 This 10th year of Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners. That includes you, Rodrigo Smith Zapata, you, John and Becky Johnston, you, Chris Benito, and you, Ryan Marks. On this episode of DTNS, Qualcomm's headphone chip can use Wi-Fi to improve your audio quality and extend your range. Plus, Amazon's generative AI tool is letting those advertisers pretty up their product shots. And why is the PS5 Slim requiring you to have an internet connection to turn on your Blu-ray drive? Why? We'll tell you. This is the Daily Tech News Show for Wednesday, October 25, 2023 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Eye of Vibi Holder. I'm Sarah Lane. Whoa. From Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. I feel like your studio was named by Philip K. Dick, somehow. I don't know why. Whoever was who suggested this in our chat, it was a last minute change. And I thank you. This is fun. Let's do it again tomorrow. Excellent. All right. Thanks, everybody. We'll see. Oh, wait, no, we have the technical stuff. Sorry. I was got way ahead of my hour. Let's start with the quick hits. Here we go. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman sources pass along a tip that Apple is redesigning the Apple TV app for TVOS and could unveil the new look as early as this December. Apple TV would be the single app for all of your TV and movies that are rented or purchased or streamed from Apple. It would also add a left side navigation for video categories. And the separate movies and TV shows app on TVOS would be removed along with video sections on other mobile Apple apps. Now, big news today, especially if you pay for Apple TV plus, Apple raise those prices. Apple TV plus service, Apple news, Apple arcade and Apple one bundles all went up in the US. Apple TV plus goes from $6.99 per month to 9.99 per month. The new prices take effect immediately for all new subscribers and existing subscribers will be notified when the new prices do kick in for them as well because they will. All right. We got mostly good earnings. Microsoft's all about cloud. Azure revenue had been slowing down for the past two years. It had been growing, but growing slower every quarter. That changed this last quarter as it accelerated growing at 29%. Now, Azure is the bulk of the intelligent cloud division, but it's not all of it. And the intelligent cloud division saw its overall revenue grow 19%. You may be tempted to think that is because of Microsoft's partnership with open AI because Microsoft talks a lot about how it believes AI is the future of its Azure growth, but it's not yet the present source of it. Open AI and AI related stuff contributed 3% to cloud growth, though Azure's open AI service did grow from 11,000 customers last quarter to 18,000. So it's growing. It's just not the big contributor that it's going to be in Microsoft's opinion. Microsoft also reported growth across the board. No division saw a decline this time. That includes Xbox and Windows OEM. After four straight quarters of single-digit growth, Alphabet just eat out two digits. Congrats. Alphabet raised revenue 11%. That rise came down mostly to ad revenue, particularly from YouTube, which is not what investors wanted to see because YouTube always kind of does well. They know Google can sell ads. They wanted to sell a lot more cloud and cloud services. While cloud revenue grew 22% swinging into profitability, it did miss expectations by about $20 million. Still, YouTube was a bright spot with ad revenue up 12% with YouTube shorts now delivering 70 billion daily views. That is really, I don't know, kudos to you, YouTube, up from 50 billion at the beginning of the year. Mark my words. YouTube will be TV in five years if it keeps going like this. Snap grew revenue. Snap. Yeah, snap. Snap did well. First time in two quarters at grew revenue, beating expectations. Everybody thought they were going to decline again. Snapchat's daily active users rose 12% on the year to $406 million, and total time spent watching on Snapchat rose 200% on the year. However, the company continued to report net losses, and that is almost entirely due to the fact that it is winding down its augmented reality enterprise business, which was costly. One of TikTok's biggest advantages is its huge music catalog. So it makes sense to lean into that in real life. TikTok in the mix is a concert set for December 10th in Mesa, Arizona, with some big names. Cardi B, Niall Haran, Anita, and Charlie Puth. I hope I said them all right. We'll headline the show along with some artists from TikTok Elevate, the company's program for emerging musicians, kind of like a sound cloud for TikTok. TikToks will be sold on... Tickets will be sold on TikTok. Maybe they'll be called TikToks. I don't know yet, but it won't be Ticketmaster. So if you're a Ticketmaster hater, that's good news. And of course, you can watch a live stream on TikTok as well, because that's what TikTok does. All right. Right around the time we were doing the show yesterday, Qualcomm was announcing new chips. So let's talk about those. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 is the new mobile chip set. This announcement went about, as you would expect, performance increases, battery life increases. The one thing that is new is it can support multimodal, generative AI devices on device. I mean, that's not entirely new, but it's really good at it now. Qualcomm claims stable diffusion can generate an image in less than a second on device. So you never have to send your data into the cloud. It also has Meta's Lama 2 LLM, so it can make use of personal data while keeping it private. You know, look at your calendar, your emails, etc. Again, without having to share that data with anybody. Also includes Wi-Fi 7 support, upgrades for Dolby HDR, support for Unreal Engine 5.2, a lot of other photography and video type improvements. Qualcomm claims it is 30% better performing, 20% more power efficient than the previous version, and mobile devices with Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 will appear soon. Qualcomm says in the coming weeks, so you won't have to wait on that one. On the PC side of things, Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite platform is built on a 4nm process that it claims can outperform both Intel Core i7 processors and AMD Ryzen 9s. It also claims it has faster peak multi-thread performance than Apple's M2. None of these claims have been tested by independent sources yet, so this is, you know, you're either going to believe Qualcomm or you're not. But the X Elite supports Snapdragon CMOS, which makes it easier to share across Android and Windows devices running on Snapdragon processors. Snapdragon X Elite will ship in PCs mid-2024, about six months. The most interesting one to me was Qualcomm's S7 and S7 Pro platforms. These are for headphones and earbuds. They included something called the Expanded Personal Area Network, or XPAN, which can use Wi-Fi to improve audio. In fact, it can deliver 96 kHz lossless, actually even go above while maintaining battery life. So it's not killing your battery and delivering you lossless just by using Wi-Fi. The S7 Pro can also use Wi-Fi to extend your range. So you walk out of Bluetooth range, but if you still got Wi-Fi, keep the signal going. XPAN pairs Wi-Fi credentials when you pair Bluetooth, so it's not complicated to get the credentials authorized on your network, make that part seamless. Scott, we talked about this a little bit on TMS, but that sounds pretty good, right? Yeah, I think it sounds all right. I mean, my biggest, one of my chief complaints about the way earbuds work now, and this is a variety of brands, is I don't, you know, I can tell when they're not as good as a pair of headphones that are meant for lossless work, usually those is great. The one thing they really go into detail on that I could find anyway was whether or not this is going to be as seamless as it sounds. So if I'm in a really great Wi-Fi environment, a nice, you know, home just covered in Wi-Fi, great network. But then I'm like, all right, I'm going for a run. I never take these earbuds out. They're still in. And I go run outside where I've gotten a Wi-Fi. Do I even have to worry about it? Does the music just drop down a few KPBS or something? Does it just, is it a completely unnoticeable process for me? Like I have questions like that, but for the most part, I think this kind of technology sounds awesome. And I think people would welcome it, especially if it's not going to hit my battery life, which is usually an issue. Yeah, I agreed. That's the battery life not taking a hit potentially was what piqued my interest as well. You know, there's a lot of stuff when it comes to lossless audio. And I'm just not the biggest audio file on the planet. In fact, most of what I listen to is spoken word podcasts. Maybe there's some music involved. Spatial audio, I think is real fun. It took me a while to like get my head around, oh, okay, this is pretty cool, which you can get out and about depending on, you know, the track that you're listening to, whether it's music or podcasts or both. But yeah, anything that improves audio in a setting where like you said, Scott, sure, if you're at home and everything's dialed in and you're good to go. But what about that whole sort of seamless and then I leave and then I come back and you know, how would that connection? Yeah, we won't see any products with the S seven or the S seven pro for a few months. So we won't really be able to try it. If I if I had to predict and I don't but I'm gonna anyway, I'm going to say, occasionally, you're going to hear a dropout as it transfers over, especially because this is a new protocol. But it so it may not be 100% seamless. But I'm going to guess they've got it worked out well enough that it's not just going to drop. It may just be a little stutter or something. And maybe not even every time. Yeah, they probably buffer it pretty good. I have one other tiny prediction to make about these chips. And it's actually the snap jag and eight gen three mobile chip set that I wanted to say this