to pick the right server, so that's good.
Welcome to the WAN Show, our weekly show where we...
WAN.
Where we WAN.
We WAN on the internet, which is sort of another,
basically just another word for that.
Now, I don't know what just happened
to my internet connection on here,
but we're gonna go ahead and fire that bad boy up.
We have a ton of great topics for you guys today,
not the least of which is, of course,
availability of the Nexus 5,
which I actually picked one up,
so we're gonna check that out,
although five-inch phones are not really my forte.
I've actually got an Xperia Z1
that I'll be checking out over the next little bit.
I'm turning into this phone person.
I have like...
Phone and audio.
Like, try all these phones and stuff.
Which is like, not you.
I'm becoming disgracefully mainstream, so don't worry.
Oh, I like phones and headphones.
Don't worry, I'm still interested in graphics cards.
Tons of rumors circulating about the Radeon R9 290,
as well as the GTX 780 Ti,
so we can talk a little bit about the rumors,
but we won't be able to confirm anything
because we are still under NDA on a lot of those details,
which we do have.
We know everything.
Our special guest this week is John Rettinger
from TechnoBuffalo, also known as John for Lakers,
so he's gonna be joining us a little bit earlier than usual
in about nine minutes,
so he's got a new baby at home,
so I can totally understand they need to be back home
and doing what he needs to do as quickly as possible.
What are our other topics for this week?
PS4 has some interesting audio stuff going on,
which is actually kind of like super-disappoint.
They're not gonna support MP3s.
Can we put on our snobby PC gamer hats?
We are the PC master race.
Yeah, PC master race hats.
And our PCs, they support MP3s.
Yeah, they support MP3s indeed.
PS4 will have an audio streaming service
through PlayStation,
which is totally unrelated to MP3s not really working.
Yeah, more on that later.
Also, phone blocks is gonna be a thing now.
Phone blocks is partnered up with Motorola
and Project Sticky, which is now called Project Para,
so we'll talk about that soon.
All right, so without further ado, it's intro time.
Wasn't that car Dude?
That's that show!
I can hear that car right there.
It's so muchILL,
now that I have to finish thisputting.
auto- Frag forro
Right now we're in the Francis here in who power
and now we're in the third house.
So we're about to run,
so right now we're gonna rush over to Brandon,
So guys, our sponsor this week is Hotspot Shield.
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Hotspot Shield is a VPN solution that works on your PC,
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This makes it more difficult to track who you are
and where you're from
and also allows you to circumvent regional restrictions
such as being able to access services
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or even getting around regional changes to services
in your particular geography.
So for example, Canadians or Europeans
would be able to access Netflix as if they were Americans
and get access to all that fantastic content
that for some reason only Americans are allowed to have.
Well, I understand why,
but that doesn't make me have to like it.
No, no, no.
I do not have to like it.
So I'm gonna let you get started
with our first topic of the day,
which is active Steam members surpass Xbox Live members.
So it's passed Xbox Live members by like a lot.
I think this wasn't like,
oh, they passed, let's make an article immediately.
It was more like,
oh, they've been quite above for a while.
So active Steam members is about 65 million,
Xbox active members at about 48 million
and PSN is about 110.
Something to take away from this is that
to be registered as an Xbox Live active member,
you'd have to have a gold or silver account.
I don't know that many people that have silver accounts,
but I haven't been on Xbox Live since like a long time ago.
So maybe that's more popular now.
About 20 million of the Xbox subscribers
are paid subscribers, so gold accounts.
But then that pales in contrast to PSN,
which is at 110 million because it's free.
So there is a ton of Steam users
and I'm happy with this news because I'm a bro for Steam,
but I don't know how realistic it really is
because I don't think it's actually a representation
of how many people are actually playing on those devices.
Yeah, and it's one of those things where I look at it
and I go, okay, I mean, you look at app developers,
for example, for Android versus iOS,
where what they'll say is, okay, yes,
we understand that there are a whole whack ton of people
who are using Android devices,
but the cold hard truth is that iPhone users buy more stuff.
They're more invested in the platform.
So I would look at it and I'd go, okay,
so Steam, you've got three times as many users,
no, sorry, not three times, okay,
compared to paid, so that is Xbox Live Gold members,
you have three times as many users,
but how many of those people that are invested
in the platform to the point where they're paying
a monthly subscription to even have
the membership level they do, I mean,
to them, what's another few bucks if they're buying apps
or they're buying games or whatever else
compared to someone who created a Steam account
and has a Steam account?
I'm pretty sure the silver members can buy things.
They just can't play on the online servers.
But how likely are they to?
Yeah, yeah.
How likely is a free member to actually invest
additional money versus someone
that's already put down money?
And then that's kind of the same but not as Steam
because to be able to be set up on Steam properly,
you probably have games.
Right.
So you're not necessarily funneling your money
through Steam because you can get game keys elsewhere.
That's true.
But I would have to assume that Steam
would still get some sort of a cut from that.
We need to find one of those cheap game key services
to partner with and do affiliate programs
or something with.
There are ways to get cheaper games
and they pay huge commissions to influencers
who are like, hey, by the way,
you're buying Battlefield 4 anyway,
you might as well save $10 and then also
us, we'll get some money too.
That would be a not bad idea.
We have to do that at some point.
We should.
I've been meaning to do it for a while.
I know Logan has one of those partnerships
and he was saying that it's really good.
Okay, all right, all right.
Anyway, so the most played game on Steam right now
at the moment is Dota 2 with 500,000 daily users
which is a massive, absolutely massive number
and as much as I was tempering the enthusiasm
a little bit there compared to how excited
we could have been about this,
I think that the trend is definitely going
in the right direction and Steam isn't even
the only platform.
I know it's the 800 pound gorilla compared to Origin
or you play but.
Origin's getting bigger by forcing people
to go on it though.
There's stuff like Battlefield.
Valve did the same thing.
Yep, yep, yep.
Hello, I mean.
I'm not saying it's.
It wasn't that long ago that gamers were equally
upset with Valve for the way that they were making them.
I'm putting on my PC Gamer master base hat.
It doesn't like.
Yeah, okay, whatever but yeah, it wasn't that long
that Valve was doing exactly the same thing
so we can't really criticize them too.
I mean, we can criticize EA a lot.
Yep, we do.
You play, honestly, you play is kind of terrible too.
I know, I know, it's very terrible.
Okay, I'm taking off my master base hat.
It's really hard to manage and it's really hard
to redeem codes and yeah.
All right, so why don't we invite our special guest
whose wife is apparently exactly like mine
because she wants him home at a reasonable time tonight.
It kind of makes sense.
Oh, it makes all the sense in the world.
To defend the wife ladies out there.
Oh, oh, absolutely.
I mean, expecting your husband to be involved
in the rearing of his child,
totally unreasonable, obviously.
And I'm sure Jon will be with me 100% on this
because I'm sure his wife isn't watching this stream.
Hello, Jon, are you live with us right now?
Delayed reaction.
See, I don't know if I'll ever.
Eed.
Oh, there we go.
There we go.
How are you?
Can we get you guys there?
Oh, our splitter just fell.
So you broke up a little bit there,
but let's try this one more time.
Hello, Jon from TechnoBuffalo.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you very much for having me.
It's good to be here.
Awesome.
So do you wanna tell us a little bit about
what life is like with the six week old bundle of joy
that you have going on over there?
I live in constant fear of being pooped on.
You never would have thought
that poop had a projectile range,
but I swear I saw poop shoot about six feet.
I mean, and like with dead aim right on the wall.
It's been good.
Our little guy will be six weeks on Sunday.
Last night he slept for about five hours,
which seemed like winning the lottery.
So that means you slept for like three hours
because you spent the first two hours laying there
in fear that he wasn't actually asleep yet.
Boken like a man who's been there.
Is he asleep?
Is he gonna wake up?
What does he need?
Is he dirty?
Is he hungry?
Is he breathing?
Or like, I don't know if you have pets,
but like your cat will meow or something
and you're like, you sit bolt upright.
You're like, ah, dammit.
Yeah, so it's been exciting.
It's been the biggest adventure of my life so far,
but it's been awesome.
I'm excited for new reasons to come home every day.
That is awesome.
So this is your first then?
This is number one, our first baby boy, Nathan.
That is so exciting.
You know what?
I'm gonna do something terrible to you.
I'm gonna offer you advice.
If you'd like any advice about that.
I will take it.
Really?
I will take it.
Because honestly we got so much advice,
most of which was terrible,
that anytime anyone told us
they wanted to give us advice on child rearing,
we told them to leave our house
for a certain point.
Listen, I'll say this.
I know enough to know.
I don't know anything yet.
So listen, I'll take it.
All right, well, I think the biggest thing is,
you know what?
Everyone else is gonna tell you treasure these moments.
I'm gonna tell you, man, ride it out.
Hold in there because it gets a whole lot better
around the first birthday and right now just sucks.
Support the lady because she needs it, man.
Dude, I am trying.
Honestly, I feel like I am a high school transfer student,
like sophomore year, just trying to keep my head down.
You know, and like just make it through the day.
Is your wife, if it's not too personal,
is your wife bottle feeding or breastfeeding?
She is, she's going au naturel.
So I lack the equipment to feed him,
although we're giving him one bottle a day
of the frozen variety.
Let me tell you,
lacking the lactation is probably good for you
because it's one of those things where you can be like,
you know, hun, I'll get up and I'll change the baby
and bring him to you.
But I mean, really that's all I can do.
So I guess I'll go back to bed after that
if that's okay with you.
That's dude, I hope she's not listening to the show,
but yeah, I've definitely pulled out like, I'm sorry.
Like the well's dry here.
I can only do what I can do.
All right, so I know for a fact,
you've had less time than you're used to in your life
to pay attention to what's going on in the tech world.
But let's start with your article actually
about the Nexus 5.
So I'm just gonna, oh my goodness,
we don't have our guest lower third.
That's John, he's joining us anyway.
So let's fire over to that article really quick here.
So it sold out in less than an hour.
Is this about what you were expecting?
Yeah, I'm actually surprised it lasted that long.
If I remember correctly,
an Nexus 4 sold out sort of equally as fast.
I mean, Google did a crazy job of hyping this thing up
without really officially saying a word.
So everybody was expecting it kind of any minute.
So yeah, I was not surprised that it sold out.
And first impressions are it sold out for a reason.
It's a really great phone.
It looks really compelling
considering the price point, does it not?
Yeah, the price point's killer.
I'm actually, I can't see, but I'm holding it in my hand.
I'm holding it up to my webcam
that you can't see in homage.
349 bucks is a killer price point.
You figure on contract, two-year deal,
and this would probably be about 150 to $200 phone.
So for the extra 150 bucks,
you don't have to sign a two-year contract.
Which is solid.
Which is awesome.
I mean, you don't want it, sell it.
