We Skipped the Pixel Event

15:38Marques Brownlee:Okay. Well, we should talk about this event. Yeah. This is an evening event. Google did this thing where the embargoes for the hands-on for all of our videos was at 10 in the morning Eastern time. And then the event announcing everything was at 6 p.m. that day. And so there was this eight-hour gap where everyone already had seen all of the stuff and we're still waiting for the Google event. Yeah. I thought that was a choice.

16:02David Imel:that freaked me out because we're in spain with the time difference i was looking at the calendar and i saw you respond to someone on slack like they said when's the embargo you said uh 4 p.m because you're or no 10 a.m talking about eastern time and i was like that's not it the event is later that's yeah that's so far away and then had to confirm it but this is i mean we've had it used to be event ends embargo yeah then it started being like event starts embargo which is funny because you get all the themes like why is anyone gonna watch this because all the reviews are out yeah yeah this now not an hour not two hours yeah eight hours before yeah notably event end embargoes was always so nebulous because people technically if the public information is out there you're allowed to report on it and so i i remember like the one plus six or the one plus 6t and it was so awkward because they would announce the phones but the event wouldn't be over and a bunch of websites would put out their information like as soon as they said this is

17:04Marques Brownlee:the one plus 6t so i remember that flip being switched because i remember it would always be uh let's say the event was 10 a.m and it would end at 11 a.m and the embargo was 11 a.m and so they'd say here is your your hands-on you do the video your embargo was 11 a.m so the event would end at like 10 55 and everyone would be like can we and then at exactly 11 a.m everyone would publish as we were supposed to and then people would like start to go a little earlier a little bit earlier because the event had ended so then i remember getting an email for a random i don't remember which company but it would say something like the embargo is 11 a.m or whenever the feature is

17:38David Imel:announced on stage whichever comes first yeah the feature yeah or whenever the yeah they would like

17:45Marques Brownlee:have a whole list of the embargoes oh yeah and so then you would have to choose when to publish based on if your video was breaking the embargo for 11 a.m. or if the thing that is in your video was talked about on stage at 1048, then you could publish then. That happened for a few years. Then, yeah, we started getting like before the event. Yeah, I think at that point it just got more and more confusing because people started sort of intentionally breaking the embargo because it was already so nebulous and like confusing that people are like, nobody's going to like call me out for this because I have a way to justify it to them, you know?

18:18Yeah. And then it became like people were publishing minutes before the event ended because like, oh, my stream was faster or whatever. And it just I don't know. Personally, this eight hour gap. This is like one of the first times we've seen something like this. I like it because as a publisher, I'm totally cool. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Because like people just read all of our stuff, watch all of our stuff. Yeah. And I think the fact that like Samsung, you know, puts it out. The embargo is the exact same time as the event probably hurts their numbers and hurts our numbers. So neither of us are happy.

18:49I like the fact that people are going to come consume our content and then eight hours go by. People can kind of digest what we had said and then watch the way that Google presents it. And I think that's interesting.

19:01Marques Brownlee:It's interesting. I've always liked it the other way around. It felt more correct where first you would hear the marketing packaged version. And then afterwards you'd hear the breakdown of what all that really means or what people believe in what that means. That's fair. And so if I was like a casual or just a consumer of that information, I would see the marketing thing and then I decide in the moment, do I want to look at the marketing? Yeah. Or do I just wait until I trust these people and hear what they have to say? I think that's the way I always picture it. Yeah, that's a good point. Now, I mean, that's the way it still happens that like Apple doesn't pre-brief.

19:33Marques Brownlee:That's kind of the way it still goes there. Like you first see the event and then later throughout the day you see the reactions of the people. But yeah, for like the Samsung thing, what I've noticed is we'll publish our video at event start. Yeah. And then you'll watch the event and 200 to 500 ,000 people will watch it live. And then when it ends, I will see traffic to our video go up. Like the minute the Samsung event ends and people start leaving and going back to YouTube homepage, they'll see our videos and then you'll see the traffic go up. So there's a group of people who are not too casual to be watching the Samsung event live.

20:07Marques Brownlee:Yeah. But they're not too into it to be watching our video first. Interesting. Yeah. I wonder if a lot of those people are the people who are used to the old embargo of like, we're still yearning for the days where an event surprises us.

20:21David Imel:And I wonder if some of those people are still the ones like, in my day, we watched the event. Then we watched the reviews. This was what a release day was to me. I need to see the event. If there's anything that's going to surprise me, now all you get is some weird Spider-Man hanging up in the corner of a stage. Yeah. Or a celebrity. But like, yeah, I think David's totally right on this actually does feel in the new age probably the best because it doesn't affect views on either person. The reason it sucks for Google on this one, and we'll get to why, is you say like we're going to watch all the reviews and digest.

20:58David Imel:Well, that means now the live stream for Google is a bunch of people with pitchforks and torches outside of the Google event because they're not happy with this release, banging on it, just ready to destroy the chat on YouTube. I was thinking about that because like the Apple events, for example, people don't know anything. And so we as like reviewers and stuff, we see stuff and then we instantly have to touch it. And then we have to make editorial decisions in the moment about what we're going to talk about and like how we're going to feel about it. but we didn't have any time to die to look at them digest the information spend time with the devices and so it's more of like a raw reaction and so that the hype around the product is actually lower because we have more time to think more critically and think about oh is this actually better blah blah blah yeah instead of just touching touching touching i don't know if i can't like give you an opinion on this yet but here it is you know yeah i i've always found

21:54Marques Brownlee:companies like Apple are obsessed with controlling the narrative around their products. So if you think of it as like the funnel of like the widest group, when they present and they show their event, that is the largest swath of people to be getting the message. So they control that one. And then afterwards, there is a smaller group who will hear a different version of the message from people like us. With this, it was like upside down. It started with all of us who had time to figure this out, essentially controlling the narrative in a way that seems like Apple would never want. Yeah. And then eight hours later, the nicely packaged marketing narrative where everyone goes, oh, but that's just the marketing thing.

22:31Marques Brownlee:Yeah. You know? It is weird. And it's the reverse Uno card of what Apple would do. I was going to say pineapple upside down cake, but it's too early for that.

22:41David Imel:Well, the event was... I was going to say, do you think part of it also, we'll talk about the celebrity who was there, Trevor Noah, this year, But with Jimmy Fallon, was that last year? Last year. Last year. Tensor. Tensor, yeah. It became like such a meme because it was pretty awkward throughout the whole thing. But clearly Google's trying to bring celebrities in to try and get a little more average person watching. Yeah. My thought was the people who are going to meme up the celebrity are probably the people watching our videos. throw that eight hours ahead and maybe a lot of that audience has gotten their share of what's going on and doesn't really care about celebrity, doesn't watch, less of a chance that Twitter's filled with Jimmy Fallon yelling about random...

23:23David Imel:The people that are trying to reach don't watch our videos anyway, probably. Exactly. I think the audience is so different. Now the event doesn't have to be a little clouded by the audience that's probably going to dunk on it. Yeah. Wait, wait. I'm sorry. Can you describe this hypothetical person you're talking about that doesn't care enough about the pixel to watch a marquez brownlee but does care enough to like sit down at 6 p.m and watch a full google event ellis at this point i felt like i'm taking crazy pills for so long thinking that anyone other than our videos watches these events but every year people swear to me that they do so i'm just accepting that maybe that person does exist but all right man i also am are they in the room right now yeah i like like Google almost feels like they're treating it.

24:07David Imel:I mean, it is Google, so they could just be pushing it to people's homepages of YouTube. So like that actually for Google, it might make. They're also probably doing it for social. The clip economy. Yeah, we need to think about the clip economy. We think our video is big.

24:21Marques Brownlee:It was interesting. Like the our video had almost a million and a half views by the time the event started. So we're like, oh, great. And then the event goes on and has like 50 ,000 live viewers. So I'm like, OK, this is a smaller part of the funnel. But then Google is going to put this everywhere. I'm sure we'll check back in and it'll have 10 million views because they paid for ads for it and it's everywhere. Or it was like live streaming on the homepage as you log on. So that's their version of the wide version of the funnel and controlling the narrative blah blah blah. They're just going to send it there.

24:50They're also going to just be clipping this like crazy. They're going to be putting it in social feeds. They're going to be putting it on TikTok. They're going to be doing everything with it.

24:57Marques Brownlee:I will say, I think they picked the right person this time. For sure. 100%. So last time it was Jimmy Fallon. We've all talked about that episode. what else is there to be said you know it's a guy who hosts the show and is well known blah blah great trevor no has also hosted a show but he's also notably like online yeah and watches tech videos yeah you could tell he was kind of into it and also was much more charismatic and and sort of ad-libbed a little bit which was funny and threw some googlers off but it was also really funny It was really funny. Really good. So that was our host for the event.

