00:00:00
[Music] what's going on people of the internet welcome back to another episode of the waveform podcast we're your hosts i'm marquez and i'm andrew and today we've
00:00:12
got a bunch of stuff to talk about from this week first of all we want to talk about some new ev stuff and how a bunch
00:00:18
of these new eevee startups like to move and maneuver and maybe it's a nice way of putting a little bit of a rant
00:00:24
probably in there but also uh we have a bit of a fun segment talking about cameras in smartphone presentations and
00:00:31
how that's evolved over time because that's been super fun but first one of the most common questions that i
00:00:37
actually get from people when they ask about my job like it's a it's a common interview question an on stage question
00:00:43
is what would you do if youtube disappeared what would you do if youtube died tomorrow so like if youtube died what would you do it like where would you move your stuff
00:00:54
or would you do a different job or yeah all-encompassing it's always about like how much dependence we have on this
00:01:00
platform sure and maybe someday youtube's just just they change a rule that screws
00:01:05
us over or they disappear or something happens like that and my answer is always youtube is far too stable to be like
00:01:13
overly focusing on that i get it it's an it's a great economic question but youtube i have a lot of trust in them
00:01:19
right now yeah uh and the answer always comes from looking at youtube's competition which is like what are the alternatives to youtube like if i'm gonna go watch a video on the internet i
00:01:31
wanna know what the the new iphone se looks like i'm just gonna go on youtube.com and search iphone se i'm
00:01:37
just gonna go to google.com and search iphone sc and it's going to show me a bunch of youtube videos or articles with
00:01:43
embedded youtube videos exactly yeah and so the biggest competition really right now
00:01:49
is vimeo yeah that's the biggest competition to youtube sort of at least i feel like it used to feel like it was the there's the netflix's and other stuff but i'm just talking about like user generated content like regular
00:02:01
people uploading videos online uh videos yeah exactly and the reason we bring up vimeo is
00:02:07
there was a headline or an article this week uh i just i'm just going to read the headline and maybe you can break this down a bit because i thought this
00:02:13
is crazy vimeo is telling creators to suddenly pay thousands of dollars or leave the platform
00:02:20
yeah what i know that there's a pro account you can have on vim yeah yeah there's business and pro accounts and actually even the creators have accounts
00:02:27
and this is kind of news to me because of this article but the the prices there aren't too too bad it's i think the two
00:02:33
main kind of like creator not business um charges are like seven dollars a month
00:02:39
to twenty dollars a month so i have one do you yeah do you upload anything on google no but i i want to know what
00:02:45
features you get for that and you can like replace videos at the same url on vimeo and i was like that's a cool
00:02:50
feature it is and then i never use it yeah well do you use v you don't use vimeo at all not actively so like before
00:02:57
we go into this i just wanna vimeo did used to be kind of that uh it was like kind of what the pete the non-mainstream people wanted to use instead of youtube
00:03:07
and i was always one of those people do you remember google videos yes yes me and my friend uploaded everything to
00:03:13
google vimeo's or videos not youtube because you know i was that cool little rebel
00:03:18
kid that wanted to do everything different that bit me in the butt i do remember vimeo had its biggest heyday in
00:03:25
my memory as like the filmmakers youtube yeah basically everything i did in film school was
00:03:31
uploaded all the compression looked better oh yeah all the just the videos in general playing back on vimeo looked
00:03:37
better and that's where you'd find most people's like short film type projects yeah and then i also kind of felt like
00:03:43
as just like an internet user you go a little step further than that when youtube was really cracking down on copyrighted music when they used to not switch it they
00:03:54
used to just take all like the amount of ultimate videos i've created that all the music's gotten taken off of on
00:03:59
youtube was a lot so you would upload the vimeo vimeo became like the the place to upload copyrighted all of all of the steven's ultimate highlight reels that all feature i think taylor
00:04:11
swift songs are all on vimeo yeah yeah to me back then vimeo was the less popular youtube but copyrighted music and generally like you said better compression just better
00:04:24
looking videos so for like film students it worked really really well yeah so that's still i think what vimeo is to me
00:04:30
now because i haven't it hasn't been that relevant in my mind um since then i still go back and try and watch old
00:04:36
videos because some of the best old callahan videos used to be on vimeo that's exactly right yeah um
00:04:41
so going through this article by the way it's an article on the verge we'll put it in the show notes if you want everything but i kind of there are two
00:04:48
main examples in here that i wanted to bring up that really sh interest me and like was kind of
00:04:54
outstanding um it seems like vimeo has they also do business accounts um which are ranging from around i think 50 to 75 a month um so i think
00:05:06
they're pushing towards business stuff a lot but the last time though i really heard vimeo
00:05:12
at all really in like the last decade in terms of non-business but more creative side was jack conte did an interview
00:05:19
he's the ceo of patreon and he was talking about which i didn't realize all the videos uploaded on patreon are
00:05:26
actually through vimeo vimeo is just the default video hosting platform for patreon right um and
00:05:33
for some reason you don't know what patreon is website where you can pay monthly to support a creator and a lot of times they wind up
00:05:39
giving you exclusive access to something whether that's extra videos or q and a's that they make on the channel whether
00:05:45
they upload stuff early yep um but pretty much it's it's way smaller amount of people watching but you're paying to watch it so it's a great way to support creating and it's like a really nice like you can password protect individual
00:05:56
videos like you can make it yeah much more locked down than a youtube video so it's like it made sense yeah they built
00:06:02
that really well yeah it works so the like the partnership there when i heard about that seemed amazing to me because patreon is awesome
00:06:09
but it focuses more on how to support the creators and then vimeo does have all the upload capabilities
00:06:16
but not a lot of people use it so this felt like the perfect mesh to me yeah um but because of this mesh is where we're
00:06:22
seeing now this story develop which is essentially i guess vimeo is getting to the point
00:06:28
where to them these creators are using a lot more bandwidth they expected and they're charging the money problem is is
00:06:36
they're just kind of coming out of nowhere with these charges so the first example um so there's a user on patreon
00:06:41