The Nexus devices hold their value
similar to Apple's.
You can also sell it in a year.
It's a pretty nice phone.
I want to put it through its paces before I do a review.
We always sort of take a longer with our reviews
and we'll tell the audience how long we use the device
before we just sort of rush to get best SEO
and put up a review like four minutes later.
That is such a great approach, and you know what?
We've only recently started dabbling in phones a little bit
because I was never really a phone guy.
And I mean, the perspective I bring
is not the experienced phone guy perspective,
but what I do is I force myself to take out my SIM
from my phone that I use and put it in the new one
and I kind of go, if I'm not willing to do this,
then how can I really say that I reviewed this device
if I didn't actually even commit to use the thing?
So I respect that so much because SEO is great,
but it's not the be all and end all.
No, thank you, thank you very much.
It's a dirty secret in our industry
that folks from other sites that I won't mention
you know, will rush to get a review up
without really using the device.
Again, I won't mention any names,
but I've been at events where we've been handed a phone
and other publications have been handed a phone.
You know, the exact same time.
Their review will go up the next day
and we'll have cited 48 hours of battery life.
And you know what?
I'm not a math major, but that does not add up.
And you know what, the funny thing is
I think it's a lot of the old media mentality here
where these, I think it's a lot of the traditional tech guys
where they're used to something like a graphics card
where all you have to do is benchmark it
and you measure the power consumption,
you measure the performance
and really that's all there is to know about it.
But to me, a phone, I go out of my way to actually,
again, this is, I'm not a hardcore guy.
I don't even really talk about the specs.
I go, this is how it felt in my hand
and this is what I thought of something I noticed
that was different and that's all I really have
to say about it and I think that there's room
for the hardcore tech spec guys
that are running all the benchmarks.
There's room for the guys that are doing the in depth
plus the real world, I actually use this thing,
stuff like what you do and I think there's room
for the casuals but the guys that really offend me
are the ones that are saying things
without actually validating it.
I could not, could not agree with you more on that.
I mean, you can't just make up numbers.
You can say the battery sucked
because we tried to play a video for 14 hours
and died after eight.
It's not how people use their phones.
Exactly.
You know, I wanna know if I can get through a full day
with being on wifi for eight hours
and an hour of phone call and can I get through a full day?
I'm not gonna spend most of my day watching
12 hours of video on my phone.
Like, give me this bad stuff that matter.
You just don't know a device until you actually use it
and rushing to get stuff out,
I think it makes our whole industry look bad.
It's dishonest to the audience.
Let's talk about using the Nexus 5.
This is something that I've been thinking about
for a little while.
I actually just recently got my hands on a Moto X
because I'm not high priority like you.
I actually have to buy most of my phones
and my take on that was do we really need a 1080p screen
in the 4.7 inch or five inch form factor?
What are your thoughts on this?
And maybe-
I will tell you this.
We have the privilege of having access
to pretty much every mobile device out there in our office.
It's a privilege and an honor.
It's a double edged sword is what it actually is.
You know that, yeah, absolutely.
But one that I really serve high and high esteem.
Few of the people in our office are using Moto Xs.
If that tells you, and they're using it
as their regular phone when they have access
to anything else.
So if that tells you anything
about the perception of the device,
it just works, it works.
Well, you don't have to have quad core
to have a good experience on a phone.
You just don't.
That is so true.
I mean, you know what?
This ties into something I really wanted to talk about
with respect to Nexus 5 as well
is are we finally seeing the commoditization
of the cell phone in much the same way
that the PC was commoditized
and then the laptop was commoditized
and even every component of the PC.
I mean, for a while.
I don't know how closely you follow PCs,
but SSDs and high performance SSDs
were a big deal for a while
and then all of a sudden overnight,
Samsung took over the market completely
with commodity SSDs that performed well enough
and were priced very reasonably.
Is this the beginning of the end
where we see phones like Moto X
that don't compete on spec
and we see phones like Nexus 5
that come in and frankly take all of the margin
out of the phone that guys like Samsung
have enjoyed for so long.
Are we there?
Are they just fast enough and are they commodity now?
It's yes and no.
So yes, for the technology that's out there right now,
it's no until the next SSD comes out.
It's no until everybody's rushing
to have flexible displays and flexible batteries.
It's no until people are trying to get near field cameras
built into devices.
Until the next big thing hits,
then yeah, I absolutely think so.
But until there's that next,
whatever rush it's gonna be,
whatever sort of fake rush
they make the consumer think they have to have,
you know, I think it's only a matter of maybe months
and not years before that next thing shows its face.
Do you think the consumer is more savvy
to the bullshit these days?
I mean, look how long they've been trying to cram 4K
on TVs down our throats without any content available
and with extremely high prices on TVs
in much the same way that they were used to being able
to charge so much for a flat panel
and then so much for a full HD one
and then et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And people just aren't doing it anymore.
Are we past that?
Or do you think that mobile
is not at that saturation point yet?
Yeah, so I think it's the industry.
So I think when it comes to TVs
and the purchase that you make maybe once every 10,
people are maybe not smarter,
but pay closer attention with their wallet
because those are real dollars.
I mean, you're talking thousands and thousands of dollars.
So I think people aren't as easily duped.
Look at 3D, like 3D is supposed to be the giant thing.
Everybody's gotta have 3D, 3D, 3D, 3D.
And really not many people cared that much about 3D.
No, I mean, part of the problem to me
was the implementations were so fragmented and so terrible.
I mean, we see this happen in the industry
over and over again where no one can agree
on a bloody standard and then the whole thing flops.
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
And when it comes to the mobile world,
I think customers are more easily duped.
And it's such a weird world in mobile.
People feel entitled to things.
I signed a two-year contract two years ago for my phone.
Where's my KitKat update?
Or so loyal to an operating system.
If you like Apple and I like Android,
we're mortal enemies.
I mean, could you imagine that same dynamic
when you go grocery shopping?
Like somebody buys a Milky Way and hears Snickers guy
and you just start like screaming at him?
Like how dare you like Snickers?
Milky Way is obviously the best.
You must be just a gigantic ass face.
That is fantastic because you know what is funny?
Because so many things on the internet are like that
where if people actually behaved that way to each other.
I mean, can you imagine being on the subway
and seeing someone, I mean, okay, let's say 10 years ago,
seeing someone with a Sony Discman
versus a Panasonic Discman
and ending up in a fistfight over it.
No, that's the way thought would have been like,
wow, does that thing skip when you walk?
You know, you're never like looking like,
it is so crazy, the internet mentality
and sort of the entitlement that people somehow feel.
It seems to be really exclusive to mobile
and maybe gaming as well.
Gaming is a big one.
It's just a strange phenomenon.
It's like I paid $60 for this game five years ago.
Why isn't the game developer still supporting servers
out of their own pocket?
Yeah, why don't I have backwards compatibility of PS4
with my PS1 Masters of Terras costume game I bought
48 years ago, you know?
It's just a, it's a very strange, strange world.
And as much as I try, I still don't understand it.
And the funny thing is your entire job
is to demystify it for other people.
So way to go, smart guy.
Yeah, yeah.
But that's my, that is my one job.
And I'm like, I cannot figure you guys out.
Like I love the audience.
They're incredible that they put food on my table
to give me a chance to live my dream.
But some of them, I just don't understand the mentality.
Like if that translated to anything else,
it would just, it wouldn't work.
Now let's talk about entitlement
and support for lower end devices.
Android 4.4 KitKat.
There was a leak that we're looking
at some unexpected improvements.
I'm just gonna pull up the article here really quick.
This was posted on the forum by MG Star.
So we're just gonna go ahead and go back to our guest here.
So the original source was Engadget.
And we're looking at, I mean,
obviously you've heard of this.
So why don't you give me your thoughts
on this revelation that they're looking to optimize
particularly memory use to the point where we could see
devices that only have around 512 megs of RAM
still operate smoothly.
So I think as annoyed as consumers are
with Android fragmentations,
I think Google is more annoyed with Android fragmentation.
I think they're trying to have more control
over the operating system.
There's a big misconception that Android is open source.
Android is not truly open source.
They release the source code, but it's not open source.
So I think they're trying to limit fragmentation
and they've done a credible job of memory management
with Android 4.4.
So hopefully they're saying, okay,
4.4 can run on more devices than app developers
can be able to support more devices.
And they can make more money
because more apps can be purchased on those older devices.
So it boils down to a dollars decision for Google,
but certainly helps the consumer in the long run as well.
That's an absolutely fantastic point
and actually ties into something we were saying
before you joined us on the show
with respect to Steam members versus Xbox Live members,
where those Steam members are the part
of this fragmented ecosystem
that maybe some game is released.
Are you really pushing it out to 65 million potential people?
Whereas on Xbox, you know that every single one
of those members is actually capable of buying the app
or the game or whatever else it is
that you happen to be looking at.
So how much of this do you think is actually focused
on smartphones and lower end or older smartphones?
And how much of this do you think is gearing up
for a Google Glass or smartwatch release coming in 2014?
So that's the big one.
I think it's necessarily starting from here on out.
I think it's a two-pronged attack.
I think it's gearing up for wearables,
smartwatch and whatever, Google Glass 2,
whatever they decide to call their second iteration of it.
But beyond that, I think it's also a clear shot
for emerging markets.
I think they're looking at India in particular,
South America, where maybe the lower spec Android devices
can get some market penetration
and also that potential dollar from the Play Store.
And that's a very good point because it blew me away
that in somewhere as technologically with it as Taiwan,
I mean, we're talking the manufacturing and design
of all this crap goes on there
and yet every cab driver's got a flip phone.
It's crazy.
In contrast though, in Korea,
almost every single person I saw had a note, a note two
or like something else, super baller and Samsung's there.
So a lot of work goes on there.
It's just slightly different.
It's so funny you mentioned that.
Our managing editor, Roy Choi is Korean.
We were talking about the difference of technology
from country to country.
He was talking about, he said exactly that same thing.
He says, he went to Korea and he couldn't believe
how many people have these gigantic smartphones
and how many women carry the gigantic smartphones.
He said it was just so interesting from country to country
to see what permeates the culture.
Yeah, more than once I saw a chick walking around
with like a clutch bag.
And as far as I could tell, it was for her phone.
Like that was it.
There was so many chicks and a lot of dudes as well
but so many chicks with notes and giant phones
that they held and worked with as tablets.
Or held with two hands up their head.
You got a can of Gallatin Mega and something, right?
I know, right?
Isn't that thing hilarious?
It's pretty crazy.
It is like iconic.
I loved using it just looking at me like what?
What is this thing on my face?
What's that guy doing?
He's crazy.
Okay, so I think our last topic here
is a bit of a console topic.
And actually it's an ecosystem control topic as well.
So I'm just gonna go ahead and fire this up
on the computer here so everyone can see
what the devil it is we're talking about.
