The 2026 Smartphone Awards Discussion Episode

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Techtober lull and studio desk mats

1:41Apple always seems to try new things, at least with the iPhone, twice. So they tried the mini, the 12 mini, and then they, yeah, and then, you know. How did you have your hand on that fun?

2:03Yeah, what is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waitform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marquez. And I'm Andrew. No David today, but over at the producer desk, we have Ellis and Mariah is back. And it's mid-Tectober as you listen to this and as we record this, which means, of course, there's a little bit to talk about. It's kind of crazy. There's like one week lull. It's the break between Techtober and Techtober. Yeah, like Techtober kind of spills into the beginning of Techtober, and then Techtober is about to kick off

2:34again, but we have a little sliver, a little rest period. But in this episode, we still have a couple other things. We've got to talk about some price increases from phones that also have already come out. Apple with an unusual partner to release some new products potentially. We're also going to have our preliminary discussions, our way too early discussions on what could be the smartphone awards this year. I wouldn't even call it way too early. Not even way too early, but early enough that there's still phones coming out, but early enough that it's fun to talk about. We have some

3:04thoughts. And of course, we'll end by talking about some MMOs. I know what that stands for, but I don't know what else we're talking about. So it'll be good. Don't forget to subscribe. Of course, we have found that asking you to subscribe does way more towards getting you to subscribe than anything else. So I'm going to just say it. Make sure you subscribe if you haven't already, wherever you listen to podcasts or especially on YouTube. Appreciate y'all. We discussed that with Alex Goldman this week on our bonus episode that came out on Tuesday. You may have missed if you weren't subscribed, but that was super fun episode. We talked all about

3:37podcasting, the old days of podcasting, what it's like starting one today, whether it should be on YouTube. We talked about asking your audience to do things like subscribe or be a premium member and how excruciating it is and how we feel bad about doing it sometimes. But we still have to do it anyways. But great episode. Go give it a wash. I said wash because I was going to say if you have extra dishes and I was ahead of myself. So give the dishes a wash. You know what we meant. Yes. Give the dishes a wash. But first, did they even test this? I have potentially the most niche one possible.

4:12And this is one I know you have not seen before. Okay. So I'm excited to show it to you. And that is in Megaphone, which is the piece of software that we use to upload the podcast. The audio version. The audio version. When you are going to schedule what time it is coming out, I'm going to hopefully be able to go to it. I have a hard time trusting these tools already. So in the publish section, we have publishing details, draft, scheduled, publish now. When we do scheduled, we have a dropdown for the time. Right now it says 12 a.m. What integers or

4:45what time variations do you think it's going to go down? Oh, when I drop this menu down? I'm I first I expected one hour increments, but now I'm thinking maybe 30 minute increments. Ready? I'm going to drop this down. You tell me what you see. Okay. One minute increments. There's a dropdown that starts at 12 and goes to 1201, 1202, 1203. And you're scrolling and it's 1212, 1213, 1214, 132, 133, 134. That is a long dropdown. It's I mean, it could because it goes to midnight. You can't type it. You have to scroll.

5:18I when you click in the cursor doesn't move at all. So I can't like just change the two. Oh, for sure. What I've found, you can just start typing, I think. Yeah. So you have to make sure though you're very caught and doing 06 colon 00 and then you get the ones you can do. That's crazy. I think the fact that the singular minutes in the dropdown on top of the fact when you click into the box, nothing deletes or the cursor doesn't move. Yeah. It should at least show that like, Hey, you're typing now you are allowed to not scroll minute by minute. It's one of those

5:51weird, it feels like it's vibe coded or like you, you want to give people a dropdown, but you, you can only really select the time by clicking something in the dropdown. So you start typing and it services the dropdown and then you click the time, which is probably, yeah, they probably didn't test that too much. Yeah. Just kind of scroll through the whole day by minute by minute. Yeah. How many minutes are in a day? Pop quiz. I have no idea. Hold on. Let me count. One, two, three. There's 3,600 in an hour, right? 60 minutes. Sorry. 3,600 in what's that? Seconds in an hour. Is it rent? Seconds in an hour. Yeah. What's

6:24the song? Rent Chicago? One of those. How many minutes are in a day? How many minutes are in a day? So 60 minutes times 24. What's six times 24? 2,400 plus. This is that mental math. Times four. 24 times three is 36 times two is 7,200. When people ask us how we retain viewership, this is why we should be the people asked to do it. I just want to say, I'm proud of us. Not a single one, one of us here opened up a calculator. I did it. I just gave up off

6:58the start and let you guys figure it out. I think it's 7,200 and I'm not going to double check. Do you want to know? Sure. Oh, you did it. Is that trivia? What do you think? What do you think it is, Andrew? I just want to appreciate the fact that generally what we've learned about Marquez in the, am I the asshole episode is he would just search this immediately while we're all having the fun time of figuring it out. And he didn't do that. I know that's growth. Growth. Yeah. That's growth. Most improved. But now I want to know if I'm right. That's okay. Cause I Googled it immediately. Cause I wanted to know. And it is 1,440 minutes

7:32in one day. Minutes in a day. Is that AI overview? Maybe. 60 times. I'm trying it also. 60 times. There's so little we trust. It's 1440. 1440. Well, now we know. There's 1440 things in that drop down. That's crazy. It's fun. All right. Also, we want to shout out the studio desk mat real quick. So I, I showed it in the, uh, the last MKBHD video, but if you haven't already seen it, we are finally, and I say that because we've had a long behind the scenes process, but we are finally launching and sharing this studio themed desk mat with the world. You

8:06have two of them, Andrew. You want to say why you have two of them? I have two of them. Um, I have two of them because we partnered with a company named Omnitype who has been in the mechanical keyboard market for a long time. It makes very high quality desk mats and something they actually introduced to me, which you've been using for far longer than I have is the, it's called like the rough or controlled texture control surface. Yeah. So you use an artisan mouse pad cause you don't use a full desk mat and it kind of has this like, I don't want to call it stitched feeling, but almost like raised. Yeah. When you describe

8:38it and don't feel it, it sounds bad. You want a mouse to like glide. Right. Sure. Yeah. But to me, it actually, it feels better. Um, I think it actually feels like a higher quality than the smooth ones, but it's just not your normal desk mat for our audio listeners. What does the mat look like? I've held it up already for the audio listeners. Oh, for the audio listeners. What did they didn't see? Um, okay. So studio vibes, studio colors, lots of different colors and shapes that are overlapping with each other to create other colors. And then we have

9:10this kind of really nice fade on a lot of it. Um, I just think overall, it's one of those things that will match with a lot of desks because it has so many colors, unless your desk is just like matte black, everything in which case it stands out. It stands out a lot. David, when he used to work here originally started the idea he's left. And then, um, Tim kind of brought it all together to finally make this push. Wait, what you're talking about our former, our former, yes. Sorry, David, who is not, not the other David as the chair

9:42is empty next to you. Sorry. Um, I'm obviously, I'm so excited about this desk mat that I'm all over the place right now. Cause we have been working on this for a while and I'm so pumped for it to come out. We made it the exact, actually we made sure it was the same price as Omni type sells it. So people didn't think we have like a YouTuber tax on it. We accidentally put it at $29 when they sell it for 30. So we were actually cheaper than Omni type by a dollar. So no one can blame us for that. And not only that, but Garrett at Omni type is big on packaging. Um, I feel like companies that focus a lot on packaging

10:15and user experience generally are pretty high quality. And he let Tim and Olivia kind of go wild with this box. Yeah. Everyone worked really hard on it. Everyone worked really hard. We had a massive studio wide discussion on if we should launch it in only the rough texture or just the smooth texture. Since people are used to that, you could say we AB tested it. Yeah, we did. I mean, we did launch both. We were worried about launching both, but we did. And I think the sales right off the riff were within 10 of each other. Basically 50, 50. Um,

10:45and I, you know, I made it clear that if you're not like up on game, you could probably just safely order the smooth and it's going to feel like what you're used to. But if you do know ball, then it's cool to know you have the option of a control texture surface. So that is, uh, that's where we're at. They're out. They're available. Go check them out. MKBHD.com. Uh, okay. Now, speaking of things that are not so cheap,

Galaxy S26 price increases and storage

11:06Galaxy S26 prices did go up, um, roughly by a hundred bucks across the board. So we talked about this when Apple did it. They raised a lot of prices that were not the iPhone. And then they, they launched new iPhones, obviously that are more pricey. Galaxy S26 has been out since January, but are now getting a price increase, uh, near the end of this year. Well, and Apple in their launch also increased the prices of the previous generation. So it did finally hit the entire Apple store basically. Um, so basically everything's about

11:37a hundred bucks more expensive. That's kind of right in line with what we seem to be expecting from everyone. So like the Galaxy S26, 256 gig, instead of starting at 900, it's a thousand dollar phone now. And then you go up from there. So if you want an S26 plus, that's a $1,200 phone. If you want an ultra, that's a $1,400 phone to start. And then they go up from there. I think the max price, one terabyte or ultra is a $2,000 phone. That's wild. The ultra is a $2,000, a non-folding phone is a $2,000 phone now. Yeah. Yeah. Is that actually, is that the first time we've seen it? Uh, that can't be, that can't be the first thousand dollar non-folding phone,

12:11but it is definitely like you're getting like, obviously the duo is going to be a thousand dollars, $2,000 to start. So you're, you are approaching foldable territory real quick at the top of that lineup. Uh, if you get a terabyte phone, by the way, uh, let us know what you do with that terabyte. Cause the only thing I've ever upgraded my storage for is a lot of video shooting. I know I'm going to doing a lot of photos and videos. So I get the more storage. Everything else I do on my phone is like a tiny fraction of the amount of photos and videos. All the apps on my phone combined are like less than 50 gigs. Like I don't have

12:44huge apps on my phone. Yeah. You do switch your phone a lot. Yeah. But I have a bunch of apps and I, here, I'll just pull it up on this one plus 15. But like, I would be curious if anyone does anything other than media to fill up their storage. Let's see what I actually have. There is a $2,000 iPhone spec that you can buy. Yeah. And a pro max. Yeah. Yeah. A pro max. What? A regular pro in two terabytes is 20. There's a two terabyte. Oh, right. I did not know. Wow. I missed that. Terabyte. Two terabytes. $2,400. That's Jesus. That's crazy. I did not know that.

