Your Luxury Car Now Has Ads!

7 Aug 2026 · 2 h 9 min · 49 chapters

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In short

The hosts discuss tech and consumer issues: YouTube’s new “reply” UI tied to shared links, BMW adding Spider-Man ads inside car startup screens, Ford’s upcoming low-cost electric truck platform (Fathom), and EU-driven pressure for Apple/Windows interoperability (Universal Clipboard / cross-device copy-paste).

Guest backgrounds

No guests are present; the episode is hosted by Marquez, Andrew, and David (Waveform Podcast).

Key claims

  1. YouTube’s share-sheet feature creates tracking links that let the sender/recipient relationship show up in a built-in “reply to the person who sent it” function, which the hosts call confusing and “really dumb,” with a “razor thin” touch target that makes it hard to reach the normal comments.
  2. BMW’s “special surprise” Spider-Man integration is effectively forced advertising in the car’s infotainment “private space,” and the hosts argue it’s a luxury-brand mistake.
  3. Ford’s Fathom EV platform (starting ~$28,350 + destination) is a direct response to the sub-$30k EV truck conversation and could finally create a competitive baseline for electric pickups.
  4. The EU/DMCA-related interoperability request for Universal Clipboard is framed as potentially consumer-positive, but also as regulation that could stifle innovation depending on how far it goes.

Notable examples

  • YouTube: sharing via Slack/text opens a tracked link and replaces the usual comment area with a “reply” interface.
  • BMW: Spider-Man ad pop-up for cars made after 2020, running July 27–Aug 10, using ambient lighting.
  • Ford: Fathom midsize EV truck platform planned for 2027.
  • Apple/Windows: cross-device copy/paste via device pairing, with work expected by fall 2027.

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

Chapters

Tap a time to open that second in VO

Upcoming Smartphone Season

0:00 to 0:30

The hosts discuss the calm before the upcoming smartphone launch storm.

“Support for the show comes from Google Gemini.”

Upcoming Smartphone Season

1:46 to 2:18

The hosts discuss the calm before the upcoming smartphone launch storm.

“This week, it feels like the calm before the storm of smartphone season.”

Critique of YouTube's New Feature

2:18 to 3:33

Exploring YouTube's controversial new link-sharing feature and its user experience issues.

“So we all know that on YouTube you can send each other videos, right?”

Inadequacies of YouTube's Messaging Feature

3:33 to 4:50

Delving into the confusion generated by YouTube's messaging integration and its implications.

“a recommendation feed where your friends just hit recommend on videos and then it just shows all the videos your friends recommended.”

The Social Aspect of Video Sharing

4:50 to 8:25

Discussing the difference in social engagement between YouTube and Instagram.

“And because of where you type the top says like reply and then under it it says like the box for where to type in.”

Reflections on YouTube's Past Messaging Features

8:25 to 10:10

A nostalgic look back at YouTube's past features and their impact on community engagement.

“I don't know when they stopped, when they got rid of it.”

The Absence of Google Plus and Its Potential

10:10 to 12:10

Exploring how Google Plus could have served as a better social network for video sharing.

“Yeah, YouTube is like, they've chased things in different directions.”

Ads in Modern Vehicles: A New Frontier

12:10 to 14:00

The discussion turns to the controversial topic of ads being integrated into luxury cars.

“is when it shows you Reels that your other friends have liked.”

BMW's Unconventional Advertising Strategy

14:00 to 18:00

Learn about BMW's integration of ads into their infotainment systems and the implications.

“There are a lot of great pre-2020 BMWs on cars and bids.”

Smart TVs and User Agreements

18:00 to 21:40

Understand the challenges with smart TVs regarding ads and user agreements.

“I mean, first of all, the senior VP of connected company development agrees with you because he called it a private space at BMW.”
Show all 49 chapters

Ford's New Electric Truck Announcement

21:40 to 25:40

Explore Ford's new midsize electric truck and its competitive pricing in the market.

“Until you turn your TV on and just instinctively press OK or press down twice and it comes back up and accept and then you're just going to throw it out the window.”

EU's Cross-Platform Clipboard Requirement

25:40 to 28:00

Learn about the EU's requirement for cross-platform clipboard functionality between Apple and Windows devices.

“this it's also a platform that can theoretically be more than just this pickup truck so we'll see more versions of low-end EVs from Ford based on this platform when they start making them.”

Universal Clipboard Feature Discussion

28:00 to 30:04

Learn about Apple's Universal Clipboard feature and its implications for cross-device functionality.

“So Adam and Marquez seemed interested in this.”

EU's Digital Market Act and Its Impact

30:04 to 31:20

Explore the implications of the EU's Digital Market Act on tech companies and interoperability.

“If you're not, you don't really know what it is.”

Balancing Regulation and Innovation

31:20 to 34:08

Discuss the tension between regulation for interoperability and the potential stifling of innovation.

“It hasn't been put into law, but Apple is working on it anyway.”

Apple's Competitive Advantage and Consumer Impact

34:08 to 36:20

Debate the effects of Apple's competitive advantages on consumer choices and experiences.

“And so USB Type-C was the obvious answer.”

The Future of Cross-Platform Functionality

36:20 to 42:00

Consider the future of cross-platform functionality and how companies might adapt to regulatory changes.

“Like, I just don't know if there's the equivalent on the other side of an easy interoperability between other products that could be like, well, we want this to work on Apple and Microsoft stifling us.”

Apple's Resource Allocation and User Benefits

42:00 to 44:34

Discussing Apple's decisions regarding features and their impact on users versus profits.

“I guarantee you in the next 30 seconds, I can find five things on the internet that Apple does that is a bigger waste of their infinite resources.”

Workarounds and Features We Wish Existed

44:34 to 51:16

Exploring personal workarounds for using iPhones with Windows and discussing desired features.

“Because they would have done it themselves if they were a good guy.”

The Minimal Phone and E-ink Devices

51:16 to 56:00

Overview of the Minimal Phone and its design philosophy aimed at reducing phone dependency.

“The hardest part of this is realizing that you have dumb workaround features because you've been doing them for so long that they're just normal.”

Discussing Minimal Phone 2

56:00 to 56:48

Learn about the features and design of the Minimal Phone 2.

User Experience Insights

56:48 to 1:00:48

Explore insights on user experience and potential pricing of the Minimal Phone 2.

“No, because they didn't really announce that many things about it.”

Marketing and Video Impressions

1:00:48 to 1:02:58

Gain perspectives on the promotional video and its effectiveness.

“And I am worried that this is going to be eight, nine, thousand dollar phone.”

iMessage Integration Speculation

1:02:58 to 1:07:40

Discuss the speculation around iMessage support and potential collaborations.

“I'll give you the buddy, the family, friends and family discount of a lifetime.”

The Concept of a Companion Phone

1:07:40 to 1:10:00

Understand the concept of a companion phone and its implications for user experience.

“straight up saying iMessage without it just being like, this is now the companion to your iPhone.”

The Minimal Phone Discussion

1:10:00 to 1:11:54

Explore the concept and features of a new minimal phone designed for focus.

“Until we arrive at what minimalism actually is.”

Trivia Time: Nautical Measurements

1:11:54 to 1:13:42

Engage in a fun trivia segment about historical units of measurement.

“Today's first trivia question is inspired by my best friend Ian who was visiting me over the weekend.”

Anticipation for Answers

1:13:42 to 1:14:10

The hosts build suspense as they prepare to reveal trivia answers later.

“We'll probably learn something at the end.”

Anticipation for Answers

1:15:18 to 1:16:20

The hosts build suspense as they prepare to reveal trivia answers later.

“Support for the show comes from Shopify.”

Anticipation for Answers

1:16:24 to 1:16:51

The hosts build suspense as they prepare to reveal trivia answers later.

“And there it was, the bike you'd been searching for.”

AI in Advertising: A Controversial New Approach

1:16:51 to 1:21:10

Delve into the implications of using AI-generated images in marketing.

“This week, CMF released brand new headphones, or at least they announced them.”

Real vs. AI in Marketing

1:21:10 to 1:24:00

Discuss the pros and cons of using real people versus AI in advertising campaigns.

“So it's clearly they're trying to make it basically not part of the image, which I get that it's an ad and you don't want it to be distracting.”

The Challenges of AI in Marketing

1:24:00 to 1:25:54

Explore the dilemma companies face when balancing AI use and genuine marketing.

“When marketing is the thing that makes you look good, and it makes you look like s**t, it's not good marketing.”

EU Regulations on AI Marketing

1:25:54 to 1:28:33

Discuss the impact of EU laws requiring clear labeling of AI-generated content.

“I would specifically say content aware fill is that gray area where it's like, am I just trying to take the sign out of the background of this?”

OpenAI vs Apple: Legal Battle Unfolds

1:28:33 to 1:30:54

Insight into the ongoing lawsuit between OpenAI and Apple over alleged trade secrets.

“For creating fake people, that's way over the line, obviously.”

The Oddities of Company Communications

1:30:54 to 1:33:34

Examine OpenAI's unconventional public approach during active litigation.

“They'd be like, ha ha, I still have access to the secret information inside of Apple even though I now work at OpenAI.”

Fitbit Integrates with Apple Health

1:33:34 to 1:35:42

Learn about the new integration between Fitbit and Apple Health for better data management.

“And to make it blue bubbles, even though it's clearly an iPhone-Android interaction because of the reaction.”

Reflections on the Apple Watch Experience

1:35:42 to 1:38:00

Hear a discussion on the pros and cons of not using an Apple Watch anymore.

“So now my Fitbit can just give all this information to my Apple Health and I can still use Apple Health.”

Wearable Technology Discussion

1:38:00 to 1:46:18

Learn about the latest wearables and their functionalities.

“does your right wrist just buzz randomly?”

The Casio Ring Watch

1:46:18 to 1:52:00

Explore the concept and implications of the Casio ring watch.

“To me, this to me feels like the slightly less elegant version of the Fitbit Air.”

Discussion on Smart Rings and Watches

1:52:00 to 1:54:50

Exploration of the practicality and absurdity of wearable tech like ring watches.

“This is like the dumbest thing I've ever seen.”

Trivia Teaser for Waveform Awards

1:54:50 to 1:55:30

Hosts introduce trivia related to past discussions and upcoming awards.

“I'm doing a hall of shame at the end of the year of my least favorite product.”

Trivia Teaser for Waveform Awards

1:55:44 to 1:56:40

Hosts introduce trivia related to past discussions and upcoming awards.

“You sent a message, and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist.”

Keychron's New Innovations

1:57:15 to 2:02:15

Discussion about Keychron's latest product releases and market strategies.

“No, Dave is looking at a prototype render that they're working on.”

Trivia and Nautical Measurements

2:02:15 to 2:06:01

Engaging trivia segment about nautical measurements and their meanings.

“I know, but it doesn't look like a mouse.”

Discussion on Gaming Mice

2:06:01 to 2:06:47

The hosts discuss a new gaming mouse and its features, including unique button configurations.

“He tweeted a picture of a mouse with a bunch of macro buttons and he wrote eight side buttons, 88 grains, latest mag ops, switches, blah, blah, blah.”

BMW Trivia Game

2:06:47 to 2:07:51

The hosts engage in a trivia game about car manufacturers and their services.

“I'm going to wait and then press it again.”

Discussion on Physical QWERTY Phones

2:07:51 to 2:09:04

The hosts talk about phones with physical QWERTY keyboards and challenge each other.

“I'll give you, I wrote like 50 bonus questions because it was such a long episode.”

Discussion on Physical QWERTY Phones

2:10:58 to 2:11:21

The hosts talk about phones with physical QWERTY keyboards and challenge each other.

“Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class.”
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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00Support 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. What 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.

0:39Excuses are easy. An epic movie night? We don't have enough snacks. Dinner party with the girls? We'd have to decorate. Surprise date night? Nothing to wear. But Amazon's Prime same-day delivery lets you say yes before the moment slips away. Try that new popcorn maker, order those cheeky drink glasses, get that new perfume, and turn that I wish we could into an I'm so glad we did. Visit Amazon.com slash Prime to find millions of items delivered fast. Same day delivery. It's on Prime. Available in select areas. Terms apply. That's weird. All right. Well, this is the weirdest thing I've ever seen.

1:20I'm not a lawyer. I would not recommend doing this. This isn't legal advice, but like, I wouldn't do this. I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I personally would not do this. New sound bite just dropped.

1:39Marques Brownlee:Yo, what is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marquez. I'm Andrew. And I'm David. This week, it feels like the calm before the storm of smartphone season. We have a bunch of different various topics that aren't too gigantic, but that's because we know it's around the corner it's about to be mid-august and then september so what do we got let's see a couple different health trackers including thoughts on garmin circa uh ads in bmws that's fun a new ford ev truck that's hopefully more fun uh you making apple add more cross-platform features we can talk about that and a few other quick hits but first did they even test this?

2:19I have one for YouTube. So we all know that on YouTube you can send each other videos, right? Correct. They recently implemented this very weird feature where if you use the share sheet and you send it to a friend, whether it's through Slack, through text, whatever, and they click that link, it is now a special tracking link that knows that the friend sent it to you. So then when you open the link, now you'll have the video, but below the video instead of just seeing the comments or the description of the video you'll see a little reply function which has you reply directly to the person who sent it to you which is really really dumb this whole thing in general talk about sorry to interrupt this did

3:03David Imel:we talk about this on the podcast because the other day i sent a video in slack and it like opened a dm with both of you guys because you opened it through slack but i thought both of you were dming me and i just assumed it was because we were you were testing a new feature and i didn't realize it was because i sent the link yeah this is the other bad thing um now yeah it's it's it's very weird i we all know that they need youtube is trying to make itself more of a social media platform there are better ways to do this i have suggested implementations such as a recommendation feed where your friends just hit recommend on videos and then it just shows all the videos your friends recommended.

3:42Dude, if Instagram's main feature is sending each other reels. Which is what they're trying to

3:48David Imel:copy. Sort of what they're trying to copy with this, but there should just be a feed of your friends recommended videos in YouTube. That's Adam pressing that. Let me get around to the data. If that were the case, how would they make money? Answer me that. Riddle me that. It would keep you on the platform. Only that. It would keep you on the platform much longer. Not nearly as much as algorithmic slop bro. Well it turns into algorithmic slop and then you don't know where it goes. The feature they shipped is way worse. This is really stupid.