about completely didn't think of this before it had just hit me. I believe that will be the switch to processor. Ah, they they already the switch is already an arm based thing. It would not surprise me at all. And I think that sounds like some really beefy specs for where Nintendo would be headed for what they want to do next. So I'm not saying, you know, I'm not going to pay money for this bet, but I'll I'm going to say it today and we'll follow up later. I think that that's what's going to be in whatever the switch to get announced as and worth worth mentioning is that you are going to have to have a device with a Snapdragon processor in it in order to use this new Wi-Fi headphone thing. So this is this is not going to happen on Apple devices. Apple's got its own thing. It might come out with something that does a similar thing. They've been developing stuff that's pretty close to it. But this is only going to be in Qualcomm, Snapdragon based devices, most likely Android devices or possibly a Nintendo switch. Maybe you can use these headphones with that. I don't know. Well, Amazon announced that is beta testing AI image generation tools for its advertisers, which would offer an easy or easier way for those advertisers to create backgrounds or scenes around whatever it is they're hoping to sell. The company says the new feature is designed to remove creative barriers and enable brands to produce lifestyle imagery that helps improve their ads performance. Essentially, this is meant to help products stand out since most product shots, if you look, if you notice are just the product on a white background. Amazon says that choosing a lifestyle scene. So in their examples, there were a lot of pumpkins can lead to 4% higher click through rates. Amazon is not surprisingly marketing this as a tool for the little guy. It's, for example, a smaller brand without an agency and a bunch of tech expertise in house. The Verge also notes that Amazon's AI has some of the same issues other models do. Items in the scene weren't always to scale and in one of their demos with the toaster, if you look at the fork, which nobody is but the Verge, but if you look at the fork, it's got an odd number of times at an odd number of angles. So it's doing that weird finger thing that AI sometimes does. Yeah. So Amazon has already been using generative AI to help sellers write product listings that are designed to sell. CEO Andy Jassy said on the company's most recent earnings call that every single team at Amazon is exploring and working with generative AI. Addie in quote, it is going to be at the heart of what we do. It is a significant investment and focus for us. End quote. All right. So Scott, we all buy things on Amazon. Does AI disrupt this for the better? I mean, you could kind of go like, eh, it's just for advertisers. But hey, if you're a little advertiser looking to make a big on Amazon, this could be helpful. Yeah. It's starting to go the direction. A lot of AI stuff lately. We're starting to see kind of rubber meets the road practicality uses starting to happen. And I was talking to an artist the other day who does comic book stuff. I won't say his name because people might know him. And I don't know if I'm supposed to say this or not. But one of the workflow things that's happening in that world is background generation. So what you have is maybe a tight deadline and a creator will make characters in the foreground, let's say Spider-Man. And they're still drawing all of that, coloring all that, inking all of that. That's still kind of the same process. But then they're like, look, what takes the longest time is the two weeks it's going to take me to make New York City look like New York City behind Spider-Man. I'm going to use generative AI to do this. And it is saving them tons of time. It's being trained on their own art. So their art inspires what goes in the background. So it feels like it was done by the same artist. I still think some people look at it and think it's kind of icky. But that's like this. It's rubber meets the road productivity. And I'm still a little on the fence about how I feel about it. But it makes sense to me. If you're a small maker of charging cables and Amazon is the place to sell them, why wouldn't you want to take advantage of a very nicely choreographed, composed image of your cables being connected to the two things that matter instead of just this horrible cut out PNG thing you sent from Shenzhen in the middle of the night. That was the thought that I had too. It's like maybe your cable is really pretty awesome. And you're excited and you want people to discover it and buy it and tell their friends and make lots of sales. But you're not really an art studio of any kind. You don't necessarily have anybody, well, you don't have anybody in house to do that. And you don't want to pay for somebody out of house to do that as well. This seems like a great, I mean, for Amazon, maybe not every company that sells a lot of wares, but for Amazon, a good way to stand out for the rest. This also slightly reminds