Is Anything “New” with the Galaxy S25?

This week, Marques is out filming a top secret video but we still have Andrew and David (and even Ellis for a little) stepping up to hold down the pod. First, they talk about everything that happened last week from the TikTok chaos to the official Nintendo Switch 2 announcement before getting into the new Samsung Galaxy S25 devices. Even Marques drops in via pre-recorded video to give his thoughts. Then we finish it up by recommending a few of our favorite apps we've been enjoying. It's a chaotic one, but enjoy! Links: Ok GO - A Stone Only Rolls Downhill Videogamedunkey - Switch 2 Polygon - Mysterious C button CBS News - Stargate announcement OpenAI - Stargate press release MKBHD - S25 First impressions Verge - Samsung Galaxy Ultra S Pen 9to5 Google - Qi2 ready article Waveform - Protocol wars Verge - Android XR Ellis app pick - NTS Radio David app pick - Pixelfed Adam pick - Rooms Music provided by Epidemic Sound Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Socials: Waveform: https://twitter.com/WVFRM Waveform: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David Imel: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

  Support for the show comes from Jira by Atlassian. AI is only as useful as the context it has to work from. But when that context is scattered across tools, threads, and DMs, that means your team and your AI agents end up flying blind. That's the problem that Jira solves. What's the goal tied to your project? What got decided last week in Slack? Atlassian's teamwork graph pulls all these pieces together, from Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub, and more, so nothing falls through the cracks. With Jira, you can actually share that context with the AI agents you already use, like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot, assign them work directly, or connect your agents through MCP. Spend less time digging through endless links and DMs, less time chasing down what got decided and by who, and more time actually shipping. Learn more at jira.com.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  That's J-I-R-A dot com.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  I could answer this phone call. We can see what this is about.

• 1:20Andrew Manganelli?

  Okay, let's do it.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Live on the pod.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Is it Marques?

• 1:24Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Hello?

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Excuse... Oh, they're gone.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:45Andrew Manganelli?

  What is up, people of the internet? Welcome back to another episode of the Waveform Podcast. We are your hosts. My name is Andrew.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  And I'm David.

• 1:51Andrew Manganelli?

  And it's gonna be a little chaotic of an episode. Already, Marques is gone. He weirdly was in California playing ultimate.

• 1:59Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:59Andrew Manganelli?

  Then golf.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:00Andrew Manganelli?

  Now it's Samsung Unpacked.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:02Andrew Manganelli?

  And then recording something tomorrow. So, yeah, but we're still holding down the fort.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  We are.

• 2:08Andrew Manganelli?

  So we have some quick updates on TikTok and the Switch 2, which we had some rumors and ideas about last week, and a lot has changed. And then, obviously, Galaxy Unpacked was also this week. So we're gonna talk about our first look at the S25 series, and then wrap it up with some of our favorite apps.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:24Andrew Manganelli?

  But first, did you guys see the new OK Go music video?

• 2:27Speaker 01

  I did.

• 2:28Andrew Manganelli?

  It's, you didn't like it that much?

• 2:31Speaker 04

  What?

• 2:32David Imel?

  I think it was very hard to pull off, so I appreciate it.

• 2:35Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah, for those of you who don't know who OK Go is,

• 2:38Speaker 04

  They're the treadmill guys.

• 2:40Andrew Manganelli?

  Gen Zers, that was 15 years ago.

• 2:42David Imel?

  Dude, I remember. This is for the millennials out there, for sure.

• 2:46Andrew Manganelli?

  The treadmill video was 15 years ago, but they are a band who the majority of their popular songs come out with some crazy viral music video.

• 2:54David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 2:54Andrew Manganelli?

  Generally involving one take.

• 2:56David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 2:56Andrew Manganelli?

  Um, this one, I don't think it was one take. I think there were some editing tricks, but essentially what it was, was shooting the video essentially 60 plus times on iPhones to have different sections of the screen and then playing it throughout 64 iPhones in the music video.

• 3:14David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 3:15Andrew Manganelli?

  To sometimes create a grid, sometimes to create, you're looking at an iPhone and it pulls back and it's an iPhone and it keeps pulling back. It's kind of wild.

• 3:23David Imel?

  It was pretty crazy because they had to hit play at the right times and then they aligned the phones. So they had to have really good timing to make sure that everything worked because people's hands would like go through the phones.

• 3:33Speaker 04

  My question was, do you think that they green screened this?

• 3:37David Imel?

  I don't think so, because it said that it took over a thousand takes.

• 3:40Andrew Manganelli?

  Here's my, my two questions. Do we think they fully hit play on every single one? Just because the UI was never quite there, except for the play button, which still doesn't take away from timing, where if it's a video and the play is fake.

• 3:53David Imel?

  It could have been a special, um.

• 3:56Andrew Manganelli?

  Player or something.

• 3:57David Imel?

  Player, yeah.

• 3:57Andrew Manganelli?

  Possibly, or do you think it was one take? I do not think it was one take because there were times where it would be like zoomed in and you would think it wasn't the iPhone and then all of a sudden you would see a little bit of that like fuzziness of filming a screen pop up at the end and then it would pull back to like another thing. So I think there were a few cuts in between the singular iPhones taking up the screen.

• 4:18David Imel?

  Interesting.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Oh, like all I'm going to say, and I wasn't there, not on the production team, don't know anything about this stuff. There is a, yeah, right? Crazy.

• 4:24Speaker 04

  Really?

• 4:24Speaker 02

  There is a network protocol called NDI that is low latency, high definition video over a network. It works really, really well, especially when you have tons of monitors all on one network. It would be unbelievably easy to get 60 iPhones, record all these things, load all the videos into an NDI server and just have them all triggered remotely and just pretend to press the play button.

• 4:49Speaker 04

  That's what I was thinking too, because then you have to get the timing correct when you're pressing the screen, you know?

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I don't think that's the kind of thing that people would be like, oh, look, there's like, there's six frames.

• 5:01Andrew Manganelli?

  I do think they filmed all of it individually or something because like it's not all perfect, which is what makes it kind of really impressive and cool. But yeah, go check it out if you haven't. They've been doing that for.

• 5:15David Imel?

  They have a behind the scenes.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Okay, go check it out.

• 5:19Andrew Manganelli?

  Didn't catch it. There's a behind the scenes.

• 5:20David Imel?

  There is a behind the scenes.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Well, now I might about to be embarrassed by the NDI thing, but if you're into video stuff, go check out NDI because it's a really cool tool.

• 5:30Andrew Manganelli?

  Awesome.

• 5:30David Imel?

  Neat.

• 5:31Andrew Manganelli?

  Okay, so we're going to talk about TikTok next because with all of the different outcomes we kind of posed last week, I don't think this specific outcome was in any of our cards.

• 5:42David Imel?

  In all of our obnitions, we missed.

• 5:44Andrew Manganelli?

  It may have kind of been all of our guesses put together.

• 5:47David Imel?

  To be fair, there is still not yet an outcome.

• 5:51Andrew Manganelli?

  That's all. That is extremely fair. But like, real quick, it is becoming increasingly harder and harder to cover tech without politics involved, especially with like a story like TikTok that we're about to go in right now. At Waveform, we are trying our best to be focused on tech and tech products and how they affect us as consumers because we are consumers, talking about tech here. There are so many great places to go to who know way more about politics and we urge you to find those people, but our goal on Waveform is to focus on the tech. And that's where we're going to try our best to do here and from here on out. So I just wanted to say that because since Friday, when this episode came out, a whole lot of things happened.

• 6:33David Imel?

  Yeah, a lot happened and also nothing happened.

• 6:36Andrew Manganelli?

  That's a really great way of putting it. So I think like the best way I kind of wrote this down is I wrote a timeline essentially from the, either the day after we recorded or the day we posted, which was the 17th. And we're just going to go over what has happened in that timeline. So. Pretty much right when the episode came out, the Biden administration set out a statement that said, given the timing of when things go into effect over a holiday weekend, a day before inauguration, it will be up to the next administration to implement the ban that we had been talking about.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  For those outside the US that don't know what we're talking about, a new president came in on the 20th.

• 7:14Andrew Manganelli?

  Not only did a new president come in, a new president came in on a holiday weekend where Monday is generally off. So the inauguration was on a Monday, the ban taking effect was on a Sunday, so the next day would be a non-working day.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  And this sort of thing has historical precedent in America. Past presidents have said, hey, I don't want to deal with this law. I'm going to let the next guy figure out how we're going to handle this. I'm out. There are also times where presidents do the opposite, where they're like, I'm going to try and screw the next guy before this guy. This is not crazy.

• 7:49Andrew Manganelli?

  It's just like a wild timing of everything.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 7:52Andrew Manganelli?

  So previous administrations said they were not going to enforce anything on the 19th, despite that being the day we all saw as the ban coming. And on the 17th, after that statement was made, TikTok had a statement that came out on their website. It said, statement on possible shutdown. The statements issued today by both the Biden White House and the Department of Justice have failed to provide the necessary clarity and assurance to service providers that are integral in maintaining TikTok's availability to over 170 million Americans unless the Biden administration immediately provides a definitive statement to satisfy the most critical service providers assuring non-enforcement. Unfortunately, TikTok will be forced to go dark on January 19th. Again, January 19th is the Sunday that we're all expecting.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 8:31Andrew Manganelli?

  However, comes Saturday night, the 18th, those of us on TikTok, and I'm pretty sure it was right around 7 o'clock because of how many people in our Slack all messaged the exact same screen they got on TikTok, which was, as you opened the app, you got a pop-up that said, important update from TikTok. We regret a US law banning TikTok will take effect on January 19th and force us to make our services temporary unavailable. We're working to restore our service in the US as soon as possible, and we appreciate your support. Stay tuned. At that point, though, if you press dismiss, you just kept scrolling TikTok, which is what I did. At first, at first, at first.

• 9:09David Imel?

  At first.

• 9:10Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah.

• 9:10David Imel?

  At first.