4:16Marques Brownlee:It does seem clear that they're just copying like the feature where you send someone an Instagram reel which just opens a DM between you and now there's messages in YouTube. This is the thing that's new. My theory is they tested this but only a little bit. They only tested this a time. Well they clearly only tested it a little a little bit because the actual point of my did they even test this is that now it opens the video and instead of seeing the comments right below the video or the description it shows a little like reply to the person who sent it to you thing like on mobile on mobile and there is a there's a little three dot icon in the top right indicating that there are three different sort of menus that you can swipe between not very clear at first not clear and i i just want to get to the general comment section right because like why would i reply to andrew in youtube because then he has to open youtube and read my message in youtube and it's like if a friend sent it to you they probably texted it to you they probably send it over like it's some sort of messaging app whatever anyway i want to get to the general comments section uh the only way to do that is to touch in the extreme center of the reply like area where where well to touch and then swipe from the center of the reply area to andrew right because uh there's the three dots if you if you try to swipe from anywhere in that area to get to the next screen it just doesn't do anything but the touch target area is like a razor thin margin in the center of that reply area yeah yeah and if you touch anywhere except for the reply section you can't get to the comment section so i legitimately could not figure out how to get to the general comments of this youtube video until i could i walked over to andrew and i was like how

5:59David Imel:does this work and then he eventually was swiped in the right spot essentially yeah for audio listeners if you can't if you remember when we talked about the hype feature essentially when under a video in mobile it almost feels like a bubble now is like comments and you click it and that's where you type but if you swipe over that's where hype is which i think still exists yeah somehow and then if you swipe one more time that's where the reply thing would be but it defaults to that slide yeah that's what the three dots he's talking about for each individual page I guess. Yeah. And because of where you type the top says like reply and then under it it says like the box for where to type in.

6:38David Imel:Yeah. If you swipe on the top of the little bubble nothing happens or actually it was just like going into full screen I think. Yeah. And then if you swipe a little under then it actually swipes the page. So the touch target is razor thin. Yeah. Just super confusing touch target and I just also think that replying to your friend that sent it to you in general inside of YouTube makes no sense.

7:00Marques Brownlee:I feel like I can see how this went. They did the usual thing where they're like, we would like people to spend more time on YouTube versus other platforms. And we know that people text each other YouTube videos, but then we want them to stay on YouTube after they watch the video. Kind of like how on Instagram, they might DM each other videos. Okay, so let's do like a 0.1 % test where a tiny fraction of accounts, we'll just see if it keeps them on YouTube longer if we have a built-in messaging feature where instead of replying or commenting in the text thread, they can do it on YouTube. And it did satisfy the metric of keeping people on YouTube longer.

7:32Marques Brownlee:So they were like, all right, technically, this is a successful test. Let's roll it out. And now everyone's sending each other videos and text threads. And then it opens up and we're getting all this. Do you want to keep messaging them on YouTube thing? And we kind of don't.

7:46David Imel:I mean, Adam Mazzeri has said that that form of sharing reels is like the reason so much, one of the main reasons people stay on Instagram so long. So YouTube knows why. The problem is, is it's not that YouTube didn't have the feature. It's that Instagram was a place that people used to talk already. So therefore that first party integration is so much easier and fluent and recognizable by people. No one on YouTube does that. No one on YouTube talks to their friends on YouTube. Instagram is already practically a messaging app that happens to have like reels and other stuff built in. YouTube is a consumption app that nobody was talking to each other through before.

8:22Marques Brownlee:And you know what's funny about that? YouTube used to have an inbox and a messaging feature. This was back in the day. I don't know when they stopped, when they got rid of it. This might be a trivia question. Who knows? But I remember when I first started my YouTube channel, there were channel comments. So you could, kind of like writing on someone's Facebook wall, you could leave a comment on someone's channel. And there were messages that you could just literally send. You could add someone as a friend and then message them in the inbox. So every single person that subscribed to the MKBHD channel, I would get an email for it.

8:56Marques Brownlee:And I would use that email to open up their profile and send them a message and write a comment on their profile saying, thanks for subscribing. And my theory was that people would see a comment on someone's channel that says, thanks for subscribing. And they'd go, oh, someone said, thanks for subscribing. Let me check out why they subscribe. And they would see my channel and they would go, oh, that's cool. And they would subscribe too. I don't know if that actually worked. You were growth hacking. But I was kind of in the early stages. is like if I just say thank you to everyone maybe that will have some positive impact.

9:22Now we just have AI Marquez talk to the fans.

9:25Marques Brownlee:No. That's actually an Instagram feature. But no now so they I think I had to eventually stop doing that because I was getting too many emails and I think I did actually I did a giveaway once which then there were like 3 ,000 emails in one day and I was like I can't keep doing this. So I stopped doing that. Then they got rid of the feature but at one point there was an inbox on YouTube that was usable. What is so ironic about this is you can see now how Google Plus would be an amazing thing. Yeah. Because that would be a social network where people could easily integrate YouTube videos because also Google, you could share YouTube videos, you could have friends, you could DM, there would be messaging.

10:04Now Google Plus would be an amazing idea. But as usual, Google is just too early to everything.

10:10Marques Brownlee:Yeah, YouTube is like, they've chased things in different directions. Today we talk a lot about how they chase TV. Your channel is like a TV channel. like all these TV features. But back in the day, they were chasing other things. And I think those might have been better things to chase. I don't think it's a problem that they're too early. I think they kill it too soon.

10:28David Imel:I mean, to be fair, since I shared with you guys, I've never seen that thing pop up again. And I know I've clicked on other people's YouTube links or sent YouTube. This is the other thing too. Like Andrew's sent me a video and it's been like chat to Andrew and I'll chat to him. And it doesn't even send him a notification that I like replied to his video. Did you actually do it? I've done it. Can I try one right now? It might be because he has notifications turned off. While you're trying that, I want to also throw this. So you two both clicked on a link in Slack and it opened that DM that I was confused by.

10:56Yeah.

10:56David Imel:If you were to copy that link from Slack and send it to your friend that I don't know, would it open with me, right? Probably.

11:06Marques Brownlee:Unless there's some sort of hidden tracker link that you can't even see in the URL. The reason it got annoying is because I would share a video on threads or Twitter, and then I would get a bunch of notifications that people had accepted my request and wanted to message me. That has happened to me. And I didn't want to message any of those people. Oh, really? I just tweeted to publicly share a video link and it just opened inboxes with everyone who put it. Yeah.

11:28David Imel:Which is insane. I don't even know how I would get to those messages now. Maybe they turned it off. I don't know. This was happening a lot last week to me. Oh, no. Because I shared a video on Twitter or something and I was at the gym and I suddenly started getting a bunch of notifications that people were trying to DM me. Yeah.

11:42Marques Brownlee:Maybe they've walked it back a little bit or realized that public accounts need to be able to share things. You did react?

11:47David Imel:I reacted. You know what? That's what I'm talking about. It's confusing. I don't understand. Anyway, free business advice YouTube from a guy who dropped out of college. All you need is a feed of friends' recommendations, and you just hit recommend on the video. because I, look, the feature on Instagram, the best feature on Instagram on Reels is when it shows you Reels that your other friends have liked. I love that feature. It's actually pretty nice. David, you're thinking too logically, man. These are good features. You need to stop. You need to stop. Copy this. This is Google. This is Google.

12:23But I would love to just like watch the videos that my friends are watching and recommending because then when we meet up in person,

12:28Marques Brownlee:we can talk about them. It's weirdly the nicest antidote in a while to the like internet. internet, what is it called? Not dead internet, but where everyone's internet is so personalized that you are the only one seeing the videos that you watch and everyone else's videos are totally personalized to them. So when you go - It's like for you effect. You go to school the next day, you're like, hey, did you see that video? Nobody else saw that video. This is really the best antidote to that. Yeah. Anyway. 100%. 100%. Speaking of free business ideas, if you're a car company and you wanted to make a bunch of money, what if you just put ads on all the cars as soon as they turned on?

13:00Marques Brownlee:Wouldn't that be great? I think that would work. I need to buy a vintage car. I think if you had like a high enough tech car, maybe like all of your cars since 2022 have internet connections. 2020. And maybe there's like a movie coming out. You just like put the trailer on the screen of the car. That's so insane. And then you just make a ton of money. Like that's like a great business idea, right? So insane. Am I overlooking anything? Isn't this not great? Every day we get close to the question. I see no issues. This is crazy. All right. Well, I guess I'll tell BMW to do that. Oh, wait. They already did that.

13:31Marques Brownlee:People got very annoyed.

13:33David Imel:Yeah. Yeah, people were reporting that they got a Spider-Man ad during their BMW startup this past week and confirmed by BMW this, quote, special surprise is part of a, quote, broader brand partnership and is running from July 27th to August 10th. Basically, it's like certain BMW operating systems are all getting this, but essentially any car made after 2020. when you started it up you got this little pop-up that was says something about spider-man and if you click it it then shows this like it's not a trailer for the movie it's this weird integration of like a bmw suv driving down the street going into the city and then like spider-man watching and like zipping around the city um it even uses the ambient lighting in your car as part of it And it's weird.

14:26David Imel:It's terrible. Unrelated. There are a lot of great pre-2020 BMWs on cars and bids. Not that. Yeah. Every day when one of these car companies just uses your internet connection to do worse and worse things, I just think about getting a vintage car again. first of all in 2023 when they were releasing a bunch of larger infotainment systems their senior VP of connected company development claimed quote to say I'm selling the screen to play a commercial I don't see it it's a private space excuse me not that private because here's a Spider-Man ad right for you it's a commercial it's a commercial yeah exactly what it is he called it I kept wanting to I don't see it articles saying that like that maybe BMW is attempting to put this under the like festive like you know Halloween and uh Christmas like festive but I don't even think they're doing this because they called it a brand

15:23Marques Brownlee:partnership like yeah they got brand partnership is an ad I mean I I can't confirm because I'm not in the back deals but I assume this Spider-Man thing wasn't just for the lulz like they got

15:32David Imel:paid to put this here yeah of course that's what it could have been it could have been an easter egg and like just release it to put it somewhere in the car maybe there is the integration maybe marvel had a bmw because like there's all a cross promotion inside a lot of movies as well but if it's some sort of easter egg where you have to like tap this steering wheel button four times or do the konami code or whatever and then it pops up then that's a cool easter egg because it doesn't maybe almost force you to watch to be fair you had to click it but it still came up but like if this was a just if this was a buried easter egg where it gave you a little extra thing about the new spider-man and like somebody quote leaked it and then people were going and searching for it then it's fun I just like turns into an internet thing imagine you buy your house and you go to turn on the sink and red water starts coming out and it's like code red you know what I mean the spider-man theme starts It's flying out of your sink.

16:36And you're just like, why? I didn't ask for this. I'll tell you why. Because in America, there's two ways to run a successful business. You can either do the Nike, the Apple, the Hermes thing where you convince people somehow to pay a ridiculous markup compared to what it actually costs to make the things. Or you can be Fortnite where in exchange for paying slightly less money, you can just shovel things that you think people like into their life season after season after season. And BMW, for some reason, forgot that they're supposed to be a luxury brand and decided they wanted to be Fortnite.

17:11You know, and that's OK. It's strange philosophically, because when we think about like you have a smart TV in your house, you know, at this point, we kind of expect that the Samsung smart TV that you have is going to play ads or the LG smart TV. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Not ads. Special surprise. Special surprises. Broader brand. The LG TV you have is going to play special surprises. If you had put like a, I don't know, if you bought a tablet to put in your BMW that was made by Samsung or made by what, I could maybe see an ad playing on that tablet that is not part of your car. But in this analogy, your car is your home, right?

17:47It is a place that you sit and you drive and you whatever. I just don't think that built into the infotainment system of the car, similarly to like your sink in your house, there should be things that are automatically playing against your will.

18:02David Imel:I mean, first of all, the senior VP of connected company development agrees with you because he called it a private space at BMW. So if anyone disagrees with you, BMW agrees with you. Yeah. I guess then, first of all, I don't want my tablet selling me ads. Of course. Unless it is cheaper. Apple and Samsung have done this of like trying to sell you remember when like the Fold 6 came out and was still trying to sell you the Fold 6 in a notification this sucks so bad but yeah they're like I couldn't understand anything but you would expect the cheaper car companies what was this guy's title again?

18:44David Imel:connected company development

Read the full transcript

18:45Marques Brownlee:I would expect that in a company that's making modern cars where they have internet connections and the ability to download software updates and new ambient lighting settings and random gps enabled front axle lift i would not be shocked if the senior vp of connected whatever you said was like hey i have an idea we could make way more money from this if we also made it a billboard and they did

19:14David Imel:it yeah they had i still think they had such an opportunity to actually make this almost the exact same thing but the user had to find it and then it turns into this like scavenger hunt kind of that would be a way better experience it goes viral on twitter and instagram and everyone's actively trying to find a bmw to do it that would be a better experience but it would by default reach less people way less eyeballs i think well this is reaching a lot of eyeballs for the wrong reason. BMW was like, we can sell you

19:45Marques Brownlee:30 million eyeballs right now. And Marvel or whoever, Sony was like, deal. And so they just did it.

19:53David Imel:Kids movies these days. To Ellis' point, that's the only way to make money. You either make a new thing or you squeeze the customer for everything they have. That's called a shitification. Yeah. They already sold you the car, so how do we make more money? Let's put an ad on the screen. I'm gonna buy a vintage car. Can't wait for BMW season 37, man. Can I have a related reverse. did they even test this before we move on which is i have i've unlocked reverse because they didn't test this and it's improving my life we're like okay i like i've gone from like i love my lgtv all the way around to like get this thing out of my house i hate it so much and it's because of how poorly made the hardware and software is um but a little bit ago part of the so okay there's been a bunch of stuff coming out about how a lot of smart TVs are like doing lots of things on your network that you didn't give it permission to and the modems are held up and there's lots of traffic going in and out and that's why a lot of them are like so slow and unresponsive and my TV a little bit ago updated and then presented me with like a new user agreement and the LG terms of service are like a million pages long and they make you sign like 50 of them anyway I realized that this time with this user agreement there was a later button and I hit the later button and I do this every time I turn on my TV, I'm like, I'm not signing this.

21:13And it takes me to the homepage. Every time my TV has never run so smooth. I somehow it does not have permission to do something it needs. It wants to do. But my Internet in my apartment like reads faster when I do speed tests. The TV is more responsive. Apps are more responsive. And it's there's some background process I have not. And, you know, I do have to hit later, but I'm pretty I feel like I've slightly de-sh**tified my LG television.

21:42David Imel:Until you turn your TV on and just instinctively press OK or press down twice and it comes back up and accept and then you're just going to throw it out the window. What's beautiful is I have six separate agreements I need to hit. Oh, no. Every time you turn it on. But only one later button. So even if I slip once and accidentally agree to something, I still have five more. Wow. I hope it keeps working. We talked about the Slate truck many times, especially because recently they have put out new pricing. But it turns out Ford has some competition coming up.

22:16Marques Brownlee:They have some competition. They've unveiled the name and starting price of what they're going to have as basically their midsize electric truck platform. They're calling it Fathom, and it's going to start at$28 ,350 plus destination and delivery. So call it right around$30 ,000 for a small or a midsize electric truck. So basically, a lot of the people who are talking about the Slate being not competitive were comparing it to gas trucks. And the Maverick comes up a lot being like a$28 ,000 to$30 ,000 truck, which is fully equipped, obviously, because it doesn't need to spend money on the battery.

