 Coming up on DTNS, reprogrammable ink so you can change your car's color with a flash of UV light someday. And Apple announces a date and price for Apple TV Plus, new iPhones, new Apple Watch, and more. Here it all comes. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, September 10th, 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And this is Allison Charitam from the Podfeat Podcast Empire. And I'm Patrick Beza from the Finnish countryside. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Sarah Lane off today. She had a vet emergency, not life-threatening, but urgent. So we'll miss her. But thanks to Allison for stepping in and stepping up, even though we just had her on the show on Friday. More Allison is great for us. Thank you, Allison. We were just actually going over some of our more emotional feelings regarding the Apple announcement on Good Day Internet. If you want that wider conversation, become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. And we're going to get to all those announcements in a bid. But by press release today, Apple announced the dates for updates to its operating system. So iOS 13 arriving September 19th. And iOS 13.1 already announced for September 30th. That quick dot one update will add things like shortcut animations, sharing ETA and Apple Maps, a few other things that weren't ready for the main launch. iOS 13 works on iPhone 6s or later, an iPhone SE or seventh generation iPod touch or later. WatchOS 6 is also coming on September 19th. iPadOS and TVOS get new versions on September 30th. And Apple also updated its website to indicate that Mac OS Catalina will arrive for non beta users in October. I'm going to guess that's after announcing some new MacBooks maybe. Interesting. So another event in October maybe. The Polaroid Lab desktop photo printer can make prints from your smartphone screen. Lay the phone screen side down on the Polaroid Lab platform and the device takes a picture of your screen and projects it onto film, which is ejected just like a usual Polaroid picture. Polaroid Lab goes on sale on October 10th for 130 bucks in the US, 130 dollars or euros in Europe and 120 pounds in the UK. It works with iOS 11 and Android 7 or newer for the app which controls setting and provides alignment guidance for the scan. I don't understand why. Well, when you can take a real, you know, take the real photo and send it to a printer, why would you want to take a picture of the screen and send it? You don't send it to the printer. You get a Polaroid. Well, I know, but to the Polaroid, you could, there's way, they have Polaroid printers. Allison, why do you eat fun? Sorry. You're, you got the next one. All right. Facebook posted an explanation of how it uses background location data from smartphones. In Android 10, Facebook will phase out its application settings in favor of the new Android 10 location settings and will respect the most restrictive choices until then. Facebook also notes that in iOS 13, users will see a pop up informing them of how often and for what reason Facebook accessed location info. The post notes that Facebook may also know some location information based on check-ins, events and IP address. And finally, EU Commission President-elect Ursula von der Leyen named Margaret Vestiger, executive president in charge of digital policy. Vestiger will also continue as commissioner for competition which handles antitrust, antitrust. In her new role, Vestiger will add issues like 5G, AI and data sharing. She didn't get the presidency this time around at the EU Commission, but boy, she sure is positioning herself for an accident. All right. Let's talk a little bit more about some other tech news. Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma stepping down as chairman of the company. He founded back in 1999. This is big, especially in the Chinese tech circles. Jack Ma bought his first computer when he was 33 years old. Alibaba was his third attempt at a startup. He's only 55 and is expected to focus now on philanthropy and education. But who knows what the guy is going to do? Alibaba has a market cap of $460 billion U.S. and is considered the world's most valuable retail brand outside the United States. Daniel Zhang Yang will become the new chairman of Alibaba. He has been CEO since 2015, so he's adding chairman to that CEO credit. Zhang is credited with popularizing Alibaba's Singles Day online shopping festival which is the biggest retail shopping day in the world. Zhang is encouraging some in-house experiments that compete with Alibaba's current retail offerings. Telling Bloomberg in an interview about the transition, if we don't kill our existing businesses, someone else will. So I'd rather see our new businesses kill our existing businesses. That's something other businesses could take inspiration from. Yeah. Competing with yourself. It's an all-time honor principle. Yeah. I mean, there are so many ways you could interpret that stepping down from Jack Ma. I don't know much about the Chinese ecosystem or market or environment, but he's quite