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0:00Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door. expertly cleaned and folded. So you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like tea time you. Mmm. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you. So did you hear about Dave? Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. Mmm. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great. we can just say the words playstation 5 pro and we'll just go noted so we should just call the episode playstation 5 pro review that's actually not the worst idea i've heard i do that we're unboxing five pro review it's just our podcast wow we'll just say it was a glitch yeah i don't know what happened we were a b testing and that was

1:03What is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marquez. I'm Andrew. And I'm David. And this week, we got a few quick hit sort of style tech news stories. I think everyone's aware that there's a whole bunch of other things happening in the world right now. And I think all the tech companies know it too. And you know how they like hate being outshined by each other? Like one of them announces an event and then the other one's like, okay, we got to do it the day before or the day after. well they're all kind of playing not get up stage so there's not a whole lot of news this week but we still found a bunch of fun stuff to keep ourselves distracted and entertained so we're gonna do that we're gonna jump in uh actually we also have a game at the end that we're gonna play yes thanks to adam so that should be a good time but first uh at the top of the dock here we have a couple of vehicles some interesting vehicles we want to like sort of jump through yeah i'm I'm going to open this one by the wildest one.

1:55Just tell me about this because I see the picture that you put here, but I don't know what's happening here. All right, it's not a new vehicle. It is a prototype vehicle accessory at SEMA, which is like kind of the CES of car shows, right? Yep. Like you see a lot of crazy stuff that this probably might not really be released. It's in the same convention center. But it is a five-screen accessory for your Toyota Tundra. it is a custom pickup truck accessory where in the bed of the truck it like comes up and then five tv screens come out for the ultimate tailgating accessory in quotes is that what this is yes so it has if you're looking at it directly from the back you'd actually only see three screens because there's one directly in the bed of the truck and two that fold out to the sides of it almost like mirrors and then there's two also on the interior so if you're tailgating with this at any angle you can watch the big game are you i don't know what else you would do the game doing this or are you nowhere near any of the games watching five of the games uh maybe you're in the parking lot and watching the pregame show or something else that's a great question it's a choice i think they just did this because they had nothing else to show at sema and they were like well this is a kind of a tv show right put the tv in the all right there it is well this is how they're describing it with the push of a button a custom-built staging shell rises from the bed of the truck on four electric actuators revealing five 55 inch waterproof outdoor screens wow waterproof outdoor displays are usually really expensive as we've seen on best buy they're like way more expensive than regular tvs by a factor of like 20 so this is not cheap actually did it probably not even it's probably not even gonna come there's probably no price again this is this This is at SEMA.

3:49This is a booth probably where Toyota's showing us off to get attention to people to talk about Toyota. And then that will be the last time we see this. Yeah. Also, I want to say, I think that one of the best things about tailgating is sitting on the tailgate. And you can't really do that with this. This is completely filling up the back of the truck. It also has like four huge JBL speakers on top, pointing in all four directions. Even the direction none of the TVs are facing. If they had had like two big screens just up against the back of the rear window and you could still sit in the tailgate with your mirrors and watch it, I think that'd be great.

4:24Well, you just need another Toyota Tundra. That's true. And that one has five seats in the back of it. Oh, yeah. Two cars. Put them tailgate to tailgate. I see. Yeah. Okay. Wow. You could do that. I actually have a different vehicle I want to talk about briefly. um and you can watch the autofocus video if you want the full breakdown but we did briefly have the rivian r1s gen 2 here um i was curious about it because i am personally a rivian r1t first gen owner and i regularly drive it so i was i saw the second gen stuff get announced and i saw some reviews and i wasn't at any of the like experiences or demos they had so i was just wondering how much of this stuff is really noticeable there's a whole bunch of stuff they're talking about here Ooh, less wiring.

5:10Oh, there's a couple new features here and there. But how much of this stuff will I actually notice? Because I'm not going to buy a second gen. I have a first gen already, but let me see. So they got one in our hands, and I actually put my list together. I reviewed it. I lived with it for a week. And it turns out there's two main things that I really noticed about it. One is the suspension and the way it drives, and the new drivetrains, which actually improved. uh basically what they did is so there's we had the triple motor 850 horsepower r1s gen 2 tri max is what it's called 370 miles of range roughly the equivalent power wise of the first gen which had quad motors but what they did is they they split apart the all-purpose and sport modes a little bit more so i think if you read old reviews of the first gen rivians a lot of people were saying things like, oh, it rides a little harsh.

6:04It's a little bit too tightly sprung and things like that. And like other full-size trucks are much softer and much more forgiving to drive. So they made the all-purpose mode softer. Everything's just a little bit softer. The acceleration pedal is a little bit softer. The regen is a little softer. The suspension's a little softer, but then sport mode is even firmer, which is, it's actually very firm for a, truck for a 7 ,000 pound vehicle it's it's really tightly sprung it can be a little much on regular streets but that's what they mainly did and that's what I noticed when driving it then the other thing is the cameras are just all dramatically better which is uh it's a small thing but like the first gen when you put your blinker on and it shows you the feed of your blind spot and it's like it looks like it's covered in a layer of grease and it's like 240p it's like okay I can see if there's a car there but I can't really see that well the new ones they're like super crisp HD like high dynamic range great colors like and by the way they're not just blinker cameras they are the the dash cam they are the century mode cameras they are very useful cameras so all the cameras being dramatically better I thought that was great that is something that always surprised me that companies would cheap out on the cameras on these cars because cameras are pretty cheap now and I know that you just want to make a very small module and whatever but I'm pretty sure the difference between like a 4080p backup camera and a 1080p backup camera is like negligible in cost at this point probably especially for something that's small and especially for something that already costs that much yeah right like what margin is that and it's a small cost that leads to a high quality of life improvement yeah well i guess when you're rivian i don't know how much they've changed i mean there's a ton of smaller things they've changed but when i looked at those cameras in the first gen it doesn't look like they were ever meant to be displayed that big especially the side view cameras like when i that originally actually it never showed that and then there was a software update and then they started showing you the blind spot cameras and i'm looking at them i'm like is there something on my cameras like it doesn't look like they're ever meant to be displayed yeah now these new ones are like great yeah so i believe tesla was able to uh improve the cameras with like software update which is pretty cool of course yeah image processing can get better but i don't you would never see a difference this big just from software like they are night and day different which is great so i love seeing that so can i talk about the interior of this was is this like a special edition one no i mean this did have the the higher end i think it's called the ascent trim i'll double check that but it did have the nice interior do you remember when ford used to do an eddie bauer edition uh expedition i think it ended at 150 i'm kind of picturing it though so this to me felt like the ll bean edition like uh rivian it's got like this like flannel accents all over the place and like a plaid it yeah like plaid and this it spoke to me sitting inside this was just like i am at home as a northeast white podcaster who loves a good ipa this thing was like it's i'm here home also the wood trim on this is way better i don't know if it's just because it's a different wood trim but this is like one of the best wood trims inside of a car I've ever seen.

