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December 19, 2025

In episode 1853 of Geek News Central, Chris speaks about Apple’s pricey new iPhone Pocket accessory, questioning its usefulness and reacting to the internet’s mockery of the product. Chris then shifts gears to tech and gaming, highlighting Steam’s new Steam Machine as a potentially game-changing console-PC hybrid, and wraps up by criticizing Amazon’s failed attempt at AI-generated anime dubbing, arguing that voice acting still needs a human touch.

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Full Summary

In this episode of Geek News Central, episode 1853, the main topic of discussion is Apple’s new product, the iPhone Pocket, which Chris describes as a three-dimensional knitted sling designed to hold an iPhone.

He provides details about the product’s release on November 14th and its pricing: the short version retails for $149 and the long strap version for $229, which Chris finds absurd. He questions the necessity of such a product, observing that many people already have enough pockets in their clothing and jokes about social media reactions mocking the iPhone Pocket’s existence.

In the latter part of the episode, Chris transitions into discussing the Steam Machine, a new gaming console from Steam, which he

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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hello, everybody.
Welcome back. It is Geek News Central episode
1,853.
Oh my goodness.
Did you guys miss us?
Because we missed you.
I'm sorry if it seems like we didn't.
I'm sorry if it seems like we just
ghosted you and left you guys out of

(00:21):
nowhere. But, you know, I'm not gonna lie.
We got bit by the procrastination
bug. Alright. So if you're here,
we really appreciate you coming back and,
jumping right back into it with us.
You know, I I in my eyes,
you know, doing this podcast has really given

(00:42):
my dad a lot more respect. Not saying
I didn't have respect for my dad, but
just it gave me even more respect for
my dad. Because
the stuff that he was balancing while doing
the show,
it it clearly shows that he had true
love of the podcast because he had his
business, he was working on. In fact, when
he's Let's say, let's go back in time.
When he was in the military, he worked

(01:02):
in the military, on base in the morning.
Right? And then he did his show and
he also was building his business. And even
before that, he was, he was writing his
book. Right?
So he was a busy guy and yet
he was able to bang out two to
three episodes every single week for you guys.
I mean,

(01:22):
just thinking about it just goes to show
like how much he loved Geek News Central,
how much he loved you guys, his audience.
And,
what I'm saying is like, I'm not saying
that we don't feel that way. We love
you guys. We love everyone that, you know,
listens to the show still, that everyone that
still supports and tunes in. But, you

(01:43):
know, when you're trying something new, you know,
it's easy to, like, you know, we we
got in a good flow. There was a
time we were getting in a good flow.
And when you get in a good flow,
it's easy to put something off for, like,
an hour or two. And that hour or
two turns into a day. And that day
turns into a week. And that week turns
into you know what?
Now we're here.
Right?
To give some perspective,

(02:05):
I have two articles that I've been meaning
to talk to you guys about for a
while now. Because I was like, you know
what? The viewers are gonna love this. I'm
gonna love talking about it because it's such
a fun topic.
But that was like last month. And I'm
still gonna talk about it today because, you
know, there are some people out there that
might not know about this news.
Right?

(02:25):
But,
man, it was one of those things where,
like, me and my brother, we both have
jobs. Right? Ray's still in school and he's
also working two jobs, you know. I give
him so much props. Super proud of that
guy for real. Right? I only have one
job, but I also have my freelancing gigs
on the side where I do a lot
of photography, videography. Right? So we're both very
busy people, and we do our best to,

(02:47):
you know, make the time for the pod
the the show because we wanna continue. And
we're actually starting to we're we're enjoying it.
We're falling in love with it. It. Right?
But it's one of those things where it's
like, like I said earlier, like,
there's days where I have time and I'm
like, oh, I'm doing it in an hour
because I just got home from work. I
wanna eat food and relax for a little
bit. The hour goes by. Right? Oh, I
gotta take my dog out to use Russian.

(03:09):
Oh, I gotta go do this. Oh, my
friends are actually telling me to go out.
You know, and then like time goes on
and on and eventually you're in bed and
you're like, oh my gosh, I didn't do
a show today.
I did not do the show today that
I wanted to do.
Even like the other day, I texted my
brother Ray because he told me last week,
bro, we gotta do a show. I was
like, yeah, we gotta do a show. And

(03:29):
the other day,
I texted my brother. This is like two,
three days ago. So Ray, if you're listening
to this, I didn't film that podcast that
day. I basically texted Ray. Yo, I'm doing
a show today.
Just let him know. Right?
That was three days ago. I'm finally doing
this show today.
You know?
And leading up to like setting up for

(03:50):
the show today, I was just thinking about
like, man.
Holy smokes.
It's so easy to put off something, you
know, you that like you built a system
for in your mind because you know how
to do it
And in your mind, you've developed
a a way where I'm not saying it's
easy, but in your mind, it's easy for
you. And since it's easy for you, you
can easily put it off.