me of, well, just because I happen to be looking for apartments right now. So, you know, I'm on Craig's list all the time. And I can always tell, you know, when they plopped in like a fake couch and like, like a fake like bowl of lemons, you know, you know, in the kitchen where you're like, there aren't really a bowl of lemons in this photo. Like I get it. Like I know the difference, but I also, you know, it helps kind of my own creativity be like, okay, so here's kind of how things look in here. I think Amazon and certainly third party sellers and advertisers all benefit from that. Yeah, there's still just one tiny piece of it. And we don't have time to go through it today. It's a whole nother topic. But there's this piece of me that's like, well, how are we vetting it though? How do we know that cable is looks as good as it's now being portrayed? Well, yeah, what are the guardrails on this? Because I can tell your product shot doesn't get to change. So it's a very limited use case thing. And I'm sure there are other filters and limitations on what it was trained on about what you can put in the background. I'm sure you can't put disturbing images in the background and stuff like that. But I'm curious what those edge cases are going to be because they're going to they're going to show up. Somebody's going to try something and put it out there. It's also going to raise the floor, right? Like when when everybody's product shots look pretty, then nobody's product shots look pretty. Yeah. And then people who really do product shots out on the beach are actually faking or people will think they're faking it. And they spend a lot of money at the beach and they're going to have to raise raise their game of what you can do with with reality, which they will. And then yeah, that it won't be even it's going to get weird, but I'm excited to see how it goes. Well, if you want to get weird, head to our discord because we're all weird in there and having great conversations. You can join them if you're not already in there already by linking a Patreon account at patreon.com slash D T N S the PlayStation five slim we've talked about it previously on D T N S comes in two versions. There's the one that has a disc drive so you can play your games on disc. And there's the other that does not come with the drive, but you can buy it separately and add it later because the drive is modular. It's the same model. Just one has the drive and the other one doesn't. Now Sony hasn't given an exact launch date for the new versions of the PS five, but boxes have begun shipping to retail in advance of a launch, which is coming sometime in November. And there's something interesting on that box call of duty news site Charlie Intel got hold of photos of one box. It was a modern warfare bundle version of the PS five slim. It was a PS five slim that comes with a disc drive. And on that box, somebody noticed a note that says internet connection required to pair disc drive and PS five console on setup. Sony has not yet commented on this issue. So Sarah, why would Sony do this? Well, Tom, I'm glad you asked video games chronicle has a good explanation of why this might happen. Xbox and PlayStation both have a daughter board in the disc drive that pairs with the console's motherboard. Now, if you swap disc drives between consoles, they won't work because of this. The stops users from modifying and then replacing drives in order to circumvent copyright protections. With the new PS five slim, the drive is modular and making it easy to remove and add. So the setup connection might be necessary to preserve that pairing. I mean, to me, this is, uh, well, this is 100% a security thing. This is them doing that. I think that this explanation is correct. They're trying to stop, you know, hacking and copyright stuff and all that makes sense. Everybody does it. They all do it. The real problem really only comes in in the fact that you have a lot of people not near enough to slow the wave of digital distribution, mind you, but a fair number of people who love their physical discs and they want them that way. And that's all they want. And if they could do this entirely off the internet, off the net, like they could with their Gamecube or whatever, then they would. And they just will see this as a, um, an obstacle that is not necessary. And they're going to, it's going to bug people. It already is bugging people. It's all, any one of my timelines are talking about today is why would Sony do this? Why would Sony do this? And I think the reasons are obvious, but if you are really sold on the idea that I want as little internet interactivity as possible when it comes to my gaming life, then this just seems like another, you know, another one of these things that makes you get online. And I don't know who those people are. I'm not one of those people. I don't mind it. I think it's fine. But I understand why people are frustrated with this when they just want their disc and they just want to play. Well, yes. Although I firmly put this in the category of if you didn't