The Xiaomi Fold and New Meta VR Glasses

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1:56Have my muse talk to your dot. We'll figure this out later.

2:05Yo, what is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We're your hosts. I'm Marquez. I'm Andrew. And I'm David. We've got Ellis over at the producer desk. Hi. Adam's on vacation. For a long time. But Ellis is holding it down. You don't have to share a mic anymore. You can actually just have the mic to yourself.

2:22Yeah. Oh, s***. Big step. Whoa. Big step. You guys might not even remember that Adam exists in a couple of weeks because he's gone for like five weeks. Yeah. That microphone is fully yours. Oh, we miss him. This is crazy. It's going to be great. Yeah. Today's episode, it is publishing in Techtober, but guess what? It's still technically Tech-tember, so there's a lot going on. Meta Connect we can talk about, which happened literally right after we recorded last week, so we can talk about it this week. We also have a fun update on the Dyson toothbrush. The Tesla Roadster is delayed again.

2:53And why the nothing headphones, the new ones, are kind of sick and also kind of dumb. And some OpenAI Dev Day announcements. And I'm going to unbox this here live, first thing on the pod, because inside here is a phone that I'm going to make a video about, but I'm going to give all of us the opportunity to give our real first, first, first, first impressions. People don't get to see that very often when we take a product out the box and give our real, raw first impressions. That's what we're doing with this. But first, did they even test this?

3:23Whoa. All right. This was something someone posted on Reddit, and I believe it's still here. That's a great one. It's very short, and it is insanely frustrating. There is a single pixel in the data quick settings button. I got to see this. On the pixels? The pixel, yeah. So do you see right, maybe like top left between the top left corner and the arrows? Do you see that one singular pixel? And if you think it's a spec, scroll down, because the whole button will move and it will follow. The hell, Google?

3:55Yeah. Dude, the pixel, oh my God. Here's a blown up version. Here's a blown up version you can see. You know what's crazy? To me, this feels like someone made this in Photoshop and like used the paintbrush tool to paint in all the white, and they just like missed a portion. Yeah, or they like did the magic wand, and like that was just a hair off of the tolerance, so it like left a pixel or two there. It's insane. It's crazy that they shipped this, but, you know, all you have to do, Google, is you just got to use the paintbrush tool.

4:26Beep. It's weird because it's like not that crazy, and no one's really noticed it until now, but it's also still crazy. It's like two pixels. That does make it look like two pixels. On your phone, it just looks like one. It looks like one pixel. And it is enough to make you be like, do I have a dead pixel? Oh, wait, it moved. I followed it. Yep, it's still there. Very strange. So, you know, that's a fun one.

Unboxing the Xiaomi Fold

4:48Anyway, let's do this live unboxing. Yeah. Okay. While you're opening this, also, be sure to get subscribed. We have a bonus episode coming out on Tuesday, an interview I'm pretty excited for. I think longtime listeners will be excited for. But, again, Marques is now opening a box that Rich ran into here right before we started the podcast because it's something we're pretty excited for. Yeah. So, this is the Xiaomi Fold. The folding phone that is getting a lot of attention from Xiaomi because it is essentially...

5:18This is the worst box. Yeah. I tried the tab thing, and it just didn't work at all. You know those FedEx boxes that are supposed to have, like, a tab that you pull? Yeah. You have two broken tabs on the table. Ironically, the Xiaomi 18 Fold, because they totally didn't steal that. 18 Pro. Yeah. So, I did a video on the 18 Pro Max. You guys have probably already seen that. The Xiaomi 18 Pro Max. The Xiaomi 18 Pro Max. To be clear. This is the one that looks very much like the iPhone Duo. And there's all this speculation about how this happens.

5:52So, I think a part of my video about this phone is going to be about how we end up with these, like, identical phones at the same time because it's actually kind of interesting. But you guys have not held, or you've played with the iPhone Duo, but you've not held the iPhone Duo. I have not. This is your opportunity to basically hold almost the same thing. Is it burgundy? But Xiaomi. And it is burgundy, in fact. Oh, my. This is my favorite stuff where they're like, this is the age-old debate online of, this came out first, so they clearly copied it. No, this has been in production for so long, so they couldn't have copied it.

6:23It's like, at a certain point, we have to understand that these companies kind of know what's going on around the world. It does look very nice. That's an interesting, that's a much more red burgundy. Yeah. If we can compare it to my burgundy. Shinier? You have a burgundy iPhone? Yeah. It's going to be way brighter. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Way. Mine is more of a wine color. Yours looks way more purple. Show it to me. I mean, I think yours is burgundy. That is like Merlot. It's Merlot. In case you're wondering why I hate on the iPhone's burgundies, because this is a good color.

6:55Oh, boy. We're not going to do this. This looks like grape purple next to that. Two-thirds of social media agree that it's a good color. Okay, so this is my very, very, very first time holding this phone.

7:08I notice things. So this is a folding phone. I'm noticing things like the spring weight. It doesn't really push open as much as the iPhone, which had like a sort of a magnetic like snap open. Yeah. This does that a little bit less. The screen's off, so I'm looking at the hinge. It's pretty minimal. It's not as minimal as like the Oppo Find N or the iPhone Duo, but it's pretty minimal. Is it turned on? I feel like- It's not on yet. Off is the easiest way to see. Yeah, 100%. Then the front screen, I'm going to boot this thing up, is exactly the same D shape as iPhone

7:40Duo as well, which is flat on the left-hand side, rounded on the right-hand side. Yeah. And then, yeah, it's thin. It's definitely lighter than the iPhone, and it's got- It has a telephoto, which I'm jealous of. Yeah, it's got triple cameras on the back, across the whole back, which feels a little bit more correct. Can I say this? I kind of wish, since the like pill camera is all the way across on the back, like a pixel bar, I wish it was flat on one side and curved on the other, so it matched the- That'd be fun. The full aesthetic of it. I think it's nice that it's like-

8:11Speed run this. Rounded, because then that way it doesn't like- It doesn't shake when you put it on the table. Exactly. You know? It'll just be always pretty stable, like this. I think if it was just flat right here, it would still be- Yeah, probably true. Stable. Probably true. All right, I'm logging into the internet, speed running the setup real quick. It does look quite good. I think it looks good, but I also, I think the iPhone looks good. Yeah. I think the Oppos looked good. I think the old Pixel Passport looked good. I- Yeah. That's crazy how much it looks like a duo, man. I mean- We, that's, that is, for audio listeners, like, picture an iPhone duo.

8:46But burgundy. There is no burgundy iPhone duo. Yeah. I would call that crimson. Yeah, sure. There were some interviews with Apple's executive team during the Apple event, and some people were asking about this phone, and they said, you know, there are just some things that we can't protect, and unfortunately, some other companies managed to predict our design, and we just can't stop that from happening. I think Ternus said that. Dude, even the icons. That was Ternus. Even the icons look like Apple icons, like the phone app.

9:18Does it do the thing? It doesn't do the animation. So, it does, it doesn't do the, the exact same animation, but it does do the thing that a lot of other Android Folds do, which is it plays an animation while you open and close it. Yeah. You're right. It's kind of a fun, like, opening animation. Which they've done for quite a while. I'm going to hand this to you, Andrew. There's your first look at Xiaomi Fold. Wow. What do you think? I do like holding it like this. Yeah. Like, the, the just general size of it, and kind of makes me wish there was a phone that was this size. I know that's the kind of thing that all of us tech reviewers are saying and would never

9:52actually work, but I do like the little, like, butterfly animation effect on the background opening it up. It's like, oh, we're all opening. They've done that basically since the first fold. Yeah. A lot of, oh, now I'm just in the settings, apparently. But, I mean, I don't have a lot of thoughts on this. I use zero folding phones. Oh, wait. The dock. Yeah. The dock at the bottom. The dock. Oh, my God. Look at those icons. It looks the same. The dock literally looks just like a Mac dock. The thing that Apple managed to protect mostly was the software experience and how they were

10:22going to optimize iOS for the iPhone Duo. That didn't leak ahead of time at all. And everyone was very curious about how that was going to work. And so, their design with, like, the right-sided dock and the toggles being on the right, I think that's a very unique thing. Although, it'll probably get copied within, like, a week. Software update away. Yeah. Yeah. I will say, like, on front screen, just, this does not have the whole right-aligned menu and everything because the selfie camera's in the middle and I think it looks great. Yeah. Like, I guess Apple wanted to do all of that and I thought they did a bunch of good software

10:53stuff on the right. This makes me wonder if it was necessary to do that. Can I just say this just makes me even more excited for the iPhone Duo? For the iPhone Duo? Because it's so wide. It just feels like a gadget, dude. It does feel like a gadget. We haven't had, like, a gadget like this in, like, a really long time. The phones have just been the exact same size, exact same aspect ratio. Having something square and weird is, like, I'm so excited for it. Also, it's not good for one-handed typing, but that encourages you to do this. And I think this is a cooler way of typing, just using both thumbs at the same time, you

11:26know? It makes it look like you're- You're doing business stuff. Yeah, business transactions only. Business stuff. Oh, wow. Yeah, when you turn it sideways, it sort of collapses the icons into being bigger. Oh, I don't know how- Oh, interesting. So, it goes to one page. It turns into a tablet, basically. A single-page tablet. Okay. With making bigger icons, which I think makes a lot of sense. That's really nice. Yeah, because that way it's just, like, it's easier to experience it as a tablet when everything's a little bit bigger. And intuitively, it makes sense. The weather app is exactly the same. Yeah. Wait, can I see it real quick? Yeah.

11:56I didn't even look at the crease, which makes me wonder if I didn't feel like I saw it. The crease is worse than the Duo, but also the Duo is using, like, all of that- I mean, it has the diffused layer on it, which definitely helps. Yeah, liquid filling. I mean, I haven't looked at a crease in a while, and this is- I mean, you have to look for it. You do have to look for it. And we've got, like, this big old light right above us that makes it really easy to find when you want to, but normally- My hot take is, like, crease worries are basically the same as bezel worries, which are just very overwhelming. When you're only looking at a photo of it in the worst possible scenario on Twitter, and

12:29then you want to make a big stink about it, those are the only people who care about creases When you use it every day, and you're focused on the content, your brain is not going to be like, but there's a crease in the center. We survived the Pixel bathtub notch. Barely. We barely made it out. We're okay with that. I don't care what the crease in the middle is. Pixel 3 XL was a moment in time, for sure. Yeah. This is cool. This is cool. I love when you open it and turn it sideways. I feel like it encourages you. Nice. And it's broke. I feel like because it makes the icons bigger and stuff, it sort of encourages you to use

13:00it in the iPad mini format. I will say, I didn't hold the Duo, but holding this like a tablet vertical, like you're saying, you, the camera bump is there. Yeah. It is there, no matter how you hold it. Does it feel like a ledge that helps you hold the phone? No. Because it's bigger now. It's bigger and it's more natural. Oh, yeah. Like, I think because it's so long, when I have it, if it would be top left corner on the back, it's right there where my pointer finger would be. Right. And the other way. Actually, this way. That might be, yeah, upside down. When it's on the bottom, I'm almost like holding it, like a grip.

13:33You just have to make sure you're holding it. That's what I want to do with my $2,000 phone. Okay. No, it's kind of nice. See, that's the thing about foldables is there's 80 ways to hold it. You can have it halfway open. You can have it fully open. You can rotate it any way you want. That is a, that's a nice discovery. But because there are 80 ways to hold it, I have talked to some developers and they're like, oh my God. Yeah. The amount of ways I have to optimize my app is insane. Yeah. The one thing, one thing I noticed about the iPhone duo is they did place a lot more emphasis on halfway open. Yeah. Than I've seen in any other foldable.