who said they were paying 200 a year and um they were okay with that it's a pretty it's a good quality platform it works perfectly with patreon obviously they had 117 subscriber only videos each
00:06:53
of them averaging around 150 views and their most viewed video is 815. on march 11th vimeo sent her an invoice that said her bandwidth was within the
00:07:04
top one percent of vimeo users and that they wanted if she wanted to keep hosting her content on the site she'd need to upgrade to a custom plan quoted
00:07:12
at 3 500 a year and she was given one week to upgrade decrease her bandwidth or leave vimeo wait okay there's lots on facts yeah yeah wow okay a couple of things really stick out so to end up in
00:07:24
the top 1 of vimeo users 100 videos averaging 150 views put you in the top one what really that's all you have to do i don't even i kind of
00:07:36
don't believe i know vimeo is small but that scene yeah that's right that seems possible that seems like she's like watching
00:07:43
billions of hours of videos from one account like someone else has a login to her account and is just watching a
00:07:48
million things well this is just this is people watching her stuff like she's getting charged based on how many people
00:07:53
watch her content so that 3 500 for i mean i doubt the 117 videos were all in one year but 3 500 a year 150 views
00:08:06
average he's never broken a thousand which yeah for patreon those are great numbers like if you're thinking about somebody paying five bucks a pop for
00:08:12
each of those like right and then getting the cut that's fantastic um but the fact that they just give her one
00:08:18
week thirty five hundred dollars a year and or she can just leave video that that's pretty bad look and that's another one of those decisions we've talked about on the podcast before where you're like
00:08:30
as you are vimeo writing out this email you're like yeah this is gonna suck this is gonna this is gonna make a lot of
00:08:36
people really mad and there's gonna be a lot of articles written about how heartless this is but we gotta do what
00:08:41
we gotta do that's crazy three thousand dollars a year top one percent though just really
00:08:49
it can't mean that vimeo is doing great at least on the creative side i know nothing about their business side and i
00:08:54
just want to make that super clear here if they've been around for this long something over there is obviously doing okay
00:08:59
but the creative side of this that's brutal yeah i actually i feel like i get the b2b part of vimeo better
00:09:05
now than this weird attempt at charging creators that's crazy yeah so i mean and they were
00:09:11
charging a bit but she said she was paying 200 a year now going up to 3 500 a year which is probably more than
00:09:18
you made from the patreon videos that you were creating in the first place possibly i
00:09:23
don't know exactly how the math checks out or what their levels of everything were um but then there was the other
00:09:28
kind of bigger um example of this was do you know the youtube channel channel 5 it used to be
00:09:35
or it's the guy from all gas no breaks i believe oh no he's kind of like goes to a lot of big events a lot of
00:09:42
them political and kind of has like a funny news report interview style i guarantee you've seen some of the interviews he's done his name's andrew and he his stuff's really funny and his youtube
00:09:53
channel is huge he's got like it's a new channel ever since he's split and getting over a million subscribers
00:09:59
probably one to two million views a piece but he releases everything on patreon early
00:10:06
to a pretty big patreon uh audience so he the other day what i guess logged on to patreon
00:10:18
saw had 200 messages and lost 500 patrons and all of them were complaining that none of their content was there anymore so vimeo took hostage essentially of all of his
00:10:31
videos um and then told him for a two year plan he's gonna have to pay sixteen thousand dollars
00:10:37
to get his stuff now his stuff these are a lot more users a lot more people watching his videos are generally like
00:10:43
30 to 40 minutes so it clearly is way way more bandwidth yeah but 16 000 it's not even pay it now or you'll lose it it's it's gone i've already
00:10:56
basically pissed off all of your patrons and if you want it back here it is weird
00:11:02
backwards policy is that that's the strangest the thing is like when you're when you're signing up for patreon you
00:11:08
just think you're uploading to patreon's video player like you don't i'm so glad you said that he
00:11:15
when this happened he first contacted patreon and then when they told him vimeo was the one who did it he said i
00:11:21
don't know what that is he's just been default uploading to patreon the whole time exactly didn't know it was embedded
00:11:27
yeah that's how well they've plugged in is like it's really well integrated and that's why they went with vimeo but now
00:11:33
yeah people when vimeo makes a crazy change like this patreon looks terrible patreon
00:11:39
looks really bad in this unfortunately which it's a shame patreon's all i i really we
00:11:45
don't have a patreon but i really really like what they're doing and a way to help creators
00:11:50
so essentially luckily he understand he has all of the videos already they're also
00:11:55
all mostly on his youtube channel now because he was just releasing things early um
00:12:00
the problem is is he said his favorite part about patreon is having the more exclusive comments and reactions he
00:12:07
stuff he can read a little easier and if he gets rid of all these he loses all of that if he has to re-upload everything
00:12:14
he loses all the comments on old videos and stuff like that and everyone gets spammed on his patrons and he's lost
00:12:20
over 500 patrons right patrons so this is one of those there's another one that's head
00:12:25
scratching decisions do you think vimeo did the math and they were like yeah some people are going to pay and
00:12:31
this would be worth it oh 16 000 for what a two-year plan yeah so 8 000 a year god for what i mean what are you getting extra out of uploading to vimeo other
00:12:43
than maybe a couple special like obviously it's branded videos and certain privacy protections that vimeo offers and still maybe copyright music
00:12:54
protection but eight thousand dollars well i don't even know what they do with copyright stuff anymore because that was
00:12:59
old vimeo yeah i'm sure they're they're getting hit with that because twitch is getting hit really hard with that as well um it basically feels like the
00:13:06
password protection and youtube can embed into things just as easily it feels like if youtube added
00:13:12
password protection that because you can't just unlist a video and put it on patreon because then people can share
00:13:18
that link yeah you can also share everywhere yeah so it makes it much harder i mean
00:13:24
i didn't even think of this but yeah it feels like youtube could kind of squash this if they did a password protected or
00:13:29
account specific linked so this is the thing this is why youtube doesn't have to evolve as quickly is because they
00:13:37
don't have to do anything now vimeo is killing it all by themselves by deciding to now charge people eight thousand
00:13:43
dollars a year for a couple thousand views or whatever they're generating which is like yet