13:21All right. I have a 512 gig OnePlus 15 here. All of my apps combined are 145 gigs. And that's including everything I've downloaded from Spotify, which is all of my libraries and lossless. So it's, it's not that much. Lossless. 62 gigs of it is Spotify. So I have like 80 gigs of apps, all my apps. Yeah. Yeah. I, um, is this not, as we're talking about this, is this not the perfect time for phones to start bringing back the micro SD card slot and just being like, you guys can figure storage out because it's costing us a damn fortune right now. It's funny because I think they

13:56would use the opposite argument is the storage is the way that they can upcharge. It's the RAM that costs them so much. And obviously storage is still storage. It costs more, but like the amount that they charge you for extra storage is definitely recouping more than they're paying. Yeah. So they would love to keep charging you for storage and not giving you the micro SD card slot. Well, but that's not the excuse they're saying out loud because that's basically saying, well, yeah, I mean, they're all the prices go up because all these phones still have a bunch of RAM in them, but they are always going to charge more for more storage. And this is, uh, not a shock, I guess. I want the micro SD card

14:30back. I think we all want a lot of things back. We're going to get cloud storage. And that's the thing. That's the real thing is cloud storage is a subscription. So why would they give you something that you can pay someone else one time for it? How much do you think you can get a two terabyte SD card for? Micro SD? Micro SD. Which kind? A slow one? Two terabyte?

14:54I have two micro SD cards, both with two terabytes of storage in front of me. They're both Sandisk Extreme SDXCs. One of them has the V30A2 with the three in the bucket rating. And the other one does not have the three in the bucket. What are they just doing? A2. V30, one, A2. One of them has the three in the bucket. Sorry. I mean like 300, like the read, write speed. Megabytes per second. All right. All right. Make me click on the links now. Oh, really? It usually just says it right on the card. Yeah. I think the SDXC is, they have a minimum speed to qualify for that. Yeah. So I'm

15:27going to, I have a guess already. I should have said what colors, is it the Sandisk gold one? It is the Sandisk gold. Okay. That's fine. That's a gooder knife. Um, two terabyte? Wait, let me think of a guess so I'm not going off of you. All right. Write speed, 150 megabytes second. Two terabyte? Read speed, 245 megabytes second. Okay. I'm locked in. Do you want to say that at the same time? Um, okay. Yeah. One, two, three. $90. $90? Yeah. I think, yeah, no, s*** is way too expensive now. See, that's one terabyte. Uh, the one I'm looking right now

16:00is $400. For two terabytes? For two terabytes. When you go down to like, uh, 512, is that like 60 bucks? I'd say that's probably around 90. No. It's still 140. How much is it? 256? But if you get, is that Gengar? This is a brand name? That's another 20 bucks. Oh my God. Wait, I think it might be. It's a Gengar. Oh, oh, uh, didn't the Switch do a bunch of micro SD cards? Yeah. That one's only 120. Speaking of things with memory, there's some, some interesting

LG smart home partnerships and foldable yields

16:29stories popping up that are like a combo of like leaks and reporting about Apple's new, I guess, home devices. And this, this latest one was interesting. It's basically that Apple is going to be partnering with LG on launching a bunch of, uh, like doorbell and thermostat and temperature sensor type things. And I saw that and I was like, oh, interesting partnering with LG. So that kind of implies that Apple is not building them, but if they're partnering with them, so they'll be Apple branded maybe, or maybe it's kind of like a Beats partnership scenario. I'm not really

17:02sure. So I click on it and there's some leaked images, uh, from this nine to five Mac article and they are just straight up not branded at all. Actually it just says LG. There's no Apple branding at all on them. So one of them is a doorbell, uh, sort of a deadbolt on one side and a touch pad on the other side, which I don't love. I think those are two different things. No, I think doorbell and the, I think, no, no, that's the deadbolt. Yeah. Which, and then there's a doorbell. I don't think the doorbell's in the leaked images, but it is a rumored thing to be

17:33coming out. Okay. So just the deadbolt, sorry, with the passcode on the other side, with the passcode on the other side. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, it just says LG on it. There's no Apple branding here. The other is a smart thermostat. Again, it looks like a nest. They all kind of look the same at this point. It's a circle with very thin bezels with a big temperature and you probably rotate it or press the button on either side to raise and lower the temperature and then a temperature sensor. But the fact that none of them say Apple on it kind of makes me think this is kind of getting blown out of proportion. Like what, what kind of partnership is this exactly? If it's just being

18:04in the Apple store or getting announced as a compatible accessory, but it's not made by Apple, then this doesn't really make it as interesting. Well, here's the other thing. If you look up LG homes, like, I don't think LG was making these home devices beforehand. Sure. Um, and I think because two weeks ago when we talked about this potential or maybe it was last week, um, cause next, next week we're having the Apple, like we think there's going to be rumored event, the home event, the home hub event. That's what I, geez, I keep getting like confused, not home pad, home hub,

18:37which we might get the home pad at. And we specifically said we were not going to see, um, a security camera. Yeah. And now we're seeing all this, that we are going to see doorbell, deadbolt, thermostat, indoor, outdoor, and floodlight camera, but all made in partnership or co-made with LG. And that's coming from German, the same person who said it's not coming, which makes me think, like you said, LG is just going to make these products. And maybe at this launch, we're just getting the first view of like compatible with Apple's new home hub.

19:10Yeah. These are the products that are going to work with that. Maybe there's going to be some sort of like branding to mark them as officially compatible. I don't really know. Cause right now, if you want to buy something that works with home kit, I guess is what it's called. You just look for that logo on the box and it says home kit compatible. And you're like, great. If I buy this, it'll, it'll be able to plug into the ecosystem. It'll show up in my home. Um, maybe this is some like higher level of, this is optimized for and passes any number of, uh, requirements for not sharing data or

19:41whatever it is. And it'll be in partnership with, and they'll get the like plug and they'll show them off alongside the new home stuff. I could see that kind of not super interesting, but no, it makes sense to launch it around this time because they're going to need to show off home hub and that's, they're going to want products that they, you know, feel like they have some control over and so partnering with LG. Yeah. Then they can endorse it and they don't have to be like, cause this is so clearly a shot directly at Amazon and Google with nest

20:12and ring. Like they basically just went, go to the nest website and make all of the things on that website. Um, yeah, we need the equivalent stuff in our ecosystem and these are easily the most popular. Like I own one of all of these products in some sort of home. I have all three of these in my Google home. I have temperature sensors. I have the deadbolt lock and I have a, I even have a, the camera stuff. Like they're all sort of talking to each other in the doorbell app. I have the doorbell exactly. So yeah, if Apple's going to have this brand new fancy

20:42display that can show the feed from a doorbell and a security camera and open and close like the locks and all that stuff, you might as well have some, some first party ish locks and doorbells and security cameras to point to that. This will work with. Yeah. And in their marketing material, they don't want it to say ring and nest all over the cameras that they're switching to. I'm sure. Um, and I doubt these are going to say LG if they made it in collaboration with Apple. However, they'll have to name it. They'll have to name it something. It's interesting because it already looks like LG has their own like home app for all of their devices for like your fridge

21:16or whatever. So I wonder if it'll still be available on that app as well. That's the thing I'm confused though is like, it doesn't seem, and I haven't looked up everything, but like they didn't have a doorbell or a smart lock. So it is funny that you think of LG as like, you can create your whole home with LG appliances and like everything LG. Yeah. But they didn't have all the connection things. So maybe this is just a good place to find the partnership of Apple ecosystem, software, LG product. I know Ellis loves LG software cut his mic right now. Um, and this, this is it.

21:50You love Apple and you love LG. This is a perfect partnership. He's just facepalming over there. I had my final freaking straw with my LG TV this week because remember a few weeks ago and I was like, yeah, you know, like LG always asked me to sign this crazy privacy. I just decline and then it lets me use the TV last week, man. It was finally like, if you don't accept this, I will not connect to your wifi network. And, uh, and I'm working on a few different solutions and maybe I'll bring it up later, but my time with web OS has come to an end. I'm done with you. That TV is

22:23getting air gapped. The second I figure it out. One other thing there is, there was an article at least about the duo potentially hitting some production difficulties already. A quote from someone close to production lines in a Chinese news article then posted by Mac rumors, which is the way we get seem to get all this stuff said final assembly yields for Apple's first foldable iPhone were only slightly above 60% as of September 17th. Source said that under Apple's current quality standards, it could take another six months to a year for the assembly Ryan line to reach a mature

22:55yield, which is, I don't know what to make of that. I, my take on this is yield. I have a hard time believing some parts of it. Like I think it makes a great headline and a really interesting headline like, Oh wow, that must be so difficult to make the duos and they might not be able to make as many as they need. But I also tend to think that with a supply chain mastery giant, like Apple, by the time they announce a new product, like the iPhone duo, it's very rare that they aren't ready to make it. Like remember the, the wireless charger, what was it called? The air power. That's like the only

23:28example I can think of, of Apple, like getting to the finish line of announcing a product, but not really having the finished product ready. When we got iPhone duo, like announced, I'm pretty sure they had for weeks and weeks and months and months been done deciding how they're going to made it. And they've started, they've started making thousands and thousands and thousands of them. And the month between announcement and pre-order is to give developers a bunch of extra time to start making their apps compatible with duo and to get it ready to ship and to give a little gap after 18 pro.

