Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Chances are your favorite websites used to depend on Google for traffic and money. But that's not really working anymore. Now publishers are scrambling for new lifelines. Neil Vogel, who runs People Inc., says his company figured it out a couple years ago. You would think, given what everyone said about us, that we would be the guys that would be doing the worst now.
We're kind of the guys doing the best now. I'm Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, the show about tech and media and what happens when they collide. You can hear my conversation with Neil Vogel now, wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.
The Mark 6? Yeah, remember they went up in price this year.
Yeah, they're hella expensive. For headphones that sound like the music is coming out of a bee's a**hole. I remember when they were like $330, then they were $350.
I want the folly for that.
That is not what they sound like, Alex. That's like the engine. Yeah, it's like...
what is up people of the internet welcome back to another episode of the waveform podcast we're your hosts i'm marquez i'm andrew i'm david and welcome to techtember everything is happening wait a second hold on oh it's it's tarch hold on it's march it's not It's tarch? Did you say Jono's been trying to get tarch going? It's the start of tarch. We don't claim tarch.
I don't know what you're talking about. Mac? I don't like that. It's like Christmas in July, but Techtember in March. Yeah, it's a lot. So we're working on the S26 Ultra review, and then Apple drops six new products, nothing drops, three new products, and suddenly we just have a lot on our plate. And also we've got to talk a little bit more about AI and how it's affecting reviews.
So this might be a six-hour episode. That's what I'm trying to say. It's rough because it's Thursday. Yeah, we're shooting it on Thursday too. Don't threaten me with a good time. Yeah, make sure you get subscribed because we have a lot to talk about. So if we don't get to all of it this week, we'll probably get to more of it next week.
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Chapter 2: What new Apple products were announced this week?
That's really impressive. Well, he's an After Effects guy, so he's Command-S all the time. Now when she does want to move it, one, she'll just be like, Command-S, S, S, S, S, S, S. It's like 10 spaces over.
At least she's saving it and making sure it doesn't crash. I have a great segue because the video that Apple played for the beginning of their event, and that's now on their YouTube channel, was really, really good, which is why I'm so sure they didn't use motion. So good. It's really good. It's really good. So Apple dropped a little, we had a week-long event.
Chapter 3: How does AI impact reviews in tech?
Oh, I guess we haven't talked about any of this. So we had Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Monday we got iPhone 17E, if I'm remembering correctly. Tuesday we got MacBook Pro, M5 Pro, M5 Max. Oh, Tuesday, yeah, yeah. And Studio Display and Studio Display XDR. Monday we also got iPad Air with M4. Oh, I forgot about those. It's been a week. And there's new crossbody strap colors. Two of them.
And then Wednesday we got the... And then Wednesday we got MacBook Neo. Oh wait, Tuesday we also got the M5 MacBook Air. Did we? Yes. I know. Yeah, the things that just got spec bumps are obviously less interesting to talk about. Yeah, I feel like we can skip those pretty quick. M5 MacBook Air, it's the MacBook Air, but with M5. Yeah. And Wi-Fi 7. Okay. There's other things. Oh. Okay, never mind.
I mean, it's mostly just like they started at 512 gigs of base storage now. Sure. That's pretty awesome.
And it goes up to 4 terabytes instead of 2. 2x faster read and write speeds, which is pretty awesome. Supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6. $100 more expensive than the base M4 Air, so that's not great, but at least it starts at double the storage.
Sorry, and you may have kind of answered that, but I missed it. It's 512 base storage, but the price has gone up? Yes. Is it the same price as the old 512 base storage?
It's 100%. So it is more expensive than the baseline M4, but for the same storage tier, it's actually $100 cheaper than you would have gotten on the M4 MacBook Air.
Good.
So it is like a better deal.
And for a lot of people, the MacBook Air is going to be the better option anyway, which we will get to the Neo in a bit. But yeah. And then, like you said, M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros, that's kind of a big deal because we didn't have M5 Pro or M5 Max of anything yet. Right. So. Those are going to be way better for AI tasks, et cetera. And video editing. Video editing.
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Chapter 4: What are the key features of the new MacBook Neo?
We didn't know about it technically. Marques told us last week.
Marques did not tell me.
about i asked earlier the podcast i left it in the editor he did ask is there a 4a pro and i was like yeah probably yeah he said yeah but i thought you were just speculating me too why are you hiding from us mark i only say what i'm allowed to say earlier this week i said hey i need to i'm writing podcasts can you send me the 4a specs so i can write it down you're like sure
And didn't send the Pro or the headphones?
