 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you including Brad, Kevin and Paul Teeson Coming up on DTNS. What is Apple's iPad stage-manage feature for exactly plus the US crackdown on Chinese chip making explained We think you might actually understand it after we talk and Bono finally apologizes This is the Daily Tech news for Monday October 24th 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt from lovely Cleveland, Ohio I'm Richard Raffalino From the Atlanta area. I'm Nika Montfort, and I'm the show's producer Roger Chang Serylaine did help produce this show today, but she's had to step away among other things of horizon issue So imagine we'll hear all about that tomorrow However, for now, let's start with a few tech things. You should know the quick hits On Monday, the European Union gave its final approval to require companies to switch to USB-C on a variety of devices. This will make a USB-C port mandatory for devices Including iPhones and AirPods by the end of 2024 20 days after being published in the official journal of the European Union classic journal The rules will apply exactly 24 months later So get all of your calendars in order as we've mentioned on previous coverage all products that go on sale before that date Will be exempt and can continue to be sold after that point. Yeah, then there's the whole laptop thing has a later date And it's it's complex, but you got time. That's the PayPal's rolling out past keys for users in the United States letting them log into their PayPal accounts without having to type in credentials The new option comes to users at first with iPhones iPads and Macs But we'll expand to additional platforms that support other things As they come Google released initial past key support for Android and Chrome earlier this month and says it will launch the stable version with an API for native Android apps before the end of the year PayPal will open up past key support to other countries starting in early 2023 Meta is threatening to keep Canadians from sharing news content in response to Canada's proposed bill C 18 legislation introduced earlier this year as it's known the online news act wants platforms like Meta's Facebook You may have heard of it to enter into revenue sharing partnerships with local news organizations Not unlike Australia's news media bargaining code which passed in early 2021 Meta said last Friday it wanted to be quote Transparent about the possibility that we may be forced to consider whether we continue to allow the sharing of news content in Canada Nothing qualified in that city. Yeah, I think they can only mean on Facebook. Not all the sharing of news One would think the Republican National Committee has filed a lawsuit against Google in the US District Court in California Alleging the company discriminates against it by sending its campaign emails to Gmail users spam folders more often than it does The email messages from other political organizations in September Google launched an opt-in pilot program That lets political parties keep their campaign meals on a campaign meals campaign emails Unaffected by Gmail spam detection, but the RNC has not enrolled in that program instead choosing to file the lawsuit YouTube began rolling out new design and features so be on a look up for these all users are getting pinched to zoom on videos That's been in testing with premium subscribers since August now will be available to all users That's rolling out the Apple also get more precise seeking showing a frame-by-frame view when scrubbing through video a welcome edition The web version and Apple also get a new ambient mode when viewing in dark mode Which will use dynamic color sampling to change the app's background color based on what you're viewing as for UI changes Links and video descriptions will now appear as buttons rather than hypertext The iconic subscribe button is now rounded and is in high contrast color rather than always in red and other buttons have been changed to Minimize distractions. Yeah, I like that pinched to zoom stuff All right, let's talk about Apple Apple refreshed its iPad lineup last week And whenever we get new iPads the question of what are iPads for crops up Well iPad OS 16.1 is out today and one of its features stage manager I is a new way of handling multitasking on the tablet that could change the answer to the question of what iPads are for Yeah, when it's turned on stage manager puts the app You're using at the center what it calls the stage I guess these stages you're managing your foremost recent apps are then put off to the left in Piles and you can add to your pile from apps in your docs It kind of amalgamate everything kind of in workloads there stage manager has faced problems in beta all summer long Hence the iPad OS update coming later than the iOS update. We're at 16.1 after all So I guess was it worth the delay is everything sorted out now the verges David Pierce says no It's not sorted out Pierce found that if you live in a handful of apps the system works well enough But if you use more than a few apps And here's a quote from Pierce trying to figure out how stage manager works turns into a wild puzzle Requiring a wall of Polaroids and a ball of yarn Soon that's metaphorical, but I'm not sure Piles of apps became hidden when using more than four and you don't know which version of an app will open if it's in Multiple piles in other words if let's say you've got the word app in two piles and you tap on the word icon It could open either one of those piles. It's a fun little game. You don't know which one it's going to do This comes on top of software stability with multiple apps either crashing or not offering sufficient views to make half-screen views usable He said it works great if you have three iPhone sized screens on your iPad. That was the one nice thing. He said Basically amongst that the other thing that kind of worked well was just the app switcher in