 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including patrons like Logan Larson, Mike Aikens, and Norm Fazikas. Coming up on DTNS, CDs are now outselling digital downloads. Ford will sell you a car, even though it doesn't have all the chips and Google is getting sued by restaurant makers. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, March 14th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And on the show's producer, Roger Chang. Thanks to Rich Strafilino for producing today's show. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The Wall Street Journal sources say that 10 cents WeChat could face a potential record fine in China for violating China's anti-money laundering rules. China requires online payment platforms to verify the identities of users and also merchants, as well as the source of funds for transactions. Authorities haven't finalized the size of the fine, but it's expected to be at least in the hundreds of millions of yuan. India's Paytm denies a Bloomberg report that says it violated rules about sharing data with China-based entities that owned an indirect stake in Paytm. Paytm called the report, quote, completely false and sensationalizing. A spokesperson clarified that all of the bank's data resides within India. Paytm, as you may recall, has been barred from signing up new customers while it undergoes an audit by India Central Bank because of what the bank calls material supervisory concerns. Although India Central Bank did not clarify what they exactly mean by that. Following a surge in Omicron variant cases of COVID in Shenzhen, China, Foxconn suspended operation at two of its quite large factory campuses in the city. The city ordered residents to work from home until March 20th, although it's unclear when Foxconn's factory production may resume. Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo and nine to five Max sources all say Apple will not offer new chips on all of its next flagship phones. In fact, I almost was like, we don't need to cover this story. Everybody knows there'll always be a new chip. And then I read closer. I was like, oh, except maybe there won't. Kuo says a new A16 will come for pro models of the next iPhone, but the standard and Max models would use the same A15 chip that you find in the iPhone 13. Just add more RAM. The last time Apple used an older processor in a new phone release was in the 2013 iPhone 5C, at least for flagship phones. Nine to five Max sources also say Apple has no plans to release a larger screen or a high performance iMac in the near future. Apple will reportedly release an updated 24 inch iMac, but it will not include Pro Max or Ultra Apple Silicon chips. Russia's communication regulator Roscombe Nadzor banned Instagram on March 14th in response to meta temporarily relaxing community standards around violent speech in Ukraine, Poland and Russia. According to internal meta documents seen by Reuters, Meta's global affairs president, Nick Clegg, said that the company was narrowing this policy to make it clear it does not allow calling for violence against Russians in general or calling for the death of a head of states. All right, let's talk a little more about those chips I was mentioning. Automotive news reports that Ford will sell some Ford Explorer vehicles without chips for rear climate seat controls, rear seat climate controls. Ford told the Verge that rear seat heating and cooling will still be controllable from the front seat console. So basically it takes the control out of the people in the back seat. You're back to being at the mercy of the folks in the front seat. Chips for the vehicles will eventually be shipped to dealers and those dealers will then install them within a year and you'll get a price reduction for your patients. Ford stressed this is a temporary measure meant to speed deliveries because of chip shortages. This isn't Ford's first change to a vehicle to account for chip shortages. Last year, F-150 buyers had the option to get the truck without the automatic start-stop system. And of course other makers like GM, Tesla and BMW have also cut things like wireless charging and touch screens. This comes as Ford continues to be bullish with its plans to expand electric vehicles as part of its Ford Model E unit, announcing it'll launch three new passenger EVs and four commercial EVs in Europe over the next two years with plans to or hopes to anyway, sell more than 600,000 EVs annually in Europe by the year 2026. Well, okay. Do not have the person sitting in the rear seat be able to press their own button to get the rear seat heated. Listen, if you wanted that and that's what you feel you paid for, I can see where you as a new car owner, you might be like, well, all right, kind of sucks. But it seems like Ford and other companies are making good on saying, listen, this is in order to give you that car that you wanted a little bit