9:16The wood looks really nice, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I already love the R1S, but this one is even better. It's so good. I'm not really hot on the LL Bean vibe, but I'm happy that you're happy. It's, this is me, man. Alright. It also has an electrochromic roof. Oh, does it really? Did the previous one not have that? It did not. Oh. Yeah, so I found that nice. It doesn't open, right? It's just tints and then untints. Okay. So you can, it's either clear or frosted. Yeah. I'm glad a lot more technology is getting electrochromic stuff. yeah seems like a lot to the snapchat yeah seeing it on the snapchat glasses was really sick of just like on off on off or even if you just like looked at the like windows outside and watching it just auto do it was really my first experience with the electrochemic was in like 2016 in china and i was staying in this hotel and the shower that's in the bathroom area of the hotel was like just in the main room so it was like oh you're just gonna see naked people it's clear but when you go in and you press a button and it totally tense yeah it gets all foggy so it's not quite it's not like it doesn't get darker it just gets like it looks foggy yeah you can't really see it's cool i've seen yeah i've seen more than one hotel with that yeah it's becoming more popular it was it used to be very expensive but i think it's been coming down in price a lot it's fascinating super cool some of you freaks are gonna leave it clear anyway uh moving we have one more vehicle actually i don't know how much you want to talk about it but it's the coolest one it's the it's the lee auto mega is what it's called it's wow how do i describe it it's an it's the shape of a minivan the ultimate mini i think it looks like the new prius got stung by a b and his minivan sized it does have a yeah that sleek shape to it so yeah it's minivan size it's three rows it is made by a company that does not ship vehicles to the u.s so you're not going to just see one on the streets unless you saw me driving to the studio today um and it is very much yeah uh the ultimate minivan i think is a good description of it it's it's full of screens it's full of tech and features and comfort it kind of seems overloaded like it's got heated massaging seats in the front two rows it's got a 50 watt wireless charger at all four of the front two row seats it's got huge oled screens in the front it's got a self-aligning hud display it's got self-driving it's got uh sensors where you can like do gestures to move media from the back seat to the front seat screen it's all this the auto park was nuts it was so good it was maybe the best auto park i've ever seen and i've tried a couple different auto park systems this one confidently auto parked with a bunch of variables it was it was pretty serious they have a singular lidar sensor on the top of that car so it's probably that mixed with machine vision and the ride is just it's called like magic carpet suspension and it is legitimately like you're not you're just like floating it is on the it's on the level of the i'll say it the rolls royce specter which was maybe like the softest magic carpet ev experience and it's also like really good internal acoustics so like you drive around in that thing and you basically just feel like you're floating along the road and then you hit a pothole and it's kind of like and you run over increasingly larger things and it's just good for new jersey it's fine it's totally fine new jersey it's great for new jersey i know nothing about the manufacturer and nothing about how they are overseas so i can't speak to that but as the car that we are seeing here which is obviously lent to us from the company so take it with the grain of salt that it is it's one of the most fun inside of a car i've seen since this year probably yeah they got founded in 2015 so it's still a fairly new company this strikes me as and this is a total shot in the dark but this strikes me as the lucid of china it reminds me of the first lucid that we saw that was so focused on the backseat experience like these lay down quality this one like the bucket seats in the back lay down the footrest comes up you can push them all the way back so you have tons of leg room it's like jetliner seats it's like jello yeah and then it has heated and cooled seats with massage and i thought the interesting thing about the massage was normally a massaging seat only gets your back this goes like all the way up your like uh hamstring like to your knee yeah i need that it was awesome yeah it feels like lucid merged with canoe i feel like that's what it was the vibe outside has a canoe vibe to it yeah it's very canoey it's crazy strange it really uh compared to the um what is the minivan that we had for a bit the chrysler pacifica now the the re redo of the old oh the volkswagen volkswagen uh yeah i feel like this is so much better it's like not even a competition because the volkswagen buzz ev buzz is that what it was id buzz yeah the outside looks cool but the interior is like really basic volkswagen doesn't have a lot going on i think they were based they were on that nostalgic like old like the old uh vans were like take the seats out and stuff and like super module and everything and i think they were kind of going for that this was like we are doing our own thing and we're doing everything about it totally it's pretty sick very weird yeah do we want to do the max stuff after the break yes sure this thing i'll do i'll do a little teaser uh for audio listeners picture me holding a tiny five by five inch computer it's a desktop you're shocked by how small it is that's after the break that's what it is you are shocked um but yeah no we we have some mac stuff we're actually i've just been using right in front of me you can see the new macbook pro or maybe you couldn't tell because it looks almost the same but the same as mine yeah i've been using the silver one so now it's space black it's a whole thing now but we're gonna get to that after the break but before we do that we should do trivia trivia dude so we got Marquez back this week but we lost Ellis.

