vo
Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast

The Steam Machine Takes on PS5 and Xbox

21 Nov 2025 · 1 h 25 min
Listen in VO

Ask about this episode

Ask anything about it. ChatGPT or Claude reads this page and answers with the times it was said.

Ask ChatGPTAsk Claude

Connect VO and ask about every podcast you hear, including the moments you saved. Add to ChatGPT · Add to Claude

In short

Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Episode Summary

Episode Title

The Steam Machine Takes on PS5 and Xbox

Episode Description In this episode, Marques is absent as he enjoys Ultimate Frisbee at a beach tournament. Co-hosts Andrew Manganelli and David Imel discuss new Steam devices and Google Gemini 3, along with a lively debate on the pros and cons of local storage versus cloud storage.

---

Key Topics Discussed

  1. New Steam Devices
  2. Context: The podcast opens with a discussion on Valve's latest Steam hardware announcements, which were released shortly before the episode was recorded.
  3. Steam Machine: A new version of the Steam Machine is introduced, now designed as a compact cube optimized for 4K gaming at 60 FPS.
  4. Specifications:
  5. Semi-custom AMD solution
  6. Zen 4 CPU with boost frequencies of 4.8 GHz
  7. RDNA 3 GPU running at 2.45 GHz
  8. Designed for all Steam games at high performance.
  9. Market Positioning: The new Steam Machine aims to bridge the gap between gaming PCs and consoles, allowing users to enjoy a vast library of Steam games from the comfort of their living rooms.
  10. Pricing Speculation: Analysts predict the price range could be between $600 to $1,000, with many factors influencing the final cost.
  1. Steam Controller
  2. Introduces a new Steam Controller with several enhancements:
  3. Larger, more concave touchpads and magnetic thumbsticks.
  4. Grip sense technology to detect pressure applied while gaming.
  5. Improved connectivity with a dedicated 2.4 GHz connection for reduced latency.
  1. Steam Frame VR Headset
  2. Valve introduces a new VR headset powered by Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, focusing on gaming performance with support for both VR and non-VR games.
  3. Features:
  4. Modular design and adjustable fit.
  5. Foveated rendering to optimize performance by focusing on what the user is looking at.
  6. Eye-tracking capabilities to enhance gameplay experiences.
  1. Google Gemini 3
  2. Launch Announcement: A significant upgrade over Gemini 2.5, claiming to offer improved factual accuracy and reasoning capabilities.
  3. Features:
  4. Dynamic interface generation, creating interactive visualizations based on user queries.
  5. Enhanced performance in math and science tasks.
  6. Market Competition: Positioned to compete with OpenAI's offerings, specifically targeting better user interaction and functionality.
  1. Cloud Storage vs. Local Storage Debate
  2. A lively discussion on the merits of local versus cloud storage, with arguments from both sides:
  3. Local Storage: Complete control over data, but requires meticulous management and hardware investment.
  4. Cloud Storage: Convenient and accessible from anywhere but susceptible to outages and data privacy concerns.
  5. Personal Experiences: The hosts share anecdotes about their reliance on cloud services and the implications of potential outages, referencing recent Cloudflare incidents.

---

Key Takeaways

  • The new Steam devices represent a significant effort by Valve to create an optimal gaming experience that blends PC flexibility with console accessibility.
  • The Steam Controller and Steam Frame showcase Valve's ambition to innovate within the gaming hardware space.
  • Google Gemini 3 aims to revolutionize AI interaction, but its effectiveness remains to be broadly tested in real-world applications.
  • The ongoing debate between local and cloud storage reflects broader concerns about data security, accessibility, and management in the digital age.

---

Additional Links

  • Shop the Merch: [MKBHD Merch](https://shop.mkbhd.com)
  • Join the Discord: [Waveform Discord](https://discord.gg/mkbhd)

---

Closing Remarks The episode wraps up with the hosts expressing their excitement about the future of gaming and technology, pondering what innovations might come next. As always, they encourage listener engagement and feedback on the discussed topics.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Hear the part that matters, and keep it.Open this episode in VO. Double tap your headphones to save a moment as you listen.
Get VO free

Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:27Adobe Acrobat Studio, so brand new. Support for this show comes from strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place? Sure, you can probably list the reasons for staying, but are they actually just excuses for not leaving? Let a career coach from strawberry.me help you get unstuck. Discover the benefits of having a dedicated career coach in your corner. Go to strawberry.me slash unstuck to claim a special offer.

1:06This podcast is so gross. Marquez, I'm sorry. Marquez, I came to work and I really gave it my best effort. I just tried to make a good podcast while you were gone. And then all of this happened. I'm sorry.

1:28What is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm David. And I'm Andrew. And I'm David. And today, we got a lot of stuff going on. As you might have noticed, Marquez is gone. He's gone. Wait, what? I know. Where'd he go? I know we sound the same, but he's gone. Oh my God, I had no idea. Yeah, he's out being hot on a beach. He's throwing frisbees. I asked him, why are you doing world championships again? I thought you already won. Listen, I'm an ultimate player. Even this one's confusing. He was like, I'm gone for worlds. And I was like, you just, we did a whole episode of your trophy.

2:07Anyway, he's doing that on a beach now. So good luck, I guess. Anyway, we got a lot of stuff to talk about this week. We barely missed the Steam announcement last week, which is a bunch of new Steam hardware, which is very exciting. Sundar Pichai did us a big favor and dropped Gemini 3 on a Tuesday. So we're actually able to talk about it relatively on time. We're only going to be four days late this week. And we've got a few other things like Rabbit being a bad company again. What else? Oh, yeah. Cloudflare took down the Internet again. We got a lot of fun stuff for you today. All the usual suspects.

2:41All the usual suspects. So, also, we launched new merch this week. We did. So I think we should talk about that real quick. We're going to do it real quick. This has been a long time coming because our team's been, like, really going hard on this for a while. Getting everything set up on the shop and getting all the designs and all those samples and making sure prints are correct. But we're really, really pumped about this. I think most importantly is, like, as a big channel, it's really easy to just throw a logo on a shirt and sell it to an audience. And that's something Marquez has not wanted to do.

3:14And I think the design team really took it to heart in this one where all of these shirts, we have one for each channel right now. If you were to look at it, I don't think you would immediately say that's MKBHD or that's a YouTuber merch. It would be like, that's a cool design. And then if you know, you know, which is kind of what we were going for. Kind of the vibe. Yeah. So we have, I'm wearing the waveform shirt right now. So as Adam, Adam looks cooler because Adam has a jacket on. That's not the only reason. It's like a purpley color with kind of the top of the MKBHD logo that like waves and patterns out almost like the Joy Division.

3:53Yeah, it kind of looks like the Joy Division. We also have an autofocus one that David's wearing right now, which is a red camera with like a manual shifting knob and a tire as the focus ring. That's probably my favorite design. Me too. That one's so cool. I like it a lot. But Ellis is wearing our main channel. It's kind of like the logo spinning around in a cool pattern. And then no one has the studio one here, but it's basically our studio logo deconstructed and just a bunch of really cool colors. Great. The shirts fit really nice. They're great material. I think it's the best merch we've ever done.

4:26So just big shout out to Tim, Olivia, Brandon, Vin, Jono, and even our old intern, David. I think he's the one who maybe pitched the waveform design. so he's not here anymore but they all worked really really hard on all of this no it's legit very good and I'm you know I know you're not going to believe me because we're selling it it actually is good I mean look for yourself we had a professional photographer come in and he took photos the photos are cool they're really good Adam looks really good in his it's funny because I showed my fiancee just the pictures and she was like you never dress like this but you look cool that's well because Because we had the photographer, but we also had Brandon and Vin dressing all of us.

5:07Yeah, they were like styling us. I wore none of my own clothes that day. I think I wore your jacket. There was also a great treat. Olivia, one of our graphic designers, she was wearing this red hat with the studio shirt. And someone on Twitter had posted like Pokemon Trainer cosplay. Your new favorite Pokemon Trainer. Anyway, yeah, check that out on the store. But until then, until you do that, we're going to be talking at you. So let's talk about the new Steam devices. Yes. Because that's the first thing that happened last week that we barely missed because it happened literally Wednesday afternoon.

5:38I think it happened. Or all the videos came out on Thursday. Yeah. I thought it was Wednesday. Linus's video came out on Thursday. Maybe he's just late. Maybe. I think Dave 2D was on time. They just had an embargo time probably because there were some videos that came out Wednesday night. Okay. Did they? Yeah. Because I remember thinking like I'm mad that we missed it but thank God we missed it because I would have known nothing about it. Dave's was on the 12th, so yeah, Wednesday afternoon. All right. Well, to give you guys a little bit of context, the Steam machine is this idea that Valve has had for a very long time.

6:08Valve is the company that makes Steam. It is the biggest gaming platform in the world. It runs on computers, and you can play everything on it. And there's been this transition over the last few years of, you know, you used to be able to have a console where you played on your TV, or you had, like, a handheld device, like a Nintendo DS or something. But there was never really this, like, melding of the two. And considering Steam has like almost every game ever made besides like Nintendo games on it and maybe some exclusives to like consoles. Yeah, I think more gaming companies are making their own launchers like Battle.net and Epic.

