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- It always comes back to AI. - Doesn't it always? (vibrant music) - Hello and welcome to "Outside the Fox", where we explore what's happening online and why it matters. I'm Steve Flavin. - And I'm Kim Horcher. And today, we are talking about technology that maybe didn't hit the mark. - The most questionable tech moments of 2025. - [Kim] Right. - We're looking back. - And I wanna start back in time in summer, flip phone summer that is. - Flip phone summer.
- So this was a trend that arose from TikTok, which is ironic because you cannot access TikTok on a flip phone. It's not done. - Fair. - But this was for some people in an attempt to unplug a little and reconnect in their daily lives, enjoy the fleeting days of summer, the ephemeral nature of it all, and not just be buried in their phones. - People have been really, I think, partly fueled by nostalgia and partly, you know, a cognizant effort to become more offline of using phones that are not smart.
I don't know if I like to call them dumb phones, but though, it does kind of have a certain ring to it. But yeah, I mean, back in the day, I had a Motorola Razr and I loved it. - I did too. - I still fantasize about that sometimes. There was something satisfying about the clap of just like, when you're finished with the call, you know? - I agree. There was something tactile that I sort of miss, but I don't know if haptics would replace it. So I'm okay with that not coming back.
- Remember when we used to, like, we carried a phone and an iPod, and when I got my first smartphone, it was really the number one reason why I wanted one is to consolidate those two devices. So I'm only carrying one device. But what hath we wrought in terms of the Pandaro's box? - It was like that peanut butter, chocolate thing. - [Steve] Yep. - But the consequences were far outreaching that we could have ever expected from a candy bar. - It's a little bit of a luxury these days to be offline, honestly.
- I don't think it's practical. - Yeah. I think for most people, for most of us, we can't really afford to do that. I think that having like a temporary, like a burner phone or like situations where you might go on a walk and you don't bring your smartphone with you, but you want something for- - Burner phone? - Yeah. - What are you doing, Steve? - Surreptitious activities, I don't know. But there has been a movement of like, there's this product called the Light Phone that's like a credit card-sized phone with very limited functionality.
It has like an E-Ink black and white screen, and there has been like this kind of offline movement of, you know, wanting to go back to a device that's not connected all the time. Yeah, I mean, there are just certain amenities that I've gotten accustomed to in having a smartphone that I can't realistically go back to having a dumb phone. - I see no problem with having a smartphone. I will never go back. We live in a society, Steve, we didn't make all this innovation so that I could wear, you know, have this old phone that has limited functionality.
I want the most functionality and the most colors. I'm not doing black and white. - Yeah. Well, I mean, let's talk about flip phones, actually. Or Foldables, I guess, as they call them now, the modern flip phones, there's two different styles that have become popularized. One is what they call clamshell style. That's like the old-school. - Like a Polly Pocket. - Yeah. So it's like Motorola Razr, which in fact, they make, Motorola has the Razr brand and they do a modern version of the Razr, which is pretty cool from a tech perspective. You know, the displays are foldable, which is wild to me, is like the idea of an electronic display that you fold in half, kind of intriguing. But at the same time, there are some downsides.
One of which is, and admittedly, I haven't used a lot of these products extensively, and from what I understand, they are getting better, but there is a noticeable seam where they're folded in half. Also, they don't fold completely flat. They get very clever with the product photography and showing these devices where they kind of minimize the effect of the fact that they don't completely fold flat. But once you have them in your hand, you can see like, oh, there's a little gap in there because it's like physics, right? It's like you can't completely fold that flat. - It's a pass for me, dog. - Yeah.
- I do not want to be paying to be a beta tester. I want the final, perfected product, period. - Yeah. - It's not for me. I could see how some people might enjoy it, but like why does a folded phone matter to me more than a flat screen? - Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. Well, so the other kind of foldable is, I think, what they call folio style. So it's like a book, you know, and so that makes more sense to me because you unfold a standardized smartphone and then you double your screen real estate.
So it basically becomes like a little tablet that folds up and is in your pocket, which I can understand the rationale behind that. I think something that as somebody who's trying to intentionally reduce my screen time, my fundamental objection to that technology, and this is just my own point of view, but it's like designed to consume your attention, right? It's like you have this giant screen in your pocket because ostensibly you're supposed to be drawn into some kind of content.
