 they did was like walk while the other person like one girl just trying to kick him in the leg. He just kept walking towards the edge of the ring and then he lost on purpose. All right. Guess we're good to go. He actually did wrestle. There was one guy who actually was like a four hundred pound three or four hundred pound like Pat New York dude who actually tried to wrestle the smaller guy and he just rolled him over like it's Monday April 30th two thousand eighteen. I'm rim. I'm Scott. It's Geek Nights tonight. What's next for smartphones. I guess I'll start with the phone. So as you all know I very much don't like large cell phones. Like if I could get a phone that was the size of my old palm free but had the capabilities of a modern smartphone I'd be very much for it. It just doesn't make any sense right is in the earliest days you know they came with the iPod and then they're like smaller smaller smaller let's make this as small as we can and then we got that iPod and everyone and everyone was like common sense. Yes I would like to carry around more things in less space iPod Nano iPod shuffle. Let's go as small as we can go. We don't want to carry around a big heavy fucking thing and then the iPhone came out and then they're like iPhone three G smaller iPhone four smaller iPhone five smaller and all these other companies were like we make them bigger and why did they make them bigger. It wasn't because bigger is actually better. It's because they did not have the miniaturization. It's hard to make something small. Yeah they did not have the advanced hardware miniaturization technology that Apple had so but they did have was marketing technology and they just convinced people that bigger they like bigger screen guys. Yeah we can't make our battery any smaller. So but we're not going to tell you that just you know bigger is better. And then so people believe bigger is better because they're stupid Americans but I have also found that in general most of the preference I see for large phones stems from a combination of untreated vision problems. People who don't have a computer their smart phone is the only computing device they own and they literally use it for everything. Those are primarily the two people who say they have big hands but actually don't if you actually measure their hand. They think they have a big one never mind. There's that UX study that showed across the board phones above a certain size which that size by the way is not much bigger than my tiny phone right now are objectively slower for even expert users to interact with because the thumb can't get all the way across. So I guess the other reason I've seen is a lot of the people we know are friends who are like I like a big phone and these are people who should know better. I mean obviously there's some personal preference like I guess if you're not carrying your phone if you're using it as a tablet if you're just putting it in a car it doesn't go in but that's it all go in a pocket. Almost everyone I know who has a giant as phone does is not walking long distances mobile every single day. Like a lot of people put their phone in a bag instead of in their pocket like we all get so at work we had a really important carry their phone with them at all possible times. Like it is an appendage of their body. I know where's your phone. Oh somewhere else. It's like maybe if it wasn't a big fucking ass thing. All the time. You know like you should. So anyway I the problem with this is that I want a small phone and we hit this point where most Android phones got really really big like starting with the Nexus 5 and onward. They're just gigantic. But you've heard me say this before. I did find the perfect phone a few years ago. I got the Sony Xperia SE Z5 compact because I don't enjoy the Apple experience and I'm already too deep into the Android ecosystem. So I phone is is an option that I continue to exclude and a lot of my friends have iPhones except for Scott seem to periodically run into weird complaints that I do not have with Android random stuff like the other day I so in Android my Android Google keyboard has a really easy way to automatically insert gifts into anything. Yeah I have G board for it's an app you get in the app store. It gives you the Google keyboard. Yeah. So multiple people we know who have iPhones don't know they can install the Google keyboard. Things like that because they're stupid doesn't mean well they don't know better. I instead the app called G board. I use the Google keyboard. The only time it doesn't show. In fact the iPhone is so smart that the G board actually communicates with Google networking wise. So Apple does not allow custom keyboards to appear whenever you're in a password prompt. It forces it to be the local only no network communication iPhone. And then it switches back to the Google keyboard for any other inputs. So that way nobody if you were to say install an evil custom keyboard app it couldn't spy on you. Because in the OS it will not allow a custom keyboard on a password prompt. So it's so smart. The Z five compact was pretty much the best physically like put together Android phone for a long time. Now the problem with it is that it's a Sony. So it's boutique and it was a little expensive. But the benefit was it was straight up water proof which I tested. I used it in water just dunked it in a bucket like I brought it with me in the shower. I brought it in a bucket of water. It's a fully submerged and what happened. I swam with it in a pool and took pictures under water. All right. Can I can I take it and dump it in a bucket after the show. My old phone. Yeah it's fine. I'll put it in a glass of water right now. It's totally fine. All right. The battery also lasted like two full days. Post a photo of it playing like a YouTube video while it's in the cup of water. I mean this isn't that unknown. There was a water proof phone. We'll see. What do you mean we'll see. We'll see. OK. Anyway. So wait you said your old phone. You're not going to put your new phone in a cup of water. So my new. So that old phone was the most water proofest phone that anyone's really ever made. And most of them have walked it back to water resistant. I think IP 68. This is two IP whatever ratings that they've got. So my new phone should survive submersion but it's not recommended to submerge as opposed to the previous phone which they were like fucking take pictures with it under water. It's fine. It is water proof. And while they got sued over that I looked into the details. It was only not waterproof if you fussed with it or if you like open this little door on the side of it that was sealed that held the SIM card which would not open unless you really picked at it. But anyway this phone. Sometimes they're like water proof. But like then if you push a button pressing the button sort of breaks the seals. The pebble had that problem for a second. The pebble was waterproof unless you pushed a button and then it was no longer waterproof. But this phone was brilliant. And the problem was it's put it's well over two years old and the battery started running out. And unlike the iPhones which were just throttling your speed so the battery would still last all day without telling you this was an Android phone. So the battery just ran out faster and faster and faster. Which one of these things is preferable. But I can configure it. I can tell it to throttle itself. It was configurable. That's the difference the Android ecosystem. People complain they added a switch for that in the iPhone. I did not touch it. I left it the way it was. Yeah. But the phone started to wear out because it's two and a half years old. And I can go to the Apple store and just get a new battery. Well yeah. Zero dollars. Zero dollars. How long after