22:52Marques Brownlee:So it can do all of the screen, air conditioning, all the power windows and stuff like that. But the Slate was, I guess I was defending it because it kind of felt like it was a one-of-one without any real competition as a electric truck. But now this will be a one-to-one competitor. This will be another small electric truck option at this low price from Ford.

23:16David Imel:I'm already confused by that because midsize.

23:19Marques Brownlee:Yeah, officially the category is called midsize. I think that would be bigger than the Slate truck. Like the Rivian is a midsize pickup truck.

23:26David Imel:Yeah, but that's like significantly bigger than the Slate truck. that's like four door so like yeah google says like tacoma ranger canyon frontier like all about

23:37Marques Brownlee:those are sized yeah closer to rivian r1t yes so yeah that would naturally have still more seats than the slate truck this appears to be a more well-equipped truck than the slate truck but we're gonna get way more options later this is gonna be coming in 2027 but it's just interesting to see us actually getting something responding to slate and slotting into this absolutely baseline super cheap electric car category we've been waiting for sub 30 000 evs that don't suck for 10 years

24:05David Imel:now 15 years now it would be really funny and super american if the first under 30k ev that like really slapped was a pickup truck it sounds like that's what we're gonna like because we

24:17Marques Brownlee:wanted a model two for forever we have model three obviously knocking on the door 30 something And CyberCab is still not here. Shocker. Just give me a key truck. Give it time. That's what, okay. I hear that a lot, but people don't really buy those. Well, I just want, I'm surprised why they can't. Yeah, because they can only go like 60 miles an hour. Well, I guess if you could buy a gas one, like people just default to buying their stuff here.

24:44David Imel:There is this guy, this is such a tangent, in like Detroit that has a YouTube channel that's like making the basis for like what you're talking about or the platform for it and like there's a lot of external modification you can do i don't know how legal it's anyway it probably not very i'm surprised that was so basic i'm sure there's more into it but this feels like i would guess this is closer to ranger size when i want the maverick size which is still four doors smaller bed away a much smaller truck but feels like something that would be closer to this price range a ranger is like quite a bit bigger than a maverick yeah and all of them feel like nothing compared to an f-150 and then all the truck guys are gonna be like f-150 is a ladies truck

25:30Marques Brownlee:f-750 is a full-size pickup truck and i think if you ever like sit in one you're like oh my god this is a massive truck it's a big truck so yeah this this will be i'm curious to keep an eye on this it's also a platform that can theoretically be more than just this pickup truck so we'll see more versions of low-end EVs from Ford based on this platform when they start making them. So TBD, just an interesting headline. Yeah. Yeah. Fathom. Didn't they stop making the Lightning? They did stop producing the Lightning. So, yes. Is this where they're refocusing their electric efforts, I guess? Basically, yeah.

26:04Marques Brownlee:And I think a lot of people read into discontinuing the Lightning as, oh, well, the one thing, I mean, they make the Mustang Mach-E, but like the one thing you expect to be successful from Ford, the electric version of their best-selling vehicle didn't work well enough to sell. They must be done with electric, but they're sort of repositioning into a way cheaper electric car. What does a regular F-150 usually start at? Oh, let me see. It's the most popular vehicle in America, so it can't be that crazy. F-150 starting price. MSRP is$37 ,000 basically. So very interesting to me that Ford is making an electric vehicle that is cheaper than its gas truck.

26:42David Imel:Well, one of its gas trucks. One of its gas trucks. And an uncomparable gas truck. Because they're just totally different things. Like, what does a Ranger start at?

26:48Marques Brownlee:Yeah, the Maverick is, yeah. The Ranger's like 33, the Maverick's like 38.

26:51David Imel:Yeah, so then it's more expensive. Or no, no, no. No, it is still cheaper. Yeah, sorry. I mean, if it's cheaper, then it's like cheapest truck. That's kind of crazy. My guess is why they're pivoting to this is F1 people still either or believe they tow.

27:07Marques Brownlee:F1 50 people? Yes.

27:09David Imel:And therefore, towing with electric significantly gets harder. Therefore, that's why they're doing the new. And they're not like totally ditching it. They're doing the like electric with gas generator kind of hybrid. But I bet people looking for whether this is Maverick or Ranger size, less people in that tow while still wanting a truck bed. etc etc so yeah i guess it would hit better even though it's not the most popular selling vehicle

27:37Marques Brownlee:in the u.s yeah if people are honest about themselves and what they really are getting a truck for they can probably get the smaller one yeah and if they're not honest about themselves they'll comment on this yeah i tow once a year and it's so worth carrying around 3 000 extra pounds every time i drive anyway uh what's the next story the eu is requiring cross-platform clipboard from Apple to Windows. I saw this.

28:02David Imel:So Adam and Marquez seemed interested in this. I wrote down some notes really quick.

28:08Marques Brownlee:Yeah. Okay. Explain what it is. So I guess first the cross, the clipboard feature, like you can copy and paste obviously on a Mac. There is a continuity feature built into Mac OS and iOS and iPad OS that lets you copy and paste between devices. So I use this all the time. I'll copy a password from 1Passwords on my Mac, and I go into the text field on my iPhone, and I hit paste, and it pastes it from my Mac. It's pretty nice. It's a super useful feature. It's just for the devices in the Mac ecosystem, the Apple ecosystem.

28:41David Imel:Microsoft filed an EU inoperability request asking Apple to open, it's called Universal Clipboard, which does what you just said. and according to MacRumors, it seems as Apple is currently working on that right now. Now, I guess the issue with, if it happened right now with what it was, every time you went to paste something, you would have to grant permissions, which is awful. The thing they're working on - Sort of like accepting an airdrop. It's not like the worst thing.

29:09Marques Brownlee:It's a one click maybe.

29:10David Imel:Every time you paste, having to accept permissions would be terrible. It's cross device. Yeah. It's like one more click. It'd be annoying, but - I guess every time you're pasting would be really annoying. This would be so this would open it up to, well, that's what would happen if it were available now. What they're working on would be something where allowing copy and paste the clipboard to be cross platform through device pairing with a one time permission. So like it would be a device pair. I think they said similar to something they did in iOS 26 with like watch notifications. There's something I didn't fully.

29:48David Imel:I don't use Apple stuff. I didn't even know universal clipboard was a thing. Oh, it's amazing. So I'm learning about it through this. I use it all the time, so it's very annoying when it doesn't work. Yeah, and I have to assume that this is one of those things where if you are in the Apple ecosystem and you use it, you know what it is. If you're not, you don't really know what it is. So the people who are, Microsoft is claiming this is one of the most requested productivity features that they would like added to Windows because there are enough people that use a iPhone and a Windows laptop. presumably probably for work.

30:20David Imel:I'm sure so many people use stuff for work. Absolutely for work. Yeah. Absolutely. So Apple is claiming that they are, let me see, that they're introducing cross-device copy and paste is a significant engineering effort with work expected to be completed by fall of 2027, which is when it would probably go into beta following full release after that. So we're talking like 2028 by the time this potentially comes out. And as far as I know, possibly only for the EU. I don't know if that means it would come here eventually if they're going to do it anyways. So tell me, the headline you wrote here is EU requires.

30:56So is the EU requiring this or is this just something that Microsoft requested and Apple is working on it?

31:03David Imel:I guess like there. Yeah, maybe the EU is not requiring it, but it's being requested through the EU inoperability, which is under the DMCA Act. And yeah, it's a request. It's a request. The Digital Markets Act through the EU. It seems like Apple's working on it. Okay. It hasn't been put into law, but Apple is working on it anyway. Yes. Here's my question about this.

31:26Marques Brownlee:Is this going, not this in particular, but is all this going a little too far? That is also my question.

31:32David Imel:I think there is no middle ground on this headline. I think it is either EU's or like governing agencies are forcing tech companies to do too much with little knowledge about tech, which is like at the head of like fair. Like we know governing agencies don't know a lot about technology. Are they stifling things? But also there's a I'm sure a whole nother part of this that's like 2027. Apple can't just get this going right now. You know, they can. they're actively being a monopoly yeah so i don't think there's a middle ground here in anyone responding to this even though there probably is a middle ground of like this does actually take a whole new team to do this because of the variables for something like windows they obviously can do cross-platform stuff way easier because they run the full stack but also like yeah eu probably is gonna or like governing agencies are gonna screw some things up here every once in a while even if their good ideas on the surface.

32:33Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. The primary question here is that like interoperability generally gives consumers more control and more options and consumers having more options allows capitalism to work better. And when you have a duopoly in a market, you kind of generally have to make sure that there's enough interoperability so that people don't get locked into one. and slowly that duopoly just merges into a monopoly. But the question becomes like, because these platforms are both like now part of our foundational daily life, but they're also companies, at what point is the regulation of forcing interoperability just stifling the innovation and benefit of one company?

33:21And that's the weird, that's the really weird middle ground that I think these regulatory bodies have to mess with. The US usually errs on the side of just like let the free market play out. The EU generally errs on the side of like the consumer is the most important thing we should care about.

33:40Marques Brownlee:It's been interesting to watch. I think to that question you asked, Adam, it seems to come down to have you as a company been anti-competitive in the past? Because this is how I see it. Like we've seen the same headlines with like adding USB Type-C to the iPhone. Instead of the law being, hey, the iPhone has a lightning port, you need to make it USB Type-C. It wasn't exactly that. It was you must have a standardized single port across all these things. And so USB Type-C was the obvious answer. I think the law was that every device that charges has to have USB Type-C. Which is fine. And everyone agreed with that because we all like USB Type-C.

34:20Marques Brownlee:And Apple is using lightning. And so they update. Now everything is USB Type-C everywhere. But if you are, let's say, because then this is like another step over the line. This is, okay, we have interoperability between Mac and iPhone. You need to loop Windows into that too. If you were just like, erase the company names and erase the history of the companies in the past and you decided you were going to build a business or a product and you just make two products that work really well with each other and then the EU comes along and goes, hey, you have to make that also work with these other companies' products here.

34:54Marques Brownlee:They just added work to your table. They just made it less like special and made it harder to work well. That would feel like they're overstepping. Yeah. But it doesn't feel like they're overstepping because we all like the conclusion and also Apple has been anti-competitive. So we're OK with this.

35:09David Imel:I think the EU DMA Act, though, is specifically targeted at tech gatekeepers, which is a list of specific companies.

35:18Marques Brownlee:So it comes down to has your company been anti-competitive?

35:22David Imel:Which also, in a sense, feels like if you are big enough to be a gatekeeper, it's it's hard. It's harder to call it stifling because it isn't mom and pop X and Y thing that now you have to. It's like these are trillion dollar companies.

35:35Marques Brownlee:And I think we fairly we've pretty fairly assumed that the only way your product gets to be that popular is not just from being really good, but also because of some additional. Yeah, for sure. And that's why they're able to step in.

35:48David Imel:My favorite part about this was just that like in the DMA, the whole thing is to be like it's to help third party companies not get kept out of things by these gatekeepers. Yet this whole request is Microsoft asking Apple. Like it makes it seem like little Microsoft is having such a rough time that like big old Apple should throw it a bone. But I also well, they're a B2B in that tier. Yeah, but like I wonder if though this feels like it's, depending on your point of view, picking on Apple and or Apple doing what it should. Like, I just don't know if there's the equivalent on the other side of an easy interoperability between other products that could be like, well, we want this to work on Apple and Microsoft stifling us.

36:38David Imel:it's just because apple has it where like there's nothing to attack on the android uh microsoft side right now that's a good point where like maybe hopefully they would do the same thing to the other one so what you're saying is windows sucks as a windows user windows sucks because yeah if they have to force apple to give windows features but there ain't no features on windows they got of force Apple to have. It's because there's less like ecosystem. There's not an ecosystem. I know. It's locked. I know.

37:10Marques Brownlee:It's ecosystem locked. I'm trying to think of some of the ones. Aren't there some like with Android phones and Chromebooks? Aren't there some like you're logging to your Google account and there's some sync that works really well.

37:19David Imel:And this still is nowhere near as nice. It's like a device paired rather than like just full stack just by Apple iCloud account. It's copy and paste. Like it's not, this is not like difficult to implement. And then, you know, we know how copy to pay. It's not like SuperVOOC. Like, imagine the EU is like, does RealMeme do SuperVOOC? Is that their thing? It's Oppo. Damn it. It's like, picture the EU being like, yo, Oppo, we love SuperVOOC. Every device that plugs into a SuperVOOC charger, regardless of if you make it, needs to charge that fast. Like, that would literally be impossible. That's an impossible interoperability ask.

37:56But copy and paste, you know, I think we've... Well, it wouldn't be impossible, but I think it's just that that type of feature is not even remotely gatekept.

38:04David Imel:I think what Ellis is saying, though, is like copy and paste is almost like a quality of like it is an expected thing to happen. And like it's such an easy thing that everyone knows. Your charger needs to somehow work with every single device, regardless of the transformers and charge it at the 700 watts or whatever Superboot does nowadays.

38:22Marques Brownlee:You know, here's one because we've been using a bunch of different browsers. Chrome, one of the biggest browsers, right? arguably the biggest browser. You can actively sync with the mobile Chrome app. So the mobile Chrome app on your phone syncs with the mobile Chrome app on your desktop. Poor old Apple makes Safari, and you can't actively sync your tabs and bookmarks from Chrome in Safari.

38:44David Imel:I think you can.

38:45Marques Brownlee:Not actively sync. You can import them in Xbox, but you can't have them live update the way they do if you have Chrome.

38:51David Imel:Like between your phone and... Yeah. Like if you're on Safari on your phone and Chrome. But I think the difference is if you have Chrome on your iPhone, which would be the interoperability. We need to stop using this word because I'm screwing it up. You can, though, put Chrome on an iPhone and that will sync, correct?

39:10Marques Brownlee:In a world where there's no Chrome on the iPhone, we'd be asking Google to make Safari able to sync with Chrome.

39:19David Imel:I think you would be making Google make an iOS app in that sense. If it didn't exist, I think the other thing would be you need to, assuming it didn't exist because Chrome didn't put it on iOS, you would be forcing Google to make an iOS app.

39:34Marques Brownlee:Yeah, I guess I'm making a convoluted situation where there's no Chrome on the iPhone. There's only Safari.

39:39David Imel:Well, it would be who's blocking that would be the one getting told. Apple makes a Chrome extension called iCloud Bookmarks that syncs your Chrome Bookmarks live to your iCloud. Apple's such a good guy, man. So it's made by Apple and it syncs it to your iCloud and then those bookmarks show up in Safari. Just bookmarks. Just bookmarks. Not like it. Not your tabs. Not like open tabs that you're actively browsing on. Yeah. That's still something. Yeah. I think the thing that I think about with this is like, does it actively harm the consumer? because like if you think back to like Apple not putting RCS on the iPhone that was like that's making their iPhone customers have a less secure experience when they use SMS.