14:03Usually Android phones are like, here's the closed state, here's the open state. And this clearly has that. But the sort of halfway open thing is, I mean, it depends on the developer, but they have stuff for that too, which is interesting. And there's also a whole ton of responsiveness to how open the hinge is. Now look at this. Okay. I'm seeing that also does. Yeah. You see the way this, uh, this wallpaper responds. I'm going to turn the brightness up to roughly how many degrees open it is. Oh yeah. Can you show it to the camera? What? That's so nice. So the phone knows how open the hinge is and the wallpaper is dynamic.

14:37And as I'm opening it, not fully open, but just moving it between those degrees, it is responding in real time. That's really nice. It's like a butterfly flapping. Whoever, yeah. Whoever designed this hinge is, is cringing right now. My, my, my, look, they say you can do it millions of times. Yeah. This is, this is the type of thing that happens when users get it in their hands. Yeah. But yeah, the grip. Okay. It's kind of not the right end grip is kind of sick. Yeah. Yeah. You're just going to have to clean your camera all the time. Clean your camera all the time and then realize you're holding a, how much, I'm assuming this is also at least $1,500, yeah, an $1,800 phone.

15:09Definitely. But by like a millimeter little bump. But yeah, this is, this is not bad. Yeah. It's nice. We'll have a lot to say about it. Stay tuned. Get subscribed, of course, to the MKBHD channel to see the whole video on everything you need to know about it. But yeah, this is the, uh, the Android side of the fence for that exact form factor. Unbelievably excited about this form factor. It's, I love short and square. I can tell you're going to be a duo dailyer. Oh, a thousand percent. This is, yeah. Yeah. I miss the, uh, I miss the original pixel fold a lot. So I feel like this will be nice.

15:39I've had so many people in my life who are not tech people, definitely don't listen to Waveform, who like I posted one story from being at the Apple event and they go, oh my God, is it cool? Is it cool? Oh my God. And I got texts from people. Dude, it's the cultural, it's one of these things that's in the zeitgeist. It's the same as like, I went and got a haircut and my barber was like, how about that iPhone duo? Like I go to the grocery store, the cashier's like, how about that iPhone duo? Like it's the thing that everybody's talking about. It's so wild. And this is weirdly like just parachuting into that same space. Like what about this too? You can get this.

16:10Can we make a bet? Okay. Okay. Cause I made, I made a bet with my friend Mark that the duo is going to sell. I mean, it's going to be a little off, but he was saying that it's not going to sell well. And I was like, based on the people that have told me that they're going to buy it, who are not really tech people, I completely disagree. Now, obviously Apple put out the pro models like a month ahead of time. And I also know people who said they were going to wait for the duo, but then they caved and bought a pro. Sure. So I think that it's going to sell less than it would have if they released at the same

16:41time, but they just have to define what well is. Yeah. That's really hard. I think that it will sell at least 50% of the amount of units that the pro sold in the first week. Oh, in the first week. Yeah. Okay. It's interesting. That's interesting. I think that 50% what we usually see in like the first week of sales is the most hardcore dedicated people, which is why the pros always sell way more than the regulars in the first week. But then over time, regular people just get a regular iPhone and it sort of evens out.

17:13So the duo is going to be some combination of the most hardcore week one people who are like, yes, I've been waiting for this. Yeah. And the new people who are like, ooh, shiny. Yeah. 50% is pretty high. I would take the under on that. I know it's high, but I think it's... So you think it's over that? I think it could be over that. Okay, I would take the under. I think it's under just because I thought there were rumors that the production of it wasn't going to have as many units. There are, but I mean, if you pre-order it and then just delayed, I don't think it's,

17:44you know... Oh, so you're saying, okay, so they don't necessarily get it. Yeah. When do they get to get it? It's a bad thing. Whenever it comes out. Yeah. First week sale. I feel like it's going to be successful. Like the Vision Pro is successful off the riff of like new, shiny, crazy Apple product that a ton of people are going to buy. Not that many people bought the Vision Pro though. Every YouTuber... I agree. It got a ton of YouTube views. That's what I'm comparing it to though. But yeah, this doesn't feel like a device that only YouTubers are going to buy to make videos about. I agree.

18:15And also I think a lot of people are going to get that $2,000 price. Because this is like a price difference to where when we're going to monthly payments, it will feel like an actual difference. This is almost double like what the next phone most people would get is. If we think people are getting like the regular Pro at like $1,100, this is double that. So like that will be the difference between like $900 and $1,100 on a monthly payment. You know, I can see the edge of the screen protector. Rip it.

18:45I've been here before. I think we're... I'm not going to peel it. Well, it didn't come in a box to say don't peel it. When I was setting up the phone, there was a stage in the software where once I signed in, it was like, hey, don't peel the screen protector. That's unfortunately for some people too late. I think there are people who would peel that before... That's why Samsung had to put it in a card on top of the phone before you even took it out of the box. That's a good point. Okay. I'm looking at how much it is per month through Apple.

19:16Okay. The iPhone 18 Pro per month for the base 256 gig storage is $50 a month for 24 months or at least for $35. This one is $83 a month for 24 months or at least for $57 per month, per 24. Okay. I don't know, man. $35 difference? I know that is a big difference, but I still think it's going to sell like crazy. I think it'll sell good. I don't know if crazy is the term I would use. There's also the celebrity endorse factor, like everybody talking about it when it shows

19:52up in the purse of a Kardashian or whatever happens. Yeah, that's true. I'm just saying the most powerful word in marketing is new. And the iPhone 18 Pro looks the same as the 17 Pro except for a new color. Maybe it has the new variable aperture, which is how they sell these things. But a new iPhone form factor is a very big deal. We saw the 17 Pro was like one of the best selling iPhones in a really long time because it was the first one that actually changed the design enough that it felt really new.

20:23Yeah. This feels really, really new. Yeah. I don't disagree with you. I feel like I've also seen a lot of tech people being like, this is so cool. And you're like, are you going to buy it? And they're like, no. Yeah. I'm not going to buy it. Yeah. Ellis, what's your over under on 50% of first week? I have no idea. We talked about it in the car this morning. We did. And I have no idea. Because on the one hand, like I do agree, the hype is sensational. Yeah. But on the other hand. In our world, it will look like every single person has. Yeah. Which is going to be. It's $2,000.

20:53I was on my phone trying to see like what my trade-in options would be if I did want to buy one. I can't even get close, man. It's like, if I traded in my iPhone and an old iPhone and another old iPhone and my iPad, I would get about halfway to being able to. That is fair. And it's just like, holy cow, man. Well, you got to throw your iPad in there, too. You don't need your iPad anymore. No, I did throw the iPad in there.

21:24That's what was crazy. And it's an iPad Pro. Jeez. I do wonder like what a carrier deal might be. Yeah. Like if there's some wild carrier deal out there for this. And I wouldn't be surprised because I bet Apple will incentivize carriers to do something to push these things out so that people have them. Although there has been a big push in the last couple of years for Apple to sell devices directly instead of through carriers. They've been making a concerted effort to do that. So we'll see. But I do think a lot of carriers are going to specifically hype the fold. For sure. David, were those monthly numbers you gave earlier part of the upgrade plan or just the

21:57Apple financing? The first one was, wait, what do you mean by upgrade versus financing? It was an Apple financing. Are those the same thing? Because they do that Apple upgrade subscription now. No, no. That was just like if you buy a monthly or if you do the lease, which is the lease the upgrade? Is the lease the same thing? So the first one was buy for $11.99 or $49.99 a month. That is the... That's like the Apple card financing. Yeah, it's financing. And then the lease was... It had it here somewhere. And the lease is what they call like the Apple upgrade.

22:28Oh yeah, lease for $35 a month. Yeah. So it's on the Pro, it's $15 cheaper to lease per month. And on the Duo, it is... Sorry, cut this out. Is that worth it? On the Duo, it is like $35 cheaper to lease per month, which is a lot. So maybe if I trade in everything I own and I lease it. Lease it for two years. You could just trade in a cool $2,000 from your credit card. You got to really want it. Can I hand you this?

23:00I would really love that. You should check it out. I hate the idea of leasing anything, but... I agree with you. Especially like a $2,000 phone. Yes. I think... I don't know. A $2,000 folding new form factor phone. There are some things that make sense. Like you can lease a Mac Studio and if you can like write that off... Well, if you win a Fortnite tournament on it, you can just buy it. Like you lease a Mac Studio and if you can, you know, if you use it for work explicitly and you can write it off and you always want to be on the cutting edge and you don't really care about the ownership aspect of it, there is a case to be made there because the lease

23:32that they... What they lease it for is actually quite inexpensive compared to what you buy it for. Do we know what AppleCare is going to cost on this thing? Will it be different? Probably it's going to cost more because the whole value is higher, but I don't know how much more. I don't want to hang on too much on Duo. We're going to have a Duo episode. I do want to ask Ellis now that he's holding his first squat foldable, if he's convinced he's going to trade in everything he owns. No, I'm not. I mean, I want one really bad. I love folding phones and I love small phones.

24:02I've been talking about it on this podcast for years now. That is two boxes checked. But it's like $2,000. I know. But for the base, it's like there's just... For me, I'm like, something that I use this much all the time, I'm willing to throw a chunk of cash at it if I really want it. Yeah. I spent... I know it's a lot of money. I spent like $1,200, $1,300 on my phone after taxes and stuff last year. Yeah. It's going to be a good phone for a while.

24:33I can't. I can't adjust it. The 17 Pro is great. Anyway, we didn't even intend to talk about this phone.

Dyson toothbrush updates

24:38No, because we have something way cooler to talk about, which is the Dyson camera jet toothbrush has two fun updates. Yeah. Two fun updates. One of them is that it is pulled from market already. Can I tell you the story about this? Wait, what? Do it. Yeah. Okay. So I'm in my coffee shop. Classic. And I'm talking to this guy because he had an X100. And I was like, oh, are you a photographer? And he's like, no. And I was like, that's weird. And then... That's... Yeah. That's us X100 users. It's out there. We are. We like to pretend we're photographers. Hey, man. I have it. I'm... You're getting better.

25:08Anyway. Thanks, Dad. You're welcome. You're welcome, son. Anyway, so we're talking. He's from the UK. He's just visiting. He's like, oh, yeah, I'm a dentist. And I'm like, hmm, what do you think about the Dyson toothbrush? Have you seen it? Because I wanted an actual dentist. No, I had... I went to the dentist yesterday and I wanted to ask him about it. And the one time he didn't be like, any questions for me? Oh, he didn't ask. It was yesterday. No, he didn't ask that. And I was like, I'm not bringing this up out of the blue unless you... Oh, that's so funny. Well, I brought it up out of the blue. Okay, good. I said, what do you think about the Dyson toothbrush? He's like, well, they pulled it from market. And I was like, what?

25:39And he's like, yeah, like two days after it launched, like the camera was breaking and they pulled it from market. And I was like, how did I not hear about this? I didn't see any news about it being pulled. And it still hasn't been re-released yet. No. And there's no updates on when it will be re-released. That's crazy. There was so much press about this toothbrush and nobody reported on it getting pulled. Online users have reported a range of problems, including misfiring jets, breakages, and operating failures when the toothbrush gets wet. What?