you bought the phone or do you have AppleCare full on or whatever. I get AppleCare. But what do you pay for that. It's not zero dollars. That's that AppleCare cost. It's included because I got the iPhone upgrade program. Oh yeah. But how much does that cost compared to just buying an iPhone. Zero extra. Zero extra. If you were to buy the iPhone outright and then buy AppleCare that would cost you extra money to get the upgrade plan. You're basically financing the phone at 0% interest over two years. Yeah. And then you get free AppleCare and you're only paying the price of the phone just on monthly install. But you lose the resell value of the previous phone I assume. So it's probably. Don't think I've ever sold a previous phone. Well normal people do. They usually just if they don't break their phone they sell it. I don't do that. I actually just give it to someone I know. Yeah. Well that's because we got money. So I don't really worry about that. Also the thing is the resale if you use the upgrade plan and you actually I was going to do the upgrade but then they didn't release a better enough iPhone last night. So that's the only problem with the upgrade plan but the you turn in the old phone which begets automatically fully repaired by AppleCare before you turn it in. So it gets you go and you go use the AppleCare. You're like can I have a brand new screen to ban your battery please to make sure the resale value of my phone is perfect. Thank you. All right. Now I'm giving you the phone back and you're using the value of that phone towards the next iPhone that I'm upgrading. So the next iPhone you upgrade to now cost you less because you turned in the old one to Apple. So I did my research to see if in the two and a half years since I last bought a phone anything had changed. The answer was no. Only Sony makes small Android phones that are good and only Sony has good hardware design for small phones. So the Xperia XZ two compact is the newest one that came out. It just came out and it's an ugly looking piece of shit and it's big. The compact is more than a centimeter taller than the previous compacts and taller is the problem because taller means it will fit in my tiny pocket. Is it waterproof? Can you put it in the ocean? No phones are waterproof anymore. It's water resistant. Like it would survive dunking in water. The ocean? Probably for a short amount of time. But and I don't want to get into the details of what those different IP whatever certifications can I put it inside a walrus and take it out? I mean, all right. A walrus? A hippo. Oh, why a walrus? We're going with this. I was thinking hippo, but I said the wrong thing. So anyway, the XZ two compact is big, ugly, not materially better than the previous years iteration, the XZ one compact. Also, it's way expensive. The previous years XZ one compact is in my estimation as of today, April 30th, 2018, the best Android phone hardware on the market. It is just markedly better in every way than the Z five compact that I had before. It's super fast. It's got the newest version of Android. Is that just because it has a battery? It's not dying. It's not just that it is faster. It has a much faster processor used by two for insurance and then use the second one when the first one dies. So what I did instead is this is the first time in my life I bought a new phone while my old one was still technically usable. It's not like every other time where the old one stopped working and I'm fucked and I have to buy something like when you broke your computer and then you can upgrade your computer so you can render faster. Yes. So this time the USB ports a little jank, but otherwise the phone works fine. It's just slow because the battery is shitty. So I just bought the new phone because I did my research. It's about the cycle time. It's the best one. And all I have to say about this phone having used it is that I have zero complaints. This phone is amazing. If you want an Android phone, that's the problem with it. This is the one and it's only like 400 bucks because it's last year's model. And the newer model is like 700 bucks and worse. See what I'm hoping for. Also, this phone appears to have one of the best, if not the best camera of any Android phone. It's a crazy good camera. What's likely to happen this year is that you're gonna get, first of all, they're gonna upgrade supposedly within like a month or two, maybe the iPhone SE, the one that still looks like an iPhone 5. Yeah. So then that will be a very good choice for a tiny phone. And I might go that route, but also they may, there's supposedly, iPhone 9 or whatever it's gonna be is gonna basically they realize no one bought an iPhone X for a fucking thousand dollars. They're gonna take the iPhone X technology, the only part of which that anyone really wants, no one cares about fucking like face recognition garbage or whatever that is. But the only technology in the iPhone X that I want is the fancy OLED screen of, oh, it's as fancy as screen. Oh yeah, OLEDs. The best screen on any phone there is. And supposedly you take that screen and you put it on a cheaper phone and then I go, oh, that is the best screen on a phone. I buy that. But yeah, I'm real pleased with this phone. But not for a thousand dollars. So if you need an Android phone in the immediate future, I think this is literally the only one worth buying. Even despite it's Sony, because it's not stock Android, you can really only get good stock Android if you read your phone or you buy like a Google device. But all like a Nexus, whatever is whatever those turned into, but all those phones are gigantic monsters. So it's not worth it. And the Sony like branded Android is 99% to Android. Like none of the Sony shit gets in my way. You can disable the few things that actually does. And it's pretty much just normal Android and it gets updates constantly. So just because it's tech Monday, I can make this aside about technology. So OLEDs that people don't know. So normal screens for any kind of screen, whether it's a phone or a TV or whatever, right? Most screens these days are LED screens. There's a sheet of LCD liquid crystals that change colors. And then in order to see the image that's being generated on the screen, basically there's a light bulb behind there that shines through. And basically that light bulb is if the TV's on or the phone is on, the light bulb is on. And the better screens these days don't use light bulbs. They use LEDs to light them up. That's what someone means when they say an LED TV. But it's still just LEDs that are on all the time with white light. It's still just an LCD screen. It's the same screen as an old screen is just has LEDs, a different light bulb, a better light bulb, right? So it's a better image. An OLED screen is an organic LED, right? So basically what those do is in the screen itself, in the LCD part, the pixels each have their own light. They light up individually, which means that the pixels that are dark are dark. You know when you look at a TV and you see that even in the black area, it's sort of gray because you got this light shining through, right? And that's what makes the image and the contrast ratio kind of crappy and hazy and not as awesome as a movie theater, right? But an OLED screen is like only the pixels that are lit up are lit up. And the other ones are pitch fucking black and it looks incredible. It's the best image like screen you can get since like plasma screens. They ain't cheap. They ain't cheap because the factories that make them have very, very low yields. Like they try to make an OLED screen in the factory and like the vast majority of them, like more than I'd say 75% of them when they come off the factory line, they're busted, like they're no good. It's like, oh, this one's no good. This