 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Norm Physikas, Chris Allen, Chris Smith and Jeff Villameck. On this episode of DTNS, Samsung's got smarts in its new Galaxy S24, but they're mostly Googles. Also, Amazon's got some more local sports and you're not imagining it. Search is getting worse. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, January 17th, 2024 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Animal House, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Jang. And joining us, Android developer and host of the Android Faithful podcast, Wednesday now, welcome back. Hey, good to be back, everybody. Everybody. Happy Unpacked Day. Happy Unpacked Day. Do you feel unpacked? Very, very, just mind, just totally unpacked by everything I heard today. Yeah, a galaxy of unpackedness. And it's all AI, as far as you can see. We're gonna talk about that and more. The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, though, has just denied Apple's request to pause the ITC ban, so no Apple Watch Series 9 or Apple Watch Ultra IIs in the US as of 5 p.m. Eastern Thursday, January 18th. So hurry, get to the store. Let's start with the quickets. In other Apple news, the US Supreme Court denied Apple's appeal in its ongoing legal battle with Epic Games. We talked about that on yesterday's show. Now, Apple announced changes are coming to its App Store guidelines to comply. The company previously prohibited developers from linking to alternate payment systems within their apps. Now they can, as long as the app also offers purchases through Apple's own in-app purchase system. The new guidelines also say that devs can apply for an entitlement to include buttons or links, directing users to out-of-app purchasing mechanisms in the US-based iOS or iPad OS App Store. Apple will also now charge a 12% commission on purchases made through alternative payment platforms for members of the App Store Small Business Program, 27% for other apps. This applies to purchases made within seven days after user taps on an external purchase link and continues from the system disclosure sheet to an external website. Those are Apple's own words. Devs need to provide accounting of qualifying out-of-app purchases and remit the appropriate commissions with Apple also having auditing rights. But Epic is not giving up here. Tim Sweeney called the new guidelines bad faith compliance. So Sweeney says he's headed back to district court to contest the implementation. Now, Juan, I know you're an Android developer mostly, but as a developer, just real quick, how do these guidelines sound to you? Oh, they sound awful. I mean, it's always a weird thing between user experience and then what's good for business and how they either align or don't align. And so yes, nominally, having developers entitled to kick out to the web is a good thing for them. Is it a good thing for users? I mean, in some ways, yes. In some ways, no. I mean, I'm kind of with Sweeney here. It feels a little, they did the least that they possibly could, and they probably need to be taken out back and talked to again. So that's my opinion. I have a stern talking to. Sturn talking to by the show. Well, in other Apple news, pre-orders for the Apple Vision Pro headset open on Friday, January 19th. Publications have got to test at the headset early. I've posted some initial reviews. And gadgets Dana Wolman and Sherilyn Lowe both said they initially had issues getting it to fit right, but with various strap and tightening options, they got there, although the weight did become a factor with prolonged use. They're not the only ones to say that. A lot of people say it does start to feel heavy. Lowe also liked the floating keyboard experience. The Wolman thought it was lackluster for extended use. Both said they thought the Vision Pro was the best of breed and VR experiences so far, noting that the price tag, of course, is sticking point. Nine to five Mac notes that the official FCC filings say the Vision Pro does not support ultra-wideband. It does not support Wi-Fi 6E or even Wi-Fi 7 due to the hardware being developed around the M2 chip. Apple Vision Pro will ship with Wi-Fi 6 support, not 6E. Apple uses UWB ultra-wideband inside its air tags, iPhones and Apple watches. So don't lose your Apple Vision Pro. WhatsApp is expanding its channels feature to include voice updates and polls and additional admins. Channel owners can now use voice updates to their followers. And WhatsApp notes that its 2 billion user base sends 7 billion voice messages daily. So this is something that a lot of people are probably going to use. Channel updates can now also be shared to a personal WhatsApp status as well. Google agreed to pay $5 billion to me. Ah, no, it's not to me. It's to settle a lawsuit from 2020 over how it tracked users activity in Chrome incognito mode and is now updating the mode disclaimer to reflect its data collection practices. That's now live in the Canary version of Chrome on Android, if you just can't wait to see it. It's also in the Canary version of Chrome on Windows and other platforms, which MS Power user noted. The new DJI Mic 2 is a 2.4 gigahertz wireless audio set that offers two transmitters, one receiver and a metal charging case announced on Wednesday. Each transmitter has a gigabit, a gigabyte, it's rather a built-in storage and offers up