What’s Going On with the Pixel 9A?

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1:14What is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marques. I'm Andrew. And this week, the two of us are missing David, but that's okay. He'll be back soon. And we're going to be talking about a whole bunch of stuff. There's some Google stories. there's the pixel watch and some why did i say pixel watch again the pixel 9a and tensor g5 stuff that video is out if you want to see it on the main channel we also talk about uh pebble watch 2 that's what i meant to say uh the end of google assistant is also a story we can hit on and now we're gonna wrap it up at the end with our keywords ebay game which is a lot of fun yes but first yeah first we do ls has a correction yeah i've been waiting for this for a while i I know, probably the biggest correction we've ever done.

1:58I just know it's been eating you up, Ellis, so I just wanted to give you the floor to address. All right, I've made some mistakes in the past, right? I've gotten some mistranslations in here and there. Whoops. Stuff has happened. This has been insane. I've gotten dozens, if not hundreds, of emails, DMs, like every way people were able to reach out to me, they could to let me know that in the 2005, in the 2005 Dinoco 400 which was the title race for the 2005 Piston Cup which Lightning McQueen stuck out his tongue to finish all facts I said that it was a tie and Lightning McQueen did not win that Piston Cup zero Piston Cup for those of you that don't know what I'm talking about I'm talking about the Pixar movie Cars that I got one random thing the man has seven Piston Cup It's the Piston Cup.

2:53He has seven. That's huge. He has seven. It's like... All right. Look, I'm well aware this would have been Lightning McQueen's. It would have been the first rookie to win a Piston Cup. I'm well aware that in the makeup race or the points evening out race at the Los Angeles Motor Speedway a few weeks later, Lightning McQueen chose to not race and make a stand. I don't care. Stop messaging me about cars. It was a joke. It was not that serious. I was talking about Car of the Tongue. I do remember a Stephen A. Smith clip where someone asked him to compare Lightning McQueen as one of the goats and he went into his whole rant about he doesn't have enough Piston Cobb.

3:36He doesn't have enough championships. I thought that was pretty great. The Cars fans, they know the movie well. You know, and yeah, thanks for letting me know, guys. But like, we're cool. And don't let him forget. yeah gosh yeah seriously anyway uh i have one more one more quick cool thing to show off do i get to call this fan art we had somebody who is a keyboard creator make us a custom waveform keyboard which is pretty sweet so it's it's mosaic this is his i should figure out the name of the keyboard before i say it out loud um but he has like a cool little mkbhd slot here for everyone wondering it's just black uh but it has a red top kind of like greenish colors and then wvfrm are a little more bold in the characters i like that that is so sick i was i walked in and i was like oh and you made like a little custom keyboard that's cool it's so heavy i just want to figure out the name of it the system 65 but pretty sick i kind of think this has to be our typing alphabet typing test uh default keyboard now

4:47keyboard the spacebar needs a little work but that's my fault what'd you type marquez is awesome i typed this is the coolest keyboard twice

