 Coming up on DTNS, why Apple's odd quarter is a preview of its future? How far can Netflix raise prices and do you trust giving your fitness data to your insurance company? This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, Spooky, October 30th, 2020 in Spooky, Angeles. I'm Todd Merritt. From Spooky Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. Drawing the top tech stories from Screamland. I'm Lane Peralta. And from Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. Spookiest of all. And I'm the show's producer Roger Jane. You sound so enthusiastic. If you want that wider conversation we have on this show, we were just talking about home maintenance and the perils of changing fuses and replacing your appliances. It was a good time. Join us. Become a member and get good day internet. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The big tech companies all announced earnings Thursday with a few surprises. Facebook beat revenue and earnings projections. Alphabet had a profit of $16.40 per share and revenue rose 14 percent after its first sales decline ever last quarter with 30 million paid music subscribers and 3 million YouTube TV subscribers. Twitter beat revenue and earnings expectations including a 4 cents a share profit. Amazon revenue rose 37 percent. Apple had a decline in profits without a new iPhone in the quarter but still beat expectations. If you want more details on earnings, keep up with the headlines at DailyTechHeadlines.com. Samsung has retaken the top spot for phone shipments worldwide according to IDC, Counterpoint and Canalis. Huawei had taken over the top for a quarter on strong sales in China because the rest of the world saw dip in phone purchases but Huawei's Q3 shipments dropped 7 percent and 24 percent year over year putting them now in second place and Samsung back on top. Xiaomi grew 46 percent on the year and took over third passing Apple which dropped 7 percent and came in fourth. Five, six and seven went to Oppo, Vivo and Realme but those are all BBK brands and if you combined them all together and made a BBK entry here, BBK would be second and closer to Samsung than it would be to Huawei. Nikkei's sources say that Sony is in final negotiations to buy the anime streaming service Crunchyroll which is currently owned by AT&T. The deal is reportedly valued at over 100 billion yen that's about 957 million US dollars. Crunchyroll currently has 70 million free users and 3 million paying subscribers with over 1,000 titles on the service. Under Armour announced it will sell MyFitnessPal to the investment firm Francisco Partners for 345 million dollars and will also shut down the EndoMondo fitness platform. Under Armour acquired both companies in 2015. The company will continue to own and operate the MapMyFitness platform which includes MapMyRun and MapMyRide though. Instagram removed the recent tab from hashtag pages before the US election in an effort to help stop the spread of what it calls harmful information. Hashtag pages on Instagram show top results and also recent results. Recent results show the latest content regardless of relevancy. Top results are ranked by popularity. Alright Rob tell us a little bit more about that Netflix price rise. Yeah well Netflix has raised prices for US users. The standard plan which includes two streams in HD goes up $1 from $12.99 to $13.99 a month. The premium plan which offers four streams in 4K goes up $2 from $15.99 to $17.99 a month. And the basic plan which is a single non-HD stream stays at $8.99 a month. Netflix raised its prices in the US 22 months ago. I believe that was January of 2019. And you know the reason that they're doing this is they're saying that you know they want to continue to offer more variety of TV shows and films. You know they become a lot costlier is the big I think the big push for this. They come more costly. More services need to compete for customers. You know I'm for high quality shows. CEO Reid Hastings said that in the last earnings call the Netflix wants to have so many hits that you know when you come to Netflix that you just go from hit to hit to hit to hit. And you never have to think about what those other services are offering. Yeah it's getting expensive. Well with more competition you would think prices would go down right because you don't want to drive people to go use HBO Max or Peacock. But what Netflix is betting on is they can still raise prices a little bit without driving too many people away and take that money and make better shows that will even cause those people to can't that canceled to want to come back because they'll be like oh my gosh that that prestige show or that awesome new show is at Netflix now. I mean that's what you know all these services you know they I mean if you're like Netflix or or a few others you're lucky enough to have a few hits but just the one will be enough to for example Mandalorian. That's why I subscribe to Disney Plus right. So that there can just be the one hit that someone says all right whatever the price is I'll pay for it because I want this 1299 to 1399 per month for you know the standard plan. I mean it's not it's not the hugest increase ever but yeah if somebody is is looking at their monthly bill and figuring out okay of all the kind of court cutting measures that I'm taking is there really a hit that Netflix