Transcription
Hey, Apple Friday.
I've been very cynical about tech companies recently, but this week so many good things were announced, I decided to dedicate the entire episode to only positive tech news. So, welcome to a very happy Friday checkout for a change. I think we all need it.
This video was sponsored by Nebula.
Okay, let's start with a brand that has been pretty disappointing recently. Nothing. After the phone 3 turned out to be kind of a letdown, they just launched three of their best products yet. Most interesting to me is the phone 4a, which my studio mate Killian is testing right now, and I'm sure he'll have a full review, but man, these are a fantastic deal. You get a really nice design, fun colors, including pink and this gorgeous blue, a really good screen, a decent performance with the Snapdragon 7s Gen 4, and get this, even a periscope camera with the same sensor that you'd find on some of their more expensive phones. But this actually starts at €349. That is really quite excellent. Sadly, I can't find the US price, so maybe this is skipping that market for now. But if you're not in the US and you don't need wireless charging or fancy water resistance, I think this is a killer deal.
Then actually coming to the US is the nothing for a Pro, which gets a $499 starting price, an aluminum unibody design that I perhaps like even more than it cheaper brother, and also a bunch of upgraded specs that also looks promising. And to round things out with nothing, they also launched the headphone A for $199. These are a kind of cheaper version of their normal overears, but they actually claim to have 135 hours of battery life with ANC off. I've only tried these briefly, but they actually sounded and felt pretty great to me.
And talking of great value, let's move on to Apple. And believe it or not, that was not a joke. I think people still think of Apple products as being overpriced, which I guess they are in some cases, but some of their announcements this week actually made their competitors seem overpriced instead. The new MacBook Neo clearly stole the show because it starts at a pretty bonkers $599 or $499 if you have an education discount, which is pretty easy to get. It has an A18 Pro chip, which is what you'd get in last year's iPhones. And while that sounds like it might be a little bit too little for a laptop, it's actually more performant than an M1 chip, for example, from a few years ago. The laptop's perhaps biggest performance limitation is that you can only get it with 8 gigs of RAM, which means this will not be great for a ton of multitasking, but I think it should work just fine for day-to-day tasks. I used a baseline M1 MacBook Air with 8 gigs of RAM for like 3 years. I did everything on that from making thumbnails for this very show to researching and writing episodes, everything. And I never really felt that it was too slow. I only really upgraded because I ran out of storage. This new machine should be slightly more performant than that. So, I bet that for light users, it will be great. And especially at that $499 price tag, it'll be pretty unbeatable.
Now, there are some clear downgrades like not having a backlit keyboard or a haptic trackpad, but you do still get a beautiful aluminum body, a better life that should be way better than any Windows laptop in this range. And honestly, I think this will be a great match for many people that just want the basic computer. So, now with both this laptop and also the Mac Mini, Apple seems to be one of the clear leaders in the budget computing category. And that's kind of a weird thought. In fact, analysts at Trend Force predicted that Apple could sell four to 5 million MacBook Neo machines this year and that the machine could become a significant growth driver for Apple. They say that all of this will happen while the rest of the industry will actually go through contraction because of the memory price increases and that would lead to Apple gaining significant market share, which I don't find very hard to believe.
But then continuing with the budget line, the iPhone 17e was also launched with the same $599 price tag as its predecessor. And this phone now gets double the storage at 256 gigs, plus also a new chip, ceramic shield, and MacSafe. Those are not the most exciting upgrades, and honestly, I'd still want 120 Hz on my phone, but this is probably plenty good for most people now. And meanwhile, there are also a bunch of minor refreshes from the iPad, which now got an M4 chip and also a big RAM boost. The MacBook Air got the new M5 chip, while the MacBook Pros also got M5 Pro and M5 Max options, among a few other small spec bumps. And finally for Apple, we also got a new studio XDR display, which at 27 in is now significantly smaller than the Pro Display XDR was, but it now has a significantly brighter miniLED panel that also supports 120 Hz. Plus, it also costs $1,700 less. Not bad. Apart from some minor increases for some of the higher-end MacBooks, which is kind of understandable given the memory price increases, all of this sounds very reasonable to me.
But we're still far from them because this week MWC also happened in Barcelona and we got a ton of other releases around the show, too. Xiaomi and Leica showed off a bunch of phones and I'd like to highlight the Leica Lights phone. This is a slightly customized internationalized version of the excellent camera beast known as the Xiaomi 17 Ultra in China. It is still mostly built by Xiaomi, but then Leica tweaked the design and the camera app and also the software to fit their tastes a bit and it actually looks pretty sick.