sooner and we'll do our best when parts, chips in this case come in. I don't know. If it was something like, you only get two tires, sorry, you get your car but we won't be able to give you your next two tires, that would be something where I'd be like, well, this is really disruptive. Yeah, yeah. But otherwise, it'll listen. If you're paying a premium for something, I can see this being, you know, an inconvenience at best, at worst, possibly something more, but what else are they gonna do? Yeah, it seems weird to call this innovation, but it is a sort of innovation in trying to figure out how to get cars into people's hands or get people inside the cars that they wanna buy without having, just taking up a bunch of space on a lot of trucks that you can't sell because they don't have the chips in them or idling factories because you can't build the trucks because you don't have the chips for them. This is a smart way to do it. You know, coming from the world of like, I grew up with cars that only had vents in the front. They didn't even have vents in the back. This doesn't seem that bad, but we've progressed, I get it. It's something that if once you get used to it, you're like, oh, really, man, you can't, now the kids can't control the vent themselves and they'll have to like, hey, can you turn it down for me? Well, these are also packages. It's annoying. It can't be. It's also packages that if you've paid for, you know, some sort of premium package and a lot of these vehicles, even vehicles that are considered luxury vehicles, you know, you got your base model and then you got your fun stuff and then maybe some stuff on top of that. So yes, I can see where you would think, well, I should have had all these features, you know, off the top, but it's better than not having the car at all. Yeah. And some of these are worse than others. The backseat climate controls is an inconvenience. Wireless charging is an inconvenience. GM dropped HD radio, that's an inconvenience. Fuel management, though. GM had to drop fuel management. That impacts your pocketbook. So that's a little more of a thing. I think what hits me most is that so many for GM, Tesla, BMW have all had to figure this out. And there's, I was really behind my prediction that we were gonna get out of the chip shortage this year until there was a war. And now I'm like, ah, that's just gonna throw everything off again. Oh, well. Well, Discovery's board approved its merger with Warner Media and it looks like the deal will finally close sometime in April with CFO Gunnar Weinfelds, describing it as in the ninth inning right now and closing that transaction. Very baseball of you. Both the US DOJ and European Commission have approved the deal. So with the merger seemingly set to proceed, what does that mean for both companies and their streaming platforms? At an industry conference, Weinfelds made the case for a direct to consumer products that combined the customer acquisition prowess of HBO Max with the customer retention of Discovery Plus's catalog. This doesn't mean we're gonna see the two immediately combined into a single offering. Companies might be working on it, but not happening tomorrow. But Weinfelds did say it will work on an interim solution like a single sign on for both services. He put a timeline for the merge of the services at hopefully not in years, but in several months. A reminder at Discovery Plus has set it $4.99 per month or 6.99 without ads. HBO Max will set you back $10 a month or $15 without ads. I was thinking this would be an add-on. Discovery Plus would be an add-on. But what you lose there is the people who just want the Discovery Plus stuff. And Weinfelds made a good point of saying this combines the demos. He's like, we're all four quadrants now, young, old women, men, if we combine these two brands together. And so it does make sense to offer one platform. That makes them more like a peacock than like a Disney bundle. Disney has broken it up. They're like, we've got the family-oriented Disney Plus, we've got the adult-oriented Hulu, and we have the sports fan male-dominated ESPN. And I think what HBO Max, what Discovery is looking at here or Warner Discovery, as we're about to call it soon, we want to have one offering. And I'm curious what they call that? Do they continue to call it HBO Max or are we getting headed for a name change? And what's the price? Because $9.99 or $15, that was a top price. Now Netflix has gone up since then. So maybe you can eke out a couple of extra dollars if you combine them together. But moving people from Discovery Plus to a significantly more expensive service, you're gonna lose people. Moving HBO Max people to a dollar or two more, yeah, you'll lose people, but not as many people. But going from $7 to $15 is hard enough. If you have to raise it a couple of dollars to merge them together, that's gonna be tough. Yeah, I know I echo a