5:01sounds very slow by the way we're working on a keyboard video for the studio channel that is unhinged and i'm extremely excited for it in fact one of the parts that i bought for one of the keyboards is so absurd that i think i have to take it out of the video so um keep an eye out for that but let's get into the news the first thing that's showed up on my timeline was a pixel watch coming back why do you keep calling it a pixel that's the third time today it's not even called the pebble watch it's like when you type the wrong word and it's auto corrected and you delete it and you type it again and it auto corrects again my brain keeps auto correcting it to the wrong word stop fucking doing that i think it's fair to to let everyone know that you and ellis landed on a flight at like 7 a.m this morning yeah there might be some sleepy talk here it was it was two days ago get up you know 4 a.m to catch a 7 a.m flight land shoot three hour drive shoot hour drive to the hotel wake up hour drive shoot all day airport land at 7 a.m sleep on the couch yeah ellis is sleeping on the couch and i got it this morning but um okay pebble we're calling it the pebble watch announcement because it is a company from the creator uh what's eric i'm gonna do you know how to pronounce his last name mickickowski no but i'm gonna try it yeah midges midjikowski midjikovsky thank you so he created a new company called core devices i think you all talked about this a few weeks ago we did and i missed that conversation so i don't know what you all said about it we we knew that this was coming we didn't know exactly what it would look like or how it would manifest but the idea of bringing a simple smartwatch back that pairs to your phone appealed to basically all of us we thought that was a cool idea we had a lot of nostalgic thoughts about our old pebbles and how much we like them and how e-ink seems to be a great idea and a long long battery life on a smartwatch could be awesome so now we actually can see what it looks like which is about what we expected i would say same shape it's a new company called core devices um and they announced two watches that they plan on bringing out this year and same shape you're very right because while this isn't actually pebble it is still uh very along the same lines of what pebble was when they were eight years ago i think um so open source operating system it's um like e-ink display great battery life and in fact they're using some old pebble parts in some of the watches um so yes it does look similar because the core duo 2 not a confusing name at all considering that's an old intel processor core 2 duo yeah it's called the core 2 duo it's called the core core 2 duo the same name as the intel core 2 duo yeah and they said this is basically the pebble 2 redone sure so it's coming in at 149 dollars it is the same frame as the pebble time 2 because they found someone with a bunch of extra parts that were never used so they're literally using the same watch face exterior for it black and white paper e-paper display 30 days of battery life it now has a speaker in the device to chat with ai assistants and this one should be coming out in july so that's the cheaper of the two then they also have the core time 2 or core 2 time now i don't know this is core time 2 time 2 that's probably why i got slightly confusing this is the more updated device 225 dollars uh it's gonna have a touch screen they don't want it to have super complicated apps but they just still want the ability to navigate through touch operation versus only buttons there still will be buttons um it's still 30 day battery life still has a speaker it has an upgraded chip that can do step and sleep tracking and there's no official date on this but they still said 2025 yeah no i like the way it looks a lot this i remember reviewing and having i had a red pebble with a black band and the super long battery life like week plus battery life was already awesome about it and getting used to testing all these other smart watches like moto 360 and galaxy watch at the time which had like a day and a half battery just made me wish i could have a week-long battery life on a smart watch so that was the number one thing i really liked obviously the screen is not going to be nearly as bright or beautiful and won't show as much stuff but if you don't care about that if you just want time temperature uh basic status stuff notifications yeah that's kind of all you need and i am excited for these i yeah me too i kind of think i like the cheaper one better because i've been realizing you know i'm now like two years into wearing this all the time and just what is it my uh phoenix 9 i forget exactly which one it was because they switched from the epics brand but garmin yeah the garmin i'm convinced this like circle is just like engraved into my wrist at this point every time i take it off i go that can't be good for me i took off my watch the other day and just was like oh my god what is that on your wrist yes it is the mark of having used a smartwatch for a long time it is so i'm assuming the cheaper one though because it doesn't have the chip for sleep tracking and stuff i'm assuming it doesn't have it's just flat on the bottom and i mostly just at this point want to tell time and get basic notifications so that seems kind of awesome it seems also like this will be probably better for android than for iphone it says it in yeah and a lot of these articles it specifically says it's still having some the idea behind that is apple when they make a first party accessory to the iphone gives themselves more access to the iphone than they give anyone else so when they make headphones like airpods or whatever they don't give other bluetooth headphone manufacturers the same access and so inherently there will be features in apple's accessory that aren't in others that's true about go go down the accessory list about everything and so smart watches they give lots of things like lots of plugs to the apple watch that they will not give to any other smart watch android on the other hand is android just lets you flip the switches turn on notifications for certain things turn them off for certain things and as a android user i mean i use both phones but apple watch over here for the iphone i'm happy to drop a pebble on this wrist and i think no i'm gonna be the dual watch yeah i will not allow it to watch there's something about having like the super simple pebble watch on one end and the apple watch ultra two on the other i gotta put a lot of the comments are echoing the same thing like once you have an apple watch it's hard to give it up you kind of get addicted to the notifications the closing your rings the things that it's good at uh and i don't want to stop using the apple watch but i also feel like i would flip it to theater mode and just kind of ignore it on my left wrist while i use the pebble on the the main yeah i'm at the point where i still love this garmin watch and i love the battery life but at this point i just don't have the time to go out and hike like i used to so like this thing looks brand new where my epics 2 looked like it went through a war that thing was used it was used yeah and like but i can't i like the just quick time and the quick like text message checking um yeah so i think i just want but if you were on ios you would also run into the same problems with your garmin similar ones yet they're saying specifically like not being able to uh reply to notifications inside uh with an iphone or connected to an iphone with pebble yeah like Garmin has like the auto replies.

12:19You know, you can like reply like, okay, yeah. Like just the basic ones. You can't even do that on iOS. It's so funny. Like I've been, like Lane's been asleep on me. Like I've been in her rocking chair and Claire's texted me. I only have my watch to reply. And I have to be like, which of these seven replies best, like explains what is happening now. It's just like, okay, period. Let her decipher that one. Good enough. Yeah. That is funny. I do have one other smartwatch. Yeah. what is this maybe we shouldn't call it a smart watch but since we're talking about watches i saw this and we're talking about simple watches this is the atari 2600 my play watch that just got announced it is 80 um like pebble it feels extremely basic um maybe more simplistic in some ways there's no bluetooth or wi-fi on this so there are no notifications but it's a watch styled after old atari systems that can do some very basic fitness tracking like step count heart rate and calories except you can't send it to your phone yeah it's just on watch but there are three so there are four atari games you can play on it centipede missile command pong and super breakout on the watch on the watch and it also has just like watch bands and watch faces that are very atari like and all atari sound effects for your alarms and or not notifications alarms and timers i'm developing a hot take in my head i don't think it will be that hot i just feel like nostalgia gets used to mask how bad products are sometimes and if you build an entire product around one nostalgic thing red flags just start going off in my head and if i am part of the generation that cares about this thing i'll probably just ignore it and just buy it because i love it but i why would i want to play brick breaker on my watch you know uh first of all brick breaker is not one of them oh snake which one is the three ones centipede missile command Pong and Super Breakout.