general in stage manager is also Just just kind of nice but not exactly a glowing review and this is since the first beta kind of been a known issue I'm I mean, you know, Anika have you had a chance to to play with this and you know does Does this point to I guess any new functionality that we can expect for the iPad if this ever does get sorted out So I haven't had a chance to play with it I was trying to get it installed before I came on today But surprisingly when I checked the first thing this morning, none of the new software had been released So I was just able to check maybe an hour or so ago and I did see it So I haven't had the chance to play with it yet And I'm getting a new iPad Pro later this week when they launch So we'll see if there's really any difference in the way stage manager works on the new hardware I you know, it's hard to guess possibly it could be better on the new iPad I'm not sure. I'll you know kind of do a little test to see on my old iPad Pro and on my new one how it necessarily works I think what Apple was trying to do was to find another way to multitask That is going to be easier for the user to use and I kind of thought of it as if you think of Microsoft PowerPoint when you're doing a presentation you can go into presentation mode And you have your main slide that you're talking from in the center Then you have all of your other slides on the side so you see what's coming up You can kind of prep that way that's kind of how I look at stage manager But it sounds like some people are not very impressed so far Yeah, it sounds like and Pierce does a good job getting into this piece that Apple's Main focus with the iPad with iPad OS is always on that like single screen immersive Experience it's just like the DNA of an iPad and everything needs to be You know you can build extensions off of to that experience So you can have the app that takes you know your stage and then have your piles that you can kind of move in and out of But it seems like the choice between having kind of windowed chaos That you might have on a desktop operating system and whatever stage manager, you know task switching Plus on a stage manager and it it seems like it's a unhappy medium or maybe it's that we're still figuring out if a if and what a an actual like tablet native Like task switching window management system really looks like I know these aren't easy problems to have but you know, it's A lot of these design principles have been hashed around before I mean this is this is a very web OS kind of style System that they have going on here Did you call uh the the typical operating system interface that we've had since the 90s windowed chaos Yeah windowed chaos. I feel I feel like you have a little little apple kool-aid on your chin there So I will say this. I think part of the also problem is on mac os The window management on there is also trash I say this as I'm on a mac right now and it's hot garbage and it's the worst experience ever compared like windows gets it Windows 100% gets window management a thousand times percent better than mac os I think they just don't know what good window management. It is and they brought this to the eye maybe Steve jobs historically hated the idea of multiple windows He thought it ruined your focus Which is one of the reasons that ios and ipad os particularly do not have windowed management steve wasdyak Was still around when they first added windowed management They took it from xerox park in the 80s and I wonder if jobs regretted that Because he really was about you're like full screen immersive multitasking meant The ability for something to refresh in the background and then when you switch to it. It was up to date. That's what it meant for jobs This is some weird amalgam that doesn't want to give us what we want, which is resizable multiple windows on a tablet and and and some kind of like Compromise to not be full screen But but be kind of still immersive and kind of still giving you focus The thing that really stands out is very unapply to me here is that the minimize Command can mean different things in different situations in stage manager in one case minimize means take it out of the bundle In another case It just means minimize the entire bundle and you have to know as a user Which case you're in which is not the way apple usually does things And also i'll say one thing that is kind of out of the ordinary for apple They usually don't put something out unless it's fully baked and this doesn't seem to be the case Even with the delay so in normal times if something is delayed you expect that when it does roll out It is in the final form And it appears that that's not the case, which is very uncharacteristic of apple. Yeah The most damning thing about this is that it's off by default When have you ever known apple to be like we want to let our users slowly roll into this like apple normally just It would be more apply for apple to be like oh stage manager isn't launching in 16.1 No and give no explanation right that i would expand be like ah typical apple Putting something in that's off by default and that is not working properly Unusual and a marquee feature steep jobs wouldn't be happy Hmm. I imagine there's a lot of people in there that are not happy right now I don't know. I I have a use for a tablet. It is very full screen though It's like oh things. I want to do mobile, but I need a bigger screen for Um, I feel like in a future where we get resizable screens that work somehow whether it's foldable or rollable I don't know that I don't need a tablet because I just need that bigger screen sometimes Often for video watching but sometimes for other things I don't know if I need an ipad or a tablet of any kind as a pc or a laptop replacement Well speaking of things that didn't make people happy It seems like price increases for streaming content is the new adding a plus to your name After we've seen increases from youtube