to 32-bit float audio recording or 24-bit with a minus six-decibel safety track. Transmitters can connect directly to phones or other DJI cameras using Bluetooth. The receiver also works with USB-C and Lightning adopters or a 3.5-millimeter analog output cable, $349 for the whole rig. That's a nice little mic. Now over to Sarah with Sports. Oh, Amazon is leaning further into Sports, Tom. The company is investing in Diamond Sports. Diamond Sports is the autonomous subsidiary of Sinclair that operates 18 regional sports networks under the Bali Sports banner. Those networks broadcast games for 37 teams, 11 of those MLB, 15 in the NBA and 11 NHL. When approved by the bankruptcy court, Amazon became a minority investor so it gets the rights to add Bali Sports net content to prime video, while the content will also remain on cable channels. So if you're watching it another way and you've got cable, you're probably good. Amazon will also be involved in negotiations with the NHL, the NAB and the MLB to keep rights for future seasons. Not the NAB, the National Association of Broadcasters. I said, what did I say? I think you accidentally might have said NAB. Oh man, ah, you know. The deal here is interesting. I would like to see Amazon buy Diamond. Diamond is essentially a different company than Sinclair. It's kind of a weird situation where they separated themselves. They're coming out of bankruptcy court. Amazon is giving them the money to make it out of bankruptcy court, but they still have to negotiate all their deals with the major league baseball teams. Their NBA and NHL deals will expire at the end of the seasons that those two leagues are in right now. So nothing's guaranteed for the future, which might be why Amazon doesn't want to buy them yet. They want to kind of negotiate these new deals first before they go in further. Because otherwise, I would imagine Amazon would just like to buy this up. And if they bought it up, that could mean no more blackouts. If you're in a Bali sports region, that could mean that all these teams would be available nationwide. Because Amazon wouldn't care if cable companies get mad or not. As it is, being a minority investor, they're just getting a sweetheart deal to add Bali to Prime Video, which gives them an advantage because YouTube lost their deal with Bali. I don't think Hulu has most of the Bali sports, if any. And Direct TV now, I think is the only streaming outlet that I know has a locked up deal with Bali. So it would be interesting to see what happens in the future. For now, it just means if you have one of these sports nets covering one of your favorite teams, you're gonna get an option to stream it that's easier than going all the way to Direct TV now or something else. I mean, hey, choice is good. When, does any of this move the needle for you? I just want to see how it shakes out. I mean, we've spent almost of last week making fun of the Peacock Exclusive. Which NFL game? So I'm kind of just curious how this will all shake out in the end and how our viewing choices will hopefully broaden and not narrow. But it is kind of funny to see all these kind of inroads into broadcast sports happen. So I don't know. Well, and Eve, for all of the sort of chuckling about Peacock, very well-participated. A lot of people signed up for Peacock. Yeah, a huge, highly rated event. And granted, annoying, but people did it. I think this is one of the small milestones along the way to all of sports being available and streaming at some point. Diamond is one of the thorniest of these. And I kind of feel like once this gets resolved one way or the other, either Diamond gets sold or all the rights go back to the leagues and it gets liquidated. My guess is Major League Baseball wouldn't mind absorbing it and getting all the rights back or Amazon ends up buying it and bringing all the regional sports on a prime video. But whatever happens is gonna happen in the next year or so. And then we're gonna see that set the template for how sports streams in the future, I think. 404 Media reports that scientists at Leipzig University, Bauhaus University Weimar and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence conducted a year-long study of Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo's product review search quality. That's the first thing. This is just looking at product reviews, searching for product reviews, not search in general. They monitored results for 7,392 product review terms on those three search engines, DuckDuckGo, Bing and Google. That's the other thing that's missing in the headlines is you only see Google in the headlines. This is about all three and they found that while a small portion of product review websites use affiliate marketing, the majority of search results did. So you're not seeing a representative sample of product review websites when you do a search. They also found the evidence of the continual back and forth between spammy sites that gained the search ranking engines and search engines changing the ranking system to remove the spammy sites out of the top spots. In fact, the study showed that of these three search engines, who do you think did best? It was Google. Google did better than Bing and DuckDuckGo at this back and forth, but spam sites have the upper hand in all cases. They expect generative models to benefit spammy sites in