14:17Do I want to play Pong on my watch? You're damn right you want to play Pong on your watch. So I have a question for Adam that I think might answer your question on this. It's like, it's 80 bucks. This is not the most expensive watch. Because this, you know, I think we like watches like Garmin and Apple because they connect to our phone and therefore it feels like we have to wear them all the time, right? We're always tracking our health metrics. We're wearing them all the time. Since this doesn't do this, is this now just a watch that is part of your watch collection, Adam, that you wear at certain times.

14:48100%. I was going to say this looks like a watch that David would like because David wears like an old Casio that he had like someone rebuilds into some custom thing. This is that for him. This feels like a watch that's part of your watch collection and depending on the day, yeah. There are people that will just have quirky watches. What day do you go to the wedding? Airplane with no Wi-Fi. You want to play some Pong on the tarmac. Because you know you have a phone, right? so i'm just trying to picture okay i today's the day i wear the atari watch because i'm for sure gonna play but do you have pong downloaded on your phone no so there you go fair okay i forgot to download on my phone but i will spend 80 to have a watch that does it looks pretty cool it does i'm not gonna lie it's got these nice colors the watch band it's got the retro color scheme on the watch band too it's pretty cool i'm okay with like i mean this obviously is like we're 100 percent nostalgia that's all we're going after for and yeah not saying 80 is the cheapest but 80 is probably the you know if this was 25 i would just assume it's a piece of e-waste in watches that's a splurge you can like easily convince yourself to spend 80 on a cool little digital watch so funny yeah would you spend 80 on a an emulator app on your phone to do the exact same things no absolutely you would spend 80 on a because 80 in an app world is a lot and it would probably be better but it's world it's a lot in the app world 80 in the watch world is a little so you would spend it in the watch world yeah it's hardware interesting there's a piece of like having it and being able to see it on you that's different than an emulator app it's still jewelry at the end of the day like it's just trying to tell people something about yourself like i'm an atari nerd yeah there's some and i like fun watches physical watch for sure if i spend 80 on a pong app no one knows i bought that app yeah until you break it out on the plane the guy next to you is like whoa oh my god is that the 80 app god you're cool i wish i had that um i have one more quick thing here uh byd announced charging tech that is twice as fast as tesla's did you see this one i also saw the headline so i'm gonna read it right now okay i can just summarize it for you real quick if you'd rather okay yeah i thought you just did no byd and now yeah they announced their super e platform that can charge at peak speeds of 1000 kilowatts or two times as fast as a tesla v4 supercharger i mean obviously this is a good headline because they're going to directly compare it to tesla which is always hot in the news but i think aside from that this is still pretty impressive i think so they're claiming it can add 250 miles of range on a five minute charge sick obviously i feel like at what point do we are we allowed to stop saying that like it depends on charging curves and battery percentage because this just feels like the metric we talk about miles per like minute of charging peak miles per yeah yeah um but still 250 miles of range five minute charge they said their you know their goal is to get as close to petrol refueling as possible that feels pretty close now maybe to like a like a low mile per per gallon sports car like a fill up could be three minutes and you could get 250 miles of range out of that yeah i probably have like almost 400 miles in my tank and it probably takes definitely less than five minutes if you had an empty tank and filled it to full could be like two three three in new jersey it's only taking more than five minutes because you don't pump our gas and the guys possibly got like 20 other people but yeah so it's that's that's an impressive number the reason i say i want to read this is because i see these types of announcements with like smartphones before and it'll be like oppo announces 250 watt charging and I'm like, are you announcing that you've got the ability to do it?

18:29Or are you like shipping things that are going to do this tomorrow? So, so far, there's only two of BYD's vehicles that can take advantage of this. And so it's the vehicle that can do it. And it's also chargers in the real world that are actually doing it. I don't know if they just announced it or, but there is in here talking about how they're, they're building 4 ,000 of these new chargers across China. So they're probably starting to build. Yeah, I believe starting to build. Okay. Yeah. That's going to be sick. Yeah, they've promised a major investment in the infrastructure. Awesome. With no timetable on it.

19:00Yeah. Just to be totally fair here. Yeah. I think what made me the most interested in this is I just got this clip of Doug DeMuro on, is his podcast the Cars and Bids podcast or is it just a Doug DeMuro podcast? I don't know the name of it, but it is the Cars and Bids team. Did you see his clip the other day? He was talking to whoever his co-host is. This Car Pod. This Car Pod. Exclamation point. Shouts out to Doug. so he had this great clip where he's just saying like i drive these chinese cars and i'm astonished they shouldn't have sent them to us because now we know how good they are and we're like crap we have to catch up i watched that yeah it was a really interesting conversation yeah um but like we've been super impressed with the chinese cars that we've got when we did the li auto mega we've had a couple half the comments were like this isn't even the coolest thing we have over here Yeah, that is very true.

19:50There are lots of, I mean, the world of EVs is getting way more competitive and way more like everyone's catching up and making cool, innovative things. And this is one of those innovative things, super fast charging. Love that. You saw the Liato Mega. You saw we had the L9 here as well, which was in the Mega video, but that was the three-row SUV. We've got BYD making, I want to say, didn't we see a, maybe we didn't know, was it a BYD bus? It was a bus with a BYD badge on it, but I don't know if that's the same BYD or how that bus got there. I've seen other BYD vehicles in the U.S., so I wouldn't have been shocked by it.