00:13:49
obviously the question of will youtube ever die will come from like a competitor that
00:13:54
comes up doesn't make those type of mistakes and eats youtube lunch in some type of way and does like probably
00:14:01
something better than what youtube does in order to actually convince people to switch because if you just built another youtube today even if it's feature for
00:14:08
feature for feature the same thing there's still no reason to switch it kind of reminds me of uh trying to get
00:14:14
people to switch like cell phone carriers a lot of people just don't want to switch they're like i don't know i
00:14:19
like my phone number my phone works fine you're offering me the same data plan but on a different carrier you have to
00:14:25
be better than what exists to get people to switch yes something has to be better and should that thing ever arrive it
00:14:32
will be so incredibly obvious that we'll have time to react to it and uh clearly
00:14:37
vimeo ain't it yeah i hate to like i hate to because vimeo does hold that old nostalgic
00:14:44
special place in my heart when i think of vimeo i think of uh like the will neff callahan video like one of my
00:14:49
favorites ever if you're an ultimate very glance one oh that's youtube still yeah i think he was youtube yeah it was
00:14:55
like just a couple years before him back in the like mama bird michigan glory days i mean not that they're not glory days i think a lot of oregon videos were on there yeah yeah so
00:15:07
sorry a little ultimate nerding here but yeah seems pretty brutal some of those prices were insane but i still think the most crazy part to me is averaging 150 views puts you in the top
00:15:19
one that is the craziest part of that to me i cannot i i mean if that's true if averaging 100 to 150 views or whatever
00:15:26
it is puts you in the top one percent imagine what the top one percent of youtube channels generate and what kind
00:15:32
of bandwidth that is that youtube's supporting yeah that is a massive difference crazy and that's also the
00:15:39
reason why i'm really interested to see where patreon goes in this step because vimeo doesn't seem to be that right that because if you're charging that much you kind of need those amount
00:15:50
of views on patreon to really you know be a full-time creator it helps a whole lot yeah but that means patreon is also
00:15:56
going to realize like wow we do have to like you still do have to hold that bandwidth and pay for that
00:16:02
bandwidth someone has to how are you making this split now and then how is this going to benefit
00:16:07
creators on patreon are you gonna start cutting into their resources really hard or
00:16:13
i don't know what's gonna happen yeah we'll see we'll keep an eye on this we'll see what what patreon does over time i'm sure we'll
00:16:18
link any update articles we find them in the show notes but we have to take a quick break and come back because we
00:16:24
want to talk about cameras for a little bit [Music] all right i have a new favorite tweet i need to share this with you this is great i i was i pinned this for waveform
00:16:42
because i want to talk about it and there's just so much here i tweeted actually probably like two three weeks
00:16:48
ago and a lot of people were like roasting me about it but i'm fine with it which is just that it seems like
00:16:54
75 of new smartphone presentations these days are just camera camera camera camera camera and that had a bunch of people going well all you ever talk about is a camera i wasn't complaining
00:17:05
i was just saying that's true that's one of the most they spent they'll go battery spec
00:17:11
screen camera feature camera feature camera feature camera features always at the end and they usually seem to end up
00:17:16
so much time on camera and it didn't always used to be this way so i just kind of tweeted that thought out there and then that was that yeah so sure
00:17:24
enough last week a tweet from a user named lee 94 josh showed up on my timeline where he actually went back and watched every single iphone keynote since the
00:17:37
first one and spent out and he actually counted how much time was spent talking about the
00:17:43
phone and how much of that time was specifically spent talking about the cameras and he graphed it all out yeah
00:17:50
and now i want to go through this because this is now real evidence that more and more time has been spent
00:17:56
talking about the cameras so i guess we can just start with the first apple event right the first apple event
00:18:02
was in 2007. it was kind of one of those iconic like massive things but i don't know if you remember
00:18:08
when we reviewed every single iphone the camera wasn't really a big feature on the iphone in the first few yeah so they
00:18:14
didn't have much to talk about well because if you think about it while smartphones were revolutionary and the iphone kind of revolutionized
00:18:20
smartphones camera there were cameras and phones before that like i had flip phones with cameras and
00:18:26
they were rough and they were rough to look at yeah just like a basic three megapixel webcam like nothing too crazy
00:18:32
like you could send a picture of like where you were to see yeah or you just like you know have a couple things to
00:18:38
scroll through on your flip phone but like they were there and the iphone didn't upgrade that at all that wasn't
00:18:44
the focus on the first iphone for sure for sure so the first iphone 2007 they spent 79 minutes talking about this new
00:18:50
revolutionary product to me that seems about right like they could spend an hour plus i'm honestly surprised not
00:18:56
more if it's your first product the first big product like that you're talking about it was good it was good
00:19:01
and for those 79 minutes they spent 10 seconds talking about the camera let's look at the back
00:19:07
on the back the biggest thing of note is we got a two megapixel camera built right in
00:19:15
the other side and we're back on the front sounds about right hey it has it has a camera on the back you can do x y
00:19:20
and z with it it's a good time moving on um that was 0.2 percent of the presentation if you move up all the way now to iphone 13 and 2021 they spent 33 percent
00:19:32
of the entire presentation on the camera that was a 42 minute presentation for the iphone which you know that's the 13
00:19:39
mini the 13 max 13 whatever yeah and yeah 14 of those minutes were spent talking about the camera that's not actually the highest the highest was in 2019 iphone 11
00:19:51
spent 35 but you can see clearly the last three years have been more than ever on the camera you kind of see like the little brackets of zero percent than
00:20:03
a bunch of teen percents and then a bunch of twenty percents and now the last three years or thirty percent yeah but even inside of this there's so many
00:20:10
interesting ones yeah if you're listening for audio right now i just i beg you come watch the video version of
00:20:15
just this part find the tweet at least yeah you can look at this graph it's fascinating uh okay my favorite one
00:20:22
is probably the iphone 3gs because it's it's the longest ever that they sorry the iphone 3g yeah longest they've ever spent in a
00:20:34
presentation talking just iphone it's the first iphone upgrade ever it's the 3g one you know they did a bunch of new
00:20:40