lot of folks listening sentiments where it's like, how many more of these options can we have? It's getting too confusing. It's not confusing if you know what you want to watch. And they're reducing an option eventually here. They're saying. Yeah, in the case of Discovery and HBO, for sure. But yeah, I think you're right, Tom, where the HBO Max, or I'm sorry, the Discovery folks saying, well, okay, you got a merger here, but now I might have to bump my monthly subscription up. Doesn't make a lot of sense. I mean, unless the offering is attractive enough. And that's the whole thing with all this stuff, is do you want to watch what you want to watch? If so, great. You've got more options than ever. If somehow you are crippled by choice, well, I wouldn't blame you either because there are a lot of offerings and I have to say Warner Discovery is a terrible name. I hope they changed their minds on that, but that's just my opinion. I believe, and that's the name of the company, not the name of the service. So I don't know what they'll change the name of the service to. Will they keep calling it HBO Max with Discovery stuff in there? Or will they try to- I think you have to keep the HBO name in there where people will think that they can't get the- Maybe it'll be called HBO Discovery instead of HBO Max. HBO Discovery is not bad. It's not bad, because it's discovering more. I'm not sure we're the only two people who have talked about this. People at HBO are like, yeah, yeah, no, we had this meeting. That's why, yeah. But before we move off this, I do wanna acknowledge all the folks out there saying, ah, it's just basic cable all over again. No, it's not. Basic cable, the analog to basic cable would be, you have to have HBO Max Discovery and Hulu and ESPN and Disney Plus and Netflix and Prime Video and you have to pay $100 a month and you have no choice. This is different. We're actually seeing the consolidation happening here, which is we're gonna end up with, I don't know how many, maybe five major players. You're gonna have a Peacock, you're gonna have a Disney Bundle, you're gonna have an HBO Max thing, not Bundle, Bundle for a while and then not Bundle. You're gonna have Paramount Plus as long as it lasts, but you're going to have a small number of major players with big wide catalogs that you have control which ones you want and you can decide to pause and resubscribe when you want. That is not something you ever had with basic cable. If there was just some sort of, I would say third party, but maybe it's more like 10th party, just a place to say, here's where you're gonna get all the things that you wanna get. You heard about that show, not sure where to find it. Yes, there are options right now. There are a lot of people trying to parse all of this information, but for example, over the weekend, a friend of mine was like, hey, Sarah, have you watched the latest season of the Real Housewives of Miami? This is a thing that I would watch. And I was like, no, haven't even heard of it. Well, because it's a peacock original. I have since heard of it and am all caught up, but that's just like, that's a great example of something where I was like, how would I know that? I, you know, you really- Well, the idea is that Apple TV Plus, or the Apple TV app, not even Apple TV Plus, the Apple TV app can do that, can search and tell you, oh, it's on this service. It can even manage some of your subscriptions for you and the more it manages the better, Roku can do that. The platforms are what's gonna become that. They're gonna manage your subscriptions. Some of them are even gonna try to consolidate them into one bill for you, but what you'll get out of it is the choice of the channels. Stop thinking, not talking to you anymore, Sarah, I'm talking to people in the chat room and out there. Stop thinking about it as these are replacements for cable and think about it as these are replacements for channels. You want it all a cart, this is what all a cart looks like. You choose the services, you choose the data. That's a good way to think about it. The channel itself as a concept is different. Yeah, you know what else is different? Restaurants relationship to delivery. Used to be they'd pay somebody like me to drive a pizza hut truck around, but that's not the way it works for a lot of restaurants anymore. Google wants to make it easier for you to find how you can deliver, how you can get food delivered. They try to give you all the information you need when you do a search. With restaurants, they add things like addresses and hours right in the search results and even developed a little box called a business profile with lots of information like that. One thing that is useful for a user is if they can order food from the restaurant either for pickup or delivery right from that business profile. So in May 2019, Google added order now buttons to those profiles in