20:27What size bus are we talking here? It was like a Pretty Young Dang. Yeah. What? I want to love you. BYD Pretty Young Dang. Oh, my God. It was in San Francisco, somewhere in between San Francisco and Sacramento as we were driving. Wait, hold on. None of you answered how big the bus was. It was a bus. it was a bus it was a transit bus yeah it was a coach bus okay yeah thank you anyway i do see byd vehicles in the u.s today which is already pretty cool but like there's that other quote we've talked about multiple times of the ford ceo driving the oh yeah xiaomi su7 or something not wanting to give it back like yeah these cars are getting competitive they're really good so yes faster charging obviously awesome hopefully they build these like quickly that'd be awesome random but related yeah um over the weekend i saw an id buzz just driving around in long island not even like in in the city in the wild yeah in the wild spotted in the wild i was like super yeah super discounted like you can get one used for 60 no way yeah 60 yeah so cheap bucks yeah no a lot of these this is the other thing no yeah i saw it is like everything has depreciated these EVs depreciate so fast that even if you're not into EVs at a certain price, it's a pretty great deal.

21:47Like the Taycan is obviously a very expensive EV when it's brand new, but a two-year-old Taycan with 20 ,000 miles on it is 60 % off. And so I didn't watch the whole clip of him talking about that, but is that because we don't know longevity of EVs yet, or we don't have a used sales market? He was saying a Nissan Leaf is basically free at this Yeah, it's because it's kind of like a piece of tech. Like when you think about a two-year-old Android phone that's been used and how it doesn't hold its value because the tech is moving along so quickly that there's no reason for it to hold its value. The new tech is just that much better.

22:21Why would you buy the old one? But the old versions are still very capable. And for people who only buy a car every couple of years, the fact that you can get what was just$90 ,000 for 65 just feels like such a deal. so depreciation is working for a lot of people who are getting secondhand evs so that's that's a very it's a very trendy thing that is just happening with lots of cars that are one more question before i know alice like audibly gasped looking at something over there so before he tells us what prices i'm assuming he saw do you think like a lot of people buying they're becoming way more mainstream now but a lot of people buying ev who would be buying new ones and selling them is like they're more tech head-esque people and like updating that feels like uh more like you're upgrading your phone or your tech versus then like upgrading your car most people i mean like every car i've ever bought is like i've bought this i'm going to take as much time not paying towards the financing as possible once i'm done until the the wheels are falling off yeah so i guess for people buying new evs now it's definitely still early adopters but it's creeping into the middle of the bell curve so I think Teslas are everywhere and they feel pretty safe most people are cool buying a new it's the most popular car in the world obviously um but in the Rivians and Lucids and a lot of other new EVs it's still mostly early adopters but you know they're proving out their people are buying them using them for hundreds of thousands of miles and they're becoming more trusted as time goes on I will say there's like a as I have the R2 pre-order i really believe in rivian but every time there's that one article that pops up here and there of like will rivian make it to boba i just go man am i like pulling a fisker not that i think they're like fisker but like that's a scenario that's really scary of buying a car that's that expensive and then a year later yeah it being a brick pretty much i've talked about this on autofocus channel and with a lot of other tech reviews when i review a piece of tech i generally pay no attention to the stock price of the company oh yeah i just don't care how the company is doing i'm a very product focused person but the one exception that i've had to make is reviewing electric vehicles where people are expected to own them for six seven eight nine years and it's possible that the company that makes and services it won't exist in that amount of time and these aren't off-the-shelf parts that your mechanic has yeah even rivian now like i'm well aware of very long lead times for replacement parts repairs and things like that i've got a little dent on my hood from like one of the first few drives where a little like rock dinged my hood i'm never gonna get that replaced it takes like three to five months to get a new hood so it's just like one of those things you have to think about with new evs today so that's why it's still mostly early adopters they hear that stuff it's kind of like horror stories whatever i'll just get the like standard option and i'll not think too hard about it and i'll get an ev in a couple more years.

25:30But yeah, the bell curve is starting to get up there, I think. I also think that people buying EVs, at least originally, were people that could, for the most part, afford it and be able to have that. And if something goes wrong, they could potentially get another car. Not like a brand new$70 ,000 car, but if this thing craps out on me, I could still afford to get a$5 ,000 beater, where most people don't shop for cars that way. they will get a used car and run it into the ground yeah like in the very very earliest days of evs that's kind of how it was where if you had bought a model s or something for a lot of people that was not their only car and they could rely on oh i'm going on a road trip i'll take the gas car but oh i i drive the tesla for you know commuting and other stuff like that that was true of like the earliest days of evs when they're brand new and very expensive but speaking of commuting ellis found his new commuter car yeah what are you gasping at over there okay so i found a listing at a dealership in patterson new jersey for a 2012 nissan leaf this is like i don't know if this is the first gen but this is like an early oh that's the earlier one yeah early gen talking like 80 miles of range or something uh we're talking 73 miles of range okay charges in just under eight hours.