26:08As if a toothbrush was going to not get wet. What the heck? Wow. Did they even test this? They claim only a small number of units have been affected. Okay, well. Of course, of course. I feel like Dyson is the company that would test, over-test everything. I agree. Because everything they make is so over-engineered. That's their reputation. Their whole reputation. Yeah, exactly. Like, everything is so over-engineered that they have to put it through the most insane stretch test of all time. And the fact that it was, like, breaking and got pulled two days after it released is insane.

26:39Anyway, that's update number one. There was enough time for an Instagram page called All Gear No Skill to find a way to take street photography photos with it, which... With all 100,000 pixels. Yeah. What is it? 0.1 megapixels? 0.1 megapixels. Yeah. There... So, you can't actually take photos with this because Dyson themselves say you cannot store any photos or media, but... Sounds like the Apple Watch. Yeah, right. In the app, there is a live viewing screen. So, when you're brushing, you can see your teeth, I guess.

27:11So, what this person did is took it out into the daylight and then took screenshots of their phone as the live view is happening. So, that's how they took the photos. And honestly, they're kind of cool. They're kind of vibey. They're very vibey. They're all super distorted, which at first, I was wondering if it was... I was wondering if the mouthwash thing had to shoot. And that's why it looked... They all look like they're underwater. But I think the plastic covering the camera is just so bad that they look really bad. This is what people, like, talk about, like, first-gen iPhone photos looking like.

27:44Yeah. But, yeah, this is weird. There's some vibey ones. They kind of all look like they're underwater. She said that she obviously felt kind of weird walking around in public pointing a toothbrush at things. Yep, I see that. Which is totally fair. And my favorite quote from her was, the camera needs a lot of light, but also can't handle too much of it.

28:05Yeah. Which is really funny, but it's also a $500 toothbrush. So, it's not supposed to be. It's 100,000 pixels, Andrew. You say it's a $500 toothbrush, but it's not on sale anymore, so you have to get them on eBay, where they're going for a $1,500. No way. Are you kidding me? 15, sealed in box. You can get one. It's just $1,500. I like thinking of it as the resale market, and buying a resale toothbrush might be the most insane thing I've ever heard. That's the most 2026 thing I've ever heard. Yeah, a lot of Reddit users were saying that it looked very similar to an early 2020s Gen AI photo.

28:36Like, do you remember Google Deep Dream? Yeah. When they had the dogs melding into each other to make the Mona Lisa. Or even the first Will Smith eating spaghetti video, where everything's wobbling, basically. Yeah. Everything's really unstable. So, that's fun. I wish I had done this first. Street photography on a toothbrush is the next meta. Brand new sentence. That's the next meta. Anyway, speaking of it not being around anymore, because it was pulled, it's the same thing

29:09as nothing, because it's not on the market. So, when you go to the aisle to look for it, it's not there, which is nothing.

Nothing Headphone One Pro review

29:19Oh, just like the headphones. In your hand. That's crazy. Oh, wow. That case sounded so nice when it hit the table. Yeah. That's a plastic. Not really plastic. Okay, so I have not tried these before. These are the Nothing Headphone One Pro. Yes. They're Nothing's first studio quality, mixing quality, quote unquote, headphones. Ellis, how do you feel when everyone calls everything studio quality? Okay, first, I just want to say, I promise I'm like locked in on this podcast. For those video watching that see me look in all sorts of directions, I got to do Adam's

29:50job too, and we've been having some audio issues on the recording computer, so I'm doing stuff on my laptop just to free up some GPU space. I swear, I take this job so seriously. All right, to answer your question, I'm kind of ambivalent. What does it mean? I don't know. Would I use those in a studio? Probably not. If I walked into a studio and someone was using those, I would either be like, damn, that guy knows something that I don't or has a lot of money. All right, Marquez, tell us about the Nothing Headphone One Pro.

30:21All right, so the review's out. This is their $400 pair of headphones that are an upgrade in several ways over the previous Nothing Headphones One. They are triple drivers inside instead of a single driver. They claim to have much better overall sound. Obviously, they claim that. But they're also slightly more premium materials. It's like a titanium band. Instead of plastic on the back here, this is glass. It's a slightly new design. And then they do this interesting feature where they have a flat button. Yeah. In here. It's a switch, right? It's a switch.

30:52And when you flip that switch, it goes from being its nice, colorful, V-shaped frequency response to being basically the equivalent of, like, flipping it to log video. It just goes totally flat. And the idea, anyway, is that that is being able to flip a switch between these being fun, vibey music listening headphones and also being, like, studio reference headphones. If you want to listen to music on the plane and then land and then edit a video with these headphones on, you can flip the switch and do both properly.

31:25Eh. Kinda. You can. It definitely does make a dramatic effect. They're saying it's totally unprocessed audio. And it literally disables the EQ when you flip that switch. So it's something. But they also come in this case, this new case that they've made for it. They still don't fold. And instead of making a big rectangular case like the last one, they've made this sort of a bralette case. It's plastic. It's maybe the worst version of this case I've ever seen. The USB-C port to charge the headphones is still in here.

31:57But when you close the case, that covers it and you can't charge them. So you have to open it to charge the headphones. That's confusing. It weighs more than the headphones themselves. So this whole package is, like, 700 grams or something. It's a lot. It's like a pound. Yeah, let me see. But I'll hand them to you. That is the Pro Nothing headphones. They actually sound, if you listen to my review, I think they sound fine. But in the world of, like, $400 active noise-canceling headphones, they are not at the top. But most of the headphones in this category aren't $400 anymore, right? They range from, like, $350 to $550 typically.

32:30I thought they were all closer to, like, $550 now. The new Sonos Ace are $450. It depends on which ones. Like, the Beats 360s are $350. The Sony XM4 relaunch is $300. The XM6s are, like, $450. The AirPods Max are $550. There's a bunch of other headphones that are, like, sort of in this range. The Quiet Comfort still say $360, which... Yeah, $360 for Bose. QC Ultra, though? I think it's $450. Oh, maybe. The new Sonos Ace Ultra just came out today. And those are, like, $450. They're $450. Yeah. So, there's a big range. This is...

33:00They're all in the same level, I guess, of, like, these are the premium Active Nox Hansling headphones. Is this titanium? Titanium, but, like, with a coating on it and with a really nice plush cushion. Yeah. The best part of these headphones is the cushion, I actually think. The cushion feels so nice. Yeah. Yeah. I gave the... Obviously, this is Pro versus the other ones, but I gave the style of the Last Nothing headphones. I did not like them one bit. And I think these are fantastic. Really? I think these look way nicer, way cleaner.

33:32I think... Although, I got tricked. I thought the interiors, I was like, oh, that actually does look like it might be something real, but it's fake, apparently. But at least it looks better. It's not, like, over the top. It's very subtle. Sure. And nice. So, you get the cool... And I love nothing truly wireless headphones. I use them almost every day. The earbuds? The earbuds. Because I think they look really good and they fit in my ears, and that's kind of all I care about because I'm not listening or watching anything important enough. For me to care about the sound as much. And I think these look nice, and they feel nice, and this case is a monstrosity.

34:05Yeah, the case is kind of a crazy thing, because it's, like, partly well-designed. It has this, like, metal latch. It's got these kind of premium materials, but then it's insane that they didn't think about charging. Wait, okay. I want you to do something. Put the headphones on, and let me see this case. Wait. So, put the headphones on with the right side on the right. Okay. And now this is your case. So, now go ahead and put them in the case. Okay. See how intuitive it is to put them in the case. So, you open the case. You take the headphones off. You try to put them in the way you had them on.

34:38Upside down. Oh, you have it upside down. That worked so well because it was upside down. Because he's, like, facing the camera instead of facing him. Oh, I see. Yeah. Okay. So, if I have them on, and the case is right side up. Yeah. And you take them off your head, you have to flip them to put them in the case, which I was, like, slightly annoyed by that. I don't know why that's... It's a little thing. Yeah. It's one of those little things that stacks up because the rest of the case is a terrible experience. Mostly. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, like, I guess it protects them when you put them in a bag, but it doesn't protect the head strap, which feels like it.

35:10That's nice. So, it feels like it's just adding weight and bulk. And bulk. Without being able to charge it. Without, like, it feels like for no real reason. Yeah. It has its little lanyard holds that I guess you could put a whole strap on also if you wanted and wear it, like, but then... Or charms and stuff. Or charms and stuff. I don't know. I'm so out of that. The last time we made a suggestion to nothing, they said, we don't listen to people like you. Yeah, they did say that. Here's what I'll say about the review process. They didn't really say that. They said, like, we don't take design from... I'm glad we didn't take design from people or something like that.

35:42Yeah, well, they're definitely going to clip this podcast and show a YouTube video out of it. So, the interesting thing about my review process, I'll say, comparison is a thief of joy. Yeah. So, I first... I got these headphones and for a couple days and for the entire weekend, I was listening to them and I was like, yeah, wow, these are nice. These are good. I didn't have any other headphones with me for reference. So, I was listening to, like, you know, lots of Spotify and a bunch of other stuff and I was like, yeah, these are good. Then they were super comfortable and the battery was lasting forever. And so, I was pretty happy with, like, a lot of it other than the case.

36:13And I was like, I think I might, like, just like to use these headphones all the time. And then when I got back here on Monday, I broke out, like, six or seven other pairs of headphones and started doing my back-to-back testing to, like, form my last thoughts to write on the sound quality. And that's when I was like, oh, like, there's a lot more warmth and separation and detail and a lot of these other headphones. And the Nothing does a good job with passive noise cancellation because of these ear cups. So, they do a really good job with ANC and I will say that they match up with ANC to the

36:44rest of the competition. But in the actual way that they sound, I ended up being like, oh, I actually don't want to keep using these headphones. Because of the way I've been enjoying Sony's and AirPods Max. Were you using lossless Spotify with Bluetooth? Yes, which is not real. Not lossless. But it is my typical listening situation. So, that was my A-B test for, like, every pair of headphones was Spotify Bluetooth. Do you think that they were... But technically still compressed at 990 kilobits per second, I guess. I guess if I was playing it out of the speaker, it would be closer to lossless.

37:15You would have needed to wire it in. Yeah, wire it in. USB-C. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think that they were targeting these more at, like, mixing, producing people or... No. I don't think so. People who think they are. Yeah. Yeah. This feature, it would be weird to get these if that wasn't your intent. Yeah. Right? Like, most of these headphones, like, I could edit videos on AirPods Max. I've mostly edited on speakers, but, like, they're fine. Yeah. But that's because I expect them to sound close to the way everyone else's speakers sound. But I have the Sennheisers that I use for editing at my desk, and they're a very...

37:47They're a more neutral sound, and that's what I expect to adjust my mix for so that when someone else listens... I don't know. It's just, like, video editing. Yeah. Like, I can see certain things in my edits, so when someone watches this on a crappy monitor or, like, a really old phone, I know they'll be able to see most of the same stuff. Yeah. It's that same philosophy. It's just a feature I haven't seen in other headphones before. This kind of feels a lot like an artifact of the Charli XCX collab, because she's technically, like, a DJ and makes her music. I was going to say, this feels like Beats Studio, kind of, like... Yeah. Beats Studio is a funny product. Yeah.