partnership with delivery companies like DoorDash and Postmates. And these days, it includes most delivery options but it also includes a link to the restaurant's website. Small but it's up there. Restaurants can then direct customers to a preferred ordering system by setting up a profile with Google and saying, hey, this is the one we're using. Make sure you include that. Though if the restaurant uses a third party service that services name like Toast or Grubhub shows up in the list of options, not the restaurant's name. So as a user, it may not be clear which option the restaurant prefers. La Fagata in Los Angeles, for instance, wants you to use Toast to deliver but when you go to the Google page, Toast is all the way at the bottom. That's where the trouble creeps in. Restaurants often sign up for things like Uber Eats and DoorDash as a way to acquire new customers even though the fees they pay are high. Some restaurants say they don't even make money off those orders. The idea is to get that customer to be familiar with the restaurant through Uber Eats but then drop a card in the bag that gets delivered that says, hey, you wanna support this restaurant directly? Order this way through Toast. Oh gosh, best of luck. And that will direct customers to order from the service that doesn't cost the restaurant as much. You're right, not everybody's gonna do that but even if they just get some people to do that that helps their bottom line. Yeah, that's true. Google's presentation doesn't help make that clear. The restaurant's own website link is just websites, very small. And the preferred delivery option, as I said, does not indicate that it is the restaurant's preferred delivery option. In fact, in my example of La Fagata, it's down at the bottom. So Florida's left field holdings which runs LimeFresh Mexican Grill franchises is suing Google. It alleges that Google is not authorized to set these pages up and that the pages direct orders away from the restaurant's own sites. Lawsuit alleges, quote, Google purposefully designed its websites to appear to the user to be offered, sponsored and approved by the restaurant when they are not. And they're seeking a class action status on behalf of other restaurants in the same position. Google says the suit is a mischaracterization and told ours Technica, quote, we do not receive any compensation for orders or integrations with this feature. So real dumb question. Knowing that the pain that restaurants may be feeling because of this and it's understandable. And also Google saying, all we're trying to do is help. We're giving you options. Could there not be some sort of, hey, I'm claiming this business and on the form that I'm claiming the business is what I would like my top three or maybe you just have one delivery options that we're working with Google and somebody on the Google team can vet it in some sense. And we never have to talk about this again. That's the problem. I feel like I should have described it better because that's exactly what Google does. They have a business profile that you can go in as a business owner and claim and edit and say, toast is the service we use that we want. And Google will be like, great, we've added toast to the bottom of the list. And that's what the restaurant owners are upset about. They're like, well, that doesn't help us because you've got all these other business partners that you're putting up above us. You're probably getting money from them for placement. Google says they're not that they don't make any money off this. I don't know that there's a legal case here honestly because Google is just like indexing information. Maybe there's a trademark infringement situation but I don't see logos and it's public information what the name of this restaurant is. I just think Google needs to do better with its interface here. Like to me, it's a UX issue is like make sure website is bigger, make sure that the restaurant's preferred delivery. It has a call-out that says restaurants preferred delivery and it's up at the top. I don't know in this case that this is something nefarious. It's just that the tool doesn't work very well for the restaurants. Well, okay, so my question to you, Tom, where you were like, oh, actually this is something that Google already has that is potentially not clear to a lot of people that care about this very much. So yeah, and instead of there being a lawsuit against Google, the thing is just that I and many other people use Google search in a variety of ways just to like, you know if I mentioned a restaurant that had toast way at the bottom, if there are restaurants near me where I'm like, hmm, I have a hand crane for this kind of cuisine, blah, blah, blah, near me. It's like, there are lots of reasons why Google is great for the sort of thing. Google wants to be great for the sort of thing. That is the whole point of Google. I don't think Google