know this was happening, you wouldn't have a problem with it in like 99.5% of the cases, right? Because most people are connecting to the internet immediately when they set up a PS5 and this is going to happen fast in the background and you won't even know it. So I, I think there's a lot more ratio of people being upset by the fact of this than there are people being upset because they're going to run into it. But yeah, if you're setting up in a rural area with, with unreliable or no internet, this is, this is going to be a problem. You're going to have to make sure you set it up ahead of time. It's not going to be a lot of people, but it's going to be some. And someday Sony might turn off that server. And that's, that's the other side of this, is people worrying about the historical preservation in the future. The good news on that is despite our, you know, urge to be cynical, there's good precedent for these companies turning off this sort of stuff to help preservation. Sony updated firmware for the PS4 to make sure that it still worked with a dead backup battery. The backup battery was meant to, to, to be an anti piracy measure. And yet later on, they got, they got rid of that. They said, Oh yeah, we don't want that battery dying to stop you from using old PS4s. And Microsoft updated the Xbox series X firmware so that online compatibility checks weren't needed for a lot of older discs. In fact, the vast majority of older discs. So yes, this could cause a problem Sunday. If Sony doesn't push a firmware update, but there's precedent for firmware updates to get pushed when people complain about it. My recommendation would be rush out while they're still available. If you still need to get a PS5 or an RE have one and get one of the ones with the built in drive, there are two models out there in the original configuration. The advantages of the slim are obviously it's smaller. There's this modularness to that drive. And it also has a larger hard drive. But in terms of like processing power, GPU, everything else, they are the same sort of across the board. So you're not missing out by getting the older one. If, if your concern is that strong on the side of not having a disk drive reach out to the internet when you want to use it. That being said, there are a lot of other times the PlayStation five and the series X and any other modern hardware is going to ask you for internet access. Yeah, because it does a whole bunch of other stuff, including firmware updates to your controllers and the device itself. So playing games needing to download an update. Yeah, many of those day one patches. They're a thing. So I think Tom is right that it's there. It's being made a little bit of a mountain out of a molehill. In this case, what is the bigger story here? We buried the headline. The biggest bundle sell for them this year with the slim will be the modern warfare three bundle. And that's a Microsoft product now. So I just wanted to say how weird that is. I didn't even think about that. Yeah. It's a very odd thing to say out loud. But there it is. It is as of now a Microsoft product that is being bundled in with Sony, even though the deal was signed before Microsoft owned Activision Blizzard King. King always gets left off. And they make the most money. It's so funny. It's the cash cow. Well, speaking of concept cars, which we weren't, but let's do it. At Tokyo's mobility show, cars, all you ever know, that's all I talk about me, you know, and everybody else who covers cars. Toyota's luxury brand, Lexus, showed off a pair of interesting EV concepts, concepts being sort of the keyword here. The LFZC concept is actually designed to enter production in 2024. Next year, Target Market Launch 2026. Not all concept cars have timelines like that and includes some bells and whistles, looks like a Batmobile, but also can use the steering wheel to race games. Obviously, you would not be driving while doing this, but it would be basically a place to sit for a racing game simulation that feels pretty, you know, like you're actually racing. The other model, the LFZL is what Lexus describes as a flagship BEV, being for battery EV concept with a vision of the electrified future. Details are slim, because that didn't make a lot of sense. Besides an interactive reality in motion mode, where in theory, and this one is kind of interesting, drivers could point to objects or places of interest during a journey, wouldn't always have to be the driver. It could be somebody that's in the car as well. And then the car's display could offer results along with voice guidance, letting the car enhance the connection between drivers and riders and their surroundings. So for example, say you and I, Scott, are going on a road trip, you're in the passenger seat and you say, I love that windmill. What's up? Maybe the car would give us more information. I like it. What's that? Dad, what's that? Yeah. Where are we? Are we there yet? The car is going to handle that for you someday. Yeah, I like the idea of the kids get answers. Are we there yet? Literally the