6:44But I mean, it clearly has the most amount of games, period, on a single launcher. And it's like the most affordable. Steam is very famous. everyone who's listening to this probably already knows this but like steam is very famous for it's like insane mega sales during the summer and during the spring and like everyone that has steam has way too many games that they've never played it's a both a waste of money and also very fun to just collect software anyway a number of years ago valve released the original steam machines and the idea of this was like okay we can kind of split the difference between being a gaming pc and a console you should be able to just have something hooked up to your tv you should be able to play it with a controller because i mean it's just a gaming console after all but valve is very hardcore about things working on linux it's all this stuff um that was a colossal failure because they valve has also been a very much pro third party and when they launched the original steam machines they launched them with a bunch of different companies that were doing it there was like Alienware and there was Asus and there was all these different configurations and to be honest it was just very confusing those companies were needed to make margin all of this stuff and so now what's what Valve is doing after the success of the Steam Deck which came out a couple of years ago two years ago I think two years ago a couple years ago I recently took ours from the office and I've been playing it non-stop I think it's just the first one the regular one but I'm obsessed with it.

8:12Yeah. So like Valve kind of took the idea of what the Switch had done by, you know, making a console that could be plugged into your TV or played remotely, and it put like a whole computer into a handheld console, which was really cool. That was super popular, and it kind of created this wave of new handheld gaming PCs that people are using. There's an Asus one that's very popular. There's a Lenovo one that's very popular. And now they decided to re-enter the Steam Machine world. So, We have three new announcements from Valve. Number one is the Steam Machine again, but this time it is a small cube.

8:49And it's kind of like optimized for Steam in a number of ways, and they're trying to create a little bit of an ecosystem because as I mentioned before, them going to a bunch of third parties was like, that is good for choice, but it makes it hard to kind of sell a bunch of stuff together that works really well together. So all the hardware that they announced specifically works well together. So the new Steam machine is this small cube. It's running a semi-custom AMD solution with a Zen 4 CPU with peak frequencies of 4.8 gigahertz boost. And it has an RDNA 3 GPU running at 2.45 gigahertz that sustains a 110 watt TDP.

9:29This is specifically designed to hit pretty much every single game on Steam at 4K 60fps. That is their goal with this, which is a pretty big ask. specifically, obviously, that's using FSR. So it's like upscaling and that kind of stuff. But the point is that you should be able to, you know, plug this into your TV and just like jump on any game on Steam at 60 FPS, 4K, really cool. I think that's a reasonable target also, 4K 60, because like we're looking at this as more of a console, right? Like I know PC gamers love to get way higher than that at a bunch of different crazy things with really, really expensive machines.

10:07but this isn't quite going after that market. This is a sit down on your couch and play. It is interesting though because it is also a full PC. Agreed. But what this is going at, this doesn't need to run 4K, 300 FPS, like crazy stuff that people can run on a$8 ,000 PC. Right. It's a computer that is made to be played on your couch that can run all your Steam games. So they didn't announce a price yet. it is going to be probably more expensive than the traditional consoles, but that's because it has more access to more software and it runs SteamOS. I spent so long on PC Parts Picker trying to figure out more or less what this would be-ish.

10:49Like what it could cost. Like what it could cost, yeah. And I found something, like the configuration I got, and I was posting about this and people kept going back and forth with me, like what they got, what I got. It seems like the average is anywhere from$800 to$1 ,000-ish. like the cheapest thing you can get that you would feel comfortable actually getting it to play but then someone replied to me and they made a good point which is like they probably have deals that they can get with the like chip manufacturers and stuff like that that they're making these like massive orders with to get the price even lower d and so if it could be like five six hundred dollars it's gonna be more than that i think so i think i think it'll be like 799 well that's where i was like landing but if it's like 600 i think that's a steal that'd be awesome a really good thing linus brought up was well first of all he said this will probably be they told him no price yet but more closely resembling a pc than a gaming console so i think we automatically go over 500 on that right um yeah but not only that but like what consoles can do is because when you buy a new console there's x amount of games that can subsidize the price of a console yeah because those are so expensive and you have to buy new games pretty much to buy those where this is running steam yeah you could x amount of these could ship out and you don't buy a single game for it because you have a library already and it's just a pc you can install stuff on so like they actually have to make money on the hardware they have to really make money on the hardware for this so it's most likely going to be i think 750 is like a reasonable guess but i wouldn't doubt if it's on closer to a thousand than 500 yeah yeah i feel like they just have to be careful though because if it's too expensive you could just build it your own like you can't upgrade some parts of this so it's like there are certain things in this that you can't really build your own in terms of like connections with the controllers like they have better um antennas and stuff inside of it there was a specifically the hdmi port being able to connect to your tv and wake the uh the console itself through your tv remote and like through that you wouldn't really be able to do that on a regular pc being hooked up to it so there are some benefits to this being like yeah really made top down connecting to your tv there are a lot of optimizations like it has super fast like pause and wake where it can be the game can be sort of in a suspended state for months on end and then you press one button and it's instantly back to it so they have a lot of optimizations around that on steam deck that works incredibly the game i'm playing right now is called Slay the Spire.

13:20It's been around forever, but it's like I've heard that. You did start playing it. It's really fun, isn't it? It's pretty addictive. I could see, though, that game way better to play on a Steam Deck when you're sitting on a couch because by my PC, I have to like kind of just get up and down and up and down. Yeah, but like being able to just, because it's turn-based, at any time when anything happens, I can just put the controller down and sleep it, and it could be three days later and I could be in the middle of the same turn. So I'm assuming this is going to do the same thing. Yeah, yeah. The IO ports are a little disappointing they went with a lot of USB-A ports and only one USB-C port I saw people complaining about this yeah I would love for them to move towards USB-C I do think that a lot of the traditional gaming hardware and PC hardware is still utilizing USB-A so that's probably why they were thinking that but one USB-C port just seems like a small amount either way you're probably not even going to be using the ports that much so The way you charge the controller is through this magnetic puck that doubles as a 2.4 gigahertz connection to the game itself.

14:22But that puck plugs in and then charges the controller as well. Assuming the backside of that is a USB-A that it comes with, I guess it's just USB-C on the other side. You're probably plugging straight into the front of it. So that's what the USB port's for. It could be C and could just be C to C. That would probably be better. Yeah. I don't know. It has 16 gigs of RAM and 8 gigs of VRAM. yeah so it's also quite I don't want to say modular but they're releasing CAD files for it so you should be able to replace the front panel with anything you want there is already a company that is making like e-ink displays and stuff for it and different types of stuff that you can run on it like you can show the like temperatures of the different components it was running like bench or not benchmarks but like specs and like heats and like graphs on the front through an e-ink display because it's just a magnetic snap on the front of it um which some people had like wooden textures on it i'm sure dbrand's gonna go crazy because they already did flat people have been joking that this is a game cube because it literally is a game cube and dbrand has already announced that they are selling a game cube wrap that makes it look like a game cube this is like as a console that's going to live in a living room of people that live in a house thank you for not making this absurd like the ps5 to me still is insane that that's like does not fit into anything no i'm not putting that on my tv console it just seems crazy so like not only that but then making it modular on the front to be able to possibly add accents to it that would fit with the general aesthetic of a living room yeah to not have to be everyone's gaming dungeon yeah is awesome yeah um and did you see the led the like user customizable led bar on it yes that's fantastic one of the ways like basically between the magnetic gap and the power buttons and IO ports on the front.

16:09There's a little IO bar that users can define what that will show or a led bar. I forget what I said, but, um, one of the ways you could do it is if you're downloading a game, it can show the progress of the downloading. So you could change the channel, watch TV while it's downloading and then know how long you have until it's finished and then swap back. Like, yeah, look, people are going to think of some really cool. Yeah. Yeah. I love the idea. I don't play video games at all. So I, I have literally no interest on this product but i love the idea reading i love the idea of uh a living room pc yeah like the idea of a pc with an os that's like optimized to be on a tv several feet away from you i feel like and this is going to sound crazy but they nintendo sort of attempted this with the wii in the way that the home screen was laid out in the way that they handled screen savers and there was a web browser yeah you know true and i feel like we we haven't really come close to something that that's as pleasant yeah to have running in a living room yeah so i would even consider buying this as someone who doesn't actually i do have a steam account everyone has a steam account everyone has but um i don't know i want someone to make the non-gamer version of this what would that look like something that's like more optimized for web browsing i guess that's the thing i said it's like it's like an os you say web os web os dude don't even get me started on I've been the biggest defender of LG TVs ever since I bought one like this blows Samsung out of the water.