So this was a tweet from Michael McAllister
that sent this over.
So it's actually the original link
is to the PlayStation blog where they dropped
an absolute bomb on PS4 audio format support.
So here, Luke, why don't I let you give the rundown
and then John, I'd love to hear what you think
of this particular method of ecosystem control.
So there was a topic actually on TechnoBuffalo about this
so I'm sure he's on top of it.
But PlayStation released a giant FAQ recently, like huge.
And it is actually pretty awesome
because it's nice to get some confirmation about things
because this is kind of an issue.
You hear about this giant thing that's newly released
and it's like, oh, well I have literally 80 questions
and none of them are answered.
So it's nice that we got this FAQ.
But people started noticing things
like the PlayStation 4 will not support MP3s, audio CDs,
external hard drives, or DLNA.
People were just like, what the heck?
One thing that they do support though is Music Unlimited,
a PlayStation service which can stream you music
for a monthly fee and you can play this music
in the background while you're playing games.
Only $4.99 a month, no less.
John, I'm sure you have lots to say about this.
Let's hear it.
Oh yes, I do.
So first I just want to say thank you
to everybody that's sort of sending messages on Twitter
that's watching the show.
It's very cool to interact sort of live.
So if there's ever been anything more Sony than good design,
it's really loving proprietary formats.
Like really in love wanting to marry
and make babies with proprietary formats.
I mean, this is the company that brought us
Betamax, Minidisc.
Memory Stick.
Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick Duo 95.
Pro Duo.
The billion different varieties.
So I am not at all surprised with the music side of things
and pushing their own silly services.
What was a little bit surprising
was the external hard drives.
And Sony said that they're limiting it
to try and reduce piracy.
Which, okay, I can understand.
You know, they all probably felt that was a big issue
with the PS3.
They placated people a little bit
by letting their internal hard drive be replaceable.
Which it still seems a little bit silly.
You just get a connector
and you can throw an external hard drive anyway
that it thinks is internal.
So it seems like a very silly thing
that I think will very quickly be rectified.
I would say come like half a year down,
external hard drives will be allowed.
I just...
Do you think it'll be rectified?
Because one thing I have to give Microsoft props for
is that they made all the most unpopular decisions
they possibly could and then swiftly backtracked on them.
Sony has shown in the past
that they are willing to make an unpopular decision
and then just ride it out.
Forever.
Forever.
And I agree, I give Microsoft credit as well
for backtracking.
They could have run a marathon backwards
for as quickly as they retreated on that.
I do, however, think Sony is really trying to be
considering the anti-XBox this time.
So I think they're gonna take a different approach
to the PS4 and I really think that's something
that's gonna be rectified
if the community wants it to be rectified
very, very quickly.
Sorry, go ahead.
I'm gonna go for a bit here.
Sure, one thing to bring up too
is it's not just Music Unlimited.
They also have, I believe, what's called Video Unlimited
which I think is supposed to conflict
and try and fight against Netflix.
And that has a little subscription thing.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Yeah, not really gonna happen.
But just putting that out there.
They're such a powerhouse now.
Oh, it's ridiculous.
Here's my issue with the way that Sony
is viewing their competition
as this Sony versus Microsoft head-to-head battle.
So they're ignoring Wii U, which they're right to do,
and they're also ignoring SteamOS.
They're ignoring SteamOS and they're ignoring Android.
I've been saying this for a little while
and I don't think this is the battle of PS4 and Xbox One.
I think this is the battle of consoles
and they're better off to band together
and figure out what their value add is and deliver it
versus more open platforms like Linux
and open platforms like Android
where the barrier to entry for a game developer
or an app developer or whoever else
wants to be involved in that platform is much lower.
I don't know how much attention you've paid
to something like Nvidia Shield,
but did you see their console mode announcement?
Yes, I've actually picked.
I'm actually staring at Nvidia Shield right now as we speak.
Good.
What are your thoughts?
So I had a chance to take a look at the update
a few days before it got pushed.
So there are a few things I've seen.
I actually agree whole-heartedly
with everything you just said.
I think the big difficulty for developers
is getting those games on television sets.
Thought things like the Ouya.
And I think the Shield and Nvidia nailed it
with the control mapping.
Yes.
So being able to take a game like NBA Jam,
that's an awesome game,
but it's kind of tough to play with touch.
And being able to just have that already be mapped
or your Shield makes it a very, very compelling platform.
Not to mention all the emulators you can download.
You know, I traveled,
I was playing Super Mario Brothers on my Shield
because it was just fun.
And you know what?
We've seen this time and time again
where the more that a platform tries to lock down
and become anti-piracy,
the more the piracy-friendly platform
that crops up to take its place gets accepted.
Because let's face it,
piracy drives platform adoption in a huge way.
And it's the elephant in the room
that Microsoft doesn't want to talk about,
about the original Xbox.
It's the elephant in the room
that Microsoft doesn't want to talk about with the PC.
It's the elephant in the room
Google doesn't want to talk about with Android,
but it's there.
Yeah, that's a very astute observation, actually.
I completely agree with that statement.
You are absolutely right.
I'd be curious,
and they say piracy,
what they really mean is we're not making enough money.
I mean, that's sort of the,
that's the between the lines,
is we don't care if you're playing our game for free,
we're clear that you're not giving us money
to play our game.
And that's the issue.
I wonder, though,
how much money these manufacturers,
Sony and Microsoft,
are paying to developers to get exclusives.
Microsoft obviously opened up their wallets
like crazy to get exclusive titles.
What if they both agreed to stop doing that?
That, okay, let's stop with the exclusive deal.
If we own a studio, so whatever,
if it was formerly Bungie or whatever it might be,
then we'll make our own games.
But if we stop doing that,
and we stop pushing this ridiculous piracy
that just locks down our console,
I wonder how that would change sales numbers
and how that would change their end of day profits.
What about a scary sort of a ceasefire on exclusive titles
where they kind of go,
okay, well, let's work together
to make them console exclusive,
and let's compete on the value-add services
like Xbox Live and PlayStation Network,
and let's figure out how to extract our money there,
but let's stop fighting on hardware.
Because they basically gave up on the hardware fight.
We saw that.
They both had the same bloody hardware in them
for the most part.
Yeah, exactly the same.
And they're still sort of backhand fighting each other.
I'm sure Sony paid Activision
to make Call of Duty Ghost 1080p only on the PS4.
So people can think,
oh, the Xbox wasn't as powerful last generation.
It's probably not as powerful this generation.
But I would bet there was money that changed hands.
I would say I can't back that up,
but I would bet that money changed hands.
So tell me this.
Now that you've played with Shield and console,
well, do you have a Kepler-based GeForce PC
to stream games to your Shield?
I do.
I've got a Falcon here.
Yeah, oh yeah, we've been testing it
and having a blast with it.
Okay, tell me this.
From an end user perspective,
if Shield is $200 for what is effectively a console
that if you have a supported PC,
so remember Shield is $200 with a supported graphics card.
So if you pay $200 for Shield,
you get to stream PC quality graphics
and man does it ever look good
to handheld or to your TV with 1080p
coming by the end of the year
and the ability to use it handheld
or SteamOS with its ability to stream from your PC as well.
So having one powerful PC in the house
and being able to game on any TV
versus picking up your console and moving it around
versus spending $400 or $500 or $300,
whatever it is on a console plus extra controllers
plus whatever you end up doing,
what is gonna be in your living room six months from now
if you had a crystal ball?
Oh, I mean the Shield for sure.
I should say though that the Shield is 300 bucks
if you wanna buy it on its own.
Yes, that's important.
And it's not even available in every country.
Yeah, but I totally see the value add
and I give Nvidia credit for pushing a product
that they know they're not gonna make any money on.
Yes.
It's a really cutting,
I thought for sure they were never going to release this.
I thought it was gonna be a reference hardware
for Tegra 4 and I went on record
and said that I was clearly wrong.
I really give them credit.
I know the folks at Nvidia very well.
They are committed this platform
and they like you to see the future
and they've done that same pitch.
Okay, what are you gonna keep in your living room?
And if we stick with this
and we educate the consumer to know what Shield does,
not just look at it as an Android tablet or controller,
they will get it.
Being able to stream PC games
that look ridiculously good anywhere you want
are incredible.
If my wife doesn't want me sitting in front
of my computer playing games,
I can sit on the couch, sort of watch the baby
and catch up with Arkham Origins.
Sort of.
Absolutely.
Or anything else I want.
And this is something, oh, sorry.
One thing that kinda catches me odd
and I was wondering what you think about this
was the release timing for different things
to do with Shield.
Because I think less people know
that you can actually play it as streaming
from your computer than know that it exists.
And I'm surprised that usually you announce things
that have to do with the device
before you release the device.
They messed that up.
Yeah.
And in Shield's case, they released Shield.
And it was this hardware
that everyone wasn't sure what to do with it.
Like what it really does,
like why does it even have these different options,
blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then finally they're releasing all these options
after interest is actually almost waning.
Yeah, they've been taking a very weird approach.
They're trying to go organic
and clearly that just translates
so we don't want to spend a lot of money.
And the big like, I mean, it's true.
And do a big like blogger education push.
I mean, so we had before this over the air update came out,
you know, we had a huge, you know, WebEx demo
talking about Shield.
And they sent us an external controller, an HDMI key.
Let's hook it up to TVs and all that kind of stuff.
And they're really pushing it.
I think bloggers for some reason don't either get it
or just don't care.
And I'm not sure why that is.
It's that emotional fandom that we talked about before.
This is a completely new, completely different thing
that I think a lot of the console versus PC guys,
I don't think anyone's happy about it.
Cause I think the hardcore PC guys look at it and they go,
well, I don't need a console.
I don't need a handheld, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I think a lot of the console guys could go,
well, then I have to have a powerful gaming PC.
I'm happy with my Xbox, blah, blah, blah.
Don't take away my console.
And the thing I think people don't realize
is I've been saying this for a while.
This is the last generation of consoles
in the form that we see them today.
And people tell me, well, yeah,
I'm gonna sit in front of my computer.
No, you're not gonna sit in front of your computer.
You're gonna sit in front of your TV.
The TV gaming experience is not dead,
but the console is dead.
And I think Nvidia Shield is actually just a pawn here.
I think it's a sacrificial lamb.
They're obviously gonna lose money on the whole endeavor,
but I think they actually don't care
if Shield 2 or Shield 3 or Shield 4 exists
because Nvidia, in their history, is an enabler.
They are not looking to sell a graphics card
directly to an end user
any more than they're looking to necessarily
sell a Shield to an end user.
I think they created Shield out of a need
to build this because no one else was willing to do it.
I think they just did it.
And they went, no, we want handheld gaming
combined with PC gaming combined with TV gaming.