car can go, no, we're not there yet, and I'll turn this car around if you don't quit asking me or whatever you wanted to say. I'm in. This is great. I think the most believable part of this concept car, which concept cars are generally not believable, is it's using essentially a D-pad for shifting and stuff to the left of that game pad or to the left of that yoke in there. Like, yes, obviously in a world where people have grown up using game controllers, we should change cars to work like game controllers. It'll be seamless for most people. Yeah. This is a beautiful concept, by the way. It's beautiful. I'll just say that. Forget about whether it ever happens. It won't. Yeah, it won't. All those things never happen, but I think those are always pretty, though. Well, the LFCC is set for some sort of production next year. So, you know, some of the stuff might become reality. Most of it is probably going to be just how it looks cool on the outside. Yeah, but it'll be. It'll be fun to see what shows up in here. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it'll probably end up looking like a Civic, but... Well, Civics look like spaceships now, too. A Corolla. Sorry. No, that's true. They always do. They eventually get there. It's just that if you get a car's concept in the 90s, we're finally driving what those really wild ones look like. I forget that my Civic is seven years old. They don't look like that anymore. Oh, I passed a Civic the other day. I was like, whoa, what did that car? Oh, it's a Civic. Cool. Wow. Haven't been to the dealership in a while. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. What's in it? Well, we got a couple good notes from people who message us on Patreon. Just a reminder that you can do that if you're a patron. R.W. Nash chimed in on our conversation yesterday about where to post in the new social media landscape because we have so many options. R.W. says, micro.blog is great. It already supports Activity Pub. I follow the DTNS Mastered on Feed There. If you spring for the premium micro.blog version, it'll give you an RSS feed for your MP3s as well. Totally great community as two. Then also from our conversation yesterday, Martin chimed in about the idea of artists being able to poison their images to fool LLMs, basically not letting their work be used without their permission. Martin says, the poison image story is making me want to see an image generator entirely trained on poisoned images. We could get some really cool surreal art from it. Oh, I'm with you on that one, Martin. There was a Boing Boing story today about training a music bot on music made by music bots. The same kind of idea. This concept of the snake eating itself with AI stuff is interesting because you will get some really gnarly results over time and it feels like we see that in some image generators already. Some stuff is looking a little funky. It's because a lot of it is being trained or retrained or an additional training on itself. Exactly. Or on other AI art that it doesn't know is AI art. And I think if you do too much of that, that's how you get three eyes at one arm. That's all you got. By the way, we posted a bit of our poisoning images conversation on TikTok and it took off. There's a whole big long conversation on TikTok on our Daily Tech News Show TikTok about this. Most people cheering it on, but there's a few people against it too. So you might want to go check out that conversation as well. Excellent. Well, Scott Johnson, you were excellent as always. Let folks know where to keep up with your latest. Well, I thought today I would let people know because there's a lot of really nice folks from this community hopped on over to support this car game I made, Dungeon Murder over at DungeonMurder.com. And right now they're just kind of a placeholder site for it. But it's a great place to go to bookmark when these are going to be available to everybody. But if you're a Kickstarter supporter of that project, the good news is they are on palettes and in a truck and on their way for us to fulfill and ship. And I couldn't be happier. It took forever. Production is a long process and never goes as fast as you want. But now that it's here, it feels crazy. So anyway, keep track of all that stuff over at DungeonMurder.com. Reach out to me directly if you have any questions and huge thanks to everybody from the DTNS community that helped drive that thing home. Fantastic. And thank you patrons for being with us. We give you a little more show if you're a patron. So stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. Google's been pushing out a way to tell where an image you found came from. Have you seen that shark in a hurricane before? Yes. In fact, you have. And now Google Search can tell you exactly where it originated and by whom. Stick around. You can catch our show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back tomorrow talking about TwitchCon announcements because there were many with Trisha Hershberger and she would know. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.