26:46No fast charge. It's blue. Yeah. How much do we think this car costs? How many miles does it have on it? It has 43 ,561 miles. That's a lot of miles for a Leaf. The funny thing is when Doug used this example, he's like, oh no, the old Leafs still have some value to it. It's the new ones that are like... The newer ones were less silly numbers. the newer ones were like actually like seemed like a pretty normal used car price oh okay really I'm going in the teens the teens I'm going gonna rate it one through teens$16 ,900 you're saying silly $16 ,000 $16 ,900 not even the newer Leafs were that much I'm saying like oh my god like $4 ,999 $4 ,999 what if I told you that if this was prices right rules you'd both be disqualified of mine no way this 2012 nissan leaf leaf in patterson new jersey is currently on sale for three thousand four hundred and ninety nine dollars and i'm not an expert in the used car biz maybe someone could explain what's going on here better but i i just looked up the vin number just to make sure like is this a salvage title is there something like seriously wrong with this car i found a previous dealer who listed this as sold with 22 fewer miles on it so i don't know if someone bought it drove it for 20 miles and said i'm done or if that's just test drive mileage it's just driving it from one dealership i wonder if a dealer bought it off but um but if you live or like an auction maybe i don't know but yeah so if you live in the the north jersey that patterson's the North Jersey, right?

28:31Yeah. If you live in North Jersey, have$4 ,000 to kill and want a s***, I should say, and want a fine car. Just for context, that car new was$35 ,000 roughly. Wow. New? Yeah. Wow. In 2012? Yep. Yeah. How much are used regular Leafs going for? Actually, at this point, I kind of want to make EVs the eBay game we play later. That'd be the category, but I think eBay Automatic is probably all of those. I see that there's one in a newark 2024 for 19 i see some 2017s for under 10 it's crazy because those cars they're not bad they just have no range there's a 2020 yeah and nine thousand dollars americans just hate compact cars for no reason yeah yeah it's so silly we can do it guys i like them yeah we all like i I mean, we all like them.

29:26I believe, man. It's one of those, I reviewed the ID.4 not that long ago. And I don't think it was a video. I think it was just for Top Gear, but I did sort of put it in article form. And it is like the, I had this segment in the Top Gear articles where I would compare the EV to a household gadget to sort of contextualize how to think about where this one sits in the market. And the ID.4 was a toaster. it's just it's an appliance there's nothing exciting about it it's whether it's new or used you can't even really tell it's just a car and that was fine and it got you from point a to point b that's what the leaf is it's just you got a car you got some place to charge at work great successful mission accomplished that's all that's all you really think about with those my friend Ian, best friend of mine, has this dream of converting a Subaru Baja into an EV.

30:23He does want to paint it cyan so that it can be a Baja blast, but I really hope one day he accomplishes that dream and has an electric Baja. Don't let your dreams be dreams. Ian. And with that, we should take a break. We'll go straight to trivia, of course.

30:45trivia okay first question the term leaf from the nissan leaf is actually a backronym for what like okay no no i'm just saying like is it you get all four words and you're right is it whoever gets the most words inside it is no i want all of it one point for each word it seems really hard but it's not that hard leaf it's four words it's definitely four words It might not be four words. It's four words. One of them has a hyphen, but it's four words. All right, all right. One point per word. I'll propose one. There's only one point at stake. Whoever gets the most words wins. If we both get all four, then we both get a point.

31:29Okay. That's fair. We'll see. Okay. Yeah. I didn't know it was back or no. Well, we'll think about that. Answers will be at the end, like usual. We'll be right back.

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33:57All right, welcome back. Let's talk a whole bunch of the Google stuff of this week. First of all, publish the Pixel 9a impressions video. Just want to say, the embargo. embargo big red flag uh and i got to use the phone behind the scenes obviously and i shot my video but the embargo specifically said in this impressions video which is funny i shot it in the exact same room as the pixel 8a impressions video in this impressions video you are only allowed to show the phone in hand back of the phone or the front of the phone home screen only i am not going to call out any other channels for possibly not adhering to that embargo but i I adhered to that embargo.

34:37It is a massive red flag, though, because what have we said? Anytime a company separates out software from the normal impressions process, you're like, okay, so what's wrong with the software? Remember the Surface Duo, which was kind of a... Well, we all found out why that had separate embargoes. That one became very obvious. But anyway, the phone itself is about what we expected. We've been talking about leaks of this phone for a while. So it's$499. It is their mid-range slash budget end of the lineup for Pixel 9. it removes the camera bar but it has dual cameras still they're basically flush with the back of the phone 48 megapixel regular camera 13 megapixel ultra wide and a 5100 milliamp hour battery which makes it the largest ever in any pixel and i suspect that using it it will have a great battery life a lot of the other features of the phone are very similar to pixel 9 it's got a plastic pack instead of glass but it's got like pretty flat sides i see these comments online about the bezels being enormous and maybe i'm just used to testing relatively cheap phones but it didn't strike me as like horrible it was worse than a regular flagship but it's not terrible uh but it has bigger bezels and slower charging and regular cheap wireless charging but in general it's about what we expected it's the pixel 9a so if you want to watch the impressions video that's there Update on that is the phone is actually delayed.