young, it seems, for retiring. I guess there are two ways you can see it. Either he's a very wealthy man and he wants to do other things, which makes complete sense. Or there are other reasons that are pushing him to retire. No matter what you say, you've got to say that he's a pretty impressive performance to go from 33 years old for buying his first computer to actually retiring at 55 from this $460 billion company. That's impressive. The sense I get is that he didn't want to continue to run this company forever. He's not an executive. He's not a financial person. He's not an engineer. He is neither Bill Gates nor Steve Ballmer in this situation. And so I think he has apparently been saying since shortly after they founded the company, at some point, I'm going to have to hand this all over. And of course, it was big when he handed it over to CEO, the CEO, Rold Zhang. So this doesn't surprise me, but I think everybody is wondering like, okay, but what are you really doing next? It's not just going to be philanthropic, right? Come on. He used to be a teacher, so maybe it will be education though. I don't know. And also the fact that it's China, even if it's not warranted, kind of adds an air of, oh, but what is really happening behind it? Which makes no sense. I know. I know. There is that. That does stick to it. I feel like with Jack Ma, it's probably less of an issue than say with Huawei or something like that. But who knows? Who knows? I don't know for sure. All right. McDonald's is acquiring, not aqua hiring. It's acquiring a company called Apprente. I'm deciding this is how you pronounce it, which makes smart conversational agents meant to automate voice ordering in multiple languages. McDonald's is already testing Apprente's technology in a few locations, drive-throughs. It could also be used for mobile and kiosk ordering. Apprente will become the founding member of McDonald's Tech Lab's research group. See, I would have gone with Apprente. So, you know, that's just me. I do think this is really interesting. I mean, it's interesting to think of you being able to use some voice recognition at the drive-through at McDonald's. But the fact that they are using it to really found their tech research innovation lab that's going to be in Silicon Valley, pretty smart. If McDonald's wants to differentiate themselves from other fast food chains, technology could be one of the ways they do it. They're already ahead of the game in delivery through Uber Eats, also with Wi-Fi and all the McDonald's. So, yeah, that makes sense to me. Now, I know where I live, we're in a little bit different situation that we have a lot of people who speak Spanish. And so this could be a big advantage just right out of the gate before they do all the other cool stuff with it. Yeah, I don't know how much it would be useful in Europe for, you know, we usually have, well, the people speak the languages that should be spoken, I suppose. Exactly. And nicely. No, I don't mean it like that. I mean, I was so careful. Yeah, that's not what I meant. But McDonald's has been interesting in tech-adjacent innovations. Like we have the kiosks now in every store and every restaurant, and that comes usually with not delivery, but table service. So you order, and I guess maybe it's old news for the US, but it's kind of surprising for us here. It is. No, it is surprising. We have the kiosks here too, which is very cool. But I don't think we usually have the table service per se. Sometimes I'll bring it out to you, but it's not really a thing. You actually get a little panel thing and you take it, you input the number and you go sit down and they bring it to you and get the number. And that's enabled by the kiosk technology, which also has other advantages. But very civilized. All right. Well, scientists at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, CSAIL, that's a great acronym, they've developed a reprogrammable link, I'm sorry, reprogrammable ink that can change color when exposed to ultraviolet light. Cyan, magenta, and yellow photochromic dyes are mixed and then sprayed on a surface. Users then decide what colors they want, we're in a program. That program directs a machine that projects different wavelengths of UV light to activate or deactivate different colors. Colors can be changed multiple times. An object the size of a shoe takes 15 to 40 minutes to process the changes. The photochromilion ink study was funded by Ford, which is interested in using it on car parts for customization and more durable colors. Does that mean I can change the color of my car after I buy it? That'd be cool. I mean, it's a ways down the road to doing that size of an item. And there's also like, they're kind of having to fake the cyan and magenta. Yellow is the only one that's perfectly yellow. But yeah, this does work and theoretically can be scaled up to where you're like, you know what, I'm tired of this red car. My insurance has been higher. Or maybe the insurance adjuster is coming and I told him it wasn't a red car. Let me take it in and have it flashed with