 Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, whose ears I am inside right now. Thanks to all of you, including Dan Krafton, Tim Ashman, Johnny Hernandez, and brand new patrons Michael and Arthur. Yay! Welcome. On this episode of DTNS, why EVs have trouble in the cold, they don't just need a blanket. What Google changed in response to EU law and Instagram tries to become your messaging platform. Stop it, Instagram. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, March 5th, 2024 at Los Angeles on Tom Merritt. And from Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger J. March 5th, Cinco de Marzo. Yeah, Marzo, I can't remember now. Lo siento. Let's start with the quick hits then. I think it's martes. No, that's Tuesday. Anyway, Windows Central's Zach Bodin says his sources say Microsoft will make a hardware announcement on March 21st. Among the announcements Bodin expects are an OLED Surface Pro X and a Surface Laptop 6 with Intel Core Ultra or Snapdragon 8 Elite chips. So both Intel and ARM versions. Let's check back on the 21st and see how well Mr. Bodin did. Yes, let's do. On Viente Uno de Marzo, as Roger and GPEG have said. China smartphone sales continue to plunge along with declines in the wider economy there. Counterpoint research estimates sales fell 7% in the first six weeks of 2024, year over year. Oppo fell the most dropping from 70% of the market last year to 13% now. Apple's share of the market fell from 19% to 16%. You're going to see a 24% drop in unit sales in all the headlines, but the market share is still 16%, which dropped from 19 to 16. Don't let that mislead you. Still not good though. Only Honor and Huawei gained market share with Honor up from 15 to 16% and Huawei jumping on the strength of the Mate 60 from 9% all the way to 17%. That puts it in second place to Vivo, which held on to an 18% share down just from 19%. In other market share news, StatCounter estimates that 4.03% of the desktop user market was run in Linux at the end of February. Linux marked 3% market share last June, which it took 30 years to get to. Just eight months later, we got 4%, just 46% more until we can declare it the year of the Linux desktop. There you go. Let's ride around the corner. Be careful when you join a video conference, especially if you're talking about military secrets. And don't forget your VPN. Last week, Russia's RT network aired a recording of a WebEx meeting by German Luftwaffe, the Air Force officials. They discussed sensitive topics like weapon deliveries to Ukraine and potential stickers on a bridge in Crimea. It was specially certified instance of WebEx with servers in Germany, but one member of the call connected insecurely from Singapore. An airshow taking place there had made it a target for Russian surveillance. The call was probably caught in a broad sweep for insecure communications. I'm going to guess VPN. I'm going to guess he didn't put his VPN on. But that's, I don't know. I don't know for sure, but that's, that's what it feels like. Federico Vitici was looking for the perfect keyboard to use with the Apple Vision Pro and he ended up deciding that the perfect keyboard was to rip the display off his back book air. Well, he didn't rip it. He just removed it. He removed it very carefully. It looks nice. It had the advantages of being lighter than a laptop with a display and one piece instead of a separate keyboard and trackpad as he was considering otherwise. But when he wasn't using the Apple Vision Pro, it had the downside of no longer having the display. So he wisely connected an iPad with a universal control and sidecar active. And then was like, well, all I need to do now is create a way to mount the iPad to the headless MacBook Air in a way that I can easily remove it. And now he's got a MacBook with a removable screen that works perfectly with the Apple Vision Pro. You can go check it out at maxstories.com. Yeah, for anybody who isn't watching the video version, this looks really nice. You know, when I first read this, I was like, oh, he's tearing things apart. This is just a mess. Oh, it looks really nice. Federico is a good dude. Follow him on X. OpenAI has announced that chat GPT can now read its answers out loud on its web and mobile versions with a feature called read aloud. Users have been able to directly ask the chatbot prompts without typing ever since the voice chat feature launched last September. Read aloud is now available for GPT 3.5 and GPT 4 and can speak 37 languages auto detecting the language of the text that it's reading. That is correct, Sarah. You can hear it right now. All right, Google announced a set of changes meant to bring its products and services in compliance with the European Union's Digital Markets Act by Thursday, March 7. That's the deadline. Products deemed subject to the DMA's provisions are Google Maps, Google Play, the store, Google Shopping, Google Ads, Chrome, Android, Google Search and YouTube. That also may be a list of all the things Google hasn't killed or changed its name