is giving me right now that makes this worth it. Well depends on what you know you consider a hit but clearly the company wants to really double down on originals not just a big a big library of old TV shows and movies in order to have those hits that make people not be able to leave. Yeah I think that it's definitely true what they say that they want to offer more variety of TV shows and give you a lot more original content. I absolutely believe that but I also believe that they're somewhat opportunistic that we're in a pandemic right now and people's viewing habits that switch to they're just used to watching stuff on Netflix. So you know someone with a calculator sat down and figured out and made a guess on I bet if we raise this up a couple bucks here a buck there that we are going to have some people we're going to churn off but the people who stay were going to more than make up for it so this was about just making more money for Netflix as much as it was for anything else in my opinion. And if they do put that back into shows I can see it working where instead of like oh when is Stranger Things back there's always something on right right now there's there's no matter who you are there's a gap in Netflix right they've always got something new on but it may not be for you what they want to do is for most of their audience always have something new we are oh I have to keep it because I'm watching that thing. John Hancock is offering its life insurance customers an Apple Watch Series 6 for 25 bucks but then you have a choice you can pay the remaining cost of the watch monthly for two years or exercise more because you got to share that data from the watch with John Hancock and if you do exercise you can reduce or even eliminate the monthly payment of the watch and keep it at just the original 25 dollars you paid. The way it works if you get 10,000 steps in a day you get 20 points push that to 15,000 steps you get 30 points or you can meet some active calorie thresholds and those vary by gender height and weight so we don't know what those are exactly you have to become a member to find out all those details but if you hit 500 points in a month and your then your monthly watch payment would be nothing you won't pay anything if you fall short of 500 you can still get part of your payment lowered depending on how many points you do accrue now a few other things to note on this you can't get this deal in New York or Puerto Rico you have to complete a health review to get life insurance that's just normal so it's not something that everybody can get because if you can't get the life insurance policy you can't get the watch if you're older than 71 you'll have lower thresholds so they do say like well if you're older we're not going to make you do 15,000 steps you have to pay extra if you want the cellular connection this is just for the gps only or if you want any special watch bands or case materials they'll let you do that but you have to pay the difference the upshot is they want to encourage you to be healthier they want to encourage you to exercise more to get your steps in so you live longer so they don't have to pay your life insurance John Hancock's vitality program that this is a part of is not new it's offered rewards with REI and Fitbit in fact three weeks ago and announced it will offer the amazon halo band that'll be part of this as well the program in general offers discounts on all kinds of things hotels purchases on amazon and it can be used if you build up those points to reduce the cost of life insurance premium so that's another part of this if you're using the points to pay for the apple watch you're probably not going to use it to lower your premiums but it really is mostly to encourage you to be healthier because healthier people mean lower payouts oh man where do I start when I when I was kind of doing a deep dive on the story earlier and as you mentioned in our pre-show meeting time this is not the first time an insurance company has said hey we want to incentivize you to be healthier and you get a kickback for that you know because we all win that way but there is something there is something that I find very cringy about do you want the apple watch do you want it to be cheaper great okay here's how you can do it you want to take a bunch of steps you agree to that great oh shoot you broke your ankle can't do that anymore now you got to pay there are so many situations that come into play where somebody who is very well-meaning and not trying trying to game the system at all can't physically do what a company has now required them to do on the surface to me this looks oh wow we just want you to be healthier and if you want to be healthier we'll give you a watch where this starts to break down say I'm on the same page as you what if you can't like you know I know that I am a candidate for knee replacement I would much rather ride a bike than get steps will that count there are all those kind of things that come in but the big thing for me is that what comes after this I think at some point these watches are going to be able to tell insurance companies whether or not they have you know their you know their customers have pre-existing conditions and you know is that going to be something that where they can determine whether they want to cover you or not I mean right