15:14Ellis is now homesick today. We're all just getting each other sick. Yeah, we're just going around. So I'm going to do a Have you been sick? You were already sick. Yeah, but it never really went away. It just settled in my chest and never really went away. Perfect. So that's why we're getting sick. Right. Anyway. You're just a nexus of trivia question. Who's out next? which of these is not a popular real ev hybrid car in china an ellis style question which one of these is not a real car in china the byd jam the wuling bingo the aito m7 or the ziker 001 oh my god i've heard of two of them yeah i have an idea that's bad i haven't the other two could be easily want to also all right yeah i started seeing byd cars in the u.s recently really yeah really i'm trying to remember where i was oh cal yeah california huh their cheapest one is like sub 15k right sheesh yeah this was in like i guess around san diego so it was like there was tons of evs already so starting to see byds didn't shock me but it was did it look potentially like it was a like somebody reviewing it or i couldn't tell i just remember seeing the logo or it might have been parked actually yeah interesting we'll think about that we'll think about those trivia questions as well answers are going to be at the end like usual we'll be right back

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17:30And if you get stuck, Shopify is always around to share advice with their award-winning 24-7 customer support. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. You can turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. You can sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash waveform. So just go to shopify.com slash waveform, shopify.com slash waveform. All right, welcome back. Let's talk New Max. last week we did get that press release week of new macs and now by the end of this week reviews are starting to come out uh including our mac mini review which should be out by the time this podcast is out so we can talk about this one this little guy here um basically and i guess i'll spoil the review a little bit if you haven't seen it yet but three main things are crazy about this mac mini one is obvious it's tiny yeah i'm like holding it in my hand right now it's a five inch by five inch by two inch little rectangular thing nobody was asking for a smaller mac mini but here we are it's like the smallest little thing you've ever seen it's a full-size desktop computer full m4 and m4 pro chips in there crazy how small it is thermals seem to be totally fine i just it just keeps getting smaller it's crazy it's really cool yeah so that's that i called it a shrunken mac studio because the old mac mini was more of like a like a it was like flat like a platter this one's a little it's actually taller than the old mac mini it's two inches tall but it's it's this makes the mac studio look huge i put this on top of the mac studio it makes the mac studio it's actually like i saw it on rich's desk and i was like whoa that thing's gigantic i don't remember that feeling big like it never no i was always like oh that's a fairly small mac studio is already unnecessarily small yeah it's a very powerful computer yeah i love the mac studio this thing is way small my best size comparison i have this roll of duct tape oh yeah you kind of nailed that when it sits on top every corner of duct tape perfectly aligns with the sides of the the mac mini if duct tape had corners it would be and then the size hold it up the oh sorry i'm doing it on the table and no one it's the footprint is exactly the same if you were to measure it it's five inches by five inch five inches and then it's also exactly two inches tall in terms of height it is like literally perfect which is crazy i don't know how you knew that but i well we were just trying to compare it to things and like everyday items and i grabbed this and it happened to be almost exactly the same i was trying to relate it to everyday things that everyone would know the size of for the video duct tape is in there and yeah a full size duct tape roll it is there but yeah on the front you have two ports two usbc ports on the front those are not thunderbolt ports and then you have three um the headphone jack and that's it you'll notice there's no power button yet on the back you have the power plug one gig ethernet by default you can for 100 bucks make it 10 gig i think yeah and then hdmi full size and three thunderbolt four ports by default on the m4 pro those become thunderbolt 5 still no power button you might notice uh on the top just that little apple logo still no power button you might notice uh on the sides totally blank this thing is nice and clean still no power button you've probably noticed at this point i turn it upside down and you see the intake fans and the power button at the back bottom corner uh so i just you know threw out the conspiracy theory in the mac mini review but i'm sticking by it i think it is someone's job at apple to create to come up with with every new design one obvious not that big a deal but easy to complain about thing to take the heat off of anything that might go wrong this is the same person that started with the notch in the iphone this is the same person that has the port at the bottom of the magic mouse instead of anywhere else this is the same person who might have even started taking the headphone jack away but this person definitely chose to put the power button on the bottom of the mac i david and i talked about this last week before we saw it it is not possible to press this button unless you physically pick it up yeah that's worse than i thought you could at least like kind of stick your finger under it and press it it's very very small and light and generally it's not gonna be that big of a deal however just like the original mac mini people build setups around it right like a lot of people buy these so that they can put like desktop risers over it and stuff and again i'm in the camp where i'm like i don't think i really need to turn off my computer that often so it's not that big of a deal and if i do need to i'll just like you know pick up the back a little bit but just a little annoying it is a little bit annoying it's one of those things that apple does sometimes where they're just like form over function it is an objectively bad place to put it the exact same way the port at the bottom of the magic mouse is objectively the worst place to put it right but it's probably fine and not that big a deal because it's only you know once a while that you actually use that yeah we're also in one of those really awkward situations where they have two products out right now and one is an objectively bad deal compared to the other one because the m4 pro version of this computer is faster than the m2 ultra which is what's shipping in the mac studio right now mac studio for the equivalent spec basically is more than double the price effectively yeah um you're getting obviously way more cores so if that is something that you specifically need there's the studio you're also getting uh the usba ports full size and that's pretty much it um so it's kind of it's kind of this that awkward situation where we were at when people were still needing to buy intel max because compatibility but literally the only situation that you would buy the intel mac is because of compatibility.

23:25I don't really see a world where you would buy the Mac Studio over a faster Mac Mini right now. Yeah. Unless for some reason you absolutely needed built-in USB-A, which I don't know why you couldn't just use an adapter, or you absolutely needed a built-in SD card reader, which again, I don't know why you couldn't just use an adapter. Yeah. So I'm not really sure if they're going to discontinue this or just update it. They haven't officially announced an M4 Ultra chipset. They gotta. If they did, it would be great because the Mac Studio is also still stuck on M2 Ultra. Yeah, so Mac Studio is overdue.