You're watching a video, you're scrolling a newsfeed, you're reading, but you're on your device. - Well, I understand maybe the social desire to have a flip phone, right? But when we're looking at modern flip phones, like the ones with, you know, Motorola, with Samsung, they're kind of faulty as well. And it makes me wonder what is the long-term feasibility of this. Because we've had a lot of issues with them. And like you mentioned, they're not perfectly foldable or seamlessly foldable. - For sure that they're not as like water-resistant or dust resistant by the very nature of like, there's more moving parts, you know? And that's another point of failure in the longevity of your device.
You know, how long can you keep folding that display really before you have to replace it. - Before there's an issue and I can't have it anymore. I mean, there's something to be said about tech that just works without being something you have to think about or work at too much. I think that's why iPhones are so popular, or one of the reasons. It's because, yeah, they're not always first with the features, but they're easy to work.
It's not for me, I can say that as much, but I'm sure there are people who would be very happy to have this for their own reasons. I talked to my friend who has a Samsung flip phone, and she said she loved it. And I said, does it hurt in any way for your content creation? And she said no. - Yeah. - It's about choice. - Yeah. I mean, of course, at Mozilla and Firefox we're all about choice. I don't object to it being a product category.
I am curious to see if it becomes, you know, mainstream, I would say, it's still fairly niche, but I kind of respect that like, okay, like we're experimenting with different form factors and like, let's see if something sticks. - Shoot your shot. - I think maybe we can segue into, gosh, some other questionable moments involving AI. It always comes back to AI. - Doesn't it always? My favorite thing. - For better or worse, we could talk about wearable AI where a lot of manufacturers are pushing us in the direction of AI-connected devices that for now are sort of, they supplement your cell phone.
But you know, ideally, this is sort of the future casting, you know, kind of like looking what's on the horizon, but ostensibly may replace your phone at some point. I'll believe it when I see it. But it is interesting to kind of see some of the experimentation that's going on there. - Are we talking about the Meta Ray-Ban glasses? - Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there were two versions that came out. One is called, let's see if I can get this right. One is called the Meta Ray-Ban.
- So close. One is called the Meta Ray-Ban Display. - Yes. - And then the other one, which is a second gen of their previous product, which is called the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, I think. So it's an interesting combination of words. It is interesting that Ray-Ban appears first on one product and second on the other product, which I wonder- - Do you imagine just a council of executives being like, okay, we'll do that, but we have to have it reversed. - I would love to be a fly on the wall of that conversation because, you know, it was a conversation or a series of meetings around that.
- That's what I think whenever I see movie credits, and there's two names, but one is up high. - Yeah. - And one is down low. - Or one's slightly bigger than the other. - [Kim] Yeah. - Or yeah. Yeah, these are real conversations that people have. But, yeah, and again, Hannah and I talked about the Ray-Ban glasses on our other podcast "Hot Takes". I have used the previous gen, which are basically just regular sunglasses that have cameras in them. And my favorite feature actually was the audio.
It's like this bone conduction audio where you can like listen to music, and podcasts, and it actually sounds better than you would think, which was like kind of cool that it's like, you know, they're not earbuds. It's kind of like an earbud replacement. I kind of wish that they would release glasses that didn't have cameras, that it was just that. - That's something that really bothers me, which is the lack of privacy. - [Steve] Yeah. - You can go film people without their consent. That's not okay.
- Yeah. Well, I mean, they have a light that turns on that's supposed to be like, you can't turn it off, but there are, ostensibly there are ways that you could get around that, conceal that. - Yes, that's what I was putting my finger at. Yes, you can get around it and you know, it has functions like translating or telling you where things are. I think it's still recording for that function to even work. - Yeah, if you're wearing these things with lenses on them and you're not really thinking about what you're looking at or you know, where you are, and I don't know, it's just a slippery slope
in terms of always wearing cameras on your face. - I don't like it. I think it's unfair to the people that I'm seeing in public and private, and I don't want my own stuff out there, possibly exploitable. - The other product, which are the Meta Ray-Ban Display, same thing, except they're a little chunkier 'cause they've got an embedded display where you see notifications and you can interact with content on the display. From a tech perspective, that's really cool. Again, from a philosophical standpoint of like, why do we need this in our lives?