And if we have to do it ourselves, then fine.
But ultimately, if someone else with Tegra 6
releases their own thing, I think they're happy with that.
Yeah, I actually agree with you.
I could not have said that better myself.
I completely agree with that.
You're the best guest ever.
You agree with me about things.
You're awesome.
I mean, when you're right, you're right.
I mean, you're not saying anything untrue, man.
Anybody who knows me knows I love a good argument,
so I'm certainly not afraid to speak up.
But I think you nailed it.
Well, you know what?
I would love to give you at least, we're coming up,
I don't want to keep you a minute longer
because I totally understand the wife thing.
You got to go support her as best you can.
So we have three more minutes.
Guys, if you have any quick Twitter questions for John
that you'd love to hear and answer as fast as he can,
hit us up, hit me up on at Linus Tech.
And John, I'd like you to take the next couple minutes
for any of our viewers who don't already know who you are,
which I think most of them probably do.
But talk about yourself and what you do
and how it's great and how they can follow you.
Always weird to talk about yourself.
I'm a geek.
I'm just, I'm a geek who somehow managed to win the lottery
and got the opportunity to do this for a living.
You can check me out on YouTube,
youtube.com slash TechnoBuffalo.
I'm on Twitter at John, J-O-N number four Lakers,
which is an awful Twitter handle.
I totally understand that.
Or you can check out all of our content at TechnoBuffalo.com.
And we just talk about tech.
We're fans of technology and we have our passion
that we get the opportunity to share with everybody.
Now, do you guys do a live show?
We do a podcast.
We used to do live shows.
We've toted live shows.
We really want to do more live shows.
It's just a matter of trying to find the bandwidth
to do them, but it's definitely,
like I say things every year,
but it's definitely on our radar.
I want you to do a live show
because you are fantastic live.
Thank you.
We have some people on where you kind of go,
yeah, you script everything
and you have a hard time holding a discussion
for 20 minutes.
Whereas that is not the case with you at all.
You guys need to do a live show because I feel.
I appreciate that.
I'm awful reading from a teleprompter.
I'm not an actor.
I'm really, really bad.
So I mean, all my videos are all done
just whatever weird stuff comes out of my head.
All right, so here we go.
We've got a couple of Twitter questions.
We're not going to keep John for much longer
than a couple more minutes here.
No problem.
Okay, so Joshua says,
John, you were an awesome guest on the land show.
Totally agree.
Thank you.
Here we go.
John from Evan.
Not really a quick question.
Oh, dammit Evan.
Okay, what were the struggles you faced
starting your own business over there?
And we're not on a clock.
I'm happy to answer the questions.
All right, thank you.
Thank you.
I mean, the struggles were,
the biggest one I faced was,
yeah, so okay, so now I'm 33
and people look at me as a 33 year old,
but they realize when they started this,
I was 25, 26 years old.
Not really knowing how business worked.
I loved technology.
I used to go to Best Buy and walk around,
press myself, you know, at the end of a long day.
My biggest thing was when I first launched TechnoBuffalo,
I didn't know about how to create a website.
I didn't know about code.
I had, you know, gotten a little bit of startup funds
from friends and family.
I had bootstrapped it all the way.
And I hired a developer.
I said, build the site.
He built it and said, okay, it's ready to launch.
So I figured, great, let's launch it.
And the site crashed in, I think it was less than a minute.
It was like 43 seconds.
It didn't crash because of the crazy traffic.
It crashed because of god awful code.
So we had to burn through 40% of our startup capital.
I had just left my job, this is 2009,
in a bad economy to make videos for a living.
I had no income for essentially three months.
So the best, long story short,
the best advice that I can give is know your industry.
You want to start a website?
Know about a website.
I was so like blindly ignorant.
I mean, I look back and I just want
to smack myself in the face.
Know your industry before you get into anything.
I had the benefit of being served
just by dumb luck, first to market.
So it was easier to get noticed and much harder now.
And it's a much more crowded field.
So if you want to get into YouTube or tech world,
find your own voice.
Let your personality come through.
Don't be a robot.
Don't copy anybody else's style.
Find your own and fight through all the hate.
That is absolutely fantastic advice,
especially that last thing.
I have many new employee here who is going to be on camera.
I actually am kind of an asshole to them, intentionally.
And the reason for that is because whatever I can say
to you is not one 10th of what the internet's
going to throw at you.
And the bit about finding your own voice
and your own style is so important
because so many people ask me,
how do I be a YouTuber?
And the answer is always to be passionate
and understand what you're trying to talk about
because otherwise people's bullshit radar
is so sensitive these days.
They're not going to buy it.
Absolutely, and don't fall in the trap
of selling yourself for reviews.
Don't think you have to give good reviews
because it's going to set your product.
The audience knows.
Be yourself on camera.
Be genuine.
And I think you guys will find success
if you just follow that path.
All right, this is just hilarious
and I'm sorry to do this to you.
No, please.
Jogzy asks, where do babies come from?
Here's how it happens.
All right, so you sit at home.
Yeah, no, I didn't know how to answer that question.
All right, all right, all right, hold on.
All right, here we go, here we go.
Hold on, let's see if we got anything else.
John, do you recommend the Nexus 5 for the price
or could you recommend a better phone for the price?
No, no better phone for the price.
Nexus 5 for sure.
There we go.
Yeah, that's an easy one.
That was a really easy one.
Yeah.
We'll steam in video.
Will you try to, let me see if I can see anything that.
Okay, we already talked about Nexus 5.
Guys, you're gonna have to go back and watch the archive
if you wanna hear about Nexus 5 from John.
Do you have any initial thoughts?
Let's make this the last question here.
Do you have any initial thoughts on the Nexus 5
and its camera quality?
Though we do, funny you should mention that.
We actually just finished writing and filming a full test
of the video and still camera quality on the Nexus 5.
So if you wanna see that,
we'll have the post up actually tomorrow,
Saturday on technobuffalo.com.
Can we get a short teaser?
But I will give you a sneak preview.
It's good, it's good, it's not great.
Okay.
That is very fair.
So guys, make sure you check that out
on Technobuffalo tomorrow.
John, you've been an absolutely fantastic guest.
Thank you so much for joining us.
My pleasure, thank you guys for having me.
I appreciate it, this was a lot of fun.
Guys, make sure that you're following John on Twitter.
Oh, we should have had his Twitter handle in there.
John for Lakers, and harass him on Twitter.
Tell him how great he was,
because the more messages I see about how great he was,
the more likely I am to bring him back.
Although I can already tell you,
we would be happy to have you back anytime
you were finding out today.
Listen, I would love to be back.
And it's internet, I don't do well with compliments,
so you do much better to just yell at me.
Awesome.
Next time, I'll make sure I have something
we disagree on, okay?
Sounds good, thank you guys very much for having me.
It was a really good time.
I look forward to doing it again hopefully sometime soon.
Take care.
Bye bye.
All right, let's move right along.
So let's move right into our sponsor message.
What a great guest he was.
Yeah, that was really good.
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So I'm thinking we jump over the BBM topic
and go directly to PSUs because we just talked
about phones for a really long time.
Yeah, we talked about phones for a long time.
You guys wanna talk about some hardcore PC hardware?
Let's do that thing.
So we're gonna jump into an Anand Tech article
about bronze versus platinum power supplies
because we've talked about this before
but we've just kind of like generally talked
about the idea of it.
These guys actually run some pretty hardcore numbers.
These are hardcore numbers which is what Anand Tech
is fantastic for and if this page ever loads
then why don't you go ahead and run them
through some of the rationale.
So first, what is 80 plus?
80 plus is efficiency levels.
So if you're above 80% efficiency,
you get different rankings.
80 plus platinum is like basically 90 plus
but not quite.
So that is how much energy is wasted
in the conversion from AC power
which comes out of your wall to DC power
which is what your computer uses.
It's how much is saved.
You're saving, you're not wasting 80%.
No, yeah, yeah, how efficient the conversion is.
Okay, so anyway, what are some of these numbers looking like?
So we don't actually have this sheet up
but I remember from memory when you're idling,
bronze compared to platinum, you're saving about $7
on something, remember these are gonna be US dollars
so wherever you are, you can convert that
as much as you want.
Yeah and it really depends on energy costs
in your area as well, that's another thing to factor in.
And it depends on energy costs.
One thing is like I don't think our energy
probably costs as much as Anand Tech's does.
So our costs wouldn't be the same as this but.
Oh Canada.
Yeah, Oh Canada, hydropower, woo!
So like there's a bunch of different factors in the playbook
which will make it different for where you live
but basically essentially for where Anand Tech
did their testing, you're saving about $7
in something when you're idling and you're saving up,
I think it's like 23.
Is that a year or a month?
A year, a year and it's 24-7 operation.
Okay, so give it.
24-7 operation idling for an entire year
and then under load which is like heavy load 24-7
for a whole year, you can save about 23, 25 bucks.
So my conclusion from this was if you're one of those guys
on say the Linus Tech Tips folding team
and you're pushing your CPUs and everything like 100%
all the time.
And you expect to get three to five years of life
out of your power supply.
Then maybe not a bad idea.
Look into high efficiency power supplies.
But if you're someone who's gonna come home and game
for two or three hours and shut your computer off
other than that, maybe don't shell out the extra money
for the platinum power supply where you get a cheaper one.
Although one thing I have noticed is that silver
and gold level power supplies are becoming
cheaper and cheaper.
That's true, they are.
And you know what, honestly there are other things
that you can do to optimize your system for power efficiency
so hold on a second, here is their actual graph
where they compared the Thermaltake Light Power 450 watt
to the EA450 Earth Watts Platinum.
So those are the actual two power supplies
that they're looking at.
And the funny thing about them choosing 450 watt
power supplies for this test is that I have a point
about that.
More than changing the efficiency level,
the 80 plus rating of the power supply you're buying,
buying an appropriate power supply for your system
could actually save you more money.
Because when you overbuy, 80 plus platinum
and 80 plus ratings only factor in down to 20% load.
Under that load, there is no spec, there is no requirement.
So it could be extremely inefficient at very low loads
and if you completely overbuy your power supply,
you buy a 1200 watt power supply for a system
that's gonna pull 250 watts under load
and like 45 watts or 60 watts at idle,
you might be getting the worst efficiency ever
and you would never even know about it.
And like your highest efficiency isn't at that 20%
where the graph starts.
It's a little bit in there.
So you wanna be actually using a bit of your power supply
for it to be really efficient.
All right, so PhoneBlocks has been making major waves.
So I think the first person who posted about Project ARA
on the forum is MGSstar.
So I wanted to give a shout out to you
for posting in the Linus Tech Tips News section
of the forum.
But this is the original Motorola post here.
I'm just gonna go ahead and fire this up.
The official Motorola blogs.
Goodbye Sticky, hello ARA.