17:39I love my LG TV Web OS. I was at 25 or 26 the one that came out last week Is it bad? It's good. No, it's terrible. It's terrible. I can't even where I'll derail the steam talk. It's like yeah, it's like it's worse get this it's worse than ai overviews it's like what were you thinking life's good what were you thinking they should call they should rename the company lb because life's bad if you get webos 25 or 26 or whatever god damn it so don't update psa yeah don't update yeah okay there's a there's a memory leak issue there's a memory leak issue if you for any app that uses the built-in media player which is all streaming apps and most lgtvs have like one gig of internal memory dude it's like and then and then by default it turns your screen savers into ads so if you don't do anything on your tv it displays a it's just like what is wrong sorry sorry but just like oh you ruined my tv lg yeah all right well to bring us back yeah let's talk do you think linux gaming is going to be a thing now because i've been seeing a lot of movement of people trying to leave windows because of the yeah i've seen that too and everyone's going to be like oh finally we have like a linux alternative i mean but i've been hearing that for a decade so i've been also hearing that for a decade it seems to me that a lot of like people are buying computers specifically for the gaming aspect now and it it is also becoming well i would say pcs specifically yes yeah well yeah because no one i know is buying a mac to game that's what yeah exactly yeah but it's kind of like people are buying macs for like work and creative work and then they're buying the pc just for gaming there's not a lot of reason to just buy a windows computer anymore just as a general purpose computer um i think linus actually just did a video about how good the m5s are and like five is like how it's very hard to justify a windows computer at this point so i could see like a movement in the industry more towards things running linux that have like a gaming skin on top of them i think that the the idea of having a dedicated gaming computer is getting much more normalized so we'll see that i'll let you guys talk about linux i know nothing i'm not saying anything about this well shout out to uh damien wilde from nine to five google he's been on his personal channel going like deep dive after deep dive in linux gaming and it's very interesting very cool uh so So there's a couple of ecosystem optimizations in the cube.

20:15One is that it has a micro SD card slot. And the idea of this is that if you have a Steam Deck, the Steam Deck has a micro SD card slot, and that's where you mostly put your game library and your save data. So you can quickly just, when you get home, take your micro SD card out of your Steam Deck and put it in the Steam Cube, and then suddenly you just have everything. And it's all local. You don't have to download anything. It's pretty awesome. They also have a specialized antenna inside of the Steam Cube for the new Steam Controller, which we will get to. The Steam Cube? Yeah, it's the Steam Machine.

20:48It's a GameCube. Steam Machine, awesome name, by the way. Yeah. I love it. GameCube's better, I'm sorry. Can't wait for Steam Machine 720. Yeah. All right. There's a new Steam Controller, which we'll talk about now. It's kind of an evolution of... Hey, man. When you gotta talk on the fly, you gotta add some filler. It's kind of an evolution of the last Steam controller that they released a number of years ago. Really freaking weird controller because they introduced these touchpads that are basically ways to interact with games that traditionally did not work with just controllers and were made for mouse and keyboard.

21:25And they added those touchpads onto the Steam Deck, and that ended up being very popular, and people really liked it. So they now have kind of evolved this concept, made them bigger, made them more concave. and now you have this massive controller that is kind of just like this bigger evolution of the older one. Really cool feature. New tunnel magnetoresistance magnetic thumbsticks, which is better than Hall Effect, apparently. They're also magnetic like Hall Effect, but they have lower power use and they minimize the dead zones. Wait, what does any of that mean? Okay, so we've talked about Hall Effect before.

22:05Andrew should actually explain this because he knows more about it on the keyboard. Hall effect on a keyboard, which I'm assuming... It's the same. It'll be pretty similar. It's basically, on a regular keyboard switch, when you press down a key, it's moving a piece into a leaf, so when two pieces of metal connect, that can send something to the board underneath, right? And create a keystroke. Magnetic is, when the key gets pushed down, there's a piece of metal that is now making a magnetic sort of connection. Like a magnetic field? feel yeah i guess however it connects to the board um and with that you can change the range of how much you need to push that down yeah and it can be much faster yeah so presumably and also it grind against itself yeah you're not there's pretty much i mean it's a spring in a keyboard switch but yeah there's no real connecting parts doing that yeah which is cool so that means that it should last a lot longer these are apparently even better than hall effect and it's really nice seeing a company do this because notably on the Nintendo Switch 1 they did not, and the OLED, they did not use Hall Effect and the Joy-Con drift issue where pretty much everyone's Joy-Cons would eventually just start moving left constantly.

23:16I appreciate that you tried to isolate it to the Nintendo Switch 1 but the Nintendo Switch 2... Well, I was just going to say, everyone was like, oh, they're definitely going to because this is the main problem from the Switch 1 was the Joy-Con drift. they didn't update it they said that they made the chasm like bigger but i they didn't it's the same parts basically so that's sad and so steam just went out and said we'll go one step further not two steps further because not only are we gonna do hall effect we're gonna do the better version of the effect which is really cool um they have a they have grip sense in the controller which can sense how hard you're squeezing it yeah my so i was listening to these there are also four buttons behind.

23:58Yeah. Was that part of, was that part of the grip sense? So like one of the features that you can do with the controller is if you're using the gyro controls in it, at any point, if you want to reset where the center of like the gyro is, you can unsqueeze the controller, right? Right, right. Was that by squeezing those buttons on the back or was the controller itself actually has squeezing? It says by gripping the buttons on the back, you can reset your gyro. So it's less of a squeeze. It's more of like having pressure points on the buttons like that are on the back of the handle itself. Yeah.

24:27Which is a really cool feature. And I think you can also, according to Dave's video, if you're like, you can use the gyro as a mouse cursor, essentially, which is another point on top of now the touchpads of like games that might not be optimized perfectly for controller versus a mouse cursor. Right. Also, you will be able to see it in the Steam frame, which is the VR headset we're going to talk about soon, which is kind of similar to in the Apple Vision Pro. you can see the magic keyboard and the magic mouse only and i think they added like a logitech keyboard but yeah it kind of like peers through apparently that will happen in the steam frame which is cool um it charges via this magnetic puck that we talked about a little bit earlier it's kind of this it's a wire that comes out of the front of the steam frame that connects it to it but that wire acts as a um as an antenna right and it has a 2.4 gigahertz i believe the the puck itself is a small almost oval shaped i mean i don't even know what to compare it to it's very small yeah and what the puck does is there's like a three pin magnetic uh place on the back of the controller and get magnetic onto it and then with that it's going to connect to your steam machine through its own separate 2.4 gigahertz connection which is awesome so you have like it's like eight milliseconds of latency you're losing the don't have to deal with the bluetooth latency stuff And all you have to do is slap it on the back of your controller or you could use Bluetooth normally, but like that's awesome.

25:55And then what that does is that just then can plug into a USB-C port or I think it has USB-C on it. And that doubles as the charging pass through to charge the controllers, which I think have like 30 hours of battery life. Yeah. I think they said. Yeah. But I think I'm a big 2.4 gigahertz stan as like someone who, you know, I always use dongles for mice or keyboards when they're wireless. when I have the option to. Everyone in this office uses Bluetooth and it drives me insane, even though it probably works totally fine. But I am a dongle fan and I think that is such a cool way to just make sure that all your controllers have their own individual connection.

26:34I can't believe you still use a mouse. Pleb. Sorry. All right. And then the last thing they announced was the Steam frame. So this is a new VR headset. It's kind of the next VR headset from Valve after the Valve Index that came out a number of years ago. It is powered by a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 processor, which is interesting. It runs SteamOS, been in development since 2019, and it supports both VR and non-VR games. So not only can it do VR games like you're used to, like Half-Life Alyx, but you can also play a Steam game where it's just in a big floating window in front of you. And I think that's kind of like a learning from the Vision Pro, from the Oculus Quest, that kind of stuff.

27:15it has a modular design so you're able to take three different parts off of the headset so you can use like a third-party strap accessory for it so that way it's not it's not just one size fits all um it kind of works like a ski mask by default ski goggles ski goggles right that's different they are different that's different uh and from people that have tested it they have said that it's a little bit hard to adjust when you first do it but you really only have to adjust it once and then it should fit on pretty perfectly after that um they are prioritizing gaming performance over other xr things so it's not supposed to be like a multi-use kind of like xr headset they're like this is a gaming vr headset very specifically i think the biggest thing that proves that is it's black and white pass through yeah it's black so you have pass through but yeah it's black and white so they're not prioritizing that um they have controllers that come with it that update 200 to 250 times per second same as the valve index and they have ir cameras on the inside that track your eye movement and the reason they do this is because they have foveated rendering which if you don't know what that is it renders the things you are looking at at a high resolution and then everything around that it renders at a very low resolution but it's foveated like it's foveated streaming is what they're calling it which is crazy yeah because it's like it basically can tell where you're looking and know that's the part of the game to stream at a higher bit rate right um to the point where i think did dave say there was a demo where they played a game where it's not even that it did the outside parts of it as lower frame rate or lower band uh bit rate but it was just dark and he was trying to like ping his eyes around to try and catch it and was having a hard catch it yeah because there are there are 18 infrared cameras that update every 8 to 12 milliseconds to track where your eyes are looking so that it can yeah it's it's pretty awesome yeah i was when i heard the foveated streaming thing i was like at what point do you spend so much money and everything and i'm sure there's a really easy question to the or answer to this but like you're doing all this stuff to save on performance at what point does it cost that much more money to put in 18 ir cameras over just like having everything render well at a higher bit rate i mean you'd have to have a much like more powerful processor which takes more power it's just cool how much you have to go into using less power yeah it's crazy crypto and ai were not a thing do you think we wouldn't be doing the foveated rendering at all like just because chips would be that much cheaper oh i have no idea i'll blame crypto if you want me to it's crypto's fault uh but that enables 250 megabit megabit per second over Wi-Fi 7, and the end-to-end latency is about 10 to 20 milliseconds, which is very short for streaming to a VR headset.