25:31Marques Brownlee:And they, of course, go through all the different Googlers who contributed to different parts of the stuff that we heard about. And it was pretty informative. It was also still marketing speak, but we got to get some questions answered on the spot, which is kind of cool. We got three phones. Four. I guess four. Pixel 11, 11 Pro, 11 Pro Max, and 11 Pro Fold. We also got 11 Pro XL. And 11 Pro XL. Thank you. They're all the same. Sorry. and then we got the watch 5 we got pixel google tags yeah google tag not google tag google tag it's google tag wait it's pixel tag sorry pixel tag pixel tag it's a pixel you're right it's pixel tag okay guys we're running on like four hours it is yeah it's yeah we can talk about all that stuff we should probably just start with the phone should we take a break and then come back

26:16David Imel:let's just do the one so we can talk about it before the first ad break okay let's just talk

26:20Marques Brownlee:what the big feature this is the feature that to me exemplifies google in 2026 this is only in the pros right this is just in the pros but it's called highlight and what it is is it's a multicolor or rgb whatever led on the back of the phone that is just well it's two things it's the flash and it's also multicolor to be a notification light sort of for exactly two things yeah one for while you are actively speaking to Gemini. While your phone is faced down. While your phone is faced down. Only because people do that.

26:56David Imel:Oh, like on a surface. So even if you're holding it. Not while you're holding it. And you might be facing the back. Only while it's faced down. It's got to be faced down on the table. I just want to, we're going to talk about it. Every new thing I learn about this feature makes me more mad. There hasn't been a part of this feature that I've been like, cool.

27:14Marques Brownlee:Yeah. Okay, so it's while you're talking to Gemini, it'll light up and it'll glow in this little multicolor orb. Or two, while you're receiving a phone call from a contact that you've assigned a color to, specifically. Favorites, yeah. So you go into the contacts, you have a favorite, you assign them a color, there's five colors. That? Five colors. I just learned that this morning. Five colors? Five colors. Can you name the five colors for me? I think it's like, what was funny is they actually said at the event, there's no red. There is yellow, blue, purple, white, and like some other greenish.

27:51Marques Brownlee:Five colors and white is one of them. Yeah. It's white when it's turned off. So it must not be RGB then because it can't do red. I put RGB in here just assuming. If it's white, it's RGB. So how does it not have the ability to do? It probably has the ability that you didn't put it in. Why not? Why not give it? Okay. Yeah, this is, this is, you get, you know, there's no logical, it can do white, which is all the colors. It can do orange. Okay. Do all of the, no, they just don't let it. They just don't let it. They just don't let it. Why? Okay. Okay. Yeah. So yeah, notably no text messages, no custom app assignments.

28:31Marques Brownlee:Like when you hear that this new phone in 2026 has a custom RGB notification light, I wouldn't blame you if your first thought was, oh great. When I get a spam call, it'll go red. when i get an email it'll go green when i get a zelle it'll go blue when i get a venmo it'll go purple and they have you have all these ideas about things you'll do with different apps

28:52David Imel:none of those things are possible as of right now no yeah just we don't have the technology yeah 20 the 2017 note 8 it was like yellow snapchat blue twitter green messages a minimal phone does no way really does it a little phone too is a notification oh yeah we were talking about that It's the thing I've wanted back most and partially because it's so simple. I'm surprised. So when I saw this, I was like, yo, it's not the glowing bar,

29:20Marques Brownlee:but like this is going to slap. This is such an opportunity for such a win. I remember the first like the Nexus. What was the Nexus one? Had a trackball light. Yeah, I missed those. Dude, on my Nexus 6 with Cyanogen mod, you could design this RGB LED that wasn't even officially part of the phone. Yeah. Which is something they put in the phone that wasn't used at all. I forgot about that. like in the earpiece right yeah in the earpiece and you could just use it for whatever you wanted in any color any notification and we don't have the technology 15 years later we forgot how we forgot how to do it we don't have the machining anymore yeah it's crazy i to me this this exemplifies google right now because if they were uh cohesive and all talking to each other and we're thinking this through this all seems very obvious to me that they would have done all this they It would have given us the ability to set it to certain apps and messages and lots of other stuff.

30:11Marques Brownlee:Yeah. The fact that you can't. Trevor actually asked during the event if they would let you do other stuff like messages. And I think all they did was confirm that they're working on it being for messages as well. For messages. Why do you have to work on it? It seems pretty straightforward. I also thought that in our vibe code economy, you could just tell Gemini to make this work and it would happen. Yeah. It is funny. But apparently not.

30:34David Imel:Especially because if you're setting it for the contact, then you have the color. All it needs to do is be that color for more or less time. One blink or multiple blinks, and now it is message versus. I feel like I can see their vision, right? Because their messaging around this whole line of pixels has been let Google handle the complicated parts of your life, get back to your normal life. A lot of the things in this event have been like, stop staring at your phone, use Gemini for things, and then let AI do things for you. So I get the vision of leave your phone face down on the table except for when you really need it.

31:11Except for the base phone. Except for what? The base. Except for the base phone, unless you're poor.

31:20But really, it's just not built out at all. It's just like they need to actually deliver.

31:25David Imel:It reminds me so much of the Fitbit Air software UI where it's completely broken. It's so bad that you don't even need a future promise of an update because we all have to assume it's going to get fixed. Like you almost have to assume it's broken. Yeah. This is just so not fleshed out. The current and especially early Fitbit Air actual exercise UI when you were doing an exercise looked like my computer science 101 first Hello World project where you just like put text on the screen on a big white box. That's all it was. And all of it was misaligned and there was like multiple different dark backgrounds.

32:08Marques Brownlee:Yeah, yeah. It was bad. Okay, two updates on Highlight. There's updates. I'm on their website right now. I'm prepared to get more, Matt. Updates, two really... Okay. One is it's not on the Pro Fold either. What? It's just on the Pro and Pro Excel. But they told us at the event.

32:22David Imel:I read a different article this morning that said it was on Pro Fold. Well, that's because they told me that at the event.

32:27Marques Brownlee:Same. they told me it was on all the phones i'm reading the website it says on pixel 11 pro and 11 pro xl so that's that's my update two is the reason it's able to do white but not red is because it's not really rgb it's using the flash which is still in there for white oh oh it's doing a weird color wheel for the rest of the colors yeah it doesn't include red it's a flash in the middle for white Simon Says. Blue, cyan, and orange to combine to make go of Gemini colors. Red. So no red. That has to be more

33:02David Imel:expensive than an LED. Yeah. Can you just put an RGB LED in there? Yeah. One of the comments corrects me if I'm wrong, but there's really only two ways to get a white LED. You can do three diodes, a red, a green, and a blue, and fire them all at the same time, and then you get white because they combine. Or you can do a blue LED that fires at a coating that has like a phosphorus that emits white, like when the photons get activated.

33:27Marques Brownlee:They're not clear about if this is a filter. I mean, I'm just going by the animation. I can't go. No, no, no, totally. But like there's a 50 % chance that the flash underneath there is an RGB. If they just fire the red LED already. Yeah. I don't quite. I hope someone in the comments comments me because I'm sure I'm missing something, but this still feels like they just went way around the block. I think there's no one clever enough at Google to think of a way to make this turn. Yeah. I think that they're probably thinking about the highlight thing as like a screen because it animates for Gemini.

33:59It kind of like waves around and moves and it's supposed to be sort of like a little bit.

34:03David Imel:So you're saying this is all they wanted to actually do. Was Gemini. Was Gemini. Was Gemini thing, but they threw us a bone and gave us the most half-baked. I think they knew that if it was only Gemini, people would be like very angry about that. Well, that backfired because I'm more angry now. Yeah. Here's a question, though. When you get calls from anyone who is not part of your favorites, does the dot do nothing? I don't think it does anything. It doesn't do anything. You have to assign, and it has to be the favorites.

34:30Marques Brownlee:Can I assign a color to everyone else? You can go through your contacts one by one and give everyone a color.

34:35David Imel:Oh, my God. Wait, you can give multiple people the same color? It can't just be phone call yellow and then mom blue.

34:41Marques Brownlee:No, it is in the contacts app specifically. So it's not the phone app or the messages app. You go into contacts, you select that contact and you give that contact one of the colors. And then when they call you and only call you, you will see that color. Yeah. Carl Pei is laughing so hard. He's like, I nailed this. Let's try one shot. I could tell that Google felt very mixed about this feature in general with like how much they wanted to promote it. Because at our hands-on event, they had constructed a giant pixel camera bar on the wall where you could hit a big red button. It would glow. Notably a red button.