40:24Right. So the EU had to step in. This I feel like isn't that. This is like a competitive advantage. Convenience. Copy paste. I disagree. I think it is harmful to consumers solely because one of the main, not main, but I would describe it as the universal clipboard is top five Apple ecosystem features that make me want to stay in the Apple ecosystem. Yeah. And removing any sort of freedom of choice from the consumer is, you know. Yeah, but the argument would be, it's just a good feature. The argument from Microsoft would probably be like, or from Apple would probably be, well, Microsoft could make universe copy paste between its phone and computer.

41:05Oh, oh. And they have the option to make a competitive phone. Well, I don't know if they do now. They did 15 years ago, and they failed. So that would probably be Apple's argument. There was a world five years ago.

41:23Marques Brownlee:There was a world five years ago where this continuity was added as a feature. There was a world where this didn't exist. So Apple came along and went, hey, we have iPhone, we have iPad, we have Mac. We have this continuity feature where you can use your iPhone as the webcam for your Mac. and we can live copy and paste things between them. Oh, great, convenient feature. I don't see any harm in not actively developing that for other people's platforms. Yeah. But it would be nice. Yeah.

41:52David Imel:I mean, Apple's never going to purposely go out and build this themselves without someone to tell them because it's a waste of resources in their eyes. Why would they? It's the obvious. And because part of it is because... Well, no, no, what I'm saying is... I guarantee you in the next 30 seconds, I can find five things on the internet that Apple does that is a bigger waste of their infinite resources. Yeah, but why would they just go out and do something to make it easier for other people to use a Windows computer with an iPhone? I'm not saying this is better for their consumers. I'm saying it's better for their pocket.

42:24David Imel:It's a waste of their resources in the sense of direct ROI to them. Maybe some users of that, but they've clearly run the stats and that is not positive for them, even though it's positive for their consumers. Maybe there's some guy out there in Belgium who has to use a Windows computer for his sick gaming rig, and he also wants to own an iPhone. That's what I'm saying.

42:45Marques Brownlee:You know the Tim Cook quote. Just buy your mom an iPhone. I'm still saying, though. But now there's more of a reason to, because you can copy and paste to your PC. No.

42:55David Imel:I'm not saying it's good for Apple users. I'm saying Apple doesn't give a s*** that it's good for Apple users.

43:00Marques Brownlee:Here's one that they haven't added yet. The continuity camera feature. So whenever you open Zoom or any video calling app, annoyingly they're like, would you like to use, I hate this feature too. I never want to use this. But this is in the same exact set of walls, right? Sure, sure. It asks you, do you want to use your iPhone as a webcam for this video call? Yeah. If you hit yes, it has this whole Bluetooth handshake and it like immediately shows you your live feed from your iPhone, which is a much higher quality camera than the webcam built into your Mac. Generally. That is an option for you, right?

43:29Marques Brownlee:Do we think that that should also be included in this for Windows PCs, for example? Or is it just not a good enough feature that we don't care? I just think that it's not a feature that keeps you in the Apple ecosystem because generally people's webcams are good enough. For some non-zero percent group of people, they're like, I gotta keep using my Mac because I can use my iPhone as a webcam. But that is such a small group of people. It's a small group of people. The amount of people texting Android to iPhone is like more than people texting iPhone to iPhone. That feature isn't actively harming the consumer though, going back to my point.

44:06It's just a nice feature. Yeah, it'd be nice if they made it for everyone. I'm all for that. I just don't see the point in forcing them to because it's not actively hurting anyone. Yeah. I think the RCS SMS thing was actively hurting, not really hurting, but you know what I mean. Like it's a bad situation.

44:20David Imel:Potentially hurting people. Yeah. This is not that. It's just a nice feature.

44:24Marques Brownlee:Yeah.

44:25David Imel:Yeah. It also, and if I'm like David's right, I put requires. I don't see anything requires just that Apple is responding to a request. Apple might just be like, good guy. Okay, here's a request that scores us. Not good guy. Not good guy. Because they would have done it themselves if they were a good guy. But like Microsoft files a request. Request is out there. We have to respond to it. Maybe this is one thing that's, you know, still going to take a while, but the team is small enough. It paints us in a good light for a minute. it's like when they started pretending they cared about repairability for a while like yeah good headline here we go companies will also preemptively add things that are not that big of a lift for them in order to make the eu think that they're not trying to be a gatekeeper like meta has done this various times like when they were trying to figure out whether or not whatsapp was a gatekeeper and then whatsapp like improved its features like the day before the deadline and they're like i I guess you're not.

45:22Like, you would have been. You would have been. And yeah, I think for them, to your point, Marques, non-zero amount of people who care about this. And Apple's like, I don't think that we're going to lose Mac users because the only people that actually need this are the people that actively are using an iPhone and a Windows computer. And I don't think it's going to stop people from buying MacBooks. And Apple probably knows that. so it's possible that in the future the eu could have required this if they determined that it was a primary core feature that needed to have interoperability they still could they still could and it's probably smart of apple to get ahead of it my favorite thing in the verge comments

46:04David Imel:for this was like a bunch of pissed off eu regulators who have their iphones but all their work computers are windows and government agencies are like i can't copy when i'm working at coffee shops dude it's like iphone and like the oldest lenovo laptop you've ever seen the business laptop the biggest bezel like yeah it's crazy yeah this is funny we've argued for this for so long and i didn't even know it existed before and i'm just like i don't care it's amazing but it doesn't work all the time um i've been having problems with it working recently maybe because i'm on the betas how do you okay i have a question for you andrew because when i slack it slack it to yourself i just slack myself everything that's crazy i used to use telegram for that um i would telegram myself every link that i wanted to open on my laptop damn you know there's apps for this it's funny you guys talk i don't do like tab syncing in my phone i think i don't know i like i like my things to be separate i don't want them all to be the same thing.

47:08David Imel:I like the fresh start when I go somewhere. Yeah, but all the time you get like a text with a video link on your phone and you want to watch it on your laptop or something. Yeah. Oh, I also do I use in-web Google messages on my... Oh, yeah. I just use like web messages as a tab. Oh, I have a psychotic answer to your question. Okay. I will press play on the video so that it starts on my phone, then I will stop it. Go to your history? Go to my history. Oh, I do that.

47:29Marques Brownlee:I do that all the time. That's a really good... That's actually probably the best use of the history. It definitely is. I do that for my projector because my projector runs Android TV and there's no way to just like copy paste to my instructor.

47:41David Imel:Or just to the YouTube app on your TV. Like, oh, play it on my phone. Go to my library history on the TV and then play it for two seconds. Yeah. Wow. The workarounds that we do.

47:53Marques Brownlee:I have hacks where I know I want to download I have a flight coming up so I want to download YouTube videos onto my iPad so I can watch them and I'll find a video on my phone that I would like to watch later on my iPad so I have to remind myself later to find it again and download it. Why don't you just save to watch later? Because I don't use watch later. I use it constantly. So I will save the video to my raindrop.io bookmarks folder so that before the flight I can open those bookmarks in the YouTube app and download them all. Why don't you just use watch later? That's what the feature is for.

48:25Marques Brownlee:Because sometimes it's not all YouTube videos. Sometimes it's a couple articles I want to read offline. Sometimes I just ran all this stuff. But the YouTube videos I have to download because I can't watch them offline without downloading. Okay, I can see that.

48:36David Imel:Watch Later to me is a playlist I never go to, but I hope YouTube thinks I actually want to watch this later and they'll recommend it to me. It's basically me being like, it's okay to not watch this right now and then forget about it. I always forget about it. Videos in your Watch Later do show up on your homepage. Okay. They do. And it'll say like from Watch Later. Okay. So I just hope that that happens one day and then I probably click Watch Later again on it. Take a guess. I have like 600 videos in my Watch Later playlist. Take a guess at how many videos are currently in my Watch Later. How long have you been using Watch Later?

49:06For a while. I think there's 350 videos in your Watch Later. 700. There are 716 videos in my Watch Later. I've got you beat. I only have 30. I have 910.

49:18David Imel:Oh, sorry. And I would say about half of these are watched. No, actually about a third. You don't remove it once you watch it? I'm screwed. No. What? Okay, wait. Now that we're far down this rabbit hole, this is a problem that I have had the past couple days. I have like 600, 700 something videos in my watch later. Do I just delete them and start fresh? Yeah. You say keep them. The more useful feature of watch later is that when you add it to watch later, it will then show up at the top of your YouTube feed the next time you open YouTube. That is a more. Yes. That's nice. That makes it more useful to me than a folder of videos that I want to watch.

49:55That's nice. Because I very rarely go to YouTube to be like, look at my backlog. No, it's like feed me algorithm.

50:02Marques Brownlee:I just. I just. I sometimes save videos that I know I don't want to watch right now, but I have a flight in two days. I'm like, that's when I'll watch that. It's a 30-minute video. I don't have time right now. You should just download it. But I'm on my phone and when I find it, and I want to watch it on my iPad, that's the dilemma. Interesting. You know how there's a feature now on the iPhone where on the App Store you can hit, like, download to your other computer. You can download the apps. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can download apps to other Apple devices through the App Store and through the Play Store.

50:33You should just be able to do that with videos, too.

50:37Marques Brownlee:YouTube, free suggestion. I have a bunch of logged-in devices. Let me download, but tell another device to download. Guys, guys, this is called consulting. We don't do this for free. I really want the future so bad, I'm willing to give it away for free. What if we did it as a social feature where you hit download, and it downloads it on your friend's phone, and then they have it. And then it opens a chat window? Yeah. Anyway, I think we do a full episode, like a bonus episode or like a segment on like little dumb workarounds that we do because features don't exist. I think that would be fun. Can we also in real time vibe code all of these features and see if we come out with a working YouTube?

51:16Marques Brownlee:The hardest part of this is realizing that you have dumb workaround features because you've been doing them for so long that they're just normal. Yeah, that you didn't even think about. You're like, oh, you know, I do kind of do this. I guess I do watch that for two seconds and then go on my projector. go to history like yeah yeah it is funny well let us know what your favorite hats are i'm currently cleaning my watch later that's funny yeah i opened my watch later i had one video deleted it i think it was there by accident honestly you're also an inbox zero guys like it's a youtube yeah inbox zero yeah i'm picturing like the youtube i'm assuming somewhere out there some youtube employees are hearing us have this right now yes hello and uh you there write this down and i can only imagine they're just like thinking about how every single tiny change they make to the platform, you know, affects hundreds of millions of customers.

52:06Billions of people. Every day. And they're here to be like, they should overhaul everything like this. What's the worst that could happen? We know better than them.

52:13Marques Brownlee:Yeah.

52:13David Imel:We know better than the millions of other customers. I'm saying.

52:16Marques Brownlee:Yeah. Yeah.

52:16David Imel:Change to the

52:17Marques Brownlee:five people. I would consider myself a professional YouTube user. That's it? I think that's true. I use YouTube a lot. Okay, but also counterpoint most people aren't and companies make features based on what most people do not what the power users do unfortunately and most people listen to waveform I think the download thing are born in California I think most people download videos on their device to watch it later when they don't have an internet connection right that's what I do that's the Netflix thing so I think I think they should build around that. They should go, ah, you're going to, the only reason you're hitting download is because you're going to watch this later when you don't have an internet connection.

53:04Marques Brownlee:And you have a watch later feature, so you should like sort of synergize. Well, they did. Because there's an auto download feature on YouTube and it downloads you videos that it thinks you want to watch automatically. Yeah, but it's wrong. It is wrong. I would say about one fifth of the videos I actually want to watch. But it does, there is a hit rate of some kind. It's not zero. It's non-zero. It's not high. Anyway, that's the European Union. Yeah. So do you actually want to hit this Firefox topic or not?

53:35David Imel:I'll go really fast. Okay. Okay, Firefox. It's the browser that I say I love all the time, yet could never answer a single reason as to why I love it other than Pretty Icon, and I've been using it for a decade. Not Chrome. Yes, not Chrome. Not Google. They added a new feature, and I feel like this is the first time I've brought a browser feature to the table because you guys are all masochists when it comes to browsers. And anyways. Yeah, I have four browsers pinned to my doc right now. Y 'all are crazy. Anyways, they just added in the right-click menu, open in split view, which is where in any link you can right-click.

54:12David Imel:And then instead of like open a new tab, open a new window, there's a split view and it will create a tab group of those two. You can click between the split view and that will change the URL bar. So you can change it in that. It has been super helpful in writing the podcast because earlier in the week, I will just open a doc and throw the links to all the headlines we want to talk about. And now just in the doc, I can right click and open each one, write down all my bullet points. And then it's there. Did you know that every browser has this feature? Not Firefox. Firefox may have had this for years.

54:46David Imel:I've just never seen that specific thing. I was waiting for him to say that same thing. Well, I still need to tell them a couple of things they need to work out. First of all, it's not perfect.

54:55Marques Brownlee:It feels like Safari doesn't.

54:58David Imel:All right. Well, have I ever recommended Safari? My two biggest gripes. When the when there's something open in split view, you then lose the option to open something in split view again. It should just replace the thing to the right. So like if I'm I have two windows split and on the left, I have a link and I want to open in split view. I should just replace the one on the right and then add that to the back button. I should be able to go between it. And if I want to close the split view tab, the only way to close one window is to close it in the tab. And then for some reason, it goes to the next tab as the window that's open or the tab that's open.

55:36David Imel:So like if I'm in Google Docs and have Verge on the right of it and I'm reading and writing, if I want to close the Verge, it should stay on the Google Doc. Yeah. For some reason, it goes to. So here we go. I'm going to open this minimal phone. Spoiler alert for what we're talking about next. open in split view I don't care that's probably Dia and Dia sucks when I close when I close this now the YouTube one yeah oh it did stand I don't know before it wasn't I don't know maybe that one's right look Firefox for life Firefox Dia sucks if you want a direct line to Andrew they follow me on Instagram you can have it DM me just email him they have emailed me before I have done calls with them Andrew you don't have to live like this I also probably won't take these calls because I can't tell you anything about this I like split view baby you just told them a bunch of things about it you were just wrong about it they fixed it already they're already listening to me please go to the next thing Ellis will be excited about this so we talked briefly about the minimal phone 2 last week if you didn't know what the minimal phone was shut up Marquez's mic cut it cut it uh we did a video on the studio channel last last year about minimal phones uh different kind of like phones that get you off of your phone ironic the minimal phone one was an e-ink phone or at least an e-paper display phone and it was very difficult to use on purpose that was the whole point minimal is now back with the minimal phone two uh we talked about briefly on the podcast last week because they showed a very very brief teaser in which they just showed the outline of the device now now they have a full youtube trailer for the minimal phone too um looks pretty nice you know it's a it's got a keyboard uh but instead of the e ink or e paper display it is now oled and the interesting thing about it is that the ux actually looks very nice um it has this really specific like deep blacks oled plus orange plus white aesthetic it's very minimal you might say um and yeah the full announcement and pre-orders are gonna go live on august 10th which is next monday on kickstarter uh ellis do you have anything to add about this So much.