stuff a hundred minutes on presentations on presentation on the new iphone can you
00:20:46
imagine a hundred minutes on a on a new phone today and they spent three seconds
00:20:51
and that's one phone not four phones we're at four phones now and they're spending 40 minutes yeah there was no
00:20:57
mini plus to explain it's just one new phone a hundred minutes of talking about a new upgrade three seconds on the
00:21:04
camera yeah my favorite part we have a clip of those three seconds and we're gonna play it right now it's a generous
00:21:09
three seconds very the same gorgeous 3.5 inch display camera that was beautiful that was the whole that was the entire
00:21:23
thing i think the context of it is they're pretty much just going through like what's on the camera yeah or sorry
00:21:29
what's on the iphone yeah um but yeah very generous i i think some of my favorite things to look at here are
00:21:36
looking at the differences between two years adjacent to each other so like there's
00:21:42
kind of some big jumps and then usually in those jumps you can find the thing like what the upgrade was and why they
00:21:48
were so impressed and like wanted to talk that much more about it so like you went from the 3g to the 3gs
00:21:55
which was 3 seconds to four minutes and 30 seconds like that is a huge jump you went from .05 percent to 25
00:22:03
yeah of the entire although the 3gs was only an 18 minute presentation i believe
00:22:08
was that wwdc that yeah yeah so 3gs was the first ever s upgrade so you can imagine all right it's only an 18 minute presentation like we don't have a ton to say because it's the same design but
00:22:20
there's a few key things in this new design that are upgraded one of them was this was the first ever camera upgrade i
00:22:26
think it went from two megapixels to five uh something like that i think yeah it looks like most of
00:22:33
them were at five because then the first big jump was from the 4 to the 4s s we did a graph we have a graph of this when i reviewed every iphone oh did we no i didn't yeah
00:22:45
let me pull up that graph too so we reviewed every iphone and at the end we had all these great
00:22:51
charts and if you've seen that video then you've seen those charts one of them was uh iphone megapixel count over
00:22:58
the years oh yeah and let me just see if i can fast forward yeah found it and they had a yup
00:23:05
two megapixel camera for the first two iphones and then the 3gs was the first ever upgrade
00:23:10
and it went to a three megapixel camera boom that one megapixel warranted an extra four minutes of talking about the camera so exactly but it's it's the one like it's an s update so there's not a
00:23:22
lot new yeah so yeah only things they changed i think were speed it was a new processor
00:23:28
camera it was an upgraded camera and so you have to talk about that for 25 of the presentation yeah um there's a
00:23:37
it seems like megapixel bumps seem to be where we see a lot of these spikes so from the 4 to the 4s they doubled the
00:23:43
time they talked about the cameras from 4 minutes to 8 minutes and they also happened to bump the camera up to 8 megapixels that year then they did
00:23:49
another bump from the 6 to the 6x um that was 8 to 12 but the selfie camera went from 1.2 megapixel to 5 megapixels so that was the thing i was going to mention about
00:24:00
4s that was the first ever selfie camera yes so they had to spend time talking about face time and like what you can do
00:24:07
with a front-facing camera but 3gs to 4 they spent less time they went down in time talking about the cameras so maybe they focused more on talking about what was that what was that
00:24:19
new design yeah four was like okay now we're up to 52 minutes again talking about all this new this is the the
00:24:26
biggest like new looking iphone yeah so percentage-wise they talked way less about it but even in just pure time
00:24:34
spoken in the 3gs 4 minutes 30 seconds in the iphone 4 with a whole new camera a selfie camera first time yeah they spent 30 less seconds talking about it i think that's the most fascinating yeah
00:24:45
decrease and then while adding something so that that just seems to stand out to me a lot
00:24:51
and then yeah the longest ever was iphone 11 20 minutes talking about just camera which is long
00:24:57
massive 20 minutes just about camera so do you remember what 11 was though um 11 so we got the ultrawide for the first time yes but there was also that's deep
00:25:09
fusion too right and remember how long they talked about that for it to not even come out yeah to
00:25:14
be a small update yeah later in a software there is a very long there's there's two main big camera like
00:25:21
features i remember them talking about that took way longer in the explanation that i feel like warranted and that was
00:25:26
deep fusion and cinematic mode both of those had like insanely long extra pieces to the camera with examples and like low light shots
00:25:37
and focus racking yep yep and i can't tell you a single person that i know even in the tech world right now that is like i love deep fusion or i love cinematic mode or
00:25:50
it's for how much time they spend with it it doesn't seem like people care i'm just happy somebody actually went
00:25:55
through and charted all this stuff because i had the thought and actually i had the thought because i was watching i
00:26:01
think i was in a briefing or some meeting where they were going over a phone and i think this ratio is even higher
00:26:08
with some other companies i think it might have been either a oneplus or a xiaomi phone or something like that
00:26:13
where i think it was over half i think clearly easily over half of the presentation was
00:26:19
camera because they didn't have a whole lot of new stuff it was like here's a snapdragon 8gen one it's fast it cools
00:26:25
we have a higher fresh rate screen and fast charging again camera feature camera feature low light camera video
00:26:32
camera high res mode cinematic mode portrait mode like they wanted to go over all the ai stuff all the color
00:26:38
they've been doing tons and tons of camera features and i was like this is it at least was 75 of the slides i'll put it that way so yeah this is this is
00:26:49
what differentiates smartphones at the highest level they're all pretty fast they all have pretty good screens i i would love to see with all the phones taken into account
00:27:01
all the presentations taken into account who was the longest like who's this the longest and
00:27:06
then who spent the most percentage-wise on one because i do feel like i remember somewhere it feels like they're only i
00:27:13
don't think it's one plus because oneplus also likes to focus on charging so much i just remember when they did the hasselblad thing that was a lot they
00:27:19
had to do so much camera stuff they talked about hasselblad they talked about what the partnership meant the
00:27:24
helicopter and all this camera camera camera even if they're not showing examples they're just talking about hasselblad and camera
00:27:31
stuff and then samsung like 100x space zoom they had um who were the who are the two guys that were like up by the bridge in san francisco like yeah the demo with the 100s yeah like they do all
00:27:42
those crazy demos and and it seems like it's focusing almost more on all the it's kind of a shame because it's
00:27:48