24:01And I, I don't think that this new information, I don't think that this crazy yield is new information. I'm, I'm willing to believe that it is difficult to make these, but I don't think that there's suddenly some snag of like, Oh, we announced it now. Suddenly we're not sure we can make enough. I feel like they've made as many as they thought they were going to make and it's going to be hard to get, but not in any sort of drastic way. I could see there being some sort of issue developed along the way. Like we've had things where, what was the pixel where some of

24:33the screens were made in one factory and had like X issue. And like when you, when the scale is so big, even when you're producing and producing and producing, getting up to it, like there is potential for a scale issue to come out, which, you know, depletes things. I remember that I forgot what phone it was. I want to remember, but even that I remember different reviewers would have different panels in their review units. So it was like, even before the whole like mass shipping situation, like they had already decided that that's how they were going

25:04to satisfy how many units they had to make. They're like, all right, we got to get panels from two different factories. And it just happened. And that's how, and then people discovered it and then it was a big deal. But I think, yeah, there's probably a lot of things that have already been decided about the duo that we're now discovering because they're just coming out. This headline also is like kind of interesting because it says like under Apple's current quality standards, which this is one of those things where a bad headline can kind of make you look good by being like, well, we're Apple. We have such high standards that, you know, like we might be

25:35reaching some delay, but we're always going to get you the best thing. It kind of reminds me of how every single week we see like AI company delaying launch of blah, blah, blah, because it's just too strong for you guys, which like then feels like build hype, like, oh my God, I have to get the strongest AI ever. And then they've released it a week anyways. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like we're getting more into these like semi-negative headlines where we all just turn it into no, that actually means they're fantastic. Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, probably not a headline Apple wants to be out there, but we, I think what's going to happen is the duo is going to come out.

26:10It's going to be limited in quantity. It's going to be hard to get. It's going to drive demand up. People are going to sell them on eBay for three K for the first couple of weeks. And then they're finally going to start being in more Apple stores and in higher quantities. And then we'll all forget that happened. But the people who pay $3,000 for it on eBay will not forget that that happened. No, I'm still so intrigued to see how many of these I'm going to see around. You know what's funny? Anecdotally. In the studio, one by one, I see people like caving and deciding they actually like the

26:41duo and might want to get one. Cause I feel like at the very beginning, didn't we do a short where we're like, how much is the duo going to cost? And then we went around and then I think we asked, are you going to get one? And almost everyone was like, no. And now I think if you went around, you might get a few more yeses. I know Alex is probably in. Olivia said maybe cause she wants to watch YouTube while she does stuff on her phone. People's imaginations are slowly like making the duo really interesting to people. And this delay is maybe serving as like a bit of marketing and people like thinking about

27:12the duo a little more, but it is also expensive. 2K for a first gen product. I don't know. Yeah. This is going to be fun for the review. Like I think we have to remember as we review this, that it is, it is a first gen product. Oh, that's so hard as the review because it's like, it's Apple's first gen product, but they've gotten to watch eight years of people doing this. Right. So Apple specifically sat back and waited for many, many, many others to do many other multiple generations of their products before they make their first generation. So the standard

27:44for this as a first generation product is not the same as the standard for Samsung being the first one to ship a foldable phone in the U S but it is still the first version for them. And I do find often the second generation is where you learn the most about what this is, who it's for, what it's good at, and like what they're doubling down on. And I think the second generation will probably be the one that is more likely to be easy to recommend to people, but we have to see like what they change. Cause remember all those like first gen foldables, first gen pixel, it was a

28:15passport size first gen, like Apple find like X or find N was passport size. And then the second generation, they all started leaving that shape. So what does Apple do with the second gen? I don't know, but we, yeah, I, I stay, I'm, I'm still thinking about it as a first gen foldable, at least through that lens. I'm most intrigued if they're going to keep the under display selfie camera for the second gen. Yes. And I have to assume they are because they're stubborn, whether it will be the right move or not, I think is another question. Yeah. And it's also funny cause Apple always seems to try new things, at least with the iPhone twice. So they tried the mini, the 12 mini and then they,

28:53yeah. And then, you know, have your hand on that fun. They tried the, the 12 mini and a lot of people liked it, but it really did not sell very well, but that did not stop them for trying a second one. The 13 mini, they fixed the battery life. It was a better phone. And then yeah, it didn't sell enough and it was over. They switched to the plus that you're bringing up the, like the, this weird section of iPhones where like they do something for two years, kill it, do something for two years. So yeah. Mini plus air. We got an air. We got our new air. We're expecting a second

29:25generation air. I don't think there's any doubt there's going to be a second gen air probably in January, February, whatever. Then what? Will it stay around? I don't know, but I would bet anything there's going to be a second gen air. So there will be another generation of, you know, duo, obviously. Will they keep all the things from the first generation? We'll have to see. All right. Speaking of Apple. Yeah. Android central closing down. Speaking of Apple. I just

Android Central layoffs and YouTube AI features

29:51want to throw this out here. It's always a bummer when we see other publications kind of die out, especially in the age of AI, which you kind of have to assume is part of the reason why this happened. But yeah, that's the thing is it's not shutting down. Well, yeah, they got rid of all of their writers. It's not shutting down, but they fired all of their writers. Yeah. And yeah. So apparently, so future they are, they're owned by future. Um, they've owned Android central for a while, but after this last week, all six writers got let go. Um, total bummer, all remaining staff,

30:25all remaining staff. So what happened is there have been articles launched since this happened and they do have a freelance contributor section and all of those posts have been made by freelance contributors. So it's this weird thing of like, are they just going to ride the freelance contributors and to, to like try and stay relevant and probably overwork them? Or I don't know what the deal is there on, on how those people get paid. I don't even know who, right. Yeah. So that's a really tough thing. They, I think they claim they're not going to use AI, but I think we're all under

30:56the assumption that this is just going to unfortunately turn into AI slop. Yeah. Which is kind of like the dead. It's like, it's like the death rattle of like a company like this. Like we've all, uh, all publications have some sort of a life cycle, I guess. Well, that life cycle is getting choked out real hard right now with it. Cause like we saw Verge, didn't Verge post those numbers of like, uh, weekly visitors and how bad they got hit in like the last year because of

31:26overviews and stuff in the search engine. Exactly. Yeah. This is why I had like a 90% reduction or something. Right. Which is, uh, this was like what tied into my whole like question about the ask YouTube feature from the made on YouTube thing. Because if you, you know, if you ask most publishers, like what happened to your traffic when AI overview started like learning from your stuff and then just telling people the answer before they ever get to your site. Well, of course your traffic basically disappears. Your ad revenue basically disappears and you have to completely rethink how you exist. Uh, if this YouTube feature does the same thing or a similar

32:00thing, what does that look like for traffic? Like do people use the feature to talk to it and never watch a YouTube video or do they use the feature to jump into the middle of a YouTube video? And so they still get the traffic and then the one second of playtime still equals a view. Not really sure how this works. Equals a view, not a, not a view that pays us. Not an engaged view, not an engaged view. It's weird on YouTube because we always say the number one thing the algorithm wants is get your, stay on YouTube as long as possible. Like do not leave, come here, stay here, watch around, have a good time. So how does that fit in the ethos of, I don't want to watch this

32:34video. I just want to know the answer. Now I'm not watching videos. Is that, is that, do they assume that person's not someone who's going to stay on anyways? They're just looking for the answer. Yeah. So YouTube has slowly evolved over the years, how they, uh, measure success of like a viewer session, I guess. And I think viewer satisfaction has always come up and like how long you spend on the site was a more rudimentary way of measuring that. But maybe there is a higher satisfaction rate

33:04of getting the answer from a video quickly instead of trying to find it and failing and leaving. And so they think that that's a better experience, which YouTube, if you're listening to this and you want to deliver a better experience, perhaps some sort of glanceable information to quickly understand the quality of a video would be useful. So people don't waste time on bad videos. Maybe if there's some sort of like, I don't know, like a ratio of people who liked it versus didn't like it,

33:36then you could see that and go, Oh, a lot of people didn't like this one. I'll move on. Just an idea. I don't know if you're like thinking about that stuff, but yeah, just a, just a thought. Um, but yeah, that is, that is just a long tangent, which is to say RIP Android central, RIP, uh, you'll be missed. I've read a lot of Android central articles over the years, especially in my rooting and modding and bootloading days. And I don't want to take away from the people who are the freelance contributors over there. I'm sure they're still writing some good stuff. I just hope that if you are one of those people that

34:09future's treating you well, which I doubt they are. And like, I think he made enough money off of mask off to pay six people. Future. That's a future joke. Well, you know what else?

34:21We'll find out in the future. Yeah. The answers to this trivia.

34:27That's good. That was smooth. You were somehow faster on the ding for the iPhone mini than you were for the trivia thing that we just set up for 25 seconds. Yeah. Diamonds from Africa. It's another future. So Apple's partnering with LG, but it is not the first time they've worked together. And I'm not talking about the ultra fine 4k that was like in Apple store. That's the one I remember that one was the one that blocked wifi. That was the one that kept flickering when you were using it in your, yeah, people forget. People remember that, but they forget that it was actually a pretty solid

34:58deal. Yeah. Unfortunately, this question is slightly muddled by the fact that for some reason, LG and LG displays are like separate companies, but not separate companies, but like not the same company, whatever LG displays, which is not LG. So I guess they haven't collab, but just roll with it. You know, suspensive disbelief for the sake of this trivia question has made the displays in a lot of Apple products. I was able to confirm two Apple products that they were either the exclusive or main supplier of panels for what to Apple products. Do you want like specific series number? Nope.

35:32Just like in general product, just, just product. Um, one of them, I will give you a little hint. One of them is a product line that has had generations. One of them, there is only one air power. There's only one that doesn't actually narrow it down. Cause you know, there's a couple of things that still only have one generation thinking about like HomePod has a display. HomePod mini has a display, just a little glowing. It's probably not the answer, but that's something, something to think

36:04about. Well, we'll get the answers. Like we've said in the future at the end. So we'll be right back.