35:16David Imel:Red button. And it would make the giant pixel highlight kind of glow and do the Gemini thing. So they had a big stand that was like, look how cool this is. But then they didn't talk about it at the hands-on event at all. Yeah. And so. It was deep into the event itself. Yeah. And it was very short. Yeah. As well. So I don't know. It seems like the hardware team like went kind of hard. And then the software team was like, oh, I forgot about this. We were supposed to do that. Yeah, they didn't use Google Tasks to actually realize that they're supposed to map it to anything. Anyway, we got a lot more features to talk about and we don't have very long in this hotel.

35:57So we should probably take a break. Let's take a quick break. Do we also have? Whoa. We sure do. Bienvenidos a preguntas de waveform. Pregunta numero uno. Estabas atento? Were you paying attention? Is this to the event last night? By the way, we watched this event at midnight. That's when it started for us. We got back at 11.47.

36:24David Imel:Most of the event at 2x speed while cleaning my room this morning. Then you're going to crush this. I'm so sorry. My head hurts. Trevor Noah was surprised by Liverpool legend Stephen Gerrard. But before he came out, Trevor wondered if it was actually him or Gemini speaking in what regional British accent? I'm going to write. I don't have my whiteboard. so our regional british accent yes this one is the liverpool really but the uk is so small man no it's so it's so complicated the uk is so complicated what i'm essentially asking is what is the liverpool accent called yeah i got it uh this is one of those things where i know one name of an accent and is it the opportunity of how many people are going to get mad when it's wrong it's probably to go i'd rather just not get the pose i'm kidding

37:14Marques Brownlee:well we'll think about it uh we will probably have to guess some accents answers at the end like usual we'll be right back

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40:56Marques Brownlee:All right, welcome back. Quick update. We continued reading more Google websites about Highlight. And it does seem like they have also said that the 11 Pro Fold has Highlight. So I'm throwing it back on the table. Base phone doesn't have it. Not enough room, question mark? I don't know. Pro Fold does have it. Pro and Pro XL also have it. Yes. Yeah. I guess we'll find out in the full review. Yeah, I guess we will. Anyway, let's talk about these phones. There's a bunch of new phones. There's a bunch of storylines going around about these phones. I think the main storyline is one of the silly ones, which is, oh, this isn't a big upgrade from the Pixel 10.

41:33Marques Brownlee:Yeah, true. Phones are incremental nowadays. I agree. But the Pixel 11 has Tensor 6. It has a brighter display. It has slightly faster wireless charging. And it's$100 more because memory is expensive. And that's basically it. It's a thinner camera bar. A new thinner camera bar and a new primary camera sensor. Does it charge quicker? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, charges wired and wireless quicker. It's funny. There was one feature I saw that I didn't even get briefed about, but somebody tweeted a screenshot, maybe I missed it during the event, about an extreme charging mode. I was trying to read about it really quick.

42:09Marques Brownlee:Do you know what it is?

42:10David Imel:It seems like it's a software thing that can just prioritize charging over, or like pause tasks that are going on on the phone to prioritize charging.

42:19Marques Brownlee:It was just funny to me because it's probably like 30 watts, which is like not extreme at all. but they're calling it the extreme charging mode which is their fastest possible charging which is you know it's better than not having a faster charging well it said it can charge the pro xl to like 75 30 minutes and the pro and the regular 11 to uh 55 30 minutes if you use the extreme charging i'm coming from the one plus 15 where i would yeah charger and it would go to 100 yeah seconds so yeah yeah it's i you know welcome small incremental increases you know tensor 6 we don't know that much about but we'll benchmark it we'll see if it's dramatically better at anything i'm sure it'll be slightly faster with cpu better with ai performance yeah more memory bandwidth the classic stuff we look to for google tensor not necessarily using gpu or performance otherwise um yeah i have i have a hot take about tensor can i can i talk about hot take hot yeah please okay i think that people think about like socs and cpus differently than google thinks about SOCs and CPUs.

43:20I agree. And I think that people always look at Tensor and they compare it to like a Snapdragon chip and you can't compare the chips very much. I know. I mean, you can in certain ways. That's what I'd say if I was losing. You can in certain ways because like obviously the gaming performance, the FPS, whatever, that's all whatever. But Google has been hyper optimizing for TPUs for like a while, like ever since Tensor won. That's part of the reason they made Tensor in the first place was because they were like, oh, we need to do AI performance, AI performance. Notably in Tensor 6, it's 2X the memory bandwidth for Gemini.

43:55So they're just like hyper fixated on this world where your phone is like automating things for you, automating tasks, doing things, you know, natural language processing, that kind of stuff. Ramblers, local model. Yeah, Gemini Nano, that kind of stuff. And I know that Qualcomm also optimizes for this stuff, but it's not the 100 % flag post thing that Google is thinking about for. So when we look at Tensor 6, it's like 2x the memory bandwidth for LLMs and stuff like that. You know, like 2x the TPUs. Big deal for them. There's a new ISP in there that allows them to do new image signal processing stuff that enables the things like the 30x zoom in the regular Pixel 11 and the 120x zoom in the 11 Pros.

44:41Pro zoom. So, I don't know. I think Google just thinks about when we make these things new every year, how can it enable more AI stuff? Whereas every other company is just faster.

44:51Marques Brownlee:I agree. More efficient. I wonder if that approach is yielding better AI performance in a noticeable way. The same way Qualcomm's approach is yielding faster graphics than Tensor. noticeable is a great way to put it because i think that google is sort of optimizing for the future and thinking about we don't want to hit a cap we don't want your phone that is having seven years of updates to one day not be able to meet the ai standards that we're shipping in software yeah and qualcomm's like i don't want you to ever drop a frame yeah mobile yeah so like genshin

45:32David Imel:impact at 400 fps yeah my counter to that would be that qualcomm is doing what people want though right now. I feel like everyone wants AI features. I'm not saying that the Google approach is correct, but I think that what Google wants out of its devices for the future, that's what they're optimizing for. I also think you're right in the sense that people who watch our stuff want. I think 95 % of people buying a phone couldn't tell the difference between any of these processors. And it will just run exactly how they think. 95 % of people buying the Pixel phone are not even going to use most of the AI features.

46:09Marques Brownlee:A couple years ago, I think you could tell the difference between a Tensor chip and a Snapdragon chip in performance. Yeah. I bet most people could. You're right. It's most of us. It's us eyeballing it. But the fact that I could eyeball it means there's some amount of people you could tell. And then you'd play a game and you'd be like, oh, it's heating up a lot more. It's actually a way worse performance. Yeah. So that's, it was interesting. Now I just wonder how noticeable, like, are we going to hit a cap with Qualcomm chips where they're like, oh my God. Yeah. Look how far AI came. focusing on frame rates like we'll see yeah but i did get an email last night from um media tech's pr agency hilarious that said by the way media tech cannot confirm this but here's a bunch of articles that infer that media tech is now the modem in tensor um that's which was really weird it was like media tech is saying that they can't say but that they are well i would like to say that I can't announce this, but I personally handcrafted every modem.

47:06I'm inferring this, of course. So there's... The efficiency thing is interesting because, you know, people always shat on Tensor for having terrible modem efficiency performance because the Samsung modem in Tensor was terrible. And so now we have a MediaTek one. Allegedly.

47:24Marques Brownlee:Potentially. MediaTek is telling me that they can't tell me that they're the ones making it.

47:29David Imel:It's a guy with a media... Hello, I'm MediaTek. Handing you an anonymous letter. Yeah, literally. Wink, wink. Super weird. It's like when there's a rumor about you, but it's a good rumor. Yeah. Telling all your friends. Anyway, they do say that the Tensor G6 chip is quite a bit more efficient, and maybe that's why. But yeah, maybe people won't be as upset anymore. I don't know. I do think certain regions of the world, like China, where everyone plays a lot more mobile games, it'll probably matter more. But they should be buying the phones that can charge at 400 watts. Yeah.

48:01Marques Brownlee:There will be phones for them. This is not phones for them. Yeah, maybe that's why the batteries didn't get bigger on any of these phones. Yeah, they got actually smaller on the Pros by a little bit. Yeah, bigger cameras, smaller batteries. But anyway, on the base Pixel, new colors are honestly the most noticeable thing about them to most people. The fuchsia color is so unbelievably saturated. All of my footage of it, it looks like I'm peaking their red channels. It's so bright.

48:23David Imel:It reminds me of Rabbit R1 where you're like, impossible to color. There's something wrong with this.