now they legally have to that may not be the case you know there's a supreme court ruling that's going to be coming here in the coming months that you know may change some of that so I'm concerned with what they might be able to do with this kind of data to determine whether or not they they want to continue to cover you or not now good and we'd worth reminding people out there we're talking about life insurance here not health insurance in this particular case but broadly speaking these kinds of incentives do happen with health insurance plans as well so we're we're sort of overbroad to the specific case of John Hancock here in some respects but I've got answers for both of you one is as I mentioned you could do active calories instead of steps and there are even some other options like swimming and and and biking that you can you can have different options to meet the threshold if you get sick and you just can't move at all let's say you're in laid up in the hospital and yeah you're going to end up having to pay for the watch that month unless I don't know maybe John Hancock can give you a special dispensation but at that point I guess the way that the life insurance looks at is like well if you're laid up in the hospital that's a you have a higher chance of dying and we'd have to pay out so you know that's part of the deal it's funny it's like I and I was telling I was telling Tom and I think it was Scott Johnson and Roger the other day that my my my Versa 2 my Fitbit that I wear all the time it's been bothering me wearing it overnight it didn't use to bother me it was fine but it just kind of I don't know it feels restrictive it's I wake up in the middle of the night and I want it off that kind of thing there is a little bit of a monitoring situation here that I can understand a life insurance company saying like well we had a deal we're not getting the data we want from you and a person being like yeah well my life has changed so yeah it's it's a it's a it's pretty convoluted and listen you don't have to do it either like this is an optional program you know they're not making you do this to get life insurance they're saying hey if you want a cheap watch this is a this is an incentive a lot of people at our chat room are like put it on your dog fake fake it you know attach it to a chicken and then life insurance companies like something is very wrong with yeah exactly you know if you put it on the dog it's like this person walked in a circle 9,422 times get away with it but if you get prosecuted for fraud you're gonna regret that so there you go well possibly good news from google uh if you like vpn services and you like google services the company added vpn to its top google one storage subscription plans at no additional cost so it'll show up in the google one app when you turn it on and off and we'll work with anyone on a family plan as well vpn is part of the two terabyte google one plan which is nine dollars 99 cents per month or 99 dollars per year as well as the 10 20 and 30 terabyte plans they all cover this google one vpn is available for android and in the us with expansion to other countries ios windows and mac in the coming months uh this is another thing they're adding to google one they have some other things like photo storage and free backups of your android phone that don't count against your cap and all kinds of cool stuff like that so this is just another one they're throwing in there for your for your 999 a month to try to get you on board to pay for that storage i think long gone are the days where we all assumed google storage would be free uh that that was a artifact of the 2000s but but we don't necessarily want to pay someone for storage if we don't need it beyond android though uh or or even an ios when when it gets to the ios app uh it's not a bad deal to get a terabyte or so of storage couple terabytes of storage and vpn yeah this is something that i would actually take a look at now i i don't uh you know hide the fact that i am definitely into google services and you know i am an android person but i do pay for a third party vpn um if i can get more storage and pay roughly the same amount that i'm you know paying um you know for the existing vpn for you know for google's version of it and get more storage that's actually kind of attractive so it would at least make me think about it now i don't know that i would just simply go out and switch but if i were in the you know if i were looking to maybe get a vpn this might be the way i would go just because it's bundled with other stuff i mean you have to trust google right i mean one of the things with picking a vpn the reason i go with express vpn isn't just because it's you know a hundred dollars a year uh which is equivalent but it's because i've i've done some researching and vetting them uh i'm not that i don't trust google as a vpm provider but you know there is that aspect of like giving google even more of your money and and are they going to make sure they i i think i actually do trust that they would keep the vpn secure but i don't know i i sort of prefer an an independent that's well vetted in this case it tom i think that's why i have friends like you to remind me and you just said it in the most polite way rob are you sure you want to get google more of your information i'm not trying to tell