one's no good. This is pretty good. Which is pretty typical of a new technology of any kind. Once you hit mass manufacturing. Right, so you can actually, you know, so think that the TVs are ultra expensive because at the factory they're making the big screens. You're getting even worse yields, right? Because you make this giant screen and like a few pixels are bad. You make more pixels, better odds of some of them being busted, right? Plus we're past the point where I mean, remember when LCDs were first around the idea of returning one because it had five or six busted pixels wasn't a thing. Like you couldn't return an LCD for that. That was expected. Yeah, then Samsung figured that out. Yeah. But now, so you'll see OLEDs these days on like watches and phones because you make it a smaller screen, more of the screens you make will turn out to be good because they're smaller. You have a better shot of not fucking up any parts of it when you're making something smaller. But well, as fewer pixels smaller, not miniaturized smaller. Right, right, right. But yeah, so but the giant TVs are like ultra expensive. So if you want a lottery or you save up your money and you I guess use your TV more than anything else because your cash potato, you should invest in an OLED TV because they are best though. And that's why I want to OLED phone. But otherwise, if you don't have a fortune of money or TV is not the most important thing in your life, just get a normal screen. They're way cheaper like orders of magnitude cheaper for. And the only thing you're getting is, you know, a little gray in the black area, a big deal. You'll notice. So I'm sure you all saw the news that Microsoft sent a computer recycler to jail and didn't really read the details of what happens. All right, so here's the story. I think we actually may have reported this story a long time ago when the case started. But here's here's the deal, right? There's a guy and he runs a business or a nonprofit sort of thing, right? I don't know the exact details, but it's one of those places that takes old computers, collects them all together, takes out the good parts, recycles the bad parts and puts together working computers out of old parts. And then, you know, gives them to people or places that need old computers and don't need a lot of horsepower, right? And you're you're saving so much in environment. You're saving people who can't afford computers. It's such a great thing to do. The people come there and learn how to build computers. It's just like this multifaceted, really great thing to do. So this dude did a thing where he needed. He wasn't pirating software necessarily, right? Because, you know, he wasn't making license keys, Windows license keys. But when you're, you know, setting up these old computers, they have these Windows stickers on them with the keys because it's some old case you del case you found from nine, you know, 2000, whatever. Yep. And I think the OEM license, you actually have to put it on some part of the computer. Right. So he's got this old del case. They put a new motherboard and stuff in there. It's still the same computer with new parts and they got that Windows license on there that's legally belongs to that computer, whatever computer ends up in that box. And they want to install Windows. You need a Windows disk, you know, because those are old computers that's spinning optical drives. You need a Windows disk to install Windows on there. So, you know, those aren't, you know, the easiest to come by. I saved all mine. I got like Windows 95 B. Well, so like my old laptop. I got Windows 2000. My, my current laptop, actually, the OEM license keys would not work with Windows 10 upgrade. There's a bunch of issues where just wouldn't. I started out my whole deal and got everything to work super great. Yeah. Well, part of it is I'd also replace the hard drive, which had died and there was a spinning disk risk. Well, there was a, because it was dead. There's nothing I could do about it. I meant you fucked up your license key, man. There was a spinning disk recovery that could not deploy to the new drive. So I ended up just buying a Windows 10 license and just installing on it because I didn't want to deal with it. I bought a Windows, I think I had a Windows Vista ultimate license. And then I got it upgrade to Windows 7 Pro. And then I took that license and I upgraded it to Windows 10 with the free upgrade. Yeah. And then now it's in such a state that when I set up the new computer, the one I just bought, I went to Amazon where I bought the keys from legally, right? And when you log into Amazon, you can see there's a screen you can find in your account where all your keys for all the software you've ever bought are still there for you. And I took that last, the very last key, that upgrade key that I used to upgrade from seven to 10. And that was the only key I needed plus my Microsoft account. And it totally just installed legal windows on that brand new computer that had nothing to do with the computer that died. So it totally works now. Not too shabby. Anyway, I don't build computers that often. So it doesn't matter anymore. I needed for this to work. He needed the Windows CDs with the old versions of Windows. So, you know, he, Microsoft mass manufactured these disks to, you know, to give to people who need it. We're making old computers. And then Microsoft took him to court and was like counterfeiting piracy. We're going to sue you into oblivion, you bad. And then now he lost and you go to jail for 15 months or something. Well, it seems like the disks he was getting, this is where it gets sort of complicated. Long time he's going to jail. Because he was getting the... How long he goes? 15 years or 15 months? He was getting, I don't know where it says in here. Anyway, he won... 15 months. Right. So he lost the court case. He's going to jail. And everyone is, when you hear that story that I just told, you're going to get mad, right? That's some bullshit right there. The guy was copying Windows disks. He wasn't generating keys. He wasn't pirating Windows. Every one of those disks still needed a key to go with it, et cetera. Here's the story. Microsoft actually put out a good press release that gave out information that changes your thoughts on this story a little bit. And there's the two things that change your thoughts in the story. One, he was not giving out these disks for free. He was charging a tiny amount of money for them, but also there's emails they showed that they were in court as evidence of him expecting to profit from selling these disks. And even... So I think if, A, he hadn't been selling the disks, he'd just given away for zero. I don't think Microsoft would have done a goddamn thing about it, right? It's because he was charging money for them, even though he was not selling the keys only the copies of the software, right? So that's problem number one. And problem number two is he wasn't just going to make it a bunch of CDRs and scrolling Windows on them with a Sharpie, right? He had a place in China, like mass manufacturing disks, and he went through great effort to make them look exactly like official, legit Windows disks with holograms on them and all that biz, which is sort of like, why are you doing that? Now it looks like they were... If you were really just trying to help people, right? Get computers working. Wouldn't you just take the one good disk you have and just make crappy CDRs and scroll Windows on them with a Sharpie and give them out to everybody, right? So that's the reason Microsoft went after him. But he still wasn't copying keys, so that, and he wasn't making... Well, he was copying manufacturers, like OEMs, restore disks. Right, so it's like, he wasn't still copying, disks were still useless without