48:29Marques Brownlee:Yeah, and it looks like that in real life. it's really i think it's fuchsia as hell it's great um so we'll test the cameras we'll see if they're actually better at least the primary camera is different i didn't get to see it but i

48:39David Imel:think the thinner camera bar looks sweet it is a thinner camera bar agreed yeah i have a hot take yeah we were fighting about we were fighting about this so now google offers three levels of camera bars and depending on how much money you're willing to spend you get a thicker camera bar which is interesting that's so backwards but apple apple kind of did this with the the iphone yeah triple camera is the big boy yeah the bigger the the bump the bigger the bump the more i think

49:05Marques Brownlee:that's money most people explain yeah difference between the pros and non-pro pretty much oh this

49:10David Imel:is the one with three cameras yeah yeah i get that i just feel like if i'm paying more money it should feel like the more premium device which is the smaller i don't i kind of disagree with that because the pixel the pixel 9a is flush and to me that feels like the cheapest phone well That's because the phone itself is super cheap. If you put that on a metal glass, beautiful hardware. I don't really think so. Because then it's just a rectangle.

49:34Marques Brownlee:Yeah, I think people associate the bigger camera bump with the more capable camera.

49:38David Imel:Here's the other thing. The pros have the shiny rails and there's that rail around the camera bump as well. So you get that premium shiny around the camera bump. And it looks more premium. No, no, I get visually why that is the case. and it being more cameras and everything. I agree with you. I feel like if I'm picking something up and I'm holding it, like the iPhone Air. When you pick up an iPhone Air, it's so thin. It's like, wow. This is a premium device. It also has titanium. It's super, super thin. It's more like the thinness. That also has a big camera bar, by the way. It's an everything bar.

50:16The whole phone. Everything. It has a phone bar.

50:19David Imel:The whole phone is in the camera. It's more so like the bump is not like it. I never got over it. Like, I know we've had it for so long, but I'm still like, this is annoying. You're going to have to get over it. I know. There's something there.

50:31Marques Brownlee:I see both sides of this where I can understand smaller camera bar means more engineering to shrink this thing. Yeah. Therefore better. But then I also see like bigger camera bar means better camera. Yeah. Better camera. So, yeah, I see. I associate just purely flush phones that are just rectangles with being cheap phones. with the worst cameras.

50:52David Imel:But it's not a rectangle. It's like a squircle thing. Like it's... I will say I like this thought of they're physically building the price ladder of flush step-up Pixel 11 Pro. Then I so badly want XL to be a little bigger and then fold to just be like a quarter inch off the back of the camera. Oh, yeah. That'd be incredible. New inch I'll just drop. Yeah. I mean, there is a reason that they associate it with a better camera is because if you have a bigger sensor, you have to have more Z depth. So they have to make it bigger. But yeah, it is funny. It is funny. 40 % thinner though on the regular 11.

51:32When you hold it, feel it, it's interesting. It's kind of, it's that in between. The bar. The camera bar. The camera bar. The bar.

51:39Marques Brownlee:The camera bar. Just the camera bar. Just the camera bar. So the protrusion itself. That's a protrusion number.

51:43David Imel:The premium protrusion.

51:44Marques Brownlee:Yeah, the premium protrusion.

51:45David Imel:You're paying for less Z depth. The base did the thing I asked them. Last year, I was like, Google, you messed up. All you have to do 256 base and praise Google. They did it for 100 extra dollars. They didn't do it at all. They didn't really do it. Worst barrier of entry.

52:02Marques Brownlee:Yeah. Come on. So to be clear, last year, the 10 started at 128 gigs, which felt a little bit late to do that. And it was$799. This year, the phone starts at 256 gigs. So we started to clap. And then they said, by the way, it also starts now at the price of last year's 256. $900. And then we stopped clapping. So yeah, memory's expensive. This is probably going to be a trend. This is not the only phone that's going to happen to, but that was one of the headlines about this phone. Yeah. I'm very interested. Sorry. No, it's fine. This is happening to every phone in the market. Like we've seen this across the board.

52:38David Imel:And that is what I wanted to say is the reason last year 128 base at$799 felt so bad is because the iPhone base was 256 at$799. Everyone. And when Apple is the better deal than you, rough. So Google almost needs the base new iPhone to be a$100 increase and same base. What is crazy to me, and I know that they have to make their margins and whatever, but a lot of these companies, especially Google and Apple, some of the richest companies in the world, if they really want to be competitive, especially Google, if they want to grow market share, it's a pretty big win for them. and I know that they might have to sell these at a slight loss or maybe they're not even selling them at a loss but they're just making a little less money.

53:24And I know that's not great but if they can sell way more phones because the PR of the phone being like, oh, it's super affordable,

53:31Marques Brownlee:it might be better for them in the long run. I think everyone watching this intuitively agrees but when you said make a little less money, all the shareholders went, huh, what? And then it didn't. But maybe they'll make more money because more people will buy the phones. Yeah, short-term gains would be nice. in the things we care about, but they got to make the number go up every time they're recording. It's just like the Nexus 7 tablet. They literally lost$50 on every single tablet they sold so that they could get Google accounts.

54:01David Imel:Even a couple years ago, the base pixels were great deals. They were incredible deals compared when the Pro started being $200 or$300 more. I'm interested if now the market's going to have to catch up, but we did start seeing a i mean a pixel market share increase is like a couple percent but that's like doubling percentage wise in u.s so like we did see it go up a little bit and now i wonder if being the same price as everything else we're gonna now in two to three years see it start to not be as good we'll see it's true we'll see what the rest of the year happens to do with phones but

54:37Marques Brownlee:yeah i never thought i would see a 900 starting pixel yeah it's it's a lot that is pretty high That's a lot. So we got the pros as well. Yes. Slightly less muted or less exciting colors. I will mention, we mentioned the rails of the phone are glossy, except for the new matte black one. So they are listening. Somebody somewhere at Google did a little extra work. This is definitely the MQHD edition. The matte black phone has matte black rails. 100%. We've complained about this every year. We've complained about this for years. Yeah.

55:08David Imel:They were so hoping the title of the hands-on impression was going to be like.

55:12Marques Brownlee:they finally map black everything abn yeah so um so the pro xl the pro and the pro xl came out same size as 6.3 6.8 again brighter displays i think we might as to say any phone yeah 3600 nits is the highest we've seen for peak brightness yeah legitimately extremely bright in person and on camera i was turning them up and actually i was mostly turning them down yeah footage because they were really bright and what's crazy is like you're not even hitting peak brightness when you turn the brightness all the way up it only does peak brightness when the sun is shining on it and it knows it needs to be brighter what if there's any clips then it'll get darker indoors it was probably not hitting the 36 no probably 24 or something but yeah awesomely bright displays which is great same resolutions i think we have a new primary camera and a new telephoto i believe yeah yeah so the primary camera in the pros is the same size as last year they told me that the main reason they swapped it out is because it uses less power than the one last year and if it uses less power they can fit more they said now we can fit more ai features in it well sort of yeah the the camera head i talked to him about the camera stuff and he said some of my favorite pixel computational photography features ever you can fit in 100 milliwatts which is the amount of power that they saved on the primary camera i see i see i see so i think that's the way that they think about these things yes but the telephoto camera is uh bigger and gets 30 percent more light intake that's nice so that's nice good so we'll be testing the zoom on these news uh on these new cameras uh tensor g6 as well less ram on the base on the base pixel 11 pro last year was 16 gigs of ram this year it's down to 12 yeah but if you upgrade from 256 to 512 or a terabyte of storage you're back up to 16 gigs of ram again yeah so that's notably less ram on the base pro which by the way is more expensive 100 bucks more expensive again so they start at $1 ,100 and the Pro XL starts at$1 ,300.

57:11Marques Brownlee:So crazy. What's the jump from

57:13David Imel:$256 to$512? In price? It's$200. It's$200? Yeah. I was going to say that'd be really like if it was only$100 you would get the four extra gigs of RAM and the double storage but it's wild. Wait, I might be wrong. But like dropping, this is the most RAM again thing I've ever seen, which is increased price by$100. Give less RAM than last year. While you guys look this up, I just want to put a little bit of context on something David said earlier. Google does not report what percentage of their revenue actually comes from Pixel specifically, but they do report a category of their revenue called subscriptions, platforms, and devices.