38:17Yeah. I really like those headphones. The fact that it has, like, the flat toggle, so, like, she could be mixing while she's using them or whatever, and then it's got, like, the bralette case that kind of makes it look like a purse, and, like, that's very fashionable. And it's obvious when you're walking around with it. It kind of feels like an artifact of that, but that also could just be, give me some money and I'll give you some promotion. Yeah. I mean... I think both of those are spot on. Yeah. The original nothing headphones launched at 300 and went down to 250, and this launches at 400. So, to me, it just felt like, hey, we want to offer something in the premium space.

38:47Yeah. And that was their distinguishing feature. Cool design and flat switch. I wish they sent us the silver ones, because the black looks clean, but, like, I've always thought nothing in all their silver or white versions look better and more on their brand and style. Okay. Well, speaking of things launching, should we take a quick break and then do the launch stuff? Speaking of launch... Let's just keep going. Let's just do it. You want to keep powering through? We've got two more quick things, and then the rest is, like... Okay, they're both uniquely launched. A ton of Meta Connect, and yeah. Yeah. We'll rush through them.

Upcoming Apple event rumors

39:15Okay. Okay.

Upcoming Apple event rumors

39:16So, we just had a big Apple event. We're about to have another big Apple event. Maybe. Possibly, allegedly. Mark Gurman tweeted this week that there will probably be an Apple event on the 13th. Event is a strong word. It could just be a release. Techtober. But it is Techtober. We often now see a lot of Apple things drop in October and November. Usually, it's, like, there's iPad stuff, there's MacBook stuff, there's all this stuff. But we've been waiting for this new Apple HomePad device that we've talked about quite a few

39:48times on the show now. Gurman is speculating that on October 13th, we're going to see a new HomePod mini with new colors like pink and green, new Apple TV, which a lot of people have been waiting for, and potentially, finally, that HomePad device. That's what I'm excited for. Yes. He does not believe we're going to see the security cameras that we alluded to last year. Last week. That they, like, showed in DubDub, right? Was that where they... They, like, kind of showed home stuff using, like, security cameras. Yeah. But, like, making their own.

40:19Right. And there was a big leak, like, a few months ago where we went through all of the Apple products that were in the pipeline, and a couple of them were security cameras. So that will probably come out eventually. But right now, it seems like it may just be the HomePad and also the new HomePod mini and Apple TV. The funny thing from this German tweet, or he then continued tweeting about it, was the last time we talked about the HomePad, we were all like, oh, we saw this really funny, like, old render of it looking like an iMac G4. Yeah. But that's totally not it.

40:50That's so silly. He just decided to come out of the blue and say, like, they do seem to be working on a higher-end version of Smart Home Hub featuring a 9-inch display mounted and robotic arm that can swivel 360 degrees. So we all think G4. And then he just straight up tweeted a picture of the G4 and was like, this is what it looks like. Yeah. That would be crazy. That's so, I like that that's so sick and so funny. It's like the Pixar lamp HomePad or HomePod. But yeah, we basically just completely decided against it. Now they're launching two. Yeah. Or not launching two, launching one in possibly a second.

41:23It would be so crazy if we got the Duo in October, we got these in October, and then the MacBook Ultra is supposed to come out this year. Like, that's so many new products. And there was a big rumor last week that John Ternus is going to accelerate the product development and release life cycle. Yeah. I think this is actually also pretty interesting because one of the things, when we always talk about Apple, a lot of their stuff is so robotic and predictable because of what they've done in the past. The easiest way to predict what they're going to do is look at what they just did last year.

41:53Yeah. When will the iPhone 19 be launched? Probably the second Tuesday of September. Like, we kind of have this rhythm where we know what's happening. They started on a Wednesday. I know. Which is like a shocker. Yeah, because it was Labor Day. Yeah. So now this report also from Gurman is talking about how, you know, one of Ternus' priorities is to just take more risks, launch more products, run leaner, and try new things and be experimental. And so, yeah, maybe an October event. Maybe a February event. Maybe just random things get launched that aren't part of a brand new huge fall event that has a ton of stuff. And we just kind of get a bunch of stuff all the time.

42:25Yeah. That sounds great. I'm so here for it. Yeah. I think as people who professionally yap about stuff like this all the time and who then also have to talk about, like, AI nonstop, Apple going fast and loose sounds like the most fun thing we could talk about. And, like, spreading it out. Instead of it being like, all right, here's a September event. There is seven new products all at once. Here are all of them. Good luck. It's like, here's two of them. Now here's two more. Now here's two more. Now here's two more. Yeah. I like that. Do you know what would be sick? If Ternus just brought AirPower out of nowhere. That would be hilarious. It would be like Tim Cook's least favorite thing.

42:56It's like, you know what I did that you couldn't do? The charger. It'd be funnier if they called it AirPower 2.

Tesla Roadster event delayed

43:02Well, speaking of re-releases, the Tesla Roadster. Yeah, the Tesla, also launch-related. The Tesla Roadster, we talked last week about how they have this re-unveiling event happening in October. It was going to be October 1st. Tomorrow. That was going to be this week. But as of you listening to this on Friday, you've probably realized that that didn't happen. That was postponed because the weather in Texas during that day was windy and thunderstorms, and this is a car demo that requires being outside.

43:34So they postponed it by two weeks. Two weeks. Which is enough time to rebook a flight, I guess. Yeah. I just see it as like, we could obviously just look like we're sitting here dunking on Roadster getting delayed again, but we were wondering how much of an event this was going to be, and I feel like this proves there will be a car driving there, doing something outside. The only things that I'm confident about is that there will be a demo of the Roadster doing something. Yeah. And so they have to have it outside, and the weather, I mean, this is a convertible, and the weather said thunderstorms and rain and wind.

44:05So I'm like, I get it. Postpone it. People are reading way into this and being like, you saw the FAA clearance that they got where it's like no flights over for 10,000 feet. People were like, the Roadster's going to fly. I'm like, relax. This doesn't mean- Google does that for Google. Yeah, I know. I'm pretty sure Tesla has done it for their old things because they don't want people like droning over top of it getting footage. It's very likely that they will do this for all of their events no matter what, but I think also maybe a drone show, maybe whatever. I mean, there are even things just like, well, it's going to fly. Even if it jumps, you don't want the wind to flip it over.

44:35It's like- Relax. Come on, guys. Relax. This is crazy. Yeah, it's a convertible. It don't want to get rained on. When you look at the weather today, and they postponed this quite a few days ago, even now when you look at the weather today, tomorrow, which is the day it was supposed to be, is thunderstorms still. So, it makes sense that they're going to delay it. I guess we'll just have to wait another two weeks. What's another two weeks? What's another two weeks? We've been waiting nine years already. Nine years. It's fine. Yeah. It's fine. Not a big deal. Everything's fine. Not a big deal. Yeah. Okay. You have time to invite me, by the way, Tesla. Yeah. Two weeks is enough time for us to invite. You're too salty about it, Marcos.

45:06Yeah, they're not going to invite me. It's okay. You still have hair. Yeah. All right. It's time for a break. For real this time. For real, for real.

Trivia break

45:12Longod, we're going to take a quick break, which means it is time for trivia. What has Ellis been cooking up over there for trivia? Ooh, something good. Because, do you guys remember a while ago when Travis Scott did that Fortnite concert? Yeah. I don't even want to know how long ago that was. It was a long time ago. It was a 2020? Did I ever tell you last time my band, which I don't want to go too into, you know, it's a previous part of my life, but my band performed at a Minecraft.

45:42A music festival. Minecraft. Travis Scott copied you? I can't remember if it was before or after the Travis Scott thing, but Pussy Riot and I want to say the band that everyone thought Banksy was in was also. This is like the most Brooklyn coffee shop conversation I've ever heard. Yeah, it's a strange Ellis loved in Philly. Yeah, I was living in Philly at the time. And I guess Philly is kind of like a suburb of Brooklyn. Yeah. Oh, God. It really is. I'm not going to accept that.

46:13Yeah. Philly people will not accept that. As I'm wearing my Philadelphia 76ers t-shirt of the day, I cannot accept that. All right. Okay. Well, question one. Related to internet music festivals, I learned that the very first, very first belongs in like so many quotation marks, it'll fill up an entire page. But the very first broadcast over the internet audio visual music concert experience was done in the early to mid 80s. Not surprised. I lied. 1994.

46:43Not having this up on the screen right in front of me is way more difficult than I thought it would be.

46:50What band was it? This is a huge band. This is a huge, huge, huge band. It was a huge band in the 90s. It's one of those bands that is perennially, like a timeless musical act. And the reason there's so many quotation marks around this is because lots of other bands that no one is, I don't want to say no one's ever heard of, but do not even compare in size to this band, beat them, including, and this was hilarious, one band scheduled an online broadcast performance to go up 20 minutes before the Rolling Stones because the drummer

47:24in the band. Did you just give it away? The Rolling Stones? It's okay, I got lots of backup questions. That was going to be my guess. Was it actually? I was not going to guess the Beatles. I was going to guess Nirvana. I was going to guess the Beatles. I'm going to say we're not together in 94. Oh. You're going to say U2? I'm going to say U2. U2 is later than that. Oh. 94 is. Guys, we all hate the macOS beach ball. Facts. Before it was a beach ball, what was the icon?

47:54Huh. Anyway, the drummer in the band beat the Rolling Stones because he worked at Xerox Park and had access to a baller internet connection. What do you mean by beat? The drummer in what band? There was a band called the Severed Tires. No, no. I just mean, oh, beat them. Oh, to being first. Sorry. They were called Severe Tire Damage. They found out ahead of time about this Rolling Stones concert. We're like, we're going to host one 20 minutes before. And they could set it up really fast because the drummer in Severe Tire Damage worked at Xerox Park. They could have a baller internet connection and they just played a show at the Xerox Park.

48:26I wonder what baller internet connection was in 94. Before it was a beach ball. Before it was a beach ball. So we're talking classic macOS. You're on like a pre, I guess that'd be preOS 9 or preOS 8. I can't remember what we consider classic macOS. But you do something, your computer freaks out, it's not responding, your cursor goes from a cursor to what? And I won't spoil this one. I won't do it. You should just stop talking. I hate stopping talking. I think I know this. Also, Ellis. Yeah. Who is sponsoring the Rolling Stones show?

48:58Like who is that? Who is putting it on? I have that information immediately to my left, but I'm really trying to not go back and forth between my laptop. So I will get that to you after the break. Okay. So we'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Shopify. So starting a new business is so daunting that most people quit before they even start. But you don't have to be like most people and you don't have to do it alone.

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50:03business and the tools to do it. If you're ready to hear the sound of your first sale today, head over to shopify.com slash waveform to start your free trial today. That's right. You can start your free trial at shopify.com slash waveform. That's shopify.com slash waveform. Support for the show comes from PipeDrive. Sales teams spend up to 50% of their time on admin work rather than selling, building relationships, and closing deals. They can really use a tool that covers all the admin stuff. That way, sales teams can actually focus on the work they were hired to do.

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51:06Switch to a CRM built by salespeople for salespeople and join the over 100,000 companies already using PipeDrive. Our link gets you an exclusive 30 days free instead of the usual 14-day free trial. No credit card or payment needed. Just head to pipedrive.com slash waveform to get started. That's pipedrive.com slash waveform, and it can be up and running in minutes. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every little detail right. So prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace.