(04:10):
Right? Because you're like, oh, it's only gonna
take that much time. So I I can
do it. I can do it later. I
can do it later. I can do it
later. But, yeah. Point is, man, the procrastination
bug is real.
But the main thing is
get out of it. Get that thing off
you and get back into it because
you you can't be in a slump forever.
You can't put things off forever, you know.

(04:31):
Like, you you just gotta you gotta get
back on the horse and you gotta
you gotta get back to work.
Anyway,
let's get into today's show. I don't have
a crazy amount of articles for you guys
today. I had those two that I was
talking about earlier that I've been wanting to
talk
you guys about. And then I had one,
that just it's a little fun topic.
Today's kinda like more of a getting back

(04:51):
into the rhythm of things. So
let's just start off
with a fun topic
that I think it's so funny.
And I'm sorry if there's any supporters of
this specific product.
But at the end of the day, you
know, how I see it, it's it's
man, this thing is funny. Okay.

(05:12):
It has to do with Apple. Right? Apple
had a had a pretty cool year, you
know.
I'd be like a month ago or two
months ago, they had the m five chips
and,
I feel like two, three months ago, we
were talking about Scratch Gate. You know, they
had a they had an interesting year.
And then they come out with this, right?
They could have ended the year on a

(05:32):
bang with the M5 chips. But no, they
want to come out with this little thing
called the iPhone pocket.
Right? It's this three d knitted sling
literally meant to hold an iPhone.
It's
it's it's
it's kind of ridiculous. I'm not gonna lie.
So it was released last month on November

(05:53):
14. So I believe you can actually purchase
it now if you really wanted to.
Right?
But
let's just get into this, honestly. I believe,
what the article was talking about was that
this slang was born from the idea
of creating an additional pocket for you.

(06:14):
I don't know about your guys' pants, but
I I normally have like three to four
pockets on my
and in my eyes,
that's enough pockets. I don't need another one.
I barely used the two.
But, you know, it was born from the
idea of creating a new pocket for,
I guess people.
Right?

(06:35):
It's basically like a three d knitted sling.
And there's two versions of it. Right? So
there's a short version
and there's a long version. They tried to
promote it by making it, like, look look
cool and stuff like that by saying, you
know, this thing could be worn in a
variety of ways. It could be handheld,
tied onto bags, or worn directly onto the
body.

(06:55):
And then they try to add it a
little a little more spice to it by
saying, it's now available in eight colors.
Eight colors, right? And these eight colors are
lemon, mandarin, purple, pink, peacock,
sapphire, cinnamon and black.
Amazing, right?
This isn't even the most ridiculous part guys.

(07:17):
I need you guys to look this if
you guys don't know what this is yet,
if you guys are listening right now, I
need you guys to look up this this
product. Okay? IPhone Pocket and do not look
at the price. Okay?
Now,
like I said there are two variants
to this sling or the iPhone pocket. Right?
There's a short one

(07:38):
and,
a long strap.
K. Hopefully, you have a picture of it
right by, by now on your screen.
Now this short strap version
of this sling
retails at a $149
US.
That's
insane.
Now the long strap design

(08:00):
is $229.
Oh my goodness. Apple, what are we doing?
What are we doing?
Because
now when I look at 2025,
I don't think about the m five chips
or anything else. I think about this iPhone
pocket that came out. And trust me, the
world sees it too because,
if you look all over social media, people

(08:21):
are making fun of this thing constantly.
You know, they're they're making fake unboxing videos.
Right?
And, I don't know if any of you
guys have high socks, like wear high socks.
Right? I mean, majority people do. But
people would be like, oh my god.
I got the iPhone pocket.
Take a look, guys. I'm so excited. And
then they whip out a pair of socks

(08:42):
and they that that they cut a little
slice into it.
Just just mocking the product because how how
ridiculous it is and how much of
if you ask me, it's kind of a
cash grab.
And it's like, if if you bought this,
you are
a victim of consumerism.
I'm so sorry. K?

(09:02):
Yeah. I don't know what this thing is.
Apple, what are we doing? I don't know
if anyone's ever watched the Lorax.
I'm sure a lot of you guys have.
But look, I don't know if you guys
remember the thneed, t h n e e
d, the thneed.
This is kinda what it's reminding me of.
If you don't know that, it's looked that
up as well. The thnid.