30:13Because this is the thing, the headset itself can run games just dedicated inside of the headset, because you can run on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3. Obviously, that's not going to be powerful enough for enough stuff, so what they really want you to do is stream from something like your Steam frame, which also has two... So the headset has two dedicated Wi-Fi antennas. there's a wi-fi 6 antenna which is only for the the game streaming it is dedicated to the game streaming so there's no other network traffic on it so it can just push all of that game streaming data directly with nothing else happening and then it has another uh band that is just used for general internet things like being updated and all of that kind of stuff so it's very very targeted at just being able to there is actually no tethered mode available on this headset um most other vr headsets you can like plug into your computer and go through a cable they don't want you to have to do that because they want it they're like we want you to have more free movement as long as you have line of sight to your your steam machine or wi-fi 7 router which not a lot of people have so the steam machine makes a little more sense uh you should be able to have pretty much no latency issues so as cool as the the steam what is that headset frame frame steam frame yeah that's cool but who cares I feel like the coolest thing announced was the steam machine like everyone is so hyped about the little box and this was just like why even announce this I agree and don't agree with you it's like it's cool the steam machine is the coolest thing I also agree it's really hard assuming the frame is going to be closer to a thousand dollars there's no pricing on it yet it's so hard when Quest 3 is 500 bucks.

32:00Yeah. Like, it's just going to be tough to do that. But you can play your Steam library on Quest 3. You can play your Steam library. It's like two-thirds of people playing VR on Steam are playing it on a MetaQuest. Well, is there... I don't know if it's your full Steam library, but you can play Steam games on it. Yeah, you can play Steam. So that's going to be the tough part. It's like, if you are really big into VR gaming, you're probably... There's probably something like this. If you really, really hate meta, there's another reason to do it. It's how much money do you want to spend to stick it to meta, which there are probably plenty of people to do that.

32:32But I think we all agree the machine's the coolest part about this. I mean, the controller's really cool too, but it feels like part of the machine launch. Yeah, again, it's an ecosystem play. For sure. They're really selling the machine. The thing about the machine that's a little disappointing is you cannot upgrade the CPU or GPU. You can upgrade the storage pretty easily. You can technically upgrade the RAM, but it's much harder. But yeah, the CPU and GPU are kind of like set in there. So it's kind of like buying a console in that way. Like, will people be able to open this up and find a way to do it?

33:04People find a way to upgrade everything. They're soldered in and it's a custom motherboard. Oh, no. I mean, to get it that small, like this is, it's small. Even compared to small PCs, like it is crazy how they got everything in there. Listen, people will find out how to do stuff on this. They always do. but I think it's definitely is the like the pros and cons of this are which way does it which way does it lean towards a PC or a console and the upgradeability is definitely on the it's better than a console because you can stick an M.2 stick in there and get way more storage than like an Xbox or a Playstation but like the rest of the stuff it's just going to have to have a life cycle like a console and I personally think that's fine i think you're opening it up to so many games out there on a steam library i think so many games on the steam library when you start looking at indie developers play really well on a tv with a controller like like i said i've been having so much fun with the steam deck and a lot of these like different roguelike games would be awesome on just a tv laying on the couch rather than at my computer and this makes that part everyone who's played pc games envisions like their old PC getting shoved into their media console and being like their backup gaming system on like a TV.

34:23But that's such a pain in the neck. It doesn't flow well. So this being able to do that is awesome. And I'm super excited. Valve said like 15 to 20 % of people who own Steam Decks have it plugged into the TV most of the time. And that is the reason they made this because it's way more powerful. So it's kind of addressing that market of people that mostly do couch gaming. Yeah. And I think like a really good number in terms of if you want to gauge powerfulness. I know you were like comparing specs and everything. They said it's supposed to be six times as powerful as the Steam Deck. Yeah. Which is, I mean...

34:55To me, that means nothing because I've never used the Steam Deck. So it's like... That's fair. I don't know. Is that like, you know, Apple six times more powerful? Or is that like... Just graph. It's just vague graph. Yeah, is that all-day battery life? Yeah. I'm also six times more powerful than the Steam Deck. I think there will be tons of games that are gonna run flawlessly exactly how you want them to and then the higher echelon of games will be like okay this isn't running like it is with my yeah 1580 on my computer but like to be out so everyone can like run the benchmarks and play the games and do the things because yeah i'm so on the fence with this like i don't know if i want it or not because one pricing i think it really depends on pricing but two i think also performance like i'm really curious to see how it performs because I'm not spending hundreds of dollars on something that I'm going to have to upgrade.

35:46And I can't even upgrade it in like three or four years. Are you with 4K60 on every game that you want to play? I don't know. What consoles do you own? I have a PS5 and it's fine. And I have the PS... Do it. There it is. Nice. Sorry. It's alright. No. I have a PS5, but that's like when i get the playstation when they come out every 10 years or whatever i kind of know like okay i'm just stuck with whatever this is like i feel like the point of steam and steam games is that if a game comes out that i really want to play i could just upgrade something for 150 bucks and then now i could play that game you know on your computer yeah if i had like a computer like a pc computer so like i can't do that with this thing to me that's why like i think this is really cool because it's just replacing that cycle of a console now like if this is the console i like because the games i prefer on steam and a lot of the games on steam that i like i would prefer to play on my tv in like a like i'd much rather sit down on my couch and play a game with a controller than sit at my desk with a controller like the games i like to play on the computer are like valorant or overwatch they're things that i mean there's console overwatch but you have two Yeah, yeah, like I my nose is touching the screen and I'm screaming and like it literally puts me in a bad mood all day I want to sit down on my couch and enjoy some things.

37:12Yeah, pause it Yeah, when Claire does say pause I don't have to be like I can't pause the game Like that I want that to be a game I can pause and walk away from the computer games are for stressing yourself out like the TV games are for Enjoyment and relaxation. Well, that's kind of where I guess my my thinking about all of this goes like is this more taking aim to? to replace PC people or is this trying to replace consoles? I think it's trying to replace consoles but with the variety of the games you can play on Steam. Yeah, I think there's so many people who play on computer and on consoles and I think this is ideal for them without having to buy a PlayStation.

37:52Now they can have the same library between the two of them. Also in the last couple years there's been a massive rise of indie games and I think indie games are very well suited for the TV. perfect example I told you about Slay the Spy the other day I bought it for 8 bucks for you to buy it on your Switch was like$30 wasn't it Steam sales are so I got it on Steam I believe oh you did I did buy Hades 2 which was$30 I think Hades 2 is my next buy it's yeah it's very good I've heard it's really good so that's that we're a week late over it's going to be almost two weeks at this point once you hear it but I hope that hearing it out of our mouths was a better experience for some reason.

Read the full transcript

38:34And if it's not, I already know what comment you're going to make. Like, LOL, these people shouldn't talk about games. So there, I already made it for you. You don't have to. That's true. Thanks. I'm casual. God, I hate when these people talk about games. They know nothing. Although I'm not casual in Dota 2 because I have almost 6 ,000 hours. Yeah, but what's your rank? We don't talk about games. I'm really bad. I keep playing it. Anyway, if you're not good at a game, Speaking of really bad. If you're not good at a game, you're good at other stuff, right? Like, I don't waste my time trying to get good at a video game.

39:05Okay. I just said you have 6 ,000 hours. Yeah, but I'm trying to get good. I could waste more hours trying to get good by intentionally... Trying? Anyway, let's move on. Well, speaking of Rabbits, Rabbit, the company... What happened? Where was the Rabbits before? When were we... Don't ask. Raymond, the Rabbits game with the Raven Rabbits? The Rabbits, that's Nintendo. well Raymond Raymond is not Nintendo but the Rabbids the Rabbids x Mario collab is Nintendo okay I played that one anyways okay um there's a recent article from Jason England at Tom's Guide that had some interesting news about the company we all know and love Rabbit that we talk about so nicely all the time um if you don't know about them they're the people who made that R1 AI box that's most well known for being orange and being able to do almost nothing.

39:57But this all started from an interview with Jesse Liu from Tom's Guide, where he was coming on to announce that RabbitOS 2 is coming out soon, and he continued to tease a new device, which, first of all, two things about that interview, or the article about that interview. Jason at Tom's Guide is saying RabbitOS 2 seems rather good now, which seems kind of interesting because that's what i've been seeing on the internet you haven't seen that yeah okay well he also said the review is coming soon but i can't find the review anywhere probably because of something we're going to talk about later but jesse also kept teasing that the gen 2 device is going to be a three-in-one what does that mean it means shampoo conditioner

40:46which by the way are always bad yeah don't use three never use two in one that's a good point don't do that first of all what are the three devices and what is the one thing it's in second of all we make fun of everything that is like x in one yeah in tech in life general because they're usually terrible i love feeling the keyboard keys on my tablet on the back of my tablet with my three one orange two square three ai three ai it's just the same thing but r2 yeah yeah um but anyway so after he released that interview they received multiple tips alleging that rabbit has a history of either paying late or failing to pay some of their employees or contractors um and a number of employees have been on strike since october hell yeah um so this is what the report says this is obviously still all alleged we will link the article to both of these in the show notes if you would like to read all of it there is a hilarious graph of the timeline of how often people didn't get paid which is basically just a straight line of people not getting paid to be clear people not getting paid is not hilarious the graph yeah yeah the graph is very funny because it's barely a graph it's just a list um just every month workers not paid workers yeah um so from January to June 2025, payments to some contractors' employees were at minimum each month eight days late, some months being 37 days late.