• 9:10Andrew Manganelli?

  Okay.

• 9:11David Imel?

  Yes.

• 9:12Andrew Manganelli?

  Then maybe like an, like an hour later, there was a little like, then people were going on and realizing, I can't like anything. Oh, profile pictures are blank.

• 9:22David Imel?

  Hmm.

• 9:22Andrew Manganelli?

  Something weird is happening. And then a couple hours, so then in that time, then we all got the sorry TikTok isn't available right now.

• 9:30David Imel?

  Right, around 11:00 PM.

• 9:31Andrew Manganelli?

  So like, not even a few hours later, then we got the official TikTok is down message again on the 18th. So not the day of the banning yet. Says, sorry, TikTok isn't available right now. A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the US. Unfortunately, that means you can't use TikTok for now. We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once, to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned, close app. And that's when it locked down.

• 9:58David Imel?

  Right.

• 9:59Andrew Manganelli?

  Really quick, funny enough, some people said the Vision Pro app worked fine.

• 10:02David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 10:03Andrew Manganelli?

  Which I just think is very funny.

• 10:04David Imel?

  That is true.

• 10:05Andrew Manganelli?

  But for the most part, TikTok was down at this point by the nighttime of Saturday.

• 10:10David Imel?

  So I want to note, that was around 11:00 PM Eastern Time. And I saw a lot of people saying, it's very sketchy that they took it down before the actual ban went to effect. And I want to note, the reason that they did that is because as of midnight, uh, it would have been a $5,000 per user that downloaded the app fine on both Google and Apple, if users downloaded it from the App Store. So TikTok probably just wanted to be very, very careful.

• 10:34Andrew Manganelli?

  It was a potential for that to happen. Like if it all went to effect and was enforced the next day.

• 10:39David Imel?

  Yes, yes. So that is the reason that they took it down around 11:00. Or they started, stopped, uh, and stopped serving the TikTok service around 11:00.

• 10:48Andrew Manganelli?

  And that happened as well as there was an Axios report and there's lots of things you can see. Saturday night, TikTok goes dark and disappears from app stores. That's when we saw it started going off and, and places like Oracle hosting.

• 10:59David Imel?

  Yes.

• 10:59Andrew Manganelli?

  Um, right. Okay, so TikTok is down. Everyone's kind of freaking out. It actually happened. Um, but because it came the day before Tik, we can all assume TikTok is the one shutting it down. The government didn't force any hands here.

• 11:14David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 11:14Andrew Manganelli?

  Um, then I think less than 12 hours later.

• 11:20Andrew Manganelli?

  If you happen to be a, you know, when you have your phone and you're just like so used to pressing buttons without even doing it. So I open TikTok even though it was closed. And then all of a sudden I get a thing that says, welcome back. Thanks for your patience and support. As a result of President Trump's efforts, TikTok is back in the US. You can continue to create, share and discover things on Tik.

• 11:39David Imel?

  But this was still before the inauguration even happened.

• 11:41Andrew Manganelli?

  This was Sunday. Yeah.

• 11:43David Imel?

  Okay, cool.

• 11:45Andrew Manganelli?

  So TikTok's back. So.

• 11:48David Imel?

  Sort of. It's still not in the app store.

• 11:50Andrew Manganelli?

  Correct. There are still some app stores it's not available in. I know Google Play Store is still not available and at least as of recording.

• 11:57David Imel?

  And Apple.

• 11:57Andrew Manganelli?

  And Apple is also.

• 11:59David Imel?

  It's still not in the app store. Yeah, I lightly thought about downloading it before they took it off just in case because I've never used it before, but I decided to not do that. And now I can never do it. So I think that's for the best for me.

• 12:12Andrew Manganelli?

  Not never. It'll probably come back. I mean, you could still go to like tiktok.com.

• 12:16David Imel?

  I don't want to use TikTok.

• 12:17Andrew Manganelli?

  That's, that part is for the best.

• 12:19David Imel?

  Yes. Okay.

• 12:20Andrew Manganelli?

  And so like, kind of where we're at right now is since then, the inauguration has happened. There has been an extension, I believe a 75 day extension. I don't even know. This is saying that ByteDance should be giving 50% of equity to an American company, I believe it has to be in order to get through.

• 12:40David Imel?

  This is the part where things get very unclear. Unclear because there's a lot of possibilities being thrown around and there's nothing substantial right now. So we're going to have to wait until we hear actual things that are actually happening. People say things and until actual things are actually happening, you know.

• 12:59Andrew Manganelli?

  For us, TikTok is up. There was panic. It was kind of fun watching it on Saturday before like the imminent shutdown and the people on TikTok kind of freaking out. But yeah, we're kind of in a place where we'll see what happens. I do think one of our predictions was, and I think a lot of people assumed there would be like a push and like give it some more time. We just weren't expecting to lose it, get it back, and then get the prolongedness of it. But I have a feeling. I wouldn't be surprised if in 75 days, we still have no idea what's really going on.

• 13:33David Imel?

  I also want to note, I think on Saturday over the weekend, Instagram decided to change the shape of the profile grid from square to the shape of a video. And they forced that on everybody.

• 13:47Andrew Manganelli?

  I saw someone posting about that like last week.

• 13:50David Imel?

  And they're clearly foaming at the mouth, waiting for their opportunity.

• 13:53Andrew Manganelli?

  Of course they are.

• 13:54David Imel?

  So.

• 13:55Speaker 04

  And that Clips app that they announced, it's like a video editing cap competitive.

• 13:58Andrew Manganelli?

  That was the funniest. I saw, so like everyone knew this was happening at TikTok. I saw a bunch of people on Instagram freaking out. They're like, I lost CapCut. How am I gonna edit? Like, I don't think people realize how many social media influencers, big or small, are just editing on their phone in something like CapCut for things outside of TikTok.

• 14:17David Imel?

  There was a funny thing where someone from The Verge posted on threads like, I bet Instagram's only been working on this CapCut clone for like a couple of days and they're already announcing it. And then Adam Mosseri replied, we've been working on it for a couple of months, actually. Which is like, okay.

• 14:33Andrew Manganelli?

  So we're gonna leave that there, see what happens.

• 14:36David Imel?

  The next week will probably be enlightening.

• 14:40Andrew Manganelli?

  Maybe, or we'll know literally nothing.

• 14:42David Imel?

  Or we'll know literally nothing. We'll see.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  On a less terrifying note, Switch 2 actually got announced.

• 14:49David Imel?

  Heyo.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  We have Peach, we have Mario, we have Kirby, maybe? I don't know. I don't, I don't really keep track of these things.

• 14:56David Imel?

  I don't know. Yeah, okay. So, so if you guys will remember, we were extremely confused last week because it was the day before, maybe the Switch 2 was maybe gonna get announced, maybe. And it did. And then Adam used a bunch of the footage in the actual video. So if you were watching the video version of this podcast last week, you did see the actual trailer or bits of the actual trailer going over what we were talking about because we were mostly correct.

• 15:21Andrew Manganelli?

  We were mostly correct. I think, I think there was a comment that was like, it's so funny that they said they don't exactly know what it is, yet everything they said was pretty much what it is.

• 15:32David Imel?

  Which, to be fair, it's not like we did the reporting.

• 15:34Andrew Manganelli?

  No, not at all. It was a real, usually leaks a day before an event are pretty accurate.

• 15:38David Imel?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, often.

• 15:40Andrew Manganelli?

  I think the couple of things that we're not quite sure about still, I'll do not sure about, and then we'll do things that we are sure about.

• 15:46David Imel?

  Okay.

• 15:46Andrew Manganelli?

  I don't, it was very much a, uh... Like teaser trailer. So we didn't get really any hard specs. So we don't, there was, it's larger. I don't think we got exact screen size.

• 15:58David Imel?

  We did not get exact screen size, but people have been doing a lot of digging and people are guessing it is eight inches based on the scaling stuff.

• 16:06Andrew Manganelli?

  Okay. I love to think that there are people out there mathematically.

• 16:09David Imel?

  Oh, they are doing that. They are doing that.

• 16:12Andrew Manganelli?

  One thing we did not figure out is exactly how the magnets work. There are.

• 16:20David Imel?

  Society still has not figured that out.

• 16:23Andrew Manganelli?

  What are magnets? It seems like there's this small piece that goes inside of the switch. And then there's also, we did find out the buttons on the back are the magnetic release.

• 16:35David Imel?

  Yes.

• 16:35Andrew Manganelli?

  So whether this is a fully polarizing magnet, whether this is, I liked your idea of like, it's a magnet with maybe just something that kind of pushes it off to

• 16:42David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 16:43Andrew Manganelli?

  Connect it, disconnect it or not.

• 16:44David Imel?

  People are kind of speculating that when you press this button, it basically pushes it just far away from where the magnetic field really latches it in, that it kind of falls off. Who's to say? That would be a simpler mechanism.

• 16:56Andrew Manganelli?

  It would, and either way, a thousand times better than the slide mechanism.

• 17:00David Imel?

  Yes, yes. So.

• 17:02Andrew Manganelli?

  We don't.

• 17:03David Imel?

  Oh, one thing, that little protruding part from the inside, you know? So for those that didn't see the trailer yet, basically the switch to is the body and then it has this interior part where the Joy-Cons attach. But they're sort of like a USB A type looking thing on the inside and many people are concerned about this. I think we had a minor conversation about this last week. Still don't really know like how that connects to the Joy-Cons as well. That's sort of an.

• 17:35Andrew Manganelli?

  I think the, it almost goes in like a plug and I was wondering if it is polarizing magnets, if there's just a small place right there that holds on to that little protrusion and that's how it kind of holds it in there.

• 17:49Andrew Manganelli?

  It looks like, do you know the USB A thumb drives where they're really thin and you take them apart and it's just the contact part? Yeah, it looks like that on both sides.

• 17:57David Imel?

  Yeah. So that's interesting.

• 17:58Andrew Manganelli?