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Previewing the annual smartphone awards

38:55apple watch series 12 all right welcome back now it's it's techtober so we're starting to get towards that end of the year where all of the phones are out which means it's starting to get to that time where we start thinking about who's going to win awards for the smartphone awards every year we give out awards for the best and worst smartphones that came out during the calendar year we have a bunch of categories and i think we can just sort of step through these and start thinking about storylines and thoughts and and this is also a great fun time to sort of pull like what

39:29our audience thinks because people people have hard reactions on what they think should definitely win certain awards and we will hear from those people as well but can i do a fun fact of the process of this yeah i'm bringing it up now well one because not a lot happened this week so it's a bummer that david's not here to talk about this but we actually have a date for end of october for when we're gonna have a meeting to kind of like discuss this and i thought it was funny because obviously when the video comes out in early december all the time we take to discuss it we have to order trophies because

40:04that's the thing we started doing a few years ago there's this gap of when a phone might come out so i'm sure people are gonna be like what happens if x phone comes out in that process and i believe it may have been last year the year before is the first time we've done it but we've done where we know a phone is coming out that we don't have that we think could like legitimately fight for an award and we've ordered the trophy for that phone yeah so i think what it was last year was the best camera right and we had like two or three that we were juggling between and we also were waiting to get

40:37like the vivo x 300 pro or ultra i'm pretty sure samsung trifold was something we were debating for best foldable as well but it was super super late in the year because and it's obviously a triple folding phone yeah so think about it just the like maybe this is good enough so let's just leave room for it to maybe win as well yeah and then obviously decide at the very end okay this one wins this one wins yeah um so yeah we there's some some phones that haven't come out yet obviously the iphone duo we know what it is but it's not out yet um i think the vivo like x 500 series is around the corner if

41:12things hold like that's usually what happens is it's around this time of year um but yeah this is what we're working with what we have and what's out and uh we we definitely already have some thoughts we can kind of go in order you want to go in order okay i'll go in order so we start with best big phone and this is funny because when we first started the smartphone awards there was distinctly huge phones yeah like phablet like galaxy note galaxy what do they call it galaxy mega remember that no you don't remember that galaxy it used to have like a regular size is it british

41:43no it's just galaxy mega and it was a phablet freak freakishly big phone which to us today is a regular size remember guess how big it was like a 5.3 inch phone probably oh it was bigger than that but it's still 6.3 okay so like but back then phones were all 4.75 are any phones under 6.3 now that would be a small phone yeah which is crazy galaxy mega would be a small phone today but yeah we used to have like distinctly huge phones and small phones so i would give an award for best big phone

42:13yeah nowadays all these slab phones are kind of the same size like we have the ultras that are really big and then we have all the other phones that are just big yeah so it's hard to pick one that's like clear-cut best big phone i don't know if i have any thoughts yet it i tend to not do the ones that are like super super safe with design someone who did something interesting last year was xiaomi 17 pro uh which had the screen on the back like they really use the space well huge battery

42:44great specs great cameras they did that again with the 18 pro this year so that's interesting i did find a comment last year on a reddit thread um that i found interesting because we last year i think it was the first time had a small phone be a flip phone and they said if a small phone that can flip to a normal size phone is allowed to be a best small phone why isn't a folding phone allowed to be best big phone and i i think it's along the lines of it's not that it's not allowed it's that

43:15the criteria between these two are generally the big phone should have the absolute packed amount of features because it is using is utilizing all the space best where smart small phone is like we know there have to be sacrifices made for it to be small but what can they pack into the smallness of it to make the size of it beneficial so like yeah a folding phone is like you get a normal size phone but it gets to be little for like putting it in a purse or like women's pockets sucks so like maybe

43:47they can actually fit it but you still get a lot of stuff where it feels like a lot of folding phones actually do have sacrifices compared to the slab phones that those companies make totally but i also think that's valid if you want you want a huge screen you would say i want the i want the folding phone that's the best big phone for me i think the bummer is we still see like lack of uh flagship not flagship cameras but like totally in the lineup they're never the best of the best yeah the best they are the biggest and most expensive phones but not necessarily the most capable because they don't have the biggest you know internal space for the heat shield they don't have the biggest internal

44:21space for the cameras so they don't have the most flagship specs um which is probably why you lean again towards uh yeah the big slab phone with the big slab specs it used to like rog phone used to run away with this because they were just like throw all the cool features that other phones don't have in here and a vapor chamber and like all of these crazy like flashy external pieces of hardware like external attachable fans and stuff yeah they went super hard now there's a lot of those things honestly big phone and small phone writing this is the ones i had the absolute hardest time i'm thinking

44:56these categories are almost i think they're still beneficial but they're becoming the least uh competitive you know what it is you know what it feels like it's like when there's an mvp award but there's also an offensive player of the year award and you're like isn't the best offensive player probably going to win mvp yeah usually but if there's like an extremely interesting example of like super heavily weighted offense and no defense you're like all right that's the offensive player but the mvp is a little more well-rounded that's kind of what best big phone is to me so i don't

45:28really have a front runner for that yet but that's how i'm thinking about that one so yeah best small phone uh you didn't really get any small phones there aren't they don't exist anymore yeah it probably has to be a folding phone one of those flips in which case you have a couple i guess we did get smaller folding phones yeah and you have like z fold we have like razors we have a couple of those huawei like there's a bunch that are all kind of the same size and shape that we can that we can look at those but yeah we don't have like small slabs anymore i remember when the zen phone was just like

46:02such an easy pick it was so good it was such a good phone it's so good we might 2026 7 2027 smartphone awards we may have some small phones depending on the successful release because clicks communicator would be a small phone oh is that coming out they're running out of time might yeah that's another one that we might want to see if that comes out this year i don't know actually i should also i don't know when minimal phone ships but i would call that a small phone too yeah they are technically small that's interesting yeah some of those are going to be

46:33like thoughtful small phone executions so we'll have to think about those it is hard because in the sense of like we want the small phone to be the most capable thing in a small form factor when those you could argue are like trying to be less capable yeah and therefore is the size to capable capability ratio not really that good they're worse arguably big like yeah big for what it can do yeah you know it is technically the best compact award not the most capable compact

47:04so i'm like if we just really like it then we can give it the award vague awards means we can change your mind exactly it's our award i think i opened the last three years being like it's my awards guys i can we can i can decide whatever i want to win and i will be able to justify it okay wait if that's the case can i can i lobby for a nomination of course there's a few comparable products and projects the one i'm looking at is called tiny pod are you familiar with this no it's that apple watch and apple watch ultra case that hooks up the crown to a scroll wheel

47:37so if you have a cellular enabled one you can use it as a standalone handheld device technically you can make a phone call on that this is it is you're right it is small and it's technically cellular enabled and you can connect airpods directly to it so it kinda that's like what you when we get kids their first phone that's what they should have like wow i will add this to the consideration i doubt it will win that'd be a wild card to just put i will add yeah the winner the apple watch

48:10there's like i said there's a few different companies that are making pretty similar products this is just the first one i could remember the name of here's a controversial one should thinness be small i mean like in the in the area of where we're at if all phones if all phones are small if all phones are big no phones are big right so every phone is the same size so what else makes it small if it's thin and light here's the issue like a cop-out i feel like they're actually are genuinely small phones they're just the weird little freaky phones yeah but then the question

48:43is are the weird little freaky small phones the best small phones but it's still subjective so yeah it is true is is the iphone era it's a compact phone so i guess it technically well the iphone air and the s25 edge came out last year so it doesn't even matter that's true ah and there is no s26 edge yeah yeah so they're both not going to qualify so why am i even saying any of this well i honestly i thought you were going to come at me with someone that i just missed no no that's that's i mean

49:13there are thin phones but they're all folding phones now so yeah interesting yeah i'd like to hear that's gonna be a fun one yeah all right so next one is best camera okay and so there's lots

Evaluating the best cameras and value phones

49:26of good cameras at this point and i almost talked about this i'm trying to think of which one i think it might have been the pixel 11 pro review where i almost i think i cut it from the video but i almost went on this like diatribe of like i don't know they're all kind of the same thing but like playing a different character and it's just how much do you like the character that they play do you like the contrasty confident one do you like the super super flat one that always has light on your face do you like the really really sharp one because they all just do their own thing and whichever one is

49:57best i don't know do you just want the sharpest one do you want the one that looks the least processed what is the best camera anymore there are there are ones that have clearly the best specs yeah like the biggest sensors and the most advanced hardware and the most customization most sharpening that is that is a character that you can get but is that the best you know david is fuming somewhere listen well to bring up what david would probably say and this is potentially i have a couple different things written down on some things i think should be considered some things that i

50:30wonder if we should consider probably not but okay i do have pixel 11 because of camera looks like camera looks is actually a really cool feature they added and arguably the shining spot of the pixel 11 series which didn't shine very bright overall but camera looks is a really cool new thing that kind of defaults and does the thing we've been asking for a long time which is like stop processing the absolute hell out of my photos and you get to default them in the camera app correct and change things up like i actually think that's awesome and pixel's always been a camera that can hang but having

51:04that feature i think is nice yeah and that's kind of the story of a lot of the most high-end smartphone cameras is they are very high on processing too yes and it's an interesting story if the one that is the best is the one that turns down a lot of that over processing and gives you some options as well so like you said you were just saying do you want the most contrast do you want this and that the pixel 11 gives you some options and lets you lock in on your option yeah and i think that's a i think that's a good thing i still like the look of the pixel cameras i think for a couple years now

51:35many years actually they've been on the contrast to your side a lot of the smartphones kind of just opt to like put light on your face no matter what but it's on the contrast your side skin tones are sort of realistic in a lot of situations so uh i value that in a smartphone camera but i also just took a lot of pictures with like the the xiaomi 18 pro max and it's really really good set of cameras they kind of just stopped caring about the ultra wide i think i feel like everyone stopped caring about the ultra wide unfortunately feels like it's turning into like the the what 10 megapixel macro or

52:11whatever the one megapixel macro i i wouldn't quite go that far not quite i think those macros were just like use like zero value add i think the ultra wides at least give you like the option to like zoom out or take like a wide i've also i've taken this is something i noticed in the last year specifically i've had a lot of people like take selfies with me and a lot of times it's like the selfie camera and like just holding it out or whatever and there's this maybe not gen z but there's this young person thing where they will use the regular camera they'll flip it around to the ultra wide

52:45and they'll take it from up high and that's a specific thing you need an ultra wide camera to do that but i see that a lot more and i'm curious if if neglecting the ultra wide is a mistake for people who like that stuff it feels like every camera is always uh every time we review a camera there's always just oh this is good this is good ultra wide not as good or we'll be like the ultra wide finally matches the megapixels of everything else so maybe they care about it yeah but that's the yeah the megapixels thing necessarily mean it but yeah yeah because

53:20people see the 200 megapixel number now and they go ah selfie or like flagship like 200 megapixels equals flagship but then you look at the size of the sensor and you're like oh it's just kidding it's they they packed the sensor with pixels but that doesn't mean it's actually great sometimes it means it's worse because the pixels are individually smaller and it's noisier blah blah blah we're getting into the weeds you mentioned xiaomi before this felt like the year of um really harping on the legacy camera collaborations because we got oh yeah the the leica phone which is this is the xiaomi 17 that is a phone got it but yeah this is a xiaomi 17 pro ultra i forget the name of it but