this even more as AI becomes more prolific. Now, this study was limited to product reviews, but it's an indication of the general decline of search engine usefulness in the face of increasingly sophisticated manipulation by sites and it's not specific to Google. It happens across the board. I feel like this is the death knell for search when. Yeah, I mean, that's just like the thing is like, it's so funny to think that, you know, a large, big huge conglomeration that's been doing this for what? How long is Google? Like Google's search been around like almost 30 years. Yeah, 99. Yeah, 30 years. Even with all their research, even while they're, hey, I have your drink. If you're playing that drinking game, you shouldn't, though. Is that... You'll get wasted. Yeah, there's something to be said about the power of a big, massive, network machine learning empowered entity and then just a lot of really hardworking SEO people trying to circumvent your, I don't know, like your good works. And I mean, it kind of makes sense. It's just like anything else. At some point, scale does not work and being able to address like the day-to-day issues or the day-to-day bad actors just becomes impossible. It's a scale issue. Although it is kind of also like the opposite where I guess suppose like Google, because it's a little more resilient, might do in fact better than being in Duck.Go since I know Duck.Go, for example, established and probably has less of the fancy bells and jingles AI that Google has. But yeah, it's a tough world out there. We've had a long time to not just use Google Search, but hack it and circumvent it and make it do our SEO bidding. Not me personally, but... Google Search is my search of choice. I am currently in the market for a new television. So when I have a few minutes here and there, I type things like OLED, Sony, 65-inch TV, living room, pics, all sorts of stuff like that. I don't find spammy sites to really come to the top of product results. Maybe it's because I'm just so used to it. I just ignore certain things because I'm used to being like, I kind of know where I'm going in the product review type thing. And yeah, maybe that's just, I have filtered out certain things. And maybe I fall victim to those things and I don't realize that either. But I don't know, I couldn't tell you that over the last five years, say, my product review search experience has gotten significantly worse, but it probably also depends a lot on what you're searching for. I don't know. I think it's gotten worse personally. I think it's gotten worse. Yeah, I'm on my brother-in-law in Sister's house and he actually specifically has some kind of special filtering for spam and like kind of like ad sites. And I have to scroll really, really, really far down to find an actual site that I can go to. And it just feels like, yeah, I do think there's some kind of like, kind of inearing or just getting used to what a spam site looks like. And kind of like almost like a kind of warping of reality of what we perceive to be spam and what versus like, you know, good, honest advertising. I just feel like my perception is warped just because of how, you know, this whole ecosystem and this whole market has evolved. So I don't know. I'm also very susceptible to Instagram ads. So that's the thing. Which I think is even worse. Yeah, because I'm with you, Sarah. It's not that search is useless, but it's not as useful as I would have thought it would be by now. Google's big innovation in the 90s and the late 90s when it came along was, oh my gosh, these results are what I'm looking for. And they've continued to fight the good fight to keep it that way. But I regularly find myself going, you know what, I'm just gonna go straight to a website because I can't find what I'm looking here. But I know the wire cutter or the spruce. So somebody has what I need. Even if you click on the product tab up at the top, I mean, that's the first thing I do. You mean the shopping tab? Yeah, yeah. If you're looking to buy something. No, that's after I've decided to buy something. When I'm looking for reviews and recommendations. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's a different story. Well, but even then, it's like, okay, I spent a lot of time at bestbuy.com as of late. And all of those reviews are grains of salt, right? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe that was a real person. I'm looking for the spruce. I'm looking for sweet home or the wire cutter. Maybe PC mag, CNET, et cetera, stuff like that. But I'm going straight there. And then, yes, once I've found it, I might go back and use the Google Shopping Engine as one of my sites to be like, okay, where can I find the best prize? But yeah, if you too have said, I don't know, is it me or Search Engine results? Not as good as they used to. This indicates maybe they're not. It's not just you. Yeah. If you have a thought about something on the show but you don't know our email address, well, here it is. Email us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Samsung held its unpacked event in San Jose this morning in California where the company announced three new phones and their AI-powered services and features. Sarah's going to run down the important specs so we don't get too held up in all the specs. What's the important stuff, Sarah? Okay, so first up, we've got