57:57Yeah, they loop it all in. Yeah. And the numbers I'm seeing for the past few quarters seem to hover between 9 and 15 percent of all revenue the subscriptions is a big bucket i i i i don't know what platforms means platforms and devices it's like android it's like yeah so yeah i guess pixel is somewhere between zero and nine percent yeah this is what

58:24Marques Brownlee:companies do when it's either something they want to hide or it's too small to matter or both so it sounds like they can shave a little bit of a price yeah like sometimes we'll want to know how much money did apple make off of uh this random small thing like they're how much how many keyboards did they sell and you can never find this information because it's always just going to be looped in with max or whatever it's the best-selling keyboard of all time markets they'll they'll say that on stage and they'll put a little asterisk and the fine print is like trust us we know yeah all right well i guess we'll just have to believe that um yeah so that's you know that's the story with the pros i'm still gonna be trying it out still testing it still doing the thing where i believe this is gonna be the phone that i use but there's so much software you don't look happy about it it's a map lag pixel we do have to talk about all the software stuff though yeah there's plenty of software but real quick the new fold just to get that out okay new specs so there's a couple interesting new things with the fold uh it is a tiny bit thinner i think it's one a millimeter thinner did you see why uh because of the new hinge because one side is thinner than

59:26David Imel:the other side oh that's also true oh yeah yeah i saw that on video it says almost a millimeter thinner and they said nearly yeah a millimeter nearly one millimeter safe big deal um it still

59:39Marques Brownlee:will have i think the same-ish size battery but uh some new camera uh and then the back material is now this like glass fiber composite, which they made a strangely big deal about to me. They were telling me, oh yeah, it's unbreakable. You can't break it. It's impossible. This is never gonna shatter. I was like, what are you, why are you telling, this is a very confident way of telling me this is material. Zach would like the word. Yeah, we're gonna find out. So we'll see. I like that it's still IP68. Like they have gone hard with the durability factor. Like Samsung's are still IP40 something, I think, IP48.

1:00:15Marques Brownlee:you can get them wet but you can't they're not ip68 okay yeah so so full ip68 still and harder to crack and victus on the front it's a it's a supposedly very durable fold yeah i'm so sorry is uh is glass fiber composite different than just like fiberglass uh i guess they're not going to tell us i i mean if you ask because this is i don't know if it's gorilla glass or not this is like gorilla glass is already yeah it's composite so that's what just grill the back material is some other I put a milk cream composite in my coffee every morning you don't hear me f***ing brag all composite means is it's mixed with something yeah well what did it you guys got to feel it did it feel like glass

1:00:53David Imel:or did it feel different I wonder if that's it fiberglass doesn't feel like glass I wonder if it was I'm attempting to replicate. Ceramic in there? Who knows? They said the durability was like 3X that. That was the front screen? The front screen. No, the front screen is 2X scratch resistant. But I also saw someone say the front display was claimed to be 3X more durable. On the back, they just said nearly impossible to crack. Something about it would have to like fold around the phone in order for it to actually break. That's, yeah.

1:01:22Marques Brownlee:I'm impressed by that claim. I need to feel the phone again and figure out. You have to be super confident to make that claim or just lying. Yeah. They also made the ultra thin glass thicker, which is really funny. They told me in the briefing, we made the ultra thin glass thicker to make it more durable. You know what's funny? This is, I think we, would you all agree this is the most durable fold? I don't know. I mean, that's what they say. Allegedly it is. because the only phone that's ever exploded in Zach's hands during a Jerry Everything test is a Pixel Pro Fold

1:01:58David Imel:I don't think it has anything I think everyone can understand what Zach did was was like not something that's going to happen in extreme like it had nothing to do because it was a Pixel

1:02:08Marques Brownlee:the video did blow up and sometimes that affects the way they market the next year's phone and so maybe they'd change the back material so that the glass wouldn't like shatter maybe it was two years ago I'm going to need to wait for the Zach video to know if this is the most

1:02:21David Imel:durable fold ever yeah yeah well i could do it for you too in new jersey i don't think google's as worried about zach's incident as like samsung's worried about like note 7 explosions yeah clearly samsung's fault whereas zach's was like such a specific thing that happened that will never happen to it yeah it was a lot of chance this was last year's 10 pro it was last year some

1:02:43Marques Brownlee:samsung executives sitting there just like god they're still talking about this yeah yeah but yeah in general$18.99 for that one expensive yeah obviously still uh but all your same stuff 16 gigs of ram tensor g6 slightly larger interior display slightly thinner bezels slightly brighter screens all the pixel stuff yeah it's all still here so looking forward to testing two new major look animations yay oh really yeah nice if you don't remember made you look is uh on the on the screen when you have the phone open the front screen will have like little animation guys that are like so if you have kids they'll like stare at it and smile

1:03:23David Imel:i did watch it work for really i saw in real life i went to the aquarium with my friend and his daughter and um we sat her and lane on this like little turtle statue and getting both to look at the same time and he just walks up and goes and then he told me that he hates the camera so much most of the time he does it he uses that why his wife takes the picture with her iphone

1:03:49Marques Brownlee:google was about to clip this out of the podcast like yes yeah oh no but i cut that did work it did work very well but trevor said that the pixel is the best low-light photography in the industry

1:04:01David Imel:That's rough.

1:04:02Marques Brownlee:Yeah. I'm sure those animations will never come to older Pixel Folds. Yeah. They forgot how.

1:04:09David Imel:You need the RAM.

1:04:10Marques Brownlee:Yeah, you need the Tensor for sure. Yeah. All right. Well, I want to talk about all the camera stuff and the software, but I think we need to take one more break. We also got to talk about the Pixel Watch and the Pixel Tag, which is the airdrop competitor. I can do that pretty quick. You want to talk about the Pixel Tag now? Should we do it real quick? Let's do it. Okay. You guys have heard of AirTags, right? you know the like the what's the little what are they based on air tags oh find my circles no but they're based on tiles yeah so you've heard of tiles you've heard of air tags well now google makes one same price same concept same thing it's a little longer though you can find it with gemini yeah it has a google g on it yeah it's uh very small thick yeah what does it's wider gemini mean it just meaning you can be like hey gemini find my luggage tag and then if you named it luggage tag it'll be like it's in nova scotia somebody stole it oh that's gonna be so because people use these for like kids at amusement parks so it's gonna be so funny like gemini where's lane you know you know the smudge tool in photoshop where you can it's like the finger thing and you you smoosh the thing to the it's like if you took an air tag and used that tool on it you smooshed it in a direction does it yeah because it's elongated like then there's an area where the battery can go in on the back and that's this a circle and that's basically the size and shape of an air tag and then for some reason they just elongated it by like almost twice the length it's thinner it's thinner than an air tag but it is longer kind of looks like the fitbit air thing yeah it's a little it's a little a little wider than yeah there yeah and yeah it's 30 bucks can you hopefully they work well just gonna replaceable battery yes oh yeah it's the same as an air tag basically this is cool i'm probably gonna get off the back you just what what how what do you put it it's a coin battery little watch battery i don't own any air tags literally the AirTag is like a coin battery with a little casing on it.

1:05:57That's literally all it is. It's pretty awesome. Four pack for a hundred bucks.

1:06:01David Imel:I'm weirdly the most excited about PixelTag out of everything here. Well the MotoTag has already existed.

1:06:07Marques Brownlee:The MotoTag is good too. Yeah. Does it have highlight? No. Then there's the watch, the Watch 5. The Watch 5 did get some interesting substantial improvements. Much more accurate GPS. They actually name dropped the Apple Watch Ultra and Garmin Phoenix on stage or any of this is more accurate GPS than both of those which was kind of crazy that they did that usually you don't name drop like that we'll find out they name dropped models so it's a better uh it is more expensive but it is uh more accurate it has more more tracking generally more data collection but obviously for more accuracy for all the whole tracking stuff they said 15 percent better sleep tracking which are more accurate sleep tracking which is a really really hard metric to actually contextualize and that also makes me think damn how bad was the sleep

1:06:53David Imel:tracking before i guess like what part of sleep tracking like falling asleep waking up rem i think that's probably what it is the falling asleep and waking up parts but whenever i read that i just

1:07:04Marques Brownlee:kind of read uh they're sampling 15 more frequently maybe kind of what i assume is happening i don't

1:07:09David Imel:know how else you make the claim of 15 more accurate i mean it might just be like our algorithms to create this score is better in some way i don't know it's mostly saying nothing Yeah.

1:07:24Marques Brownlee:I mean, design wise, it looks the same. It has a slightly higher clocked Snapdragon W5 Gen 2 chip inside. Yeah. Better memory bandwidth, more on device Gemini capabilities, which I know that you wanted in your watch. Insulin resistance detection is their big new headline feature this year. Insulin resistance trends. Yeah. Specifically. And what was the other trend? There was another trend.

1:07:47David Imel:There's a blood pressure. Blood pressure, oxygen levels. Well, so there's a like breathing emergencies. breathing emergencies was one of the other things for like choking toxic inhalations or drug toxicity accidents if they drop if your oxygen drops it can call emergency services yeah yeah by the way a friend of mine's dad got in a bike crash recently and he got knocked out in the bike crash he had a pixel watch on and it did call 9-1-1 oh and it actually did help him that's probably crash detection yeah crash detection yeah okay so this stuff does work yeah you know that's why they use it in the ad every single year for the apple watch they're about to ask you what is when The bear comes in your house.