  But yeah, if the actual. Did you watch the actual trailer?

• 18:03Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 18:05Andrew Manganelli?

  The sound design in it is so good.

• 18:09Speaker 04

  I will watch and provide feedback.

• 18:11David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 18:11Andrew Manganelli?

  I would love to hear your thoughts on it because it's just like, it's so satisfying the clicks. I think, uh, Marques, Eric and I were watching and they did the first like Joy-Con snap.

• 18:25Andrew Manganelli?

  Oh, man.

• 18:25David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 18:26Andrew Manganelli?

  That was so nice.

• 18:27David Imel?

  Yeah, it's very nice.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, I probably should have watched it, but I just don't play games like that.

• 18:32David Imel?

  Understand.

• 18:32Andrew Manganelli?

  It was just beautifully done. They did a great job. It just like, it's the switch and then it like kind of pops and gets a little bigger. And then the Joy-Cons like fade over because they're black and we have these pops of color on the interior where it connects and also right under the joysticks.

• 18:46David Imel?

  Joysticks, yeah.

• 18:47Andrew Manganelli?

  Did you, I saw people talking about that, their way of saying that. So we didn't get the actual, if we know their hall effect.

• 18:56David Imel?

  Right.

• 18:56Andrew Manganelli?

  But somebody, do you know the part where both of them kind of snap on and race around?

• 19:01David Imel?

  Yeah, yeah. Someone thinks they're a mouse.

• 19:03Andrew Manganelli?

  Well, people were saying also that it's drifting around. So that's their hint at that it's, they're fixing the drift.

• 19:09David Imel?

  That would be a deep cut.

• 19:10Andrew Manganelli?

  Which would be very funny.

• 19:12David Imel?

  Somebody thinks that you're going to be able to use it as a mouse in certain games.

• 19:16Andrew Manganelli?

  I saw something with that as well, but was a little confused about it.

• 19:19David Imel?

  Weird because it seems like it would be easier to just use a pointer, but you know, I don't know. They definitely have, uh, IR blasters on them, so.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  So I was too deep into the edit last week to really like take in any of this Nintendo stuff. I was just grabbing footage and dropping it in. But did we learn anything about it?

• 19:37Andrew Manganelli?

  This is what we did learn. Well, we know it's bigger. We know the general design of it. We know some upgrades physically on the exterior of it.

• 19:44David Imel?

  USB ports.

• 19:45Andrew Manganelli?

  What we also know is that April 2nd will be Nintendo Direct that presumably announces it. And then that there's a couple of other days in some larger cities with experiences that you can go to about like a week, 5th, 6th and 7th, I think.

• 20:00David Imel?

  It's different weeks depending on the city. So it's April for New York and then later on in the month, they're doing LA and then they're doing Dallas later too as well. I signed up for a ticket for all three. For a few more days, you are able to put in for one of these slots. You can only sign up for one slot per city. So I imagine that the very first slot in New York, because it's the first experience in the world, is probably going to have the most people signing up for it. It's a lottery system. So you can still sign up until, I believe, early February. So go do that if you live in the United States. I will be flying wherever I get a ticket, if that even happens. I doubt that's gonna happen, but you know. So also, at the very end of the video, they showed Mario Kart. Surprise!

• 20:46David Imel?

  But one interesting tidbit about Mario Kart is that it looks like there were 24 lanes for karts. So people are speculating 24-player Mario Kart.

• 20:55Andrew Manganelli?

  Okay. Can I pitch you my favorite game type that me and my friends play in Mario Kart? And how much cooler it would be with 24 players?

• 21:03David Imel?

  Okay. Don't tell me what I think you're thinking.

• 21:05Andrew Manganelli?

  Baby Park. You know, that map, the small map with more, it's just an oval with, and then everyone plays as Roy, just because it's a funny character and everyone the same, and you play only green shells. So you're just racing around this oval, and you're just launching green shells. So imagine 24 players with just green...

• 21:23David Imel?

  That sounds like chaos.

• 21:24Andrew Manganelli?

  That will be the first thing that I want to do.

• 21:27David Imel?

  Mario Kart, yeah.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Mario Kart.

• 21:28Andrew Manganelli?

  Mario Kart.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  What do we think the C button does?

• 21:33Speaker 04

  What's the C button?

• 21:34Speaker 02

  The button that has a C, that no one knows what it does.

• 21:36David Imel?

  Oh, that's a good, oh, I think it's probably, it probably stands for capture, and I bet you it's a screenshot.

• 21:40Andrew Manganelli?

  There used to be a screenshot button.

• 21:41David Imel?

  There is a screenshot button on the Switch, but it's probably the capture button. That'd be my guess. Yeah, so we don't really know a lot more about it. I don't love this, the stand looks a little bit different, and I feel like it looks a little, it's not squared off anymore, it's kind of rounded. And I feel like that's gonna look...

• 21:58Andrew Manganelli?

  Oh, the dock.

• 21:59David Imel?

  The dock, sorry, not the stand. The dock looks a little bit rounded. I don't think that's gonna look as nice with most TV consoles.

• 22:06Andrew Manganelli?

  I'm guessing the reason they did that is they didn't want to physically make a bigger dock to take up for it, and so just the roundness makes it look less weird that it's sticking that far out of the top.

• 22:16David Imel?

  That's a good point.

• 22:17Andrew Manganelli?

  That's all I can think of.

• 22:18David Imel?

  That's a good point. Yeah, I'm excited that there is a USB C port on the top now. Yeah, I would go watch Dunky's video on the Switch.

• 22:26Andrew Manganelli?

  Dunky did one already? I can't believe Dunky's still around.

• 22:28David Imel?

  He, dude.

• 22:29Andrew Manganelli?

  I haven't seen him in a minute.

• 22:31David Imel?

  So, yeah, we were right.

• 22:35Speaker 04

  We did, we did it.

• 22:36David Imel?

  We did it. No original journalism, but we were still right. Okay.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  If you do want to read some great original journalism about the Switch 2, Polygon has an article called "All of Our Guesses About the Nintendo Switch 2's Mysterious C Button", and it is so funny. It's not serious at all. Like, one of the things is Criterion, and it just opens up the Criterion Collection for you to watch. One of the things they put was Columbo, like the 70s TV detective, and like, it just gives you a Columbo cratch. Anyway, go check out the article, it's hilarious.

• 23:08David Imel?

  All right. Last thing that we just want to mention before we head to break.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  Hey, David, do you remember last year when Sam Altman said, "I'm gonna raise $7 trillion"?

• 23:18David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  Well, he fell short.

• 23:20David Imel?

  Yeah. What? Well, he wrote, "There's 500 billion now", which is a percentage of 7 trillion. Anyway, right after the inauguration, it was announced that $500 billion was being invested over the next four years to build the Stargate project, to build AI infrastructure in the United States. It is a joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX. Other partners include ARM, Nvidia, and Microsoft. But effectively, they are building all of these crazy AI data centers in the United States. $100 billion is being immediately invested into the project, with the other $500 billion coming over the next four years.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  So is that just like, I don't know, 100 Nvidia 4060s or 4090s?

• 24:05David Imel?

  Yeah, 5090s, yeah. This project was actually kind of already announced back in April, but back then, they were talking about a $100 billion investment, so I guess negotiations are changed, or the number ballooned, or something like that.

• 24:21David Imel?

  But we'll probably be hearing more about it. OpenAI did officially put out a press release about it on their website, so you can go read that if you want to hear more about that. Kind of interesting, considering there are many AI competitor companies right now, and none of them are involved in this, so.

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Also, I just, I just want to point out, you know, we make that joke about that tweet that's like, that the book, "Don't Use the Murder Machine", and then someone names, "Do you guys know the plot of Stargate, the movie"? The plot of Stargate is these scientists use technology to essentially activate this portal, which takes them to a world ruled by a fascist. Just saying.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Not a good thing to name this project.

• 25:04David Imel?

  Probably not a good thing to name this project.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Terrible thing to name this project.

• 25:08David Imel?

  Well, on that note, everybody.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  We're gonna go watch unpacked.

• 25:11David Imel?

  We're gonna go.

• 25:11Andrew Manganelli?

  We're gonna, we're literally gonna go watch unpacked and come back and report on it.

• 25:15David Imel?

  And we'll report on it and we'll talk about it and we'll have some fun things to say, I'm sure, and it will not be 75% AI.

• 25:25David Imel?

  We'll be right back.

• 25:25Andrew Manganelli?

  Can't wait till the clip back in is like, it was 75% AI.

• 25:29David Imel?

  Welcome back, everybody. It was 75% AI.

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• 27:43David Imel?

  All right, welcome back. It was 75% AI. Okay, um, we're going to talk about unpacked here, but actually Marquez has recorded something for us. So we're going to listen slash watch that really quickly. So Adam, kick it off.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  I am pre-recording this and sending it to the pod folks because it's a few days before normal recording and I have now seen and held and used briefly. The new S25 lineup from Samsung, all of the ones that we know about anyway, S25, S25 plus and S25 Ultra. And I have some thoughts, so I'm going to leave them here for y'all to react to. First up is the designs. They're the same. We've had some talks about this on the podcast earlier, some, some leaks and rumors and stuff like that, but it turns out most of it was true. From the outside, these phones are almost indistinguishable from the last ones. They have these new colors that are like gray, blue, silver and black.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  Like they're extremely tame colors and dimensions wise, shapes wise, materials wise, for all intents and purposes, they're the same phones. I think for the base two phones, the only way to tell them apart is they moved the 5G antenna to the other side of the phone. Really subtle. For the Ultra, there's bigger rings around the cameras and slightly thinner bezels. So it's technically a 6.9 inch screen now instead of 6.8, but otherwise new colors and that's it. A little boxier. You know when phones used to do S updates? And they were totally shameless about how, hey, this is just a spec bump with the same design and that's what we're doing this year? That's basically what's happening. This is a Galaxy S24S. So that's the first part. I'm curious if you guys have thoughts on designs not changing?