some UV light and change it to a nice neutral tan. This is, yeah, this is really a really cool idea. Of course, it's still kind of at the research level at this point. It's practical. They're doing it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's practical, but it's not implemented. And it seems not easily immediately implementable on the commercial industrial level. But if you start thinking about the many things that you would like to change colors for every once in a while, could be very enticing. I mean, just the fact that it's fun to say. Yeah. Photochromelian. Yeah, it's a good name. Just the fact that it can handle UV light out in the sun without fading is a big advance on its own. Like that might be the first practical use of this, to be honest. But the fact that it can also mix basically what they did was say, we're taking something we've done with 3D printing, which had very low resolution. And we're mixing all of those pigments together in a way that is easy to activate. So they use different wavelengths of UV for cyan, for magenta, for yellow, and for get rid of it all. Basically deactivate or activate it. They can make things invisible? No, they can only make them black. You activate it all. It turns black. You can deactivate all three selectively to blend and make the colors. But yeah, I mean, I can see the sun. Yeah. The UV light of the sun is fine. It's totally durable out in the sun. It's only, you have to bombard it with specific wavelengths and specific points for a duration of time. So yeah, sitting it out in an empty sunlight. They did say specifically that that's not a problem. Hey, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. All right, let's get to the Apple announcements, Apple TV Plus. They showed off a trailer for the show C starring Jason Momoa. They said that the trailer for the morning show was one of the most watched TV trailers ever, one of, anyway. But the most important part, we are going to get it November 1st for $4.99 a month family plan. That is Apple's new deal. The price always includes the family plan lately when they announce new services. So that's not a huge shock. But $4.99 is half what most people were thinking this was going to cost. And if you buy a new iPhone, a new iPad, or a new Apple TV, you get a year of Apple TV Plus for free. I think that's a really interesting move on their part. The $4.99 is surprisingly low for a family plan. That's pretty crazy since they know everybody shares their accounts anyway. So might as well lean into that. But the fact that they're tying the first free year to iPhone, iPad, Apple TV purchases means they are suddenly going to be able to say, look, millions of people have Apple TV Plus. And those numbers obviously are not going to be much because, as you said, it's going to become free with a lot of products. I think this is something they had to do because there is so little content when they launch it that they could have done and would give you three free months or six months free. But that would not have looked good. And this is a great way of making it appealing or usable even though there isn't a lot of content. The $4.99 is probably going to stick. I don't think they can increase the price. So I think long term this is a more interesting, important move. It's almost like Apple TV is an added bonus to the Apple ecosystem instead of just an independent thing. No, this feels like a driver of hardware sales still. And we know Apple is transitioning into being more of a services-oriented company. So the more I think about it, the more I think this is Apple saying, we need to build up a base of people who love using the service first. And then we'll figure out how to monetize that better later down the road. So maybe it's not raising the price of $4.99 a month. Maybe it's adding a bonus tier that gives you premium stuff. Maybe a year or two down the road, we see that. Maybe it's just selling in those channels as part of that Apple TV Plus experience and getting saying, hey, it's Apple TV Plus for $4.99 a month plus HBO if you want it, plus stars if you want it. Maybe that's enough to get them a cut of those subscriptions. I don't know. But I for one would have tried it anyway for the purposes of this show, but I'm happy to pay $5 a month. That seems like a reasonable channel price for this. It's going to have a small amount of content at launch, but they are going to add content every month as it goes along. So it'll build up over time. But knowing that it's always going to have a limit, it's not going to have a back catalog like your Netflix's or Hulu's or Disney Plus, makes me think that $5 is at the right price. This is smart. All right, let's talk about the iPhone 11 and the 11 pros. Starting with the 11, they called it the toughest class ever. It's a 6.11 inch retina display, spatial audio with Dolby Atmos available in purple, white, green, yellow, black, and red. And boy, did they have a lot to say about the camera. This isn't even the best of the cameras they showed off today, but it's a dual camera, two X