disney plus and hulu apple is raising the price of apple music by $1 a month to $10.99 And apple tv plus by two dollars to six dollars and 99 cents Apple also raised the price of apple one which bundles music and tv plus with other services by two dollars to 16 dollars and 95 cents a month annual and family plans will also increase Apple said music licensing costs have risen and that it raised the price of apple tv plus because of the increased selection There's just so much great content on there. You'll want to pay for more right tom. Oh, yeah Um, I guess I don't know 699 still seems pretty reasonable compared to what the prices are for these other things 499 was a screaming deal Especially with what apple has in there now Uh, and and I get I get the reasoning of we only had a few shows that launched so we kept it cheap now We're raising it. Uh, I also get that inflation is rampant everywhere and the cost of everything is going up Which is going to have knock on effects like this Uh, I I guess the way I come at it nika is is apple tv plus Still worth 699 a month given what they have is it's still worth that much To me it is I I think we're going to die a death by you know small increases It's like they'll they'll nickel and dime, you know, everyone's nickel and diamond you will add, you know A dollar here a dollar there when you think about it. Oh, that's not that much money Until we get up to 1699 instead of 699, but I think at this point They were smart to keep it low initially because they were a new platform And they didn't have a lot of content now It's some really great content coming out of apple tv plus So, you know in the grand scheme of things with everybody, you know, raising prices by a dollar or two It it makes sense. Yeah And be master has a good question in the chat inflation for digital goods seems so weird It does seem like wait the price you don't need gas to deliver me apple music You know why why are those prices going up? But it's it's a chain of effects, right? The price of gas makes it more expensive to to do business Labor shortages make the wages increase also the price of gas and food going up means that there's pressure to increase The wages to keep up with it which raises your operating costs, which means you have to raise your prices elsewhere Which is how that all ends up happening Yeah, the one thing I think that will uh, there's two things that I think most people won't notice this all that much I don't want to say that a price increases is you know, it's not a big deal It's people's harder money, but a lot of times, especially with apple stuff Their subscriptions are very often rolled into other things by a new iphone You get three months of apple arcade or you get apple tv by some air pods You get some stuff people are upgrading those on multiple cycles And if they're riding those offers they might not actually see these charges all that much And depending on what carrier on they have all sorts of things that are rolled into there As well where you know, if you have you're on a certain Verizon plan or t-mobile plan You get certain of these music services and stuff Yeah, I got apple tv plus as part of my t-mobile. Yeah Yeah, so you so you know depending this this may not impact you now the price of your Verizon bill May go up next year or next month or something like that that may happen down the road As well, but the other thing is the one thing that they didn't say is this is the apple tv plus ad supported tier As opposed to every other service that we talked about which is Clamoring and and thirsting and rushing as headlong fast as possible to throw ads in there so that they can offer a lower price tier And 699 still comes in under Netflix and disney plus with a smaller catalog admittedly. Yeah, uh I think it's interesting that they gave reasons for these these price increases. A lot of times people just raise prices. So, yeah All right, folks, uh, if you have ideas of what you'd like to hear us talk about on the show We'd love to hear a one way to let us know is our subreddit. We look at that every single day I appreciate everybody supporting us in there You can submit stories and vote on them at daily tech news show dot reddit dot com Well, the united states crack down on chip technology in china is having significant effects This fight, of course, isn't new It's more than 10 years old at this point in october 2012 the us house issued a bipartisan report accusing zte and huawei of stealing intellectual property and threatening us national security because of its ties to the chinese government And its military zte made the entity list in 2016 and not to be left out huawei made it in 2019 Those lists require a license to sell them certain tech a license you weren't likely to get in all, you know Probability zte had its restrictions eased But huawei still labors under them having to spin off its compute its consumer phone unit honor in order to survive Although under is doing much better since the spin out at least. Yeah, uh, but the fight with huawei and zte wasn't about phones It was about networking equipment and the fight has now expanded to include Most of china's domestic chip making industry so not just the chips in network routers, but the chips in all the things The us now requires a license in order to export a long list of advanced chip making hardware and software To a long list of entities in china They really are targeting things that could be used for ai or any kind of surveillance technology anything they think might Even if that's not its major use might end up helping the military So the license requirements not only apply to us companies But they also apply to companies outside the us Who are using us owned intellectual property in their chip making so for example if taiwan's tsmc Which is a taiwanese company. It's not based in the us. It doesn't doesn't work within the united states jurisdiction But if that company