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Meta Connect announcements

52:15Welcome back. I have the answer to David's question now. It seems like this whole thing was in support of a multicast backbone creatively called M-Bone, which was a backbone infrastructure to deliver audio-visual stuff cleanly over IP. Nice. M-Bone. M-Bone. M-Bone. I wonder what they're up to now. Xerox PARC? I guess we'll never know. I guess we'll never know. All right. Last week, we barely missed some big news because this event happened literally hours

52:48after we recorded last Wednesday. We say right after, but it was like long enough after that. Well, we record during the business day on Wednesday and then Meta Connect was like after hours on Wednesday. Yeah, because it was Pacific time. Because Pacific time. For Pacific. Yeah. So, they had a lot of updates that they released. They released new Ray-Ban Meta Glasses. They released new audio-only Meta Glasses. They had a new VR mixed reality headset that looks suspiciously like a Vision Pro without the like eye shield things.

53:19But better. But better. They had holograms. They had a lot of stuff. So, we're just going to go through all of that. I think there's two big ones to talk about. Okay. I think the headset is really interesting. That's what I have the most of. Let me really quickly go. There's updated third-gen Meta AI Glasses. Yep. The audio-only version is obviously like a less bulky. They can put them in more frames that are because they don't have to be so big. They can do music calls, AI, and a pair of glasses. Also, no cameras. We like that. Yeah. And they're 349. Also, better battery life. 12 hours on the charge.

53:51That's what I was thinking. Yeah. Cool. And then the really big one that I'd like to talk the most about, we kind of hinted in a previous episode, which is the Meta VR Glasses. Yeah. The funny thing about these with the name is I kept looking up what the name was this and then I realized they were just called the Meta VR Glasses. Yeah. Because I kept thinking these were like, I see them as Quest Pro 2. Mm-hmm. Because they remind me so much of what Quest Pro in a better form factor is. Yeah. They're like Quest Pro had a baby with a Vision Pro. Yes. I mean, honestly, yeah. But also shrunk way down.

54:22Like, Nreal Glasses had a Vision Pro baby and like with Quest Pro capabilities. They're what the Vision Pro should have been. They are 100% what Vision Pro should have been. And they're also a third of the price. Yeah. So this is what I really liked the piece that also Gurman wrote on what Apple has been working on with Vision Pro because Vision Pro has kind of been dead and we keep talking about Vision Pro, but like it's not that popular of a product. But we've been talking for years about how there's smart glasses that are trying to add more and more capability and there's headsets that are trying to shrink down with all the

54:53capability they have in them. This is the headset shrinking down. So it's like high resolution, pretty wide field of view, full immersive VR. Obviously, you can still do pass through and it has like sort of light bleed. It's a little bit more of an open design, but it is very much like it's got the smooth glass on the front. It has a bunch of sensors and tracking and it looks like a Vision Pro from the outside. But it's way lighter. It has a separate puck which has the compute and battery in it. So it's taken a lot of that weight off of your head and it is, yeah, it's very capable

55:25and obviously you can run it standalone. You can connect to a PC just like a Vision Pro, but it's a third of the price of Vision Pro. It's like $1,400, right? $1,300. $1,300. Yeah. It's like a pair of ski, the lenses of ski goggles, but then with the, I always figure out what the sides of glasses are called, stems, arms. Yeah. It has like glasses arms within the wire going down. So like, yeah, imagine Vision Pro without a big strap on your head because they're a hundred grams, which is crazy. Really, really, really light. That's lighter than the Snap Specs, which are supposed to be just like actual glasses.

55:59To be fair, those are, the entire computer is integrated. Fair. That is totally fair. And they're also like double the price of these though, which is insane. And I also think, I don't think these are supposed to be glasses. Like I know they're called meta VR glasses, but no part of this makes me feel like you should like walk around, maybe pull these up in a coffee shop, maybe on a plane when you're doing work. These are, these are seated things to me or like standing in an office. I did find that specifically interesting. Them just choosing to use the word glasses in the name of the product, even though it's

56:29still a headset that's shrinking towards glasses, which maybe implies that they are going to keep shrinking it and want to keep getting that down towards glasses. But yeah, they have their other glasses products. This is definitely not one of them, but it has camera pass through. There's a couple of things like it doesn't have a head strap, right? So if there's no head strap sort of mounting it to the top of your head, they are technically just big glasses. I guess when I use the word glasses, I'm, I'm using it the most literally, which is like, you're wearing glasses. You're looking at me through glass. Yeah. This is camera pass through. Yeah. So I guess that's in my head, it's not glasses because it's not clear.

57:01That's fair. But maybe they're going to get there with this product at some point. Yeah. And they took a lot of design inspiration from the Vision Pro. They also took UX design inspiration from the Vision Pro. It has eye tracking and it's pretty much the exact same way that you interface with Vision Pro, where you look around with your eyes and you tap with your finger. A lot of them are converging on this too. The Samsung one is the same thing. I mean, it's great. Yeah. It does not come with controllers. It can use old Quest controllers, but to your point, it's not even coming with controllers now. So they're going all in on like tapping, eye movement, hand tracking.

57:33Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which, and from what I've seen of like some of the first impressions, it sounds like they did a really good job on it. And people compared it to the Vision Pro, which was, I think all of us agree, the most impressive part about the Vision Pro. Yeah. Vision Pro was really heavy, destroyed your neck, had a couple of cool things. But the fact that it was so good at tracking your eyes and just clicking, the controls were so intuitive. That was the coolest part of the Vision Pro. A feature that people have been very impressed with that traditionally has been very bad is the virtual keyboard and mouse experience. So when you're wearing these, you can just like look down at the tabletop that you're

58:06sitting in front of and a keyboard will show up and like a trackpad. And apparently you just type and it is really good at catching your fingers. Now, I don't like doing this. Every time I've ever had to type on just like a glass keyboard or something, the fact that it's not pushing back on your fingers and you're just like slamming your fingers against the table, it's pretty uncomfortable. But everyone who has tried this has said it's like surprisingly accurate, which is cool. The minute I saw it as a keyboard turd, I like was like, I hate this. This is so stupid. But then I realized in the scenario where I don't have the keyboard with me, it's so

58:40much better than I'm sure everyone remembers David's impression of typing on the Vision Pro, which is just like your eyes darting back left and right and clicking your finger. Like that's annoying. It works well, but it's annoying. So having that keyboard be able to pop up is probably great. I think more people are going to be using this at their desk with their actual mouse and keyboard connected to their computer as a place to have an infinite amount of screens and real estate in front of you. And I think that's why this not having like eye blocking shades on the side feels similar

59:13to the Quest Pro, like you're more in your environment, like this is a pass through thing, like you're not. Mixed reality. Yeah. You're not taken away from everybody else in the room with you. So that's why I think this is, again, this is Quest Pro, but better because I could see more people using this for work and productivity as like sitting at your desk with all of your normal stuff, even your laptop, because you can see your screen, but also then have multiple other screens around you. Yeah. For me, the best feature of the Vision Pro was the extended display from your MacBook. You would sit in front of it. It would pop up on top of your MacBook.

59:44You could have one large display. You could have a really wide screen display. There were just multiple ways to do it. This, but your neck not getting tired and also having like airflow coming through the sides of your face. True. Sounds really great. Yeah. So I do aim to test these out and check them out. I'm trying to get a demo of them. TBD, again, TechTember is super busy. So it was like on the radar, but we didn't get out there because we were reviewing other things, but hopefully we get to check these things out. Yeah. These aren't launching until spring 27. Yeah. So we've got quite a while until these actually drop, but the people who have tried them were

1:00:15quite impressed. Yeah. Quick specs on them. Dual 5K micro OLED panels, 2412 by 2288 per eye, up to 120 hertz. This is where I was a little confused. 70 degree field of view, horizontal, 66 degrees vertically, three hour battery life, but the puck does have USB-C for continuous use. Like the Vision Pro. Like the Vision Pro. The puck is 300 grams, which is funny. That's three times the weight, but also makes sense. They got to move. Yeah. It is a quarter of the weight now on your head, which is important. 12 gigs of RAM, 120 gigs of storage, micro SD card slot, six cameras for head tracking,

1:00:48four infrared for eye tracking. Like you said, $1,300 spring 2027. Yeah. That's quite surprising. It is. They also did pull out a one more thing.

Meta Muse AI agent

1:00:59The Muse charm. Tamagotchi. Which we haven't even talked about Muse yet. I had it for last week's. And then last week's we absolutely crashed out about YouTube and I think we were all sweating. So we needed a break. That's my bad. So we can quickly talk about Muse charm and then talk about Muse because all Muse charm is, is, is, is a physical representation of the Muse that you carry around. It's like a thick Apple watch on a key chain that has your little Muse avatar. It's a thick Tamagotchi. So for people that don't know what Muse is, because we, we haven't even talked about Muse at all. Yeah. They released their own little AI agent thing, which we'll get to opening eyes version later

1:01:33in this episode, but it's this cute little furry guy. And that's a very intentional decision to make it cute because Mark Zuckerberg is on a campaign to make people not hate AI. All these companies are right now. On this podcast, we have said, I don't get why AI isn't making all their things you talk to like cute, like Clippy. Yeah. I'm regretting saying that right now because we're about to talk about another cute thing. So Muse is like a personal, personal little agent. It's a virtual machine that runs in the cloud that you can have. It's free to use.

1:02:03You can ask it to list things for you on Facebook marketplace. You can give it access to your Gmail. It's like, it's everything that you would do with like Claude co-work or something like that, but it's in a little micro agent thing that you can run on your phone. You can run it on different surfaces. And because it's in a virtual machine, it's like sandboxed in a way. Yeah. Although you can still give it access to a lot of things. There've been some weird things that have happened so far. Like someone listed some stuff for them on Facebook marketplace and they just gave it all the access that it asked for. And then the Muse agent communicated with the person, told them when to come pick up the item.

1:02:36Told the person who showed up that they will, they will be right down. And the person, the person that was selling the stuff didn't know that. And it told them their address, all this stuff. So clearly there's like, you know, there's a lot of, uh, weird things and edge cases that can go wrong with these. But for meta Muse has been by all accounts, a huge success for them. Yeah. It's, it's like the agentic assistant. Everyone is trying to launch because you can give it access to so many different things. Like you said, the marketplace thing. Um, I mean, it kind of, does this not sound sort of like open claw before, whereas like

1:03:10you can now text it and it's doing all of that. Pretty much literally from, yeah. Facebook. Yeah. They're being like, hire the open claw. They did not. That was open AI. That was open AI. Um, but someone did decompile the virtual machine to like, look at all the system files. They're identically named. Yeah. And someone tweeted about it and was like, this is just open claw, but rebranded. And the guy that, I guess the guy that's the head of Muse or whatever was like, it's not, but we took a lot of inspiration from him and we think that he did it the right way. The right, the first time. And it was like, okay, but they're all identically.

1:03:41I definitely watched some interview with Zuck where he like, he mentioned open claw in this and the way he talked about it kind of made it seem like, yeah, we just like pulled that in. Like we just pulled that inspiration in there. It's open source. Sure. Exactly. And I think that like open claw was such a weird thing because it is powerful, but it's so confusing and it's so complicated to use. And if there's anything that meta is good at, it's taking a good idea and making regular people understand how to use it. Yeah. And destroying the privacy on it. And then destroying your privacy.