you what to do hey folks if you want to join the conversation in our discord which you can uh join by linking to a patreon account you can share your own vpn tips in there get get on that join patreon.com slash dtns for a normal year it was a bad quarter for apple you heard that earlier when sarah was was summarizing all the the big tech earnings profit down seven percent over last year iphone revenue down 21 percent but for a coronavirus quarter it was received well revenue overall for apple was up one percent and acknowledgement that the new iphones didn't come along in this quarter like usual uh meant that people were like oh okay they normally have an iphone at least for part of the quarter and they didn't this year that's going to make a difference this i think is also an early look at what life will be like in a world where phone sales just flattened out uh where people just aren't really buying phones all the time similar to what we do with laptops and tablets now apple will be able to occasionally pick up the slack with occasionally peaks of its already flattened product lines we have examples here ipod revenue was up 46 max sales up 28 those sales are a little juiced by lockdown needs where more people needed laptops and tablets than usual and they won't always be there but services is what apple says is its future and lockdown juiced or not services picked up big time for falling iphone revenue 21 percent down in revenue and iphone should have been a disaster but they were up one percent overall why is that well in part it was services revenue being up 16.3 percent they made 14.55 billion dollars on services that made it the number two revenue generator for apple to the iphone which was 26.4 billion services recorded an all-time high of 585 million paid subscriptions growing by 135 million year over year on track to reach 600 million by the end of 2020 there was some bad news in here though china was not good news net sales grew year over year in every market except china china revenue for apple fell from 11.134 billion to 7.946 billion but services is the future they're not going to make a whole lot on services in china because it's harder to do services in china and apple just launched its apple one subscription plan which bundles its subscriptions into monthly prices from 10 dollars to 30 dollars a month they got three tiers in there and that's going to bring in more subscribers as well and get people to pay a little more money and they're not done there CEO tim cook said on the earning called this year has a few more exciting things in store which everyone assumes means apple silicon i can't take it mr cook i've had enough um so a few things here tom you you said ipod i know you meant ipad but ipad revenue being up i was just pronouncing it like spanish ipod right yeah of course i know well you're you know yes i meant ipad yeah ipad revenue just in case you confuse anybody ipad revenue being up 46 max sales up 28 percent both of those are like okay people are at home they're you know that well first of all there wasn't a phone to buy but even if there was it's like yeah yeah like we gotta you know let's let's think about how we make the most of our current situation because most people are hanging out at home much more than they had in the past that makes sense to me the numbers are pretty impressive though but i think that you bring up a good point about the phone sales flattening out flattening out you know and let's take the you know pandemic step even out of the equation you just you're going to get to a point like you said with laptops and tablets where enough people who want them have them and they're only gonna buy a new one if something goes wrong or you know three to four years go by and you're just gonna get slowing sales on that kind of model yeah i think that is definitely the case when it comes to phones if you think about you know smartphones they've been around for a long time but they really haven't been around for that long and when they first came out every year or every other year which is more you know people generally upgraded their phone every couple of years what you would get in a new iphone compared to what came out two years before was magic and probably for the last three or four devices that just hasn't been the case now that they absolutely are putting their you know their big toe into the camera but the cameras are getting so advanced that people just aren't using that if they're not into you know really into photography it's like you know and then a lot of photographers are still going to get their dslrs their mirrorless cameras and all that kind of stuff so now your phone is just something that well when i need a new one i'll get one and you know i think of my wife it's like you know her phone is up but she doesn't want a new one it's like the one i've got she's fine it's no point and you know getting a new one i'll have to learn how to use it let me just keep what i have until it you know until it's slow or until it doesn't work so i think that is a big part of it peoples you know just buying a new phone every year every other year is just slowing down for them they're getting them when they need new ones at this point yeah the upgrade cycle is definitely slowing because it's it's now a big upgrade if you wait three or four years because