optical zoom out on an ultra wide camera can switch between main camera and ultra wide semantic rendering that relights photos based on a subject, some multi-scale tone mapping with highlights differently depending on where they are. Portrait mode now works on your dogs. I've used portrait mode on my dog, but now I don't have to work hard at it. Apparently, it's just going to work nicely. A new portrait effect called High Key Mono that turns a picture into a nice black and white mono night mode with adaptive bracketing going after the pixel night mode, which is amazing. Video has improved stabilization, 4K 60, slow-mo time lapse, new extended dynamic range for video. You can get quick video from your photo just by holding the shutter button. They say the flash is 36% brighter, and the front camera is 12 megapixel true depth with a wider sensor if you rotate to landscape. Front cam can also do 4K 60. A13 Bionic Chip, which Apple claims is the fastest CPU in a phone. They also claim the GPU is the fastest one hour more battery life than the iPhone XR, which this is essentially the replacement for. Faster face ID, and they really emphasize durability and water resistance in the video for this thing starts at $699. One thing I wanted to draw attention to it, Tom's a 2x optical, but he said 2x optical zoom out, and that's important is it's a zoom out, not a zoom in, because zoom in is what I was waiting for, but they really emphasize the fact that you can do that ultra-wide video and photographs, and that's something that they emphasized and showed a ton of pictures on. I thought that was really interesting and the night mode looked pretty amazing. That's obviously an answer back to it's the Google Pixel that's got the crazy great night mode, is that right? That's right. Yeah, it's interesting because this is the main iPhone now. The iPhone XR has sold gangbusters, but it was like the XR, which is like the kid's version. This is not it. This is the 700 bucks iPhone is the main iPhone. It's the iPhone 11. So I think there's a little bit of retargeting here. Right, that's the shift. They really did make this was the phone. Oh, if you're a professional photographer, now you want to talk about the other phone. Because they want to get away from that perception that iPhones cost $1,000, right? So they're trying to say, no, no, iPhones cost $699. There's that and there's also the fact that the XR was their best seller. We thought that at some point they were going to shift the main device as the one that's a thousand bucks with the 10 and 10S. That's not the case anymore. They are refocusing on. It's not the best one they have, but it's the main one. Let's talk about the best one. The iPhone 11 Pro and Pro Max has a square camera bump with three lenses on the back available in midnight green, space gray, silver, white and gold. The iPhone Pro Max is 6.5 inches. The iPhone 11 Pro is 5.8 inches. So you are essentially getting three iPhones just like we've had. Super Retina XDR display with OLED, two million to one contrast, 1200 nits of brightness, 15% more energy efficient. Also has the spatial audio and the A13 bionic chip, some faster machine language, faster matrix multiplication. They did a lot of talking about the chip in this because they're trying to appeal to the nerds who really want, you know, the geeks who really want a pro machine. So they talked about the seven nanometer transistors. 8.5 billion of them. The four high efficiency cores that give you the great battery life, the two high performance cores that are there. If you need them, hundreds of voltage gates, hundreds of thousands of clock gates. So they're saying the chip only lights up when it's needs. Really trying to talk about the battery management because the iPhone 11 Pro gets up to four hours longer battery than the Pro Max gets up to five hours. Then the XS and XS Max. Then the equivalent previous ones. Right. And they're including a fast charge 18 watt adapter in there. That was dominating the headlines in my RSS feeds. People were very excited about the 18 watt adapter. And the camera is better too. Wide angle camera with f1.8 lens, tele with f2.4, ultra ride with 120 degree field of view, can do half time, one time, and two time optical zoom. Video on all three cameras is 4K 60. They talked about a new software update coming in the fall called Deep Fusion, which uses machine learning for low to medium light. That's really their big hit at Google's night mode. And iPhone 11 Pro starts at $999. The Pro Max at $1099. Pre-order Friday at 5 a.m., shipping September 20th. And as usual, they kept some of the older models around. Not the XS. XS is gone now, but the iPhone XR stays around at $599. And the iPhone 8 sticking around at $449. Yeah, this was definitely a cool phone. I got to say on the iPhone 11 was so good sounding that I started doubting whether we were going to get a Pro model. Probably one of the single main things was having the 2X zoom. Like you pointed out, the OLED screen is better on the 10, sorry, the 11 Pro. Thank goodness we don't