not so swift. I think that's a clipped title. Yeah, yeah. If anything. I know what it would be. Waveform episode 315, Taylor's version. Oh. That's good. Techtober, Taylor's version. Guys, welcome back to trivia. All right, guys, my first question is about the Rocket e-book, one of the first e-readers released late 1998, but most people consider it a 1999 product that had four megabytes of flash storage. How many 400-page books could it hold? Okay.

1:20:21All right. You guys seem to have very quickly gotten your answers. Yep. These are Price is Right rules. I put some thought into my answer. What is this? What's Icarus football, Adam? What? Hmm? Sorry. There's a Wawa football jersey. Like, European football. Soccer. David said it on me. That's so sick. It seems like... It's like the... No. Well... Well... Uh, so David and I both put 99. I put 10. Yeah, that's not right. Andrew. 10? Am I over? No. Okay, thank goodness. You're right on the money. Oh, are you serious? Exactly 10. Wait, in Price is Right. Triple points. Triple points. I'm just kidding.

1:21:11I didn't know. It does mean something in Price is Right, though, right? If you guess it exactly on the... Oh. I think you win the thing. Can we ask Alex? I was doing the math of like, okay, they must have picked a 400-page book specifically to make it a nice, round, even number. So it's probably a nice round base 10 number. So it's probably either 10 or 100 or 1 ,000. And then I just tried to think like how big is a book text file. And I thought you could fit 1 ,000. You get a$500 bonus. David, you are last but not least. I'm not? With four points. No, you are last. And least. And least. In points, but not in character.

1:21:45Oh, thank you. That's me. Marquez, smack dab in the middle with six points. He's mid. Pretty mid. Yeah, you know, five out of ten. And then Andrew, just leading the pack. So I'm the Taylor Swift album, huh? Yeah. You're the showgirl. I'm probably like 1989 Red Taylor's version. How many points do you think you have? Price is Right rules. If you get it wrong, you lose all your points. I think I have nine points. Damn. You just said it. Dude, you could have had that, man. You could have looked so smart in front of everybody. I was trying to set you up. How much is an FM receiver that we found on AliExpress?

1:22:22Yeah, and so Price is Right. For a little clarification, this is not just the receiver. This is a PCB with two knobs, an LCD screen, some DSP, a headphone jack, a headphone amp, some memory so you can store preset stations. This is a radio. This is a full radio. It just happens to be all on one little tiny circuit board. Can I ask maybe a stupid question? Sure. I know the dollar sign comes before numbers. Does the cent sign come after? No, it comes after, yeah. When would you ever write a dollar sign and a cent sign? I'm not writing a dollar sign. I'm only going to write a cent. Yeah, cents come after.

1:22:55Because there's no decimal. For some reason, I always put the dollar sign after, and I know it's wrong. That was a what's a chair moment for sure. Or what's a chef. I need to eat. He ate with that. Whoops. Who wants to go first? I wrote 99 cents. Just like that one album, that one song from the guy. Oh. Thrift shop. 99 cents is an acceptable answer. does that mean it's the right answer that means it beats me at 14 cents correct that is true I said$3.29 I should have put$1.29 guys the AliExpress listing for this item was exactly $0.99 $0.99 3x points that's wild thanks for watching also thanks for watching the Pixel Fold 10 Pro that's a long name review thanks for watching our autofocus channel which has also recently published a tesla alternatives video so if you're interested in that after we talked about the new model 3 and model y feel free to watch all of that on the autofocus channel the studio channel i'm sure has also published something recently and so now every channel has something new for you to watch as we plow through techtober there's much more to come stay tuned for that in a story interview thanks for checking it out and subscribing and see you guys very soon peace goodbye we're from produced by adam alina and ls rovin we're part of the vox media podcast network and ensure outro music was created by vane so

1:24:32i can't wait for the palma oled