Do we really wanna be plugged in to just all of these notifications and like never putting your phone down. - I'm concerned with having a display that close to my eyes all the time too. Because I've been very wary about my vision. I've had LASIK surgery. - Yeah, same. - So I'm thinking, I don't wanna do this again. - Yeah. Well, something that Hannah and I talked about on "Hot Takes" is just the etiquette of it all. Like, people who are wearing these glasses, and they're reading notifications, and even though if you're sitting, you know, if I'm wearing them and you're sitting over there, you can't see what I see, but you can tell that I'm not looking at you, right?
It's like I'm disengaged, I'm like looking at something else. And so what does that mean in terms of like how we interact with each other? The basic humanity of like, it's like the people at the coffee shop who don't take out their AirPods, you know, it's kind of rude. - Well, I mean, we were talking like on the last subject regarding the flip phones, it's like a desire to pull away from being immersed in technology and software all the time, and just kind of connect and have a real moment. So that's the antithesis even.
- But it is interesting again where, you know, it's like smartphones have kind of plateaued, even, you know, entry-level wearables like Smart Watches. It was another thing to charge every night that I just kind of like, I wanna live my life without one and see, and it felt like I cut off my ankle monitor, honestly. It was just like, it was so nice to not have the psychology of just like, oh, here's another thing that's tracking me, but also like another thing to update the software.
Another, you know, like thing that I have to plug in every night. - You have device fatigue. - It does seem to be this trend of like, you know, how many wearables can we have, exactly? There was an editorial I read recently on "The Verge" where this writer was talking about just, I think the headline was basically we're all in wearable hell or we're about to be in wearable hell. And she's like, okay, it's my job to review wearables. So she's got like six Smart Watches, and like all the rings, and like the glasses, and everything. And she's like, I'm so bogged down in like notifications and like all the things.
- You can turn them off. - Sure. But it's like, you know, she's testing them so she can't necessarily, it's like part of, you know, and that's a very extreme example. We don't necessarily have to, but if you have like more than one, if you have an Apple Watch and an Oura Ring, you know, and a smartphone, and a tablet, you know, and some Ray-Ban glasses, it's not hard to imagine the situation where, you know, you're just constantly getting drawn into some kind of, you know, engagement or content. - I have a hypothetical for you.
- [Steve] What's that? - Overloaded with wearables, biohacking, which ones worse? - Oh, as in like embedding something in your- - Yeah. - That creeps me out. I don't know, like in you know- - I'm personally against it. - I know some people that would be into that, but I personally would not be. I think that part of what's nice about an Apple Watch is that you could take it off. - You can opt out. - You know, you can even like your phone, and I highly recommend this, actually, like go on walks and don't bring your phone.
Like at first it introduces anxiety, but when you get used to it, it's so nice to just not have, to just not worry about- - It's not for me. I just turn off notifications. - [Steve] Okay. - If you're trying to reach me on Slack, good luck. Emails, sometimes. Yeah, this is why I'm a little bit hard to get a hold of. - Okay. Well, I mean, while we're talking about wearables, we can also talk about some of the flops, like the Humane AI pin, which was the thing that is maybe, I don't know, some might say ahead of its time, it is interesting to like this idea, you know,
this hypothetical reality in which like we don't necessarily need a smartphone or a screen to interact with the internet, which is kind of a wild idea, but maybe we're not far off from that. And so there is an interesting kind of like spaghetti at the wall situation where people are like, what does that look like in terms of the hardware? You have to bring it with you somehow. So what does the hands-free or eyes-free device look like? That implementation of it seemed to be clunky and was a bit of a flop. - We can't talk tech flops and not talk AI because I wanna point to the MIT Media Lab, the state of AI in business, it found that 95% of corporate AI pilots did not return on investment because they simply just weren't being adopted.
I mean, we were looking at these and sometimes they're really slick in presentations, but in practicality, they simply don't function in a way that's workable and usable. - Yeah. I mean, the scale at which they're investing in this technology, you know, these various companies, they can't all be winners, right? There's gonna be a small handful of players that end up on top and then the rest, who knows? - Well, I mean, everyone is moving so fast, or all the players in this are moving so fast.