24:02So I guess this gets me, I'll just finish my opening point, which is there's three crazy things about this Mac Mini. First one was size. The other two are the base M4 Mac Mini is a great deal. It's$599. It's just a base M4 chip. They doubled it to 16 gigs of onboard memory. It's got all these ports. It's tiny. Thermals are great. Performance is great. it's like that's a that's a damn good entry mac good job yeah the third and final thing is wait a second the most powerful mac mini is the most powerful cpu mac so far at desktop mac the desktop mac yeah because the m4 pro is the fastest single core performance we've ever seen on any mac obviously with m4 or m3 or m2 and then yeah the m4 pro is benchmarking above m1 max and is hitting M2 Ultra levels.

24:53It's above M2 Ultra. Of CPU and GPU. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, the point you're making, I think, is that the M2 Macs are overdue for an upgrade. The Mac Pro, the Mac Studio, we're gonna hopefully see M4 Ultra and get all of those updated sometime soon. We don't have that yet. We just have MacBook Pro with the M4 Pro. It's very weird to me that they didn't do that already. Yeah, so they're kind of staggering all these M4 Mac upgrades. But yeah, as of right now, Now, Mac Mini is in a really impressive space. Yeah. And then as you noted in your review, what's very funny about this is that the base model is an extremely good deal at$599.

25:30And then if you have an education discount, you get it for$499, which is even crazier. But once you add the additional SSD storage and you add the RAM. No longer a great deal. You have almost an entire extra Mac Mini. Yeah. So maybe the RAM could be worth it, but honestly, there are Thunderbolt 4 ports on the back for the base model. Just buy an external SSD or an SSD enclosure and permanently mount it to the back and you'll be fine. It's so much cheaper. Buy two of them and run them in SLI and then you get 32 gigs of unified memory. That's a name I haven't heard in a while, SLI. Yeah, I guess you are limited in ports.

26:09You only have three USB-C ports, so you gotta be careful. But they're all Thunderbolt on the back. We're sorry, yeah, three Thunderbolt on the back and then two USB-C on the front. It's funny thinking about running like a CalDigit onto this knowing it's the same size pretty much. Right. Like to add an extra dock onto this for more IO, it's the same size as the actual computer. I understand that this computer is very cheap. I am pretty bummed out that the ports on the front are just USB 3 because that's going to be the most common port that you attach an external SSD to. It's going to be hard to get to the back, so it's kind of frustrating.

26:41Here's a question. Would you rather have three USB 3 ports on the back and two Thunderbolt on the front over the three Thunderbolt on the front and two USB 3 on the front? Sorry, three Thunderbolt on the back and two USB 3 on the front. That was very confusing. Wait, say it one more time. Okay, this has two USB on the front and three Thunderbolt on the back. Would you be okay with losing a Thunderbolt port, but they're on the front and then the back are just three USB? because that'd be worse that'd be where you need the you need at least one on the back to be thunderbolt so you can connect oh the monitor yeah okay yeah because i was gonna say like you'd normally rather plug io in the back right or if you're they're assuming you're using a wireless keyboard i'd probably be okay with one thunderbolt on the back and then two thunderbolt on the front yeah at this moment same the front port is always the most convenient when i plug a thunderbolt drive into my mac pro which is also the same situation i get an error message that it says you can't plug in this Thunderbolt accessory into this port, and I have to unplug it and plug it in the back with the Thunderbolt ports.