53:58like edition technically this release in china december 25th 2025 but globally was february 28th i think this should count the um this is just one of those things where like it has the the zoom ring on the outside it has this incredible knurling i think it's called right yeah knurling yeah knurring knurling knurling it feels like a oh yeah the side of the phone yeah it's a nice phone to hold and take it is speaking of another one the oppo x9 ultra hasselblad edition like and then i think vivo's

54:36also been doing zeiss stuff and like there we think the x500's coming out soon we've been doing all these things where this hasselblad one and vivo in the past have had all these extra lenses do we add extra lenses that x9 ultra i thought was incredible that's what that won last year right i know this came out this year okay x9 pro right x9 pro won last year x9 ultra i use that phone for a while for a couple yeah no it came out this year i think okay now you're making i'm almost i looked at so many camera collabs things and sometimes the chinese phones are hard to tell it is hard to

55:10remember sometimes i use it for a bit this year because i remember i had it in that um when we shot the luce i had that as my phone okay fun fact for those of you who don't remember this year yeah we went to italy to shoot the ferrari luce at least i did i uh forgot my charger no i didn't i forgot my adapter for italian outlets so i had to make my phones and everything that i was using last for two days without charging it luckily i had an iphone air and this phone so the iphone

55:40air died really fast and this phone lasted forever for like two straight days and i took a lot of photos and videos on it and it was excellent and yeah i remember that being really really good that's definitely a candidate for for camera remember if this orange like Hasselblad colored camera button has like haptics because it's not turned on right now and it feels awful i think it's just a shortcut i think some of them have also copied the like swiping back and forth camera control stuff i don't think that's one of this one does not have a rotating bezel around the camera no but this is a

56:15good looking phone yeah really really capable camera system that's definitely a candidate right there um and then the last thing which i don't think we should count but we have to bring up is we just kind of got the first looks at this uh huawei mate 90 pro max that has a $900 they're calling it the z10 oh this is this is okay this should be this should not count no okay i'm glad we're on the same page yeah so they made a this has actually happened before uh yeah i think it's happened a couple times actually they made a lens that you attach to the phone but it has its own sensor in it so it's

56:49like a 24 to 200 millimeter lens or something it's a one inch sensor and i know it has 10x optical zoom yeah so what happens is you screw it onto the back of the phone and it uses your phone as a viewfinder but it's not using the cameras on your phone it has its own camera built in so you're connecting to it and then you take pictures with this it's a whole camera it just doesn't look like one because it's sort of closed off yeah one of the i think it actually is like a is it magnetically hooks onto the back and then you screw the lens on it's like something like that i'm sure yeah but yeah i it is

57:23not part of the phone the huawei phone actually only works with like some special edition version of this like the collector's edition or something yeah but that is a really funny concept because we've seen this before i'm trying to remember was it sony that did this yeah it was sony like qx10 or something like that i don't remember let me let me get it but it was sony so last time i saw this it latched onto the phone and it again had its own sensors in it and you could connect it you'd pair it with your phone your phone became the viewfinder and that was supposed to be a better sensor you could take pictures with do you think xiaomi did this a couple years ago yeah xiaomi did this

57:58last year actually um at ces i think it was it was bad last time yeah it looks much different this one looks way nicer in the sense of how it physically looks but who really cares about that unless it takes a nice picture but marquez that was a crazy poll it was the sony qx10 yeah 12 years ago because i reviewed this and i was like hoping it would be great and it was a real pain it did not connect very smoothly to the phone it didn't take much better pictures in the phone it was it was a cool idea but it did not work very well but you looked cool using it did you yeah you felt cool

58:33sometimes because you thought you're going to take a sweet photo with that big zoom lens but yeah anyway that will not qualify i think cameras got the most fun uh distinctions this year really good stuff competition then there's a value award so we changed it because it used to be best budget phone now it's value award because what is budget anyway you know 200 300 400 whatever best value award um we have lots of players in this space every year and it it almost ends up just being like most interesting good value phone i mean this is a year where it's the hardest to pick it because

59:07everything things have literally gotten more expensive since they launched we just talked about it so you know this is usually something where we talk about msrp but msrp at launch isn't even how much they cost anymore so it's such a hard thing in ramageddon to to think about of a good value right now because yeah not a lot of things are a great value yeah i kind of think that the we have all the usual players in this space like we always get moto g's at 225 or whatever we always get

59:39now we always get cmf phones we always get nothing phones we always get like galaxy a series phones and a lot of them are pretty predictable and i don't want to fall into the trap of just being like well this one has the best specs so it just wins because i think the experience of using a budget phone sometimes is more than just the specs well cmf is not releasing a phone in 2026 that's fine i mean there's going to be you get like uh like the a series is very predictable they're just paring down what you know from a galaxy s 26 and it's just going to be the a50 whatever they do

1:00:11like that's a that's a very predictable safe budget phone but that's almost like the most boring possible option and i'm curious i'm going to sort of what i usually end up doing is digging back through the whole year of phones under a certain number and seeing like which ones actually were good which ones were interesting did something unique at that price that's more likely to win an award for best budget phone or best value phone i think it's the one we're gonna have to do the most research on because we didn't cover a lot of you know more budget things this year and we'll probably have to go find what people are enjoying yeah under x amount of dollars s26 ultra best

1:00:47budget phone what price if you had to guess off the top of your head don't mariah don't open this can of worms what what price should win oh no i was gonna say like if you were considering a budget phone like what price would you start up or like you know go under so the law of diminishing returns i think the i think the your phone isn't going to get much better bar is at like eight hundred dollars i think once you get to eight hundred dollars you can't really your phone's not going to get much better than the phones you get for eight hundred dollars but if you're looking for value

1:01:19and you're looking to get significantly less than eight hundred dollars i think i think five hundred dollars and under there's some good value down there i think five hundred is the number for a long time that i've thought of with price increases like those phones we were used to being at five hundred dollars are probably closer to six right now yeah the problem with the can of worms i'm talking about is no matter what we say people are going to say that's not budget budget is under 350 budget so yeah that's why we kind of changed value and like defining a number bites us and bites tiny pod

1:01:56might win two awards this year 79 it is a it is a case technically that makes it hard to win i don't know i i'm but yeah it is interesting like and again we're in the united states where a an msrp of a phone doesn't matter as much because especially the people looking for just give me whatever works are definitely going to a carrier and not and paying monthly like yeah no one in the u.s is really buying phones straight up unless you're probably listening to this podcast yeah the people listening

1:02:28what do you mean i do yeah but yeah yeah well then um okay this uh best battery category wow there's so many good ones for this year i have a question yeah we still should consider one plus 16 in everything as it'll just make you even more sad when it wins a bunch of awards for all the things it's getting yeah but so best battery is obviously you wanted to have phenomenal battery life but then also include some of the other things that make a good battery experience it lasts all day it doesn't

1:02:59kill background apps in doing so it charges fast ideally maybe it has wireless charging it's just super convenient to charge all the time maybe it has magnets in the back so it's super easy to charge stuff like that i i want to include all of that in my best battery award but yeah the one plus 16 has a is it 9 000 milliamp hour battery now i think 9 000 or 8 800 or something like we've got a lot of phones with ridiculously big batteries now that x9 ultra like i said lasted me two straight days plus

1:03:29traveling like it was a it was a dog it lasted a long time and i think that's a 70 some 7 500 or something that dog in the world it's got that dog in it and then this one plus 15 which i've been using since last year is still like a phenomenal battery and we've gotten phones that are like running laps around it it's crazy i gotta pick which one is legitimately just like a two day long heavy you know it probably would get two days what the tiny phone tiny pod no the apple watch battery is

1:04:00noticeably less yeah but it's not doing heart rate sensing oh if you're just if it's in your pocket that's it does it if it's sitting in your pocket what is it doing i've got the other one is called

Best design, foldables, and phone awards

1:04:10the mini phone ultra that's the one that's specifically great great name that's the one that's specifically for the um apple watch ultra and i think yeah oh damn that's kind of sick not gonna lie so you put your apple watch in a case it's got a flat screen this is so adam core i can't even wow he's although this could not go for best best deal because it does it is 800 because of the case is 800 no no no the apple watch ultra inside oh the case is 38 but you need an apple watch ultra

1:04:41yeah that's fair enough that's funny yeah there'll be some interesting ones for best battery okay next up best design best design best design i have one in terms of just like honestly coolest looking solid materials the nothing phone for a pro yes the funny thing is in neither of the colors i'm holding up because the silver color is the best um this is pink and this is black yeah but the silver color is the best looking i think them keeping the transparency to just the camera

1:05:17plateau and then making the rest of it metal for a fairly decent price i think this is designed great my biggest gripe that one button is rounded and the rest of them are flat but i think that actually does serve a purpose of well they say it's the easier to find the ai button except it's the only button on that side so i don't think i need it to be round i just know it's on the left but i think these are really nice designed phones i agree now here's here's the complication with this yes this has always been the most subjective and most complicated award for me this one's changed names

1:05:50more than once it used to be the like best built phone yeah durability award and then like build quality and now it's design and design includes so many things it includes functionality it includes durability potentially repairability and aesthetics the metal on the bottom of that phone means no wireless charging if it has a design compromise can it win yes but makes it harder to justify so i love the way that phone looks aesthetically it wins but that's one of the compromises it has there's other things that are just like

1:06:24we have these crazy thin like folding phones now that could win a design award because they've done great there we have well there's no new thin thin thin phones like the iphone air that won this last year there's no new s26 edge or iphone air 2 but yeah design award is that is i'm all over the place with this one design's always tough there's a feature i can think of which is i think one day especially with big and small phone category getting a little more boring and it's hard like i think in the

1:06:56future a potential new category could just be the best feature that launches in a year of like what actually is like a really cool thing people added and i do think the s26 privacy display is really cool the reason i don't think it can win best design is because it actively makes something else worse on the phone which is hurting the resolution and quality a little bit but i especially like the s26 one over the xiaomi 18 pro max one i just didn't think that worked quite as well when i saw it but the