giving Microsoft money, right? So now it's not necessarily this clear cut thing where Microsoft is bad. It's sort of like a half and half situation where like, yeah, he wasn't actually... The disks are still useless without giving Microsoft money. He wasn't necessarily pirating the software, but also he was sort of, why was he counterfeiting the disks so heavily and also not charging $0 for them? Yep, right. And it looks like, I mean, I haven't read too deeply, but it looks like there's even more. He might have been selling those disks to other PC recyclers. Yeah, that's what he was doing. Yeah, as opposed to just using them to recycle PCs himself. Yeah, I know, right? He said he was selling them to other people who were in this recycling business. I don't know if he was also recycling PCs or if he was just selling the disks. No, he was also recycling them, but also selling the, you know. I guess the moral is... Each recycling place only needs like one disk per like employee, right? Because, right, you build a computer, you install windows, but you just don't want to have to share the same, you can use them the same disk on every computer. And in fact, if you want to really protect yourself, use the disk to restore the computer, but you give the person the URL of how to download the manufacturer's disk so that a person can re-download, restore media themselves directly from the manufacturer without touching you. Microsoft doesn't and other manufacturers don't always provide the downloads of those. Yeah, now separately... They usually allow those disks like ship with the computer and that's the only way you can get the disk. Separately, I think there should be a law, there should be a certain amount of time, like a decade after any manufacturer sells a PC where they're obligated to provide, restore media. Well, I think if they bundled the OS, they should be responsible for it. Yeah, I mean, a lot of how can PC hardware manufacturers do a good job of this. You go to someone's website, they got the drivers for fucking everything there. Like ASUS website, there must be so many drivers available there for every fucking motherboard universe, right? You know who doesn't do a job about this? Any scanner in the world? Like every time Windows updates, they'll just throw away our standards. If you get a Canon or a brother, those websites have all the... Yeah, they have drivers for like Windows 7 that don't work in Windows 10. Oh, yeah, they don't update, they're not supporting and providing drivers for newer OSes. That's true, yeah. But I guess the real moral here is when you see a story like this making the rounds and there's a very outrage worthy headline, do at least a cursory read of the article because I'm almost everyone I've talked about this issue with. Well, because the thing is, a lot of the articles that came out were only telling that first half of the story and it was only after, like we told this story way back when it was new and it was only that first half. We didn't hear the other side. And only now the dude was sentenced and then people told that same first half of the story again and it was the first round of articles and then Microsoft made a statement and then we got a second round of articles with that second half of the story only now. So it's like you didn't hear the whole story right away. So you gotta wait for, it's like you gotta wait until you know everything that was all those details. Cause even people who saw that story didn't bother to go read the court filings and look at the evidence or anything. Yeah. So there's some other news. If you haven't noticed, there's been a lot of talk about how cable TV and just TV services in general are completely tanking. Of course. Because we talked about this since we lived in India. That's not new. So what's new is that Comcast in particular, this is partly, it's not just to illustrate what Comcast is doing cause Comcast has always been a pretty terrible company. The worst one. It's the worst one. But it's more to show what the stakes are and like why, why the industry is structured the way it is and why everything that's happening around this question is happening. Basically, Comcast is increasing the speed of their internet in a bunch of places. So anyone who has Oh, that's nice of them. So anyone who has 60 megabits down is gonna get up to 150 for free. Okay. Anyone with 150 is getting 250. And with 250 is Yeah, just upgrading all their tiers. Yeah. Everyone 250. So the 400 people are getting a gig. Damn, son. Yeah. Gig. Doesn't say if it's symmetric. That costs a lot of money a month though. If you already get in 400, what are you paying? Yeah. Right. I can get, I can get like a ton from a spectrum. I got to pay a hundred bucks a month. But they are only giving this free upgrade to people who also pay for TV. Well, I mean, that's a totally, I guess legal business thing. But on the other hand, they have this regional monopoly and also Comcast is part of NBC, which is a TV company. So it was totally shady as fuck and could be antitrust. Maybe we should do some antitrust thing in there instead of letting them merge in the first place all those years ago. Oops. Yup. Yeah. Oh, we got a super chat. Muhammad says, am I the first person to send a super chat on the stream? You paid money to pop up at the top. You are not the first person. You're the second, third person ever to pay money. Why would you pay money? To find out, to find out how we react right now. This is what you got. This is where your five bucks got you. Nothing. You got you. Why would you do that? You could have bought a bagel with like a bunch of stuff on it for five bucks. You could have bought a bacon egg and cheese for five bucks. Bacon egg and cheese near my new work was inferior to the one near my old work, but it cost less. It was $4 instead of $4 and change. But the bagel was sad. Nope. It's not as sad as bagel in another city, but it was a steamed New York bagel. So better than a bagel from like Boston, but not as good as a real bagel. I got to find a better place. All right. I'm just looking to see if this, I got a phone call from New York. Oh no. People really call me. It's probably someone speaking in Chinese trying to tell you something about the consulate. Probably. There's a lot of those these days. That was making the rounds. It's making the rounds hardcore. I got, even with my Haya app, I got two today. They leave a voicemail. That's the worst part. The other ones don't leave a voicemail. That one does. Yeah, luckily most of them, they come from the area code of where I bought the phone upstate. And I don't know anyone. I get all these two one twos that are from New York. Originally it was the phone number of the Chinese consulate who is someone hopefully I will never have to call. So it's okay to block that number. Yeah, yeah. Hopefully someone who will never call me. But I got a Chinese consulate of New York, but it was they were spoofing that exact phone number when they called Chinese people. And that's why, you know, it helped their scam. It seems to me it must be a scam that works because they keep using it. Okay, it's not any of the people, whatever. Probably a scam. You should get the Haya app or the equivalent. There's like a bunch of apps. I can't tell which one's better. So I just went with the one that's easiest. I don't think there's any value in having more than one because they pretty much all have the same database of blocking. The Haya one is like crowdsourced. It's like you'll go and you'll copy and paste the phone number into it. And then you'll see all these other people going, oh, Chinese, Chinese scam. And then you know it's, you know, a scam. All right. But yeah, the stakes here for these cable companies is basically that they, if they