57:58I don't know. No, because they didn't really announce that many things about it. The UX looks pretty cool. I have two thoughts exactly. Only two. I killed your mic. You can't share the fact. I don't know. There's so much speculation about what it's going to be able to do on Twitter. The thing that I'm kind of most interested in is one of the founders. So there's a notification light. They didn't mention this in the teaser. There's like a notification light, old school LED. and they showed a picture of it flashing blue and one of the founders said it will flash blue specifically when you have an iMessage come in.

58:34And it was not explained how and it was not explained why and I had my iMessage working on the first minimal phone. Fine. How? With Marques, I'm bringing your mic back.

58:50With, I forget which one it was. with one of the, like I ran a server on my iMac at home. But I didn't need to sign in my iCloud like anywhere suspicious. Like it was just, it was running a server. I was running a client on the phone. Super minimal. Yeah, yeah, you could say that. I think like the part I remember being the most annoying for minimal phone one was the hardware software integration. Like there were so many things with like screen sensitivity and brightness that just like never really, I felt like didn't get worked out by the time I stopped using it. And this new one looks so chic and sleek.

59:28I meant sleek. It does not look chic. There's nothing chic about using this thing. But I'm so excited for this thing. I agree with you, David. I think the minimal launcher, the updated minimal launcher looks dope. Looks nice. We're about to hit an interesting golden age of minimal devices. The Clix Communicator is coming out fairly soon.

59:47David Imel:market share about to go .1 baby it's about to hit.01 it's going to be incredible I can't wait for this whole segment to just be slow zooming in on Marquez's face you are the editor look look look

1:00:02Marques Brownlee:I have two thoughts they might surprise you they're not going to

1:00:09David Imel:he's going to say it looks good

1:00:11Marques Brownlee:my first thought this looks really cool I am intrigued because the balance between like the purpose of a minimal phone and not having social media and doom scrolling but still being able to do stuff, this just from the teaser seems to be able to do a lot more stuff and actively avoid the downfalls of the stuff you're avoiding. So I'm curious to try it. But two, this worries me that they're doing a teaser video showing the chic new hardware and OLED display and all this price, and they haven't shown a price tag. And I am worried that this is going to be eight, nine, thousand dollar phone.

1:00:56David Imel:Can you really put a price on productivity?

1:00:59Marques Brownlee:I think this might be a$900 phone. No. Seven, I bet seven. The first one was like$400. I'm guessing. Look at this, compared to that one. This is a slow-mo video. $649 is my guess. With these beautiful renders of this amazing OLED display. It's 49 seconds of amazing hardware. And this... With almost no sound design.

1:01:22David Imel:I don't know why it makes me laugh that the minimal phone has so many buttons on it. I know it's a keyboard, but there's just something about like... It's a keyboard.

1:01:32Marques Brownlee:The first minimal phone was$450. It's actually... And worth every penny. It was$500. I'm gonna guess$650. I guess. And this one has an... That one had an e-paper display. This is an OLED. OLED's probably cheaper than e-paper. Not a nice OLED. e-paper is not produced in mass enough to be cheap. You don't need a nice OLED. This is a teaser implying a nice OLED.

1:01:55David Imel:I would argue you need a nice OLED when you have so little on the screen because the blacks mean so much more to look like a nice screen.

1:02:03Marques Brownlee:A bright OLED that actually is black in the blacks with this UI.

1:02:07David Imel:The UI that we're looking at would be better with a nice OLED screen.

1:02:12Marques Brownlee:this video all these close-ups of the switches like they're playing this video implying a very premium experience and a very premium hardware and a very premium price tag is usually what

1:02:22David Imel:comes with that that's all i'm saying damn rooting this is going to be sick launching don't separate

1:02:27Marques Brownlee:don't android launcher on this is going to be so nice don't buy an 800 phone you know how it's all right let's place your bets this is is 800 649 on kickstarter early bird pricing

1:02:40David Imel:that doesn't count for anything it's a kickstarter isn't it that was like that xiaomi phone that was like 249 to the first 100 people and then it was like 400 dollars

1:02:50Marques Brownlee:after that it's gonna be okay it's a kickstarter I joined the waitlist by the way already earlier today so we'll see I had so many more thoughts about the video than I did about the phone from the video and that might be because I'm on minimal phone twitter doesn't that worry you that there's so much in this video that's promising so many interesting little things I had the opposite feeling I was like God I really don't want to just like be a jerk because it is like a really high quality video but the whole time I was watching it I was like there's no environmental sound and there's no sound effects for any of the motion and so it feels like no guys that's not what that means it feels it felt to me like they had done like a blender animation and then just sort of like set music to it like yeah whereas like that's what it is but it would have been a much more impactful communicative trailer had like all of these things made sounds and it had been in a space and like they might not have physical units made yet they definitely don't it's kickstart yeah that's almost more reason to have sound yeah go to go to free sound effects.google.com when you said in a space i thought you meant like a real video no like adding reverb and ambience and like i was like So you're saying you want them to hire you to do something?

1:04:05I'm saying I will be the greatest. Look, minimal phone company. I'll give you the buddy, the family, friends and family discount of a lifetime. If you bring the... I think I might be either the best sound designer who's also a number one minimal phone fan or the best minimal phone fan who happens to be a sound designer. I feel like I'm at the peak of those two. Watch someone come out of the world.

1:04:32David Imel:Hans Zimmer has a minimal phone, right? No way. He would have called me by now.

1:04:36Marques Brownlee:Now that you've seen this video and you're interested in the phone, can I get you to commit to a price tag that is too high to be reasonable? Like at what point am I like this phone is too expensive? Like now that you've seen this and it's a minimal phone and you've seen what you've seen. I have one follow-up question, though. Does it assume that a lot of the integration features are fixed in this version? or is it like does it have the same bugs that were there when i stopped using they fixed everything they fixed everything everything i would pay careful yeah i know i would pay oh i'm gonna make you mad marquez oh no assuming they fixed everything right and like it everything that's in this video just works the integrations the software i would pay the same price that I paid for my iPhone 17 Pro for this.

1:05:34Isn't that$1 ,000? That's a bold thing. $1 ,000. Because it's clearly less capable than the iPhone. You're serious.

1:05:41David Imel:That's crazy. Yeah, I would pay$1 ,000. Because I want all these features in a phone. You have them. You have all of these features. You have them. You just also have more of them. No, no, no. I want a physical keyboard. I want a headphone. I want all of these things. And But at the expensive... I don't think that's that crazy. I have another question. Yeah. You mentioned Minimal Phone Twitter before. How active is Minimal Phone Twitter? Pretty active. Sounds like it's not working very well. Why? It's 45 ,000 views. Because they're on their computers too much. Well, because they shouldn't be on Twitter.

1:06:15There's no Twitter on the Minimal Phone. Yeah, question, Alice. Does this run other Android apps? Yeah. So you could run Sunbird, which just relaunched, which allows you to have iFo... Well, it sounds like they're trying to do it by itself. It sounds like they're doing something, but they haven't said anything. They just said, Bloom iMessage notification. Wait, so you're saying that, oh, you're saying that Minimal Phone is offering iMessage support? They haven't said anything. I believe, I can't remember if it was Andre or the other founder, and I'm so sorry, I can't remember the other founder's name.

1:06:45He posted a screenshot of his, like, dev unit showing off the notification LED because he was like, oh, people always say they want this back, we're going to show it off. and he posted a Twitter picture of the LED being blue and he said it will be blue when you have iMessage notifications. He did not explain what that meant. Yeah. I would be willing to bet that they're doing a collaboration with Sunbird. I really hope not. Remember, Sunbird did a collaboration previously. I know, but Sunbird was a bad solution to that problem. It was a broken... Yeah, it was not... No, it's a solution that requires me giving possibly my most sensitive password to a random warehouse somewhere in, you know, like...

1:07:25Yeah, true.

1:07:27David Imel:When you said iMessage, the first thing I thought was companion phone. Do you think there's a chance this is a companion phone? That changes everything. That literally changes everything. I mean, I can't imagine them straight up saying iMessage without it just being like, this is now the companion to your iPhone. I used to say companion phone before, like, when I was books palming you know may is my main but like which has its own benefits because then you can still do apple stuff you know dude if also if the if they never get because the the nfc paying never worked in my minimum phone one two which produced some really hilarious moments of me trying to get on the subway and that dumb phones video adam and i did um if that's not fixed that gets old really fast yeah like the feeling of missing a train because you're just like tapping your phone over and over again.

1:08:22My problem with all of these is that they make amazing secondary devices. And I want one that's as good to be a primary device. So to Ellis' point, I don't think spending a lot of money

1:08:32David Imel:is crazy for one of these. But I would like it to be able to be my primary device and have everything fixed and work perfectly. That would be nice. That would be the dream. But as of right now, everything we've tried, it seems to flourish as a secondary device. And nothing seems minimal. like having to carry two phones. Yeah. I think you're... Okay, it's because naming it, this is the same thing with the essential is when you name it so precisely, you're inviting people to dunk on you for essentially anything. Pun intended. The essential con, man. You could say that about everything. You could be like, someone could be like, I'm trying to do like a minimal aesthetic.

1:09:11Check out my black sweater. It could be like, there's like 30 ,000 pieces of thread in that sweater, bro. Like real minimal. You know, it doesn't really work.

1:09:18David Imel:Yeah, except the sweater's not called the minimal sweater. this is calling itself the minimal phone i'm saying essential if yeah i don't know if you're in the uh like phones twitter with essential phone but it was like we're the essential phone oh but you don't have a headphone jack that's it's just like it got dunked on for any personal opinion that someone had that that phone didn't have that we'll do a bonus episode it'll be me and you some leather armchairs a nice fireplace i'll be wearing a black turtleneck and some spectacles and it'll be called ellis and andrews adventures through the semantics of minimalism And we'll just do like an art history survey.

1:09:52I'm the least minimal person ever. No, but maybe then you realize you are kind of, we'll do a survey through like art and philosophy history. I would watch that fuck out of that. Until we arrive at what minimalism actually is. We'll listen to some Philip Glass. I understand.

1:10:07David Imel:It's just Andrew asleep on the chair. I was talking and sipping whiskey.

1:10:12Marques Brownlee:The description of this video, I mean, they use the word minimal, but I think it's, they're trying to apply something else. that's just like no social media, no distractions. Because the description is, this is the first official look at everything we've been building quietly. A premium, compact 5G phone with a full QWERTY keyboard, an OLED display, and an experience to help you stay focused brings thoughtful hardware and intentional software in one device built for communication, productivity, and getting things done. It's more than a minimal thing.

1:10:41David Imel:It says experience designed to help you stay focused without giving up the tools you need.

1:10:45Marques Brownlee:Yeah, pretty critically. So like Slack. But if it's just running Android, can I install it anyway? Hell yeah, brother. Or is it not running Android? I think it's probably running Android. It's definitely going to be running Android. So there's one, I'm not going to call it a review. One YouTuber got a prototype dev device and was allowed to play with it. He was not allowed to show it on camera. But he did. No, no, no, no, no, no. He did show it on camera. There was shots on camera. and it has the Android lock screen, like where you do the... But I wouldn't be surprised if the minimal launcher, the launcher that it comes with, integrates with the hardware.

1:11:25Everything is just Android at the end of the day, which is just Linux at the end of the day. On my minimal phone one, I installed a different launcher. I don't remember which one I had, but I was not using minimal launcher on my first one. Okay. Do you want me to keep talking about minimal phone? No, I remember when we said that this was going to be a quick segment. Yeah, let's wait till we have more info.

1:11:45David Imel:This whole episode is quick segments and then us yapping. Yeah, the European Union section was long. Especially I want to keep talking about the minimal phone. I do, unfortunately, today have maximal trivia to ask you guys. Oh, don't look so disappointed. That was fine. Maximal. Oh, this is just how I look. No, that resting disappointment face. I liked it. Today's first trivia question is inspired by my best friend Ian who was visiting me over the weekend. And you guys brought up a Ford truck called the Fathom, which we all know can mean to conceive of something far off. However, Fathom has a second definition.

1:12:29It's a unit of distance. It's a nautical. Wait, is it Fathom or Fathon?

1:12:33David Imel:It was just spelled wrong in the doc. Oh, okay. I got it. Wait, how is it actually spelled? No, it just said N in the doc instead of M. Oh, okay, okay. We're good. Trivia question stands. Yep. And the reason this is part of my best friend Ian is because there was a few years where as a joke, he memorized, you guys ever heard of a gill? It's like another old-timey... Like the fish thing? No, there's an old-timey unit of measurement called a gill. It's a 32nd of a gallon that we don't use anymore. And my best friend Ian memorized that and would only give units of volume in gills for like years. It drove everyone insane.

1:13:06It was hilarious. Sounds very imperial to me. And so, because I know none of you know what a fathom is as a unit of measurement, I'm here to ask you, of these old-timey units of nautical measurement, which one is the farthest? A, the fathom. B, the league. C, the shackle. Or D, the twas. I have

1:13:35Marques Brownlee:almost no idea I have only one tiny little bit of information about one of them which is League which is the book called 40 ,000 Leagues Under the Sea 20 ,000 Leagues 20 ,000 Leagues Under the Sea so a league can't be that big that's what I was

1:13:49David Imel:see pretty deep literally my same mindset I was like if it's 20 ,000 I don't think the earth's core could go that far it's gotta be yards if it was actually big a league is probably a yard this is not a science podcast yeah

1:14:02Marques Brownlee:alright All right. Go think about it. We'll probably learn something at the end. Shout out Ian. Answers at the end, like usual. We'll be right back.

1:14:17Marques Brownlee:Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is a complete website platform, not just a builder, so teams can launch and keep improving their websites in one place. Thousands of businesses, from early-stage startups to Fortune 500s, are choosing to

1:14:55Marques Brownlee:We'll see you next time.

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1:15:37Marques Brownlee:The moment your first customer is ready to pay, Shopify checkout helps them finish their purchase, and when they come back, their details are already saved. One tap, and they're done, because the hard part should be coming up with a great idea, not making the sale. And with Shopify handling the setup and checkout, you have more time with the more important things, whether that's planning the next campaign or developing your newest offering. And if you're really going to do this thing, you got to make sure you're doing it right. With Shopify, you'll be on the same platform that powers some of the biggest names in the game like Mattel and Gymshark.

1:16:05Marques Brownlee:With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and a real business, so go make it one. Start your free trial at shopify.com slash waveform. That's shopify.com slash waveform. Shopify.com slash waveform. This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace, And there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew, well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook.