1:08:24The bear's in your house and your watch can tell 911. Yeah, it was three gigs of RAM

1:08:30David Imel:from two gigs, double storage to 64. Oh, so they can put more RAM in the watch, huh?

1:08:35Marques Brownlee:For Gemini.

1:08:37David Imel:How much is it? Did we say? $3.99. $3.99. Oh my God. Well, to give them credit, and I hope I'm right about this, just to leave it in if I'm wrong and someone will tell me, I think this is the first increase on Pixel Watch since this time. Of price increase. Oh, price increase. I think so, yeah. Fine. Five generations in and you raise it 50 bucks, I think? Yeah. Okay. I don't think that's as bad compared to all the other things. Yeah, I agree.

1:09:05Marques Brownlee:Yeah,$3.99 is in line. Does it have highlight? It does not have highlight. It does also have blood pressure trend. No, it just tells you who's calling you. It's a screen. It has a whole screen. It can do more than highlight. But yeah, that's essentially it. Yeah. Better fitness tool. We also got a new color of Pixel Bud, and they're pushing an update to it. Pixel Bud Pro 2, which are really old now, and I don't know why they haven't released it Gen 3, I guess because they just think that it's fine and they can make new software updates, which is what they're doing. They're pushing a big software update.

1:09:36It's supposed to have better antsy. It has sleep detection now so that when you fall asleep and music's listening, it'll pause and stuff like that. It has something to do with matching up with your watch to do something as well. but I thought the watch is what detects if you're asleep. Maybe that was it. I think that was it. I don't think that's the sound. The buds had something. Were you paying attention? It was 1 a.m. So I don't know. But yeah, I don't know. You don't need to buy new Pixel buds, but they did have the new olive color. So it's the same color as the Pixel Pro green. So are any of us fall asleep with earbuds in?

1:10:14Sometimes.

1:10:15David Imel:Really? I stay in. I live in the cellar. notably on the busiest street in my neighborhood and sometimes there's construction that happens in the middle of the night and it's really loud uh i also have my ac running right above my face and that can get annoying sometimes so sometimes i do wear noise-canceling earbuds to fall asleep i also use them on the plane to fall asleep same so yeah the plane is the big one they do not stay in really and then i lose them and then i find them are you a side sleeper i i sleep every direction. I am. Sometimes I go backwards. I can't imagine rotisserie sleepers.

1:10:49I would lose those so fast. No, I'm a side sleeper. I sleep in them, not like every night, but if I'm somewhere loud, I'll use them as earplugs and they stay in all night.

1:10:56Marques Brownlee:Wow, you're lucky. I'm a big white noise while sleeping person. I slept, so I lived in Hoboken for five years and my apartment there had, right outside there was a bus stop, there was a hospital, so always got ambulances, blah, blah, so I always just put a fan right in the window and just turned it all the way up. So I would always fall asleep to that noise now in a hotel like this it's too quiet yeah i'd like play white noise machine or

1:11:19David Imel:something wow i just i can't actually i no one cares but i hate white noises because we have to play it for when lane was a baby sleeping in our room and now owen and i can't wait till the white noise you're more of a pink noise guy more dead silence brown brown brown noise dead silence is

1:11:35Marques Brownlee:creepy i love dead silence yeah better than live silence actually you know it's funny this is so off topic what okay i had i had a this is so stupid my i had a spotify i just looked up like rain sounds there's like a 50 track like rain sounds thing that i was playing yeah so like last night we're super jet lagged i started the rain sounds thing and then i went to sleep and then i woke up and the rain sounds had stopped playing and i was like that's weird that stopped playing so i went over to turn it on and right before i turned it on the shower just started like making noise of like random water coming out of it yeah and i was like my shower did that too the hell's good like i was about to play water sounds but then a little after water i was freaked out for like five minutes i was like what who is in this room right now who turned off my water and made water so none of you guys watch youtube ever to fall asleep i've never i do uh i always try to the sleep timer okay the autoplay algorithm when you're sleeping it's crazy land show it's yeah

1:12:40David Imel:yeah dude they will show you things that you did not even um there's a really good reply all episode where spoiler alert this person was playing like white noise but it happened to be this one like white noise thing they got had like footsteps and then like a person like mumbling so the the person was living in the like basement of a house and thought someone had broken in in the and like freaked out yeah yes that would freak me out one more slight tangent uh while we're here my friend is a musician and makes decent money in his band with his band as a full-time job dude shut up about street light manifesto that's not they do not make decent money i'm sorry i'm sorry he probably makes more money than they do anyway um and he recently a few months ago started making like ambient sleep music to go to sleep to and he's put out like five ambient sleep albums it's probably a good hack he said he makes like 30 to 50 000 a month it's like with ambient sleep music but he's like i know for a fact that spotify in the next like year is just going to start ai generating all this music because why would they give that money away to other people when they could have it for themselves and it is the it is the easiest like money hack ever um anyway yeah his immediate sleep music is good I actually use it so he doesn't need a plug he's making plenty of money on it well I'm not plugging listen to waveform when you're sleeping yeah yeah yeah which okay one more I had a friend tell me that the YouTube algorithm he falls asleep to YouTube every night and every single night he wakes up and it's playing our Halloween episode from last year and it's always the Halloween episode and he always wakes up and finishes it and he says it's every night you can probably recite it as he's gone it's just crazy I know I know that's amazing anyway the one where I'm a minion I think you were all dressed it was the it was the year before this last year oh the Hamburglar yeah when I was a large language model

1:14:43Marques Brownlee:you were I might have been dressed

1:14:46David Imel:oh no no no I don't think you were there and we made you a zombie in the thumbnail and people called it clickbait because it was a joke that you were sick I think right and people were really mad you weren't in the air that's really funny all right well we really have to take a break and then we got to talk about some new software stuff because i really want to ramble about um about camera stuff which means it's time for tensor i mean trivia there you go notable delay tensor trivia trivia dude so we spoke about highlight earlier marquez stopped looking at my tablet we still got the highlight feature which is the new google way of letting you see that you got notifications on your Pixel phone.

1:15:26David Imel:Notification. Notification. Notification. Notification. Yeah. But HTC already solved this years ago with a case that protected the screen. Oh, yeah? Do you remember what this feature was called?

1:15:39Marques Brownlee:What it was called? What was it called? I made a whole video about this case. Yes, you did. Oh, no. And I was in Barcelona when I made that video. Really? Yeah. Which is also in Spain. In Spain. Wow. Where are we at now? Very topical. I wish I remembered the name. I have an idea. I could describe it in such detail. It was cool. Dots. That's a great word. I'm glad you said that. No. It's in the name for sure.

1:16:02David Imel:That's for sure in the name. Oh. Okay. I was mad I gave you a hint, but I didn't know it, so I may have inadvertently given myself a hint. It's like a portmanteau. Was that like a Halloween candy joke? Because Marcos likes dots. Marcos does. I love dots. Well, David's friend knows.

1:16:16Marques Brownlee:This will make much more sense when we hear the answer. Yeah. Okay. All right. We'll either learn something new or remember something incredible at the end. We'll be right back. Like the HTC, incredible. Two. Wow, callback. Thanks.

1:16:39Marques Brownlee:I've got a text.

1:16:40David Imel:The summer might be almost over, but a new bombshell has entered the villa. Meet the voices of DeepGram Flux TTS. I'm Drew. Low-key casual. I'm Alexis, an upbeat morning person. I'm Haley. Always cheerful. Flux TTS has some real personalities that are ready to speak. You can interrupt, pause, and keep talking without losing the plot. Fancy a chat? Come try all the voices free through September 12th at deepgram.com slash keep talking. Terms apply. Support for the show comes from Google Gemini. You know that moment when curiosity strikes? You're exploring a new city with a family and a sculpture catches your daughter's eye.

1:17:20What is that? Who made it? With Gemini, you can snap a picture and get a fully interactive breakdown of its history, architecture, and even hidden secrets. Gemini is built for moments like that. Whether you're learning something new, solving a problem, or looking for your next favorite thing, Google Gemini is here to help. Download Gemini, Google's AI app, or visit gemini.google.com to learn more. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business.

1:18:07The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify.