27:45So people are going to get that message if they try to plug a fast SSD into the front. It's going to be like, not the port for this. Plug it in the back. As I'm looking at this, can I have a low-key conspiracy theory on why they didn't do that? I'm all for it. Because then they would have to put the Thunderbolt logo on the front, and that would kill the aesthetic of it being clean like this. That's a great question. Are there any Mac Studios with Thunderbolt on the front? No. I don't think even the Ultra does. Oh, okay. so because i mean the ultra they don't want the logo on the front yeah because the ultra of the mac mini is also not thunderbolt that's really sad there is no ultra it's just pro sorry not yeah the mac mini none of them are yeah so that is a little disappointing it's going to be harder to get to the back ports and for people that are like photographers that need to use external ssds a lot to transfer files quickly yeah it's going to be very annoying to i think that that is more annoying than the power button being on the bottom so i think that is my theory about apple's price ladders is even though it is actually totally capable chip wise performance wise of being like the photographer's computer or like the light editor's computer is not meant to be it's still just the entry mac for like a casual like the think about the m4 imac which is just 1200 bucks obviously it's not cheap but it's like a very casual this baseline computer to just get a computer so you're saying like this is the this is the m4 imac of this is the baseline computer where you want your own monitor you don't want the imac because like i would call the imac the baseline yeah but it's 1200 to start and if you have a computer yeah 1300 bucks so if you have a monitor already you just like all right i'm gonna get a mac i'll get the 500 600 mac mini and that's plenty of computer for every casual thing you're gonna do actually i could see this this is perfect for the like i have a friend who does like software engineering and he has just a mac mini and his gaming pc hooked up to the same monitors and just swap so this is great to just like use a kvm switch yeah and just like code on this if you'd prefer to do that on mac and then switch over to your computer but the second the second you're going to be the photographer thinking about how many ports do i need or how many external drives am i going to plug in or anything like that they walk you right up to the mac studio because you start to think about like oh m4 pro or how much more am i going to spend yeah but it's so much more expensive but the max studio also has regular usb3 ports but it has usba it has way more ports yeah and even though you're not gonna have much more performance it only has one extra c port though on the back and then two usba it's not that many more oh it has a bunch of usba i thought it only has two oh well i've used both of mine so it has four thunderbolt and two usba that's a big difference that's one extra port for one thunderbolt and two sba three extra ports well sure you know i don't know i don't know i just i just feel like that's i wouldn't buy that for twice the price for three extra ports you know well you say that and that makes perfect logical sense but if you walk up the rungs of the ladder one by one you so you kind of end up there faster than you think like the base mac studio as you say is uh two thousand dollars right now it was m2 pro it's like so much slower it's m2 max sorry yes so it's a better gpu or almost as good well it should be better but it's not but it's m2 max it's i think we all know it's not a great deal right now because we want m4 stuff in there but yeah you for that price will get all the extra ports you'll get hopefully soon m4 max and then it's actually like a cal digit and hook it up to one of the usbc parts on my back but a cow did it is like what five hundred dollars or something yeah that's exactly that's yeah you're getting right up to yes in mac studio i don't know so anyway that's i think we're in a weird place because max apple's lineup is not fully updated to m4 which is why this like weird comparison kind of makes sense but i think hopefully soon mac studio gets m4 mac pro gets m4 yeah and then everything is on uh tiered to me it feels like apple only sees the front ports as a way to like charge the magic keyboard and the magic mouse that's kind of mostly what i do in all of their press stuff they just show it like having the um playstation controller plugged into it or the teenage engineering thing plugged into it but they don't actually show anything transferring data just charging never substantial data so yeah that's interesting that's a good point i didn't even think of that yeah we should talk about the macbook pro yeah okay that that's the last thing we got here which is this is the new m4 generation macbook pro um geez i haven't upgraded my macbook pro in three years we were just talking about this before i was 28 years old when i got my my m1 a wheel max yeah i was just a child um and i've been using it ever since and i haven't really been tempted by any of the upgrades from m1 to m2 was silly m1 to m3 and i don't really need it m4 ultra m4 max comes out and m4 pro these new laptops now they're starting to stack the improvements on top of each other over the m1 generation not that i need some performance improvement but they also did a couple little things one uh thunderbolt 5 so faster io for those ssds for those big projects two there's a nanotexture option on the display interesting yeah very interesting that it that's this is it yeah you've you've seen it it's pretty sick looking yeah uh i have thoughts on it and then three it is space black and the first one isn't so it's just kind of like a bunch of little things now stacking up on top so this is the first one i've at least thought about switching from my three-year-old m1 max to this uh brand new m4 max um we are still mid review process on that so i don't have an answer yet i will say it's a great laptop it's very expensive but it is very performant it is uh on our export test basically twice as fast as my laptop on like major multi-threaded apps which is awesome so i'm i'm liking this laptop a lot so far yeah it's pretty good i think every single year up until now people have been like the performance improvements are like 20 little bumps but the m1 generation jump was so big from intel in general both in thermals as well as performance that people are just like why would i ever need this and i continue to believe that generally if you had an m1 max i i bought an m1 max when it first came out i don't plan on upgrading because i'm like yes it's faster but it's already so good that until it's like really really really good or my computer just dies yeah you have we have like years left on our totally lives you can get like six to seven years out of these computers um the things that i'm really excited about the thunderbolt 5 i think is going to be huge uh that's only in the pro of the mac mini but it is on these laptops which is awesome on all the ports which is super cool it's nice to see apple adopting a new standard slash technology early they obviously did adopt usbc really early in some ways in some ways yeah parts yeah pieces of it yeah but uh thunderbolt 5 the spec only came out like a year ago and there's only like a razor laptop out right now that has it so it's kind of cool seeing them uh push that out so hopefully more ssds come out with it uh i think the nanotexture display it looks very very good it's 150 extra on these computers it looks so good though so we opened it up and we were all looking at it i was like blown away yeah yeah we had like a long conversation about it yesterday i'm kind of torn on it i think it looks phenomenal and that's because i took it out the box and it's been two days and it doesn't have any fingerprints or anything on it yet and it looks so good just never touch it yeah just don't ever have anyone ever touch it with anything um what i'm curious about is i've had the nanotexture pro display xdrs for years now and those things do not wear well like if anything touches it if any dust touches it if you use any polishing cloth that's not the apple one it is super easy to get like marks on it and like to have it permanently scuffed and just start looking kind of rough yeah um which we kind of learned in real time like some of ours look great still some of ours look are looking kind of like fingerprinty which is bad david and mine is at this point i'm like i guess i'll have to start touching it with my hands and figuring it out because i don't want to recommend people buy a nanotexture laptop yeah or a nanotexture uh imac but isn't there also a nanotexture ipad like how is that one doing i want to see like how these different nanotexture displays are aging over time to determine if i want to recommend them or not because yeah like i said it looks phenomenal now it's even a little bit brighter underneath this nanotexture i think it's a thousand nits standard sdr max brightness instead of 600 and also the battery even though it's the same size m4 is giving it an extra hour or two like a bunch of little things but yeah nanotexture i'm not sure how it's going to age but it looks incredible right now it looks incredible right now yeah yeah i feel like if you're working in cafes a lot near windows and stuff it's going to be a huge benefit yeah or on airplanes this is my It's an airplane editing laptop, which is why I'm like, this is maybe great.

36:52It makes perfect sense on a laptop in terms of glare because you always have more opportunity for glare in something that's mobile, but it also does. And maybe we're just not the best at cleaning them correctly. Maybe you have to wipe a smudge immediately. But we both looked at our monitors and they're not great. And then you think of something that you have the potential of touching every single time you open or shut it. Every time I open it. It's just asking for smudge city. The Pro Display XDR was also the first product they shipped with Manotexture, and I wonder if they've improved it since it came out years ago.