in the past seven years. Congrats residents of the European Economic Area. You now have more consent screens than ever before. Yay. Google will no longer link personal data across user accounts of some products for personalization of ads. Users will have to link them in settings, though Google says it may prompt users with banners in certain cases. Yes, more banners. Browser and search choice screens are coming to Android as you'll get those by Thursday. So when you're setting up Android, it'll say what browser would you like choose from these options? What what search would you like choose from these options? And I'm sure there'll be lots of think pieces written about how you get on those option lists. Also, it's coming to Chrome for desktop and iOS later. It's not coming right away, but it's in the works. And so that's good enough to meet their requirements. When it does come when you launch Chrome for the first time, it will ask you if you want to choose another browser, I guess, and also ask you which search engine you want. Starting on March 6th, Google Play app developers can directly point European users outside the app for promotional deals. Mostly this means app developers can promote a cheaper payment or subscription from them directly. This produces what they have to share with Google. Yeah, if you're confused on that one, you could do this in the Google Play according to the Google Play rules before, but it wasn't directly. There were limits on how you could do it. Now you can just say like, hey, get this for cheaper, click here and it'll take you off site. That goes along with, you know, looser rules around third party apps, third party app stores and all that. Google will also launch a data portability API so that developers can make it easy for users to switch between competing services. This isn't really something that is so much required for Google to do as it is for apps to do. So TikTok, for instance, has to comply with the DMA by allowing you to export your data. I don't know where else you would take it. Reels? Snapchat? I really don't know, but they have to do it so they're doing it. So these APIs will allow developers to do that. And even if you're not required to do it, you can do it. So that portability API is coming for developers. Google is also providing advertisers tools to help them get consent from users to target them for ads. More pop-ups, yay. And this list adds to previously announced changes like listing more third party non-paying search services in tiles when you do a search. They're removing some of their own tools like Google Flights. So there's a lot here that they are required to do. And they're doing it less contentiously than Apple, which is kind of digging in its heels and doing the least it thinks it can justify. It's a lot of work, no matter what, whether you're digging in your heels or doing what Google's doing here. Sarah, do you think it's going to have any effect? Like, is this actually going to make the European tech landscape more competitive? That's the point. That's what they're trying to do. Yeah, I honestly, going through all of this, I doubt the experience is going to change for the end user all that much. I mean, maybe it's sort of like, oh yeah, where'd Google Flights go? Okay, I'll use something else. Or there's a larger banner that a developer has now on a page when I can save some money by paying the developer directly, rather than going to the Google Play Store. I also, that one specifically, I wonder, it's like, why would anyone not want to save money? So if developers weren't allowed to do that before, I get it. If, you know, if you sort of had restrictions on how you could, you know, the language you could use or colors or, you know, size, text, all that stuff, I get it. If you can just sort of say like, okay, pay here, but if you want the better experience, pay this other way, everyone is going to do that, right? That would be, I guess, a big difference, unless you're just a person who's like, I don't care about three euros difference. And I feel lazy right now and I'm just going to stay inside. That's going to be more people than you might expect who are like, you know what, I don't know. I trust Google to handle my money, which, you know, you could argue whether they should or not. But somebody may be like, I pay Google a lot of stuff and they seem to be doing fine with it. I don't know this app, so I want to pay them, but I don't feel comfortable. I think a lot of it is what you said. Like people are just like, I don't know. It seems like a lot of work to go off into a browser and fill something out. So the Google Pay experience may be a little smoother. Yeah, there will be people. It'll be interesting to see what that percentage is because you're right. It is more rational to jump through the hoops and save a few euros. I don't think this is really going to change the landscape though. I don't think it's going to make, you know, an explosion of innovation where companies finally feel they can compete