42:12Is that late? Is 37 days late? That's another month. That's just crazy. I'd love to get a double check. I'd love to get a double check when the check before just never came. And then July, August, and September there were contractors and employees who hadn't been paid at all. Some of the employees threatened to go to the press and were met with please not to those responses uh the or rabbit's response to the employees were along the lines of payments would be conditional based on additional investment coming to the company at the end of october what you might get paid if we make more money and it's not even if we make more money if we get more investment yeah i feel like that should be immediate red flag as employee um three of the employees have been on strikes since the start of October, which three does not sound like a lot.

43:00It's not, but rabbit only has 26 employees. So that's a fair chunk of 26. Isn't that much either. Um, and if I can go on a side rant, Ellis will love this. I was trying to figure out how many employees rabbit had. So I typed in Google, how many, how many employees does rabbit AI have? What happened? The Google AI overview said, uh, the rabbit R1 company has 26 employees. And that actually goes into a whole thing about how they're not getting paid right after that because of the most recent article. But I was like 26, that sounds totally reasonable. Um, but I just want to find the exact quote that they got that from.

43:37So the links weren't really helping me on the side. And then I went into the AI mode and said, can I see the exact quote you got this 26 number from? And I said, well, it's not an exact quote. In fact, we're just basing this all on an estimation of other information. Some websites say five to 10, some say 25 to 50, but then I was clicking the sources for that. It was bringing me to other Rabbit companies, basing the number off of the wrong thing, only for me to then read the rest of the original article I was reading. And Rabbit themselves are quoted, and they're saying 26 employees. So it was right.

44:13There was an exact quote. AI Overview just couldn't find the quote that it was right about. It's the second worst product ever made. Well, on their LinkedIn, it says 2 to 10. Their LinkedIn says 2 to 10, which is what I was about to write. But then in the Tom's Guide quote, they said it's three employees who are currently on strike and we have 26 total employees. Maybe it's two to 10 and then they have contractors. Possibly. I mean, they definitely there's contractors are not paying. So that could be right. That's true. Just to clarify, I did not mean the rabbit R1 is the second worst product ever made.

44:46I meant Google AI overview. Is the first worst product the human AI pen? No, it's LG's WebOS 25. It's just insane that they did that to us. Dang. rabbit has responded to this they claims they were ready to sell units in india but due to regulations that got paused which caused the money flow issue um they uh jesse claims that they've signed it or they've signed a term for a next round of investing and will get everyone paid for sure cool uh take that as you will um but like with all of this going on how can you look at rabbit in a positive light at all i mean like this is the company that like their their founding was like this weird nft pivot do you remember that vaguely i the coffee zilla videos on all of this were like crazy based on like the nft stuff and then how like some of the ai things that we were it was doing was like if it you asked to play its favorite song it would just play the beatles every time it like wasn't even really doing anything it was just like oh yeah the Beatles and then their whole generative UI thing was completely false and like their weird tech demo live event thing was like totally staged and like I don't know man this yeah so it's one of those things where they're launching rabbit os2 and they're saying a new product's coming out next year sounds like they're trying to get funding to pay those yeah it sounds like they're trying to pay their employees and maybe stay alive I mean they stayed alive longer than humane yeah congrats they ain't making printers yeah at least they're not in the but hp dungeon yeah true it's none of this makes me say i want to give them another chance with the os2 but we got to do the same thing we did a few weeks ago we got to find something nice to say why would we do i'd still like the orange yeah i think the rabbit has amazing packaging the little like Game Boy case kind of thing that clear plastic scratches very easily though yeah but it's great packaging so we said something nice you can't be mad yeah everyone calls us tech doomers I think it's totally reasonable to watch a company hype something up completely fail to deliver and lose trust in that company I think that's fair yeah yeah especially when it's over and over and over you know yeah fool me once so yeah let us know if you're using Rabbit OS too Can't get pulled again.

47:09And if there's more than 26 people saying that, I'll know one of them wasn't working for the company. All right. Well, that's depressing. I guess we'll... Speaking of depressing. Yeah. Ad break. No, trivia. Trivia's not depressing. Trivia's like a fun part of it. My score is dwindling and that's depressing. Compared to mine. Throughout American history, we have had so many visionaries make immense profits off of their brilliant ideas. We had Steve Jobs and Bill Gates believe that the personal computer could change the American home We had Sergey Brin and Larry Page believe that a search tool was what Americans needed and the world needed To find what the information that they needed on the web Jimmy Wales Who's Jimmy Wales the Wikipedia guy?

47:57Oh, we had Jimmy Wales, you know And we had Gabe Newell who realized that knives actually make a better casino than product. And with his billions, Gabe Newell just received shipment of his new 360-foot mega yacht. This thing has... From reading, it has a hospital on board. It has a basketball court on board. It has 15 gaming PCs, which feels like not that many. Is that how many fit on a basketball court? It has a hot... That's how many near the hot tub. But guys, what is the name of this yacht? And this is a multiple choice question. So let's get our options. Is this from his yacht brand? Because he's now the CEO of a yacht brand.

48:45You're kidding me. I'm not kidding you. This is like recent news from a couple months ago. Jesus. He like has a yacht company now. This guy owns a yacht company and can't buy steam.com? Who owns steam.com? No one. Still. Is it like a Satoshi Nakamoto sort of situation? I have no idea yeah maybe steam.com used to be nevermind I would sell this to Valve for like 1 billion dollars A A Alex A-L-Y-X name that for the Half-Life character B Leviathan cause it's really really big C the USS Shinji Ikaru and I had to look this up Shinji Ikaru is a neon Genesis Evangelion character I hope I said any of that right.

49:32Or D, Zero Day, named after the kind of exploit. Why do we do the music? Because otherwise I'm just going to be reading a list. Yeah, fair. I like the music, to be clear. Okay. We're going to talk about Gemini 3 and the other stuff Google did after this.

49:57Bye. Don't go away. Bye. No, not buy. We'll be right back. We'll be right back. Sorry. We'll be right back.

50:14Support for Waveform comes from Shopify. A new business brings with it a daunting to-do list, and that's why the right tool can be a total game changer. For millions of businesses, that tool is Shopify. It's the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10 % of all East Commerce in the U.S. That includes household names like Mattel and Gymshark, as well as brands that are just getting started. Shopify gives you access to your own design studio with hundreds of ready-to-use templates so you can build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style. Shopify is also packed with helpful AI tools that you can use to jumpstart your content creation, and you can even feel like you have a whole marketing team behind you with tools that let you create email and social media campaigns.

50:58If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your big business idea into reality with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash waveform. That's shopify.com slash waveform. Shopify.com slash waveform. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy for you to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place.

51:42LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. Either post your job for free or pay to promote. Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high-quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today.

52:15Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. You can 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. Oh, hey, welcome to gift wrapping. Whoa, Zoe Saldana. Hey, can you wrap these, please? Wow, iPhone 17s. You splurged. At T-Mobile, you can get four iPhone 17s on them. It's the perfect gift for everyone. I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe. Well, it's better than socks. So I have to trade in my old phone, right? No, at T-Mobile, there's no trade-ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift.

52:58Incredible. In fact, wrap up my old phone, too, for my Aunt Rosa. Forget that. Aunt Liz will be jealous. Sounds like my family drama. Oh, I got it. I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with, hey, where are you going? To T-Mobile. Thanks, Zoe. The holidays are better at T-Mobile. Get four iPhone 17s on us. No trade in needed when you switch. Plus four lines for just$25 a line. With 24-month legal credits and four eligible portings on essentials for well-qualified customers, auto pay plus taxes, fees, and$35 device connection chart. Credits end and balance due if you pay off earlier.

53:28Cancel. Contact us. Finance agreement. 256 gigabytes. $830 required. Visit T-Mobile.com. Welcome back. We are blessed by Google this week for dropping a big announcement on a Tuesday. Google! Google. Thank you to Sundar for dropping this on a Tuesday. Anyway, we got a big announcement. It's Gemini 3. So previously we were on Gemini 2.5, and it was kind of falling behind a little bit. OpenAI had released GPT-5, which was a little bit of a disappointment. Recently they had GPT-5.1. We had CloudSonnet 4.5. Now Google has released Gemini 3. Google is calling it its most intelligent and factually accurate AI system yet.

54:09that's quite important they call it the strongest model in the world for multi-modality and reasoning supposed to be much better at nuance they talked about this a lot so like trying to actually understand what you mean instead of just what you say that was a big focus for them another big thing about Gemini 3 is it's supposed to be much less sycophantic and much more objective so it's supposed to be a lot more to the point when it gives you answers it's not going to be like you're absolutely right you're the most beautiful person in the world something like that so it's what I want I mean you could probably ask it to do that but by default it's going to be just a lot more straight to the point more objective it's also much better at math and science and yeah so these updates just sound like it went from third to fourth grade yeah like each one of these just like we're going through elementary school now yeah really good at math yeah I listened to an interview with Demis Hassabis, who is the CEO of Google DeepMind.