37:25It's been a long time. Other changes that are awesome. Love that they added an additional USB port on the lowest end 14-inch because originally the regular lowest end 14-inch had one less USB-C port, which is cool. So glad they added that. And then 16-inch, they base it at 24 gigabytes of RAM now, which is awesome. They jacked that up. oh and it goes up to something crazy isn't it 128 now uh yeah i think it's 128 max now is it really yeah because i had oh yeah 128 geez yeah so it goes crazy it's a lot of memory cool thousand dollars yeah great no one said it would be cheap definitely will not be cheap yeah but yeah these laptops also why is this the marketing for it hold on apple intelligence is here oh yeah yeah everywhere it's also yeah every you have it yeah it says hello apple intelligence doesn't say it's here yeah so you can say hi to it but it's technically a while away it is out now technically if you upgrade sonoma it's on my m1 yeah max laptop the official build is out but the only things it really does is like the writing tools and if that's really what you want out of apple intelligence then like good for you yeah you won't need i think everyone's waiting for the siri upgrades that aren't coming until like march of next year i think they're slated for spring so that's kind of crazy i'm waiting for that till i review apple intelligence yeah it's gonna be like three more months or something yeah we'll see but i think that these are really really incredible machines and if you didn't buy an m1 or an m2 or an m3 these are pretty good pickups so i have a question should i just touch i just how do i figure science how do i figure out how well it ages do i just start going crazy touching um i think i have to it depends how long you're planning on using it for do you have like a niece or a nephew no because they would just i was gonna say just let them use it for like a week and that's like a year of wear and tear i mean i i'm gonna use it for a few more days for this review and then start putting the review together i think in the next few days i gotta figure out if i gotta review this fair um just uh you don't want to just touch it live on the pod can you wait till we get b-roll of it yeah yeah okay i mean there's a little before you send vin and brandon off a cliff yeah yeah it's not coming off see i don't know dang i don't know man also that poor soul that has to update the compatibility list of the apple the polishing every year when someone on twitter goes it has been updated somebody logs in and like changes the updates yeah good job yeah you did it wow so that's about it we also had obviously the imax um but that's there's nothing new besides they now also come with the m4 and the nanotexture option yeah but the nanotexture option on those are 200 instead of 150 so like based on screen size i guess it's based on screen size but then the 32 inch protosflay xdr being a thousand dollars is out of control but it's been years since they first started shipping that so it's probably way more expensive to add gotten better because the ipad yeah nanotexture is like a hundred extra dollars maybe i think it's a hundred bucks got it okay yeah and it only comes with the one terabyte and two terabyte models right which to me was a sign that they didn't want it to be it's either a sign that they don't want it to be on everyone's ipads or a sign that you should pay more to get the one terabyte just to get the nanotexture it's just to walk you up the ladder yeah one or the other there's definitely that i also think that they think that digital artists are going to be the ones that want it the most and they need more storage but which is fair also they don't need more storage right you're forcing them to have more stories exactly so all right we're gonna wrap this section up with uh a little it's not a game as much as it's thought experience yeah no i don't know it's a question i'm posing out because there's not a lot that happened you guys can play along at home because i'm sure you're gonna have your own answers to this but the theme of this question that we're all thinking about is what is an app that you use all the time and like to use but is actually a bad app and I've thought about this a little bit I have a couple answers actually a lot of these are going to wind up being super niche but I'm hoping that the listeners out there when they hear it they'll feel seen.

41:35Mine is not niche at all It's not niche? Good, that's better Start us off The Google Messages app What? I love that app It is chaos What is bad about it? Besides them turning feature flags on and off constantly more so when i open it up it's just text messages from people i know some that i don't uh random spam numbers that don't get blocked because it does a good job of like separating the spam into like its own little spam and archive section but more than a few get through and just end up in my inbox same like i'm looking at one right now that has an exclamation point next to it already and it's like hi i'm sarah a recruiter like why did that not just it is weird when it's Like makes it into your main inbox, but is basically saying it's spam while it's in there.

42:23Yeah. Like it is. I guess it's not a bad app functionally. I just wish it was like a cleaner experience. Like if there was folders where I could just like be in one section that is only people in my contacts, all the messages are there. Okay. I have a question. Okay. So didn't they or aren't they going to start adding different categories that you can jump between? That's what I'm hoping. I think that that might be something they're working on. Yeah, I believe so. I just find that very funny because just like we talked about the AR glasses and VR headsets crashing into each other and trying to become the same thing, email and texting is crashing into each other trying to be the same thing.

42:59It's like, let's make the texting app just like email. The closest analogy I could find to what I would want, unfortunately, is just email. It's faster email. Just give me better filter options, I guess. So I can go into the section of numbers I don't know. It does a good job of auto-deleting the one-time password text messages that you get. there's a feature for that. It does that, yeah. Does that now. But just give me like one step more. I think the Pixel does it a little bit better, right? Doesn't it have better spam filtering on Google messages? I get a ton of spam. I don't know. Oh, it might.

43:31Interesting. Yeah. Okay. At least up until this election week, I've gotten a ton of spam. I do find it funny though, because I kind of hate the way the email is formatted. Like it's a very old system that feels like it could really be streamlined. there's always these truncated messages and sometimes parts appear and disappear and it's like texting is so much simpler. Can we interest you in Notion Mail? No. Are you on the wait list still? I'm still on the wait list. I am too. Because my app that I hate on mobile is Notion. Can you? Damn. That's a good one. It's awful. I don't know how many people use Notion that listen to this podcast.

44:12It is now a fairly popular productivity app, the mobile app experience for this is just like what if you took a desktop computer excel spreadsheet and put it on your phone whack except you couldn't see anything whack you hit a notification to jump to a certain task that you're in but you have no idea what even project that task is it i was gonna say can we all name our least favorite thing about the notion app it's that it's that and it's also when i try to move things around when i try to reorder things in a like a tab list and i try to grab the handle and then i grab i ended up selecting a text so i have to like unselect the text and like hide the keyboard and i try to grab the handle again and then move it and then the whole thing moves and now i'm moving it to the wrong place yeah moving things i just want to say on a foldable device it's not a problem yeah because because the notion app just feels like it's a desktop app but there's not enough screen space for you to see anything the main reason the thing david's talking about is like if you get tagged in a specific uh Let's get into it.

45:13Task. So let's just say podcast,

45:19like podcast clip thumbnail. All right, so we're like a couple deep inside. The truncated folder. So the way we have it is we have the waveform category, then we have episode 258, and then within that are a bunch of subtasks. So that would be like in the waveform, episode 258 post-production clip three thumbnail right so as i get the notification for that all i can see is clip three thumbnail and waveform podcast and three dots in between like and then if i want to see where that is in there because when we're doing things out you have to back out and it's basically just find it i mean because you can't like get in to see where that folder like structure.

46:07Timeline is going. Yeah and the notifications that you get is like Mark has updated a property script. Mark has updated a property in research testing. I click on that. Research slash testing. That is a default that we have for every video that we ever did. Because we have a bunch of that task but in different projects. Right. And you don't know which project you're in. Right. You have no idea which project you're in. Once I'm in that you can hit the back button next to research testing. It just brings you back to your inbox. Just to home. I do not understand. I feel like there are like two to three ways that people's brains work and mine just doesn't work like this.