focusing more on these like collaborations they do to attempt to show it off but it just turns into more of like a commercial and less about
00:27:55
actually the camera and how normal people are using it um yeah but there's a reason
00:28:01
there's a people say this a lot to us too why do tech reviewers focus so much on the camera and because
00:28:07
honestly it's it's the biggest gap you can see between vlogs and the biggest thing
00:28:12
every single person who uses that phone whether you're a huge tech head or a completely average joe user like you're
00:28:19
going to be like this camera looks better every time you buy a new phone you'll be like oh my goodness these pictures are so much better yeah that's
00:28:26
nice that's really what it comes down to for me the biggest difference in phones in battery life will be like
00:28:32
either oh yeah i can kill this one in a day or yeah this one has pretty good battery life it'll last you longer than
00:28:38
a day yeah the biggest difference between speaker quality is what like ah this one's not that loud oh this one's nice and rich okay great but the difference in cameras is like that's one feature
00:28:49
that pretty much everyone uses at some point on their phone a lot of people are like i have kids i want to be able to
00:28:55
remember these like moments i it to have a good camera and if it has a bad camera it's going to ruin my whole phone
00:29:00
experience and some just don't have good cameras some are just not good for that type of thing and some are better at it
00:29:07
some are really good at it and that's a really meaningful thing to a lot of people i remember my my five pillars of a great
00:29:12
smartphone for me as a reviewer i narrowed down to five yeah it was performance battery software camera
00:29:21
and build quality basically and like even as a reviewer if it's only five i think for
00:29:27
a normal person they're like i'm gonna get this new phone i need to have a good battery good screen good camera it's
00:29:32
just three and it probably has to be an iphone for most people but like that's software so three or four things so yeah
00:29:39
if it narrows down three or four things then those things are gonna get the most air time and it turns out the camera is
00:29:44
probably number one and i think the fact that we are reviewing dozens and dozens of of phones every
00:29:51
single year and they're still seeing these big differences in cameras when you think of the average person upgrading two or three years down the
00:29:57
line that camera jump is gonna be the biggest jump they encounter when they upgrade i claire usually
00:30:04
i upgrade her with a phone that's like two years old every year and every time she gets she's like i can't believe how
00:30:10
good this camera is she takes pictures and she's like this looks so good like i'm so happy with this and she's using
00:30:16
like an s10 right now and is still amazed at the camera that's one of the funny things about like the way phones
00:30:23
have gotten better is if you look at a phone six years ago when it first came out we
00:30:30
were all like does the battery last a whole day yeah good six years later does the battery last a
00:30:35
whole day yeah okay good it's like the battery capacity had to change massively inside the phone to achieve the same goal yeah and then same thing with like speakers
00:30:46
like the screens are bigger and they look much better than six years ago but if you show someone a
00:30:52
photo from a camera from six years ago from like an iphone 6 versus a 13 it is a dramatic difference especially video all this stuff that is consistently true
00:31:03
about these things i go back and watch our old videos all the time and it's like it'll be videos raving about the
00:31:09
camera and i look at it and it's like like it looks so foggy yeah did you clean that lens off before
00:31:14
you took that picture yeah exactly speaking you know before we switch to our next topic here of new phones
00:31:21
i know it's turned into kind of a meme here with my pixel 4 xl but i finally bought a new phone i was really hoping
00:31:27
it would get here before today's episode so i could show it off but which one did you order i'm not gonna say that i'm gonna let people guess
00:31:33
uh i because i have talked about wine basically every single phone uh let's see guess in the comments guess on twitter i'd like to know what you guys think you wanna do you talked highly of a lot of do you wanna leave it
00:31:44
open-ended or do you want to do multiple choice give people pull on twitter yeah we could do a poll
00:31:50
we could do paul i think there's a couple i've talked about um that that will narrow it down enough but i'd like
00:31:56
to know what people think i would be very interested in and it's totally not the one you got
00:32:01
that's i'm very curious now you see what people say it's at the point where i feel like people just whenever they like
00:32:07
tweet at me they just have to mention that i'm still using a pixel for it yeah and it'd just be like okay buy the next
00:32:13
episode we'll know by the next episode we'll know hopefully the fedex tracking has moved like one state
00:32:19
in like four days so i'm not that confident about it but all right let's take a quick break when we come back
00:32:26
i'm just gonna rant about a new ev yes yeah [Music] all right we're back welcome to the ev section of wave form yeah no look i so this is a
00:32:47
video we've been sort of working on in the background for a while because i have a lot of thoughts on this but about like
00:32:53
the ev car space and how uncertain and weird it is amplified by the chip shortage amplified by the fact that evs are hard to make and cars in general are just a crazy
00:33:07
market to be in right now but like trying to order any v today is crazy the the actual experience of like there's an announcement is it real will i get it if i order it should i
00:33:19
pre-order it's a hundred bucks to reserve my place in line will it ever have like there's so many weird
00:33:24
questions the 100 refundable thing is still baffling to me and you know we talked about rivian we've talked about the the f-150 lightning you can get in line the cyber truck like how long
00:33:35
that's been on order and then you look as far back as like i i technically ordered a tesla roadster
00:33:41
in 2017 and that's still not out yet and then there's the faraday futures of the world and it's just like i don't know
00:33:48
what is even coming out anymore it's confusing confusing it is and then today i opened up instagram uh at like nine in
00:33:55
the morning it was way too early for this and i got an ad for this electric car company that i've never heard of which is not uncommon but
00:34:06
it was actually just straight up asking me to invest in the company in an instagram ad yeah can you read what it
00:34:11
said on there um but it was just a picture of a pickup truck and it said uh our reg a plus
00:34:20
funding round is closing soon invest in atlas motor company atlas motor vehicles today and don't forget to check out
00:34:26
bonus benefits and incentives yeah and also just to like paint the picture a little better it's a photo of a pickup
00:34:33
truck with like if you know whenever cars are kind of testing new models they have like the white and black camo wrap
00:34:40