don't, they need to boost the numbers of humans they can say have TV or else the entire thing breaks. Good, fuck them. Meaning that they will very often, like they will do anything to get you even if you don't pay for it to have the TV service. And it'll be real interesting to see this all collapse in the near term. Well, I mean, you know, advertising has always been this sort of, you know, fraud situation where people like lie about numbers or use numbers that are technically true, you know, to like, cause you're trying to sell ads. You're trying to make someone else buy ads, right? Yeah. You're an ad seller. You have inventory. You're like, buy an ad on my website. We have X uniques. We have X views. You have X impressions. You're always trying to inflate. Our newsletter has this many subscribers. How many of those are fake? I'm just saying that somebody's subscribers we have, you know, and you're not technically lying. So you can't be sued for fraud, even though it totally is a fraud because the meanings of those numbers are totally right. You're not telling the person here is how much money, how much you'll actually get in return for the ad that you are buying. No one ever tells you that. Yeah. And you would never buy the ad at the price they're selling it for. So, you know, ratings on TV are simply the same exact thing. This many people watch our TV show, actually. This guy on Twitch has like 7,000 people watching them all day long every day. How many people actually watch that baseball game? Yep. That's why eSports is so terrifying to a lot of industries because it's not a million. You can see exactly how many people are watching and it turns out it's a lot of people in some cases. It turns out it's a lot of people, but also it turns out that that number nowhere near approaches the numbers that like Nielsen ratings say they're getting, but the Nielsen rating numbers are actually super, they're that inflated. They're actually like less, right? It's like we see how many people are watching League of Legends championship. We know that that's bigger than like, you know, some baseball playoff game. Yet the baseball playoff game is claiming to have these millions and millions of viewers, but it's probably just because the way they're counting is fraudulent. And if they counted the same way the League of Legends people counted, you would see that they're smaller and then the whole can of worms collapses. There goes, we see the man behind the curtain and they in trouble. All right, I think that's enough for the front bit. We pay for rim, not for Scott, five bagels. It was worth five bagels. It was worth five bagels. That's pretty sad if you just rim recognizing your existence was worth more than eating a delicious sandwich. I paid. Which could not only set your hunger and delight your taste buds, but also five bucks will barely I guess that's all. I guess that's all it does. Five bucks will barely buy a crappy sandwich for lunch in midtown. Don't go to midtown, but I work in midtown. You could buy, you could buy a whole bag of cookies. You could buy a cookie lunch. You could buy a box of ice cream. You could buy a tub of lard. All right. You could buy some cheese for five bucks. But anyway, things of the day. What do you got? What was this cells? Yeah. So this is so I didn't think I don't know how the hell they image this, which is really the amazing part of this, right? But they took a zebrafish and they went to the zebrafish's inner ear, right? And they somehow captured imagery of the cells in the zebrafish's inner ear. So we got like super microscope action. You're seeing individual cells moving around, right? And it's also moving. It's not like some dead cells on a plate with some electron microscope. This is video of living cells moving the fuck around and their immune cells. So you're seeing immune cells in the inner ear of zebrafish moving around, immunifying, I guess. I don't know what the hell is going on. But holy shit, look at that. It's moving cells on a video. Have you ever fucking seen that in your life? No. And that makes it thing of the day. That's pretty cool. So this was making the rounds periodically. And I guess I just never bumped into it until now. But it's a little over sensationalized. But the gist of it is it's an accessory for the Game Boy, ostensibly the original Game Boy, called Pettisidate. And all right. Like the Game Boy, Game Boy, Game Boy with Tetris. Yep. OK. But integrated with a contraption that will administer nitrous oxide and knock you out while you're playing a game. I mean, I did have an orthodontist who had plenty of Game Boys. I played many Metroid 2s and Link's awakenings in that orthodontist office. So the argument here was that. It was just Game Boy. It did not have an accessory attached to it. It's an integration of you take a gaming system, like the Game Boy that a kid would be used to, and you couple it with what is basically just glorified headphones and a gas mask. I don't understand why it needed to be an accessory. What did it accomplish by connecting to the Game Boy? You could have just given a kid a Game Boy and then also administer the nitrous oxide while they're distracted by the Game Boy. What do you need to attach the delivery mechanism to the Game Boy for? So the kid, the kid's controlling the release with the Game Boy? Nope. It does. It's the only the only point of integration. As far as I can tell, look into this thing is it's just headphones with a gas thing. It has nothing to do with the Game Boy, except it was designed for the Game Boy. And I suspect the only reason it was actually designed and socialized this way was to probably get some grant money around using gay. Like there's probably some reason why they frame this as a Game Boy accessory. But really, it's just gas headphones. OK. So it didn't even plug into any hole other than the headphone hole? Nope. Just headphone hole. You could just plug it into like a CD player. Yeah. Exactly. But also, why do you even need the headphones and the thing to be integrated in any way? You could just have headphones. Yeah. And then a nitrous delivery thingy mask. And then a game, you just need the three things separate. They are gained nothing by being combined. It's not like combining a phone and a camera where something is gained by uploading your phone photo to the internet right away or sending it to a friend. And there's a reason to combine them. It's there is literally no benefit gained by combining the three things together into a single entity. All right. So because I bought a new smartphone or it's talking about smartphones. And we got no other Monday show ideas. Send your Monday show ideas to hitknightsatfrontroadcrew.com And you skip the meta moment. All right. The meta moment. The book, the book is still Emily Wilson's translation. Oh, I said I would read more of it during when I was not working last week. And I did not. No. So you're still hanging out with, I guess, you just got your odysseus. I read zero more pages. So you had just gotten to odysseus making his raft. I think I read, yeah, pretty much. He didn't get out. Did he get off the island that he meet Noshka yet? No. OK. I also did not know. Before I can I want to tell you this, I did not know. I knew Noshka was only a Miyazaki character to me. So I did not know that that name came from anywhere. It really seems like most people who started the odyssey in high school only read specific excerpts from it because so many people have said to me that they didn't know it started with Telemachus. I knew that. And because I had the problem. They don't know about characters like Noshka because I didn't know about Noshka until they say everyone seems to start with like the Cyclops stuff and like a couple of spits of odyssey's story and skip their