So Sticky was a truck that apparently trekked
across the US or going somewhere
with a bunch of rooted phones, some 3D printing equipment
and the goal was this my friends.
So much like PhoneBlocks' goal is a modular phone design
that is upgradeable and can be tailor made
to a specific purpose, that is the purpose of Project ARA.
So this is a whole lot of renders
from what I'm looking at right now
and not necessarily concrete proof
that Project ARA is a real thing yet.
However, let's do a quick recap of what the,
so okay, Motorola's working with PhoneBlocks
in terms of publicity.
So.
In terms of publicity.
Go, what are your thoughts on it?
Essentially there was Project Sticky.
Motorola was already working on this.
Yes.
PhoneBlocks, behind closed doors essentially,
PhoneBlocks comes out and builds a huge community.
Now Motorola realizes that for this platform
to be open and accepted by a huge amount of people,
they need a following.
These types of devices and these types of groups
need a following.
Is that playing audio?
Nope.
Muted, okay.
So what they did is they decided to partner up
with PhoneBlocks who essentially came up with the same idea,
just slightly different, and grabbed that huge community
that's there, that tweeted about this on the Thunderclap,
that's been following the videos, that's been on Reddit,
all that kind of stuff.
You're seeing a summary of all of that over here.
Hey, it was Marcus Brownlee.
Anyway, go ahead.
They want to grab all of this that you're seeing over here
and attach it to their product, basically.
So they partnered up with PhoneBlocks
so that they can get the community of PhoneBlocks
and the hardware of Motorola to come together.
And that's Project ARA.
Now here's, okay, here's, I'm gonna summarize the issues
and I'm actually gonna use an article from a non-tech
to summarize some of them because I love these guys so much
and you should just go on their site every day,
that's what I do.
Anyway, so they summarized some of the issues.
So issue number one, purely hardware perspective,
there is a trade-off between purpose building something
as compactly and as efficiently as possible
and building something that is more modular.
It will be bigger and it will be bulkier
and it will be heavier.
Trade-off number two that they bring up is regulations.
So FCC only tests the single configurations for approval.
These are devices that send and receive signals.
So having them be modular
and just completely interchangeable
might actually be a showstopper
depending on how they can get individual parts FCC regulated
but if they work together and then they cause interference.
I mean, I've seen stuff as ridiculous
as a lamp and a baby monitor plugged into the same circuit
that cause interference on the baby monitor.
This stuff is complicated
and a cell phone is a hell of a lot more complicated
than a baby monitor.
They're gonna have to get each individual part cleared.
But what about if you take this one and put it together
and it causes some kind of problem?
But then wouldn't they have to test that
to be able to clear it?
Exactly.
Yeah, it's gonna be really complicated.
But maybe it can be done.
And then the final issue that they see
is actually one of history
where Intel tried to do this with a project Whitebook
or whatever it was called.
Hold on a second.
Yeah, Whitebook where they wanted
upgradable modular notebooks.
I mean, Intel has been an advocate
of PCs being a component business.
They make CPUs and they make other parts like SSDs,
motherboards, not anymore.
But by and large, they like that approach
historically in their business.
They've wanted that
but even they are not trying to do that on smartphone at all
and they gave up on laptop because the market showed
that what it wanted was tightly integrated devices
that are beautiful and sleek and slim and small
and lightweight and highly, highly integrated.
So I'm gonna bring up a couple other things
that I think here.
So here's a big problem.
You know what?
Oh, where's that thread on the forum?
Crap, there was a great post on the forum
that I really liked about phone blocks.
I didn't remove any phone blocks.
Yeah, no, I know you didn't remove it
but I really wanted to give this user a shout out here
because they did a great job of summarizing it.
But the issue is that much like the PC,
when's the last time you upgraded a component of a PC?
What I was just gonna bring up is the main problem
that I find is that, especially they're saying
like developing markets, all this kind of stuff.
Whenever I see anyone upgrade anything,
it's pretty much always a bucket upgrade.
It's not like a single component.
That happens with computers.
That happens with practically everything I can think of
to be completely honest.
Someone still kind of likes their car,
one component fails.
They're like, ah, it's fairly expensive to fix it.
I could, but I'm just gonna buy a new one.
And there's a lot of that.
And that mentality, especially on the high end,
I don't really feel like is gonna change.
And there's the fact that a lot of the time
it doesn't make any sense
because by the time you're unhappy with something
or by the time there's even a suitable replacement
that you would even want,
there's probably a suitable replacement
for some other aspect of the device that you also want.
I mean, the evolutionary changes that happen
between a Galaxy device, a Galaxy S2, a Galaxy S2
to an S3 to an S4, they change almost everything.
They put faster storage in them, faster processor,
bigger screen, better screen.
They do all these things at the same time.
And I think what's gonna end up happening
is much like on the PC where someone like,
I mean, Intel and AMD and Nvidia
are all notorious for doing this.
Oh, buy this motherboard now and upgrade the CPU.
Let me know when's the last time you upgraded a CPU
in a system, come on.
By the time you're ready to spend money on that again,
there's a better motherboard and a better CPU
and a better graphics card.
You take that old machine
and you hand it off to someone else.
Or even if you perform all those upgrades
within a reasonable period of time,
you're still gonna end up with an entire computer
or an entire foam worth of leftover parts.
There's a few use cases that I see for this.
There's the person that's extremely accident prone.
I know a few that constantly break their screens
or constantly break X, Y, or Z.
But then we don't need a fully modular phone for that.
We just need an easily replaceable screen.
Yes, but none of them are.
And they're not really going in that direction
except for this where you could take all the modules
off the back, buy a new base, put all the modules in
and it would probably be a lot cheaper.
Okay.
Because I'm assuming that I haven't looked a ton
into Project ARA but the screen is built into the base
unlike phone blocks, right?
Project ARA, they are talking replaceable screen right now.
Okay, okay, didn't know that.
So you could just take the whole base,
all your modules, replace the screen,
which is awesome because I know a ton of people
that just break their screens repeatedly.
Their phone's still fine.
It still works in the background.
I know a buddy actually like a day or two ago
that broke his screen.
Phone's still fine, boots up, all good.
Can't see anything though.
Not really helpful.
That would be helpful for someone like that.
Or someone who has no real interest
in upgrading all the time but wants a phone
that can text people, call people
and take really nice photos.
So they're gonna spend a bit on their camera module
and a bit on their storage module and that's about it.
So very specialty.
Yeah.
Now all of that stuff about how this is impossible
that I just said, oh yeah, the last one
that wasn't even brought up by an OnTech
but that I think is really important
is who's gonna support this?
If I'm Samsung and I'm used to selling people
$600 or $700 devices that are all made by me,
am I gonna turn around and go, yeah, yeah, Motorola.
Hey, here, we're gonna make really great components
for your thing so that we can sell something
for like 30 bucks rather than selling someone
a whole phone and so you can sell them
the rest of the phone.
And I'm not just talking about Samsung.
I'm talking about everyone and it's not even just,
I'm not criticizing Samsung for it.
It's just a reality.
That would be terrible business.
How much of the device can, like, okay, one,
maybe Samsung doesn't sell anything.
Maybe Samsung sells the parts to Motorola,
you buy everything from Motorola.
Right, why would they even wanna sell these parts
to Motorola to support this project?
We've seen awkward competitiveness behind the scenes
where Samsung makes some device for Apple
and Apple makes some device for whatever
and we've seen that in the past where it doesn't seem
to make a lot of sense but they made money.
But if it's not being integrated at a higher level
such as from Samsung or from a flash manufacturer
or a camera manufacturer, I mean, that's the thing
is all these guys are so vertically integrated
to the point where they'll borrow from each other
but, you know, if they can use their own sensor design
or their own flash or their own processor, they will.
Yeah, and I expect Motorola to use as much
of their own stuff as they possibly can.
But I think it's gonna come.
They don't have anything.
They don't build flash.
They don't build processors.
But it's Google, Google makes flash, do they not?
No, Google's software only.
Flash makers are IMFT, Samsung, SanDisk, like Intel.
These are the guys who actually,
so Intel is the crucial Intel joint project.
So no, the actual manufacturing of any of this stuff,
Motorola has to convince actual manufacturers
who are actually selling this crap in their own devices
to support this.
Good luck, Chuck.
That's all I have to say.
I think if they're buying it, it'll happen.
Okay, so with all of that said, here's my last thing.
This is how it could work.
Low end devices.
This is where I see the potential.
I think that all the enthusiasts getting really excited
about things like the phone blocks promotional video
for the Thunderclap are deluding themselves
because that's not really what this is about.
In order to build a device, let's say even within
the next year or even two years, we'll be looking,
so to build a device that could have
a somewhat reasonable form factor,
somewhat reasonable weight and perform well,
let's say as well as a device today,
you would be looking at significantly downgraded hardware.
It would have to be much lower power,
it would have to be much smaller to make up
for all the extra room that you're gonna waste
with the housings that have to go around each component
and with the interconnects that have to be built into it.
And in order to compensate for that,
we're gonna be looking at low end devices.
And I think that that's where something like Project Aura
could be great for developing nations.
I think all these enthusiasts are getting excited
thinking that we're gonna be building high end Uber phones
that you can upload, I'll be able to upgrade it
with a 16 core processor, this and the, yeah, sure,
if you wanted it to be this thick or whatever else.
We are very quickly reaching a lot of,
there's a great article on PC per
about how graphics card performance is slowing down.
And we've seen explosive growth in mobile,
but for many of the same reasons
that we saw explosive growth in graphics cards
compared to CPUs where it wasn't just
that the manufacturing processes were shrinking.
The other thing going on here was that the manufacturers
were learning how to optimize for this.
Well, phones are already not able to really benefit
from manufacturing process shrinks
in the same way that graphics cards and CPUs
were able to benefit for years.
So what we're seeing right now is some benefit there,
but a lot of it is actually just coming from optimization.
So once they get a good handle
on how to design these things to get more power,
we're just gonna have to draw more power
and it's just gonna have to be bigger
and need more cooling and all that stuff.
And obviously Moore's Law isn't done yet,
not by a long shot, but for Project Aura
to come in a reasonable period of time
and be in a reasonable form factor,
I think it's a low end play
and I think it makes a ton of sense there
where again, replacement parts or low cost upgrades
or saving on electronic waste,
these are all great things that are gonna happen,
but not at the high end.
The high end developed nation consumer
has shown time and time again
that they want an Alienware or they want a MacBook Pro
or they want these highly integrated devices
that have economies of scale on their side
in terms of cost as well.
In addition to the manufacturing advantages
and the fact that they're lighter and thinner
and faster and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
not an Alienware so much,
but although they're heavier, they're faster.
I was talking about their laptops specifically.
They're faster?
Yeah, they'll have like SLI GTX 680N.
Yeah, but other people make that too.