We even have big companies that ostensibly have a lot of money, a lot of resources. We had Meta doing their somewhat recent demonstration of their new wearable and they were throwing to, you know, they were doing this Korean cooking recipe, and something was supposed to help, and it glitched out. And they said, oh, it's the wifi. - They blamed it on the wifi. - We know, it's not the wifi. But that goes to say that a lot of this looks like hype and a lot of rushing to market before we have the goods to back it up.
- It's tricky. It's interesting to look at what's happening and you know, speaking on the Mozilla side and the Firefox side, we're experimenting with AI, of course, as other tech companies are. I would like to say that we're being really thoughtful in how we roll it out. I think a lot of these other companies are being pretty reckless if I'm being honest. And throwing a lot of money at research and development that may or may not pan out. They're definitely casting a wide net. - It's like the.com bubble but again. - Yeah. And how then are we gonna be interacting with the internet in general, you know? And it's kind of a wild time in the browser space, quite honestly.
Like for Firefox, like everybody on our team is pretty electrified, actually at, you know, like some of these AI browsers that are coming out and they're not, you know, like we have thoughts and feelings about that particular implementation of it. But it is kind of cool to see that teams and people are rethinking how we interact with the internet, and how we search for things. It kind of makes the browser relevant again in a way that it hasn't really been, it's been this utility, you know, for so long, and now things are kind of being shaken up, which is kind of cool.
- I mean, I can't say no AI because that's just not really practical. - It's not going away. - But I'm gonna reiterate from previous episodes, that I think AI should be treated as a tool. - Exactly. - And it often isn't. - Yeah. Well, something that, you know, again, Hannah and I talked about, I feel like I'm plugging our other podcast. - Yeah, I hope you're plugging this one on your other podcast. - Well, I mean, it's because we were just doing that for so long and now we're back, so now we got two awesome- - Make sure Hannah knows what's happening here.
- Yeah. Okay, well, you know, I'm just bopping back and forth. But something we talked about in, 'cause we did a whole episode on, you know, the new ChatGPT browser Chat GPTAtlas, and you know, the thing about the current state of AI browsers, we've got ChatGPT Atlas, we have Perplexity's browser called Comet. We've got Google Chrome, of course, that uses Gemini. We've got Microsoft Edge that uses, what's it called? Copilot. It's like hard to like remember all of the AI names. But each of them is developing their own LLM and they have an incentive to push their own LLM. And so when we were talking about it
and reviewing all of these, you know, obviously, we're biased, but we're pointing to Firefox where we have a feature called the sidebar. We have a few different LLMs, including ChatGPT that you can turn on. It's opt-in, so you can leave it off if you want. You don't have to use it if you want. But the functionality of it is actually very similar to these AI browsers, in the fact that you have an LLM that's alongside the content that you're browsing or interacting with. But the difference is you have a choice.
You can choose to use it or not, or you can choose your LLM. We're all about that at Firefox, is empowering the user and you know, being able to customize your browsing experience however you want. And I think that's something that is a little bit of a, you know, we're in uncharted territory in terms of not only are we entrusting a lot of agency to these, you know, platforms, but also, you know, entrusting them to act on our behalf, you know, when we're, you know, we have to share a lot of information with them in order to be useful. And so what does that actually mean? - So there is this old adage that people like to use, it's called "Move fast and break things". But I don't know if that really works in the era of AI.
- Yeah, exactly. Especially when AI is talking to teens and giving them some bad advice in many cases, you know, it's really sensitive. Something that I'm really proud of at Mozilla is that we really advocate for responsible AI and that we're, you know, advocating for legislation and guardrails around, you know, being responsible and thoughtful in implementing AI in the public sector. - That's all you can do. - A hundred percent. Well, on that note, that is all the time we have for this episode. - Yes, unfortunately. But I am curious, what were your flops and things that worked for tech in 2025 and did you participate in flip phone summer?
If so, I wanna know how that went. What did you do? I am curious. - Yes, in the meantime, make sure to subscribe to our channel and download Firefox because you know it's the best. We'll see you next time. - Bye. (vibrant music)