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Because I've always thought about change for the sake of change kind of getting annoying and like you end up losing your identity. You want to sort of narrow in on what you like as an aesthetic and repeat it and iterate on it? This is just, it's just the same. So I'm curious about that. But anyway, number two is there are new specs. They're also pretty minor, though. It's just the new Snapdragon 8 Elite 4 Galaxy chip across all of these phones. And there is 12 gigs of RAM in the base phones now, so all of them have 12 gigs of RAM across the board. Which is nice. Obviously, these new AI models will need more RAM. And the Snapdragon 8 Elite 4 Galaxy, I have to do some benchmarks. We've got to test and get the phones into review.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  I don't know how different it's going to be versus the other Snapdragon 8 Elites, but I assume it's going to be a pretty great chip because we love that chip. But no IP69, no ultra-fast charging, no bigger batteries, no silicon carbide, no brighter display, no new cameras, no nothing. It's just, just a new chip and more RAM. So those are the new specs. Everything else that's new about these phones is AI and software. So I'll, you know, I'll link the video below with my first impressions where I demo some of these features. And maybe if you guys want to watch that, then you'll see some of them, maybe insert a clip. But there are some that are kind of useful. There's this new assistant that is only triggered by holding the power button.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  There is no voice command for it, but it's sort of a combo of Gemini and Bixby. There's also a new AI select tool, which if you forget about it, you could just never use it on your phone. But if you do use it, there's some cool stuff like making GIFs of videos instantly and summarizing articles instantly if you want to select them with AI select. But in general, like... This stuff is going to come to the S24 series. I'm pretty confident. Samsung wouldn't tell me that, but just based on what I know about how good those phones have been and the history that Samsung has with, you know, seven years of software support, which is great, by the way. That's a pro of getting a Samsung phone. I feel like, yeah, a lot of this stuff is going to come to the S24s and maybe even S23s.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  Now, I hope that's true because Apple didn't do that with Apple Intelligence. They would say that their new chip unlocks this stuff. And I'm sure there's some part of the Snapdragon 8 Elite 4 Galaxy that Samsung is going to tie to this AI stuff, but hopefully as much of this as possible comes to S24. And so that's basically it. A pretty minor update of these new phones. And you know, if you're Samsung, how can you really blame them, right? Like, the S24 is sold really well for them. They won awards. There were, my smartphone of the year was the S24 Ultra, and a lot of people liked it. But also, that phone was kind of close to the year before that, which was honestly pretty similar to the year before that.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  So it does kind of feel stale. It's a, it's a good, boring phone. It's zero risk for Samsung and therefore zero risk for most of the target demographic for this phone, but I'll leave it at that. Let me know what your thoughts are. Were you hoping for more? Were you expecting more? Or honestly, just not really surprised that Samsung's playing it safe? When will they ever not play it safe again? That's a question to think about. Take it away.

• 32:46David Imel?

  Maybe with this Edge model.

• 32:47Andrew Manganelli?

  I feel like Marques started that off as like podcasty talking to us and then just turned into a video.

• 32:54David Imel?

  Like, that could have been the video.

• 32:56Andrew Manganelli?

  It felt like his video script by the end, like, let me know right below that like button.

• 33:00David Imel?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Marques, I will let you know in person.

• 33:02Andrew Manganelli?

  Okay, do my first really, really quick thought, right from the, one of the first things he said.

• 33:07David Imel?

  Sure.

• 33:07Andrew Manganelli?

  Okay. The S25 Ultra is very slightly different looking and he said more boxy and I would argue especially looking straight on, I think it feels less boxy.

• 33:19David Imel?

  Right.

• 33:19Andrew Manganelli?

  I, I think what he's saying is that now that the rails are more squared off, that part feels a little boxier, but looking straight on the old one, pretty much had 90 degree angles in the corners where this is much rounder on the corners and I do think looks nicer. It is so minimal, but it kind of has.

• 33:37David Imel?

  I liked the box.

• 33:38Andrew Manganelli?

  iPad-y vibes to it, which I, I like this new one better.

• 33:41David Imel?

  Alright.

• 33:42Andrew Manganelli?

  Super, super minimal.

• 33:43David Imel?

  I would like to see it in person. I would like to respond to Marques Brownlee, who said, "Maybe change for change's sake is a bad thing."

• 33:52Andrew Manganelli?

  I saw you freaking out about it.

• 33:52David Imel?

  And I disagree with you because uh, in the golden age of Android phones, especially with Nexus devices, who the hell know what's, it was gonna look like the next year? You know, we got LG, we got Huawei, we got uh, Samsung, we got all these manufacturers making random stuff. It was great. It was amazing. I loved it and I don't think anyone is excited about these phones. This is, you know, I understand why Samsung's doing it, but if you live in the United States, it is so dominated by Apple and Samsung and they have all, both of them have released the same phone for four years now and we just really, really need some uh, some mix up in here.

• 34:34Andrew Manganelli?

  This is, this is a perfect example of when you kind of become the default phone, especially to the people outside of all of you listening to this podcast, you can be safe. And I'll be honest, even someone, I listen to this podcast, I live this podcast. I bought the S24 cuz it was kind of the boring, safe phone and I just knew it was gonna do what I wanted it to and I decided not to take a risk and the price was good for it. And also Samsung's trade-in deals are always like, some of the best trade-in deals, always look for those.

• 35:06Andrew Manganelli?

  So it's not the worst thing, but it is the safe thing and it's far less fun to talk about.

• 35:09David Imel?

  Right. Yeah, it's difficult. So like, Marques kind of already went over the high level details of the entire event and all of the phones, uh, but we can talk about them briefly. It's just so hard to talk about because the S25 and S25 Plus. Are basically the same phone as the S24, S24 Plus. You're not really getting a lot more new. You're just getting that new chipset and some of these new AI features. Uh, something to note that The Verge put out an article about is that the Ultra, the S Pen no longer can be used to take photos. And they also got rid of the little magic wand feature and they cited that nobody was using them.

• 35:47Andrew Manganelli?

  Correct.

• 35:48David Imel?

  I could, I could, I could hear that. Um, I think that taking photos with it was still very useful, although I think a lot of people probably just use the gestures because they have a lot of ways to take selfies. I feel like every year they need to come up with a new way to take a selfie.

• 36:02Andrew Manganelli?

  You can do it with a Samsung, a Galaxy Watch as well.

• 36:05David Imel?

  Yeah, or you can like put your palm out and it starts the countdown. So, you know, I get it, but it is a little bit sad to see.

• 36:12Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah, it does seem like the main, so that's one thing that's changed. The changes are mostly in S25 Ultra.

• 36:18David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 36:18Andrew Manganelli?

  And what that is is very slight visual change. Because of that visual change and smaller bezels, we do go from 6.8 to 6.9. Quad HD, AMOLED, 120 Hz, cool. The ultra wide camera goes from 12 megapixels to 50 megapixels.

• 36:35David Imel?

  Okay.

• 36:35Andrew Manganelli?

  And they talked a lot about that and how it's better macro photos, better ultra wide photos and video. That's all fun. Um, I believe there's the new glass on the front, ceramic, glass, ceramic, corning, gorilla armor too, whatever. Um, so. I don't know. I'm so, at that point in it, they had said like, this next gen glass is the most durable ever. And I realized that every tech company out there needs some new vocabulary because we can't just say.

• 37:08David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Andrew Manganelli?

  Most advanced ever, every single year for every single update.

• 37:14Speaker 04

  Sure as hell can.

• 37:15David Imel?

  Well, a lot of the time there's like, there's an inverse relationship between shatter resistant and scratch resistant. And a lot of the times on a TikTok cycle, they'll just make the next version more shatter resistant, but not talk about how it's less scratch resistant and vice versa. And they just go back and forth forever. So, you know, I don't know. I think a big part of the reason that it's probably more durable as well is because of the shape and because there's less of the screen bleeding over the edge.

• 37:40Andrew Manganelli?

  Mm hmm.

• 37:41David Imel?

  When Apple switched the phone to be square with the iPhone, they also said like, oh, ceramic shield. And sure, you might have some of those ceramic elements inside of it, whatever. Most of that durability came from the fact that now it was squared off. So, you know, uh, okay, we can talk about some other stuff. Pricing, we've got 799.

• 38:02Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah, that was something we didn't have. I don't, I don't believe even in the briefing from Marques's video.

• 38:06David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 38:07Andrew Manganelli?

  Has pricing in it.

• 38:07David Imel?

  I don't think so.

• 38:08Andrew Manganelli?

  Nope.

• 38:08David Imel?

  So the base model of the standard S25 starts at 799. The Plus starts at 999, and the Ultra starts at 1299.

• 38:18Andrew Manganelli?

  I can talk about one thing that I know you'll be interested in.

• 38:21David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 38:21Andrew Manganelli?

  And I only know this because of fellow, um, Cheeto ally Ben Shun on 95 Google, right before this came out, confirms that S25 is ready for Cheeto, but not Cheeto inside of the phone. Um, he had a great article called Galaxy S25 is ready for Cheeto, but there's a problem with MagSafe accessories and just, uh, about a bunch of different accessories. It looks like they have the very typical like stand that can hold your phone, your watch and charge your earbuds or your ring. Actually, wow, this can do all four, it looks like. Um, but yeah, so Cheeto ready.

• 38:56David Imel?

  No.

• 38:56Andrew Manganelli?

  Which means, in case you haven't listened to us complain about this for the last month, it means there will be accessories that are Cheeto slash MagSafe, whatever, magnetically compatible, but it does not mean that the magnets are inside of the phone.

• 39:09David Imel?

  So they'll have Cheeto ready cases. Well, I lost that bet.

• 39:13Andrew Manganelli?

  Well, it's funny though, because these, um, these ones that they have are clear and we all, there's also like, um, Dbrand, which is a channel sponsor, by the way, has a clear case with a magnet on the back. Marques and I made the joke that pretty much the only way you can tell people you have the S25 lineup is by buying a clear case because the colors are the only new thing that really looks any different from the series before.