on it so it's a black and white camo wrap but the car is as boxy and like simple as you can imagine it so you can tell every single line on it as well but yeah yeah so like a camo wrapped truck
00:34:53
asking you to invest in an instagram ad with like 90 likes on it yeah if you click on it or google the company you can go to their website where they say
00:35:04
they make they're going to make an electric vehicle platform that you can put all sorts of vehicles on they're starting with a pickup truck called the xt
00:35:15
500 mile range blah blah blah right at the top there's a big red invest button oh yeah and this is just this is the perfect like summary
00:35:26
of all the different ev like things that i've seen over the years here look they even show you here's how much money
00:35:31
we've raised how many investors we have uh first of all you can make one where do i even start okay let me just start with this tesla changed the game pretty seriously
00:35:43
okay like the the dealership method where if you wanted to go buy a car what did you do you went to a dealership you
00:35:49
had it a little bit you bought the car from the dealership not directly from the company so tesla changes the game a
00:35:54
little bit they go direct to consumer they sell cars online and in order to have people buy cars online but not
00:36:02
necessarily just buy them willy nilly and then cancel they go okay there's a hundred dollar reservation fee then
00:36:08
we'll build your car and then you can get it and pay full price when you pick it up that was like the old way of doing it it's still a
00:36:15
hundred dollar reservation i think there's still i think it's 100 for a model three because i remember
00:36:21
when the cyber truck came out it was like the hundred dollar refundable reservation fee and that's the first
00:36:26
time i remember that i think even today it might be a thousand or 500 just to know that people are serious it's like a deposit right exactly
00:36:33
to get your spot online they will start building the car to your order and then when it's done you can pick it up and
00:36:39
pay the full price there and is that refundable or not it's not refundable okay i think that's the difference some
00:36:44
of them are i think this one cyber truck is is refundable generally a deposit is non-refundable yeah i don't know if this
00:36:50
one's refundable or not but it is just to keep people from just ordering tons of stuff for no reason right
00:36:56
um so then we got used to like this online reservation of getting your spot in line for an ev
00:37:03
and then tesla kept doing it they did it with model s they've done it with now trucks and cars that haven't shipped yet still years later so they did it with
00:37:13
actually here's the crazy one the roadster yeah a lot of people don't know this but the tesla roadster
00:37:18
is going to be a base 250 000 car right but if you want to order a tesla roadster you'd have to send them 5 000 reservation fee and then within 10
00:37:32
days send them 45 000 more dollars to secure your place in line yep so it's one fee
00:37:39
just to get your name down and then another fee which is a part of the price of the car
00:37:44
to get your name like locked in place not refundable and then you play the rest when you get
00:37:51
it unless you're the worst yeah even worse the founders edition which is one of the
00:37:56
first thousand we don't really know too many other details about the founders edition roadster but the founders edition the colors the different red
00:38:02
right slightly different rich sure uh which is 250 grand is five thousand dollar deposit to get your name down and then within ten days the entire rest of the two hundred fifty
00:38:14
thousand dollars so you pay 245 000 more dollars to get your spot in line to be one of the first thousand tesla
00:38:20
roadsters here's the fun fact that was in 2017 when they rolled it off the truck and they've been selling those out ever
00:38:26
since but let's say you ordered on day one within 10 days you put down your quarter a million dollars if you put that same
00:38:33
quarter million dollars anywhere else you would have made money off of it but instead you just gave tesla
00:38:39
an interest-free loan of 250 000 if you'd put that money in tesla stock for example i think we calculated that would be worth something like three and a half million dollars right now
00:38:51
i think from being that long ago yeah it's uh unbelievable it's a crazy amount of money so you know there's all these
00:38:57
companies that are seeing how well this pre-order method works it's good for cyber truck for example it's really good
00:39:04
for showing interest demonstrating interest in the product and for attracting investors in general
00:39:10
so when you get to say hey we made one really cool ev paraded it around and attracted a thousand reservations it's kind of like shark tank you're like oh so you just need the money to make it
00:39:21
now right and then you go out and make the thing but so many of these companies just
00:39:26
haven't made the thing they just don't make the thing so they just take all the money parade it around make one really cool ev
00:39:34
which is the easiest part parade it around get as many reservations as possible from regular
00:39:39
people parade that number around get as much investor money as possible and then disappear
00:39:45
faraday future lordstown motors maybe friday's not gone but that's basically what happened
00:39:52
and it is very very rare that one actually makes enough money in that parading the car around stage to
00:39:58
actually make the car yeah that's why it's so rare we got like rivien is new we got lucid as new and then some others i checked out around the same time took a long time
00:40:10
though it took a long time and they're just starting to ship riven took a long time they're only shipping 25 000 cars
00:40:16
next year like it's very hard to scale up a car company and ask tesla they're the last ones to do it
00:40:22
at scale but yeah it's crazy how many like of these we're starting well and i think knowing
00:40:28
that is what made this specific atlas vehicle like very very strange to us because it's like i we had never heard of this and we're pretty i mean if you listen to waveform
00:40:40
we talk about any ev news possible because it's interesting and it's like it's the it's the big thing going on
00:40:46
right now it's what's changing in technology and evs are big and i'd never heard of this company and the first time we're seeing
00:40:53
it is in an instagram ad to invest in it not even to buy the truck they're just straight to like yes all right we're crowdfunding exactly like you've never heard this invest in us now it says
00:41:04
they've raised 5 million with 3 500 investors interesting um but i've heard absolutely
00:41:10
nothing from this and actually i just realized do you see what the url for this is atlas motor vehicles.com oh oh
00:41:17
okay i'm in a different part i guess it's invest in alice.com oh it does take it yeah yeah so here's so here's the
00:41:24
formula right so i've narrowed it down this is the exact formula of making billions of dollars
00:41:29
step one make a nice drawing of an ev something that would sell a lot a render yeah something if you got to make up some features if you have to do it like a drone that flies out of the back yeah draw on the flies out of the
00:41:41
back something crazy just make it look nice step two design a whole web page around that one really cool ev it