have to have people saying X and 10 and mixing that up. That's probably the best thing. The iPhone 11 Pro M10. But it definitely sounds like a really good camera. I thought this was where they did a demo with an application called Filmic where they showed using multiple cameras at the same time. So you could take a photo or video of someone at you at the same time that you're filming a concert, for example. You could have both things in the view of the video at the same time. And that's bananas. Yeah, that's pretty cool. I think there are a lot of people who are going to argue about the Pro nomenclature that honestly doesn't really matter all that much. This one is all about the camera. And it seems we're going to have to wait for the tests and having it in hand. It seems like it is a substantial upgrade to the camera elements. Whether or not it's useful in your everyday life doesn't really matter. It's the kind of thing where you want to have the best one. Because if you didn't upgrade a little bit every year, then it would still be on the crappy cameras of the iPhone 1. And this is getting into a territory that seems like it is competing with some really expensive cameras. It's been eating away more and more at that capabilities. I don't want to say market because that one is also evolving. But they focused, laser focused on the camera for this device. And that's what you really want if that's the device you get. And it seems you're getting something substantial out of it. Yeah, I think what you're really going to notice is the four-hour battery life though. That's what you really notice. That's true. That's what I really want, yes, is the longer battery life. But yeah, the video, the photo and the durability, they also emphasize the durability on the Pro as well because it's got the most durable glass ever and that steel band around the side. So let's talk about the iPad, new seventh-gen iPad, 10.2-inch retina display, A10 Fusion chip. They claim that the chip is two times faster than the top-selling PC, really pushing this as you could use this as your laptop. Smart connector for keyboard, support for Apple Pencil. It's lightning though. It's not USB-C. A megapixel camera, gigabit LTE for the cell phone-enabled model, starting at $329 for the non-cell phone-enabled model, $299 if you're an education customer. And you can order that one today, ship in September 30th. So this is to replace the 9.7-inch iPad, which is the bottom line iPad. So this is really kind of cool that they just brought up the bottom. This isn't saying we need a better iPad Pro. This is bringing the bottom up to the A10 Fusion chip faster and all that, but it's going to get really confusing because this is now the 10.2-inch retina display when we have a 10.5-inch iPad Pro. No, no, no, it changed 11. That's right. We'll be fine. Yeah. 10.211. And I think it's roughly the same size as the old 9.8. They just slimmed down the bezels, right? No, that's not. No, actually, they have the pretty substantial chin and forehead. I don't think the bezels are that much smaller. Yeah, we did for an animation showing those bezels disappearing and they didn't. They didn't. I think the Pro is still the thin bezel territory. But this is a lot of tablet for $300 or a little bit more. It's a lot of very good quality tablet. I think just like the Apple Watch, we were discussing this before the show, when we weren't looking or when we were looking and seeing it move so slowly that we didn't notice, Apple is kind of cleaning house on the tablets and watch markets. Of course, there is competition, but I think especially in the tablet space, it seems like the by far the best deal is this new iPad. Well, let's talk about the watch because the Apple Watch space, they're cleaning up into your right, Patrick. The new Watch Series 5 has an always-on retina display. That means you just raise it if you want it to get brighter. But even when it's sitting down, you don't have to touch it or raise your arm to look at it. You'll be able to see it. They called it an LTPO display that refreshes dynamically from 60 Hertz to as low as 1 Hertz for power saving. They claim it'll last 18 hours on a battery just like it has. They added a compass app, which will also work in the maps part. You can press and hold the side button for emergency calling in more than 150 countries and it's available in silver, gold and space gray in the bargain basement aluminum version. If you want to go stainless steel, it's gold, space black and polished. The brushed titanium version also has a natural and brushed space black option and there's a new white ceramic model as well as if you really want to spend money Nike and Hermes models. An Hermes model now has black. Series 5 starts at $399, $499 if you want LTE built in order now and stores have it September 20th and the Series 3 will stay available. Not the Series 4, Series 3 price drops to $199. I think it's fascinating that the big selling is this is a watch and you can tell time on it. And they actually emphasize that at the end of the video about