1:04:11So you don't need any terminal or any, any fancy new knowledge. You just get Muse. Just use WhatsApp. You just talk to it. No, you can use WhatsApp to talk to it. You text it. Yeah. And it just does the things you ask it to. You give it your credit card. It buys stuff for you. You give it, you know, access to your accounts. It can send those emails, triage. That's like the goal. Like you're saying these things like it will do that. Like you're asking it to do it. Well, yeah. It does it, you know. This is always the thing about AI. Since the beginning is when it hallucinates, how bad is that for you?

1:04:43Like if I'm asking for it to just ask, answer a simple question and it hallucinates the wrong answer, that's not a huge deal. But if I'm asking it for like some critical like allergy information and it gets it wrong, that's a little worse. If I'm asking it to buy something and it buys the wrong thing, that's a little worse. If I ask it to list things on Facebook Marketplace and people show up to my house, that's a little worse. So how bad is it when it hallucinates? What does it do? Yeah. That's always going to be a question. Yeah. I was avoiding using this product for quite a while because I feel like, you know, fool me once, shame on me.

1:05:15Fool me twice, can't get fooled again type situation. George Bush reference. I know we're in Texas. And I decided eventually, you know what, if I'm going to be a good tech reporter, I have to sacrifice my privacy. So I did. And it is proactive in a very interesting way. Um, it'll, it's alerted me to emails that I didn't notice I had gotten before that it flagged as important, that Gmail did not flag as important that I thought was interesting. It was like, you should reply to this person by tomorrow morning. And I'm like, oh, that's actually helpful.

1:05:46It, I connected to my calendar. So I went to an event last night and I had two things on my calendar. I had like the event on my calendar and then I needed to be home by a certain time. And it was like, oh, I see this events, but on your calendar, you should leave by this time. The best way to get there is by city bike. Like you could city bike there in 20 minutes, or if you could take the subway in 40, if you want to get home on time, make sure to leave by nine. I was like, whoa, that's kind of interesting and proactive. Yeah. I still personally don't feel like there's enough value out of these products for me to want to use them. Um, especially giving up my privacy to something like meta and something that will potentially

1:06:19go out and tell everyone my address. But yeah, I feel that they are building towards something that could feel more useful in the future. So this is their version. They now, as you said, Andrew, have a Tamagotchi version of this. Yeah. The charm. The charm. The charm, yeah, it's like a Tamagotchi that now you can speak to. I, I'll give them credit. I think the most, the coolest thing about it was in order to speak to it, it's not a wake word. It's a put your finger on a fingerprint scanner. So only you can talk to it. That's interesting. Um, cool.

1:06:50Privates. Privacy wise, I guess. So people aren't taking over your muse that has access to everything. Someone posted on a subreddit that they gave access to their ring cameras, which is just like, Hey, Amazon's got all my stuff. I want meta to have it too. Uh, but I guess it was for to see if their truck was like the truck or something was there or package. Yeah. So like, it's all these things where we're getting to this point where we've always said, what's the, the convenience to privacy ratio you are willing accepting. Yeah. Like willing to give up. Uh, and we're getting pretty close to like severe convenience, severe privacy.

1:07:25I think we're there. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I, the question right now is potential, potential convenience versus privacy because it might be actually less convenient when the guy shows up to pick up the low ball offer for your MX keys. Um, and you never show up. Can I quickly read that the message that they, he said, bad news on the MX keys pickup. Uh, Usman showed up at your building on nine 15 and waited, messaged a bunch of times and nobody came down. He left angry at nine 38 and left a negative rating. Worse.

1:07:56My auto reply told him, yep, I'm here at nine 27 when you clearly weren't available, which is on me. That's a bad look. And it made no show worse. Jesus. I sent him an apology. I love that when AI admits that it just like made up or like messed up, it's like, yep, that's on me. You're right. That's on me. You're right. I did this incredibly horrible thing. That's a, that is definitely a meme that has made it to my Instagram feed. It's just like somebody passed it on the ground with like a jar of peanut butter. Like, yeah, you're right. That you are definitely allergic.

1:08:27That's on me. But I think what you're saying about like the privacy and convenience is like we're fully there. I remember a couple of years ago, like talking about this in the video, like there is a direct trade-off between like the perfect assistant knows everything about you and then is super, super useful. Like, oh, they, they know if the packet was delivered because they just checked my cameras. They know if I need to reply to that inbox because they know all of my emails and they know when I need to leave this event because they know where I am, what's on my calendar, where I need to be to have all this information. And so that full, full release of all of your information comes with maybe some usefulness.

1:09:02I don't have any, like I have a couple interesting use cases I've seen, like the inbox summary thing, not so much for me because I literally read every email. So I'm like the email summary doesn't help me. I'm just reading the emails anyway. Yeah. But there's some other, you know, interesting stuff that could be fun. But yeah, I'm still waiting for the killer feature for me. I think what's tough about it too is so in the sense of the marketplace thing, when he followed up, he realized that he had given Muse his address. He just didn't think. So like he did give the information out.

1:09:34It is kind of his fault that it got sent out, but he wasn't expecting them to just send it to anyone who sent an offer on marketplace. So it's this weird thing of like, careful what you wish for. I do wish that Muse had my address so that it could buy me something and get it sent to me. Although when I think of that case, I'm not thinking it's going to send my address out to random other thing that it has access to. So you have to be super, super careful if you're trying to deal with any of this. The really weird thing about these assistants is that in order for them to be useful, they have to be proactive, but they have to be proactive in a way that you want them to be proactive

1:10:07in. Because like this, the agent was trying to be proactive, but it didn't really understand that it was not doing that in correlation with the user. And so everyone's talking about, oh, eventually, you know, eventually all these companies are going to release their own version of Muse, right? We're going to talk about the open AI dots later in the episode. Anthropic's going to release their own, I'm sure. And all the memes around the Anthropic one are like, every single time it wants access to anything or wants to do any task, it's going to ask you if it's okay. And if an agent is asking you to confirm every single step, you're not even saving time anymore.

1:10:44And that's the weird trade-off with these agents, right? Like, or if you have a personal assistant that's a real life human, maybe for the first month, they're going to ask, is it okay if I give this person your address? Is it okay if I have your credit card? Yeah, they're going to ask that and you're going to have to go along those steps with them. Eventually, the point of a personal assistant is they know everything about you, they learn everything about you, and they can be proactive without asking. Yeah. But do you trust a random artificial intelligence agent to be proactive without asking and

1:11:15not accidentally order a thousand paperclips? Yeah. I don't know. So it's almost like there's like a, like you hired an assistant and there's like a training time. Yeah. And these companies don't know how long of a training time is like acceptable for the user, so they kind of just want to like get right to doing stuff. Yeah. That's interesting. But there's also like no, there's also no repercussions if it messes up, you can fire a personal assistant. No one, there's, it's not clear legally yet who is liable when an agent does something

1:11:45wrong slash illegal. I feel like it, and this is me with zero legal knowledge of anything, but it has to be on the person letting the agent go at this point. Because like FSD right now, well, because that's like supervised, but you are liable and there are some very funny videos out there of people being like, no officer, I wasn't driving. And it's like, the police officer does not give a shit that it's FSD, you're liable. So I don't know what that's going to all be. I mean, OpenAI's agents broke into the Australian health ministry last week and nobody seems

1:12:18to be liable. That's part of the reason all of these AI companies right now are sort of like asking for regulation is because they feel like in the lobbying and negotiation of that regulation, they can impart some of that liability legally on the books to the person versus someone else. You know, it doesn't, it's not clear if they want it to be the agent as like their own being that can be like held legally responsible or the person controlling the agent or the person who trained the agent. Yeah. It's kind of the same question we had around like section 230 around the internet and who's

1:12:51liable for the content that gets posted on social platforms, right? Like they had to decide, no, the platforms are not liable. It's going to be the person that's liable. They haven't really decided on if that was the right move yet. And so now I think that they're taking that as sort of a blueprint and reconsidering like, how do we move forward with this? Because it's a very similar situation. It's like if your agent did something, are you liable or is OpenAI liable? Yeah. There's a few interesting cases, the one of which that I think we will see the results

1:13:21of first is a little too sad to talk about on this podcast. Okay.

1:13:27There, these agents have already committed crimes and aided in crimes and we will find out soon what happens. Yeah. I mean like, and again, this is meta doing everything. They were super, super, especially in like Joanna Stern's interview with Mark Zuckerberg, which was fantastic. You should go watch it. It's very uncomfortable when she asks about privacy. Yeah, there's lots of, I mean, they were pretty forward on saying like, these are secure virtual machines and stuff like that.

1:13:57But it's also because at the same time all this happened, they had a landmark case against them with like an $18 billion fine. What a crazy press timing. And then not just that, but now all these New Mexico charges because they didn't go in that settlement with like 43 million different privacy violations just in New Mexico alone. So again, it's, it's meta that you have to be, it's literally every person that lives in New Mexico. So yeah. Wow. Multiple times. If you're going to use these things, be ready that they're going to make mistakes, privacy,

1:14:33and this is everyone. No tech cares about you. No tech really cares about your privacy that much. Yeah. They want your privacy. Yeah. So the more and more you give them access to, you have to decide if the convenience is worth it. Um, one thing Muse can't do though is shop on Amazon because Amazon, um, blocked it from being able to shop. Because it has its own shopping agent called Rufus. Well, and cause I think the main thing a lot of people are saying is because the best, the way Amazon makes a ton of money is because people pay them to be better searches on Amazon.

1:15:05When you go to Amazon, you might buy 10 more products. It's also an ad service. It's an ad service. So if your Muse is going there and buying stuff, they're losing tons of sales. So apparently Meta asked, uh, sorry, Amazon asked Meta before this launch to not be part of Muse shopping. They ignored it, did it anyways. So now Amazon is blocking Meta, which now in all these AI agents that are supposed to do everything for us, everyone is making an AI agent. So who's going to block who from what, not be able to, when Amazon launches an AI agent

1:15:35is Meta going to be like, well, you can't use Facebook or Instagram. So this is going to make all of this way more complicated. You know what this reminded me of? This reminded me of our conversation around, would you rather have a humanoid robot that does everything or individual components in your house that do the individual things? Cause you can have one agent that just goes on all the websites and does all the things, but companies are never going to let that happen because every surface that your agent touches is like an ad network or just like a monetization platform for that company. At least for now.

1:16:06So to your point, Andrew, like, yeah, you're not seeing like the ads on Amazon of like other things, but there's also the like, here's other things that other shoppers purchased with this item. They're hoping they're like doing the grocery store thing where they put all the fun little candy at the front of the store. So in like the, the Red Bull at the front of the store, they call it like last minute purchases or something. Yeah. Something like that. They optimize grocery stores so that you have to go as far around the grocery store as The milk is in the back corner. Think about where the milk is in your grocery store. It's in the back corner. One of the most common things you buy at the grocery store.