1:07:26i was like genuinely impressed with how well that's 26 it's only in the ultra right only ultra yeah that privacy display was really cool when i was editing that video i was like i want this on my phone now like it's been a long time since i've seen like a feature and i'm like wow that's like that's really great i think they could have so easily done just uh hardware wise what every privacy like screen protector could do but the fact that they're making they're localizing it to like notifications and certain things or even just certain programs i think that was a really smart idea yeah that was

1:07:58a really good feature i don't know if we're yeah is it a separate like s26 can't win because it's the exact same phone as it is for four years yeah it's yeah that is the other thing i think a feature a feature award would be pretty cool yeah yeah we'll have to i'll play with this one best design is uh i'm also gonna listen to comments but that's a that's one that i don't have a front runner for yet s design i think peaked with the essential phone there's also a lot of phones are like kind of the same design like the big look at the big circle on the back of the opro and then a big circle

1:08:29on the back of the xiaomi and yes and i accidentally pulled out the well the and the other phone i talked about in terms of legacy camera collaborations is the vivo which looks just circle i mean they're all supposed to be cameras so i guess that makes sense but yeah big old circle uh minions phone the mission all right best foldable is another award this is there's a lot of options this year finally because it's different we arguably have three i guess we've always had passport but like we really got the more like squat passport style come back along with regular and along with flips

1:09:06yeah i i mean i think it's between duo and xiaomi 18 fold okay they just seem to you know be the newer thing which maybe that's recency bias but they're just the more fun thing foldables are fun well don't forget about fold eight i was gonna say bro fold eight yeah i remember full days but fold my issue is like two months ago fold eight though is worse than the other thing that came out with it which is full day ultra that's why i don't yeah i think if fold eight was same specs as full day

1:09:41ultra and like hammered home i'm still like you know like flagship level as my older brother but i'm just you get to pick your uh form factor i would like it a lot more interesting yeah there's also the huawei pura x max which is another like exact same shape as the duo and the passport stuff um i don't know i i think the fold eight had a lot going and you said worse specs but like it has i think one less camera and less battery than the big screen but i think that sacrifice was worth it

1:10:15to make a phone that's like funner to hold and use and has like this great aspect ratio when it's open i think it looks nicer looks nicer than the duo and the cheaper oh cheaper than the price probably is are you considering just hardware or like also are developers making like actual apps that utilize these spaces everything uh that's definitely a part of it androids had folding stuff for so long that that world is kind of a little bit more evolved but also messy uh iphone duo is going to come out and

1:10:47we expect to see a big response from developers and we kind of hope to see a bunch of really good iphone duo apps that could push us in that direction um that animation though that animation though it's pretty nice they're also capability wise all pretty similar to each other like iphone duo dual cameras fold eight dual cameras yeah i guess when you compare fold eight to duo very similar like i think it looks way better than both of them which one do you think is better the full date i think the two vertical cameras look so much nicer than the horizontal cameras on duo and

1:11:22uh xiaomi xiaomi yeah and i like the symmetrical front versus asymmetrical front true it looks i haven't held it in a while but i also haven't held the duo at all it's really light the fold eight is way lighter than the others yeah so i think you may have convinced me fold eight probably is i think it's my favorite that i've used this year and i haven't spent much time with the duo so we have to obviously reserve judgment there but i think a lot of the things i like about the fold eight are are a little bit more unique to it how light it is the dual camera layout stuff like that and

1:11:55samsung has years of experience of making the software functionality i just wish they could have gotten the no crease down the way apple did because god that screen on the inside of the full of the duo it's the best inside screen it's so funny that they focus so much of being like can't see the crease but you are going to see this uh dot for the under display selfie camera like they had such an opportunity to be like don't see anything but they're like i'm gonna make something else also pop up in certain bits of light yeah it's it's it's not not noticeable but it is less noticeable than

1:12:29maybe the worst creases that are out there creases are generally getting really good across yeah so i'm not really mad about the creases but yeah what apple did with their screens and the anti-reflective coating and just using it really liked that screen on the inside so yeah i'm gonna we'll use it more obviously later in the month but that is i'm so interested to see how much you like the right aligns like menu system in the front screen and i think that could be it's either going to be like this is a great idea or you should have just put the selfie camera in the middle and called it a day

1:13:01and to see what sort of experiences app developers come up with for iphone duo because i use there's a bunch of interesting iphone apps that i'm curious if they're going to do like fun stuff on the duo or if it's just going to look like a iphone app or an ipad app we'll see uh okay so there's three more awards there's most improved bust of the year and mvp i've got one down already i think these are my most important ones most got one for most improved no bust of the year oh bust of the year go ahead pixel 11 pro don't even debate it the pro highlight was the biggest failure of the year by far and the

1:13:34pro is such a waste of money compared to the 11 that's the 11 already is more expensive and still stupid and this is coming from pixel user you make a lot of good points it is definitely this was the year of pixel and pro pixel being the least differentiated and highlight yeah nothing good there so i i feel that is it the bust of the whole year considering all the other phones i gotta actually think about that i mean that's what's what bust is becoming harder because less phones

1:14:08are taking big risks and yeah so you have to just actually nail the things that you're doing um when you want calling highlight a risk is wild they've it's been the thing phones have had for over a decade ago like they could have just done it right the first time and we probably would have been like damn that was one of the best features of the year um the lowest bar possible and they still slam their forehead on it it yeah it's tough the bluey phone if you give bluey phone bust of the

1:14:39year it didn't come out this year actually that's funny you have to consider that one for all the categories yeah the bluey phone has to be in the race or just like it should be on the side of the table and just never mentioned uh virtue phone virtue virtue phone oh my god wow yeah it's been a long year yeah i'm willing to say that the pixel 11 pro is on the front page of things i'm considering for bust of the year the trump phone was this year right the trump phone was this year damn that's a that probably doesn't count because the phone on the base of it is probably seven years old yeah unfortunately that makes it worse that it came out this year uh well then there's most improved

1:15:17so most improved is another one where it's like all right who actually did something like really different the privacy display on the x26 ultra might be enough by itself to make it most improved or at least be on the front running for most improved because people don't do that much different from year to year with their phones yeah what did the iphone 18 pro add a variable aperture and a two nanometer chip is that bigger vapor chamber most improved yeah bigger vapor chamber which is great like that's three things three things we don't often see three things 20 minutes ago you were like

1:15:49we the s26 we can't even talk about a design award for it because they haven't changed it in five years well the base s26 is there's there's nothing new about that design s26 plus nothing new about the design s26 ultra barely new design new screen feature new chip that's basically the three things that are new with it you look at a lot of the budget phones like the nothing phone where they play around with the design more they changed more things well they their issue is is last year the nothing phone 3 their fan base hated and then they didn't release a flagship this year so there is no

1:16:21nothing phone 4 i don't think we can consider for a pro the same phone being improved so they were ready you know a lot of times the people who win most improved are the people who essentially won a bust the year before or were in runner-up for bust and then they made a change nothing was like nah yeah so on that note the bust of the year last year was the iphone 16e well the 17e is a better phone but not good enough to be like a most improved winner i wouldn't say not a celebrated

1:16:55yeah not exactly a trophy winner um so yeah another one that we'll have to do some digging for and it might be one plus 16 is so sad not coming to the u.s i mean it's well it's hard to improve over the phone that you're literally still using so it obviously was great true but they somehow did they got that they got the two nanometer chip in there they got the in 9 000 milliampere battery in there they got the screen on the back for some reason don't know what that does but it looks cool

1:17:2515 won oh no 15 didn't win anything it's just the phone that i used the most i was gonna say i thought it won phone of the year last year but that was it was pretty close to battery oh one battery award yeah it was great for battery if iphone or sorry if one plus 15 or 16 wins most improved i don't see how it doesn't win phone of the year fair enough yeah so phone of the year is like the mvp award i know how can you give your most valuable phone to a phone that's not even coming to the u.s or you can really use in the u.s that would be a real bummer um what would win phone of the year

1:18:00okay there's a couple storylines iphone duo is a storyline because folding phones have been around for a long time but then when apple jumps in it kind of brings that category to the forefront of people's attention even though it's been around for forever now suddenly we may get a bunch more people interested in foldables good folding apps etc so that's a storyline um the one plus is kind of a storyline but it's like in the opposite direction like it's not available like one plus is kind of shrinking their footprint and not shipping to the u.s anymore and like they made it a really really

1:18:33good phone but i'll never be able to use it and that's really sad there's also the xiaomi 18 pro max which was just like yeah hey everyone who did something cool we're gonna put them all in the same phone and just make a behemoth of a feature set phone yeah yeah they double down on on just one upping everything and did a really good job so that's a good storyline and then yeah phones that sort of get forgotten about from earlier in the year like the s26 ultra with the privacy screen or the find x9 ultra with the Hasselblad collab and the incredible battery life

1:19:03or the great design of our nothing phones that we've seen for the past couple it's a good design it's not a mvp level design but it's interesting um yeah i don't have a front runner for this either but i am i'm carl's ears just perked up when you said nothing in the mvp i i really consider everything for for mvp because i know it's it's not i always say this it's not the best phone of the year award it's not the most capable best specs you win here's the trophy it's the it's the phone

1:19:36of the year and that's like all the things that come with like what happened this year the stories of the year maybe it was just like they finally did the thing we were asking them to do for years like the iphone 17 last year so things like that all i'll factor in so i have to think about that too but yeah i'm i'm fascinated for what the comments will be on this episode because i think people always feel strongly about things that they think should win certain awards for sure definitely and we'll see a bunch of people disagreeing on what they think those things should be yes it's also

1:20:07okay if the phone you own doesn't win an award it's still a good phone if you're enjoying it yeah congrats there's lots of really really good abc test phone of the year ab test the video i think that what happens is a lot of the best most boring phones don't win any awards because they're already really good and they take no risks and they change nothing they're not most improved they're not the bust they're not the phone of the year they're not the design award they're just boring like i just won an s26 all right fine that's a solid phone nothing boring

1:20:38like next like phones like that like the iphone 18 we don't have one yet but the 18 pro hey good phone design award no best battery no best specs best cameras no but like pretty good at a lot of stuff so it's not going to win awards for that the issue is is like the goal of almost every major phone company is they want to eventually be the boring phone because that means they're selling so much that they can just continue to be a default yeah and like boring probably means a ton of money so like if you're doing all these crazy features it's usually because you're