• 39:35David Imel?

  That is true.

• 39:36Andrew Manganelli?

  So go on and grab one of those.

• 39:39David Imel?

  The, I just, mini rant about Cheeto ready.

• 39:43Andrew Manganelli?

  Do it.

• 39:43David Imel?

  We've already done this, but I just, I just want to say like, now it's just a way for them to make more money on the cases.

• 39:51Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah. Well, and. So Chi, does Chi have to license this to cases? Chi too ready, right?

• 39:58David Imel?

  Uh, yeah.

• 39:58Andrew Manganelli?

  Seems like a good way for Chi to make even more licensing money to all case manufacturers.

• 40:02David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 40:03Andrew Manganelli?

  And etc.

• 40:04David Imel?

  So many bait and switches. I'm sad.

• 40:07Andrew Manganelli?

  Cool. So.

• 40:09Speaker 04

  Can I just say that the S25 Ultra looks so good.

• 40:13Andrew Manganelli?

  I think it looks good, man. I think it looks way better than the other one.

• 40:16Speaker 04

  Titanium railing, the two-tone. Love that.

• 40:19Andrew Manganelli?

  The two-tone is nice. Um, I do, like I said, I like the curved corners more and the flat edges. I think it looks really nice. Um, but it seems like most of the stuff we're getting is AI-based.

• 40:32David Imel?

  Yay.

• 40:33Andrew Manganelli?

  Which they spent, there was a, the Samsung unpacked went out of order of how we are talking about it. It was like straight into Galaxy AI. Talking about Now Brief and the Now Bar and a lot of different AI tech summarization and then right into Gemini. There's a point later where they started talking a little more about like pricing and stuff and Adam goes, Hold on, we can't record the podcast. They haven't talked about the phones yet. And like three of us turned around to him and said, no, they did.

• 40:58David Imel?

  They did.

• 40:59Andrew Manganelli?

  It's like, no, they didn't talk about like the cameras or anything. I'm like, no, we talked about the cameras, Adam. It's, it was brief.

• 41:04David Imel?

  Completely missed it.

• 41:05Andrew Manganelli?

  It was like in the middle. I just wish they would start off with it, but let's get into some of the AI stuff. I think.

• 41:13David Imel?

  Okay.

• 41:13Andrew Manganelli?

  Would you agree that the TLDR of the AI features on this phone are a lot of the stuff we've seen in Google and Apple phones? At least what they've announced, but now in a Galaxy phone and some of them having slightly updated.

• 41:28David Imel?

  Yes.

• 41:29Andrew Manganelli?

  Features.

• 41:30David Imel?

  But some of the slightly updated features were also Google announcing features that this just happens to be the first phone that releases on, which we have seen from Samsung and Google every year for the past like three years.

• 41:40Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah, it works good for Google. It lets them announce early without having to have their hardware out early, but also lets Galaxy have a selling point of like a couple extra features that you didn't have before. I think one of them specifically is Gemini Live being multimodal. So it can talk about things on your phone screen.

• 41:58David Imel?

  Right.

• 41:58Andrew Manganelli?

  That wasn't available before. Now we have it. And I think that's kind of neat.

• 42:02David Imel?

  Gemini Live is also pretty good. So.

• 42:04Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah, it, I always go, this sounds pretty cool. And then I hear Gemini Live talk and I go, I want nothing to do with that.

• 42:10David Imel?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, since it's AI, you still have to verify literally everything it tells you, but it's kind of cool that it sounds like a natural conversation, at least. They had a new feature that they also announced where it can now take action across multiple apps. So you could say like, add this to my calendar and send a text to this person that we're on for the day.

• 42:33Andrew Manganelli?

  In the Galaxy AI portion, before Gemini, we had things called the Now Brief, which is essentially personalization of different information that you might find useful throughout your day, based on what it's seeing on your phone. Also, something called the Now Bar, which is a lock screen widget that shows the most relevant piece of information available to you.

• 42:50David Imel?

  And looks a lot like-

• 42:51Andrew Manganelli?

  What was it called?

• 42:52David Imel?

  Live Activities-

• 42:52Andrew Manganelli?

  Live Activities.

• 42:53David Imel?

  On the iPhone.

• 42:53Andrew Manganelli?

  Can show you scores, can show maybe how far your Uber is away from you, if a flight's getting delayed, stuff like that.

• 42:59David Imel?

  I wonder if that's going to need APIs, because the Live Activities API is a thing that developers have to implement.

• 43:05Andrew Manganelli?

  Wouldn't be surprised if it does. That would make sense. Also, like, natural language actions. One of them, I think this is going to be one of those things that's good for accessibility for people who aren't tech-focused like us. An example they used is telling your phone, "My eyes are getting tired", and it adding the, like, night blue light dimming onto it.

• 43:24Speaker 04

  I hated that, though.

• 43:26Andrew Manganelli?

  You hated-

• 43:27Speaker 04

  If your eyes are getting tired-

• 43:28David Imel?

  Stop looking at your phone.

• 43:29Speaker 04

  Just stop looking at your phone.

• 43:30Andrew Manganelli?

  Fair. But if you can say stuff like that, that's a little more natural to your phone, to be able to change some settings around or things in the phone, that's gonna, all of us family IT people out there, it's gonna save us a few phone calls.

• 43:43David Imel?

  That's true. As long as people actually use the AI features.

• 43:46Andrew Manganelli?

  That's true. It all depends on, I guess, how easy it is to get to them.

• 43:49David Imel?

  Right.

• 43:49Speaker 04

  Well, now you could just hold down the side button.

• 43:51David Imel?

  Right. So that's another interesting thing. Like, Mark has mentioned, now if you hold down the power button, it doesn't open necessarily Gemini nor Bixby, but it's like a combination of the two.

• 44:03Andrew Manganelli?

  It seems like, kind of like, a combination of, like, using Gemini, but then also using, he said Bixby. I don't remember them saying Bixby-

• 44:10David Imel?

  Yeah, I don't either.

• 44:11Andrew Manganelli?

  -in the show at all, but what he's talking about is from the briefing, and I don't know exactly what they said in there, but it seems like holding down that button gives you Gemini, until Gemini needs to physically interact with your phone somehow, then it goes into Galaxy's AI, whatever they're calling it.

• 44:27David Imel?

  Do you guys remember how we had most of this with Google Assistant? And you can tap down the power button.

• 44:32Andrew Manganelli?

  So scared of just.

• 44:33Speaker 04

  That's just what I was thinking the whole time.

• 44:35Andrew Manganelli?

  Google Assistant just going away soon.

• 44:37David Imel?

  I mean, they barely ever talk about it.

• 44:38Andrew Manganelli?

  I know.

• 44:39David Imel?

  They had the similar situation to this Bixby thing in the Pixel. The Pixel event. When they they barely really talked about Google Assistant at all. It's just Gemini, Gemini, Gemini. And then at one point, they said, and Gemini can use Google Assistant to do the like, turn on and off your lights in your home. And it was like, where? What is this branding? I'm not really sure. I don't know. It feels like Google Assistant and Bixby are kind of like in the retirement home together.

• 45:07Andrew Manganelli?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:08David Imel?

  And Gemini and Galaxy AI are their newborns. So.

• 45:11Andrew Manganelli?

  Um, yeah. Yeah, a couple of other quick things. There's being able to ask your phone to find specific photos. So it's basically like gallery search, but with voice. They use an example of a dog in a bathrobe. And but the more you ask it, the more it can use context to think like. That was in October because you're asking about a Halloween picture or.

• 45:30David Imel?

  You were already able to do that in Google Photos.

• 45:32Andrew Manganelli?

  Now with voice.

• 45:34David Imel?

  Cool.

• 45:34Andrew Manganelli?

  Awesome.

• 45:35David Imel?

  Okay.

• 45:35Andrew Manganelli?

  Um, Circle to Search, which was. A great example of you mentioning like, here's something Google AI is doing. But it's launching first because I believe the S24 launched Circle to Search. Now, this now the new features are. If it sees in that circle, a URL, an address, a phone number. It'll be able to like, let you click on those and go straight into whatever you need for them instead of just a web search for them.

• 46:02David Imel?

  Right.

• 46:03Andrew Manganelli?

  Awesome.

• 46:03Speaker 04

  They just get to announce new AI features every six months instead of every year.

• 46:07David Imel?

  Google does.

• 46:08Andrew Manganelli?

  Google gets to have a second event that they have to do zero work for.

• 46:12David Imel?

  Although ironically, at the Pixel event, because they didn't announce the Pixels for like, the first hour, they used a Galaxy S24 Ultra to show off all the new Gemini features.

• 46:21Speaker 04

  That was part of the deal.

• 46:22David Imel?

  Yeah, probably part of the deal.

• 46:24Andrew Manganelli?

  So with AI stuff, the thing that kind of. Made me the most upset. Was saying that by purchasing these phones, they all come with six months of Gemini Advance and two terabytes of cloud storage for free.

• 46:37David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 46:38Andrew Manganelli?

  Which means.

• 46:40David Imel?

  Why does that make you upset?

• 46:41Andrew Manganelli?

  Because then eventually we will have to. What is the difference between Gemini and Gemini Advances? Are we losing Gemini?

• 46:47David Imel?

  Gemini Advanced is like the paid OpenAI thing.

• 46:50Andrew Manganelli?

  Okay, so we'll still get all of these features without paying for it.

• 46:55Andrew Manganelli?

  That's what makes me upset.

• 46:57David Imel?

  Great point.

• 46:57Andrew Manganelli?

  What, what in here will I potentially lose if I don't have Gemini Advance, which is a monthly subscription?

• 47:03David Imel?

  That is a good question. It's a good question.

• 47:06Speaker 04

  Twenty dollars a month?

• 47:07David Imel?

  Yeah, what if you stop paying for it after six months and most of these features stop working?

• 47:11Andrew Manganelli?

  That's terrible.