35:59We thought it would be coming out like sort of right after our videos were. It is actually not coming out now until apparently April. We don't know exactly when, but they're saying April. We also don't know why. There is some speculation as to why, but that phone is slightly delayed. They just said we're checking on a component quality issue that's affecting a small number of Pixel 9a devices. It happens. Yeah. Unfortunately. It's always a small number, but it's always the small number that completely delays an entire launch, which makes me think maybe that number ain't so small. Well, you know, you can't ship.

36:32I mean, anytime. No, it's either like somebody writes an article and the phone's out already and you have to take it back or you just address it now and you delay the phone a little bit. So I want to give some credit and I want to make some speculation. OK. The credit I will give is you still can't pre-order it yet, which I think is good because I'm sure there are plenty of other companies that would let a red flagged impression go out, have issues, delay it, but still let people send them money. So I'm glad you cannot do that yet. That's fair. The speculation, you have to immediately think, is part of the reason this one, like they enforce harder rules on the original embargo and then immediately have something that's a big enough issue that it delays.

37:14it's very hard for me not to put those together and be like was there something they knew about at this briefing and then they decide not to talk about it later maybe maybe not I like to speculate a little bit sprinkle a little drama in there somewhat sometimes do you think it is something specific I guess I don't know what because the thing is they still let you all use the phone and you still used it and everything felt totally fine And also, they're very clearly checking all of those phones to make sure it doesn't have the problem before they're going to let a bunch of people review it. So we wouldn't have seen that issue in our review impressions devices because those are all curated and handpicked.

37:58Yeah, and they've even gone so far as to they're saying they're not sending them out to reviewers yet. Right. Yeah, so it seems like there's quite a bit of it because they could send them out, ones that they checked to not have the problems and still send them out. And there still could be reviews done on them. i'm glad they're not doing that yet and letting it but like this whole launch has like you said big big old red flag on it yeah a little damper i think everyone should be a little more careful ordering it and going through the proper uh research before yeah i guess spending money on it i guess the question is i mean they're never going to tell us what the problem was right they're never they're not going to go all right we fixed it turns out there was just a vibration motor issue or some of them were shorting out oh they're all fine now like they're not going to tell us so it's just something stupid well it depends on the severity yeah i mean if it's enough for them to delay the phone it's probably kind of significant so i just feel like they're gonna just sell the phone in april and that'll be that and we're never gonna find out exactly what it was unless it leaks which it's google so it might but i imagine they're just gonna put it on sale and it's gonna be what we expected all over again just a month later that's all i can sort of picture happening yeah i want to try and guess what what the issue is but i have no idea i have no idea and i think like it would expose a lot of potentially more stuff down the pipeline of why an issue is probably maybe they have multiple factories working on it and something for remember when the steam deck didn't they have two different factories working on it where one installed the fan backwards so like magnetic cases were causing the fan issue to like stop or i guess that was a dbrand issue but because there were two separately manufactured steam decks yeah yeah you're probably right we'll probably never find out I did say something though at the end of the Pixel 8 or Pixel 9a video which is because I mean it was a very short impressions like alright here's the phone I can't show you anything but here it is you know the specs now but at the end I'm like I also am curious about Pixel 10 and the reason I'm curious about Pixel 10 is the same as it's been for the last couple months Tensor G5 possibly having a big performance jump and being at the level of the Qualcomm chips and maybe finally being like a full flagship through and through from the outside hardware to the inside the specs and software and competing on every level and yet to be honest i like the pixel phones but they are not the highest performers at that max level so i'm very curious if pixel 10 is finally going to do it if it's finally going to be the one that reaches that flagship through and through level and then after the video goes out we get a nice article uh that seems to pour water on that and i actually said in the video i feel like i'm jinxing it by saying that's out loud so here we are the headline says tensor g5's processor might drag down the performance of the pixel 10 line it might not be all that we were hoping for it to be do you think it's because they're not calling it the pixel x yeah they should call pixel x the 10 feels like a big opportunity we somehow haven't seen the actual retail packaging yet it could still do it we'll know by next week yeah so the pixel 9a feels like it's good because it has the same chip as the flagships but that chip is just not a very good flagship chip so it's like great you're on the same level of performance of the flagships but the flagships are a step behind the snapdragon 8 elites of the world got it um so we're hoping for this next tensor chip whatever the next generation is g5 to really step up efficiency obviously this is going to have some ai compute stuff on board they all are doing that too but just in general higher clock speeds more memory bandwidth just more processing uh performance in general and it seems like maybe we shouldn't get our hopes up that high and that's sad yeah did you read through this article i read through it and understand very little of it it's a bad week for david to not be here because um but i i have a general gist of it i also wrote down some quotes if you just like me to read them off you can read the quotes i can i can sort of translate maybe you can help translate and then i do have an analogy um to and you can tell me if it's right or wrong sure okay so uh google is designing its processor without samsung's help and is going to tsmc to handle manufacturing um here are some of the quotes that i don't fully understand at all but i think i have an idea of what's going on google send to be blending its proprietary designs the brains and bronze of the chip the gpu and cpu are reportedly coming from arm and imagination technologies video codec ditches google's custom big wave and samsung's mfc in favor of chips and media's off-the-shelf solution display controller is also switching from samsung's dpu to verisilicon's dc9000 fully custom isp design entire but entirely by google replacing samsung customized isp found in tensor g4 those seem to be the biggest changes as we're expecting with G5.