with Google and Apple and TikTok and Amazon. And if anything, it might have the opposite effect of regulatory capture where companies are like, ooh, if we get big enough, that's a lot of work. It's a lot of expense that we have to do and only the big folks can actually afford to do it. Yeah, it's, I don't disagree with the principle of any of these rules. I just don't know if they're going to have the effect they're intended to have. Yeah, if there is some big effect on anyone listening who this applies to, do let us know. But I'm with you. These feel like incremental changes for the better. Sure, none of this seems like it's for the worse. But yeah, I don't. Some of it's going to be a hassle. That's the only downside is people are going to get tired of seeing pop-ups and being asked things. People don't like to be asked to make choices. They really don't. I hate being crippled by choice personally. Yeah. What I was not able to choose to do was log into Facebook, Instagram threads or my meta quest this morning because the meta had a big old outage. Wow. I hadn't heard everyone complain about it, Sarah. Started around 10 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday, which is usually right about the time I sit in front of my computer for the first time. Oh, yeah. And I was like, yeah, it's down, whatever. We're not talking about that today though because outages happen. By the time you're listening to this, it's over or very over. You might be listening to this episode next week. That's not really the interesting thing. Exactly. I had already forgotten. Well, Otis looked at his Instagram this morning. It all worked out fine. So all is well. But speaking of Instagram, the company announced a new feature this week, allowing users to edit direct messages or DMs, as the kids say, up to 15 minutes after sending them. Users can also get the option to pin up to three messaging threads to the top of their inbox. Maybe you talk to somebody there all the time. You just kind of want to put it up at the top. To edit a message, you need to press and hold it. Then choose edit from the dropdown menu. Pretty cut and dry messaging apps do this now. Once you edit the message, the purple text bubble will have an edited label on top of it to notify the other person that something has changed here. So this is very similar to some of the new features of iMessage, which I do use the edit tool here and there. And I see other people doing it as well. I've never been in a situation where I'm like, oh, I got you. You know, I saw what you did before you changed the message. But I'm also not having like cray-cray conversations these days. And I'm not doing that in Instagram either. But I do a fair amount of direct messaging through Instagram. I mentioned my dog's account, which I help manage because I'm his mother. I have my own. Just the other day, somebody messaged me in there and I was like, where did this come from? And he said, well, you liked my photo that I posted the other day. And I was thinking of you. I was like, yeah, that makes sense. Of course. Maybe you don't even have my phone number anymore. I hadn't talked to him in years. But the whole editing messages thing is it's funny because you have that camp of people saying, oh, you know, you know, now we're going to have to do all these screenshots to make sure that, you know, that crazy DM that gets changed later, you know, still, you know, stays somewhere for posterity, that probably is going to happen as it does with all these messaging apps. But I think this is a good thing. I, you know, for anybody who said, hey, Twitter, give me an edit button. It's like, it's all the, it's all the same idea. It's, oh, I made a stupid typo or, you know, that sentence could have been worded differently. Or, you know, I just want to take it back. You know, all that, all that stuff is just, those are nice features to me. I agree that, and I want to point out before I say that the next thing I'm going to say that edit features are necessary and they are rarely abused. I mean, we've had edit features on Facebook through its entire run practically. And if anything gets abused, it's something on Facebook. And no one is out there with horror stories about, oh, somebody tricked me by posting a message and then editing it. Like, it gets even less of an issue when you're talking about direct messages. Like, what are you doing saying, hey, would you like to eat Mexican food? And then when the person says yes, you like edit it to say Chinese food and go, ha, you said yes. Now we have to, like, like what, what are you doing that would really like cause a problem with people? I'm sure, I'm sure you're coming up with a scenario right now, but it just doesn't happen that often. So I think after 10, 15 years of edit buttons in very highly used situations, we can agree that it's not abused in the amount that causes it to be something we shouldn't have. And I think it's fine. I'm more fascinated that I like you, Sarah. I'm getting more messages on Instagram