ass. The thing that taught me the most about the odyssey when I was young was not any class in school or anything like that. It was a multi-part DuckTales episode. Oh. Almost movie. Yeah. In which they dealt with the, I don't know if the Cyclops was in it, but there was the whirlpool. The they they sailed in between, you know, like a Colossus and then they got to Ceresy who was just magic at the spell and in a place. And I think they're also sirens. Yeah. I should find that and rewatch it. Oh, yeah. That was good stuff. Otherwise, so that did not obviously did not include Telemachus or a wife or suitors or or hundreds and hundreds of slaves or a hot calypso. Keeping Scrooge McDuck hostage on Island. They're not included in the DuckTales fridge. Just the adventuring part. So this weekend, I, without Scott, will be live for Geek Nights at Zenka Khan on Saturday. I'm doing my Anvay Openers panel one last time before I retire it forever. I'll be biking in beautiful weather. The only reason I'm retiring it is because it's a pain to update it. And I don't want to can. And also most of the videos I want to get for it are increasingly taken down from YouTube and it's not worth the effort to find like weird openers to anime around the world. So I'm retiring this one the last time I'm ever going to run it. And I'm doing a brand new anime panel and I'm also redoing one of our PAX panels. But if you're going to be a Zenka Khan on Saturday or Sunday, you can see me there. And otherwise I'm just going to be playing board games maybe in tabletop at the con or possibly just like in a hotel room and good luck finding me. It sounds like a safer idea. So yeah, smartphone sales independent of kind of like is tied to all this stuff we talked about at the beginning are dropping pretty rapidly. It's because no new phones come out that are compellingly better than the phones we got. Yep. And as I just pointed out, a newer iteration of a phone that I like is actually in almost every material way worse than the phone it's replacing. And simultaneously, you notice that smart watches after their big splash, those aren't selling well because it turns out a lot of people didn't really understand why they wanted a smart watch and smart watches by and large have a pretty bad UX. Like nothing's really been better than the pebble. You can't buy the pebble anymore. So I guess I'm wondering, partly because we need to come over the Monday show that wouldn't take too long, but would have something to say about what would what are real material things that could change that would make like you or me for example, what would make you excited to buy a phone? I mean they're like, what would make you be willing to? The problem is that back in the day phones are so shitty that you could easily imagine ways to improve them, right? The cameras were so bad. Yep. The data was so slow. The battery ran out so fast. Let them plug into my computer with USB and not a proprietary cable. The screen was so shitty. There were, you know, there's so many things that were just obviously bad about the phone that could easily be improved. Let me access the internet. Let me have apps, iPhone one. They added the apps for the later iOS update when the iPhone 3G came out, which is when I bought it, like a smart person. But anyway, you know, so there's so many obvious problems, but now it's like, what can you really offer me in the next phone? We already talked about the OLED screen, but that alone is not super, it's nice, you know, but it's not super compelling. Like, oh man, I gotta have that phone right away, right? You can make the camera better. You can make the CPU faster. You make the battery last longer. You can even make the data faster. That's one thing that you sort of almost forces you to upgrade. If they come out with like 5G, 6G stuff, new radios, you sort of have to buy a new phone. But even then, unless the infrastructure upgrades, like... Yeah, yeah, but phones have been... I'm saying at that point, you're gonna have to do something. Yeah, well, like the difference between 3G and 4G is night and day. The difference between 4G and 5G, though, is supposedly not much, because we're not even using all the bandwidth possible on 4G. Oh yeah, I stopped holding on to my unlimited grandfather plan because I'd never use more than a few gigs a month ever. Yeah, and the other problem is that not only are the new phones coming out these days only marginally better than the previous phones, but the previous phones are still working just fine. It's not like they die and go bad. Yeah, I mean, look, I just bought a new phone, but I still have my old phone for the first time. Also, the new ones, the price has gotten exorbitant. There's been sort of these decreasing returns where to make the phone a little bit better costs a fortune and more money. And it's like, well, that's not worth it. If it was like, yeah, for that nicer screen, I'd give you 50 more bucks or 100 more bucks or something like that, but not for $1,000 iPhone X. Fuck no, it's not worth for just that, that for a little screen and also this feature I don't care about where it looks at my face. I don't even want that. I'd probably disable it. Yep. No, I don't want that. So what could, what could phones materially do? Because it seems like they're mostly focused on more pixels, higher quality pixels. Those are good. Higher pixel density. Those are good things. But they're not, they're not making that big a difference. But they also, considering that people want these giant phones, the ultra high res does not buy much for the average phone user. No, I mean, the things that I want, for example, are if the iPhone, the one thing you can always complain about the iPhone is that there's no SD card slot. Yeah, having an SD card slot in a phone, now that I've been used to having one. I have an SD card lightning reader, which works, but actually is kind of way slow. If you have a ton of photos on there, I usually use it for putting photos from my camera into the iPad or iPhone. And when you, it works, like you plug the thing in the lightning hole and you put the SD card in it and then it importer shows up, but it works nicely, but it's kind of slow. You have to wait for all the photos to appear. So if you took a ton of raw photos, it's, you got to wait. So I think the first material thing I can think of. It would be nice if it was just like put an SD card right in the, in the iPad or the iPhone. Like I think the next real phone revolution, like something that would actually change the market would be if there were a battery that lasted more than a day or two. Like that would be the killer app for most people. There are a lot of people who want that, but I mean, that's personally never been a problem for me. It's only been like a minor inconvenience because the only times my battery comes close to even going down are days where I'm out and about the whole day, which is for me rare. Usually I'm at a desk all day and my phone is plugged in whenever I'm near a thing to plug it in to. And usually when I wear my phone out or when I need battery, when I'm using it all day, it's cause I'm doing an activity like hiking all day or biking all day with Strava. If I bike all day, I have a little cylinder, right? A battery. Yup. I fully charge it the night before I leave my phone plugged into it. I have that same cylinder. And when I get home, my phone is still at a hundred percent and the cylinder is not a hundred percent empty. That cylinder holds so much energy. And it's still that cylinder is a minor inconvenience. Right? So being able to get rid of it because the battery in the phone was just so fucking awesome would be nice. Yup. But it's not worth paying more than, you know, 50 to a hundred dollars. Well, I guess it would