1:16:50All right, welcome back. We got some more news for you. This week, CMF released brand new headphones, or at least they announced them. They're called the CMF Clip Pro. It's their first open headphones. This is a growing category of headphones. Bose made some last year that were fairly popular. There's been a ton in the last like two, three years. There's been a ton. There's been a ton. So they're earbuds that basically clip onto the side of your ear and they're open. So they don't go into your ear canal. They just shoot sound into your ear. this is for people that want to be able to just ambient play play music and you know watch videos on their phones without bothering other people but also hear other people talk to them so there's not something like blocking the ear canal good for commuting good for commuting if you're biking

1:17:32Marques Brownlee:or biking like the street around you stuff like that yeah so you don't get hit by a car transparency uh so cmf is announcing their new line of it called the cmf clip pro they put out some teasers for it on Twitter. They sure did. They sure did. Everyone's talking about the headphones, right? Everyone's not talking about the headphones. They put out these teasers on Twitter. They are teaser photos. The classic nothing CMF sort of British minimalism style that they've always kind of done with the weird haircuts and bright colored blank canvases and stuff like that. But you'll notice in some of these photos that there's a little watermark in the bottom corner that says contains AI generated imagery.

1:18:20Now. Sure does.

1:18:21David Imel:Wait a minute. It says way more than that. Sorry. Have you read the whole thing?

1:18:26Marques Brownlee:It says. Contains AI generated imagery. Any resemblance to a real person is purely coincidental. Yes. Coincidental. What the f*** does that mean? There's context here. There's context here. It's very hard to see and find and read this text. They're clearly trying to hide it. My first question was, if they're trying to hide this so hard, why would they even include it? Turns out that just a few days ago, the European Union passed an AI Act, which requires AI providers to embed digital watermarks or technical markers into generated files to make automated detection possible. So now they have to put this labeling in there.

1:19:04This is more than just like a digital footprint. Sorry, companies must visibly mark synthetic or altered images, audio, and videos so that users know when the media is artificial. That's the one.

1:19:14David Imel:That users know immediately that the media is. Immediately is what it says, which is clearly not immediately. I don't think that the EU would like this personally. But yeah, so people are freaking out because it says contains AI generated people basically. And there's a couple ads. There's a video. There's a video of a girl that's like wearing them and dancing. and at the beginning of the video it says like this is not a real person like and it's generated it's an ai generated person wearing them so that's weird and bad and i don't know i mean yeah this also says it contains ai generated imagery any resemblance to a real person is purely coincidental which means this is not a real these are not real people which is just we clearly don't love this already um because of that like they're not using real models and that's kind of but what's fun what's funnier about this like ad campaign is they just messed up in so many ways another way that they have messed up um they published this photo of a guy that's like floating with a cmf pro in his ear but you should click the link yeah um you click this link look at the photos right so he's floating with it in his ear but if you zoom in on the photo you can see that this is like it's every amazon like white labeled earphone product you've ever seen where it's just like it's just literally they like cut out the background and they just slapped it on top of a pre-existing photo um it's really bad they they quickly took down that one uh but people are getting very angry at them for using ai people i think fairly rightly so in this circumstance I also think this law went into effect literally like two days ago.

1:20:57So we're going to start seeing this happen with a lot of companies.

1:21:01Marques Brownlee:This is so strict. Yeah. The thing that hits is like how they're putting it as like light gray text on a lighter gray background. So it's clearly they're trying to make it basically not part of the image, which I get that it's an ad and you don't want it to be distracting. But it does come across as hiding it. and then yeah the videos it's you kind of just have to assume that they're thinking people who buy these don't care about that and yeah are fine with them yeah just not using real models or

1:21:30David Imel:photography my issue with this is is like one they're hiding it i don't get what they mean by any resemblance to people is purely coincidental i think what they are saying is that these are not real models these are ai generated people and if if it happens we get yeah if it gets alleged that we are trying to like use a real person's uh likeness in this it's purely coincidental oh they're saying like when they say people they mean like specific person you think you're saying okay because the prompt clearly had to have written person i mean the other the video is like a girl waking up a guy climbing which you can tell is ai when he falls because it's so bad a guy walking around and like chilling on the couch like yeah the other thing is is this video other than probably the rig on lcap which is yeah him climbing it's like this is not a crazy thing to have to shoot no and you're a i know cmf is a budget company but they're a big enough company to be able to shoot their own commercial yeah i have what may be considered a nuanced take about this i'm not sure but light them up boys

1:22:48that's a long clip do you just add them laughing we're usually laughing over that so okay it is it is annoying and ironic that everyone in the industry is is telling companies you have to use AI. You have to adopt this for your stock to go up, right? Like the only way for people to get funding for their stock to go up is for them to say, we are adopting AI. We're using this in more places. At the same time, now they have to disclose it. So people hate them for it. So you kind of put in between this rock and this hard place. I think they should just go ahead and use real people anyway for many, many, many, many reasons.

1:23:30David Imel:Super different. I think to use AI is like for like this is like advantage but also like as tools or you need to have like AI features on things or you need to be using it to study different whatever not to like make the advertising and like I agree destroy the personal. I think marketing is a big part of companies' budgets. And if they can save a dime by using AI people, they will 100 % do so and tell their shareholders, oh, look, we used AI to save 3%. That is the same thing. When marketing is the thing that makes you look good, and it makes you look like s**t, it's not good marketing. So they're stuck in a rock and a hard place.

1:24:08David Imel:That's the market. Figure it out. Hire real people. It is weird. We talked before about how companies that don't use AI and use real people will point it out, and it's sort of become like a luxury thing. Like Porsche uses real animators.

1:24:22Marques Brownlee:You know what I mean? We had to do that for the shrinking down video for the three nanometer video where we were like, hey, I'm shrinking down to the size of this single transistor. I know that you're gonna think that this is AI watching this. So I just want to make it clear. A lot of human hours went into making this. And it came across as like both a disclaimer and like a statement of like almost pride. Like, hey, just so you know. Yeah. A lot of hard work here. Yeah. And I know that nothing saved a lot of money by using AI and not using, you know, full shoots and stuff. However, they also hired Charlie XCX as their like brand campaign person.

1:24:56Marques Brownlee:Damn. They're throwing a lot of money at another thing. So. Yeah. Marketing also often feels like optional extra spend. Like nobody enjoys marketing in general. We're getting marketed to. It's just a fact of life. And we're like, all right, companies are going to market to us. so when they also cheap out on marketing to us and kind of hide that it's ai and do all these other things it doesn't feel good it feels actually slightly worse than regular marketing yeah so maybe they they could actually uh take advantage of this by getting a little positive sentiment once in a while and using real models and real people totally i think it's kind of crazy actually now that this eu law is in place this is this is going to feel like the new via twitter for iPhone because every company that has AI in their marketing now has to legally in the markets in the EU has to legally label it clearly and immediately uh which means we're going to see a lot of public backlash from a lot of companies well and the thing that's weird about there is

1:25:53David Imel:how much of it helped by AI like like if I were scrolling on yeah CMF thing here and if the you know some of the close-up product you know renders use some ai to like make them move around right to me that's a little different than full-blown creating new people i think that's

1:26:14Marques Brownlee:because it wasn't a human doing it before right like if if you're doing the models or whatever but it feels like yeah right like the the products i wasn't going to see a real product anyway like when you watch spoiler alert when you watch those beautiful ai video or beautiful apple videos of like products that are not out yet that's a 3d render most of the time with some practical effects there's a lot of work that goes into making those and to substitute with ai would probably feel bad but not as bad as these are not real humans right videos that feels slightly worse i wonder if they had to use that full label because the mandatory labeling through the eu says companies must visibly mark synthetic or altered images so if you use photoshop and you use generative fill this is the same problem that we had at the very beginning of instagram like trying to label and it said made with ai even if you just did like generative fill on a some dust on the photo you know what i mean so do you have to label ai even if you just use like generative fill in a photo like that's yeah the line is in a different place we need to know where that line is you should have to label it if you are creating new objects or people i agree i think that's adjusting it's still fuzzy.

1:27:28David Imel:I would specifically say content aware fill is that gray area where it's like, am I just trying to take the sign out of the background of this? Did it make a new tree when I did that? Is this creating a new object now? I would say you're creating a new object, sure, but if you're adjusting, fixing, that's not creating new things, that's removing things. Sometimes it is. Well, if it creates new things to remove a thing, yeah. That's the gray area to me.

1:27:55Marques Brownlee:Damn. It is really a gray area, I think. It's really gray. Like content-aware fill, if you're getting rid of the dust on a camera lens, you're technically creating new glass underneath it. I think we all accept that that's not creating a new thing. But when you move the line, you're like, oh, I got rid of like a rock in the background, and it put extra grass back there. Okay, that's a little bit further. Oh, I used AI to get rid of a flag that was in the background of the photo. We don't want to have a flag there. But then it created a whole new tree in the background. Yes. Okay, it's still fine.

1:28:24Marques Brownlee:It's just a tree. and then you just keep pushing the line further and further and it's all gray. It's all gray.

1:28:30David Imel:Companies want to push the lines to all of us on different things like marketing with AI is going to turn into something where you're going to have to listen to your audience and they're going to have to determine collectively what the line is and you're going to have to play that game and CMF just played that game and found out and they crossed the line which is 100 % of everything. For creating fake people, that's way over the line, obviously. but I definitely foresee a lot of asterisks is about to happen where a lot of companies literally do whatever the EU says is barely over the line like you said Adam replacing a rock with some grass right and then they have to mandatorily add the add the little marker and then people are going to think that they that the whole thing is generated or something well is this just going to desensitize everyone to that asterisk probably because every marketing thing will have it now

1:29:22Marques Brownlee:that's a possible future probably and we're in the like forefront of it so only a few brands are doing it and getting it seen and so it feels like it's rare but it may desensitize us and it'll eventually take away take it away once it's once it's normalized i just imagine that because this rule is now in effect in the eu uh the next couple months are going to be kind of crazy on social media platforms because we're going to see these tags all over a ton of marketing and people are going to be very angry it's going to hit very it's going to hit slightly differently with each company yeah like imagine google doing it you're like yeah i could see that yeah and then imagine like apple doing it you're like hmm that's weird yeah like there's there's so many different every time if i use magic eraser and photo in photos in the eu and then i share that image will it have this water well it should it yeah because google remember google's doing their watermarking i don't know if it's compatible that's a hidden watermark right oh sorry not of water.

1:30:16Marques Brownlee:It's like it's buried in the file. But Adam, it's companies must do it. You're not a company. Companies are people. You know what? There's one thing to learn from this episode is companies are not people. Companies are not people in the EU, though, but they are in the United States, and we don't require the rule. Okay, speaking of a company that's trying to pretend like it's a person, OpenAI. We talked briefly last week about this lawsuit, this crazy lawsuit that's happening where Apple is suing OpenAI for alleged trade secret stealing and all these LMAO texts that they have sent. They'd be like, ha ha, I still have access to the secret information inside of Apple even though I now work at OpenAI.

1:31:00So now OpenAI published this blog post, which is kind of nuts. They're bringing it to the court of public opinion. The blog post is called Apple is Getting This Wrong. It's not a super long blog post. It's basically just talking about the lawsuit and how they think that Apple is wrong for bringing it. But they do share a bunch of iMessage conversations and a bunch of email history to show that both Apple says that it contacted OpenAI in February and got no response, but now admits that its lawyer contacted the wrong person and that the person at the company confused two last names. So they emailed the wrong person because they had similar last names.

1:31:40that Apple claims it had a conversation with OpenAI's general counsel, but now Apple admits that never happened, that Apple's lawyer says that it told OpenAI it was resolving any issues, then went silent for five months until they randomly got hit with the lawsuit. This is all alleged by OpenAI. We are not saying any of this is true. Yeah, so they published the iMessages and the emails, and this is really weird. I don't think that usually companies come out and make blog posts about active litigation. In fact, the number one thing you're supposed to not do is come out and just make a bunch of blog posts about active litigation.

1:32:17So it's very irregular that this is happening. It makes them seem very confident.

1:32:21David Imel:They seem very confident. Can I read to you my favorite message or part of this? Very, very long. I was like, they only allege the like couple quick things. This thread is. There's a lot of redact. There's a lot of stuff. But yeah, my favorite part is redacted Apple information. Will redacted Apple information prototype build, but too late for redacted Apple information? With the reply, awesome. I was thinking redacted Apple information for redacted Apple information and redacted Apple information for redacted Apple information. But since redacted Apple information was pushed back, then it should get redacted Apple information also.

1:32:53David Imel:I think we are aligned. Smiley face. Same, bro. How this is supposed to... You know what's crazy about this? This is not unheard of for them to be publishing... unheard of but like you can publish these transcripts right we normally see that from court cases and it'll just be text and that's that says it's like redacted apple employee number one whatever yeah someone had to photoshop into the form of iMessage to make it look like iMessage for the people reading it to be more easily no no adam they had chadgbt photoshop okay yeah also where's the indicator that says uh that says ai generated image i think it's photoshop it does To look like a screenshot, even though it's one really, really long one.

1:33:37David Imel:Heavily edited. And to make it blue bubbles, even though it's clearly an iPhone-Android interaction because of the reaction. It goes light. Light Apple redaction. They made it blue. Yeah, so they didn't even do it right. They tried to make it look like an iMessage conversation, and they didn't even do it right. They did get the text correct. Actually, now that I'm looking at it, this isn't even as... It's not the right font. No, but I can select the text, which means this isn't even a photo. No, these aren't screenshots. That's what I'm saying. They rebuilt this. They built this inside the web page.

1:34:08Oh, inside of ChatGBT. That's weird.

1:34:11David Imel:All right. Well, this is the weirdest thing I've ever seen. I'm not a lawyer. I would not recommend doing this. This isn't legal advice, but like, I wouldn't do this. I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I personally would not do this. New sound bite just dropped. I do love how it's like, how the messages are liked. This response, like all of the reactions are text messages. Yeah. Yeah. Crazy that one of these people is using an Android phone when they're all Apple employees. Well, no, the thing is, is one isn't an Apple employee anymore, right? Well, sure. It's an OpenAI employee. But it doesn't seem often that an OpenAI employee would spend 24 years at Apple, and then as soon as they get to OpenAI, switch to an Android phone.

1:34:59anyway quick little hit just wanted to mention Fitbit data can now sync to Apple Health let's clap yes two things I don't use I don't know I was told to clap, I clapped I'm hyped about this because I'm still using the Fitbit Air still enjoying it and an iPhone and previously you had to use a bridge app to bridge your Fitbit health, Google health information over to Apple Health. Now it's native. So that's good because I don't have my iPhone in my pocket all the time. So I don't always have my step information or my heart rate variability or stuff like that. And I don't like wearing an Apple Watch.

1:35:42So now my Fitbit can just give all this information to my Apple Health and I can still use Apple Health. I like Google Health. I actually like it quite a bit, even on iOS. And I've kind of come around to the dumb Gemini previews.