55:11And a few years ago, he did this interview and he said, we are five to 10 years away from AGI. And then in this interview, he said, we're five to 10 years away from AGI. And that was like - You want to guess what he'll say in five to 10 years? I was going to say. Pretty sure he said that three years ago. A big feature of Gemini 3 is that it's supposed to create dynamic interfaces. so if you ask what is the three body problem in Google search and it uses the AI mode it's supposed to explain it and then also create an interactive animation that you can play with to actually show you how it works and that's a really big feature of this model that they're really pushing is kind of the learning capabilities the ability to be able to move through things that you're trying to learn with this platform um and it didn't work for me so i i tried pretty much every single exact prompt that they had given it in the ads that they put out and none of them worked on one of them i asked for a visualization of the three-body problem just like it had asked or just like they'd put in the the video and it described what a visualization might look like and then I said can you just make the visualization and it said I don't have the ability to make interactive visualizations so and i'm definitely on gemma this is just unlike the google.com a i mode a i mode yeah a mode but you have to change the drop down to the one that includes like graphical things yeah there's something there's like the default one which is just like regular problem solving and then they have a special one that will like whip up uis and stuff yeah how do you get to that me and they were trying to figure this out earlier because on my account is just a drop down and it is it's nowhere to be found i on mine it does not show at all maybe it's like rolling it's possible that this is rolling out slowly um but yeah it seems like google is kind of starting to try to skew gemini towards being like a tool that you can use to learn, a tool that you can use to build UIs.

57:16And as part of that, they released Google Antigravity. And this is a dedicated app that you can download. It's kind of Google's response to Cursor. Cursor was this AI coding app that has blown up in the last year, gotten very, very popular. Most companies are using it as an IDE. You may remember it from Trivia Extravaganza, where Ellis looked at all of the startups that were founded by YC and it was like the cursor of blank. The blank. The cursor of blank. Like those companies, that's what cursor is from. Yeah, and cursor costs$20 a month for the pro version. Pro Plus is$60 and Ultra is$200. So Google's anti-gravity is free, which is pretty cool.

57:58For now. For now. And it's pretty good. Adam and I both used it last night. I used it to create, so whenever there's a new model that comes out that talks about its vibe coding capabilities. I just have it build my Pina Colocator app, which is like where to find the best Pina Colada near you. And it honestly did a pretty decent job. It did a pretty decent job. It looked like a template you would find on the website building. Yeah. Whether or not it was functional was different, but at least the front-facing UI of it all was like, okay, I can see this. Yeah, but I had made Gemini 2.5 build Pina Colocator, and it looked horrible.

58:34so this is definitely a big improvement in the pina colada finding capabilities if you want to use that as a benchmark i was just gonna say this is the benchmark that all the i companies should be using yeah but the kind of cool thing about google anti-gravity is that it's it's it's got different modes depending on how forward with the agents you want to be so there's a mode where it's mostly you coding but then you can just like talk to it there's one where you tell it what you want it to do, but then it creates a checklist and it asks you across every step if you liked that or if you want to modify it.

59:08And then there's another mode where it just basically does everything in one shot. And so it is an IDE, but based on the interview that I heard with Demis, it's more that it's like a development tool that they built an IDE around as opposed to an IDE with AI features. So it's agent first. So, I mean, it's pretty cool. and I think that a lot of the industry is now going to move over from Cursor, which is kind of bad for Cursor. Famously, Google bought Windsurf, which was like one of the biggest acquisitions ever. And that was also, I believe, like an AI coding environment. I'm really interested in this in particular because Cursor has been such a game changer for the developers I know.

59:50Yeah. And they're working in like very big code bases. So like Cursor seems to be able to understand everything, you know? Yeah. I obviously haven't like when we mess around with these things, we don't we're not connecting to some like big corporate database, you know? Yeah. So I'm not sure how it's going to function in those situations. I would imagine fine. Yeah. But I don't know. We haven't been able to test it. I just like opened up my personal website and had to do a couple things just to see if it would get the context of it. So like to your point earlier where you were saying that they were trying to make it more nuanced.

1:00:21One of the things I did was in my personal website, I basically just have a list of the places that I've worked. Right. so like i have it's my resume so i have waveform as one of them like waveform podcast and i told it in the ide i didn't do this in google gemini or anything like that i was just like put a floating emoji of a microphone next to waveform podcast which coding a floating emoji that will like animate a little bit not super difficult but the context of like understanding the word waveform podcast finding where it is on the page putting this right next to that in particular i was wondering if that would work if that would like trip it up at all and it did it like perfectly fine which was like pretty interesting so how did you do that did you give it a screenshot of your website or no i opened up my project because i have my react code just like my website is built in react and i don't even know something whatever it's built in react so i have that folder on my computer in my computer so i just opened it up on an ide it yeah look through everything and was able to like yeah figure it out yeah um one thing that i did find interesting though was this morning i was trying to i've been like having on my to-do list and my website forever that i want to add a second page right you have a second page for what games i know so that i did that this morning oh you did i had to i wanted to add a second page because i didn't have a second page at first it was just a static website because that's the easiest thing to host in aws like whatever so I told it to use React router to make a second page which is that's just how you like navigate pages and whatever and it completely just built out a second page for me no problem and I was like okay that's that's fine that's cool like I'm glad it did that relatively quickly and then I was like okay now make a snake game in that page and it made a snake game so if you go to my website and you look at that snake game there's a snake game there and I put adamolina.com yes yes adamolina.com but I also put Marquez's face as the little thing that you have to eat if you play the snake game.

1:02:19But I'll just, if anyone wants to see, please just go to the video, not my website, because I pay per click for people that go there. Also, unless I'm using the wrong keys. Oh, it's A-S-D. And it does kind of break. If you go left and then right, it immediately kills you. I thought that's what just snake did. Oh, maybe it does. Because you're on top of yourself. Nothing's popping up, though. okay i'm just spinning around um oh wait i got a score and i don't even know how i got it okay okay one thing that i found very funny about google antigravity is you have to obviously give it a lot of permissions because it has to be able to control parts of your computer everything everything but when you uh install it and then it brings up the website where it's like thanks for installing google antigravity you feel successfully authenticated uh it has a docs link and then it has a twitter link and it calls it it says twitter it doesn't call it x which i fine as it should quite funny um anyway something about gemini 3 that i was thinking about that feels a bit concerning is like this is very cool that you can do these generative uis right like you're supposed to be able to do these generated um interactive tools that helps you understand math and science you can ask it about mortgages and it creates like charts that kind of like show you what things would cost and all this stuff.

1:03:41But this is all happening on google.com, right? Like a number of years ago, Google got in a lot of trouble with the European Union for scraping websites and putting the little text answers on the side of google.com. And they got in trouble because they weren't guiding people to the websites. And we've talked about this before. If people are not getting guided to the websites, those website owners are not making money. If those website owners do not make money, then Google does not have information to scrape from. so if you keep people on google.com and you're just you ask any question and it just creates an interactive thing for you on google.com it kind of feels like google is trying to make gemini and google.com effectively the same thing where you can just do everything in one little window and i see where the value in that is obviously but then no websites are going to get any traffic so I don't know the far reaching elements of this if this is like very successful make it feel like SEO is just officially cooked well it's a new SEO now your SEO has to get picked up by yeah but then you're not getting paid you get nothing so what's even the benefit yeah I don't know I foresee a future in which there is a much tighter integration of content creator slash like writer relationships with their audience and that's going to be the way people make money.

1:05:06It's not going to be the banner ad version of the internet that we have had for a very long time and has been dying a pretty quick death. But either way, it is pretty weird. There have been pretty interesting demos that people have been putting all over the internet. Someone asked for an interactive 3D Lego builder and it made it for them instantaneously, which is pretty cool. I can't get any of this stuff to work and it's very frustrating. I think you're using the wrong mode. I don't know, man. You made that dropdown. I've been trying. Either way, people are pretty excited about it, which is a big shift from how people were feeling about GPT-5, which was a pretty big letdown to a lot of people.

1:05:44So the races are heating up forever and always, and now we're here. Adam made a pretty sick game this morning. Or you used the example that... Oh, yeah. So when David and I were trying to test this out, we were trying to figure out why it was showing up on my account, not on his. Yeah. One of the prompts was that someone on X had posted like, make me a dino game that has me jumping over the latest news stories from today. And then it's basically like, you know, when Chrome has no Internet and you just play the dino game that jumps over things and gets a high score. It's that. But every obstacle that comes your way is just a news story.

1:06:20But the first news story, because it did it for me, like it spun it up. I had a little game to play. The first news story was such a long headline that there was no way to win. It was just like you would jump and it would just jump high enough. You would fall immediately into the first block and just like crash out. Yeah, it was very funny. So I don't know, mess around with it. See what dumb games you can make. And anyway, that was the big news of the week. So I think that we are going to take it to trivia before we do our second trivia ad break. Trivia, dude. Trivia, dude. The standard way to measure reverb time is called RT60, which is the amount of time the reverb tail takes to drop 60 decibels.