these days. I have a bigger problem. I don't have a problem with the edit button. I have a bigger problem with why are we have so many different ways to message each other? Like I have to keep track of 20 different things now. Yeah. Yeah. I've got a, I just downloaded WhatsApp for Mac OS. Didn't even know there was an app because I've got a friend who she, she's capable of using messages. She has an iPhone, but she lives in Amsterdam. And WhatsApp is just like where all her other friends are. And so she's just like, Sarah, it just is at the end of the world to use this. It's like so much easier for me. And I'm like, no, it's not the end of the world at all. But now I got to make sure those notifications are on or I'm going to miss your message. But yeah, there's that. There's Facebook messages. I don't know. I don't know. I'm not using Messenger all that much lately on Facebook, but I used to use it quite a bit. Instagram, DMs, and of course, you know, anything social, networking, the, the, the folks who say, I really only talk to people using Instagram direct message features. That a long time ago. Well, I don't know. I mean, Instagram hasn't been around since that long, but I think it launched in 2010. But maybe five years ago, I would have been like, that's so weird. Really? That's where you message everybody. But I can see, especially if you, you can, I mean, I have like countless contacts, but I really only talk to about five or six people on a daily basis. And even, you know, some days not even that many people. So it's like, if you're all in one place, that's the wave. It's not so much that Instagram DMs work better than another way to contact somebody. But, you know, sometimes I could see somebody's active. So I'm like, oh, you know, maybe this is a good way to, to, to catch their eye, you know, rather than wait for discord later. It does feel for me that Instagram is an alternative for most people. Like my sister will message me on Instagram, but usually she texts me. My friend Lamar messages me on Instagram. Usually he texts me. I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't I don't. Signal on the other hand, the people on signal only use signal. I, the people on messenger seem to only use messenger. So I don't know that Instagram messages has taken the place of a messenger for people yet. It's like you say, it's just, I'm in Instagram and I saw you post and thought of you kind of a situation, I think. Yeah. But I'm glad they have an edit label because I can't type. Well, I make mistakes all the time. You know, you mentioned Facebook having this edit feature since the beginning, you know, unless there's a post that is like especially weird, you know, where I notice it's edited and I'm kind of like, okay, yeah, somebody went back and rethought some things. I don't even notice that. Yeah. And I also don't, you know, if it's a sentence and, you know, it fits the caption of the photo that was posted, it's like, cool, you edited it. I don't know what he did. Who cares? Yeah. Well, folks, if you would like to send us a poorly spelled unedited message or a perfectly spelled edited message, you can do so on multiple platforms. Direct message us on threads. Send us a post on Instagram. We're at DTNS pics. DTNS PIX on both of those. We're Daily Tech News Show on TikTok and we are DTNS Show on X and Mastodon. Come find us. Say hi. There you go. I'm so excited right now that I'm picking up and saying hi two of my future friends and family because doing it for them is really exciting. With that I ended the Q&A session. Stay on the plane, we'll just enjoy the hell of it and I'm going to get off the plane. Okay. So we said, let's try specializing our new class in Photoshop, don't get doubted about of explaining it even more briefly. Yes, let me short circuit his explanation, get it? Liquid thickens in the cold is the thing you have to understand, right? I'm not talking about water turning to ice, that of course happens, but other liquids get sluggish, right? They thicken up, they start to get a little slower, they don't flow as fast, even if they don't freeze. And most lithium ion batteries have a liquid electrolyte in them. This is why I'm like, go read Wesley Chang's explanation because he's got more to it. But it made me understand that like, that's the principle, that's the thing, that's why the cold affects the battery. The electrolyte is what carries ions from one side of the battery to the other. And when you're charging, it carries them to one side, when you use the battery to power the vehicle, it pulls them to the other side. And if the electrolyte is thick from the cold, they don't move as fast. The electrolyte doesn't move as fast, it slows things down. And so your charge doesn't happen as fast and your discharge from, for powering the vehicle doesn't happen as fast. Okay, well, so if we understand what's going on here, what does Professor Chang suggest might be a solution? How do we get it to, you know, not be so thick? He has a few ideas that they