1:35:56Marques Brownlee:but can I ask what do you like about apple health what I like about apple health because I found that once I couldn't use apple health I didn't miss it at all one thing that's useful about apple health you can copy and paste universally one thing that's useful about apple health is that a lot of apps use apple health as a data source source yes that means it's getting it from your phone or from whatever is dumping into apple health like other apps that I use will pull information from apple health like what like uh so like factor if i use a garmin and i go on a run it all saves to apple health and then other things can pull that information like strava from apple health yeah it's sort of our repository so like i have a um ge smart scale the ge smart scale syncs to apple health and then my macro factor pulls my weight from apple health got it So this is kind of the copy and paste thing.

1:36:49Marques Brownlee:This is an ecosystem thing still. Sort of. Yeah. Yeah. It's like Apple Health is like the heart of my health data. It's your data collecting hub. Yeah. And then all the other apps are different organs that pull from it. Yeah. Yeah. That's fair enough. Yeah. I guess I don't have anything pulling from Apple Health, so I wasn't really missing anything. Yeah. I have like three apps that pull from Apple.

1:37:12David Imel:I was going to say, this has already been super long, but I would love to hear your thoughts on not having an Apple Watch anymore? Because you've been like the Apple Watch guy for years. True. Since I started here. Yeah. And now the past couple of weeks, you just have not had

1:37:26Marques Brownlee:an Apple Watch. I've had I there was a lot of thought about like, what do I use an Apple Watch for? What will I miss if I don't have it anymore? And it was it was really kind of a short list of things that I use Apple Watch for. It's telling the time. I do still miss that. But then there is the notifications on the wrist. I don't miss that. There is the closing the rings every day, which it's like a fun thing to track but it's not the most precise and i honestly stopped missing that and then it's all the all the other measurements and data collection and information that gets aggregated that i can then learn from health wise which is literally replaced with the other wearable which is in this case a whoop we'll talk about the other one i'm wearing in a second um so i yeah there's like smaller all small all other small things do you miss group challenges uh we they never yeah i gave up on them trying to add group challenges i figured they'll never do

1:38:20David Imel:it they do that yeah i'll say i'll say and this kind of ruins my whole shtick since wearing a watch i don't miss notifications on my watch that much i'll still scream from the top it still should be a thing that they offer because all of the functionality is there but yeah I don't miss notifications that much your watch usually I'm also just confused because it's always on your right hand and now your arms are on your left hand and I'm used to watching your watch just blow up the entire podcast

1:38:51Marques Brownlee:it would light up I definitely got very used to it just like constantly buzzing and lighting up

1:38:55David Imel:that's probably why you hate notifications so much because it's just everything it's 24-7 do you still get phantom buzzes?

1:39:02Marques Brownlee:does your right wrist just buzz randomly? at first I did but not anymore there was actually a solid week and a half And I almost would make fun of people for that. I'd be like, what do you mean phantom buzzes? And then I would feel one and check it. I'd be like, oh my God, it is real. So I'm glad I got over that, but yeah. But okay, speaking of other wearables, so David, you're wearing the Fitbit. Yeah, I'm wearing the Fitbit. I haven't been wearing the Whoop. Andrew, what was on your wrist a second ago? What was that thing? What is that? I haven't seen that before.

1:39:28David Imel:The Garmin Circa.

1:39:29Marques Brownlee:I don't know. It's here. So you're how many days in?

1:39:33David Imel:24 hours.

1:39:34Marques Brownlee:24 hours in. Any thoughts?

1:39:35David Imel:I have my extremely brief impressions because it was only 24 hours and I haven't even done a workout with it. But I will try and quickly go through this because this is a long episode. Okay. So it's big. It is. It's thick. I want to see it next to your whoop because now it actually doesn't look that big compared to the whoop. I thought the whoop was a little slimmer profile.

1:40:00Marques Brownlee:Dimensionally, it's a little bit taller than the whoop off the wrist.

1:40:03David Imel:I don't have a big wrist, but I'm using the large extra large band and it fits fine. But like this thing is wide. Like if you look at it directly at my wrist, I look like Mega Man pointing my or like it's hanging off almost the sides of my wrists. Yeah. Which I think is too big. I don't love this. I immediately want the Fitbit Air after this if I want to keep it. So I don't love that. especially because it's a screenless tracker this is supposed to feel like something that just melts in my casio watch right now is a smaller slimmer profile than my activity tracker yeah um so the auto sleep tracking now this has only been one day bang on per like perfect day one day one so awesome what i would say so i set my sleep schedule like you do in the garmin app I put 10.30 to 6.30.

1:40:57David Imel:I laid down on my bed around like 10.20, and I remember scrolling on my phone for a while and thinking to myself, I need to see how well this works. 10.43, I put my phone down. It says I went to bed at 10.45. At 11.45, Owen woke up. So I got up, helped for a minute, went to the bathroom, went back to sleep. It nailed a six-minute wake time at 11.45.

1:41:20Marques Brownlee:You went to sleep that fast?

1:41:21David Imel:I mean, six minutes. I just woke up, put his binky back in, went to the bathroom went back to sleep i was pretty tired um then i my alarm woke me up at 6 30 i was like wow that's really good that's all automatic because like it could have just said oh you're laying down and you set your sleep time to 10 30 therefore you are sleeping yeah but it didn't actually clock it till presumably right when i fell asleep it also recorded a nap that i took when i fell asleep on the couch watching a movie with lane right after dinner last night for like 15 minutes. And it is in my daily report that there was a rest time and counted it towards my body battery.

1:41:58David Imel:So spot on with that. Now, the other thing to sleeping comes with the button, which is to stop the alarm that's going off on your wrist. So it's 6.30, buzz, buzz, buzz. I press it. I'm hanging out. I'm like pretty lazy, not getting out of bed. 10 minutes later, buzz, buzz, buzz. I thought I stopped this. Oh, I must have snoozed it, but in a panic, just press it again. now I'm awake and I'm like this thing's gonna go off again I need to figure out how to do it the app is not very good every Garmin user knows their app is information dense but pretty poorly laid out when you want to find things so I actually googled how to turn it off which is kind of hard so you have to hold it apparently so 10 minutes later it's like 650 I hold it and I turn off my alarm cool we're good halfway through my commute this morning with my music playing on the car my wrist starts beeping and just over my speaker just goes 60 minutes and I'm like what?

1:42:55David Imel:and apparently I had started an activity and that was Garmin does like if you have it turned on which I guess by default it does after an hour it alerts you that you've been working out for an hour so it had connected to my Bluetooth speakers through my phone to tell me that it was I guess in your headphones it would tell you and it told me that it was 60 minutes so I had been running a 60 minute activity because I thought I had turned the alarm off all you need to do on that is the little light on the side should either blink or stay a color when an activity is active i think that's so simple and so easy if you want to torch me on the notification thing i think just an active activity should be anyways uh last night i was in my backyard for like 20 minutes just putting on my disc golf basket and it auto added that as an activity i thought that was pretty cool it wasn't an intense one yeah very much but it did put it in there.

1:43:46David Imel:I have my default to just do activity so it doesn't try and assume what it is and I can just edit it because I mostly only care about heart rate and time. So that was pretty good. However, DC Rainmaker did a blog, a really, really good blog comparing everything. And he found that the Circa, one of its biggest issues was not auto-detecting during warmups when Fitbit Air and or whoop was doing it correctly. And because the circa to save battery life is tracking heart rate at a much less frequent time outside of an active activity, he can't then go and adjust the times because there's not enough information there.

1:44:26David Imel:So with the Fitbit error, the whoop, if it did happen to miss 10 minutes or sometimes if you have a cool down period in between, he can just adjust all of those things and gather all the information that it missed where this just doesn't have heart rate data.

1:44:41Marques Brownlee:Reminds me of the Pixel Watch. Yeah. Yeah. Pixel Watch would sample like every second or something.

1:44:49David Imel:I think this is doing, I don't want to say every minute or something. It's very infrequent in comparison to when it is tracking. Gotcha. So in my eyes, you know, 24 hours with reading a lot of different stuff, the size of this, the band is awesome. The colors are great. I think it's really comfortable. I just think it's too big. This feels to me like Garmin was creating this to be a whoop competitor not knowing Google. And then the Fitbit Air came out first because if this comes out without the Fitbit Air, it looks so much better. That's a great point. When the Fitbit Air is out, even though it has all their software issues and bad whatever.

1:45:27David Imel:It's gotten better. I've heard it's gotten better. And even, I mean, DC Rainmaker has said even a lot of the Garmin things in the couple of weeks, it's been out. They've been taking feedback and trying to fix some things. it seems like him and des fit are like i meant the fitbit air has gotten yeah yeah but so is the garmin as well um but like this to me especially being twice the price feel like the fitbit air has better tracking in terms of the heart rate stuff in that it's lighter it's smaller it's less of a nuisance it's just like overall the better product and it's half the price yeah so this feels like a really bad buy when that's out i do like that they're integrating the button into this i think they could do some stuff with the lights i think if garmin could somehow put standalone gps in this it would feel like the garmin product in this new screenless fitness wearable category yeah for sure and i think i think this is a wait for gen 2 and hope they improve no gps was kind of a shocker to me on this product yes especially since it's

1:46:27Marques Brownlee:interesting yeah i to me i don't know how i don't know how difficult it would have been to add gps and still get good battery life? Can I see your whooping fast, Clayton? Very, very, very. Yeah, probably very. To me, this to me feels like the slightly less elegant version of the Fitbit Air. Like, I like that it has a button. That's nice. But like the way the bands attach and like having to remove them and reattach them, I like the band, but I don't know that I would do it like this. It is a little thicker, a little taller, a little bit, the app is a little bit worse. Like the data is a little bit worse.

1:47:00It's just like, like you said, Andrew,

1:47:02Marques Brownlee:slightly less elegant version of the Fitbit Air. But I kind of do wish the Fitbit Air had a button.

1:47:07David Imel:I wish the Fitbit Air had a button. I think the button is a good thing. I'll say this Whoop, it's just as tall as the Whoop, which I thought that, but the Whoop is less wide. Therefore, it feels like it's sitting on top of your wrist, not kind of bending over your wrist. And I do think that feels better. I still don't like the Whoop mechanism, but... Funny that you guys are still arguing over those devices when this thing is so... Try this next to your... Next to it? Yeah. I still think we are forgetting the most important part, which is that this does not have a subscription. Well, I think that's like part of the...

1:47:38David Imel:I think this... If Whoop is its only competitor at$200, no subscription with all this, it looks like an incredible... Which is why the Fitbit Air is incredible. Yes. The problem is, is the Fitbit Air beat them to the punch at a better price point. Yeah. Also not a subscription. I mean, it has a subscription. You really don't need it. No, no. The Garmin has a subscription too. Yeah, but it's for like nutrition stuff. It's not like for actual... And coaching. Any other data. Yeah, that's fine. Same thing as the Google one. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. That's why comparing to all of its subscriptions are similar to the Google subscriptions.

1:48:08David Imel:Therefore, the Fitbit Air just beats it to everything. The Garmin subscription is the Garmin subscription for all of their products. It's not just for this one device. Like if you have a watch, you can get the same subscription. Are you supposed to wear this to sleep? Yes, I wore it to sleep. I feel like the thickness of this would be very uncomfortable. It didn't bother me sleeping. I just, like, I don't know. the fact that it just should be like a bracelet feels like it should be way smaller it's a really big puck compared to the fitbit air yeah i think fitbit air nailed the form factor yeah so it's yeah it's like not even close yeah yeah fitbit really the the fitbit needs to make material that doesn't look like ass after like a few weeks though yeah i want to combine i want to combine

1:48:49Marques Brownlee:all three of these i want the form factor of the fitbit air with the band of the of the garmin but with the connection method of the Fitbit Air. So I wish I could just do the Velcro thing. But this material, this band is nice. This band is nice. The material is nice.

1:49:04David Imel:And the colors are great.

1:49:06Marques Brownlee:And then give me the battery life of the Whoop. Give me the data collection of the Whoop, but the UI of the Fitbit. Yeah, yeah. Like mixing them all together.

1:49:15David Imel:Which is funny because I think just Fitbit needs to work on their UI because the data collection is all the same. It's just how you throw it out and be, are you body battery? Are you strain? are you google's it's just like a score right yeah yeah yeah they all have a slightly different score yeah yeah yeah i will say um so you're supposed to be able to wash these bands and i have i've washed it twice and it has also taken out the the blue color like the blue has washed out of the band and i know that they never said that these bands were particularly luxe but um it's pretty sad that i washed it like twice by hand by just scrubbing it a little bit

1:49:53Marques Brownlee:and the blue pigment has like come out you know damn i'm really waiting for some much nicer bands to hit the market which they will they will indeed patience um well before we get off of the health tracker thing and take it to break i just wanted to point out there's a new casio ring watch so ring watch yeah so alex has the casio ring watch uh this is so funny because i saw watch ring i

1:50:20David Imel:I guess. It's a watch ring. That's the confusing part is I saw this on a Verge headline, I think, but didn't read that it was a ring and I was like, this is such a weird, chunky watch. You watch people. So it's a watch. This is ring people. It's a ring that is a watch. It's like a Casio watch that you wear on your finger. Is it a joke, right? No. They sell it. I wish it was. This is a real... It's amazing. I think it's 100... No, hey. Hey, hey. It's cute. It's adorable. Am I being pranked right now? Alex has one. Alex has one. then you can check it out later. But they just announced that they are now making one.

1:50:53It's China only right now, which is really sad. But they are now making one that is a full on like health tracker device. So it's like an aura ring competitor, but it's a watch that you wear in your finger.

1:51:02Marques Brownlee:This is not a joke. Are you serious?

1:51:03David Imel:I don't know. None of this is fake. None of this is fake. Why don't they just make a smartwatch? Like if any company could just put a smartwatch tracker under like a G-Shock with. Yeah. Would make so much sense. It is crazy to me that Casio has not made a smartwatch that just looks like a regular Casio. Yeah. Because a bunch of companies are making third-party attachments for it that allow it to be a smartwatch. I can't believe this is real. Look how sweet it looks. It's so adorable.

1:51:31Marques Brownlee:In the pictures, they have their hands all spread out like this, so you can tell it's not. And it's mini versions of their watches, but you're wearing them on your fingers. Casio owns G-Shock, which makes smartwatches. I don't know if I can be anymore. G-Shock does have a smartwatch?

1:51:44David Imel:I didn't even know that.

1:51:45Marques Brownlee:Just to be perfectly clear for audio listeners, picture a G-Shock watch around one of your fingers. That's literally what it is. Well, and scaled correctly. And there's other, not just G-Shocks, but like all the Casio watches they basically made ring versions of. Am I going to get roasted for this? They all work. This is like the dumbest thing I've ever seen. No, I also hate this. This is insane. When it came out, I was like, this is stupid. But to each their own. You guys hate Whimsy. You're buying Adam one. Whimsy? You're going to hurt your fingers. Why? It's just a ring. Yeah, but you remember how the Oura Ring was like, people thought it was really chunky and they finally made a thinner, smaller one.