1:06:58Wait, why are you asking a question about reverb? because the shirt that I'm currently wearing and that Andrew is also wearing is called reverb. The waveform reverb. I thought you were going to put the reverb on. Oh, yeah. Reverb. Please write on your whiteboards the correct abbreviation for decibels. Oh, okay. The correct abbreviation. I got it. Okay. If you say so. This is definitely a trick question. Question, question, question. Alone. You got it. Alone. Alone. Anyway. We'll be right back.

1:08:15We'll be back. every day so your money is always accessible when you need it no matter your goals wealthfront gives you flexibility and security right now open your first cash account with a 500 deposit and get a 50 bonus at wealthfront.com slash wave that's wealthfront.com slash wave bonus terms and conditions apply cash account is offered by wealthfront brokerage llc member finra slash sipc not a bank the annual percentage yield on deposits as of november 7th 2025 is representative subject to change and requires no minimum. Funds are swept into program banks where they earn variable APY. Support for the show comes from Framer.

1:08:55If you run a business, you need a website. And sure, you could pay for one of those cookie-cutter site builders, but you'll end up with a website that looks like everyone else's. Or if you want to go beyond a typical site builder and get into true design, you could try Framer. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful, production-ready websites, and it's now redefining how we design for the web. With the recent launch of Design Pages, a free canvas-based design tool, Framer is more than a site builder. It's a true all-in-one design platform from social assets to campaign visuals to vectors and icons all the way to a live site.

1:09:30Framer is where ideas go live, start to finish. Framer even helps you design more than websites. You can create social assets, campaign visuals, icons, and even site resources all in one place. Listen, we're not all website builders. I mean, most of us aren't website builders, but that doesn't mean we don't want to build a website here and there. Maybe you want to build a website for your personal portfolio. Maybe you want to build a website in case of popular game collapse with a popular toy. Looking at David. Maybe you want to build a website that just plays the most popular alternative music of the late 90s and early 2000s.

1:10:06Also looking at David. Framer gives you a bunch of tools that us non-website builders can understand so you can build whatever niche website you want. Ready to design, iterate, and publish all in one tool? Start creating for free at framer.com slash design. And use code WAVE for a free month of Framer Pro. That's framer.com slash design and use promo code WAVE, W-A-V-E, framer.com slash design, promo code WAVE. rules and restrictions may apply.

1:11:05Time to do your best work with the all-new Adobe Acrobat Studio. All right, welcome back. We're beginning this third segment with a story because Adam and I ran into each other on our morning commutes. And we got on the path train. We left New York City. We got to New Jersey. And we were waiting at the bus stop. And New Jersey Transit buses have an app that The Verge famously said is a bad app, but I think is a good app. Me lie. Damn. It's a good app. It's okay. It's for a public transit app. It's amazing. Okay. So let's anyway, we opened the New Jersey transit app and try to activate our tickets.

1:11:42And lo and behold, we cannot connect to the server. And I'm like, what's going on? And then Adam goes, Oh, it must be the cloud flare thing. And I go, what cloud flare thing? And that's how I found out. And then we had the really funny joke of like, how do we explain to the bus driver that neither of us have cash, but we need to get to work. And the app doesn't work. Like, do you go, do you go up to the bus driver and say, so do you know what cloudflare so cloudflare you basically got EMP'd basically every I forget what day was this Tuesday yeah earlier this week this is yesterday yesterday at the time of recording I was trying to find something at Ikea because Alex was going to it the Ikea website was down yeah like a lot of the internet was down and I feel like every time one of these moments happen everyone collectively realizes how much power we give these like server companies basically that keep the infrastructure of the whole internet up didn't you say that down didn't you say down detector was down detector was down even down detector was down if down detector is down whatever you're about to search for is probably down yeah they don't need to be up during that yeah no but it's just like one of those moments that everyone like when aws goes down i think that happened like two weeks ago and everyone's like damn like there's a lot of services that run on aws people like legit can't use their jobs yeah It feels like large portions of the internet are just falling apart like every few months now.

1:13:05Yeah. But brings me to my discussion point because Jono sent me a tweet that he found this morning from private talk Y on X that he was like, this might be a good discussion on Waveform. And I clicked and I was like, huh, okay. Yeah. So here's the question. You have to pick one. Do you want unlimited cloud storage, but you can only use cloud services or unlimited local storage? But everything is local. So when you say everything is local, you mean you have to download every YouTube video you want to watch? Every YouTube video, every service you use, it has to be local. So Spotify, you have to download the songs first.

1:13:43Wait, how do I use Twitter then? You have to download 100 tweets at a time. Isn't that what Twitter already kind of does? Yeah. Kind of. But yeah. I would say... Well, no, you would have to have the entirety of Twitter on your phone. It's really hard to... But you have unlimited storage. Yeah, yeah. It's hard to imagine this as a regular website browsing kind of thing in terms of like YouTube, Twitter and stuff like that. As it just like everything that I save, would I rather have it all local or all cloud based? I still think that's a fair question because would I rather have it all local where I'm individually transferring things between all my different devices, which can be a pain in the neck?

1:14:25or would I rather all my devices be able to connect to the same cloud thing, but then we have an internet issue? Even that's a hard question. I think if it was in terms of live your entire life on the internet, we'd have to start imagining some things that don't really exist for things like YouTube. I mean, unless my phone just had one billion terabytes of just literally every single thing in the world. could I still use like how different is the world in this fantasy like can I use iMessage or is it like every time I want to sync my iMessage across devices I need to like put all of my text on a thumb drive and like move them over.

1:15:11Dude even if it's just stuff you're saving locally like if I took some photos now every time I want to send them to the other families that I was with I have to bring them an SSD and like plug it into their computer. What's the IP over Avian? Oh yeah, over Avian care. Okay, I'm going to bring this back into territory that I'm intimately familiar with. Do you guys use Obsidian? No. The note-taking app? No. You knew the answer to that question. I know. So the way Obsidian Sync works is the files themselves are local. They're in a folder on like your hard drive somewhere. And what you do is you can either set this up yourself or pay obsidian five dollars a month which is how they make money to keep that folder in sync across all of your devices if you don't want to pay them you could just set it up yourself so that's like an option so in this world in this scenario i'm envisioning basically everything works like that like you have a hard drive somewhere at home that has unlimited folders so to your iMessage question you would have to then like every time you pull out your phone you got to like pull down to refresh and have it sync across the servers you know and then i would get all my local files on all of my devices.

1:16:21So that's the obvious answer. It's not cloud versus local. It's would you rather have access to the world's cloud network, cloud backend, or would you rather have to set up everything yourself, PewDiePie style, so to speak? I have thought about this so many times, Adam. Now that I understand the true paradigm of what you're presenting here, I really have a lot to say because in a perfect world, I would love to have everything local. It's the reason I don't have an eight sleep mattress. Well, there's a lot of reasons I don't have an eight sleep mattress, but that's up there. If I could be confident that I was secure, that all my stuff was encrypted properly and no one could break into my home networks, or certain, you know, then...

1:17:16Well, that's the benefit of, like, the cloud. Yeah. I think the security is what keeps me from, like, going full quote-unquote off-grid. And I know it's, like, the most ridiculous use of off-grid ever, but, you know, like, I think I will be bound to the cloud flares, to the Google Drives. Actually, Google Drive is not secure at all. Don't keep safe. It's secure because it's impossible to download anything from it, so no one's going to take your stuff anyways. But the thing about this, too like if you had to have everything local you if anything was on your computer you couldn't access it on your phone and vice versa no not local like like i i think what adam's actually asking is like would it would you rat like assuming a world where there was no black and white where either like you did not have access to any internet backbone stuff other than dns like because because i think in adam's definition of local you're allowed to set up a server you know what i mean where you create your own cloud storage and have in infinite storage in that world but you have to deal with it then yeah but then you have then you have to be the one that's like actively managing it it's like the it's almost like asking like it's not like asking like would you rather eat vegetables or not eat vegetables it's like would you rather only eat vegetables that you grow yourself or only eat vegetables that you get from the store which i guess for most people they've already made that choice but it's the same way with file storage Like most people do not host a single thing themselves.

1:18:43And as someone who's like tried to host things themselves in their apartment, like got a big fancy router that I can hold multiple networks on and like, dude, that, that sucks. It's a lot. It's a lot of work. It's definitely a lot of work. I know. But the idea of being free, see, I told you, I thought a lot about, especially if you have unlimited storage in this, in this perfect world of unlimited storage. which sounds like local's the obvious answer with the extra work. But I just thought that it was an interesting question because then my mind went to what Ellis was saying. Like, okay, then there's the privacy, the security, the ease of use.

1:19:18The part of the big talk about all this AI stuff is that it's all done on a server somewhere. You don't have to worry about it. So does that mean I need to download these models and run it myself on my own server if I want to use AI? Don't use it. Well, that's a whole other thing that we should talk. We should do a bonus episode on that. But Andrew, like one of your favorite products of the last 12 months that I've heard you bring up a lot is the picture frame, the smart picture frame. Like, would you get as much enjoyment out of that picture frame if you had to manage that server yourself? I guess.