is trying to stick it to restaurants. They just need to maybe rethink some of this. I mean, you can make the argument that Google would like the restaurants to advertise and then they'll show up at the top of every search. But you're not going to get that for a bunch of little. Exactly, exactly. You can't expect that from restaurants of various sizes and taking in various amounts of money and having various amounts of employees today. Well, and that's why some of the restaurants are upset. They're like, greedy Google wants us to spend money we already don't have. And I don't know that that's really what Google wants. I don't think they expect that, like you say. I really do think it's just bad UI. Like they just haven't perfected that product and they need to be able to reach out to restaurants a little more. Google also historically doesn't have great customer service. It's improved quite a bit over the years, but maybe you need a little better customer service with these restaurant owners too. Hey, folks, if you're feeling social and you'd like to get in touch with us somewhere on a social network, I've got good news for you. We are on the socials at DTNS Show on Twitter and DTNSPIX, P-I-X, DTNSPIX on Instagram. Check us out there. When we talk about the resurgence of physical media in music, we're usually talking about the rise in vinyl sales. Vinyl sales have been slowly creeping up for more than a decade. That's not exactly a new trend. Vinyl sales have steadily increased since the mid 2000s. So reporting vinyl sales grew in 2021 isn't exactly breaking news. However, figures from the RIAA show that vinyl is not the only physical media seeing a resurgence this past year. CD sales, that's right. Good old-fashioned compact dist increased in 2021 for the first time since 2004. The combination of increasing vinyl and CD sales means that overall physical music sales grew for the first time since 1996 to 1.65 billion. So CD sales rose for the first time in my podcasting career and CD revenue grew for the first time since I had a website. It doesn't stop there either. Even the humble cassette is growing in popularity. Come on, Tom. Don't be so. According to the British phonograph industry, cassette sales increased 94.7% in 2020 to the highest number since 2003. The RIAA doesn't even keep track of cassette sales in the late 2000s. But so we had to go with the BPI number. And this doesn't mean streaming music is on the decline. Paid subscriptions still brought in $8.6 billion, up 23%, and ad supported streaming $1.8 billion, also up around 20%. So the increased physical sales are not at the expense of streaming. The only category that went down was digital downloads. That category saw revenue fall 12% to just $3 million more than CDs. CDs is almost ready to catch digital downloads. And in a way, Sarah, this kind of makes sense. People who wanna own something wanna digital downloads, maybe they're just fine with like, you know what, I'll just own the CD if I'm gonna own something. I might as well own something. Yeah, this is the most interesting part of this to me is, and listen, digital download people out there saying, no, I still want that. I don't want a CD, I want a cassette, I don't want vinyl, I want the download, I want that album. I will put that in my system the way of my choosing. You're still out there, but it is on the decline. And I think that that was always something that I had a sort of hard time with back in the day of, wow, okay, now we have digital versions of the CDs that you keep buying, Sarah. Not that long ago, I took a bunch of, I mean, when I say a bunch, I mean hundreds of CDs that I just knew I wasn't gonna rip. I didn't really have space for them on any hard drive anywhere. It really wasn't gonna listen to them anymore. And because I've been a streaming music subscriber for as many years as I have, years and years now, started with Artio, now it's Apple Music, I don't care because I'm used to it. But if you are a physical person, like yes, vinyl has enjoyed a resurgence for some time. CDs, I kind of get it, I kind of get it. A lot of card radios still have a place for a CD. I mean, I think my card does actually, I've never used it because sets, I'm less sure about it. I mean, because sets are like the most important media we got out there. So I mean, best of luck everybody, but I guess it's one of those throwback things that people just enjoy. Producer of today's show, with Sarah I have to not hold back. Okay, let's hear it. I have to jump in here. I am holding my always cassette anti-socialites great album, I picked it up I think two years ago. Now the reason I did it was cheaper than the digital download and it came with the digital download code. So a lot of times when you're thinking, especially of vinyl and cassettes, you should think of it. Please take the cassette, it's cheaper. You should think of it as those mediums