1:52:19Marques Brownlee:They were like, all right, I'll finally wear a ring. This is the opposite direction.

1:52:23David Imel:Yeah, but you can't tell time on an Oura Ring.

1:52:24Marques Brownlee:Well, then don't get a ring. You don't need to wear a watch. You don't need to wear a watch on your wrist if you can just wear it on your finger. This is, are people, and this is one of the pictures, are people doing this? Are they wearing the watch and the ring at the same time? Is this not ridiculous? Casio Maxi. Am I going insane? That's amazing. I love that. This is crazy. It's amazing. What time is it? Hold on. Let me just... Yep, it's still 1045. You can't wear gloves with this on. You can't wear gloves with any ring on. You can't handshake any.

1:52:54David Imel:No, your glove just has a little hole in it. So you can see that.

1:52:57Marques Brownlee:Yeah. For your cigarette. You can't make a fist anymore. With any ring. The battery life is one day. The original G-Shock DW 5600 is only 100 bucks. Just get that. I bet the battery life for this is like 20 years. This is the tiniest thing I've ever seen. Yeah, but a regular Casio watch lasts 10 years and it uses a coin battery. If I weren't married, I would propose to play with this. Do you think you could fit a coin battery in this? It's probably the size of a coin, of a coin battery. It's probably about the same size. I'm not sure. If I ever meet anyone wearing one of these, Alex has one.

1:53:31David Imel:I'm imagining Marquez walking up to a guy on the bus who is holding their light phone flip with their Casio ring holding the flip and Marquez just launches himself out. Dripping. Just the opposite person to me.

1:53:47Marques Brownlee:You know, to each their own. Alex says he does not have one. Get on in here. I like the lore of Alex. You literally had one last week. What are you talking about? You've never worn this ring watch. I don't have a ring watch. Ring watch, right? Okay, good. No, he has the cigarette ring. Are you being so for real right now? I'm being so for real. I've talked about that. I think they're cool, but no, I never bought one. I saw you wear it last week. What are you talking about? Is this a dream? Did you hallucinate me wearing a ring watch? I remember walking up to you and I was like, you have one of the Cassidy ring watches?

1:54:16And you're like, yeah, I got it. No. Was it rich? I said I have a G-Shock. Nah. You should have something to do with beans. Dream beans made it up. Maybe it was dream beans. Whatever. I heard my name. Alex, Alex. Alex. There's a certain philosophical hilarity to if you make a ring. excuse me, if you make a watch shaped like a ring it becomes a combination of two things. It's a ring watch. But if you make a ring in the shape and size of a watch it just becomes a bracelet. It just sort of translates its properties. And I say that because I want to stop talking about this. Yeah, we gotta be done.

1:54:50This is like a long episode. This is a long episode. Trivia. Alright, trivia dude. I'm doing a hall of shame at the end of

1:54:57Marques Brownlee:the year of my least favorite product.

1:54:59David Imel:We are working on Waveform Awards for the end of the year. A little teaser for December Okay, we spoke about BMW earlier, way earlier, like three hours ago. But which automobile manufacturer operated the car sharing service Reach Now back in 2016? I don't know. You don't know? I don't know.

1:55:23Marques Brownlee:Take a guess.

1:55:24David Imel:Casio?

1:55:26Marques Brownlee:We'll have to think on that. We'll find out. Answers at the end. Be right back one more time.

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1:56:41Marques Brownlee:Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla? Smooth caramel, maybe. Or a white chocolate mocha. Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits.

1:56:52David Imel:Find Starbucks frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. All right, welcome back. Gonna go fast. Skip ahead 35 minutes to get to the end of this. Just kidding, we only have 20 minutes left on the card. Okay. I just want to say Keychron, the keyboard company, kind of cooking lately they for whatever reason their twitter game they just tweeting every day and they're releasing stuff and they're showing off prototypes of things and something about it just looks like key crons on the up and up um they just released a new really lightweight gaming mouse with a magnetic swappable battery which is like something i've seen in a couple random Chinese mouse companies, but like this is really cool.

1:57:36David Imel:Is this the full mouse? No, Dave is looking at a prototype render that they're working on. That's a lot of like mice enthusiasts have built things like this, where it's a fingertip grip only mouse, which is essentially only the front half of the mouse. It is like 30 grams or supposed to be 30 grams. That has the magnetic swappable battery as well. They're posting that and they're like posting all these things about like, what are some things we should change? They have something they just released called the nape pro which is this really sick mini wireless trackball device oh yeah that even ellis came to me and was like dude did you see this thing keychron's doing it has six customizable buttons it fits kind of right at the bottom of your keyboard by the spacebar to now be a trackball with all these different buttons i think it's sweet sweet concept terrible name it is a weird name nape is but do you know that you know what your nape is it's like the back of your neck it It is the back of your neck.

1:58:29David Imel:I don't know if it's those under nose for some reason. But it's the native pro. Yeah, true. Back of your neck professional. Keychron actually responded to Random Frank P. tweeting that it seems like Keychron's just kind of going wild lately. And they responded by, appreciate it. We made some big changes internally this year. I'm the CEO, and I've been personally leading our new product development. We also rebuilt our product team. You're only seeing the beginning. We've got a lot more innovative products on the way. So it seems like the CEO may have just taken over Twitter and it's just like he's tweeting anything from or did the social media manager become the ceo that also could be true it but they're just they're showing off new products they're showing off designs of products they haven't even thought about making yet or like to ask for different uh opinions building in public yeah they they actually to go back on something we talked about earlier when they released that fingertip mouse they got the made with ai tag and then everyone was talking about it to where they were like we don't know why found out that it was through the render like coloring they used ai to color it and then they were like i guess this is what does it we'll like not do that in the future they're just being like super open and it feels like keychron's done the one plus route of be like we're getting in we're getting mech keyboards to be this actual accessible thing now we got built big and we're just building a billion things to sell you that feels kind of cheap and now we're going into a little more the like enthusiast space again and getting community feedback and i mean i still haven't tried any of these products so i don't know if they actually are that good but they're building some cool stuff and the nape pro looks awesome it's cool i feel like ellis could have 20 of those on his desk and just flinging balls all over leave it i feel like ellis could have like 10 of the nape pros and just a million customizable buttons and trackballs and everything.

2:00:23David Imel:It doesn't have a knob though, which is what he loves. Oh yeah, it's around the ball. There you go. It has everything. They're also working on a Thunderbolt doc. Why not? They're just becoming the peripheral. The CEO is literally responding to every single comment on Twitter. He's just locked in. How do we feel about CEOs on Twitter? That's a fair point. It leads down the wrong path. At least he's posting just under the Keychron account and under his like personal one trying to have a personality one of the things was him just like it's him with this little four button macro pad that he put a mouse sensor in and he can use it as a mouse while having four customizable macro pad buttons on top and he was like just the mouse if 500 people can well do you know what a macro pad is yeah i had multiple but like if you put a sensor on the bottom it just becomes a mouse i guess with buttons like a logitech mouse that you can have different macros on the top yeah but they're mouse shape this is macro pad shape it just like seems like they're cooking up fun things there and i think he wrote like if 500 people all make like pre-order this i'll make it or something like that um so yeah what was their first keyboard keychron cooking q no no k1 there it is yeah it was last week like someone commented how much are you planning on charging for this the market really needs a fingertip mats that's cheaper can also compare to gblows and specs and he just responded how much would you suggest price and spec and he's obviously not gonna like do all of the things but yeah it just tell me how much to charge for this product that's kind of then he just one day anyone else obsessed with carbon fiber keyboard cases lately and then just is like him flinging around a random carbon fiber keyboard case that he has this is kind of amazing my new twitter king david relax sorry uh but yeah we should get to trivia yeah Marquez, it's kind of crazy that you asked us about...

2:02:15David Imel:Look how cool this is. It's a mouse. I know, but it doesn't look like a mouse. It can be a mouse. Is it a ring? And it's just showing us things that progressively look less and less like mice and being like, you can control your computer cursor with this. That weird two-button finger pad you showed us earlier. This can of Chi Forest is also a mouse. Is this a mouse? things because i was saying you know you're quite the person to ask us about having your your company ceo on twitter because uh my company ceo is on twitter yeah and youtube that's true and he is trying to have a personality on twitter yeah yeah mark has relax what video do you guys think i should make dude guys we can't talk about youtube or tech we have to talk about old-timey nautical measurements which of the following is the farthest unit of distance?

2:03:10A, the fathom. B, the league. C, the shackle. Or D, the twas. Can't even spell the last one.

2:03:25Twas. Okay. I really wanted to make sure I pronounced it right. Twas. Sound like a smoker. You gotta leave that twas. I literally can't take it out. Or just French, one of the two. All right, which one is the farthest? Flip them and read. And all two of you wrote... Fathom. A fathom...

2:03:49David Imel:I wrote shackle. Damn. Can't be a league. A fathom is three feet. Really? That's just a meter. A shackle is 15 fathoms. A yard is three feet. Let me finish. A shackle is 15 fathoms. And a league, different countries have different exact measurements for what a league is. That makes no sense. It is between one and three miles, depending on what country you are in. So it's a league? That is a league. One to three miles is an enormous range. Wait, so what's a toise? A toise is six feet. The entire point of a standard is that it's the same. Well, these are old-timey measurements. Like, we don't use leagues anymore.

2:04:33And also earlier when all three of you were like, I know it's not league because they were 20 ,000 under the sea. That is a common misconception. The Jules Verne novel, 20 ,000 Leagues Under the Sea, describes the vessel traveling 20 ,000 leagues horizontally while they happen to be under the sea. They are not actually 20 ,000 leagues under the sea. That's a bad name then. You were correct. That is way deeper than the ocean goes. That's what I thought. You thought right.

2:05:00Marques Brownlee:But you can't do 20 ,000 miles under the sea. you can it would just be about twice the circumference of the earth yeah

2:05:09David Imel:i guess you can also this was rich talking about standards as americans all right so hey wait i have to tell this story real quick mom i love you i'm so sorry but i was talking to my mom once and i just i described some some unit of distance and like something and my mom goes i'm sorry like how many football fields is that like because everything in america is like measured in football fields. And I thought about my brilliant academic mother and I was like, Mom, you've never been to a football game in your life. You don't even know how far a football field is. She was like, you're right. I have no idea how far a football field is.

2:05:46She has an idea in her head. She couldn't tell me how many feet or yards it was. I couldn't either.

2:05:51David Imel:I think it's actually more confusing because are you including end zones or not? Thank you. Adam, here's your trivia question. Wait, before you do that real quick, can I read? I forgot. This is the funniest tweet the Keychron guy did. Do you have? Yeah, yeah, we're good. It'll be really fast. 20 minutes. He tweeted a picture of a mouse with a bunch of macro buttons and he wrote eight side buttons, 88 grains, latest mag ops, switches, blah, blah, blah. More buttons than a typical MOBA mouse, but lighter and simpler than a traditional MMO mouse. Would you be interested? Someone tweeted, MMO gamers have waited years for this mouse.

2:06:20David Imel:And he responded, you're kidding. We don't actually have that much confidence in this mouse, actually. What? Okay. That's weird. What's a MOBA? It's a multiplayer online battle arena. Was that bait? It wasn't bait. I had never heard of a MOBA. Okay. We still got BMW. Which automobile manufacturer operated the car sharing service Reach Now back in 2016? That's the wrong button. I'm going to wait and then press it again.

2:06:51Marques Brownlee:Reach Now?

2:06:53David Imel:Reach Now. Do you guys want a hint? I have no clue. Don't overthink it. That's my hint. Is there a car company called Reach? Maybe. Maybe it's in another language. Maybe it's not. Who knows? Stellantis. Halo Reach. It could be Stellantis. Stellantis is in English. What? Isn't Stellantis a U.S. company? Stellantis. Did you not say U.S. company? He didn't say non-U.S. company. He didn't say any region for the company. I was just laughing because he was like, maybe it's not in English, and you went Stellantis. Flip him and read. What do you got? Who wrote what? I can't see. Oh, no. Who wants to go first?

2:07:38Marquez. Marquez, what'd you say?

2:07:40Marques Brownlee:I wrote...

2:07:44Marques Brownlee:I thought Reach Now was like R-N was like something.

2:07:49David Imel:I'm going to stop you right there. You're incorrect. He wrote Renault. Renault. Renault. Andrew, what'd you write? BMW. David, what'd you write? BMW. Correct. Yeah, that's, yeah. Yeah. Sorry, Marcus. I'll give you, I wrote like 50 bonus questions because it was such a long episode. I'll give you a bonus question real quick. Do we have time for this? You've got 30 seconds to answer, and if you can't come up with anything, that's on you. I'm going to try some hard. Guys, name a single phone that you can buy in the United States in 2026 with a physical QWERTY keyboard that is not the minimal phone 01 or the Clix communicator.

2:08:26David Imel:Buy from where? the store physical keyboard physical cordy keyboard it has to have buttons it has to be on sale new from the factory in 2026 you can use it on us characters what was it called like the exact model name yes if you get the iteration wrong like if you say the blank blank three instead of the blank blank two i'm okay with that i didn't i don't that's okay i don't got it nothing you all put nothing The correct answer was the Unihertz. Titan 2. All right. No more points awarded. Thank you all for listening to the longest episode of the Waveform Podcast ever. Is it really? I don't know.

2:09:09All right. Might be. Close. What else do we say? Make sure you watch and subscribe. Yeah. If you made it this far, I really appreciate you. The European Union is going to mandate that we have shorter episodes for competition purposes.

2:09:25David Imel:Unless you all comment right now. Yeah. Save us. For interoperability, we actually have to tell you guys to subscribe to the Vergecast.

2:09:38Marques Brownlee:And that's where we cut. That's where it ends. If you made it this far, you got the joke, so there it is. Thanks for watching.

2:09:48David Imel:That's so funny. I thought you were going to say like on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Waveformer is produced by Adam Alina and Alice Rovin. we're not part of the Vox Media podcast network we are still part of the Vox Media podcast network Interact Your Music is by Vane Sill we'll see you next Friday normal episode we'll be in a very different place

2:10:22you have to leave that part in

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From the publisher

This week, Marques, Andrew, and David talk about the newest Spiderman x BMW collab that has everyone angry before debating whether the EU should make Apple share some features with Windows computers. Then it's all about CMF and their newest earbuds (modeled by AI models ) and a few quick hits about wearables. It's a long one this week but it was also still a fun one. Enjoy!

Links:

Reddit - BMW x Spiderman

Ford Fathom

Verge - Apple to Windows Copy-Paste

MacWorld - Fitbit syncs to Apple Health

CMF by Nothing Twitter

Casio ring watch

Keychron Twitter

This episode brought to you by:

Framer: https://www.framer.com/waveform

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

Follow us on socials:

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

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

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

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

Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin

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

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