1:21:12trying to catch up in market share so samsung is just dominating the android market they get to just be the same s23 plus plus plus yeah yeah you got to take risks to get to the top and then once you get to the top you don't want to take any risk to lose your spot and then someone else is going to take risks to get to the top so playing with a lead yeah yeah all right well let us know in the comments how you feel of course we will be reading those and in a few short weeks we'll be starting to pick them out but of course we have a little bit more to talk about so let's take a quick break and do a trivia question

1:21:43do you guys want they're both tech questions the way you said it like that makes me think one's not really okay i want the less tech question you're the less tech question mark is gonna have the more tech question well here's the thing the less tech question has more points available for it more points on a no david week i think we have to assume i need more points all right yeah after the break we're going to talk about mmos and every single person who works here asked me to do an mmo

1:22:18question but here on the waveform podcast we believe in fairness and so i went on a bunch of forums looking for the original 2004 minimum specs required to run world of warcraft oh boy i need you guys to tell me closest delta this is not prices right rules these are delta how much video memory do you need how much hard drive space do you need and how much ram

1:22:49do you need to play world of warcraft on the minimum specs in 2004 um fun fact in the minimum specs from that year they specify that you need at least a 56k modem hilarious that you could get half a megabyte per second i'm pretty sure and still play world wow came on three or four discs as well if that helps wow hint but yeah i remember putting multiple cds in my computer to download see i'm at a huge disadvantage already because you have installed and played this game before yeah but i this is on

1:23:23like a family computer which means you've got the minimum requirements right there i'm just looking for context oh i don't remember the minimum also actually this was a surprisingly difficult thing to find online and so i'd like to give a shout out to the blizzard forums user crooge crooge thank you crooge you couldn't find like did it have it on the box man i remember that box the it was in the manual the intro the like intro sequence when you first booted up wow the like cinematic intro of og world of warcraft chills can i guess for david this week because i don't know the answer

1:23:58yeah i you could however i think i know what david is doing right now and i kind of want to just call him out of the blue on the podcast and see if he knows yeah or just text him and be like you have five minutes to respond to this text message all right well we'll have those answers at the end as well like usual we'll be right back support for the show comes from google gemini you know that

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World of Warcraft and Runescape MMO updates

1:26:09linkedin today at linkedin.com slash quality all right welcome back this next part of the podcast will probably mostly be dominated by mariah and myself because we're going to talk about mmos but you did say you know mmo stands for massive multiplayer online yes almost always essentially also means mmorpg which is a role-playing game correct yes so oh man i'm gonna have to i'm gonna have to condense this and the hardest part about condensing one of the most convoluted video game types possible as i'm going to get flamed is this a new story sort of or a new thing that's happening

1:26:43it's it's it's a mix of a bunch of new things with your absolute favorite category possible which is nostalgia oh yes so let's go see if you follow me at the end i'll kind of see what you think but in the last couple months we've gotten a new world of warcraft game announcement and we also just got at runefest a new runescape announcement of course runefest is something that mariah and i will be finding a way for uh convincing you to send us to it for studio or something for business for

1:27:15business purely business um it is in london that part will be a little tough anyway world of warcraft and runescape are kind of like two of the bigger mmorpgs out there um and both of them you know have a great player base and a lot of them are focused on nostalgia but with these two announcements in my eyes it feels like world of warcraft is trying to be runescape and runescape is trying to be world of warcraft and i will explain why all right let me bring you let me uh re-evaluate paint him a scene paint me okay yeah so runescape is a game that launched in 2007 it was a browser

1:27:50based mmo it was really popular because a lot of it was free it was actually you could it was linked on miniclip so a lot of people found it through miniclip it was browser based so you could play it at school which is probably a huge plus um almost zero computer requirements because it's browser based and even when you did pay for the subscription it was like five dollars a month so fairly cheap lots of stuff to do in it um world of warcraft on the other hand like ella said in the trivia question launched in 2004 backed by i mean made by blizzard so we're talking about massive

1:28:26gaming uh company here also made on existing ip yes correct the uh from the warcraft rts games and you know this was an expensive you had to pay for the actual game and it was 15 a month um but this is like more modernized of that time because we had actual graphics we had incredible scaling open worlds it was first player for a third person but roaming a lot more where world or runescape is click based uh you know a much more lax combat style and everything okay um and both of these

1:29:01games you know kind of have had their heydays and then of all both went astray a bit runescape try kept trying to modernize it changed the way combat handled it changed the way graphics handled it it turned into what we now know as runescape 3 in 2013 jagex launched something jagex makes runescape called old school runescape which essentially was thank you brian bringing back the 2007 runescape that we all knew and love yeah they said do you like nostalgia yes do you have money yeah i'll sell you some yeah come back and one thing they've done great since then that game

1:29:37is still running is they just kept what was good and what everyone liked about old runescape but still added updates to it there's still progression and what they call permanent progression kind of where like you grind really hard to try and get something and that thing stays relevant even though they're going to release new items new bosses new raids all new things to do can i ask a dumb question uh always yes i'm gonna get flamed i already know it's okay you're not gonna get flamed because you're saying you don't know what's going on yeah can you win no i mean good i mean

1:30:10depends just to say you can't really you can totally win yeah there's a game over section because the way you're describing it because i when i picture a game i'm like all right it's competitive people are trying to win and then you win but as you describe the game it sounds like oh yeah you're just kind of roaming around doing stuff and then you buy the expansion pack and you can roam around more and then do more stuff then you can scam 12 year olds free gilded armor um so like runescape the ultimate goal is you have what is it like 26 different skills that you

1:30:41could all get to 99 which takes a metric piss load of time i mean you can basically max out everything all skills do every quest in the game for some people they don't consider that being done but i would say that's more than enough yeah there's more to do because then there's like there's collection logs of different types of gear some of the gear is just for show essentially there's a notorious like meme going around that it's a game you never quit because like the game really never ends so it's like people come crawling back years later i'm in runescape recovery right

1:31:13now so you only take breaks runescape does such a good job though of keeping the old style releasing updates that are still to what all the players want and not making all the work you did totally useless world of warcraft on the other hand they're the ones or they re-released something called wow classic in 2019 um i got really into it again because it was literally just re-released the old game that everyone loved max level 60 slowly roll out the old raids everything used to do the

1:31:45issue is then they made the same mistake of they continued to launch all of the old expansion packs they did in the past and now we lost this you know you're all the stuff you worked for again to get in 60 so now both of these have launched new things world of warcraft is launching something called wow forever which is essentially bring back the old world of warcraft that launched in 2004 but they're going to actually update the thing while guaranteeing a level 60 cap which is what the original one was so they're focused on this like permanent progression horizontal progression

1:32:19whatever you want to call it where you work and work and you it's beneficial to do all these things you don't lose everything so in my eyes world of warcraft is like what did runescape do really well i want to launch the new game so they're adding um in professions there's all these new items you can get from only grinding professions they're opening up that part of the game more they're adding different skills to characters that have been around for a while a new race um new things that still are part of the old game the nostalgia game that everyone likes because they

1:32:49keep ruining their games and now they're relaunching that where runescape decided to just launch a new game called runescape 4 that's currently in development won't be launched for a new year but it's made on the unreal engine it's going to be the same world and characters and general storyline in a different time but we're finally going to get the modernized graphics so when someone decides hey i want to play runescape if you don't know about it or have the nostalgia for it if you went into old school runescape you'd probably be like what the what is this low poly ass like

1:33:21yeah so basically like most of the demographic is familiar and has the nostalgia for the super low poly and can you imagine jumping from that to unreal engine new game this vibe this low poly vibe into a modernized version of it on unreal engine so i'm really excited for both of these i have two questions okay okay i rambled so much there my two questions and there might not be real answers to this but one is there because you know kids growing up these days playing games didn't play

1:33:54old school runescape do those kids clamor for the old runescape or do you think they are just on the new runescape like if if you were to start playing runescape today and you played the newest one do you think they go oh this sucks give me the like new one that looks like the old one or do you think they wouldn't care for that at all i think um i think actually right now old school runescape is more popular even if you're a new player because there seems to be this back and forth with at least streamers which streamers kind of essentially help control a lot of popularity of games right so like

1:34:30wow and runescape keep hitting these lulls of content and a lot of the streamers play both of them there's just one you're not going to watch him but if anyone out there is interested in this a youtuber named jimmy j1 mmy plays both of these a lot and does really great content just discussing the changes between both of them but we'll see a lot of things happen where world of warcraft launched hardcore mode which is if you die you lose your character there's a lot of dying in mmo so all these streamers and youtubers got together and made a guild in this hardcore mode

1:35:03and turned a bunch and like made a bunch of content and then once that started getting stale a bunch of them went over to runescape and started playing runescape and runescape had this like huge surge so they're kind of going between both of them and i think old school is already just more popular this new game i do think if you discover runescape especially if they mariah do you think there'll be a free a free to play world in rs4 dude there better be i don't know that's the thing if you you can hook people with free and and when i say like there's free and

1:35:35membership membership unlocks a bunch but there's still so much to do in the free version it's like but if you're asking marquez if the young folk are playing these games yeah i don't know mmo there's definitely like but runescape and stuff like there's surely i don't know other things i would argue all they need to do is see a streamer watching it and then be like oh i want to play which i'd say they're more uh likely to be influenced by someone on twitch playing runescape and yeah unless you had

1:36:05like an older sibling who played it and then told you about it you probably wouldn't really know what it is came out in 2004 at this or 2007 at this point parents might be showing their kids here's my other question i'm going to describe to you a game that i used to play when i was in high school okay and you can tell me if it's closer to runescape or world of warcraft okay so the mechanics of this game this is this game is called tiger woods pga tour 2007 and here's what happened i i obviously played

1:36:40golf growing up and i had like a not that powerful pc that i installed this on this game this game came on three discs three cds nice and i installed the game and basically let me build my own character and then go play any number of like kind of photo realistic golf courses but it also let me play the game as tiger woods or as davis love the third or as vj singh or any number of those characters that had different sort of attributes and you could swing their swing and like play the golf course as

1:37:12them so if you played as your amateur character you'd probably not hit the ball as far as not as fun you play as tiger you're like wow my god when i first got that game and started playing i didn't have nearly a powerful enough gpu so when i loaded that game up and installed it my character was a a series of like vectors and like colorful lines on the screen but it didn't actually load all the polygons to like see their face and i still could see the golf course and the ball so i would play the