I mean, they're faster than a highly integrated solution.
Yeah, so I looked up the Google thing
and what I was confused about
was how they were when they were selling enterprise drives
and everyone was like, how the hell are they doing that?
Are they making their own?
Yeah, I didn't end up following that up
so I thought they were making, yeah.
Okay, I think the issue with volume today
is that that's really far away.
We need to get that closer.
It needs to be like here.
So we can, well, don't worry,
we'll reposition the mic next week.
I'll just yell more to compensate.
Hopefully that makes up for it.
That's gonna make it peak
because the gain's too high apparently.
So, oh, fine.
So moving right on to Google Smart Watch
and Google Glass News.
This is, of course, a huge deal
with the Kit Kat optimizations for low power devices,
with the, my internet is apparently being a giant turd.
You keep disconnecting.
Yeah, I have no idea what's,
the issue is my notebook, I think.
I think it needs a restart.
So, you know what?
Well, let's just talk about it.
If you let me diagnose this,
you can talk about what's on there, right?
Turn it off and back on again.
Did you try to reboot it?
Yes, I did.
Thank you.
IT Crowd's awesome.
I actually expected you to kind of night
through this whole topic.
Okay, pick another topic then.
Maybe do some of our, I tried to see,
I'm so used to touch screen.
I tried to scroll his laptop.
Okay, go down and do some of our rapid fire topics.
Can I do graphics cards?
No, I wanna get into that one.
So yeah, don't worry guys, it's coming.
Give me one sec.
So amongst a few things,
one of the most ridiculous topics we have this week
is actually the massive Xbox that just took up space
and kind of sat there in Vancouver,
which is kind of a good job.
You took up a parking lot in Vancouver,
which is like super not helpful for all the people
that have serious trouble parking in Vancouver
every single day.
Thank you for that.
That was great.
I don't even go to Vancouver
and that drives me a little bit nuts.
But either way, it's a hype machine.
So we're talking about it
along as a whole bunch of other people.
Yeah, we don't even care about Xbox One.
I'm not planning to buy one.
Someone asked me if I'm gonna do an unboxing.
I said, yeah, sure, if I get a free one.
I'm not gonna buy it though.
I think your unboxing would be kind of hilarious.
I'd just be like, oh yeah, okay, so it's black.
It's a box.
I think that's an Xbox logo on the front.
It's not the first one.
So I don't know about that.
But yeah, if you can see in that picture,
which I'm pointing at, which you can't see me pointing at.
Here, let me show you how to point at things.
Oh, nope, this way.
There you go.
There we go.
Ah, if you can see that,
if you can see the building behind it,
you can tell how actually insanely big that is.
Yeah, and like the lines on the parking stalls right here,
like it's huge.
It's ridiculous. It's massive.
It's really freaking big.
And then they're just like, yeah, it's there.
So you can like go look at it and stuff.
I think you can also enter a contest
to win an Xbox One or something like that
if you go there.
It's like that.
You can do it online too though.
You can do it, okay, well.
So if you go to a URL, which is,
I was just planning on us clicking on it,
but it's xbox.com slash en dash ca slash one source.
If you go to that, which is a little bit,
probably sounded weird and I said it really quickly,
but oh well, you can put in your gamer tag
and I think one or two other little bits of information
and you'll be put in a draw to win some stuff.
Right now, all we know in that group of stuff
is an Xbox One, but there's some other like things
that they haven't really said yet.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and I'm gonna say
some of the other stuff will be Xbox Live subscriptions.
And probably controllers and more Xbox Ones.
Or games.
Or games.
Probably exclusive games.
Probably exclusive games.
Just some assumptions.
This is like the, I don't know.
I wanted to have this in here
and I think you actually added it,
but I wanted this, I didn't remove it
because I thought it was hilarious
that they just like were like, oh yeah,
this is a big Xbox in a parking lot in Vancouver.
Go look at it.
Yeah, do that thing.
Hype machine, yeah.
I don't know, kind of obscene.
Okay, so my output's not working here unless it is,
which we are about to find out.
It is.
I can jump onto the next topic.
Sure, yeah, jump onto our next one.
So a gas station clerk took a bullet to the chest
and was okay.
And how he did this was by having his phone
in his pocket, apparently.
So he didn't even actually realize that his phone
like was broken or what was the cause of it
until he took it out of his pocket.
Which I think is kind of crazy,
but he was probably on an insane adrenaline high
because he was just shot at.
So he probably didn't feel it because of that.
But it's actually kind of nuts.
So his HTC phone, and I'm calling that out for a reason,
blocked the bullet.
Made him not be critically injured or died.
Judging by the fact that a phone blocked the bullet,
he maybe not died.
But either way.
It wasn't gonna be helpful.
Yeah, it wasn't gonna be a good situation
and then the phone made it a not bad situation.
I'm wondering how fast he's gonna go out
and buy another HTC phone.
Or how fast HTC sends him a free phone.
Or how fast HTC, exactly.
I bet you his next phone, however he gets it,
will probably be an HTC phone.
So there's a picture of the phone.
You can see the bullet entry right there
and how it just decimated the screen.
But it's a bullet, so.
Yeah, maybe what we should do is.
Instead of drop test.
Is criticize HTC for the phone breaking.
It's ridiculous.
I can't believe they think this level of quality
is acceptable to this market.
What we should do is we should bullet test an Xbox One.
Ha ha ha ha.
As part of the unboxing, we should take it out to a range
and just shoot the crap out of it.
So you have a license, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, okay.
So we could legitimately do it without it just being like.
You can go to a range and shoot without a license.
A license is only for purchasing and holding onto,
like having, acquiring, purchasing, all that stuff.
You can go shoot, like you can actually go with someone
into the woods to an area where you can shoot.
And if they own the gun, you can shoot.
And that's not illegal.
Oh, okay.
Not that, any of this matters for the stream.
But yeah, just putting this out there.
So we can, yeah, this would be no problem
if we wanted to go shoot stuff.
Okay, so here's what I'm gonna have to do.
I'm just gonna have to build us another little scene here.
So, guys, give us a moment here.
Oh, look at that.
We already have this one.
So then all we have to do is add screen region.
Boo, what did I do?
Oh, that was.
I think you grabbed the side on that.
Yeah, I got this.
There we go.
There we go.
Okay, so we're adding the screen region.
All right, so let's move into our next topic,
which is da da da da da.
Oh, you know what, I probably kinda did this wrong.
Sorry, everyone.
There we go.
Let's go move ourselves into the corner,
and yeah, Xplit, go away.
Okay, Google Smart Watch and Google Glass News.
So this was from ABC News.
New with new Google Glass and Smart Watch,
Google wants to be all over your body,
and they're not the only one if your name is Slick.
Oh.
Because I wanna be all over your body.
I knew where that was going.
All right, so the Explorer Edition.
So first up, Glass.
Explorer Edition owners can invite up to three others.
So I actually reached out to Marcus Brownlee
from MKBHD already.
I am assuming that this all works
and goes according to plan.
Gonna be getting my hands on this one.
It's available in new colors with a new earbud,
which I kinda look at and I go,
oh man, that's gonna look ridiculous.
But, I see how it's necessary,
but I'm not super thrilled on it.
Is there a picture of it?
No, I don't think there's a picture,
but I think it looks pretty ridiculous.
But a bigger thing is that it is now prescription compatible
so that is pretty darn cool.
That is a really big deal.
It is still sort of slated for a 2014 launch
and they haven't said anything about whether battery life
has been dramatically improved in any way.
So I'm excited to try out Explorer.
I'm sure you're excited to try it out.
Yeah, for sure.
And one thing is that the new Kit Kat update
actually helps with battery life a little bit
in the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi regions,
if I remember correctly.
Who knows where they were targeting that?
Smart watches, glass.
Smart watches and glass.
So I think even if they didn't do anything
necessarily to glass in particular for battery life,
I think it'll be slightly better
just because of those two protocols.
All right, so our next thing here, boom.
Sorry guys, this is gonna be a little bit inelegant for now.
And that, oh right, I went to it on my laptop
because I'm used to that.
Ah, so inelegant.
I had a way to load, we're good, we're good.
All right, so Google may launch a smart watch
before Apple.
The new device would be quote unquote personal assistant.
So obviously the one in the picture, guys,
is not a rumored Google smart watch.
That is the Galaxy Gear from Samsung.
So go.
It's interesting, it kind of reminds me
of how you treat your pebble actually,
which is more like you get messages there
and you'll notice that someone's calling you
and then you'll go get your phone.
It's not really necessarily like something
to do a whole bunch of things on.
No, and I think that's where Samsung really went wrong.
They tried to make it too much.
It's like, oh well you can return text,
you can do this, you can do, you know what,
I can still do that faster on my phone.
Yeah, and I actually, I like the way you use it
because I know even if you don't have your phone on you,
if I need to just text you something
that I don't really need a reply back from,
I just need you to know, I'll just be like boop boop boop,
boom, I just don't even care.
It saved my bacon a number of times.
I was on a court playing badminton
and I had left my phone off to the side as an app to do
and I got a message from my parents
that they couldn't bring my baby home
and I had to go get him so I was able to go get him
before it was bedtime and then just today
I had left my phone on the table
because we were playing music off of it
and I got a message from you I think
and it was important and I was like,
oh balls, where's my phone?
But that's good and it makes a lot of sense
and I like that angle actually
because that at least for now
is where I think smartwatches should be.
Oh, if Google's watching or anyone's watching,
you know those things that you can keep in your wallet
that set off proximity alarms like the Proximo?
That needs to be built into smartwatches
so we can enable functionality
where if I go too far away from my phone,
it'll let me know.
So there, anyone listening,
there's my, all I want is 20 bucks, okay?
So if anyone implements that idea, 20 bucks
and you can have a patent, I don't care.
No, not per, no, just a, I just want 20 bucks
or even just buy me a pizza.
There, we'll call it.
I think that might have happened.
We'll call that done.
If someone's already done it, then whatever.
No, I mean like today.
Oh, someone bought us a pizza, oh, what?
I think Brandon has it.
A pizza?
I think so.
What?
I'm pretty sure.
Brandon, do you have pizza?
I think he was letting us finish our topic.
Whoa, hey, oh, there's pizza, wow.
Okay, so someone implement, is gonna implement this idea.
Oh, so it's from the forum.
There you go, aw, thank you.
What is it celebrating?
I don't think anything.
How did they get this address?
I know how, I didn't give it to them.
I know how, it was you.
Wow, well, thank you guys very much for the pizza.
So because it's what the alpha male does,
I'm going to eat first while Slick has to talk
about our new topic, which is.
I think there's specific rules that you can't have any.
I don't know if those rules stayed.
Nope, too bad.
So the FAA is loosening the rules
for e-devices on airline flights.
This was posted by Delons, Delons, whatever, man.