Well, I didn't get the 4A Pro info. That was the thing. So the event was in London, the literal hours after the Apple event in New York.
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Chapter 5: Why did the hosts miss the Nothing 4A Pro launch?
So I couldn't physically be at both. So I made the decision to see the six Apple devices in New York, and I wasn't able to teleport to London fast enough to also see the 4A Pro. Bummer. Dude, what's wrong with you? Yeah, I couldn't. I actually looked. I was like, is there a flight that takes off and gets me there at like 3 o'clock in the morning so I can just show up and make a video.
But no, there were no flights I could make that happen.
That boom plane.
We're cutting that. Why?
Because that's not f***ing real. We talked about it though. It's true. That s*** is not coming out. Are you kidding? That's why we couldn't take it.
That's why we couldn't fly on it. That's true. But yeah. So anyway, this stuff was sort of held in London for us to see from those who are actually there with cameras. Yeah. And it looks pretty good.
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Chapter 6: What are the key features of the Nothing Phone 4A Pro?
The specs also look pretty good. So the 4A Pro, again, it's a 4A Pro, not a full flagship. It's not a 4. So because it's a 4A Pro, it's got a Snapdragon 7 Gen 4 chip. I'm going to kill myself. I think this is just them coping that it's like, hey, if you want to put a mid-range chip in this, you can't call it a flagship. If this was a Snapdragon 8 Elite, then they could call it a flagship.
But since it's not, all right, we have to call it the A Pro instead of the flagship. Fine. Yeah. So Snapdragon 7 Gen 4, 6.83-inch AMOLED. It's a 120-hertz display, but it will sometimes get to 144 hertz, depending on the app, kind of similar to some other gaming phones have. 5,000-nit peak brightness, which means nothing to me. 5,000 milliampere battery, 50-watt charging, triple cameras again.
Better cameras, though, than the 4A. And better looking. It's got the glyph on the back.
Chapter 7: How do the hosts evaluate the new Nothing headphones?
It's got the nothing phone 3 little display thing.
Yeah, in a better way. So like if you haven't seen it yet, it is an all metal body, which is awesome.
Beautiful.
Except for wireless charging because it doesn't have that because it can't. Oh, I didn't even think of that. Yeah. Poo poo. It has like a large camera bump similar to an iPhone in terms of footprint. But this is proof that you can do that like everyone else and make it unique because this is actually sweet. Essentially one main camera top left corner. Dual camera, what are we calling them again?
Pills? It's a pill. The pill? The bean. The bean. We got a bean, a double camera bean under that horizontally. Then to the right of that, a large circle glyph interface, which I believe has 137 mini LEDs. It's 57% larger and twice as bright compared to the phone 3 glyph interface. Wow. Yeah.
and we still have the red recording led on it because that should be on every single phone ever yes but then encased in that is a full metal silver pink or black body yeah it looks great it also has the like hooking over there it looks has like the little circular like indent on the bottom that matches the new uh pixel buds i or uh sorry not pixel nothing nothing buds feels like that yeah it's just like spin
thing yeah it matches all together really well although the pink I will say okay so like in the camera bar it is color matched on the silver and it's color matched on the black but the pink is still silver so it looks really weird I kind of wish that they made that pink here's my problem is look at this picture on the verge that looks
This is the black phone, but it looks like a silver camera bump, and the black metal looks like it got, like, plasti-dipped instead of, like... I think the silver version of this phone is the best looking one. It's 100%.
It looks great. Yeah. I will say, like, I miss the HTC full metal body phones, and if you're not going to have wireless charging, which I still really love wireless charging... All metal is pretty awesome. I'm curious about heat and how that ends up working out. Maybe because this chipset is a little bit lower performance, it's not going to get as hot. Is there a vapor chamber in there? Probably.
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Chapter 8: What concerns do the hosts have about AI and content creation?
Yeah.
Which is a hard thing to do.
Do we see the price yet? $499. $499. So not flagship price. No. I think pretty good price actually. It's cheaper than the Pixel.
It is interesting though because it's $499 USD, $499 pounds and $479 euros which if you do the, they've done this before where like they match the price but when you do conversion rates on that it's wildly different.
Yeah. It's a better.
It's the same price as the Pixel 10a right? $4.99. While you guys are looking, my favorite thing about the video was it says, world's first 140x zoom asterisk, and then it says, claims are based on publicly available data at launch, which I think is the claim that it's the world's first 140x zoom, which again, just feels like such a rant.
It's going to look really bad. If you zoom into 140x, what are you doing?
Have you watched the video? No. Even when it zooms in on the perfectly rendered video of everything, this looks terrible.
Yeah, I mean.
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