1:37:42game as this bunch of lines and rays and like i'd see the swing and i actually went in and customized their face and their clothes and like bought accessories to not even see it to not even see it and then one day i got enough allowance money to get a new gpu for that computer and i installed it and i loaded up the game for the first time and saw my character for the first time he looked nothing like what i thought he looked like but the general tones and colors were correct but like

1:38:13everything else was a surprise but then i went on to like play the game with a new appreciation i would like spend uh earned money in the game to get like a new glove or a new club or a new ball and you could play new courses you could never win like you could compete and win a tournament and yay you won the tournament and now there's another tournament next week so like you're not winning the game but you could always play new courses you could always buy new accessories for your player you could always

1:38:43upgrade your gpu and see more there was also future versions of the game that had more micro transactions and higher quality graphics and that maybe made people crave the nostalgia of the 07 version of the game a little bit so in the terms of how you're longing for it nostalgia wise yeah that's like the runescape uh perk i guess it's like we all had that moment you know we wanted to i

1:39:13remember the first time i got my first dragon weapon was like the coolest thing ever and that's i yeah um the rest of it is more rpg versus mmorpg because there's no online so imagine you had you built your character and now all of those golf courses other people online were also had all of their characters at the golf course so maybe you would yeah team up with four people on a card that would be like running a dungeon or like think that was a thing in later versions of the game

1:39:46and i needed to have a certain level network connection to play at the same time as other people and the most important part of that online game would be you get your you know your really sick new golf clubs or clubs and stuff and it's equipped to your character the most important part is then when you stand at the clubhouse and everyone just stands around and you look at all the you like you stand there asserting dominance by how much better your gear is we call that bank standing um so much of mmos are just standing in the popular places to show off the stuff you worked

1:40:20for and doing actually nothing nice yeah yeah that's why mmos are so great it takes so much time to play runescape i kind of just want to like be in the world again and screw around for a while and not commit to anything but that's not going to be out for a few more years but you know maybe you'll send mariah and i to runefest and we'll have a good time there um company card we'll make a studio video you know i'll i'll spin that in my head a few times i'll think about it i appreciate you yeah thank you marquez yeah well you know what it's time for now i do the end andrew you said

1:40:54something earlier that i wanted to draw attention to okay i'm scared you made sure to specify that you're referring to a metric piss load oh uh which sort of implies the existence of both a imperial well i was gonna say like the mega and giga piss loads that's part of the tiered system i just thought that was really funny oh i don't know why i use the term piss load all the time i think it's

Trivia scoring and Apple supplier answers

1:41:15my way of trying not to curse on the podcast which probably just makes it more offensive because everyone's like what is that guys lg has made display panels for two apple products what were they he's thinking someone else is writing also they probably made displays for more apple products

1:41:49but these are just the two that i could find like industry trade journals being like lg made these lg display made these and uh you know it's just so hard to track down apple suppliers something marquez said before almost your ming chi quo all right i'm gonna give one point per correct answer who wants to read first i'll i'll go first marquez uh an iphone at some point okay um i think it was an ipad damn and i said imac but if anyone online can find proof that marquez is right i will award him

1:42:22the point in retrospect this is i just spent a lot of time these are the only two i could really confirm andrew i wrote a macbook and a home pod oh my god the answer i was looking for was the apple watch oh i would not oh that was the oled in that yeah and the pro display xdr oh display xdr that is an lg panel an lg displays panel no i don't know anymore wait no wasn't it the studio oh it was the pro display xdr because that was a five six k well okay so i remember the lg

1:42:59ultra fine 5k came out and everyone was like oh the same panel but smaller slice of it were they referring to the pro display i don't know because it doesn't have the same specs but the idea was it had the same scaling damn i missed i forgot that story there was a whole story about that four three more potential points to get today i need you to tell me the video memory hard drive space and minimum ram required to run 2004's world of warcraft wait storage vram and

1:43:35ram and ram they wait wait what sorry we're having a uh technicality issue mark has i'm trying to get you a point all right we're doing closest delta i have two gigs of

1:44:07storage that's definitely too high 256 of vram megabytes and 512 megabytes of ram i think i'm too high on everything i wrote one gig of storage eight megabytes of vram and 64 megabytes of ram you said one gigabyte of storage one gigabyte of all right let's see if david is driving i'm on the waveform podcast well that's crazy you're on the waveform podcast david i need you to answer two trivia questions for me are you ready okay i'm ready can you name two products that lg two apple

1:44:44products that lg made the display for studio display xdr no i'm sorry uh pro display oh he can in fact hear you i can't hear marquez but i didn't hear him just get it wrong just get it wrong apple products all right i'm gonna have to cut you off i'm so sorry wait i'm gonna say iphone 4s uh probably not but if it turns out to be right we'll uh we'll we'll give it to you all right question number two i need you or the answers i was looking for were

1:45:18pro display xdr and apple watch didn't i say that no you said studio display xdr did i really you did we have i have it on tape next question is gonna be so confused by this question david i was thinking the pro display okay whatever are you familiar with the hit game world of warcraft i'm familiar all right i need you to tell me the minimum hard drive space vram and uh regular ram memory of the 2004 release of world of warcraft minimum hard drive space

1:45:53i'm gonna say two gigabytes two gigabytes hard drive space ram requirement four gigabytes ram requirement four gigabytes okay and then vram vram two gigabytes two gigabytes all right is everyone ready for the answers yes the first one we're gonna do hard drive space andrew you said two gigabytes marquez you said one gigabyte david you said two gigabytes yep the correct answer is four gigabytes meaning that david and and andrew tied and get the point how did they both updating the score that's david and andrew get

1:46:28one point next one let's do vram andrew you said 256 megabytes marquez you said eight megabytes david four gigabytes four gigabytes four gigabytes oh sorry my bad the uh marquez has gotten this point you need 32 megabytes of vram to play wow geez okay that's it i'll take it okay and finally ram andrew you said 512 megabytes marquez you said 64 megabytes i think marquez is on the money and david you

1:47:03said two gigabytes of ram do i have that correct yeah marquez gets the point or i said i think i said four gigabytes of ram but i said two gigabytes of vram either way we need 256 megabytes of ram meaning marquez is 64 megabytes barely inches out and we're both like one delta off in terms of scale number yeah yeah so i really said studio no actually you did i'll check the tape i'll i'll

1:47:34check the tape to make sure that none of your guesses were accidentally correct you definitely i know he said studio because then marquez said into the mic pro display xdr and i was like if david then guesses that next i know here marquez because there's no reason to guess the pro display after saying studio all right quick update on the score while we have you david oh mariah is still adding the points we're gonna have to put the score will be on the screen as we review the tape it should be respectable now audio listeners enjoy yo all right next day is here i'm editing the podcast it's ellis

1:48:06if you're audio listening and don't recognize my voice for some reason um i did not award those trivia points correctly because questions about apple suppliers are really really hard to answer i did more research and i think i have at least some conclusive answers so let's get into it okay marquez he said imac g4 and apple iphone 4 i don't know why i said apple it's an iphone they're the only people that have ever made iphones um the g4 i was able to find a mac world article from 2002

1:48:36um that cites some sort of industry trade journally type publications talking about how a second display supplier had been added to the g4's supply chain so lg was no longer the only one so i'm counting that as proof it's sourced uh lg did make displays for the imac g4 so marquez gets one point for that iphone 4 this one is a little bit harder to track town but i was able to find a korean trade journal press report type thing from 2010 uh that i had to translate from korean into english with the safari thing

1:49:12that talked about uh lg ramping up their production of the retina display in that phone so i think that's safe to say lg did produce the displays in both those devices um next andrew andrew said the homepod mini there's an iFixit teardown that i think just shows that the iFixit it's not actually a screen it's like an led controller by texas instruments or something like that so so lg's not involved there he does not get that point andrew also said macbook and i wrote this question really

1:49:46poorly i'm just going to accept that answer lg does make the displays in the apple silicon macbooks or at least they did for a long time i think they're no longer the primary supplier but again this stuff is really hard to get actual answers to which is part of the reason ming chi quo is like so amazing on like i don't know how they find out anyway whatever david what did david say david said iphone 4s which would be correct because it's the same retina display as in the iphone 4 they're not the exact same display which explains why i could not really find that much about the 4s

1:50:16but i could find stuff about the 4 i'm just going to assume they're the same we're just going to give david that point david's other answer was the studio display xdr it's too new i just couldn't find supplier data on that so he's not going to get that point so in conclusion uh marquez got two points andrew got one point and david also got one point thanks david do you have anything you want to tell the people before you go home okay do you think world of warcraft is turning into runescape and do you think runescape is turning into world of warcraft i've never played either of

1:50:47the games i really couldn't tell you and you would agree tiger woods pga tour 2007 is the best version of the tiger woods franchise right i'm partial to the 2006 version i'm gonna be honest i don't think that exists but okay i'll i'll i buy it i buy it we didn't have the technology ea sports how many gigs did that require i don't know it was three cds so something huge three cds three cds yeah for a computer game yep it was a lot okay all right thanks for picking up the phone david we really

1:51:21appreciate it all right david from stowe vermont i'm out david amell everybody wait isn't that the crazy trivia music for like the big ones i use it all so anyway thanks for watching thanks for listening thanks for the trivia points uh it is of course mid-tectober which means we have much more to talk about and next week's gonna be lit and so will the next one so the next one and so the next one see you soon get subscribed if you haven't already get a desk pad wash those dishes and we'll

1:51:53catch you in the next episode peace i really hope david's wingo let's go let's go wait form is produced by mariah zenk and ellis rovin department of vox media podcast network and intro outro music was created by vain still all right great show everybody great show great show thank you thank you so much we appreciate it glad to contribute everyone's got a hard question about ai your job your kids where it's going

1:52:31anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way because there's hope in hard questions ask yours at claude.ai slash spotify and keep thinking that's claude.ai slash spotify at edward jones we believe rich is about taking care of what gives your life meaning that's why your financial advisor personalizes your plan to help you preserve your progress and create something that lasts let's find your rich edward jones member sipc

1:53:04so you and you you you you you