I don't know what to tell you.
Delons.
Delons, okay, so there's a picture
of someone using a laptop on a flight
and all I have to say is about friggin' time
and then I'm having a piece of pizza.
Yeah, it should have happened a long time ago.
It's been kind of ridiculous.
Even when I was a kid playing Game Boy Color on the phone,
on the plane, sorry, not on the phone,
when the lady would come by and tell me to turn it off,
I'd just be like, really?
Even as a kid, how does, what?
No, there's no way that I'm going to take down a plane
with my Game Boy.
That's ridiculous and it's been kind of crazy forever.
One thing that I think is nuts about this
is that there's so much crap going on right now
and the Senate had to get behind this to push it through.
Like, couldn't you do other stuff?
Like, I'm happy this happened and I do actually,
I don't think it's important necessarily
but I think it was ridiculous that it existed
and I'm happy it's gone and it should have been gone.
I just don't think it necessarily needed the,
like, I don't think it should have been required,
the amount of backing that had.
It should have been as difficult as it was, yeah.
Yeah, that's ridiculous, like, come on.
It should have been so simple.
Now, it's not, like, all the devices all the time
so phones are still not allowed
unless they're in airplane mode
and I think they're still asking for certain things
during taxi and takeoff and you know what?
Some of the concerns, I kind of understand.
Having a bunch of laptops and, like, tray tables down
and all this stuff going on when you're landing
and things could be flying around in an emergency.
Heavy devices, so, like, this laptop would be,
you'd have to stow it, which makes sense
because, like, I think it's 90% of the problems
happen within 10K of landing or taking off.
So, if there's a higher possibility of a problem,
stow your device that could knock someone out.
And I get that, but on the other hand,
if I'm, like, if I got my earbuds in
and my phone's in my pocket, come on, man.
I mean, honestly, I do it anyway.
I usually wear a hood when I fly
so I just put my hood on and then I have my earbud
going around the other side
and then I just have my phone in my pocket and I'm like.
And there's no amplification of the signals
by having that many of them.
Wi-Fi is gonna be allowed now
and I've had people saying,
why would you want Wi-Fi on a plane?
I can think of a hundred reasons
to have Wi-Fi on a plane.
DS multiplayer, you can stream.
DS multiplayer is sweet.
I know, right?
You can stream using, like, to your smartphone,
using those little, like, external hard drives
that are battery powered.
This is something that I do all the time.
No, it's fantastic.
All right, so moving on to our next topic,
which I would normally open up on my laptop
but instead I'm gonna open it up over here
because for whatever reason, my output's not working.
I blame DisplayPort, even though I love DisplayPort.
So this is something that it's hard to even call a rumor
with a straight face.
This was tweeted to me by Stephen Toe
and it's from overclockers.co.uk
where some guy, if you scroll down,
where's his GPU-Z shot?
I think it's, no, Catalyst Control Center.
Yeah, okay, so R9, 200 series, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Ah, yes, here.
So his frequency is wrong.
So there's hint number one
and then I don't know if we see stream processors here.
There we go.
So the frequency is wrong
and the number of, wow, where are the stream processors?
I don't see them.
They must be here.
Maybe they're not.
Anyway, the frequency is wrong.
This is according to the rumors,
which it's really hard to call rumors
with a straight face now,
Radeon 290 instead of a 290X.
So a retailer in Europe managed to accidentally ship
an R9 290 to a member of overclockers.
Obviously, the guy's like, yeah, I ordered a 290X,
so I'm gonna exchange it,
but not until I've benchmarked it.
My favorite part is like,
people seem kind of unsure
and he's not releasing a ton of information
and then all of a sudden he's like,
GPU-Z, photo of the box, photo of the card, like, yup.
It's pretty epic.
There's an issue with this.
A lot of the time when we say, okay,
but bear in mind, guys, these are early benchmarks,
actually there's not gonna be that much of a difference,
especially with CPUs.
When we see that, I mean, they always had it,
every single time.
Somehow Tom's gets a sample like six months early.
Go back and look at all of those.
It's basically the same performance.
I mean, someone like Intel has finalized
pretty much everything
and they're working on fine tuning
for like the last six months leading up to a launch.
That's how they project launch days,
a quarter or two quarters in advance,
because they know it's done.
I don't actually find graphics cards to be the same.
They're ramping up production.
Graphics cards are a little bit different.
Yeah.
Where particularly the hardware
was probably done a while ago,
but the drivers could be being tweaked
in the days leading up to the launch
or even the days after the launch.
So whatever benchmarks that he's run,
I know for a fact that those performance numbers
may not have very much to do at all
with how R9 290 performs.
I thought you were going the other way
and I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
No, no, no.
I mean, so guys, take them with a grain of salt,
but until we know pricing
and the real performance of R9 290,
we won't know, sorry, I got something in my eye,
the whole story, all right?
R9 290.
And like it could be.
It could be accurate.
Could be accurate.
It's all speculation right now.
Yeah.
All right, so moving on to our next topic.
This is another rumor.
This was posted on Linus Tech Tips forum
and it's got the classic fry gif.
Shut up gif, sorry.
Shut up and take my money.
The rumor and which we can't verify
is that the GeForce GTX 780 Ti has 2,880 CUDA cores.
All right, so that if it were true
would be more than GeForce GTX Titan.
So here's all the rumors.
You guys can check out the thread.
It was posted by You Better Not.
And of course, the You Better Not thing
is we better not discuss anything
that we're under NDA about.
So all we can say is this is what's in that thread.
There are rumors out there on the internet
that it'll be available in three gig,
six gig and 12 gig configurations.
Although.
I think the galaxy images are actually pretty interesting.
Are they?
Is it?
Well, yeah, it was galaxy images I think
that showed like three different configurations.
There's stuff that's no surprise
like support for NVIDIA surround
and adaptive V sync.
That I think we're probably.
I mean, okay, I'm not gonna say it
but I think it would be stupid
if something like that was even under embargo.
But there you go, guys.
The rumors are out there.
Our card is here.
We've been briefed on it
and we are very excited to bring you coverage of it
as soon as we can.
But that is all we can really say for now.
What we can say is that with everything
that's been going on lately between AMD and NVIDIA,
man, shots fired, shots fired back, shots returned.
I mean, it feels like one of the ships has to sink.
They're gonna run out of cards.
Or they're gonna run out of bullets.
With all the launches and pricing tweaks
and performance tweaks and everything that's going on,
it is an exciting time
for graphics card technology right now.
And next week, I think we're gonna finally see
all the dust settle and all the cards will be on the table.
And we have a lot of videos coming out next week.
Yeah, a lot of plans
like Battlefield 4 performance roundups.
Stay tuned for that.
Through the roof.
Battlefield 4, we have two different GPU tests coming.
We have GPU tests coming tonight,
which is gonna be really, really early.
Drivers aren't optimized yet.
He's determined to do it tonight.
It's not shot yet, right?
It's not shot yet.
But all the performance testing,
you spent the last two days.
It's releasing tonight.
I'm not losing all that work.
There is a video being released tonight.
Two different resolutions, two days worth of benchmarks,
real in-game playthroughs, which is what we do.
All cards overclocked, which is what we do.
Guys, stay tuned.
It's gonna be awesome.
Yeah.
And like, yeah, the drivers are not optimized yet,
and there's a few things.
And because of that reason,
we're gonna have another GPU follow-up
once the two other cards that are coming out-ish
sometime in the future are out.
We'll have a follow-up then.
All right.
Brothers and sisters,
this is a bit of a direct response
to a particular Twitter follower
who keeps trolling me about,
well, I shouldn't say trolling,
keeps harassing me.
What word should I use?
You know the guy I'm talking about, right?
Alexander?
I don't know.
What is this even?
All right, this is the forgotten name.
Oh, yes, yes, yes.
I know who you're talking about.
Okay, who keeps getting on my case
about not talking about the positive things about Bitcoin,
because typically, it only really makes news for us
when something disastrous happens.
Like, it turns out that however many percentage
of the transactions were drug-related,
or it turns out this, or it turns out that,
or some exchange shuts down.
That's the only time we really talk about it.
So now, just for you, man,
we are gonna talk about one of the most positive things
that could possibly exist about any currency.
This guy buys $27 worth of Bitcoin,
is now worth about a million bucks.
Which is amazing.
So what he did was, when it was worth around,
I think it was like 880,000-ish,
he sold out, he cashed in at about 1 5th of his coins,
and then bought an apartment
in one of the nicest places where he lives.
Which is like, sweet.
He bought 5,000 Bitcoins in 2009 for 27 bucks.
And the only reason he bought it
was because he was interested in encryption,
and I think he was doing a paper or something, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I'm just trying to find it.
Yeah, working on a thesis paper about encryption,
was introduced to the Bitcoin, and was like, eh.
I'll buy a few, just to see kinda how it works.
Saves his wallet password somewhere,
forgets it and leaves it there.
Eventually heard about how exploded it was,
hunted for his password, found his password,
oh my god, I have basically a million dollars.
Amazing.
So there you go, man.
Stop bugging me on Twitter about it now.
All right, we've got some more, I think that's it.
Let's go back to our headline items
and make sure that we discussed everything.
BBM, okay, but that's not one of our headline ones,
so we've covered all that stuff.
Oh yeah, yeah, let's do BBM.
We jumped over because we talked about too much fun stuff.
So BBM got, I think, 10 million downloads in the first day.
Now there's a few kinda interesting speculations
about this actually being legitimate.
This was posted by the point blank
on the Linus Tech Tips forum.
If you guys aren't a member,
go join the Linus Tech Tips forum.
We had some people show up at our meetup
who weren't members, so we chastised them thoroughly.
I've noticed a few of them are already members.
That's good, they did well to do so.
So one thing that I kind of was interested in
when I first read this was there was that massive amount
of copy-paste purchased reviews.
So how many downloads are legitimate
and how many are actually 10 million on the first day?
Because if I'm Blackberry, I'm probably pretty clever
with respect to spoofing IP addresses
or faking downloads of something.
Yeah, so they got a lot of downloads.
I don't know if it was actually 10 million,
but I have seen a lot of people,
like just friends of mine and stuff,
talking about it and downloading it and using it.
They are getting a lot of downloads.
I don't know exactly how much it is.
It is actually pretty cool.
A few main things that I want to point out
that it actually does is you don't have to give out
your phone number to be able to use it,
which is awesome if you're selling stuff online
or just using Craigslist or anything like that.
Or if you're someone like me who wants to communicate
with followers or whoever else
but doesn't necessarily want phone calls.
Yeah, so that's actually very cool.
Picture sending doesn't suck.
Picture sending through text messages just sucks.
And is expensive.
And is expensive.
And there's other services for this,
but that is just, you can have benefits
on two different services.
I mean, that's something that drives me crazy.