there have been enough new features introduced in the intervening time but if you go year to year it's like well how is this much different than the one i had before and that's what we see with tablets and laptops etc so survey that's why apple pivoted to services years ago and it takes a while to turn a ship that big and this is an example that well that seems like they're turning it you know the apple one subscription before we move on it is intriguing to me i kind of did the math for me i don't feel like i'm going to be saving a lot of money but i have seen a lot of people online especially talking about this being like yeah i can save like five to ten dollars just by doing it this way rather than doing the a la carte stuff i've been doing with apple over the years and it'll keep people in because they won't want to cancel because they've got so many things invested in it and that's that's really where you win with subscriptions that's why they do bundles is not because they not because they want to save you money it's because that wouldn't work right they'd make less money if everybody saved money it's that you're less likely to cancel when it's multiple things in there you're like well i don't need news anymore but i do like music and maybe i'll keep the tv and then you might end up spending more over time than you would have if you only had one service and you're just like yeah i'll just get rid of that i don't need it anymore also when you bundle across your family everybody likes something different about service so you can't get rid of any of it because someone there's always you know i think of you know you know that five family five person family there's always somebody who likes something in this and you can never get rid of anything that's where they get you well facebook announced that daily active users and monthly active users declined slightly in the u.s and canada pointing to unusually high engagement numbers last quarter because of the pandemic so you know people are moving on to other things meanwhile whatsapp now delivers 100 billion messages per day its yearly peak is usually on new year's eve this past new year's eve whatsapp saw 100 billion messages so whatsapp is experiencing and new year's eve every day these days it is really uh experiencing quite a bit of growth putting it ahead of all other messaging apps including china's wechat in india whatsapp is the most popular of all apps on smartphones yeah i look at this and i think i wonder if this point stored people getting tired of facebook itself uh i know it's just us and canada i know it's just one quarter but when you look at those whatsapp numbers you're like well it's not like people are stopping communicating with each other and they're communicating with each other more than ever they just don't seem to want to do it on facebook in the u.s and canada especially around election time you would have thought there would be more interest in talking about stuff but uh roger pointed out in our pre-show meeting he's like he's been using it less because he's just tired of seeing all the people arguing yeah i think that's a big part of it there's facebook fatigue right now people are just just okay who am i going to go argue with today and it's like i'm not going to argue i'm just going to stay off the platform yeah right but then 100 billion messages a day it's like we just throw that number out there but that is literally getting everybody on earth to do something 12 times yeah in a day every two hours everybody do this and that's what's happening with whatsapp when you think about 100 billion that that is a large yeah a large number of having conversations they're not just sending a message yeah definitely i also know that you know facebook and instagram although you know facebook owns instagram they're different beasts but i wonder if there is just there's less of hey look at this fun vacation i just took let me put a bunch of facebook photos up there and get some likes it's like no you're actually just communicating with people because that's what we're we're all kind of yearning for these days and so it's just it's a it's a natural reaction to the state of the world and luckily facebook owns whatsapp so you know it it wasn't either way yeah we want to control who we talk to that's what you do with whatsapp versus let's put it out there for anybody who follows me which is what you do on facebook yeah now this news dot com announced it's partnering with meditation app calm to create a live stream on election day in the us that's on november 3rd designed to help calm you the live stream will include breathing exercises and other meditative activities with peaceful nature footage from all 50 states see very inclusive it will go live at 5 30 p.m eastern time on november 3rd on now this is facebook and youtube pages and will continue throughout the following day as well i get this as a publicity stuff but it's pretty genius to say like look you're all going to start being stressed out as soon as polls close at 5 30 p.m eastern uh so let's give you an alternative instead of getting all all you know freaked out do what justin robert young was saying yesterday open the 12 county websites that actually matter in swinging this election and then put on a calm soothing channel and just relax for a little instead of getting