it, they say, and you can tell time and I know that's funny to make fun of them for it, but it's going to be awesome. I mean, I am so tired of turning my watch off on with my nose. It happens to me as well. This is, my mind was blown with this. It's probably a technology that many people already know, but slowing down the screen refresh rate to save battery is amazing. That being said, the current Series 4 basically lasts two days and they claim it's 18 hours. It's for the Series 5, so you're going to go back to your watch probably definitely needing a charge at the end of the day. But yeah, it's that thing alone, the fact that, which is ridiculous because many other watches have done this before and we don't need to get into that. The fact that you have an always on display on an Apple watch is big no matter what the competitors are going to say. And the Series 3 for 200 bucks, it's still a very good Apple watch. 200 bucks, it's an entry level price for a wearable device. Now let's clean up the rest of the announcements. They were emphasizing the health aspects quite a bit with the Apple watch. So they announced an Apple Hearing Study with the University of Michigan and WHO, a Women's Health Study with NIH in Harvard, an Apple Heart and Movement Study with the American Heart Association and Women's Hospital. If you want to participate using your Apple watch, you can enroll in the Apple Research App later this year. Apple Arcade was given a lot of attention off the top. It'll launch September 19th in more than 150 countries with 100 new games in the launch catalog also for $5 a month family plan, including a one month free trial. And they brought out the new head of Apple Retail Store to talk about how they will have an Apple Watch Studio where you can try on bands. They're launching a trade-in program, which I think was the reason they brought out Apple Retail to talk about low monthly payments. So you can get new iPhones starting at $399, $599, or $699 with the proper trade-in, and you get these low monthly prices. And they announced the Apple Fifth Avenue Store in New York opening again. It had been remodeled, it had been closed for remodeling. It's opening on September 20th as the new iPhones arrive. Any last minute thoughts on any of the rest of those announcements? I think we've covered it in depth. I'll just add that I'm very surprised. Again, while we weren't looking, Tim Cook has turned or is turning Apple into his Apple, where there are a lot of impressive products. As you said, the iPhone is still the main one and it takes a chunk of the presentation time. But there are a lot of things that are very valid as flagship products. So I don't think it happened in one bang like Steve Jobs used to do it. But I think this is a very successful, or at least it looks from the glow of the announcement. It looks like it's a different and successful move on Tim Cook's part or during his tenure at least. Well, it showed that we have a wide variety. Tim Cook was saying years ago, you're going to love, we got so many good things in the works and people are like, where? We know that we're seeing them. Today is the day I feel like we finally saw, okay, yeah, this is a suite of interesting offerings. Allison, do you have any summation, any summary thoughts on the announcement as a whole? I would say that they did come up with an awful lot of new things and not anything fully mockable, like they have sometimes in the past, where they make something sound so much better than know it's the greatest thing in the whole world. They were just like, yeah, this is really, really good. I thought it was a strong set of announcements, but like you, still waiting for that new MacBook Pro announcement. We always want more. And they usually give us an October announcement, so it sounds like we might get that as well. Fingers, toes and eyes crossed. Yeah. Thank you, Patrick Beja. As always, folks want to find out more about what you've got going on, where should they go? You can check out Pixels, which is a show about gaming or MVGB, which is another show about gaming that we do right here on the DTNS network. If you're not a huge fan of games and a hardcore gamer, or as I said, Pixels on your podcast app right now. Alison Sheridan, thank you so much for being with us and talking Apple today, which I know you hate, but it was great having you along. Let folks know where they could find what you're doing. Well, you can find more at podfeed.com, including my Tesla tech series, if you couldn't understand my audio on Friday. I've got all of it written up in blog posts there. And of course, we'll be talking Apple stuff as always. We're changing our Patreon rewards. So we came up with a proposal. And if you haven't looked it over already, thanks to so many people who have, let us know if there's anything in there you just can't live with. You can find the proposed Patreon reward changes at dailytechnewshow.com slash Patreon. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com, we're live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.