plus a digital download. And then I don't have to worry about managing the digital file. I have to, like I have this physical backup in addition to something I can display, a physical backup in case my hard drive crashes. I don't have a lot of like music sync services, music locker services have kind of gone away in the advent of streaming. So it is kind of a nice port, like something to have like a physical hold on to. Sure, listen, if we're talking like cassette as a backup, want it, it's free. In fact, it's actually less expensive for you altogether. Of course I'll take it. It's just that the cassettes, listen, I've had, you know, cassettes, you leave them in the sun too long, things happen. Cassettes are- You get that warm hiss of the best. Don't have the longevity that we were promised back in the day. But I'm with you. Like I had, sure, let's do it. Let's go back to cassettes, everybody. It'll be fun. Kids these days- I got my Walkman right here. Kids these days think they're crazy. They're crazy cool. Oh, cassettes, like back in the day. Yeah, it's like real to real. Yeah, you can even watch it. See, the left side is getting lower and so you know you're almost at the end. Good times. Well, folks who've been watching Star Trek Picard, may have spotted some technology in episode two. If you're an eagle eye, you might know what I'm talking about already, but I'll tell everybody else. Nine to five Google notes that you can see Dr. Girotti using what looks like a Samsung Z, maybe Galaxy Z, fold two, maybe a fold three. It's in a case, so it's sort of hard to tell, but some folks have noticed the tell-tale display crease of the Samsung foldable. Star Trek's 25th century would maybe seem a little beyond this technology, but as fans of the show will point out, some of season two is set in 2024. Not two years from now. So other current day gadgets could make their way into the show, whether they be new or relics. I think what was wild about that, because they are going back to our time, close to our time, but they hadn't yet. They're still in the future when you see like, wait, is that a Z Fold? Is it there on her very futuristic lab bench that she's using there? So- I mean, maybe that's like a plot point. It's like, you don't know that she's already been back to 2020. Oh, maybe it's a spoiler. I didn't even think about that. You're right. I mean, I'm not saying I know, but- I'm not saying you're right, but I'm saying you're right. It could be that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. All right, let's check out the mailbag. All right, let's do it. Denny had some good things to say about their aftershocks headphones. Denny says, I own a waterproof pair that is MP3 only, and the reason is that they're for swimming. Bluetooth waves don't mix well with water waves. Denny says, I swim nearly every day, and when I started using this with my lap swimming workouts, it was a game changer. They stay in place better than any other kind I've tried. The bone conduction sound in the water is incredible. Anyway, I know y'all like hearing about weird use cases, and these are outstanding. I love all that you do. Oh, Denny, thank you so much. Shocks, if anybody doesn't know, is spelled with a Z, S-H-O-K-Z. But the aftershocks headphones, they are oddly popular, I guess, is what I say, and this is another cool use case. Thanks for sharing that with us, Denny. I mean, as a person who lives somewhere with a pool, I'm a little pool-phobic, but I love the idea of really trying to do laps with good music slash podcasts going on in there. That strap around the back makes sense when you're swimming, because they're not gonna be as easy. For sure, yeah. It never really made sense to me before, but yeah, thank you, Denny. Always good to have on-the-ground reports from our community. We also wanna thank a couple of brand new bosses that we got over the weekend. Daniel and Nick, thank you so much for backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Daniel. Thank you, Nick. Welcome to the team. Woo-hoo. Yeah, remember I said we need 11 more people? Now we just need nine more people. Thank you, Daniel and Nick. You have done your part. You sure have. Hey, folks, reminder, there's a longer version of the show. It's called Good Day Internet, available at patreon.com slash dtns. If you're not a patron, this is something that you get for being a patron. So thanks in advance. Live, folks, stick around, because Good Day Internet is coming on after this show. But reminder for everybody else, we are live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Eastern, rather. 20 UTC, I'm gonna get that right tomorrow. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We are back tomorrow, speaking of tomorrow, with how to make sense of Apple's complex product offerings with Alison Sheridan. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program. Thank you.