(09:23):
But iPhone, not iPhone. Apple. Come on guys.
Oh my gosh.
Wild.
Wild, wild, wild, wild stuff,
honestly.
Well, before I get into the next topic
that I do wanna talk about, I just
do wanna, you know, take a little quick

(09:44):
break. Okay? So just wanna take a little
break to shout out our incredible sponsor, GoDaddy.
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(10:05):
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(10:26):
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(10:48):
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(11:52):
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Geek News Central.
Now, let's get back to the show. Okay?
Now, this next topic, man,
I've been super excited to talk about this
just because it's so cool. If you guys
know me, I love the gaming innovations that's

(12:14):
been coming out the past year. I mean,
we talked about the Xbox handheld. We talked
about, you know, you know, the EA sports
deal. We talked about a lot of gaming
stuff this year. Now this one blows all
those out of the water. K?
I don't know if you guys know about
it yet.
But Steam. Right? Steam is a it's a
it's a
it's a platform where you can buy games

(12:35):
and play video games on on your PCs
and stuff like that. And they have something
popular called the Steam Deck. It's like a
handheld device where you can play your games
remotely and it's super super cool. Now,
for the longest time, there's been
a a war between consoles. It's all it's
always been either Xbox or, you know, PS4.
And

(12:55):
as of right now, okay,
I think I might be able to confidently
say
what Steam is coming out with is gonna
blow both of those consoles out of the
water. Okay. Now it's called the Steam Machine.
Now I'm not kidding when I say I
think this device is gonna be amazing.
Alright. It's

(13:15):
a powerful gaming PC
jam packed into a roughly six inch cube.
Okay. So this thing can fit
in like, it's not gonna take up any
any space at all.
It's it's not, you know, gonna be
a a hassle to place on your desk
or under your TV. It's gonna be really

(13:36):
convenient. Right? It's optimized for gaming with fast,
suspend and resume and cloud saves. And, you
know, that's just the beginning. Right?
With Steam, if you guys know,
you should have log in and all your
games are there for you to play. Right?
So the Steam machine, it offers six times
the horsepower of the Steam Deck. Right?
And you can literally play your whole Steam

(13:57):
library, including your favorite triple a titles. K?
Now along with that,
this PC
offers four k gaming at 60 FPS with
FSR.
It's gonna be available in two storage sizes,
which is gonna be 512 gigabytes and two
terabytes. And they both come, come with expandable
storages. All you need is a all you

(14:18):
need is a micro SD.
I believe with the ports,
there's quite a bit. Right? So
you can put a one gigabyte Ethernet cable
into it. You could put a display port
1.4.
You could put a HDMI two point o,
one USB c, and four USB a ports.
So it covers a lot of things. Right?

(14:38):
Now
what makes this machine so amazing is that,
you know, when they first advertise it, you're
like, oh my gosh. You know, Steam is
making a console. It's cool because they had
their Steam Deck that was released,
not too long ago. And that was a
huge success.
So everyone's obviously gonna be excited for it,
right? It's like Steam's finally come out of
the console.
Super excited. Can finally play Steam games with

(15:00):
a controller. You know, and stuff like that.
Or on the big screen.
It's not just the console, guys.
Okay?
And I don't know if this seems like
a big deal to anybody, but this thing
is also a PC.
K?
It's meant to be optimized for gaming, but
at the end of the day, it's still
a PC. You can install your own apps

(15:20):
or even another operating system.
Right? But at the end of the day,
it's it's your choice because
it's a PC. You can do whatever you
want with it. Right? So, guys, this thing
is insane.
If you have the chance,
to just like look a little bit more
into it, I'm not gonna go into crazy
details. I kind of want to give you
guys the overall outline of it.

(15:40):
But this thing's gonna be big. I think
Xbox and PS4 is gonna have a hard
time
competing with this, in my opinion.
Just because majority of the time,
when you play games on Steam, you can
play almost any game you want, except like
if it's a PlayStation exclusive.
Right?
So

(16:01):
I don't know. I think I think steam
is gonna be the next the steam machine
is gonna be the next big thing. It's
gonna it's honestly gonna be the next big
thing.
You're gonna see a lot of kids asking
for this probably for,
for Christmas
or birthday presents and, you know, probably next
year because,
I believe

(16:21):
I don't know when they're releasing this. Let
me see if I can find something for
you guys.
The Steam Hardware family officially expands in early
twenty twenty six. So I believe
should be coming out in 2026,
hopefully. I'll keep you guys updated once I
find out
more information on that. But, yeah,

(16:42):
it's super cool, guys. I can't wait for
this thing to come out and yeah.
One of this one of the final things
I really wanted to talk about,
it's not really tech news,
but it is news. Right? It has to
do with Amazon. K?
Guys, Amazon, what are we doing, man?
What are we doing? I know early a

(17:02):
lot of in a lot of our other
shows, we talked about how amazing AI is
and the possibilities of
AI. And
oh my gosh. I mean, Amazon, it's it's
good on them for trying to do something
new and see what AI is capable of.
But holy smokes was this a flop.
Okay?