the flagship Galaxy S24 Ultra. It comes with a new titanium finish, 6.8 inch of 120 Hertz, 1440p display, 50 megapixel camera with 5X zoom, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip starting at $1,299. The Galaxy S24 Plus comes with a 6.7 inch screen similar to the Ultra. Also has the same front camera as the Ultra featuring 12 gigabytes of RAM. 12 gigabytes of RAM, it's got to be more than that. It also starts at $999.99. And the S24 has a 6.2 inch display, eight gigs of RAM and starts at $800. Both with S24 and S24 Plus having those aluminum frames. All three ship on January 31st. When, which one are you getting? Probably the S24 regular. Was it regular? Like unleaded, the non-Ultra one. The non-Plus, the non-Ultra. The non-Plus and non-Ultra. It's a regular old phone, nothing too large. I don't know, I feel like I'm in the minority, especially among Android fans. I don't want a tall phone. I want something that actually fits in my hand without me having to stretch my thumb. And I always like kind of seeing what a lower, high... There's like this new segment appearing where it's like the lower of the premium phones. And I feel like the S24, it's a lower premium. I feel like there's going to be, there's this expanding market of lower premium mid, it's not even mid, it's like low premium. And I want to kind of see what the S24 is like. That $800 price point, right? Yeah, that basically the $800 price point. So we'll see, I want to get that S24. Well, and the nice thing about it is, these models are not that different than the S23. They're a little brighter, they're a little bigger in their screen because they removed the bezel, but the differentiator works on all three of them because the differentiator is the software. One of the key features is what they call Galaxy AI, but that means everything. Users can access the Google Gemini models through Samsung apps and services. Same way that you can on Pixel. So the Gemini Pro is going to power Samsung notes, voice recorder and keyboard apps. For example, the voice recorder can do a summary. You can ask Google Gemini Pro to summarize what you recorded. And then Gemini Nano, which is the on-device model, the one where you don't need to be in the cloud. Gemini Pro, you got to go to the cloud. So you're given some data to Google. Gemini Nano, you don't. That will enable Google messages, including magic compose, which I think Samsung calls tone selection. That one you don't need an internet connection for. And that will be able to let you choose a tone in which to compose a message. So you want to be excited, do you want to be professional, et cetera. Also Google announced circle to search. So this is coming to the Pixel 8s and the new S24s. Users can draw a circle over or tap parts of the screen that you want to search. So you either long press on the home button or that tab, that navigation tab. And then you can just circle something and results are presented on top of the existing screen or app. Also live translation, which isn't new, that was demonstrated before by Google, but that's coming as well. Real-time language translation of 13 different languages on the phone. Each person would hear a translated version into their preferred language, including other person on a conversation, not needing an Android phone. They could be on a landline. So it'll send, yeah, yeah. It'll send it back and forth and handle it on your phone's end. So you've picked your form factor now when, there's a few other things that it does here that we can get through, but do any of these excite you? I'm just having a lot of deja vu this morning during Galaxy Impact. Cause I feel like a lot of these features either exist already on Pixel or are a weak packaging of things that we've heard at Google IO before. And this is not to kind of take away the value or the impressiveness and also kind of like the probably upgrade that everything has had from Gemini. But like live translation, as he said, Pixel has demonstrated something like that. Even magic-compose, and it's kind of weird because at some point I was watching and I was like, waiter, I have some Google in my Samsung unpacked. Like it was really hard to tell at what point Google kind of left off and Samsung began that even had like Hiroshi Lockheimer and a few other like Google execs on stage. And it was weird at times, especially when they would run through other, you know, like things like magic-compose, again, which was announced last year at IO or even talking about Android Auto. It's a really, I don't know, because I feel like I already have this stuff, but they're just like repackaging it for me. I mean, it is really hard to tell what exactly Galaxy AI is either in addition to or in lieu of or in the same space as any kind of Pixel exclusive feature. I mean, maybe that's just it. Maybe it's like Google Pixel exclusive features and then also your Galaxy AI. And I mean, like most of these things I think are really interesting. I do think that the really the thing that this new kind of generation of generative AI I think is the most fascinating is summarization and organization and being able to distill things for you. So I think it's like no-to-sist and then like the summarization of the recorder which also by the way, a Pixel recorder feature where you can summarize and also detect like, you know different