all hyped up i won't be shocked at all if they extend this beyond the day i think a day and a half is what they're going to give you the people demand more meditation yeah we're going to give you till mid november we need more of it they start demanding calm you know give us more calm i need breathing help yeah uh folks uh you can email us feedback at daily tech news show dot com and then we look in our mailbag which is virtual and uh sarah picks a couple things to talk about indeed this one comes from dwayne in germany dwayne says you mentioned in a previous show that us companies will be able to sell to wall way except for 5g what does that mean dwayne asks dwayne says me and my wife have wall way phones and i'm about to buy the mate 40 plus pro pro plus for myself my wife is a photographer so we always go with wall way because we like their cameras does this mean we'll soon see gps on wall way again if not i'm still getting the mate 40 pro plus i just wish everyone pushed the tech to the limit like wall way their phones are always top notch dwayne do you work for wall way really into wall way but uh either way whether you do or not uh it's a good question i should have said 5g infrastructure to make it clearer uh because what they're saying is you can now apply for a license will approve some licenses to sell chips to wall way if you're not if they're not going to use them for their 5g infrastructure so their switches uh their networking equipment for implementing 5g service that's what the us is concerned about and this is turning a corner because it's the us saying we're not just trying to squash wall way anymore we really are just trying to keep their 5g infrastructure from being built out because that's where the security concerns the us has lie they're not worried about security in the handsets they're worried about it in the network infrastructure and to your point about the image sensor dwayne i have some good news sony and omna vision the world's two leading camera image sensor providers have been granted licenses according to nikka.com by the us government to resume shipments to wall way uh so the image sensors will will be good in future wall way handsets because of this samsung display had previously received permission to ship oled screens not samsung chips but oled screens and intel and amd have resumed some undisclosed shipments uh but we don't know which kinds we don't have any news about media tech or qualcom which would be the modems that go into wall way uh we don't know that they can get chips from intel and amd to replace the snapdragon so if qualcom gets a license to do this then yeah wallway's back in business as tom mentioned feedback at daily tech news show dot com is where to send those emails not going to get into it until the post show but two not one but two photos of bearded dragons uh i could not thank you more you're all wonderful people also shout out to our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels including paul reese ragnald vermidal and jeff wilkes let's check in with len peralta who has been illustrating today show what have you drawn for us len well you know we're a day away from halloween obviously four days away from the uh from the us election and you kind of mentioned uh that there's going to be some a lot of zen going on uh after the election uh but there's a lot of scary stuff 2020 is a horror show we don't need to tell you that everybody you know netflix raising their prices even though nobody has money to afford it apple profits are down uh car cany a kardashian hologram is trending uh halloween more or less canceled we've been locked down for nine months tom and i have turned 50 this year please make it stop everybody make it stop and uh that's what this image is all about sort of on the brink of something really scary not only halloween but just the us in general folks it's scary out there stay safe and uh you can pick up this oh uh this print at my patreon patreon.com forward slash len or at my online store len peralta store dot com spooky scary very scary very scary good work len um you know yeah i mean even though you called out tom's age but i call my age out too len looks like 30 but yeah whatever yeah i'll look very young i'm speaking of looking young thanks to rob dunwood for being with us today rob what's been going on in your worlds not a whole lot still hunkered down trying to stay safe from the uh you know from the pandemic but uh folks can reach me um at all things at rob dunwood and definitely check out my podcast at the smr podcast dot com yeah go check it out folks it's good time there was a chicken wings and beer episode this week always a good time and uh chris ashley even insisted on talking woodworking even though rod wasn't there so my apologies on behalf of the audience rob smr podcast dot com uh folks if you want dtns as a video podcast get the video rss feed at daily tech news show dot com slash subscribe you can always support our show at any level at daily tech news show dot com slash patreon we are live monday through friday at 4 30 p.m eastern 20 30 utc join us if you can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live we'll be back on monday have a spooky weekend see you later this show is part of the frog pants network get more at frog pants dot com Bob hopes you have enjoyed this brover