46:37Why is that not a drop-down menu on the top? I don't know. Just like research, research, and then you prop, and it's just in order, in chronological order of what sub-filter you're in and you just climb up. And it's crazy because it seems like there are so many people that are so into Notion. Like people have - It does a lot of great things. Yeah, like the desktop app is pretty good. If you were using Airtable before Notion, it's like 10 years ahead of what Airtable used to be because Airtable is just Excel on the internet and it's really bad. I don't get it but yeah the app for notion guys come on just you don't have to make it look and work exactly the same as the web app it just has to do the same things sounds like a skill I think we all know mobile is pretty brutal if you have a foldable you're in the elite club but for us plebs that are using our bricks we just gotta carry one of these around everywhere we can always have notion uh okay yeah fully on board uh with that I like that one what did I write down I have three at notion please fix oh okay i have a category of apps okay banking apps every um every in every smart home accessory has its own app that you have to like log into to connect to it and i use the google home app so then what i'll do is i'll open google home and then i'll go to like ingest that new smart home thing like i have an august smart lock so i have to download the august app and then log in and then connect the lock and then i'll go to google home and then import my august account and then bring that lock into google home but then the august app just kind of sits on my phone and sucks you still have to have it i don't think so but if it ever stops working in google home then i would have to go re-download it reinstall set it up again like i just have i just leave it on my phone i would like to introduce you to the matter protocol oh man is this going to save me because at this point i have a bunch of i have a miros app i have a bunch of random other smart outlet apps.

48:29Matter allows you to manipulate those apps within just the Google Home app. No, no, you can do that, but you can only do the very basic functions of on-off, unlock-lock. If I still have, I have, Mark has four different types of lights or smart plugs. So Miras, InBrighton, I don't even know what else I have on here. I've got a few. Yeah, so those will all be in the Google Home app and I can use through voice commands on my Google Homes or can turn on and off. But if I want to set a schedule timer for them that I have to do inside the app or if it gets disconnected and I have to reconnect it, I have to have that app to reconnect it.

49:09Right. I am going to make an analogy. I think that smart home apps are very similar to charging apps for CCS-based cars. 100%. Because there are a lot of options in the ecosystem because it's a standard and so everyone wants in on it. but nobody actually commits to making the interface good. So all the CCS charge-based apps are also terrible, but it's the same thing. Occasionally, the car manufacturer will try to make their app the hub for all of the charging networks. Like Ford. So the FordPass app will include the logins and accounts of a bunch of those, but even that is never flawless. It's just finicky.

49:51Yeah, no, I agree with you on the smart home stuff. It's not good. Matter is trying to fix this and it's a slow burn. I don't know if it ever will though, because it's just the connectivity aspect of it and it's not going to be able to change the control. With Matter, will I be able to set up a August smart lock without ever downloading the August app? Yes, yes. In Google Home, there's a connect to a Matter enabled device button and you scan a QR code on the product and you don't have to use the August app at all. Oh, that sounds great. You just do everything through Google Home. I'm officially a huge Matter fan.

50:25Whatever I gotta do to help this out, I would love to. I still wonder where, though, like... Because, like, I can't set a schedule for the smart plug that I have of, like, turn on 5 o 'clock, turn off 5 o 'clock. I can, for me, Ross. Through the Google Home app? Yeah. I think. Maybe not. Dude, I don't know. I still feel like I can't even set my temperature. You have to do it in the Me Ross app. Matter is slow growing and still not a ton of devices have it. I feel like the ultimate issue with it will be is that because of so many different companies are still making the things for Matter, like they're going to incentivize you to download the app.

51:02Yeah. I do not have scheduling ability. That's fun. Yeah. Yeah. Also, just the way that smart home systems work in general, like sometimes I can tell it to turn on all of my lights and it just doesn't work. and then I'll manually turn everything on and then five minutes later everything just like turns off because it's it's like what is there a queue in my internet system that is just like backed up for five minutes like I don't really know what's going on but I had also set up some routines through the Google app where it would do a couple things in succession yeah and then one by one they would just break so I'd say I'd have a thing where I say good morning and it's supposed to like turn the lights on open the shades tell me the weather and like look up the news and then one by one it I'd say good morning and I'd be like, sorry, I can't do that.

51:47But then do the other three things. And then it would say, sorry, I can't do that. Sorry, I can't do that. And then just do two of the things. It would just start breaking. Yeah. So that's about right. I do want to do like a state of matter episode because we had a matter episode a while ago and it's been quite a while to see if anything's actually better. Has it been? It's been like a year. Yeah. That's. Does Matter Baby work yet? Does what? Does Matter Baby work yet? Matter Baby? Yeah. What is that? What is what? Matter Baby? What? it didn't work i i thought i could get you what's the matter baby i thought i would try a dad joke it didn't work it's pretty good leave them to me yeah it would have worked if you did it Andrew what's yours i i'm realizing that like there are all these apps that i don't use very often but they all have very specific things that annoy me do you know what i'm gonna say on this one that's a good one the orbi app yeah all right wait what is that it's a router mesh network okay the internet speed test button doesn't test the speed of what you're downloading from the actual router it tests the speed of the internet connection directly plugged into the router so every time i test my speed i'm getting like 800 down because all it's testing is the speed that it's getting into the main router it's just your router going yep i'm still getting down but that's not what i was asking i'm like sitting on the opposite side of my house like wow youtube's being really slow is it a problem with youtube or am i getting a really poor connection over here do i have to change the mesh network and it's like no man you got 900 down it's like i definitely do not i also recently added a satellite and i didn't remember the user i had a different phone i didn't remember the username and password login have you ever forgotten your username and password to orbi i don't believe so these are my favorite nightmare because you have go into this web portal and then like find this info on the bottom of the router and that's the temporary password to log in to like reset the admin password to finally like log back into the app it is a disaster i i i wouldn't wish for getting that password on anyone but and then you actually add the satellite and it goes through this whole thing it says like this is like nine different steps of like what it's doing and you just can't do anything while it's working at the end you're like i guess it it to give it credit it tries to like auto manage things so i put this new satellite in and then a bunch of devices started connecting to it because they were close to it but it didn't really let me for those wondering a satellite is like a mesh uh network node that it extends the network it's i would argue that the majority of problems that come from a home wi-fi system is what it tries to automatically do things for you it's totally you getting no for sure i mean that's the whole reason that new wi-fi uh routers now have dedicated smart home networks on them because a lot of smart home stuff only works on 2.4 gigahertz but a lot of the intelligent switching will switch between 2.4 and 5 gigahertz depending on traffic load and it'll just break smart homes just because they just don't work on 5 gigahertz right up the majority of my chromecast issues have always been from like oh you're connecting to the satellite that is 150 feet further than the regular router that is right here on 2.5.