speakers and label them. I think all that is super fascinating and of course live translation for, you know, communication. So I think all that is super interesting. It's just like, it was really confusing because I feel like I've heard all this all before. I don't know where, what's Galaxy AI and how is it different? Because Gemini's in there. So I don't think it's different. There's differences in that some of the Pixel 8 Pro stuff works locally. Whereas on the Galaxy AI, it works in the cloud. I noticed that. And yeah, there's a few features here and there that differentiate it. But largely my impression was if you like Samsung style, which is a thing a lot of people like it or if you like Samsung's universe and you want to get, you know the Samsung Galaxy Watch and you like the Samsung App Store and the Samsung native apps and especially if you're in Korea and everything works with Samsung then this is a great phone because you're not going to be behind on features. You're not going to look at the Pixel and think, gosh, I wish I had that because you're going to have everything. But there's not a reason to get a Samsung Galaxy S24 if you don't like Samsung stuff. There's not like, well, I have to get it anyway because, right? That's what I was not seeing. Yeah, and I think it is weird because yesterday on Android Faithful yesterday we covered one story where basically Google is shuttering a lot of Google Assistant features. And it really feels like, you know and we also, another story is that Samsung is no longer the number one smartphone manufacturer in the world, it's now Apple. I mean, Samsung of course in the Android sphere or in the non-Apple sphere is still number one but it feels like there's like this dramatic shift in how Google is approaching the entire smartphone ecosystem and its role as the AI provider. I think so for so many years it's like Google is the platform and it kind of was like a North Star and like, hey, here's a bunch of stuff that you can do with our technology and here's our phones to showcase it and there's like a muddled, you know distinction between like being a platform leader and example and also just being in business and we get to sell phones and who's gonna pay for all these people working on assistant and other features. And it feels like a big shift to, okay we only have 4% of the market share in Pixel no one's really picking up any of these really cool demos that we show you after year. How do we get people to pick things up? And I think it makes sense to and to what I just saw today was basically, okay Google's like, all right, 4% is 4% Samsung, if we actually want this AI business this AI features to be noticed to be picked up and to be kind of like part of like the average consumer and not like those of us here in the tech space who are savvy and who are super fans average people to be able to notice this we need to get and kind of put it more forward in a Samsung shell. And that's what I was getting is that it's just a big shift to, okay Google and Samsung, we tight we doing this thing together and that's really what I thought of it was just like, okay, they're going to kind of focus on partners instead of just being this you know, this like golden example that you know, other Android, oh yeah. That's more of a Microsoft model, isn't it? Google had to about Android faithful talking about some assistant features kind of winding down because Google said they just were underutilized. Yeah. I wonder, you know how many of the people who knew what the options were said, eh just don't need to do it and how many people just don't know how to do it? I think that's yeah. Have not been sort of like walked through this is how this makes your life so much easier and I think a lot of assistant I'm not just talking about Google assistant assistants in general you hear a lot of just sort of like yeah with AI all the companies have to reimagine all this stuff that is definitely true to some extent but there are when I watch an event like unpacked and I'm kind of like, okay cool AI got it that's the buzzword, all right what are we doing? What am I doing? What am I doing with this? Sometimes I feel like sort of like looking for product reviews on search engines I'm like, I just need good places to show me the cool tricks and we're still in those early days of companies being like, oh nobody's using that but it's like, well maybe I would if I understood it better. Yeah, 100% discoverability of features is the seminal problem in application development and doing cool stuff and I think regardless of any like any software product I've ever worked on it doesn't matter how cool your idea is or how much it could empower people how much productivity they can get out of it if they can't find it they don't know how it works it's DOA and I think that's like 100% that you hit the nail on the head is that Google's cranking out all this stuff some of it's half-baked and the other half people can't find it so yeah and I just think hey give it to Samsung and they'll do their hello fellow kids marketing and let people know look at all the stuff that you can do with us so yeah maybe it's just a Hail Mary to do the sports now Well because I'm looking at this stuff and in today right, generative photo edited magic editor edit images by long pressing or circling objects in a photo this was