• 47:12David Imel?

  I don't think that's true. I don't think that's how it's gonna be.

• 47:16Speaker 04

  Are you willing to put your name behind that statement, David?

• 47:19David Imel?

  I will bet on it.

• 47:21Andrew Manganelli?

  I could be super wrong and I could have missed something, so please tell me how wrong I am.

• 47:24David Imel?

  Gemini Advance is just a more advanced model and you'll probably still have access to the regular Gemini control stuff and searching stuff.

• 47:32Speaker 04

  So if you don't pay, your phone gets dumber.

• 47:35David Imel?

  That would be horrible.

• 47:36Andrew Manganelli?

  It would be terrible.

• 47:37David Imel?

  Man, are we really moving towards a world where your phone is a subscription plan outside of the already subscription plan that you already paid for it?

• 47:44Andrew Manganelli?

  To use it.

• 47:44David Imel?

  Outside of the carrier plan that you also pay for?

• 47:47Andrew Manganelli?

  Yes.

• 47:47David Imel?

  Outside of your texting plan that you?

• 47:50Andrew Manganelli?

  The fact it took this long is actually surprising.

• 47:52David Imel?

  There's like four layers of subscriptions, though.

• 47:55Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah.

• 47:55David Imel?

  Wow.

• 47:56Andrew Manganelli?

  So.

• 47:56David Imel?

  It's a good question. We'll have to figure that out.

• 47:59Andrew Manganelli?

  Let's, I think the last thing I kind of had here is a couple AI photo/video tools.

• 48:05David Imel?

  Okay.

• 48:06Andrew Manganelli?

  I guess not all of them are AI, because they did introduce LogVideo.

• 48:09David Imel?

  Even if they're not AI, they'll call it AI.

• 48:11Andrew Manganelli?

  Okay, AI LogVideo. They did introduce the Face Swap, which we've talked about on Google Photos before. There's an Audio Eraser that we've seen a couple different times that allows you in post to erase wind noise, background noise, increase regular talking noise to make it more clear.

• 48:29Speaker 04

  Which was the one time Ellis went to use the bathroom during the audio feature.

• 48:33Andrew Manganelli?

  I know. He was really sad to miss it. This event in general.

• 48:39David Imel?

  Yes.

• 48:39Andrew Manganelli?

  Was really boring.

• 48:40David Imel?

  It was horrible. They've been horrible for a while. So.

• 48:44Andrew Manganelli?

  Most tech events, not just Samsung. Most tech events.

• 48:48David Imel?

  Yeah. But I feel like the the the fact that they like refuse to change how the phones even look kind of like is mirrored in the boring level of the event.

• 48:58Andrew Manganelli?

  It's fair.

• 48:59David Imel?

  They also showed a render of the um AR glasses again.

• 49:03Andrew Manganelli?

  So not only did they show the render of the glasses, it started as the yeah. It started as like this weird timeline. They showed this like hypothetical timeline of what could be going forward with how all of this AI works in it. And it showed a phone, a folding phone, a tri fold. They called it multi folding.

• 49:23David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 49:23Andrew Manganelli?

  Then goggles or VR headset.

• 49:26David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 49:27Andrew Manganelli?

  Then glasses.

• 49:28David Imel?

  Yeah, which implies that a tri fold is going to come out before the VR.

• 49:33Andrew Manganelli?

  That's a really good point that I didn't think of because all the rumors right now are yeah.

• 49:36David Imel?

  It was a timeline.

• 49:37Andrew Manganelli?

  It was a timeline. I guess, I don't know if it's timeline of release date or timeline of technology, maybe.

• 49:43David Imel?

  I don't know.

• 49:44Andrew Manganelli?

  But then they did show.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  Timeline of lies.

• 49:47David Imel?

  A time lies.

• 49:49Andrew Manganelli?

  But then, right after that, they showed a render of the front of a Google head or.

• 49:54David Imel?

  Google XR.

• 49:54Andrew Manganelli?

  I'm calling it Google headset because we're talking, we've been called, they called it Google XR in the.

• 49:58David Imel?

  There is, yeah, Google X.

• 50:00Andrew Manganelli?

  Android XR.

• 50:00David Imel?

  It's Android XR. Yeah, I think it's Android XR. But there was a name, it was project.

• 50:05Andrew Manganelli?

  I have Android XR, that's all.

• 50:06David Imel?

  Okay, but it is project something.

• 50:08Andrew Manganelli?

  And then later, again, though, in an AI infog, in a graphic about AI, they showed something that said said headset and said glasses. So not only are we talking about, they mentioned glasses twice.

• 50:20David Imel?

  They're definitely mentioning glasses.

• 50:21Andrew Manganelli?

  Or they like alluded to it. They actually talked about the headset a little. They alluded to glasses.

• 50:26David Imel?

  When Google releases their Gemini glasses, it will probably be at a Samsung event, so, you know.

• 50:31Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah.

• 50:32David Imel?

  Okay, something that was at the very end that makes no sense. We have briefly mentioned the existence of a potential iPhone 17 Slim. And then we mentioned the existence of a potential Galaxy S25 Slim, uh obviously to be Apple to the punch. They did the credits, which was two screens very quickly so that they could one more thing us. They are calling it the Galaxy S25 Edge, which if you don't know is a callback to the S6 Edge, the Galaxy Note Edge, the Galaxy S7 Edge, which is when they were first starting to figure out how to bend displays. So they sort of had this like, it would bend over the side of the right side and they would

• 51:15David Imel?

  display information on it. They are just reusing that brand name to make a slimmer phone is what it seems to be. They showed a very quick splash video and a very quick render. And at the event, they have a few units, but you have to stand like 10 feet back from it. So you can't really see exactly what it looks like. Marques took a little video for us.

• 51:37Andrew Manganelli?

  Oh, did he post it?

• 51:38David Imel?

  You did. It's a random channel.

• 51:40Andrew Manganelli?

  We're seeing this.

• 51:41David Imel?

  It's in waveform. Yeah, we're seeing it right now. It is extremely hard to tell what's different about it really, because they sort of have this like exploded, it's not even exploded view.

• 51:51Andrew Manganelli?

  It's like hanging.

• 51:52David Imel?

  Hanging. They're hanging it. I don't know. It just looks thinner. I don't know.

• 51:56Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah. So it was, it was like, they tried to pull the like Marvel end of credits, but they knew the minute credits rolled, people would pee. So the credits were boom, six seconds long. And then then they said, now you think you've seen it all. And then like S25 Edge, which I will give them credit. All of us looked at each other and said, this didn't leak. Are we actually getting surprised? It may have been a little boring, but I am hyped anytime there's something that genuinely surprises me in one of these events. So kudos to Samsung.

• 52:26Speaker 02

  What if it's an S25 without the AI features? Like if you're like.

• 52:31David Imel?

  Slim. We slimmed out the AI.

• 52:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're like, I don't want any of this.

• 52:34Andrew Manganelli?

  One thing I can see from this, and you could see from the render is it's definitely not just like the S25 because it only has two cameras. It's an oval camera bump on the back, which looks very similar to like a regular iPhone, but slimmer. I hate to compare everything to iPhone in this, but like, it's just kind of where we're at. Yeah. You can see in this one clip very much so just two cameras and like a flash or a microphone underneath it. And it's like hanging on this bar and there's just an absolute sea of people reaching over trying to see it and people sticking their cameras over and security guards like shushing them back. Do we think this is potentially like the new version of the S series FE? So like.

• 53:20Andrew Manganelli?

  Could you see this coming out approximately the size of the S25 Plus? Very similar features, maybe slight spec bump down and in that like $700 range?

• 53:32David Imel?

  I think it's gonna be $1,000.

• 53:35Speaker 02

  I think that would be a terrible move because the FE has such great brand recognition.

• 53:39David Imel?

  It's probably gonna be more. I wonder if it's gonna be 1,100. I feel like they're going to pull some sort of like, it took a lot of intense special engineering to get it to be this slim and still like deliver this level of performance. So you're paying for the extra, you know, because I think-

• 53:55Andrew Manganelli?

  But you're getting one less camera too.

• 53:57David Imel?

  I know, but I think that the iPhone 17 Slim that is rumored is also rumored to be way more expensive. So.

• 54:07David Imel?

  We know nothing else about it. Um, The Verge asked for comment and a Samsung representative said they had nothing further to share other than the tees that unpacked, which was clearly planned. Cool. Thanks, guys. Uh, obviously the hands-on video that Marques did is out now on the YouTube channel. So go watch that if you want to know more information about these phones. Otherwise, um, that was basically the event.

• 54:32Andrew Manganelli?

  That was. I'm sorry. That sounded pretty down, but the event was pretty boring. I think everyone can admit that. That doesn't mean these phones are going to be terrible. They're probably gonna be some of the best phones of the year, like they always are. Samsung is this wild phenomenon where like they release six months before everyone else.

• 54:50David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 54:51Andrew Manganelli?

  It's generally a pretty boring event and then you get to the end of the year and you go, nope, that was probably one of the best phones of the year. So I don't know how they do it.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  Did we mention that the TV thing, the TV watch thing?

• 55:02Andrew Manganelli?

  Oh, can you mention that? I thought this was the coolest thing. They announced it. I wasn't even, I was packing my car.

• 55:07Speaker 02

  I don't even know how to feel about it. It's like, uh, if your, if your watch knows you're asleep and you also have a Samsung TV and they're both set up on smart things, your TV will turn off because it'll be like, oh, this dude's asleep.

• 55:24Speaker 02

  There's a pizza party happening. This is not a drill. Yeah, your TV will turn off. And on the one hand, saving electricity, pretty cool. I think it'll be good, you know, save electricity. It'll be interesting. There's an entire generation of children who remember waking up at 4 a.m. to the George Lopez show playing and just being confused. It'll also be interesting because I do feel like there's a decent amount of YouTube AdSense revenue generated by autoplay while people are asleep.

• 55:54David Imel?

  True.