54:59It's crazy. I have one other small one, and I've tried this with Marquez already, but this is called Hatch. It is a white noise machine for Lane. It is arguably the most popular white noise machine for nurseries. I just want you to try and change the volume on it. That's the Hatch. So you can click that. I already got you into that. I want you to find the volume change. Does it look nice? It looks fine. It's like blue. It's like rainy. It's just not intuitive. It is not intuitive. Changing the volume should be like one of the easiest. It should be one of the most basic. Wayne is home with my in-laws right now, and I'm praying she's not sleeping, so if David accidentally rips this thing, it doesn't seem.

55:42I will also say the DevioLay app is similar. Is it? So like right now, David's on the screen. it says touch ring and there are like three main kind of things you can do which is essentially changing the different types of white noise that'll play so there's like sleep rain what's the other one ocean so those are all there you can select those and pick which noise you want all right and now he's clicking the little hamburger menu on the side trying the volume buttons that's not it nope each one, so that it's multiple barnacles, an Note in the game build. mainly three balls

56:42ove I literally trying to scroll It's not scrolling anywhere because it's only one page. It's only one page. I don't. Does it have a volume? It does. It has a volume. I found it. Yep. Oh, wow. It is like that's doesn't that doesn't look like a button. It's this like 10 pixel tall little thing, almost like in Spotify where you're with a song's playing on the bottom. Wow. Except the background of the button is the exact same color as the rest of the screen. Yeah. So it just doesn't look like a button at all. This is how you you have to click white noise and then you have the volume. but literally everywhere else just wow it is super unintuitive one one night i was home with lane and claire's like oh i always just turn the hatch down a little bit after like she goes to sleep and i probably took me 20 minutes to turn the volume down so yeah that's extremely frustrating that's a good one do we want to also talk about apps that are surprisingly good even if they're very simple i'll do that we can be positive yeah come on yeah why not okay so i have this app for my apartment building called butterfly mx it's for so okay yes it's just for your building it's just for my building so is it like a white label app that like the building signs up for or something uh i don't know if i'd consider it white label it's a it's a lock company that it's like a smart lock system for apartment buildings so they have a little touch screen outside and you have there's an app for it and you can use it and the thing i really like about it is the ux is like insanely simple but it is insanely consistent like it always works the only time i have trouble with it is when i'm literally standing right in front of my apartment and because my phone is like trying to connect to my wi-fi network it can't really do it so i just turn the wi-fi network off and it works you just literally slide to unlock it unlocks the front door of the apartment building it's super simple you can create there's it's so simple it literally looks like they coded this in a day like it's not very like super minimal but you can create virtual keys and you just put in like the name of the key how long you want it to last if it's recurring oh that just reminded me of a terrible one so you can create you can create like a virtual key that you then text to someone oh say it lasts for this amount of time and it gives them a QR code and also a pin.

58:39So when they go outside your building, they can either just scan the QR code or put in the pin. Always works. It has a video doorbell, so they can like ring me and it rings my phone and I can either answer with video or not. I just love that it's like, the app literally looks like it was coded in one day. The UI on that looks better than every single smart home product I own. Like sometimes you just need functionality and you don't need it to be pretty. And I'm fine with that for this app. and it is surprisingly very very good so shout out to butterfly mx nice yeah you have a bad one so when i upgraded to the new google home stuff i it was with the goal of getting rid of the nest app from my phone entirely because that thing sucks so i have the new i have the new thermostats i could finally get rid of nest but i realized i have one more thing which is the nest yale smart lock on my like back door which is supposed to have all those features like i can make a virtual key i can make a one-time password so if someone's visiting i can give them the passcode that only works one time and then someone else drives it won't work all these nice features it's supposed to have but now that i don't have the nest app it's literally not connected to my smart home ecosystem at all oh so it just has the one passcode it's always had and i can't remotely open or close it i can't do anything with any of those features it's just you can't open you can't unlock it from your Google Home app?

1:00:04Nope. Wait, really? Yeah, it's in the Nest app. Damn, unfortunate. Oh, I use a Eufy one. I can do that, but I do need the app, which kind of sucks. But does the Nest app still exist or is it just all in Google Home now? I mean, there are still things that exist in the Nest ecosystem that are like mostly functional in the Nest app and like kind of also work in Google Home, but are mostly in Nest. That was like what the old thermostats are doing and the old sensors and all that, which is why I got rid of them. but yeah i mean it still exists it's just not good i want to say my one request for butterfly mx is they have an apple watch and like a i'm pretty sure they have a it's not android where google where os app uh and that's great but i don't wear swap watches they don't have a widget and i would really like a widget on my phone so that i could just tap unlock and it would unlock my front door i have to open the app and slide the swipe to unlock so many specific apps that could if there was a widget for one button i would be the my like subaru app to just heat my car up yeah pull my car up like if i just had a widget which is one thing i'm just like yeah yeah i want to heat it up goaded though i'm jealous dude that subaru one is like great put your fingerprint in wait hit hit heat oh you're sure you want these settings yep okay all right sending to card it's it takes so long i will admit they have a like a long press actions and And then you can hit unlock front door.