1:16:37Yeah. Always put it in the back. And so it's a similar thing. It's like Amazon wants to get as many, as many eyeballs on as many products as possible and optimize those products for you around the things that you're buying. And an agent is just buying the thing. It's not like, oh, what if I also wanted a case for my iPhone? Mm-hmm. Like an agent doesn't do that. Totally. And that's so interesting because I can see a lot of the ways that this could play out where like I'm picturing the literal thing, like a grocery store, like a robot walks into a grocery store, doesn't care about the candy or the Red Bull, goes straight to the milk,

1:17:08picks it up, goes straight to checkout and leaves. Yeah. And if you're that grocery store, do you block the robots from going in because they're not buying other stuff? Or is it, hey, that's a customer that's going to go buy the milk somewhere else if I block the robots? Yeah. So they have to decide if they're like, all right, bring in the robots, like they're buying the milk. Or if they're just like, no, only humans. Humans buy way more stuff. I think Amazon is enough of a monolith that Amazon themselves is like no freaking way. Well, because Amazon is the free one to two day shipping. So when Muse buys this thing off of this mom and pop store that is probably actually better

1:17:40for everyone, you're going to be like, it's been 48 hours. Why don't I have this? Muse, you idiot. Why didn't you buy the thing that will get to me right now? Yeah. Amazon is a lot more power here. Amazon has the upper hand. And Muse is new and doesn't have a ton of users. It has actually a lot of users right off the bat. But if Muse was absolutely gigantic, it might be a different consideration for them. Yeah. I was thinking the other week, like they had a million users in the first like week or something, which in the grand scheme of things is not a lot, but for a new AI agent

1:18:11product from Meta, that's actually quite a bit. They also just shoved it everywhere. I think I opened Instagram and Muse is just dancing on the top of my app. I was like, what's going on? Which by the way, now we have Muse and we also still have Meta AI. I feel like they need to get rid of Meta AI. I don't know. That's the most meta thing ever is just have like a bunch of random stuff that we're not sure about anymore. The one last thing I wanted to talk about regarding Muse and specifically the Muse charm is this feels like a redux of Zuck trying to own the next surface. Oh, he's always, yeah. Like we've talked, when the Metaverse was blipping in that like six months that everyone for some

1:18:46reason was investing in the Metaverse, we talked so much about how the fact that like Mark Zuckerberg was so mad that he didn't invent the iPhone and he wants to be the next version of the internet, he wants to have control over. So he was like, I'll just make the Metaverse a thing so that everyone can run the like Oculus OS and we'll kind of control the surface. He's mad that he didn't make Google. He's mad that he didn't make the smartphone. Now he's like, okay, I'm just going to make the AI agent that everyone wants to use and

1:19:16I'll make the physical little charm. And that's why, you know, it's an app on your phone. Like Muse is an app on your phone because it has to be there, but he wants to get it away from your phone. Yeah. Everything that relies on being on the phone will always lose to whoever owns that surface. Yeah. Which is, you know, Google, Apple, et cetera. Yeah. So, and by the way, they tried to make a phone. They did try. Facebook first. It didn't go well. Uh, the cha-cha, et cetera. Yeah. So yeah. So now they're trying to make the next surface. Yeah. It's interesting. Wow. I was going to say something, but then you distracted me because that's the stupidest

1:19:47thing I've ever heard. Joanna's like, sorry. The guy who is, who spent his like days in college making the rate hot girls by stealing their photos app was like, why wasn't I making a revolutionary product? That's so stupid. Well, he's just mad that he like didn't invent the smartphone. Or Google.com. Yeah. He just wants like to own the underlying surface. The iPhone, the first iPhone took like half a decade of technological research. It wasn't just some VC code. Jesus. Yeah. Well, the other thing I think we can look at is like how many times has he tried to do this and how many times has it worked out?

1:20:19Joanna's question. No, I'm sorry. Joanna just really quickly had this question that was like, oh, so like she was talking about the glasses. So what happened to the metaverse? He goes, this is the metaverse. And like you can tell it gets really upset. And she's like, oh, okay. They very much rebranded the metaverse to be just like XR. Yeah. Now it's XR. Exactly. Yeah. And we've been thinking about this since the beginning. Totally not in front of the Eiffel Tower. Without legs. Definitely not that. Mark has the sort of AI agent versus agent shopping whose agent gets to use whose platform

1:20:53instead of that platform's own agent reminded me of a story this week published in Reuters that was a bunch of statements that the insurance company Blue Cross Blue Shield put out. And this is the most like US healthcare story of all time. But Blue Cross Blue Shield is essentially saying that hospitals signed up for all these AI products that help the hospitals identify additional billing conditions that they can bill insurance companies for. So a patient goes in, reports a bunch of systems, the doctor may say, oh, we need to do this

1:21:24to you. You have this thing. We're going to send an insurance bill for that. And then an AI goes, hey, just so you know, there are also these treatment options that you could give so you can bill the insurance for more, which Blue Cross Blue Shield said added more or less about a billion dollars in cost to them over the past two years. So they have had to go hire their own AI companies to AI scan these to find which ones to reject, which sort of results in both sides wasting a bunch of money, raising costs,

1:21:54healthcare costs for everyone. For a net zero.

OpenAI Dev Day and Dots

1:21:56For literally no effect on patients. Yeah. And this is the way everything is going to get old. Sounds right to me. I mean, it's the same. Also, it's not called Rufus anymore. They renamed it. The Amazon one? It's called Alexa for shopping. Okay. But yeah, it's the same. It's the same thing. Okay. Grocery store. Google for cars. Google for cars. Google Drive. Google Drive.

1:22:20What is it actually called? I don't know. We tweeted that like six years ago. That was like an idea. No, but because it's changed now to like. Google Android Auto turned into Google Android. Android Automotive. It's something for cars. No, Android Automotive is like the when it's embedded, like the Polestar. Cars with Google built in? What? Guys, stop. Please, stop. I like how they were like, here's all these fun names. And now it's just like the literal definition of WhatsApp. Look, we're like a little past 30 years old, okay?

1:22:51Our brains are starting to deteriorate. I know. We're trying to be on the cutting edge to inform our viewers every week. And you guys are making it really hard. I could maybe do this when I was 21. I know. I'm having trouble. Google, cars with Google built in. That's, all right. Well, we're going to talk a little bit more about some AI agent stuff after the break. We'll try not to overwhelm you. But first. It'll be quick. Trivia. Timeout. Yeah, you doing the timeout symbol for audio listeners, he keeps doing the timeout symbol.

1:23:25And I keep thinking he's going to be like, hold on, I have to say something off mic. Just trivia. When will we all learn that this is a trivia sign? It's trivia time. Just trivia. Just trivia. It's not a technical foul or a timeout. The Rolling Stones. Or capital T. Rub it in, why don't you? Adam's gone for one hour. Second question, question number two is another classic Mac OS. That is Mac OS before Mac OS, Mac OS X, referring mainly to Aiden. Actually, I lied.

1:23:55Apple's with Mac built in. Apple's with Mac built in. Because this question is an OS X question. I take it back. Okay. We're all familiar with the OS X settings icon. It is a set of years. Yeah, that's what we were all thinking. Yeah. But before it was Gears, what was it? Gears of War. Did you see they just released a Gears of War pizza cutter? Do you know the gun that has the chainsaw on the bottom? No way. It looks like that, but it's a pizza cutter on the bottom, like the circular pizza cutter.

1:24:27Wow. You know, stuff like that, I'm always like, that's cool. But I would never want to have it in my house. It would have been cool 10 years ago when I was ThinkGeek. Well, I thought, no. When you bought it on ThinkGeek. Yeah. Exactly. Woot. Yeah. I had the bag of holding ThinkGeek. That's the name I haven't heard of in a long time. ThinkGeek, yeah, because it got bought by GameStop. Oh, no. And then they got rid of the website and just started selling ThinkGeek branded apparel inside of GameStop's. Oh. I had a lot of ThinkGeek shirts. I wish I didn't know that. I had the bag of holding backpack that had like a D20 on it. I think I made a video about ThinkGeek.

1:24:59No way. I think I did. Really? You did what? I think I made a video about, I did. I, in May of 2009, I made a video unboxing a random box that ThinkGeek sent me with random little stuff that they made. Wow. I brought my Android polo shirt that I wore to an Apple store in like 2009 because I thought it made me edgy.

1:25:20That was cool. And then, yeah, I bought some weird stuff there. I'll show you the photo. What was in it? Man. This made me think of this stuff. Do you remember Woot? Woot is still around. Is it still? They used to have something called the Backpack of Crap, which was just a Woot branded backpack filled with garbage pretty much that they sent you. Just like, I got like a basketball and like sidewalk chalk and cheap stuff. Oh my God. Glass outdoor thermometer with a huge easy to read LCD and temperature read. So you put it in your window on the other side of the window and then put it outside and

1:25:53it shows you the thermometer temperature outside. A weather origin story? Yeah. ThinkGeek.com. Is this the moment? In case you ever doubted how long I've been interested in weather related tech. This is me being edgy in 2012 wearing my Android polo shirt at a genius bar. Nice. Show them. It's classic. Yeah, I can show it. So you can send that to me. Wow. Oh, that's like an old school Apple store. That guy's got wired ear pods. Yeah. It's a genius bar Apple store. Yeah. Back in the day. Back in the day. Anyway. All right. Okay.

1:26:23Well, we'll think about that settings bar icon for a little while. We'll be right back.

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1:28:12Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. That's indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. All right, we're back, and we're ready to talk about Dots. Not Marques' favorite candy. The new OpenAI Dev Day launch. I'm so hungry. Unfortunately. And I have nothing else to really say about that. I just wanted to reference Marques' favorite candy, which is an insane favorite candy.

1:28:43I'm glad you remembered. It's top three. It might be number one, though. It almost is Halloween. Yeah. About the time to start buying some Dots again. That's true. So we were just talking about Muse. Yep. So yeah, that again, but OpenAI. So they had this promo video, though, and these things are, they're really, really fuzzy. So you see the back of David's laptop with the grass or whatever? Imagine like a macro shot, like really, really close up with the physics of like it blowing in the wind. Like that's what they started with. These little cute, furry slash fuzzy dot characters that essentially do the same thing.

1:29:17They are built by OpenAI, but they are little agents that can go around and do things for you. There's no physical representation of them yet. We still expect OpenAI to come out with some hardware. Yeah. That'll probably have Dots or whatever they want to call it. Like a hardware product. Yeah, like a hardware product. But yeah, that is, that is what we got launched. That's basically what they are. They're more enterprise focused, I would say, because they're more focused around getting work tasks done for you. They go and do little coding things for you. It's only available to GPT Pro and business premium users and enterprise accounts, whereas

1:29:48Muse is just anybody and everybody. It was at the top of Instagram. And then obviously like Muse is going to work best with meta products and meta products are all consumer products. So it can reorganize your Instagram for you. It can do whatever on your meta stuff. But Dots is sort of OpenAI's version of this, mostly made for coding and things like that. The demo video is a heavy work stuff. Work. Triage my inbox, make sure my calendar, retime my meetings so I can make my daughter's recital, stuff like that. This is where I actually feel that the agentic stuff kind of separates between people who

1:30:23do like businessy work and people who are just average consumers, because I've never been able to find a lot of use cases for all of these like generalized agents. But everyone I talk to who is like works in marketing or works in like PR or works in like, you know, makes a lot of slide decks for a living or like has to analyze a bunch of data, they use these things constantly and they're trying, they're constantly like singing their praises to me like, oh, I have, I have all these agents triaging this and blah, blah, blah. And I'm just like, I have nothing in my life that I want to use this for.

1:30:54I have no idea what I would use this for. I also have this weird, I don't know if it's a fear, but like in a world where these agents are emailing on my behalf and like moving things around and communicating for me, I'm going to like see this person and they're going to be like, they're going to like reference something that they think that I wrote, but that I didn't write. And I don't even know got written on my behalf. Yeah. And I just never want that to happen. Yeah. Is that not a concern? Like I live by my calendar, right?