is using a us designed piece of equipment To build a part it can no longer sell that part to the restricted entities in china without a license Now these rules don't affect everything for example South korea samsung and sk hynix can continue to have their chips made at plants in china Apple can continue to make its iPhones and even sell those phones in china The restrictions are meant really specifically to stop chinese companies that may have connections to the chinese government from using us tech To make and develop its own chips if you are you know primarily serving or you're you're one of these other companies You we've seen it We've seen sk hynix explicitly say they've gotten exemptions from it and it's you know presumed on a lot of other Kind of westward facing organizations. Yeah, there's a little bit of having their cake and eating it too They they want to stop china's domestic industry the wall street journal notes that this works well Because the u.s. Still dominates the design and development end of chip tech So nvidia qualcomm amd and intel those are all us companies and they make up 67 of the logic chip design market So that's that intellectual property they can they can wield about china has a company called high silicon And a few others but they still only make up five percent of that market chip design software Is all also dominated by the u.s. Cadence and synopsis have 74 percent of the market china Has three percent of that market the u.s. Even owns the plants the u.s. Has fabricators like applied materials and kla Making up 41 percent of the fabrication market china has two percent Others come from taiwan, korea, japan and europe china's advantage is Location it's the place where the factories are so china has 14 percent of chip fab locations And 46 percent of assemblers packages and testers where the chips come together into parts The u.s. Has two percent these us regulations are letting companies continue to take advantage of building and assembling things For a cheap price in china But they're hindering the ability of chinese companies domestically developing technologies and making chips for themselves Yeah, and the new rules don't stop at hardware and software either they prevent us persons from supporting china's chip development and production without a license as well Dozens of chinese chip company executives will either have to give up u.s. Citizenship or quit their jobs China's leading domestic chip maker ymtc has asked all u.s. Citizens working for it to resign ymtc chief executive simon yang who has a us passport stepped down to ceo last month And he may give up his remaining role as deputy chair The policies are having an effect too for example a company called byron technologies b i r e n Makes a general purpose gpu That some people are thinking might outperform the invidia a 100 a chip you can no longer legally send to china without a license You'd think that would be a bright spot for china. Oh, hey, we're competitive here. However, taiwan's tsmc Makes the chip for byron and has halted production of the byron gpu While it determines if the chip in deeds performs well enough to fall under us restrictions Yeah, and that's just one example. I mean the numbers are just bad overall This really popped out to me this morning. Put any other daily tech headlines china's chip imports fell 12.4 In september on the year and then domestic chip output also fell 16.4 percent in september So china's bringing in fewer chips and making fewer chips compared to last year. It's like over 90 billion chips I did the math. I've got a calculator. Some of this is economics, of course, but not all of it Yeah, all and but all of it bodes not well for china's aim of chip self-sufficiency Nevertheless, it's not going to dissuade china's president c jim ping Who was just confirmed for a third term as leader of the communist party He is the first person to get a third term since mal He will be elected to a third term as president in march. That's a formality See also created a central committee of loyalists moving anyone from other factions out So don't look for any moderating forces there in his address to the party congress last week Z called for the country to win the battle in core technologies And of course, none of this will help the chip shortage, which is slowly teetering towards something like easing But every time it does something like war shooting or trade seems to complicate matters and further extend the drought just over time Yeah, uh, I think some of the things that surprised me looking at this is I thought more fabrication took place in china 14 percent is still puts it as the leader But fabrication is spread out a lot more across korea japan brazil india Mexico a lot more places than I think people realize. It's the assembly. It's the packaging It's the testing that is most concentrated in china And that is the part of the process that is the easiest under these regulations to let continue Yeah, and and from someone who is not uh, uh, well, like extraordinarily well versed in like international commerce and diplomacy I mean, I remember when 2012 and 2016, you know, when we saw these companies being put on the entity list and thinking This is this is like like Huawei's done like they can't I don't know how they as a company continue and not realizing The the kind of the chess pieces that are on the board internationally for the us and china to continue this Going forward is is really been informative to watch just from somewhere from kind of the outside from just a pure tech background Well, the guardian had a really interesting. Oh, sorry. Nika. Did you have something before we move? No No, I was just gonna say what it kind of, you know Stood out to me is that the fact that we thought we were On the other side of the chip shortage issue and um, it appears as if we're not the chips are still hot Every time we think we're a past it Something else something