1:18:17Marques Brownlee:Okay, welcome back. we do have believe it or not some software to talk about from the google event one last segment here uh do we have any favorites we want to any like highlights from the don't do it marquez sorry that's a pun i meant to say any things that we think are worth talking about yes software yes go on so i have a few camera things i want to talk about go on okay google added a thing called camera looks i saw this yes so camera looks is kind of like the fujifilm film simulations in a lot of ways i did an interview with isaac reynolds uh google pixel camera chief uh last time i interviewed him was for the pixel 4 so it's been a while that was their prime it was their prime it was well except for the whole solely thing we don't talk about that um yeah but But at the time, when I interviewed him in 2019, it was wild because their whole mentality at Google was, if you are tapping anything on the screen except for the shutter button, it is error.

1:19:21That's what he told me in 2019. All input is error. The Elon approach. All input is error. This year, notably extremely different. There are so many settings now in the Pixel camera. You have pro modes. You have manual settings. You got everything. But there's this new mode now called camera looks. camera looks uh there are four defaults for sort of like the original camera look and then you have vanilla which makes it a little more kind of like warmer and then there's a classic i don't know there's a few primary and then there's a bunch of basically film simulations so you've got the digicam simulation oh it has these built into yeah it's also built in called digi um there's a minimal one which basically removes so okay the coolest thing about all of this is that the way that they are doing this is that they are doing less computational photography dynamically.

1:20:13But in the most Google way possible, depending on the settings that you change with the contrast and the options that you pick, because you basically pick one of these film modes, like the Digicam mode, whatever. And then you can change settings like contrast, you can change settings like sharpness, like all of these things. Depending on the settings you change, the processing will dynamically do less HDR or less sharpness, things like that. So when you do, you know, when you're taking an HDR photo, it's compositing a bunch of sampled frames on top of each other to give you better noise reduction, things like that.

1:20:48And the Google camera team is very, very sure that this is the best possible way to make a photo. I disagree. And apparently a lot of people have disagreed because now they have this camera looks thing. And now when you take a photo with one of these modes it's using less samples to actually have less sharpness make it a little bit softer make it have a little bit less uh less detail in the shadows things like that imperfection imperfections they are they are using machine learning to dynamically give you less perfect photos which is the most modes right but only in these modes not like by the default camera no the default camera is the same well you can set it as a default you can set four modes as a default annoyingly this is very annoying you can't set like the digi simulation as a default you can only set the only defaults you can set are like the vanilla the like minimal there's four options okay and then there's a bunch of film options but it's the most google thing in the world to use machine learning to dynamically decide how much computational photography they should be doing at all um so that's very funny and i think it's really cool uh because what's been people it's what people have been asking for for a long time it's clearly a direct reaction to people using a lot of third-party camera apps that give you these features um so that's pretty great i

1:22:07Marques Brownlee:think it's nice yeah it's good i will definitely be messing with these um it almost opens a can of worms into a much bigger conversation which is i'm not going to do it so don't take the bait don't do it but are we at peak smartphone if like most of what we're trying to do with new smartphone cameras is give them some imperfections back yes but don't take the bait don't well that's another episode okay we'll do that that is a that is a great separate episode but hour later i do think it's amazing that we're making cameras worse because they are too perfect yeah and isaac reynolds was like no we like we've we've solved the camera um which sure if you want it to look like ass but you know anyway so other end of the camera spectrum yeah uh because i noticed there's a lot more when i was doing my hands on there's a lot more buttons in the camera mode Yeah.

1:22:55Marques Brownlee:Another one when you slide over to the left is just this magic capture feature. Yes. Which is and they showed it at the event as well. All you do is again, this is about living in the moment. So don't even bother snapping photos and videos. Whatever's happening in front of you, just open up magic capture and start it and point it at the scene. And then whatever happens happens. And at the end, Google's magic capture will have decided on some photo frames and some videos to capture for you that are the best, the highlights. from that scene. Yeah. And they give some examples which are interesting.

1:23:29Marques Brownlee:I think a nice example would be like, I don't know, a solar eclipse is happening in front of you or something. And instead of like pointing your phone at it in front of your face, you should just like enjoy the thing in front of you. And so just start a magic capture and whatever it decides is happening, it'll capture it. But the example they use is much more action packed. It was like people playing basketball in front of you, different poses, different, you know, people looking at the camera versus not looking it will smartly take tons and tons of frames sift it down pick the best ones and give it to you yeah magic yeah you sold you sold me on that feature when at first i was like this is the dumbest thing i've ever yeah i know that you kind of it's funny because in the keynote the the example they had a lot they said it was a live demo their example was that he was at a basketball game he's like you want to live in the moment so he has his phone just recording while he's watching the game i've tried doing this before and it's really hard if you're not looking at the screen your hand kind of lost your hand kind of just drifts and it's really difficult frame this yeah yeah you're not in the moment things still need to be in frame i don't you need to keep looking at your phone it's difficult yeah it's notably very difficult yeah so we're gonna have to really try that out what i found very interesting is that it's one of the three modes now because previously you had you had uh photo mode and video mode now there's photo video and magic capture yeah it's like that's the first thing i noticed when i was right up there I was like, wow, a new button?

1:24:54Marques Brownlee:This must be a big deal. And it's just magic capture. Yeah. Which I think is interesting.

1:24:58David Imel:I could see it being useful for like the group photo that you have to put the camera down and go on the timer. And then every time you go back and someone blinks, you just like throw magic capture on. Everyone get in and grab a frame. Or give a tripod. You frame the video first and then you hit magic capture. And then you go do the thing. I don't know. You want to be in front of your daughter as she's blowing the candles out of her cake. You don't want to be like the Vision Pro guy who's like doing this, like filming her, you know, which is incredible. That's in the moment, technically, I guess, just through a screen.

1:25:32So there are some uses for it. It's going to be interesting to see if it actually works. You took it out of my mouth, though, because I was going to say, isn't this a video? It's video, but so it's Google Clips. Yeah, exactly. If you guys don't know what this was, many years ago, Google sold a small clip-on camera. You could either just like put it in the corner and mount it somewhere. But the whole point was it was a little clip on camera that you'd clip to things. And it would just record for like two hours or whatever. And it would just find random frames throughout the day when it noticed you were smiling or whatever.

1:26:05And it would send you like these updates of like, oh, look at all these photos of you and your family having a happy time. Now I don't think we would ever put a camera made by Google in our houses that we're constantly recording. but this is effectively what magic capture does which is funny at least you are manually turning it on instead of just letting it do its thing whenever you

1:26:25David Imel:whenever it wants I think it sounds useful and fun I just don't believe the live in the moment because then you're just gonna get a bunch of videos of people's feet on the ground yeah unless you have a tripod or something or that's what you're going for that's you know hey okay I have a really really crazy what is a photo slash what is a video thing oh no david gosh we can't do an hour on this don't have to this is a small can of worms or a medium can of worms we can make it small for now but i want you to chew on it and later we'll talk about it again all right okay so they haven't so if you remember um there's now there is a mode where you can upload your footage to the cloud and it will do a bunch of things like upscaling it to 8k and boost video boost and it makes the low low light video it will like brighten the shadows and do all this stuff because as to run on google's tensor cores in their server centers whatever um still a really weird thing that you would do that and it's like i guess you're just doing it with the videos you want to and it takes up a lot of storage etc there's a new thing in it inside of video boost called a pro stable video and this is basically optimizing the stabilization of your video so if you're walking you know you're running whatever it'll it'll stabilize it if it thinks it needs stabilization what it is actually doing this is so crazy is that every frame in the video it is using uh as information for a gaussian splatting 3d model so it builds a 3d model of the scene and it uses every frame to then gaussian splat the scene which is a relatively new technology where you basically create 3d stuff out of 2D images based on micro camera shake and things like that because you're seeing around the pixels, et cetera.

1:28:18And what it does after it creates the 3D model of your scene, it then creates a virtual camera track inside of the scene that flies the camera through. And - Are you kidding me? I'm not kidding you. And then they told me that they actually had to add some camera shake back because it just looked like a literal drone shot and people felt uncomfortable with it. So they had to add artificial camera shake a little bit back to make it seem like it wasn't. So now, Mike, what's crazy is because it's using your frames as reference material for the 3D model for the whatever, you're still technically getting the same video back.

1:28:59But there is a 3D model of your scene that a virtual camera is flying through. And what you're getting back is kind of a 3D render of reality.

1:29:09Marques Brownlee:Heavy mix of reality and interpreted things. Huh.

1:29:14David Imel:Can we just appreciate that Google can take a video, 3D map every single frame. Yeah. Create a fake camera, track you. Yeah. Add shake back to make it look good. Yeah. And the f***ing RGB light on the back. Five colors and can only do calls. Yeah. And one of them is white. What planet do we live on? I know. No, this is just the most like, what even is a video anymore? Like you're giving me a 3D. It's almost like I'm getting a 3D animation back of the reality that I captured.

1:29:48Marques Brownlee:Yeah, that is very Google. Okay, I will chew on that. I'm going to try that as well.