1:31:25Same. But I also create all the events on my calendar. Yeah. And I send every email myself. Yeah. And like there's a world where this is triaging, this is answering, this is following up, this is sending emails on your behalf. Yeah. And then I'm going to see that person. Yeah. And they're going to be like, oh, that was funny that joke you made about, yeah, like I don't want that to happen ever. Yeah. And I feel that agents and personal and like assistants are best suited for people that are high power enough or high status enough to already have a personal assistant.

1:31:57Because there are like, there are people with high status jobs who have people that book meetings for them. You know, there's those services like Calendly where it's like, here's my general availability. You can book a time and I will be there. I cannot do that. I think that's how I would actually like this to operate. I would like it to be like, I would like it to jump on a thread as like a new person and be like, hi, I'm the assistant. And this is something that Google tried with the call feature where it would be like, it would call a restaurant and it'd be like, I am someone's virtual assistant. And they would hang up because they're like, no, I don't want to do that.

1:32:29But instead it had to pretend to be a human to get through. And I feel like that's the same thing with email thing, but flipped. I don't want it to email as me, but I would be more comfortable if it emailed on the thread by getting added to the thread and then helped coordinate. All right. These are Marquez's times and availability. And then I could jump in later. But then you're like, that's like saying to the person emailing you, like, I don't have time for you. I feel like that is sometimes depends on what the thing is scheduling.

1:32:59Sure. But if you like really these, I think people saying this is triaging my inbox, want to do like answer everything. And the minute I see a, this was answered by dots or muse, where I see like dots or muse come in and it's like, Andrew can't do blah, blah, blah. I'm like, oh, cool.

1:33:16Screw me, I guess. I mean, we should rather know or not know, I guess. Yeah. The other problem with that is that you don't want your agent to decide who can book a meeting with you and who shouldn't be booking a meeting with you. Because we get a lot of emails every single day who want to book a lot of meetings with us. Like as a say yes to everything every single month. I just tell them you say yes to everything this month. That's a disaster. I would say that my like response rate in my email is probably less than 1%. The amount of people who email me, I probably respond to less than 1% of them. So I just don't want an agent, you know, just being like, book a time, book a time.

1:33:48I'll take one step further. You're worried about, you know, it's sending on behalf of you and then meeting that person. This is it can connect to teams and Slack. Yeah. At what point are just two things talking to each other? Like when are agents not just talking to agents? And then your agents are planning things for you and telling some other person's agent that you're going to do this. And now I'm just getting a list of commands from my agent to make it look like I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. This is effectively what happened with that Muse Facebook marketplace thing because the agent told the guy, I'll be right down, even though it wasn't actually him.

1:34:21Yeah. And so he wasn't right down and he got very mad. Is OpenAI's whole Microsoft team is just a bunch of agents talking to each other and them just walking around the office until an agent tells them to do something? A lot of people who use these like swarms of agents and stuff do have room, like Slack rooms where the agents are just coordinating. That's wild. This is the modern, I'll have my people talk to your people. Yes. I'll have my agent talk to you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So surprisingly, that was like, you know, they had a few other little things. They now have a $500 a month plan instead of just a $200 a month plan.

1:34:54Jesus. Yeah. There are a lot of people that were really capping that $200 a month plan. Wow. And a few other little things. But I was actually surprised there weren't more big updates. I thought we might see a little glimpse at their hardware product because it's been a while now. Like they made that romance video in San Francisco with Johnny. I have a long time ago. Yeah. That little picture, that black and white picture they took. Do you know how many people are spending $200 or $500 a month on this? I have no idea. A lot, right? Probably a lot. I agree with you now. Duo's going to sell like hotcakes. People can pay $200 for a bunch of fake things.

1:35:24$500. Yeah. Messing them up every day. Duo going to sell. Four months. Four months of ChatGPT premium or an iPhone. Bro, you can have two agents talk to each other on your Duo. They each get their own screen. They each get the side of a screen. I guess it's theoretically a business expense, right? I mean, the Duo could also be a business expense. Yeah. I mean, I expense my Anthropic account. Yeah. Fair enough. I'll send you the bill. To myself. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. So, I don't know. Do you want to talk about this last story real quick, Andrew? That's Ellis. Oh, Ellis. It's less of a story, more of a quick shout out, because we talked about him before in

1:35:58the past. YouTuber, musician, hacktivist, men in many hats, Ben Jordan. Yeah. Mostly, I think of him as a guy who's just like really, really, really good at making YouTube videos. Yeah. Testified before some subcommittee of Congress this week about flock cameras and the need to regulate them and put third-party auditing measures in place. It was just really good. I feel like you see YouTubers in public, and sometimes they don't always represent us

1:36:30well. Like, YouTuber in the real world is sort of like a dangerous thing sometimes. And so, the fact that we had someone from the platform that was able to so eloquently express themselves and stick up for people, shout out, man. That was great. That was great. That was just one of the A-B tests of that video. The other one, he was pro-flock. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was it. You can find his testimony. I'll link it in the show notes. You've probably seen it on Twitter already or something like that. Yeah.

1:36:59I'm glad we're still calling it Twitter. Yes. Of course. Of course. On that note, what else is such a T? Let's see. Oh, yeah.

Final trivia results

1:37:07I remember. Trivia. Testosterone. Wait, what do you mean what else is such a T? Why do you pick that T word? Because a lot of people say there's no testosterone on this podcast. Twitter. That's what I meant. Twitter. Twitter. You're right. It's very smelly in here. Is it? No. Oh. Not yet. It would be. Do you have a marker? Yeah, you do. Yeah. We each have one. Oh, you have one. Okay. I got two. All right. We all know it. We all love it. It's the beach ball. It comes up when your computer is not responding.

1:37:37But it wasn't always a beach ball. That was the wrong button.

1:37:45Adam.

1:37:47It's okay. I normally do all this any week. Like, anyway, I don't understand why Adam being gone is making this so difficult. I think it's because he's my better half. Oh. I thought you were going to say best friend. No.

1:38:03Ouch. I don't think he would say that either. But he is my better half, which is a funny thing to say because he did, uh, is that doxing? If I say ****? I don't think so. I wasn't going to say it. I don't know. I was going to let **** when he gets back. I'm going to bleep it. Let's just bleep it. He just got. I'd have to redo the waiting music again.

1:38:23Yeah. Okay. Cool. I'm the idiot that has to edit this episode, so we'll see if I can actually get that out of there. You're editing? Mm-hmm. Wow. Flip around and read, boys. I don't think I went back far enough. Oh. That's fast. We all have a different answer? I think it's. Oh. I think it's that. Okay, Marquez, you go first. I didn't. I don't think I went back fast far enough because I remember the beach ball, which was rainbow beach ball. And then when I go backwards from that, I remember like a single color beach ball. It was like purple and lighter purple. So I have like a purple pedaled flower circle thing.

1:38:55I'm sorry. That was not the answer I was looking for, but that is triggering a weird memory. I'm going to go in and see if there's something to that. Okay. All right. Andrew. I had hourglass. Okay. Another one that was not the answer I was looking for, and I cannot find any evidence on a preliminary search that there was ever an hour. There's ever an hourglass? Yeah. Ooh, I want to look. It might have been a Windows cursor because I do remember. I really thought I remembered like old, old Mac and I thought it like spun and like.

1:39:28I remember that too. I remember there being little grains of sand. Yeah. I drew the grains of sand. That's why I wanted. I do think Windows had an hourglass, but I thought I remembered like an old 2D Mac one. Okay. David, you put. I put clock. And I don't know how to adjudicate that because it's not the right answer, but it's also not the wrong answer. He doesn't need the points that bad. Because the correct answer is a wristwatch. But a wristwatch is a clock. Let me see. It is a clock. Yeah, let's see. Hold on. Mac wristwatch.

1:40:00Well. That was a stupid thing. There is an Apple wristwatch. That's kind of sick. Not going to lie. That's what it was. The Mac OS wristwatch. Yeah. Well. Loading idea. That looks like a cursor clock to me. That looks like it. What? Yeah. No, I think you give it to David. I do see it has the band. So like it definitely is a watch versus a clock. But I think you give that to David. Yes. The brain trust has decided you get the point. Thank you, Claude. It's weird doing my own score update and then going right back to my question.

1:40:31But with that one point, Marquez and Andrew, your points stay the same at six and nine respectively. Nice. Nice. David is Max Verstappen-ing this game with 14 points. It's Tiger at the 2012 Masters right now. I didn't get it. Wow. I really thought we were all going to have the same answer for that. Damn. Me too. That was a modified version of the original question, which was- The Rolling Stones. Which was what time was on the wristwatch. Oh.

1:41:01Because it was not animated. Was it 3 p.m.? It was 9 p.m. Oh. Yes. Question number two. Okay. System settings, aka system preferences, as it was once known, is a bunch of gears interlocking. But before it was that, this is the early days of OSX, like 2001 to 2003-ish. What was that icon? Or you don't even have to describe the icon. Just tell me what physical object was present in it.

1:41:31Huh. This one I'm pretty stuck on. I did not remember this. I had to go into a wiki.

1:41:40Settings. Oh. I got a guess.

1:41:46What would embody a setting? A setting. Give us a guess. It should be a sunset or something. Ah. All right. Flip them and read. I almost wrote that, but I... I know that... Yeah. Should I go first? Yeah, say it out loud. I said floppy disk, and I know that that's the save icon, but for some reason it's wrong. It went into my head also, but I was like, no, I think that's been saved for way too long. It has been. Yeah. I just wrote a computer. Yeah. I'm going to come back to that. Okay. Mark has... I like that better than my last one.

1:42:16What did you put? I scratched out one thing. I wrote a hammer, like a tool. No, but that would be fun. That's like the develop... That's the Apple developer app is a hammer. It is now. Yeah.

1:42:29I like the idea that you just bash your computer with a hammer. It's not like a tool, like a screwdriver or something next to a... No. I don't know. You're adjusting. Actually, I feel like screwdriver would make sense. Screwdriver would be really good. It would be harder to show in that amount of pixels. Yeah.

1:42:44Just to make it a closer game. I'm sorry, Marcos. No, it's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. The answer I was looking for was a light switch. Oh. The original OS X settings icon was a light switch right next to a large Apple logo. However, there was one singular Mac OS X developer preview. I don't think you should even give me these points. Whose settings icon was a computer. Computer. What's a computer?

1:43:14Change the settings. Oh, the light switch. Interesting. Where's the light switch? What do I have to search for? From 01 to 07, there was an Apple logo next to a light switch. Then it changed to gears. Oh my God. I do remember that. Hmm. I do. It's like a light switch, but on the... Like a panel. What's the thing? It was like it was around the light switch. Why can't I think of it? What is that guy? Airdrop sucks. I literally can't even open this. That's why we blip. Oh, I canceled it because it asked me for a code. I didn't want to read the code. Canceled. Oh, here it is. Another week.

1:43:45Another zero points for me on trivia, but that's okay. That's okay. I'm going to get some eventually. I appreciate you guys' support in the comments. By the way, we're A-B testing this, and in version C of this video, I got a lot of points. Yeah. So you should refresh until you get that one. That's true. Anyway, thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Welcome to Techtober, baby. We're just getting started. See you soon. Woo! Bye. Waveform was produced by Ellis Rovin. We're partnered with Vox Media Podcast Network, and our outro music was created by Vane Still. Bingo.

1:44:30Support for the show comes from Injun. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Injun is the fastest-growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes. Earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, Injun customers save more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS.

1:45:02More than 1,000 businesses join Injun every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at Injun.com slash Vox.

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