else comes up uh, all right The guardian had an interesting interview with bono on lots of things related to youtube and and the whole music scene, but he touched on The uh, the fact that youtube's music showed up in an itunes library without you wanting it Bono says blame me. It's my fault He explains how back in 2004 a month before the band single vertigo was released YouTube's manager paul mcginnis jimmy ivyne edge and bono paid a visit to steve jobs in palo alto where they suggested Apple offer a black and red youtube themed ipod which they did 10 years later when tim cook was apple ceo, you two came back and said hey, why don't you give away music for our songs of innocence album and and We'll we'll pay for it. But but people won't have to pay for it as bono describes it on september 9th 2014 we didn't just put our bottle of milk at the door But in every fridge in every house in town in some cases We poured it on to the good people's corn flakes and some people like to pour their own milk and others are lactose intolerant Uh, so he understands that it wasn't that it was free that people objected to it was that it was forced into your library Bono says the band quickly realized they'd opened up a serious discussion about the access of big tech to people's lives As many of you will recall apple provided a way to delete the album and tim cook told bono You talked us into an experiment. We ran with it. It may not have worked But we have to experiment because the music business in its present form is not working for everyone Do you forgive bono nika? I guess it's it's been a while now. It's fine We I survived I survived it so Sure, I forgive you bono There you go. This this is a big moment for bono. I think we've all finally forgiven him Well, I don't know rich I I you know what in my because Somehow in bono describing talking to two CEOs of apple and getting exclusive rights to distribute his album to literally every iPhone user Sounds somehow down to earth also. So just for that I I forgive him for that feat of linguistics I I liked his metaphor. I like that he owned he owned it and said it was my fault I poured the milk in your corn flakes. I shouldn't have done that like that. That's good I also I don't like milk on my corn flakes. So, you know, I wouldn't like it if bono came into my house and Bought me corn flakes, which I don't have and then poured milk on them And who let bottle in the house? Yeah, please get bottle Edge no problem bottle Yeah, you got a cool half the glasses get them out of here. Yeah. All right. Let's check out the mail bag All right, we had in yang he sent an email regarding last thursday's episode and he said on uber showing ads Will the driver be able to turn off the screen or well Will there be a penalty if the ride is active and the screen is off? I usually across for the radio or music to be turned off anytime I take a taxi or a rideshare Just to have a little bit of silence and for video I get carsick at least when I'm not dry when I'm not doing the driving Which a video within my sight line will make work at worse and he's in legos, nigeria. So in yang Thank you so much for writing it. Yeah, good question I I didn't see any clarification what you'll be able to do to that screen during your ride That's showing you the ad if it's anything like taxis Sarah was telling us in in our pre-show prep that you know, she was out in new york recently for a wedding and The taxis still have those those video players in the seats, but you can turn the volume down You can't turn the screen off, but you can turn the volume down Hopefully the uber ones would would at least give you that much so you don't have to have the noise blaring at you Um, I don't know deke. Have you ever run none those taxis with the things blaring talking at you? Yeah, and honestly because everything is about selling ads everything is about somebody trying to sell you something I would be surprised if uber would Give you those types of accommodations I think at this point they realize that they have a large Chunk of the market share and it's like well, you're gonna get these ads and and like it Yeah, reminds me that netflix series maniac the ad sys the crazy ad system they had in there I know if you've seen that it's just like people yelling ads at you constant You can like you have to be like at the gas and it's like and it's like at the gas station if you're getting gas I know at least here they show like the the five day There's I'm just trying to get some gas I'd pay the three cents more a gallon just to opt out of it like let me pay more for the gas to opt out of that, please I don't know. I used to I might have said that a few months ago I'm not sure anymore Uh, well, thank you nika monford uh for being with us as always lots of apple stuff to talk about today If you like hearing nika talk about apple stuff. Well, there's a whole show of that Absolutely, you can head on over to snubblewest.com to get all of the details We talk all things apple and some other tech as well And this week's show was probably going to be pretty busy because lots of drop things were Dropped today and we'll be dropping on wednesday Excellent go check it out folks. It's a good show Thank you nika and thank you to our brand new boss glenn who just started backing us on patreon glenn Yes, the the hordes of grateful people are all applauding you. Thank you glenn That's all for you glenn and it could be all for you tomorrow Uh, including extra extra technology news columns and bonus material at patreon.com Dtns patron stick around because one of the things you get is the extended show good day internet You can also catch the show live monday through friday 4 p.m. Eastern 200 utc find out more daily tech news show dot com slash live back tomorrow talking google's pixel 7 7 pro and pixel watch With shannon morse talk to you then This show is part of the frog pants network Get more at frog pants dot com