are working on, that, you know, he's an assistant professor, like you said, so he's part of a research team. They're working on some new materials. Some of them wouldn't even be lithium ions, everybody's trying to find a replacement for lithium. So there's that. Also working on solid electrolytes, there's some progress being made with solid electrolytes for lithium ion batteries, which wouldn't suffer the slowing from the cold. You can also warm the battery to get it going. That's another thing that he suggests is systems that just warm up the battery, just like you do with an old diesel engine to start it in the winter. While you warm it up, get that electrolyte loosened up and then your battery works better. I can imagine there's a lot of people in cold climates, like, you know, Minnesota or Sweden, who are like, oh, yeah, no, we've got car heaters for diesel engines. I've had them for years. Why not have them for electric vehicles, too? I mean, does that constitute anything different than just like letting the car run for a minute? I mean, I guess when you have an EV that that sounds like a sort of silly term, right? I don't know. That's a really good question because with, you know, with a gas engine or a diesel engine, you are burning fuel. So there is heat being created in large quantities that you can use to warm up the engine. I don't know with EVs if they warm fast enough to make that have a difference or if you need to provide an electric heater in there. That's a very good question. But, you know, there's there's definitely a problem with them starting. If you, you know, if you can't get them started, you can't warm them up anyway. So you got to make sure that you get them loose enough to discharge enough electricity to get rolling in the first place. Well, I guess everybody should just move to the tropics and then we would have an issue anymore. That would be another, that would be Sarah's suggestion to add to Professor Schoening. I'm kidding, of course. Yeah, just live somewhere warm. People, come on. But yeah, this is, I think this, a lot of times I see people complaining or arguing about EVs. And there are downsides to EVs. There are differences with EVs. But what I like to see is when people are arguing in good faith and from a set of good assumptions. And so when I see someone say, well, EVs will never work in the cold. I dismiss that. I'm like, well, no, there's lots of people in cold weather using EVs. So that, that just isn't true. If, however, understanding this, you say, well, EVs work less well in cold weather and we need better batteries, then that becomes a more productive discussion because it's not forget that EVs, they don't work in the cold because they do. It's, ah, if you get an EV in the cold, you should be aware that you're going to run into this issue, you know, similar to having a diesel engine. And if you're reading about developments in battery tech, that might be something you keep an eye out for is, oh, that's a solid electrolyte. That would help the EV stuff. And maybe that makes you, you know, feel a little better about buying an EV in the future. If you know that, oh, there's solid electrolyte batteries coming. Mm-hmm. Anyway, you're going to buy an EV. Not right now. I have to pay off my car for the next 100 years first. Well, sure. But let's just say, let's just say if you didn't have to. I, I, I actually, I would very much like an electric vehicle. If, if I felt like the car that I wanted and the price that I could offer for the car matched, I would do it tomorrow. That is not in the cards right now. But yes, I, I think they're great. I also don't drive that much. So the whole conversation about range and I also don't live in a very cold climate. I mean, it is winter in Los Angeles, but it's not really that cold here. I don't think, you know, I would be lucky enough to not be super affected by something like this. But, but yes, EV, you know, it's on a very distant horizon for me. And Clinton points out that older, less expensive EVs may not have heating or cooling elements to precondition the battery, but the newer ones do. So it's less of a problem than the newer ones. And that might be something if you're shopping for an EV, you want to keep an eye out for. All right, let's check out the mail bag. Oh, right. If you want to keep your smartphone charged up when you're traveling and most of us do, it can be a little tricky. Sometimes it's like, where's the outlet? Or, you know, I don't know. I, you know, didn't, didn't bring the right chords with me. Chris Christensen has a tip for keeping it all topped off. This is Chris Christensen from amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. I don't know about you, but when I'm traveling my smartphone, which for me as an iPhone is getting a lot of use. It's my boarding pass. It's my directions. It's my entertainment through podcasts. And of course it's my camera. I tend to take more pictures with it than with any other camera that I'm carrying with me. And that means that