(17:24):
So
what Amazon did was that
they had an AI
anime,
dub
beta for some, like, anime shows.
K.
So some notable ones were was Banana Fish,
No Game No Life,
and Vinland Saga.

(17:45):
Right?
And pretty much, you know, when you listen
watching anime, a lot of people don't really
like to listen to it with the Japanese
audio. They like to listen to it with,
you know, English voice actors or whatever voice
actor you want. Right?
I don't know if you guys can look
up a video still or if it's still
on,
on Amazon Prime at the moment. But, dude,

(18:06):
it's bad.
It is
so
bad. Like, the difference. Right? The difference in
emotion
that that is portrayed in the characters,
it's it's ridiculously
bad.
I'm not sure if they,
if they took it off.

(18:28):
Oh, well,
here.
Reporting to you live right now. Not live.
But Amazon appears to have quietly removed its
terrible AI generated English dubs. Okay. So it
looks like they were they they took it
down. But
if you have the chance, go look it
up. You can look it up. You can
look it up because it's so bad. It's
painfully bad.
You know,

(18:48):
I think it's a kind of like in
a way, it's kind of refreshing in a
way to see that,
yes, AI is amazing,
but there's also a humanity aspect of it
all that needs to be,
taken into account because there was,
you just gotta look you just gotta look
it up. I'm sorry, guys. I can't really

(19:09):
explain it, but you have to look it
up. So look it up maybe Banana Fish
or No Game No Life or Vinland Saga
Amazon AI generated English dubs, and you're gonna
see
how terrible this experiment was. And I don't
know. Maybe maybe it might be better in
the future.
Who knows? Right? But
and maybe this was just a test run.

(19:30):
But if that was a test run, it
was bad.
It was bad. I think I'm saying bad
a lot. I gotta stop saying bad. But
it was bad.
But
let's move on. K. Because the more I
talk about it, I feel like I'm gonna
be going in circles and
there's nothing positive about this whole thing. Hopefully,

(19:50):
Amazon, just hire just hire a voice actor.
That's I think that's the the main thing.
Just hire a voice actor and get the
job done. You don't need to make loopholes
to save some money.
Amazon, you guys got the money. You guys
have the money to hire people. Just hire
people. Hire talented people that work hard and
have careers meant to
do the job.

(20:12):
You don't you don't gotta cheat your way
around it.
Anyway, though, I was really hoping to find
some space news,
because as you guys know, my dad loves
space, and I like to always add some
space articles,
you know, to each show.
I couldn't really find anything that was remotely
interesting.
But hopefully next week there is something. Right?

(20:34):
But like I said, you know, today was
kind of one of those shows where we're
trying to get back into the flow of
things because, you know, we've been we've been
gone for some time. And I do we
do apologize. Right?
And, you know, since you guys did return,
whoever is returning right now, we just wanna
thank you guys. You know? You know, we've
been gone for some time. We really appreciate
you guys coming back and supporting the show
constantly and,
just being patient with us. You know? But,

(20:56):
you know, New Year's resolution, we're approaching that
time. We're approaching that time, guys, where we
can start making New Year's resolutions, and this
could be one of those things. I turned
22 this week.
I think on
what day do I turn 22?
I think I turned 22 on Saturday. So,
yeah, December 13. So
happy early birthday to me.

(21:17):
Another year older.
It's kinda crazy that it's already December and
it's almost 2076.
This year went by crazy fast and I
feel like the older I get, the faster
it's gonna get.
But
I'm gonna I'm gonna be,
one of those people in my thirties that's
gonna say, man,
I saw my twenties

(21:38):
blink go by in a blink of an
eye. That's gonna be me. That's gonna be
me.
But yeah. Like I said, another crazy long
episode. Really appreciate you guys for coming back.
And I will see you guys in the
next one. If anything, it might be Ray
next time or me. Who knows what's gonna
happen? But
we're point is we're gonna see you guys
again. Alright?
But yeah. You guys have a great rest
of your day. And yeah.

(21:59):
Goodbye.
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