42:46Yeah, Tensor G4 is designed by Samsung, if you didn't know, which is funny because a lot of people don't know that these internal components are made by each other's competitors, like Samsung makes displays for the iPhone. It's all hilarious. So when we first switched to Tensor in Pixels, it became interesting because we assumed Google would be doing lots of optimizations for their own thing. And it turns out there wasn't that many. And now when they can finally design from head to toe their own chip and get it done straight through TSMC, they can switch a lot of parts out from Samsung design parts that aren't necessarily optimized to specific other ones that could make it perform better.

43:23Wait, real quick. Samsung manufacturers. Manufacturers, they didn't design them. Sorry, manufacturers, yes. So there are lots of Samsung individual pieces on there that are not optimized. So ideally things get way better when they are able to control the entire vertical integration. That's essentially what that means. And from this article, it seems like is tensor g5 this big jump in tech and like is it the next big thing for pixel it's like a yes and no where like performance we're not going to see immediately is going to be like this big jump but the fact that google has so much more of a say in all of the design process of it feels like a big step for the pixel lineup and tensor because now we're getting closer to that like yes from the ground up ecosystem i think so yeah and but i also just feel like and maybe this is short-sighted but i just feel like you just need more raw horsepower in general okay which is like what you get from the snapdragon 8 elite phones like they just have more power and more headroom and can do more with the higher end applications and games and things that need more power tensor just doesn't have that type of power do you think it has the potential you know maybe this is like they had to take the step back to take two steps forward where like let's wrangle this more in closer to us get us designing all the things for maximum efficiency and then you know next year year after they can make more headway on that because it's less um samsung manufactured stuff i think that could be the path yeah so that's what we're all hoping for yeah fingers crossed i mean it's not entirely damning this headline it's just the headline says might so I'm not going to give up hope on Pixel 10 just yet.

45:06Okay, can I make an analogy? Yes. That as a film student... This is such a bad take. I can't even believe this is about to be said. As a film student, people are either going to hate me or love me for this or just not understand it at all. This feels like the movie Citizen Kane to me. How, Andrew? Citizen Kane, okay. Yeah, do tell us, Andrew. As a film major, everyone always talks about Citizen Kane being the greatest movie ever. it's like revolutionary and you need to all see it and the movie sucks i think it's super boring you agree with him but the movie itself revolutionized the film industry because of how we shoot things they did a lot of stuff that has never been done before and just like movies and filmmakers and directors of photography going forward changed the way that they shoot movies so is this is the tensor g5 the thing that in of itself isn't that amazing when we first see it but is this step into completely changing the tensor lineup that's not a terrible take maybe i would just say tensor g1 was a citizen cane okay because it was their first step towards doing the whole vertical integration i mean they had other qualcomm chips and google phones in the past and suddenly it's tensor so oh they're going to do their own optimization and they have had to work on that and now that's going to be five generations in so uh i see where you're coming from i feel like that has some legs we could maybe perfect that it's got me really worried now about saying that out loud but i don't know i don't think it's a very good movie okay i just i just want to point out on the wikipedia page for citizen kane the third sentence the third sentence the first sentence citizen kane is a movie second sentence it was his it was well's first feature film the third sentence, Citizen Kane is frequently cited as the greatest film ever made.

46:59I know. That's his problem, I think, is because as a film student, you go in hearing that a thousand times and then you watch it and you're like, what was that? Oh my god. If you don't get a single DM about this, I swear to god, I got hundreds about cars. The only good thing about Citizen Kane is that the cheat code in The Sims was Rosebud colon semi-colon Don't spoil it for anyone that hasn't seen it. that's all I'm saying I have not seen it there's been enough time yeah we might not I mean if this is a spoiler at this point you weren't gonna see it so that's fine listen if you never mind I'll leave it there what do we always say expectations are the thief of joy if you go into watching a movie and someone's already told you that this is the singular greatest film ever created it cannot possibly live up to that it's my dad's favorite film is it really?

47:48yeah and I went into that class has you ever seen Cars? oh yeah but how many how many piston cups has Charles Foster Kane won I think it's my dad's favorite film is a good bar that's a good bar that you can clear I have a lot of movie you'll be like oh I could see why this is your favorite film I've met Adam's dad he has great taste so I can't but that's one bar and then this is the greatest movie you will ever watch is a very different bar no that's Tennant inception was pretty good too if that if if not to harp on this too much longer but if this if people said it is the most important movie ever made that's a high bar to film it like that's way different yeah oh so as a viewer i didn't enjoy it yeah you can say it was extremely important but it might not be the best i think i should have learned about it i didn't really like it that much though yeah better than doom if the bar we're good that's funny um okay there's still more google stuff though so here's uh do we have the memoriam music ready for this oh we do indeed i just made alice maddeny shut his laptop and kind of screwed that part up do the lights still work nope dang it that's fine we can still do this is david the piece that holds this podcast together Maybe.