1:29:53David Imel:I'm going to pretend that never happened. It's so crazy. I can't wait to see it. Because the Samsung and the Apple one is already really good. Yeah, they said they only do the Pro Stable video when it thinks it needs it. So you can't force it, which is annoying. Okay. So I think you should like go on a run with your phone or something.

1:30:09Marques Brownlee:I'm going to sprint down the street. Yeah. I'm going to try it. Yeah. We got to like force it. Samsung stabilization though is pretty good. Yeah. It doesn't do this. You can flip your camera. It has EIS and OIS combined and it'll do as best as it can with the information and it'll like crop in. So it has way more room to do the stabilization. But you'll see that it's. This is the most Google thing in the world. It's like use software to just completely eliminate the need for hardware. Whoever thought of that was like, how many Tensio chips we got? Yeah. an idea the Gaussian splitting is a new uh rapidly evolving technology what if we just really took advantage of it wow so so crazy i think that's just crazy i just wanted to talk about that yeah that's the main stuff so the future the rest of the features on the phones themselves is android 17s like you've seen this on yeah pixels like there's not that much stuff that i saw on the pixel 17s that i tested that i was like oh this is definitely not coming to the pixels yeah from last year yeah that's the big question and that people keep asking me about too because there's another feature called creator suite that is also in the video yeah in the video sections built in it's built into the pixels only right now we'll see if it comes to android 17 later because for some reason they added the like tick tock cutout reactions feature to android but the creator suite is a section in the video sec it's a part of the video section that gives you a teleprompter it gives you uh audio enhancement features it gives you uh frame guides for like If you're doing 9 by 6, you can pick your aspect ratio.

1:31:36Social media UI guide. Yeah. My take on this is that they're trying to capture the UGC crowd, which is user-generated content. It's the people that are opening 20 boxes a day and just making fake ads. That's a growing huge amount of people, by the way. So I think that Google really wants to capture those people. Teleprompter worked pretty good.

1:31:57Marques Brownlee:I'm not going to lie. Teleprompter, you just input, and you can speech-to-text, whatever. you can input a couple paragraphs of whatever and then you start recording with the feature on and it hears you so it can advance the teleprompter as you speak and it was which is google's bread and butter like great voice dictation understanding your voice wait we should use that for the i was just thinking yeah if we were to record our ads on a pixel on a pixel it would look we'll just well great can we not just like put it in the the tray of the two-way mirror and then just have an advance? I don't know if it would hear us.

1:32:29Marques Brownlee:That feature, yes, would work well. No, it would hear you. I guess the idea is it's showing that text at the top of the display right under the selfie camera. Yeah. So it looks like you're looking at it. It looks like you're making eye contact but you're reading. Yeah, I'm vibe coding this for the iPad. I'm surprised. It probably exists. There's probably a way to advance a teleprompter based on talking. Yeah, I'm tired of standing up. Yeah. For those who don't know, we've been manually advancing. Like everyone has done since the history of time. Yeah. yeah yeah caveman manually advanced this is perfect for ai perfect for ai yeah so yeah otherwise it's it's a pixel yeah otherwise it's pixel i just want to talk about those software features but pixel by the pixel 10 the big question the huge huge question in the room that i for some reason didn't think to ask which was really obvious is like what which of these features are coming to pixel 10 if any yes yeah well i don't know that's probably true yeah what they will say is either we have no we have no crack at it by the pixel 11 yeah if you want it now pixel 11 or we have no plan we have no future plans or we do not disclose future plans yeah or they'll say something like for the messaging feature for highlight they'll be like we will work on this yeah and then you'll go okay when's that gonna happen we'll see yeah yeah so yeah i don't know i like all those features but if they come to the pixel 10 it's almost like I like them a lot more.

1:33:53What is this phone? Yeah, but does it have matte black rails? That's true. Just get some spray paint, Marquez. It's fine.

1:34:00David Imel:You're going to give up your insane battery life for matte black rails?

1:34:04Marques Brownlee:No, I do. The OnePlus 15 is still... You can charge it 1500 watts. It's fine. Yeah, that phone is killer. You're just charging it 2000. OnePlus 16 in the United States? I want the OnePlus 15 with the Pixels, camera chops, and some of the software features. I don't even think the pixel has the camera. It's not going to happen. Anyway. Anyway. That's not going to happen. So, yeah. I think we should go right to the end, which is our last segment. Trivia. My laptop was muted. Do it again. We're back. We're so back. I'm never going to forget this podcast. This is crazy. Question number one. Trevor Noah was surprised by Liverpool legend Stephen Gerrard.

1:34:51But before Mr. Gerard came out, Trevor wondered if it was actually him or Gemini speaking in what regional English accents? Wait, are we shouting it out? Oh, yeah, wait, wait. Do we want to? Liverpoolese. Hold on. We could slap him. Do we want to do a rapid or do we want to slack it to me?

1:35:19Marques Brownlee:I think that's the whiteboard equivalent I think you're the only one that knows the answer Marquez Really? I think he knows the answer? I might know the answer How confident do you feel David? How confident do you feel Andrew? Are you going to say Cockney?

1:35:30David Imel:No I'm starting to worry It's not a British accent I don't know David are you going to submit an answer? Alright Andrew Marquez on three say what you're thinking One two three Neither of you said Dang Were they reasonable? What did you say? No. You're closer. Counts, points. I think this accent derives from a Welsh accent, but it is not. Would Welsh people be really mad that I said that? Or would Liverpool people be really mad that I said that? I don't know. Would Trevor Noah be really mad that I said that? I don't think so. Sick. That's all I care about. I said Gaelic. No, that is not correct.

1:36:16Gaelic is a whole language that is not English David you want to just throw something out there man he did Liverpoolese that is technically correct although not the word I was looking for the word I was looking for was scouse yeah you know scouse he said that? he said that in the event he said is that Liverpool legend Steven Gerrard or is that Gemini speaking with a scouse accent I think I'm going to get the next one right.

1:36:46Marques Brownlee:I told you we would learn something new. All right, question number two. Yeah.

1:36:51David Imel:HTC had a case that would cover the screen of their phone and show you little notification graphics and stuff underneath. What was it called? Should we yell it out? No, Slack it to me because I don't like it when you all yell because I can't hear. Slack it to Ellis or Adam? Me. Also, there's no way to, like, if I have you guys do it one at a time, then it kind of defeats the purpose. I think it's that, but I'm pretty sure I'm right. I think I'm right. All right. Let's go around the room. David, what did you say? Dot matrix. Dot matrix. Andrew? I wrote quick dots. Quick dots. I only wrote dots because Marquez said dots.

1:37:35David Imel:I wrote dot matrix. Dot matrix. Definitely. The answer is dot view. Really? Dot view? Dot view. So is that the name of the tech, but it was the Dot Matrix case? I believe so, yes. Oh, the case was called the Dot Matrix case. Itself was the Dot Matrix case. I knew that. That's why I thought. Well, no one got any points. Marquez still with one. Andrew with three. David with three. I thought this video on this was really short. It was a four-minute Marquez.

1:38:01Marques Brownlee:Yeah, well, it was just a case. Oh, the Dot View case. It was a feature of the Dot Matrix? It was. By the way, this is one of them. That is the one of the first like three videos I ever shot on a red camera. Really? I think it's actually the first one I ever shot on a red camera because it was a rented red scarlet. And it was the first video I ever published in real 4K. First video I ever shot in raw. First video I ever shot in Spain. And first video I ever shot in Mobile World Congress. Wait, this is cool. Yeah, I remember a lot of stuff. No, no, no. Sorry, sorry, sorry. That's not in Spain. that case I shot in my college I first got it in Spain and brought it back to my apartment so it was on the red but it was not in Spain it is dot view by the way dot view this is sick as hell and if you managed to screen record what was happening on the screen it was just a bunch of blobs but it was a really clever feature phones used to be cool dude we've gone so far backwards it can't do red and that is the end of the podcast thank you for watching obviously stay tuned and get subscribed if you haven't already because the reason we are in this hotel room is because we shot this crazy other podcast that is in the works so stay tuned for it it's amazing i can't over promise but i

1:39:20David Imel:really think it's he's over promising it's so good um but uh yeah we'll otherwise catch you

1:39:26Marques Brownlee:very soon in our regularly scheduled programming so see you then my head hurts peace wait from

1:39:33David Imel:is produced by Adam Molina and Eclipse Rovin. We were partnered with Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro after music was created by Vainstil. Eclipse! That'd be a point. And Brandon Havard. Oh yeah, and Brandon Havard. It's behind the camera. Oh yeah. Turn the camera on, Brandon. Yeah. Turn the camera on.

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