00:41:48
doesn't have to be real just make a nice looking web page for it step three get enough money
00:41:54
this is the hard part to make one of them just one make a really nice like you don't doesn't matter how much you spend on it just make one really nice ev parade that car around to as many people
00:42:08
as possible put on an event send people to the webpage and make sure you have a big red reserve button on
00:42:16
that webpage at some point make people able to pay i don't know 100 bucks whatever just get people in get people in the door hitting the reserve button
00:42:28
when you get a bunch of people that have seen wow this one uv you made that's a great idea and it's totally real and
00:42:34
then they go to the webpage and they see look at all these other cool features it's gonna have it's totally real they'll totally reserve right
00:42:40
step i don't know what are we on three or four it feels like some like scam classic yeah no next step is
00:42:48
take that number of reservations and parade it around to people with billions of dollars look at what we just
00:42:54
did we have this great idea they don't know if it's real or not we have this great truck we only made one but it
00:42:59
doesn't matter and we're gonna make so much money if we can just make like millions of these trucks
00:43:06
whatever ev and get them to invest in your company so you can tell them that you're going
00:43:11
to build a factory and scale up production and really make this thing for real tell as many of them as possible get as much money as possible and step 5 is good luck with the rest which
00:43:23
is if you can actually build the factory and the tools in the factory and the robots and everything and hire all these
00:43:29
people and engineers and maybe even poach them from other failed companies and put them all together and stir hard
00:43:34
enough maybe you can ship a couple more of these things um but yeah we've seen so many examples
00:43:39
of this i mean lordstown basically followed this exact formula as far as i can tell yeah one thing i
00:43:45
this is one thing i found really funny when we were like looking into this video is some of these websites just
00:43:51
feel like they don't even care like the lordstown website it's weird the photography is
00:43:57
atrocious the website is terrible there's like 50 different fonts but they just have to make it look like a good product it doesn't look like a good
00:44:03
product button no the product looks cool okay the website doesn't look great but the product oh if it was real they'll be
00:44:09
so sick all the pictures are taken with like an iphone se in the dark and nothing is like level it's just brutal
00:44:17
like you look at something like that as just somebody who anyone who uses e-commerce shops and you look at it and
00:44:23
just think there's no way this is how little they care about the presentation of it and if you've got a bigger car that's all you need i guess um i kind of want to talk about because
00:44:34
one thing you mentioned was like give it a bunch of features and you need features to stand out yep and this atlas
00:44:40
car has some wild claims just promise the world then if you get enough money you can hire
00:44:45
engineers who will figure it out yeah but it doesn't have to be this is like more than prom how long does it take you
00:44:51
if you wanted to charge your tesla right now from one to a hundred all the way to a hundred uh honestly possible 45. this
00:44:58
claims it can do it in 15 minutes cool yeah great that's for sure that's just like at that point you're just lying i feel like i just i mean we're gonna we're gonna hire engineers though
00:45:09
with all the money from your investment man like listen i hope they can get to 15 minutes and what's crazy
00:45:15
15 minutes is four or five times longer than it takes to gas up a vehicle so you're still not
00:45:21
quite at that time but this is claiming zero to a hundred fifteen minutes any conditions it should
00:45:28
be fast affordable and consistent all the time i bet it should be but yeah just yeah and everyone has a slightly different take on it like lordstown was going to do trucks this atlas company
00:45:40
every time by the way anytime i ever talk about these companies some one of them reaches out like oh can we talk more about it i'm just telling you right
00:45:46
now i'm not interested until you ship something so i'm just i'm not but this company says they're going to do an
00:45:52
eevee platform so they can build a bunch of different bodies on top really interesting similar to what canoe
00:45:57
was trying to do and more and like a fleet version and this is fleet as well i kind of like this they're taking the eevee
00:46:04
skateboard wheel design letting you build something on top of it because almost all evs have that similar design
00:46:11
great idea um i think that part in itself is really cool but then like talking about 15-minute battery charging
00:46:17
and just like some of the things they're promising on here seem wild when at the same time you're buying instagram ads to invest into the company that just seems like such a reach i
00:46:30
would love this desperate move i would love to see one of these go on shark tank
00:46:35
and try to explain themselves actually i would really love that because then you'd have to see how
00:46:41
investors yeah you'd have to have the like you'd roll out the one truck you made you better look at this product it's going to change the world but wait
00:46:48
it's not just a product mr wonderful it's a licensing deal because we make the platform and we can sell this
00:46:54
platform to anyone who wants to electrify their cars it's a great idea and they go oh what's the market size
00:46:59
for this it's cars it's a bajillion dollar market they've got all this prep they've got this beautiful website and
00:47:06
by the way we've got 10 000 people who have already reserved one we just need your money to invest to start making
00:47:12
this thing right now and the mr wonderful goes all right well how many sales do you have i'm like well we haven't actually made any yet but we
00:47:18
have a lot of reservations and a lot of interest and then you go all right well how much
00:47:24
money do you need and they go uh 50 billion dollars yeah and they go oh probably one percent in the cup yeah
00:47:30
we need a lot more money than than you're willing to invest right now yeah and i just want to make it clear like
00:47:36
all of these zv companies i hope succeed i would like all of them to succeed almost often oh yeah oh wow okay
00:47:43
someone's got a bit more of a gripe going then but like it just feels like it's hurting
00:47:48
oh man i don't know if i even want to say that but just like don't know this website itself just feels kind of like a
00:47:53
slap in the face to some of the other ones and i hope they're developing technology to make a 15. like
00:47:59
you've got a couple really cool things here crazy fast charging battery you have a
00:48:05
platform that you can design different types of trucks on to meet the needs of the fleets you have and stuff like that great idea all of those ideas are really
00:48:11
cool but like when you say all of them are coming together and just a giant button to just invest money in it
00:48:17