• 55:55Andrew Manganelli?

  I was just gonna say, like, the way, I'm assuming TVs still have this, but TVs have had this for a long time. It was called sleep timer, which is you knew you were going to fall asleep to this, turn this off in one hour.

• 56:08David Imel?

  Sleep timer.

• 56:09Andrew Manganelli?

  Do they really?

• 56:10David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 56:10Andrew Manganelli?

  The problem with that is, is I feel like every time I was, like, there's nothing like just closing your eyes and going to sleep when you are the most tired, if that happens to be out, like, it's the worst when you're on the couch and you're like, I need to make it to my bed, but I'm not going to be as sleepy as I am right now. But if you're watching in bed, or if you just want to fall asleep, if I were cognizant enough to set my sleep timer, I would always make it to the sleep timer, and then it would turn off, and I would turn it back on, and then fall asleep with the TV on. Being able to just watch and be like, you're asleep. I can turn, I can safely turn this off.

• 56:44David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 56:44Andrew Manganelli?

  It's the most niche thing ever, but.

• 56:46David Imel?

  I think it's good because I often will fall asleep to like YouTube or something, and then I wake up at 4:00 in the morning to YouTube playing, and it's, I get a worse night's sleep because I woke up in the middle of the night.

• 56:56Andrew Manganelli?

  Hmm, with it on.

• 56:57David Imel?

  Yeah, because I was coming out of some sleep cycle or something, so.

• 57:00Speaker 02

  And, uh, and we had this whole event, and this was, that was the cool part.

• 57:05David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 57:05Speaker 02

  That was mean. I take it back. It was, it was a beautiful event. It was, production was great. It sounded fantastic.

• 57:11Andrew Manganelli?

  They always do the sweet screens on the stage, like, Samsung's so good.

• 57:14David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 57:15Speaker 02

  A plus for effort.

• 57:16David Imel?

  Are we allowed to say that Marques is seeing something secret while he's out in California?

• 57:20Andrew Manganelli?

  I can say that I will not be on the rest of this episode because I have to leave right now to go meet Marques to shoot something top secret.

• 57:29David Imel?

  Looks like you guys are stuck here with me.

• 57:31Andrew Manganelli?

  So, that's our little teaser. That's also why there won't be trivia this week, and why I said it was a chaotic episode, because we didn't fit everything in on time, and I need to run, but there's still a little more of the show left.

• 57:42Speaker 02

  Will TikTok be gone? Yeah. Also, Andrew, not to make this episode even more chaotic, but earlier this episode, we reported on Project Stargate, the $500 billion effort to OpenAI. Larry Ellison launched some AI stuff. Since we said that, like, three hours ago, we saw headlines that Elon Musk was saying, "Nah, it's not real. They're not gonna do that." He's not involved in this, but he says they have not raised the money and it's not gonna happen. And him and Sam Altman are duking it out on Twitter.

• 58:15David Imel?

  Well, it's funny, because he said they don't actually have the money. And then Sam Altman says, "I genuinely respect your accomplishments, and I think you're the most inspiring entrepreneur of our time." And that was it.

• 58:24Speaker 02

  And then he went on to say, "Wrong, as you surely know. Want to come visit the first site already underway? This is great for the country. I realize what is great for the country isn't always optimal for your companies. But in your new role, I surely hope you'll put America first." And then, um, and then in a separate thing, I saw Satya on the news. And Satya got asked, he was like, "So Elon just said that this ain't real."

• 58:51David Imel?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 58:52Speaker 02

  Uh, "What's up with that?" And Satya, in the most, like, goonish way possible, was like, "I'm good for my 80 billion." And I was just like, I...

• 59:03David Imel?

  I just want to say, by the time you, dear listener, are listening to this... A lot of this will be different.

• 59:07Speaker 02

  A lot has changed.

• 59:08David Imel?

  But this is as of recording on Wednesday, January 22nd.

• 59:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's been the case for the past week. So we'll see what happens.

• 59:13David Imel?

  Anyway, if you've made it this far on the podcast, I salute you. Uh, we're gonna take it to a quick break. Andrew needs to get to the airport for a very secret project he's flying out for. And we'll see you after the break. And then you'll be stuck with me. And, um, I will hopefully give you a really great 20 or so minutes.

• 59:28Speaker 02

  You will. I can't wait to listen to it later.

• 59:30David Imel?

  Okay. See you in a sec.

• 59:32Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 59:46Speaker 01

  Support for the show comes from Jira by Atlassian. So AI is only as useful as the context it has to work from. But when that context is scattered across tools like threads and DMs, that means your team and your AI agents end up flying kind of blind. That's the problem Jira solves. What's the goal tied to your project? What got decided last week in Slack? Atlassian's teamwork graph pulls all of these pieces together from Jira, Confluence, Slack, GitHub, and more. So nothing falls through the cracks. With Jira, you can actually share that context with the AI agents you already use, like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot, assign them work directly, or connect your agents through MCP. Spend less time digging through endless links and DMs, less time chasing down what got decided and by who, and more time actually shipping. Learn more at jira.com.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

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• 1:01:19Speaker 07

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• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  Welcome back. Andrew, like we said, had to go do some top secret stuff via airplane, but I'm here.

• 1:02:06David Imel?

  That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Have you ever seen me on this side and Ellis on this side?

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  Actually, I think this might be a first.

• 1:02:15David Imel?

  One of the permutations.

• 1:02:16Speaker 04

  They have switched chairs.

• 1:02:17David Imel?

  Okay, so what were you about to say?

• 1:02:19Speaker 02

  I was about to say, we are coming back in this very good third segment of the show and we are going to talk about some of our favorite apps. But before I get into the app that I really wanted to talk about, I just wanted to say honorary mention app goes to Blue Sky.

• 1:02:37David Imel?

  Thank you.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  No particular reason.

• 1:02:39David Imel?

  How many people said?

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  Just, I think everyone should be on that.

• 1:02:43David Imel?

  How many people said, "Blue Sky is never going to happen"?

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  I might have said that.

• 1:02:49David Imel?

  I think you said it.

• 1:02:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I don't know if it's happening yet.

• 1:02:52David Imel?

  It's happening. They have 28 million users.

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  I just put a sick meme on there.

• 1:02:56David Imel?

  That's right.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  So you know there's funny stuff waiting for you on that platform.

• 1:03:03David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  No reason, just, I just think, I think now's the time. I don't know, just. Anyway, David, would you like me to share my favorite app that I'm using on my phone? Or would you like to go first?

• 1:03:15David Imel?

  Go for it.

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  I just want to say before I do this, I have gotten now five or six DMs that I'll read the same way. They go, Ellis.

• 1:03:23Speaker 04

  I know where this is going.

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  I was so sure I saw you on the subway in New York City. Well, I wasn't sure. It might have been you. It might have not been you. And then you pulled out your purple 12 mini. And I was like, that can only be Ellis. And I just want to say, every time I get one of those DMs, it warms my heart to know that my, and I'm going to say it here first, I'm admitting it, guys, this phone barely works. Over the holiday break, I was getting lunch with Adam and he saw me pull out my phone and attempt to type a text message. And I probably pressed my phone seven times before one of the key presses registered. And that's how every day is for me, actually.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  And Adam was like, oh my God, I did not know it was this bad.

• 1:04:07Speaker 04

  I assumed that it like, Apple's usually very good at keeping their older devices alive. And I didn't know that that was that old. I assumed it was still functioning.

• 1:04:15Speaker 02

  It is still functioning. All the components work. My theory, my working theory is that it, I have the base storage model. I have 64 gigs. I don't know how much RAM is in this thing, but I'm sure it's not much. And, and again, I'm basing this on assumptions. If you're an iOS engineer, please tell me how wrong I am on Bluesky.

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  But I have a feeling a lot of memory swapping happens in this thing, like from the, the storage to the memory, to the storage of memory. And I think over the years, the RAM is getting worse. I'm almost out of storage all the time because iOS is just a bloat machine. And I think what happens is the RAM just fills up and that is what you're seeing. Because if I'm having digitizer issues like that and I lock the phone, unlock the phone, don't switch apps, like stay in that app. The RAM refreshes and it's back to like, working perfectly. Yes. Super annoying to have to lock and unlock my phone almost every time I want to use it.

• 1:05:11Speaker 04

  You admitted that.

• 1:05:11Speaker 02

  But I am so dedicated to this thing not ending up in a landfill. I don't need a new phone. There's not a single feature on any new iPhone that I absolutely need.

• 1:05:22Speaker 04

  It's not about the features. It's about having a working phone.

• 1:05:25David Imel?

  I respect Ellis's choices.

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  Thank you. Anyway, so my, my favorite app that I'm using on my phone right now is the NTS app. NTS is an online radio station. They have two stations, NTS one and NTS two.

• 1:05:43Speaker 04

  Very fun. Wait, does NTS stand for something?

• 1:05:46David Imel?

  NTC?

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  NTS stands for nuts to soup, which was the name of a previous blog run by one of the guys who founded NTS. Anyway, NTS is really cool. They have two stations. One of which is usually more hype music. The other one is typically more chill music. It's a lot of dance music. It's a lot of international music. It's live DJs. You get cool personalities. They also have these really great playlists on their website. And typically they're called infinite mixtapes.

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  And they have things like Memory Lane, Poolside, Slow Focus, The Tube, Labyrinth. I just think NTS is a super duper cool way to listen to music. Oh, and then another thing they do that I think is just like so awesome is they'll do these curated playlists, which I guess every streaming service does curated playlists. But theirs are just so awesome. Like, it'll be like, like a spotlight of Cuban artists you've never heard of, or it'll be like a deep dive into music of Detroit in 1997. Or like, just like, they're just so good about caring about music and caring about culture.

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, go, NTS.live is the website. The app is pretty good. If it works on my terrible phone, it'll probably work on your phone.

• 1:07:06David Imel?

  That's right.

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you like music, I gotta go with that.

• 1:07:11David Imel?

  You like jazz?