The carriers had every opportunity
to just crush this whole iMessage
and BlackBerry messaging thing
by offering more features, better security,
and I mean, come on.
The actual amount of data it cost them,
like the rates that they charge for texting,
they allowed this whole thing to exist
when they could have just made texting free
and not had to bother with any of this.
And like picture texting is terrible.
Yeah.
And always has been.
Why is it terrible?
I don't know.
It's ridiculous.
Better attachment support.
You can send like Excel documents
and you can send all this other stuff,
which is really cool.
And it's encrypted end to end.
It's encrypted for you and then it isn't decrypted
until it hits the other person with the phone
and it's apparently not stored on BlackBerry servers,
I think, pretty sure.
So that's actually really cool
if you're someone following the NSA stuff
and you really care about all that kind of stuff.
And there's a whole bunch more.
That's just all I felt like listing right now.
So my thing.
Go ahead.
My thing personally is why the hell didn't this happen
years ago and why the hell didn't they release
their encryption stuff years ago?
Oh, like their business grade?
Yeah, they should have just flipped Gears.
Like I don't know how everyone didn't notice.
They should have just flipped Gears
and became a software company.
Because they're good.
BBM is good.
Their encryption thing was good.
They would have been really successful.
And now they have this massive company of hardware stuff
that no one cares about.
And the thing is they could have sold
of the entire ecosystem to corporations.
I mean, it's not just, guys remember,
it's a much bigger picture than just selling
individual cell phone users a secure platform
or a secure way of operating their phone
or a secure message. It was all enterprise.
Because you can sell the backend servers
that drive the whole thing,
which they were already heavily invested in.
So you could, you would have allowed yourself
to not let Android and Apple,
Android and iOS catch up to you.
You would have allowed yourself to maintain
that dominance there and built a niche.
But come on, I mean, who could have known
that they just didn't stand a chance?
That Android was gonna get so much better so fast.
Years ago, they were already dead.
Like they've been dead and flopping around for so long,
which is what I don't understand.
Like, yes, there was a while there where they were fighting.
They released the bolt, whatever,
I don't remember the prefix or something.
Yeah, 9300 or something.
Yeah, and they were like kind of etching along.
But then for so long after that, they were nothing.
Like why not just slip gears
or keep producing the hardware, whatever.
Maybe it becomes something. You gotta convince investors
that it's a good idea to do something like that as well.
And I mean, how do you convince people that, you know,
a free app is the way forward for your company?
But the encryption and servers and stuff, not free app.
The BBM thing, maybe that happens later.
But the encryption and server stuff
should have happened a lot.
One way or another, guys, definitely check out BBM.
Not because we're Canadian
and we really want BlackBerry to survive,
but just because, you know, it's cross platform,
which is great.
iMessage is fantastic.
Except that, what?
It only works with other people who have iOS devices.
Are you freaking kidding me, Apple?
It's like, yeah, I'm going to convince
all of my friends and family that they must use iPhones
because I wanna use iMessage, it's ridiculous.
Anyway, all right, let's move on to the next thing.
Dell laptops.
Dell issued a recall because they had laptops
that smelled like cat pee.
This is, don't worry, this is a quick topic.
We're not gonna talk for too long about this,
but how did this make it through QA?
Honestly.
Like honestly, what happened here?
I think that was one of my first comments
on the document was like, what happened?
So this was posted by ChillxNate on the forum.
So the BBC is reporting that Dell's Latitude 6430U
ultrabooks have an interesting characteristic
you won't find in any MacBook Air.
Palm rusting emits an odor that smells like cat urine.
An issue with the manufacturing process
is thought to be to blame.
Now the funny thing here is you actually have to contact
Dell and you have to still be within warranty
in order to get a replacement.
Now it's a business-oriented ultrabook.
Can you imagine walking into a business meeting
and smelling like cat pee?
I mean, I have a router that smells like B.O.,
which is funny enough, but then a laptop
that smells like cat pee, you can get all kinds of smells
out of a faulty plastic manufacturing process.
And that's apparently what happened here.
It's not a reliability issue or anything like that.
It's just hilarious.
And it's not bad for your health.
People speculated about that.
It got a little bit crazy, but it's actually fine.
All right, so our last main topic of the day,
before we move on to some of our forum topics and all that,
is this video right here.
This was actually tweeted to me by at R-T-E-V.
Guys, remember, tweeting things to me sometimes works,
but it's much better and I'll love you a lot more
if you post on the forum in the news section
because we actually have shifted to almost exclusively
browsing for news in the forum
because we figure what you guys care about
is what you wanna hear us talk about.
And-
And honestly, the news section has gotten so much better.
Oh, it's so much better.
Pretty much everything ends up there anyway.
It's so good.
I mean, our forum community does a great job
of maintaining it.
I mean, Linus Tech Tips forum news section is my homepage,
so that's how I stay up to date on things,
which is fantastic to be able to say that
about what the community's done there.
So this video, flexible, high definition, C-A-A-C-O-S
displays, so check this shiz out, guys.
This YouTube video right here.
Yep, yep, yep.
Okay, here we go.
So let's go ahead and we're just gonna-
I think these-
Yeah, advertisement.
I'm gonna watch Twitch chat
because I don't know about the audio.
Okay, so check this out, guys.
Oh, we just muted it, that works.
Until now, with oxide semiconductors,
reliability was generally a problem.
Check out the way that this display wraps around
so you could see notifications on the top of the device.
It's got buttons.
Okay, so hold on, let's just go back and look at it again.
So you guys should definitely check out this video.
So it's got buttons that sit here on the side
and they've got a cool closeup
that shows you how you might press that.
I mean, this is an entirely different way
to operate your device.
And then they were also showing off,
where's the curved battery?
Yes, bendable battery design right here
that would be huge for wearable tech.
Combined with curved displays, curved batteries,
you could be making bracelets or armbands
or all kinds of crazy, awesome wearable technology
that really is, whether you think so or not,
really is the future.
I mean, I get a kick out of all the speculation about,
will these guys have a smartwatch?
Will smartwatches be the next big-
Yes!
Yes.
Yes, it's done.
It's a foregone conclusion
and this is absolutely amazing.
And like one thing about that too
is you can bend it around your wrist.
If it's flat, you can bend it around your wrist
10,000 times, apparently, before it becomes a problem.
And you saw their bend test there.
So that's actually pretty cool.
Another crazy thing that they had was like,
I don't remember the exact specs, but let me see here,
a 13 and a half inch 4K resolution screen
that weighs 10 grams.
Go watch that video.
It's like four minutes and like-
It's pretty epic.
A lot of the time I start watching a video
and I'm like, okay, skim, skim, skim.
I just watched the whole thing.
I was like, I need to see this
because it's amazing.
The link for it will be in the WAN Show doc at the end.
Do you want to start downloading the Bill Logs of the Week?
Yeah, sure.
Is this it?
Yeah, oh, here.
Ah, for crying out loud.
At least we have Office on this computer.
Do we?
Yes, we do.
Okay.
Yay, Office, which is still the best.
So we actually have a Bill Logs of the Week this week
and it is pretty epic as normal.
Not that surprised.
We've changed a little bit of the way that we do it
by suggestion by Wayler and Dave,
by moderators who found a better way of doing it.
So we actually have a little bit of hardware specs
along with the name at the beginning.
So if there's anything that stands out a little bit,
we could point it out here.
The main thing being that he went naked on his case,
which is his brother named his desk the plank.
And it's basically just all sitting on his desk.
This is a 24 core, four processor folding machine,
which is just absolutely beast.
Well, that's one way of doing a computer case.
So it just kind of sits on his desk.
This is a new way of doing a desk computer.
Don't even bother bolted in, just, you know.
Wood isn't particularly electrically conductive.
So as long as dust isn't an issue
and he doesn't accidentally zap it,
then this is an interesting cooler layout that we got going.
This is a cable that isn't plugged into anything.
Optical drive is clearly too far away
to reach an IDE or a SATA connector.
That's kind of awesome.
There's a little bit more of an updated shot.
So he's actually using a drive cage now.
Yeah, all right.
Upgrades.
And look at the, it came from a fractal case, obviously,
cause there are the accessories and real coolers.
And more secured cooling set up there.
So he's busting out all the folding.
24 CPU cores, man, that's sexy.
That's pretty freaking beast.
We're a long way away from games
being able to leverage something like this,
but the folding team has been doing really well
and in large part,
thanks to the way that folding does leverage more cores.
So that one is.
For science.
That one was kind of in big support of our folding team
and just to show off some of the interesting things
that you can do with computers
that a lot of people don't actually realize you can.
Now this one, check out the case.
Old Russian oscilloscope.
This is pretty cool.
That is the finished computer.
Wow.
It's done, it's in there, it works.
This isn't, if you read the other specs there,
this is not the highest end computer.
Not at all.
I just, I included that cause I knew you'd care
cause it shows the finish.
Yeah, it's black crinkle finish, it's gorgeous.
Yeah.
So that's.
Look at this.
Yeah, so it's not, it's not the highest end computer,
but it's freaking cool.
And if you go check out all his build log,
you can actually see he takes the whole thing apart.
Like he has to take out the old CRT screen,
which looks ridiculous.
You gotta be careful doing that.
You don't want them to like, explode.
Yep, and it's a really interesting build log.
Also nod to a fan.
Nod to a fan, very nice.
So yeah, check it out
because his build log is really interesting.
He tears that thing apart
and makes just a wonderful little machine,
which is as, yeah, as you can see.
Oh, that's the 24, whatever.
Yeah, we're done.
Not super high spec, but super freaking awesome.
And yeah, I thought it was pretty cool.
Well, I think that's it for the WAN Show for this week,
unless you had anything else to add.
I think we actually had a very efficient show today.
Went pretty quick and covered everything.
Yeah, it's like an hour and a half.
We ended like right on our mark.
And you guys are awesome for watching.
4,500 of you are watching by the end of the show here.
We are, as always, overwhelmed by your support.
Tune in next week.
Same bat time, same bat channel.
And if you tuned in late
or if you know anyone who wants to watch or whatever else,
don't forget the archive always goes up on YouTube
once we're done with the live show.
You know, it helps a lot when we don't have interruptions.
I think that was the biggest thing.
Yeah, it's really the biggest.
We didn't have any glitchiness today.
So again, thank you for watching.
Until next time.
And a big thanks to our sponsor, Hotspot Shield.
Yes, one quick thing to add.
After party, guys, I'm gonna be a little bit late
because I'm gonna finish that Battlefield 4 video first.
And then we will have an after party.
That's tomorrow morning.
That's why the after party.
You want a date in the morning?
Yeah, she's flying to China for two weeks.
So I'm seeing her before she leaves.
Oh, okay.
Anyways, that was slightly awkward.
Now it's over.
Why are we doing this?
You can't.
I can't click it.