without seeing much is feels i think sketchy at best the reason i i'm like trying to package all these thoughts into one video and like hey maybe it's a waveform clip right now but we'll figure
00:48:29
this out yeah but like i do think it kind of does hurt the potential of a lot of the the industry in general like when it gets so sketchy to try to
00:48:40
decide what to buy we've had people come by at work like when we have the rivien out and we're shooting it people are
00:48:46
like that's the thing that's the rivien i want one i actually already have an order in i wonder when i'll get one
00:48:53
and i'm like i i can't tell you when you're gonna get it maybe someday soon and at least we have one here but that situation is a lot worse for some other ones i made a video about the faraday
00:49:04
feature knowing what i know now i would definitely have hesitated to make that video like we saw the lucid air five
00:49:10
years ago and it's finally just starting to ship how many others are we gonna point a camera at that never happened
00:49:15
lucid air was like full basically almost fully working prototype that we drove in
00:49:21
and to us we're like okay this is a step further because that was the year after faraday feature i believe i started the
00:49:27
ces after you saw the faraday future and i thought it was really cool and then we're like oh man we haven't seen much
00:49:32
and it was pretty bare bones oh but here's the lucid this has like we're gonna drive in it and the only thing didn't
00:49:38
really work was like the air conditioning or something yeah so we thought it was right around the corner i thought they were about to ship and
00:49:44
that's the thing like and i bet elon said basically a version of this before but like
00:49:49
yeah making the first one is easy so the fact that they had a really good single working prototype for us to drive in
00:49:56
it's a good sign which means hey you can source parts build motors make a nice interior fit and finish is like cool to
00:50:02
see that type of stuff great you hired the right people to make that one but the hard part is making a million of
00:50:08
them and the gap between making that one really good and and mass producing in a
00:50:15
way that can sustain a company is huge it's gargantuan so that's that would be my point of the video is trying to highlight like what this
00:50:26
stuff does to people's minds when they start seeing so many of them that they don't know what's real anymore yeah it
00:50:33
uh and just like to reiterate here these are just our opinions quickly like uh we don't know
00:50:39
much about this company maybe they do great i'm sure they wouldn't be happy about saying all this but like but like
00:50:46
this is just what we're seeing in our thoughts when we pay attention to this all the time and
00:50:51
it's getting to the point where it feels weird i guess and we just want to try and put our thoughts out on that um it's funny i see so many new ones this is the other thing i want to probably include
00:51:03
is there's a difference between a new company promising an eevee and an existing company promising uv because at least that existing company is already mass
00:51:15
producing cars yeah so we feel like we have some basis to go by like okay we know what their fitness finish will be like we know how many they'll be able to make like it seems like they've got a
00:51:25
good head start rather than like trying to crowdfund from zero into ford exactly
00:51:31
i mean like i know we've talked about this before and i think both of us kind of wonder which side's the better option
00:51:37
for this because you have tesla who created a great product and all the super beneficial things of ev and smart
00:51:45
car and driving and all that together but manufacturing is what they really had to learn and they're still really
00:51:51
working on that where you have someone like ford who has the mustang or the the maki and and stuff like that who has production down pat i mean like it's
00:52:01
like the pinnacle of production but then they're used to gas powered the ev smart
00:52:06
stuff like that they're not a software company it's it's so which one of those is going to catch up
00:52:11
to the other side first where are they going to cross paths and then kind of equalize um but then starting from new
00:52:17
is just the whole when you don't have the experience on either end yeah it's a lot harder and i get it it's hard yeah i
00:52:24
mean i sort of put a bit a pin on this i made a video a while ago i think it was called like dear tesla competitors or something
00:52:30
like that i think it might have been around the riviera it might have just been like dear evs or something something like that but basically what
00:52:36
you just said like okay tesla's here poor manufacturing great ev tech and then and like ideas
00:52:43
trending towards getting better manufacturing exactly and then you have the like fords of and mercedes of the
00:52:49
world who can manufacture a car trying to get better at the ev thing and when do they meet in the middle and
00:52:55
get better at the thing they're bad at and what does that look like do you think that mercedes and ford will get to
00:53:00
be a really good software company an ev company first or do you think tesla will
00:53:06
get to be a really good manufacturing company first yeah i don't know what's harder i don't know what's more or less
00:53:11
realistic but that's the the thing that we're watching that's a fascinating thing yeah so uh i wanna i wanna actually recommend a piece of content to watch i haven't done this in a while yeah it's a youtube
00:53:23
video jason kamisa he's one of my favorite car video hosts ever he does a really great job uh and he just reviewed the lucid air okay super oh that was that really i've been tagged in that
00:53:36
video so many times just haven't gotten a minute to watch it it's a great video he compares it to the mercedes
00:53:42
like s-class obviously and we did get a chance to look at the eqs which is sort of a similar in class but he's like look
00:53:48
the lucid is built by a startup redesigning evs from the ground up like same dimensions of a car but it has a front trunk because mercedes just puts stuff in the front and doesn't have a front trunk like watch that video not
00:54:00
only is it super well done but it shines a light on the difference between the lucids and startups of the world and the
00:54:05
mercedes of the world that we're talking about all the time so that's a good one i think this is just like this rant
00:54:11
turned into more of a rant than i was expecting even though the our document literally just has the website title and
00:54:17
rant um but like i think that's proof we've been working on this video for a little bit hopefully it comes out pretty soon
00:54:23
but every time we seem to take one step deeper into like learning about this we just have more questions it's like quicksand yeah it really has been like that so uh thanks everyone for listening
00:54:34
this was a pretty unscripted ending here that went all over the place so if you're confused
00:54:39
rightfully so same but i hope you stuck around for it yeah that's it video soon hopefully yeah look
00:54:47
out for it catch you guys next week peace waveform is produced by adam molina we
00:54:52
are partnered with vox media and our intro outro music was created by vayne silva [Music]
00:54:57
please leave that in please leave that in [Music] you