I'm going to run out of power. One thing that's part of my kit now is a MagSafe power bank that connects right onto the back of my phone, which also has a MagSafe case on it. So I don't have to carry around both a power bank and cables. And I can just quickly slap on a power bank and even put it right back in my pocket and recharge my phone and be ready for the next picture or the next boarding pass or the next podcast. I'm using a power bank from Eventtronics, but a number of different manufacturers have them. Look for them. They're great. And this is Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. A smart tip from Chris Christensen as usual. Thank you, Chris. Stephen wrote in about AI having a light bulb moment. We were talking about this with Nika yesterday and said, that made me think of a book I'm certain Tom has read. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein. One of the main characters is called Mycroft Homes, a computer that got so much processing power and additional workload over the years that he simply woke up. Definitely a light bulb moment in my humble opinion. Really makes me want to start networking as much hardware as I can get my hands on. Stephen, don't do it. Don't wake up Mycroft. Yeah, we read Moon is a Harsh Mistress years ago for Sword and Laser, the Sword and Laser Book Club. And I remember the Mycroft character. I'd forgotten about the light bulb moment though until Stephen wrote in and mentioned that. So yeah, we don't always have to make a Skynet reference. We could make a Mycroft Homes reference. Friend of mine has a dog named Mycroft and I have not read this book, although I'm familiar with it. And I asked her today, is that what Mycroft is named after? And she was like, yes. Yes, as a matter of fact. The computer that woke up. Yeah. Because Mycroft Homes is also Sherlock's older brother in the Sherlock Holmes stories. The timeline named the computer after the Mycroft from the Sherlock Holmes stories. Well, she named it after the computer that was named after Sherlock Holmes' brother. So you see, somehow, it's all related. Yes, that's right. We also got a note from Vinara writing in on Patreon who said, saw a video of a guy using his Apple Vision Pro to pay for stuff in stores. I'm still looking for the video, says Vinara. And please send it if you find it. He was going around tapping his face in the card readers. Wait, what? If I had the cash, I'd love to try one, but I think my wife would kill me. Does the Apple Vision Pro have NFC tap to pay in it? I didn't think it did. I don't think so. No. Then you need to try this out. This is, yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, I'm not, yeah. I got nothing. I'm like, maybe he was taking photos, but of card readers, probably not. Or is the shtick where he was just pretending, but I want to pay with my computer. Yeah, you see a lot of those videos floating around, and then someone who has a Vision Pro is like, you wouldn't even be able to make that gesture. This person is just shining you on right now. I know you just had an Apple Vision show yesterday, and you're talking about this a lot, but what are you using it for these days? Media consumption. Yeah, that seems to be the consensus, right? Now, I did read a great article on Ars Technica yesterday about just someone who kind of took one for the team and said, I used it exclusively for work for a week. You know, here's the good, here's the bad. I, for what we're doing right this second, I don't know if that's possible. I mean, I could wear it and still read the screen in front of me, but I wouldn't really be using it to podcast, but I could do it for kind of everything else. I think I would find that frustrating because I just, you know, when you get, you know how it is, when you've got a vibe, you just, my keyboard, my trackpad, things are the way that I want them to be for work, but yeah, I think that's interesting. I don't really use it on a daily basis for anything besides just kind of like kickback and enjoy, but it's very enjoyable. Yeah, and if the price comes down someday, that would be good enough for a lot of people, I think. Exactly. Patrons, stick around for the extended show, good day internet. Someone was asking us recently what happened to NFTs and we said we'd keep an eye out for new uses and we found one. There are some NFTs being issued to get you into the Coachella Music Festival later this year, actually just coming up in a month or so, is this a signal of the revival of NFTs as something not scammy? We will discuss whether it is or not. We'll also remind you that you can catch our show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 at UTC. We'd love to have you join us live. If you can, find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and join us tomorrow. Scott Johnson is sharing his analysis on the new and upcoming partner games at Xbox's Wednesday announcements. The DTNS Family Podcasts. Helping each other understand. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.