be material different. I'm talking like the difference between the Pebble smartwatch and any other smartwatch. It's not the difference of, oh, it lasts 50 percent longer. I'm talking like, what if it lasted more than a week? Yeah, but I mean, I can still plug my, in any week I can plug my phone in. What benefit do I actually get from the battery lasting a week? Yeah, but I noticed once I switched from my Pebble to this, it's such a minor and trivial inconvenience just to make sure I'm charging my, like every night put my watch on the charger before I go to bed. But I had lived. The thing is that's not like an inconvenience for me. It's a habit. It's not even like a problem. True. But I had. Carrying the cylinder is a minor problem. But I had lived for a while in a world where I would travel without even bringing a charger for my smartwatch. And because the Pebble just lasted a week, plus. I don't feel like screens will really get better in a material way that would matter. And if you make them bigger, they're just laptops or tablets again. You know, people have always tried to make that thing where you put the phone in something, right? Yeah. So if you made a phone that was truly somehow so powerful, like it's got a 1080 and an i7 in it, that powerful that it could be your computer. Then yes, that would be compelling because then I could throw away all my computers and when I get home, I could just plug the phone in and then he would have have monitors and keyboards on my desk. But actually I would just have this phone and I wouldn't have to have any desktops or HD PCs or any other computers. I could just have this one tiny thing that has the incredible horsepower of a 1080 and I do literally everything on it. And that would be terrific. And I would only need one computer instead of one, two, three, four, five, five or six computers that I have. You know, so that would be compelling, but that ain't come until I'm an old man. Yep. When I'm an old man, that's how strong a phone will be. I still really want and I feel like this will happen at some point. Maybe not even then. The like periphery cloud of interface devices and the phone, and I'm making quote fingers here, is basically just everything that my phone does except the screen and it's literally just the batteries and communications and horsepower to connect to all my cloud shit and to do local processing. But then I carry around like, I have a bunch of screens and I use whichever one I want or I have a smart watch and some glasses that's way better than real glass. It's the same things people always imagined, right? But I mean, really what we got to do is get to the point where, you know, that you don't have to carry around a CPU in a video card or anything. You just have literally just glasses that are non-dorky or not even any glasses. Like it's all dorky. Dorky's fine. No. Why? Why do you care about aesthetics? Because it gets in the way. Oh, how's it get in the way? Unlike you, my eyes work. So I don't need to put any garbage on my face except to block the horrible rays of the sun. Ah, but I already wear glasses. So glasses that do something is just great. Yeah, for me, I don't want to have to put anything on. I want to get to the point where it's like a sticker. I just put a sticker on the side of my head. Like a tiny one, right? Like a little tiny sparkly speck. And actually it projects everything from my face like it's cyberpunk land. I am curious about, I think another big step forward will be the, because the second screen peripherals tended to not go that well. I feel like the screen peripherals that are some sort of contact lens that can give an AR overlay, like that sort of technology. I don't have to poke my eyeball. But the caveat to that is that again, that's the kind of technology that I want, but I don't know what a consumer, like kids might be into it, but I don't know what the consumer market wants. The only reason I want that sort of thing is to carry around less shit. It's the same as, it's really just making the phone smaller and it's just another way to make the phone even more ridiculously small. It's to make it invisible. But I guess I do want heads up display, like I want to be able to see information from my phone without having to get my phone out. And smart watches for my days. Basically just the same thing is making the phone smaller. Make it so small that you can wear it next to your eye or in your eye, or it is your eye. Or it's in your ear, it's in your brain. And then someone will hack it, it goes to the shell style, it's gonna be trouble. But it's the same thing as making it smaller, right? It's, it accomplishes the same goal. It's just when you reach a ridiculous level of smallness, suddenly new things become possible, like having it in front of your eyeball. So what about people who aren't super techie or don't care that much about this stuff? Is there anything we could do to make smartphones better for them? Like anything that would compel them to upgrade? I mean. Make marketing compel them to buy them. Oh yeah. It's a marketing problem, not a technology problem. Cause technology doesn't convince those people that, you know, if you're not a person who cares about technology, then you're not gonna care about technology. You have to, right? You just buy what, you know, marketing makes you buy, you're convinced to buy something. Yeah, because nerds always seem to go then, like I see, every now and then I see that perennial story of some nerd is like, the real answer is, we need modular smart phones so I can build my own. It's like son, you can't even build your own laptop. There's no one's gonna let you build a phone. There's a reason why they're manufactured the way they are. No one wants a modular phone where you could like swap out the processor except you, I don't even want that. I mean, I guess you could have a magical phone that like, you know, is small and then you can get big and then you can get small again. Oh, someone in the chat actually points out a phone that could actually play real games. I mean, iPhone and iPad can play real games. To an degree. I mean, the iPhone can't play what, battle tech. Why couldn't it? Well, it can't right now cause it won't run on iOS, I assume. Well, I mean, it hasn't been written for it but you can get the same exact XCOM that is on PC, you can get for iPad. iPad, not iPhone. I got Sib 6 on my iPad. iPad, not iPhone. You can get it for iPhone, I'm sure. Are you sure? There's no reason you couldn't. Yeah, but can't you actually? Even just the graphics be cut down but there's no, there's no technological reason you could not make such a game for the iPhone. You know, other than you just have to cut the graphics down cause the GPU is not as powerful and you don't want to kill the whole battery. But you see, you keep saying could, could. Is it actually a game that is playable today on an iPhone? It looks like- Just because no one has made the software doesn't mean that has nothing to do with the hardware, right? It's like, what if- Well, by that, by that logic- That's like, if I got it, if I got it- By that logic, Apple computers are fine for gaming cause you could run any of these games on them. I'm just saying, but there's nothing that Apple can, what if I have a PC with a 1080 and it's just like, oh, well nobody, they release a game for Mac that's ridiculous. It's like- But no one makes a good game for Mac that's not also on PC. I'm just saying, it's like, oh, it's not out on that platform. Therefore, that, you know, it's like, well, there's nothing the platform can do to make someone who writes software write it for that platform. That's stupid. Oh yeah, but if it doesn't exist on the platform, it does not exist. It's already, the hardware is already capable of running