• 1:07:11Speaker 02

  Ooh, and right now-

• 1:07:12David Imel?

  I listen to NTS.

• 1:07:13Speaker 02

  One of my favorite DJs, Ans, has a playlist up on NTS as we speak. I'm probably gonna go bump that after this.

• 1:07:20Speaker 04

  That's cool.

• 1:07:22David Imel?

  I wanted to shout out the Pixelfed app once again. We talked about it very lightly last week. If you don't know what it is, it is a alternative to Instagram that is federated over Activity Pub. If you don't know what that is, what are you doing? I feel like I've mentioned this 50 times, so you should go watch our Activity Pub and AT Protocol episode. We'll link it in the show description. However, the reason I want to shout out Pixelfed right now is because, one, Instagram changed the aspect ratio of all of the posts, which I don't think that we've mentioned yet. Something very, very frustrating happened-

• 1:07:56Speaker 02

  It's unopening Instagram right now.

• 1:07:57David Imel?

  -over last weekend, where your profile grid on your homepage-

• 1:08:01Speaker 02

  Oh wait, no, mine's still square.

• 1:08:02David Imel?

  Sometimes some peoples are still square, but they're moving it. Everyone's been being moved to like, it's not four by five, it's something similar. They introduced some sort of way to sort of crop in your images, but it just makes it look worse. Anyway, it's frustrating, and it feels like Meta is just going to continue to do whatever the heck they want to try to make Instagram just a video app. Like, they really just don't seem to care about photography anymore. So-

• 1:08:29David Imel?

  I understand that it is frustrating to constantly move apps every single time the app starts getting just destroyed because they're trying to make more money off of you.

• 1:08:39Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:08:39David Imel?

  Pixelfed, federated over Activity Pub, the whole point is that it's decentralized. Something I wanted to call out about it is that the developer, which yes, the developer, the one guy that is developing it.

• 1:08:52Speaker 04

  Are you serious?

• 1:08:53David Imel?

  Yeah, single guy that's developing it, yesterday upgraded the infrastructure, and it was down for a little bit while he was doing this because he said they were getting an influx of users, so now it is way faster. Like, when I first started using this, the actual app last week, it was extremely slow, it was lagging like crazy, it was glitching. Now, everything's going really well. Again, it's super basic, but, you know, the federated social web is really important right now, and I think everybody should be moving towards these platforms that give you more control of your content. So if you want something like Instagram, but it's much simpler and will not change

• 1:09:32David Imel?

  into a video platform in the future, get on Pixelfed. My account is @[email protected].

• 1:09:39Speaker 04

  Wait, I have a question for you.

• 1:09:40David Imel?

  Follow me there.

• 1:09:41Speaker 04

  Because you recently moved your entire website to Ghost.

• 1:09:44David Imel?

  I did.

• 1:09:44Speaker 04

  The open protocol, open source protocol posting thing.

• 1:09:48David Imel?

  Yes, open source.

• 1:09:49Speaker 04

  And now, this Pixelfed, if you were to publish a post on one, would it show up on the other?

• 1:09:55David Imel?

  So, Pixelfed is only images.

• 1:09:57Speaker 04

  Okay, so if you were to post like an image on Ghost, on your website?

• 1:10:01David Imel?

  Yes.

• 1:10:02Speaker 04

  That would ideally pop up on Pixelfed, or vice versa?

• 1:10:05David Imel?

  I believe I would be able to follow my Ghost account, yeah. Something that's cool is the Bridgiefed people, which we also talked about in our federated content episode, you can basically create a bridge between Activity Pub and the AT Protocol on Blue Sky, so that it creates sort of like this Ghost account that mirrors what you posted on other platforms. So, on Pixelfed, you can follow the Bridgiefed account, and it will create a Blue Sky account for your Pixelfed account, that you don't have to do anything on. You can just post on Pixelfed, and those posts will show up on Blue Sky. And the benefit of that is if you're on Blue Sky and you just want to

• 1:10:49David Imel?

  follow my photography, you can follow my Pixelfed account through Blue Sky, which is very cool.

• 1:10:54Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 1:10:56David Imel?

  Anyway, I just... I think we're moving towards this world where we really need to start thinking about decentralized social media. So try out Pixelfed. It's really great right now.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07David Imel?

  A lot of people are joining it. It's having a good time. Yeah, that's what I wanted to shout out.

• 1:11:11Speaker 04

  Nice. Good one. Mine this week is an app called Rooms. It is an iOS only, I believe. And I remember when they launched it, I was on the S24 Ultra and I was very upset that I couldn't use it. And now I'm on iPhone and remembered that, oh wait, this app exists like a couple, couple, maybe two weeks ago. So I downloaded it and it is basically TikTok, right? For pixelized rooms. So you can make like a pixel room.

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. This is sweet.

• 1:11:43Speaker 04

  It's really dope. It's really creative. People have been getting very artistic on here. There's different like tags you can do. So there's like featured trending. You can do an art one that just shows like dope things people make. You can do games, education, experiments, fantasy. It's, it's insane. I tried my hand at making one of them and as basic as it is, I'm very proud of it. And I made it like the wallpaper on my phone just because it's like, wow, this is really, really clever. Definitely check it out.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  I'm gonna check this out. This might, I mean, obviously I haven't tried it, but I think I'm gonna go ahead and, and, you know, previously my favorite for you page style feed belonged to BirdBuddy.

• 1:12:22Speaker 04

  Oh, yes.

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  Terrific, terrific algorithmic feed, but I can see this taking the cake.

• 1:12:27Speaker 04

  Dude, I'm telling you, if ever you get the urge to just like swipe and not do anything with your time, this thing at least will inspire you and make you want to build things versus just like consuming for the sake of consuming. It's really cool.

• 1:12:40Speaker 02

  That's pretty cool, man.

• 1:12:41Speaker 04

  And people in here are so talented. It is crazy. The things that they are building look actually beautiful, like they're works of art.

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  Oh, and there's a web client.

• 1:12:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. And you can do it on a website, too.

• 1:12:52Speaker 02

  I just wanna, I wanna say, are you, did I cut you off?

• 1:12:54Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:12:55Speaker 02

  Okay. So this is exactly what being friends with Adam is like. Is he goes, he goes, guys, I just got a new phone for the seventh time this year. I've, I've switched once again. And then You're hanging out with him and then three weeks later, he's like, dude, I just discovered this really sick thing, but it's only on the phone I'm not using. And then he'll be bummed about it for like three days and go like, you know what? Nah, I'm doing it. And he'll do some, this is the other thing about Adam. That's so crazy is this man is the master of the trade in.

• 1:13:28David Imel?

  That's true.

• 1:13:29Speaker 02

  This guy will be like, will be like, dude, you already have an S25 Ultra? Where did you get this? And he'd be like, oh yeah, I just like went under my bed and I found three chocolate chip cookies and a Nexus 8. I gave it to Samsung and they gave me $17,000 and I went and I, I bought a new phone.

• 1:13:46Speaker 04

  The Nexus 8 is psychotic.

• 1:13:48Speaker 02

  But it's just like, this is, bro, I've known you now for like three or four years and like, I this, I feel like I'm always watching you do this crazy acrobatic trade in stuff.

• 1:13:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's a lot. I, I think, I don't know, we'll see. I think I've settled down now. Because now I have like a shortcuts routine and so many little things that are just like such a core part of my life.

• 1:14:10David Imel?

  Adam, why are you lying to us live on the podcast? You can say whatever you want.

• 1:14:15Speaker 04

  Adam, I'm in denial.

• 1:14:16David Imel?

  It's not gonna be true.

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  I do think you could totally start an entire

• 1:14:20David Imel?

  Blog based on

• 1:14:21Speaker 02

  Blog, like TikTok account, YouTube channel, whatever. Yeah, just like, like Adam's trade in corner. And I think it would go off.

• 1:14:30Speaker 04

  David's Fediverse corner and Adam's trade in corner.

• 1:14:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:33David Imel?

  Oh my gosh.

• 1:14:34Speaker 04

  This is what happens when Marques and Andrew leave.

• 1:14:36David Imel?

  Yeah, we gotta say.

• 1:14:38Speaker 04

  We all have a corner now.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  When the cats are away.

• 1:14:41David Imel?

  The dogs come out.

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  No, that's not.

• 1:14:45Speaker 02

  Okay, that's what it is now, baby. The dogs are out.

• 1:14:50David Imel?

  All right. Well, it's been a week. Lots of stuff happening on the internet. You already know.

• 1:14:55Speaker 04

  There's things ongoing right now.

• 1:14:57David Imel?

  There's things, many things are ongoing. It's hard for us to be a definitive podcast, especially when it takes us two days to edit this thing. So.

• 1:15:03Speaker 02

  If you're in the Northeast United States, stay warm.

• 1:15:06David Imel?

  It's eight degrees Fahrenheit.

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  It's cold.

• 1:15:08David Imel?

  That's been it. Thanks so much for watching. Thanks so much for listening. We hope you catch us next week, or we hope to catch you next week on the waveform podcast. We've been your hosts.

• 1:15:20Speaker 02

  I'm Ellis.

• 1:15:21David Imel?

  I'm David.

• 1:15:22Speaker 02

  And there will be trivia next week.

• 1:15:24David Imel?

  Next week. So.

• 1:15:26Speaker 04

  When everyone's back.

• 1:15:27David Imel?

  Catch you guys in the next one.

• 1:15:30Speaker 02

  Peace.

• 1:15:32David Imel?

  Wade Perlmutter, producer, Adam Molina, and Alice Revan. We are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network and our intro action music is produced by Vane Sel.

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  This is so crazy. David, what are we going to talk about?

• 1:16:00David Imel?

  Oh, I know what to talk about.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  What? I don't. There's nothing in the script.

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is more than caring about the latest and greatest. It's also taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are with personalized financial strategies that help protect what matters. So you can preserve your progress while creating a path forward. The key to being rich is knowing what counts. Let's find your rich together. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

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