Meanwhile, talking of sick camera phones, Vivo also brought their X300 Ultra to international users, including some new updates. This phone has a big focus on pro-level video features, which you can see not only by the bonkers camera hardware, but also by its set of accessories. And what I found the most interesting is that they now also support Samsung's brand new APV codec. This is a new video codec for high-end creator workloads, which should be really good for video editing and color grading. It first launched in the Galaxy S26 series last week and this week Vivo announced that the X300 Ultra is getting support for it as well. It looks like APV could become the new standard for Android filmmaking.
And then not to be outdone, Honor also brought the world's first IP68 and IP69 certified foldable phone to international markets in the form of the Magic V6. They again teased their robotic gimbal camera phone with live demo units at the show. And they also announced the collaboration with the German cinema camera brand Ahri. I guess Hasselblad and Leica were already taken, so why not airy?
And last in my gadget fest is a concept device from Lenovo that I think is kind of worth paying attention to. It's called the Legion Go Fold concept. And not only does it look like an actual potential good use for a foldable screen, Lenovo actually also tends to bring their concepts to market much more than other brands. So maybe this is not completely vaporware. Now, there are many more concepts like the modular technophone or the modular Lenovo laptop, but I don't want to bore you with all of those. I've just put links to a bunch of those in the description along with all the new stories.
And let's move on to the brief instead. And here we start with a surprising announcement from Motorola who says that they have an official partnership with Graphine OS. Graphine OS is of course perhaps the most famous de-Googled Android project right now. Interestingly, people from the Graphine OS team have said that they will probably only support new Motorola models starting from 2027. So that is still kind of far in the future. But this should make quite a few privacy nerds very happy.
Then also this week, Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon Elite chip, which is their first ever 3-nanometer SoC that they made for smart watches. This represents a new and significantly higher tier for Qualcomm's wearable chips. And they claim a pretty bonkers 5x increase in single-threaded CPU performance and 7x increase in GPU. And they're clearly also pitching this for devices that have cameras. I wonder what those will be.
And moving on, Google has just released desktop mode for Pixel phones, going all the way back to the Pixel 8 series. You can now just hook up your phone with a USB-C cable and you should be ready to go just like with Dex. Nice. And also nice is that AirDrop will become available to more Android users with support confirmed to start rolling out this month to some OPPO phones. This follows the Google Pixel devices, of course, and it means that soon enough we should just be able to drop files to each other wirelessly across ecosystems. Cool.
And Google this week also finally settled their lawsuit with Epic Games and as a result they improved things for app developers in a few key ways. First, developers can now quote use their own billing systems in their apps in lieu of Google Pay billing or they can guide users outside of their app to their own websites for purchases. Second, installing third-party app stores will become much easier and there will be fewer scary pop-ups. And third, there's a whole complicated web of reductions of Google's 30% app store tax. And while I won't explain those in detail here, I bet developers will appreciate them. Now, Google is simultaneously also still trying to get app developers, even those who want to publish their apps outside of the Google Play Store, to have to register themselves with Google. So, the Android app ecosystem is not becoming completely free just yet. But the news this week are positive.
And talking of things opening up, remember that just last week we talked about the open standard for smart door locks. Well, this week Samsung already rolled out support for it in their wallet under the name digital home key and the Aqara U400 also already added support for it on the door lock side. So, you can now use the standard to unlock the locks via NFC using a Samsung wallet. That went very fast and UWB support should come next quarter 2.
And if you're not quite tired of all the good news just yet, I have one more. Day Pass has also just launched. Their first three episodes are already live and it's already become my new favorite show to watch. Each episode shows Jason from Not Just Bikes, simply taking every form of public transit in an interesting new city. And I find it to be a fantastic distraction from the constant doom loop that the rest of the media feed is in right now. It's a Nebula exclusive series, and Nebula subscribers get not only access to this, but also access to loads of other exclusive content. On the Friday checkout, for example, there's a whole Q&A part at the end of each episode, which around 3 to 4,000 people tune into on average. This week, the viewer question I answered is whether I really think that people will use smart glasses or if they are just a fad. And each week, Nebula subscribers can submit a new one. Meanwhile, there are tons of great Nebula originals that I think you would really enjoy, like 17 pages, Mad Kings, and so on. Getting a Nebula subscription gives you access to tons of great exclusives like these. And it helps to fund a small but very valuable slice of the internet that isn't completely overrun by low-effort AI slop that is designed to tear our society apart, but is instead just carefully crafted videos made by people who actually care. Best of all, with my link go.nebula.tv/tfc, which is also linked in the description, you can also get a big discount. Nebula costs just $30 for a full year, which is 50% off the usual $60 that you pay with a regular link. Or if you're in Europe, we've also just set up payments in euros and pounds. And either way, each of your subscriptions through my links directly supports me. Oh, and if you absolutely hate ongoing subscriptions, then we even have a lifetime offer. With a regular link, that would be $500, but mine brings that down to $300 as well. So check out go.nebula.tv/tfc TV/TFC or scan the QR code on screen and I'll see you over there.