49:12I think we're finding that out. Yeah. Well, anyway, killedbygoogle.com noted website that documents all the projects killed by this massive company full of people that don't talk to each other. They have one to add now. The grave is dug. It's just it hasn't been lowered in yet. Yes. Oh. So I'll take this opportunity to say goodbye officially to Google Assistant. lived a good life was compared many times to other assistants like Siri Alexa and others but soon found itself passing the baton to the next generation of Google Assistant forcefully passing the baton it had no choice so right before stepping into the grave it taught everything it knew to this new kid named Gemini and then lowered itself peacefully never to be heard from again we still have a little more time it's still in all of our speakers you bring that okay that is a very that's a question i have um i'm gonna start by this by so google had an announcement on march 14th that gemini will be taking over google assistant and google assistant will be replaced in 2025 great um they said over the coming months we're upgrading more users on mobile devices from google assistant to gemini and later this year the classic google assistant will no longer be accessible on most mobile devices or available for new download on mobile app stores additional additionally we will be upgrading tablets cars and devices that connect to your phone such as headphone and watches to gemini we're also bringing a new experience powered by gemini to home devices like speakers displays and tvs we look forward to sharing more details with you in the next few months until then assistant will continue to operate on those devices so i guess it does say it's going to speakers eventually yeah yeah that pretty much just says sayonara assistant it's funny because still to this day on android phones like if you hold down the power button you get the google assistant thing but if you have a widget on the home screen it's still google assistant oh and so i recently was going to go to a restaurant and i opened gemini and i just said the name of the restaurant so i could navigate to it and gemini just started telling me the history of the restaurant like just doesn't know what i want to do with that information google assistant still knows like oh i say the name of the restaurant pull up the listing i'm gonna navigate there so you know when that goes away i'm still a little bit worried about gemini we'll see yeah in general it seems to have caught up and does mostly all the things that i wanted to do from google so they did in the press release say they've updated to a lot of the most requested uh features in it and they have this actually pretty awesome list that like gemini now has weather updates it has event reminders and lists maps can uh work with google drive asking about a video play music flights and hotels what's on your screen messaging alarms and timers something i think we were all actually pretty can control your smart home which is something i was very worried about um you can call on it uh what else is here messaging apps the two things that are on this list that are not available on gemini that is available on your systems is routines and finding out what song is playing i'm very confused at why i can't figure that one out it seems like multimodal the most obvious yeah that seems like the first thing it should do because it has access to your camera your microphones routines is also a little weird i think if you're someone who uses routines you it's really i mean it's in the name it is part of your routine at that point i my routines kind of fell apart i kind of want to put those back together i had some routines every morning well yeah i guess i should wait for the transition but i i had a routine where every morning i would say good morning to the speaker and it would do a whole bunch of things it would open the shades yeah i had to say it like that too or it wouldn't respond it would open the shades it would start playing the news tell me the weather tell me traffic to work things like that and then slowly one by one they started breaking and then i just stopped doing that routine because it didn't work anymore so i gotta build that one up again maybe when gemini why do we put up with this i love all my google integration it was so cool when it works i know it felt like magic it's like this is the smart home of the future this is so great and then it stopped it really is and then you just spend an entire day resetting all of your google devices to try and get it to work like it used to and then you realize half of the things have just been killed off ever since moving in with my fiance now she is very against home assistance and anything like that home automation so i have not had to live with it and can confirm pretty fine it's cool just like press the button just press a few extra buttons in the morning yeah honestly that's how most people are it's fine but yeah i i assume assistant will go out peacefully and gemini will will pick up the slack but uh yeah i'm sure it will be a smooth transition and gemini will definitely get none of the things wrong that were really simple for google assistant doubt all right i've got one more google headline for you okay google wallet launches new feature for kids to securely pay and store passes.

54:13So tap to pay for your children's phone. Kids to securely pay and store passes. So you can send your kid to the store with like a pass on it. A credit card on their phone for tap to pay. Okay, ultimately this makes sense because what if your kid's in like a bus pass or like if they're on a field trip and you need to, you don't have, no one really carries cash around with them. It's hard to give your kid 20 bucks to pay for lunch on like a field trip. so basically you can add credit cards onto their phones that you get an email every time they use it you can like immediately revoke the credit card off of the phone in case they're spending it too much on but like so much of this just reminds me of like whenever there's microtransactions in a game it's always like oh did you use your parents credit card for these v bucks or whatever and they're spending too much and google was like let's do that in real life let's give these kids tap to pay so they can just go buy whatever they want with their phone until their parents get too many emails and now the credit card companies this is bold of google to assume that kids have androids it's actually that's an interesting part because i didn't even think how many kids are going to do this versus like if apple wallet or whatever yeah i don't know though but that's it could be a way to get young people like when i young people makes it sound like i'm talking about teenagers like the youngest possible demographic in android as their first phone like this might be how they disrupt the pipeline there's a reason samsung paid mr b so much money to do samsung things because they're like we've lost the younger generation we need to now get the generation that hasn't even bought phones yet and we want them to want samsung phones yeah i mean the it doesn't seem like the galaxy fortnite skins really worked that well for the awesome ads all the a series awesome awesome awesome you remember those no i don't know you didn't see those commercials no oh apparently the a and a54 stands for awesome and they did these commercials where they would just call the phone awesome over and over again and i let me pull one up because i'm not describing it very well and i feel like you guys are going to appreciate how weird this is it's for some reason it's reminding me of the budweiser frogs what why