all impressive stuff will people remember if they saw it or if they never watched this keynote and they buy a galaxy will they know to use it that's a big question transcript assist you know the translating stuff that we're talking about over the phone I think sometimes people don't use it because they're like yeah it's a great demo but I don't really need this in my regular life but you're right sometimes they don't use it because they don't know it's there No I think it's also really fair too like I think even things like you know pixel features like best take where you know if you have a bunch of adjacent pictures and you get to take your best you know the faces from the best ones and stick them together and create a composite where everyone's looking perfectly at the camera yeah yeah it there is like a gap also in kind of connecting to a user case especially as like a lay person that doesn't want to go and like experimental things and doesn't pay attention I don't I don't know it's it's kind of an interesting thing in technology is when you innovate you there's like a part of it where you're trying to respond to a need that you see and then it's part of it has to be imagining what people could use it for yeah that they don't know they want and that yeah they don't know that they want and sometimes you're right and sometimes you're wrong and then sometimes there's just a weird disconnect where it there's a possibility out there where this feature is like used by like half half of the world but you're not able to you know do the the 10 things in that particular variant of the multiverse that actually connected people that thing it's it's really weird I think sometimes even luck but about something hitting the zeitgeist in the right way and maybe that's just what everyone is doing right now AI is the zeitgeist throw a bunch of darts out there and maybe something will hit with someone and help us sell some more S24s who knows I think if you can't make the feature work in a product placement shot in a K drama that's on Netflix then it's not a good feature it's not going to catch on that is really fair I think that's a good test especially for Samsung yeah exactly specifically for specifically for Samsung all right let's check out the mailbag Kevin had a thought he posted on Patreon about our conversation yesterday about AI and job cuts Kevin says AI and those 5% job cuts we're also about labor shortages currently we work in civil engineering to have trouble finding staff a lot lately if we can free up segments of the workforce to fill other roles as we replace some with AI it might benefit the workforce strains granted education and location play into it and if cut workers can retrain et cetera but it was a good thought experiment on other benefits of AI impacting jobs oh Kevin that's a great point a lot of those industries that we're not predicting job losses from AI also have job shortages versus the ones that we're saying yeah we might have to eliminate some jobs are not the ones with shortages although then you had ones like construction that you know there's it's kind of in the middle so yeah that's good stuff thank you Kevin Craig says he listened to yesterday's show and we were talking about the Apple Vision Pro and it gave him two thoughts one I want to use the Vision Pro video just like I do with other monitors or TV in my living room I want another screen to the side when I'm working on other things to me this is awesome and in very little space thoughts if you mean can you see your regular screens and do a screen to the side of the Vision Pro that's interesting or if you mean like I just want to have multiple screens virtual I think you could probably do that that those are both interesting and Craig also says I'm already anticipating sharing the Vision Pro with my wife but she needs readers for things close to her face will she be able to use it yes you can get those you have to pay for it but you can get those lens inserts for readers and you don't even need a prescription for that you only need your medical prescription if you want to get prescription lenses they have reader insert lenses as well and they're a little less expensive than the prescription ones I think well thanks Craig and also thanks Kevin for writing in and thanks to everybody who sends us feedback every day also thanks to you went way down let folks know where they can keep up with your latest yeah so if you want to continue to listen to me and also my co-host Michelle Ramon Jason Howell and Ron Richards keep talking about Android Things you can be right here on the same stream every Tuesday night at 5 p.m. Eastern 8 p.m. Pacific for the Android Faithful Podcast Patrons stick around for the extended show Good Day Internet Samsung also announced a smart ring well they kind of announced it we're gonna talk about that and probably more of our thoughts on unpacked stick around you can catch our show live Monday through Friday we record live at 4 p.m. Eastern that is 2100 UTC you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live we're back doing it all again tomorrow asking if the end of podcasting is nigh we keep asking ourselves that but we'll keep podcasting about it Justin Rubber Young joining us the DTNS family of podcasts helping each other understand Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program