1:19:48Sure. Like the picture frames server. The way the picture frame works is it's pulling pictures off of my phone. Right. But if you had to, if you like, if you had a network like at your house, a router, and it was up to you entirely to vibe code all of the systems. Oh, then we're talking in like a, yeah, this world is crazy then. So when you want to go watch TV or I guess stream things, you have to have, you're setting up. No, I don't think there's that. It's a Plex server. You have to get a Plex server. Exactly. Okay. Yeah, that's a ton of extra work. It is. I think you just don't get to do anything.

1:20:28No, people do this. This is why you need to be on Twitter, man. No, this is not why I need to be on Twitter. Didn't PewDiePie just... I cannot believe how many times I brought up PewDiePie in this episode. But this was like a whole thing. It's like PewDiePie embarked on this as like a side quest and instantly got hacked. Nice. Yeah, I don't know. You don't even seem interested by the concept. I think I'm more confused by the concept. Okay. If that makes sense. I'd probably just pick cloud then. You like, to you, like, I mean, cloud is the obvious choice here, right? Like, what we're talking about.

1:21:09It's the one you don't want to make, but it's the easy choice. Yeah, there are obvious downsides. For example, like, a random company like Cloudflare could have a bug and all of a sudden you lose access to, like, half of your digital life. You also can never really know how secure your stuff is because you just have to trust these companies that time and time again actually violate your trust. You have to pay them money, which sucks. I hate paying people money. I mean, the same thing is true with the other thing. You could have a house fire and now you've lost literally every piece of everything that you have.

1:21:42You could have a weird electrical surge. You could have somebody spill water on something. yeah yeah on the other hand this is one of those those questions that has no answer and everyone on facebook just yells at each other on the other hand if you wanted to like edit a video you'd have to like stream the footage right if you were all online you'd have to edit the video online and if and then if the internet isn't fast enough i guess so yeah like you're streaming it from whatever server you've uploaded it to. In this metaphor, you plug in the memory card and it uploads to the cloud. But then to edit a video locally, you have to stream it.

1:22:24Let's remove ourselves even further from the reality we live in. I think the question that is most interesting here is, would you rather everything be Chromebook? There's no processing, no storage, nothing gets done on your end. You're effectively using a terminal at this point, right? Or everything be RTX 5090 Super Chud Gaming PC. Gaming PC. Because sometimes I'm in a coffee shop and either they don't have internet or the internet's bad and I want to edit video. But then where are you putting your video? On my unlimited local storage. For you to watch by yourself? No, I don't. Yeah, maybe this is time.

1:23:06This is hard. Marquez, please come home. Dad. Dad. Wait, you're right. Can you not be a YouTuber if you have unlimited local storage? You can build your own YouTube? No, no. The way that I was thinking about this was the infrastructure, like all these companies still exist. The infrastructure is still there. But you can only access the things by having it local. Everyone gets everything else but my goddamn frame. I have to figure out by myself. Well, YouTube or Spotify, let's say. You're heading out for the day. And it's like, I'm not going to be home all day, but I want to listen to music. I have to like download everything in order to listen to it.

1:23:44Like it's only available on local. We lived that life like 15 years ago. Yeah. And everything was great. It was. Everything was better. Okay. So here we go. We've landed on an answer. Just take us back 20 years. If you just wanted to say iPods are sick, we could have just said that. It's a really interesting point that I think a lot about because I do feel like we are increasingly entering an era... I'm going to choose my words very carefully here. Give me a sec. Alright, so I'm leaving these pauses in. I think we are increasingly entering an era that resembles feudalism. Yeah, techno-feudalism.

1:24:26Where we are nothing but serfs to the cloud flares and the Amazons and whatever Larry Ellison's nonsense is called. Yep. And, um... Isn't that already what we want? It's techno-feudalism. Yeah. All right, can we please go to trivia, guys? Trivia. I wish I had, like, a sad version of the trivia music. This is interesting. Guys, turns out you don't actually need... Marques Brownlee? The numbers will show that later after this episode. Turns out we do actually need Marques Brownlee. It turns out you don't actually need to be a techno-feudalist to make a billion dollars. All you need to do is convince children across the world to gamble on knives.

1:25:08Let's go. Gabe Newell did that and bought a 360-foot yacht. I need you to tell me which of these is the actual name of his ginormo boat. Also bought a yacht company, to be clear. Did we confirm that? Yes. Okay. What a guy, man. Are you ready? He loves a C. A, Alex, A-L-Y-X, like the Half-Life character. That's not in Half-Life 3. B, Leviathan, which is just a word that means ginormo. C, the USS Shinji Ikaru from the Neon Genesis Evangelion protagonist, I think. Maybe he's an antagonist. Maybe it's a she. I don't know. Or D, Zero Day, referring to the kind of exploit.

1:25:56I put B because I thought C was a trick question. B is the correct answer. It's called the Leviathan. That's such a boring name. Gabe Newell would, I mean, I don't actually know anything about this guy. I shouldn't. It just seemed kind of funny. But also, USS is reserved for U.S. Navy vessels. Civilian vessels cannot have the USS thing. David, congratulations on scoring your eighth point. I needed this. Oh, it's getting tight. It is. What are you at? I'm 10, I think. Yeah, so you're still two points ahead. But that might change because my boy Adam has got some trivia for you right here. Hit him!

1:26:36Abbreviate decibels, please. What is it?

1:26:41What do you think? We are going to be very pedantic on this one. As pedantic as the 6-7 part of my trivia? Yeah, actually. Really? So I have to say this out loud? Well Okay I'm not going to be that pedantic We're going to have to say it out loud for audio listeners Anyway What do you guys got? I wrote lowercase d capital b Yes I don't know if I'll get marks off for this But I wrote lowercase d capital b with a period After it I don't know why I thought period That's not as pedantic as I thought The lowercase and uppercase Was really what we're looking for here Do you know why that is? Because bells is the unit and a decibel is a tenth of a bell or ten bells.

1:27:35I guess a decabell would be ten bells. Wait. A bell is a unit of sound? Yeah. Is it like actually like a bell? It's a unit of energy. So it has nothing to do with bells. It's not even spelled. This is why no one cares about audio. That's true. It is named after Alexander Graham Bell. Founding father. Well, I think that's been it for this week. Thank you for tuning in. Make sure that you like, subscribe, and I don't know. Tell Elsie's a big dumb idiot. Yeah, do that on whatever platform you like using. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week. Marquez will finally be back from being hot in Portugal.

1:28:13And hopefully we'll have more news for you. Is it even hot there right now? I don't think it's hot in all the videos. It looks kind of cold, actually. Not like, you know, the other kind of hot. The kind that it's totally normal to call your boss. If you're running on a beach... Andrew, save us. And you're throwing a Frisbee. Waveform is produced by Adam and Liam and Ellis River. We're partnering with Vox Media Podcast Network. Honestly, Produced is doing a lot of work there. And our intro outro music is created by Vane Cell. Bingo. Let's go.

1:28:52Bro, I exercised once. End sentence. I've been so tired.

1:29:25presentations, videos, social posts, flyers, and more. Meet Adobe Express, the quick and easy app to create on-brand content. Learn more at adobe.com slash express slash business.

1:29:39Support for this show comes from Aura Frames. It's not a competition to see who can give the best present during the holidays, but it does feel nice to know you really nailed it. Aura AuraFrames is that ideal gift. It makes it effortless to share personal, easy, and unforgettable frame digital photos to the people you love. Just upload your photos, share videos, and even preload memories before it ships, so your gift feels thoughtful from the moment it's unwrapped. For a limited time, visit AuraFrames.com and get$45 off Aura's best-selling Carver Matte Frames using promo code VOX at checkout. That's A-U-R-A frames.com promo code Vox.

1:30:23Terms and conditions apply.

From the publisher

While Marques is out enjoying the Ultimate Frisbee on a beach somewhere, Andrew and David sit down to talk about everything from the new Steam devices to Google Gemini 3. After that, things go off the rails quickly as everyone discusses the pros and cons of local storage vs cloud storage. Enjoy!

Shop the merch:

https://shop.mkbhd.com

Links:

Valve - New Steam devices

Tom's Guide - Rabbit next-gen hardware

Tom's Guide - Employee payment story

Google - Gemini 3 announcement blog

Google - Antigravity announcement

Verge - Cloudflare outage

This episode brought to you by:

Shopify: https://www.shopify.com/waveform

Framer: https://www.framer.com/design (code: wave)

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/MKBHD

Wealthfront: https://www.wealthfront.com/wave

T-Mobile: https://www.t-mobile.com/switch

Music provided by Epidemic Sound

Social:

Waveform Threads: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast

Waveform Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/waveformpodcast/?hl=en

Hosts:

Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd

Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli

David: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel

Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17

Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast

Join the Discord:

https://discord.gg/mkbhd

Music by 20syl:

https://bit.ly/2S53xlC

Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

More from Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast

All 214 episodes
The Worst Idea YouTube's Ever Had...25 Sep 2026 · 1 h 54 min
WTF is a Googlebook?18 Sep 2026 · 1 h 40 min
YOUR Reactions to the iPhone Duo!15 Sep 2026 · 1 h 26 min
Did Apple Actually Duo It?11 Sep 2026 · 1 h 42 min
The Steam Machine Takes on PS5 and XboxWaveform: The MKBHD Podcast · 1 h 25 min
Listen in VO