the software, right? Making that software for it is not the job of the person who makes the phones. It's not a part of this conversation. You can have real games on a smartphone these days. Well, to a degree, you know, I mean, what about your, you keep seeing it's like real game. What do you mean by real game? Because Fortnite is the only game that like normal people care about. Fortnite's on phones. Yeah, I know. It's on iPhone right now. That's on phone. And that's a real game to most people. PUBG's on phones right now. So those are the top games. They're on phones at the end. And that doesn't seem to be driving smartphone sales. No, it's just driving people have phones to give more money to Fortnite and PUBG. Yeah. I don't know if there's any material advancement to a smartphone that would change the situation for the average consumer. PCs had the same thing. They got better and better and better. And now what is changed? What has made a PC better in the past X years besides just being faster and better? For normal people, nothing. They don't use PCs. They just use phones and tablets. The only real thing that has come to PCs and that is like recently, that is not just faster and better is high DPI screens. Yeah. Other than that, it's like, okay, they're just faster and stronger with more memories and more chipies. Yeah, but PCs are already becoming. Phones have reached the same thing where it's like, well, we've made them as good as we can. What else can we do? I guess what I find interesting is that PCs... Last time someone made cars better. It's like the engines got way, way better. And now... The engines actually have continued to get much more efficient and the hybrids will come out. It's just like CPUs. They keep getting slightly better, but cars, four wheels, and they go. Oh, but there have been a lot of material changes that made, like making a new car today, objectively superior to a car you could have bought a few years ago and the arduousness upgrade. The rate of improvement tapers off at a certain point. The dramatic change of, to say, between a 50s car and an 80s car versus the difference between a 2000s car and a 2010s car. A lot of people say wireless charging. Wireless charging has come and gone a million times in phones. It's never more convenient than just plugging it in. Right, wireless charging is cool. We have it in certain phones. Starbucks used to have pads. You could set your phone on if it was compatible. The two problems, and it works, the problems with wireless charging is, one, it's not really more convenient because you still have to put your phone in a certain spot. What's the difference between putting it on a pad and putting it in a near of a wire? The wire is actually more convenient because you can pick up the phone and move it around. You're going to leave it on this spot, right? Wireless charging would be great if it was just wireless charging being beamed everywhere. So as you walk down the street, this thing is shooting at your phone, charging it up. That's wireless charging. Something like that might exist someday, but for right now, pretty sure most of the ways. We've made all these technologies, we've been able to remove the wires, right? It's like, well, if you want to remove wires for power, you need to remove the power grid. You don't have to plug in your TV. There's just power in the air. You don't have to plug in your microwave. There's just power in the air. You don't have to plug in your phone to charge everywhere. Electronic devices that are in this area are just all being powered with electricity shooting through the sky if that's even physically possible, right? But yeah, no more outlets in your walls, in your house, no more power lines outside, right? Just power everywhere. I guess what's interesting though is that- And your gut's getting fried, I guess. PCs, partly like that market got gutted by the introduction of smartphones and tablets that were good enough for the things that an average person does with a computer. All the things that a person does with a computer, only smaller and more convenient and easier. But smartphones, there isn't anything that really is teed up to replace them. So they replace PCs for a lot of people, but they're already good enough to do everything that most people would have done with a PC and now do it with their phone. Actually, you know what would be- If you could imagine- You know what, here's a real material change. If you could imagine the thing that would replace smartphones and be the next thing that ramps up and then tapers off, you would be not have to work. I think a material change would be a phone that was actually pretty invincible. I mean, that's a help. It makes me want to buy it. I think a full third of all the phones I see in the wild have cracked screens. They have invincible phones relatively, but they're sort of, you know, armored. Or they're boutique, like, so full disclosure. They're not elegant. I am not going to test my new compact, but the previous one, the one that I replaced, I have beaten the ever living shit out of this phone. I dropped it at work. I haven't put an iPhone in a case since the iPhone 3G. I've never put a phone in a case. The only time one broke was the iPhone 5. I was riding my bike and it was in my bag and I fell over and I guess just the whatever hit the ground just happened to spike into the phone. So despite having gone swimming with this phone, used it in the shower. I think my iPhone 6 I had in my pocket and I was wading into some water and then I think it got half in the water. I went oops and I went back out and then it would totally fine. But I dropped this in a stairwell and it bounced down two full stories on concrete. And there was a couple of tiny dents in the case. The screen was uncracked and the phone was undamaged in any material way. This phone is actually invincible. And but again, because it still works, I'm not going to push that or test it. And I'm definitely not going to test it with a new phone but arguably the new phone with its metal case or its metal top bits is actually probably more resilient. I feel like if you made a phone and you marketed it as not needing a case, is that strong? I feel like that iPhone doesn't need a case. It is that strong. Don't just don't be. But why do I see so many cracked iPhones? Because people are fucking clumsy. Well, how come mine isn't except for the one time? I follow. Yeah. But I'm saying make a phone where even if you're clumsy, it doesn't break. Don't be a clumsy Oaf. But like dynamite. I mean, I'm not. I don't break phones. I mean, take care of your shit. Be careful. Don't like grease up your hands and use your phone with one hand while you're biking and not even looking at the road and, you know, doing stupid shit. You know, just care of it. Hold on to it tight. My Nexus four broke. I remember literally I was it was in my pocket and I was just sitting at a desk and I hung my jacket on the door and it was in my pocket of a jacket and I was typing on the computer doing something and I just heard this sound like glass shattering. I'm like, what? What was that? Whatever. And I ignored it. And then I went to go to Ben. I went to get my phone to charge it and the screen had just shattered on its own. Well, I'm pretty sure there's a defect and it had been it had knocked back the rim, breaking things on purpose. Why would that Nexus four? I loved. I didn't. In fact, when that phone broke, was a terrible time to upgrade. I ended up buying a really suboptimal Nexus five in London because I was really in a hurry to have a working phone again. I think I gave that Nexus five away, though. Everyone still kind of works. But yeah, smartphones are an interesting space and I'm hungry, so I'm just getting the show off right now.