 This 10th year of Daily Tech News Show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Chris Benito, Steve Aya Darola, Jeffrey Zilks, and our lifetime supporter, Mountain Sloth. On this episode of DTNS, is Microsoft out of the virtual reality game? What is next for Tesla after some less-than-stellar press? And how do eScooter companies bounce back? Can they? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, December 21, 2023, from Studio Pat, suggested by Pat, and Studio Without a Hatchet, suggested by Todd. I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dunwood. From Deep in the Heart of Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And the show's producer, Roger J. I probably should put a hatchet in this new studio. Thank you. Sounds like a threat. This is a suggestion, Todd. Well, there was a hatchet in the old one. Yeah, somebody had pointed out. So, yes, Todd, I will get right on that. But first, let's start with the quickings. A new criminal justice bill in the UK could allow police to use facial recognition searches on a database containing images of 50 million driver's license holders. This legislation would allow images collected on a CCTV to be matched with driver's license records, potentially putting every driver in the country into a permanent police lineup. In a filing Wednesday, the U.S. International Trade Commission denied Apple's motion to delay an import and sales ban on the Apple Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra II while awaiting an appeal. The ITC ruled in October that Apple's oxygen saturation sensors in the Apple Watch infringe on patents from medical device company Massimo. Apple Watch 9 and Ultra II bans go into effect on December 24th. Airbnb is using proprietary AI and machine learning technology in several countries and regions globally to identify whole house bookings over the new year's holiday weekend that could be at higher risk for disruptive and unauthorized parties. The technology uses hundreds of signals like trip duration, distance from home location, last minute reservations, sometimes those are flags, and type of venue booked to determine if reservations should indeed be authorized. Bethesda, maker of Starfield said of the company's biggest launch ever with more than 13 million players since its release in September that you can expect updates to the game about every six weeks in 2024 starting in February. These updates will include everything from quality of life improvements to content and feature updates. The Starfield team is also hard at work on the development of Shattered Space, the first expansion to the game due next year as well. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that Apple's Vision Pro headset, announced back in June for the first time, is lining up for a February launch. He also notes that we shouldn't expect another launch event for the $3,500 device as supplies will probably be limited. Got a cheer from the audience there. I mean, mostly a cheer that it's that soon, because oftentimes when you say beginning of next year, it means anywhere between April and May. So February would be aggressive. Yeah, yeah, indeed. Well, speaking of VR and mixed reality, Microsoft announced that it is deprecating Windows mixed reality and removing the feature in an upcoming release of Windows. Microsoft's attempt at building out a VR ecosystem for PCs kind of inactive over the last few years. The nixing of Windows mixed reality also includes ending support for using a Windows mixed reality headset with Steam VR and the dedicated mixed reality portal app. The news timed interestingly, obviously we just talked about Apple's Vision Pro headset, late January, perhaps early February launch for consumers. So what do we all think here? Is Microsoft just putting it all on pause to see where we land in a few months? Is this is this Apple's game to play? Well, I think that this is a deprecation. This is an ending of life that makes sense. I've heard people in various comments saying, oh, that Microsoft's getting like Google and this is not the case. This product or this line, this service that they were trying to offer, they just missed the market. It wasn't something that Apple, I should say Apple, that Microsoft did well. So I think a big part of this announcement is that well, we know that this behemoth Apple is about to come out with something. We're not really extending life on doing what we're doing. So we might as well just go ahead and end life on it now so that we're not that we don't have comparisons made to us when we're not really even trying to be in the space any longer. The reality about this space is that it is hardware dependent. And that's the restrictor plate that you've seen on every single one of these devices. Be they from Microsoft or Meta, who I think right now has the best in class device in the world of mixed or virtual reality, even Apple for as exciting as that device might be. They still had to go with the very un-Apple like rat tail. Wait a minute. Let me translate that to Cupertino. A supple woven cable that connects to a physical battery that you keep in your pocket. They did not want to do that. The reason why they had to is because there are hardware realities to make a great experience be possible. Let's assume that the initial reviews of Apple Vision Pro are correct. That means that we are looking at a new paradigm shift in terms of what this space will be. I applaud Microsoft for understanding that what they've done to this point isn't the future and they can shut down what they have going now. So they don't have to answer any questions of whether or not their solution is a solution that matches up to what the current meta is. Yeah. I'm with you on that. I think for anybody who's not in the VR space, which is a lot of people, that included myself until I got my first question and I was like, Oh, there's some killer apps on this thing. I really enjoy this. I never fooled around with anything that Microsoft made in the space. So this doesn't affect me at all. If Microsoft figures out, okay, so here's what seems to be gaining traction. And I'm not just saying that that has to come from the Vision Pro headset at all, but VR is going to get a real boost in the conversation at the very least over the next few months. Microsoft coming in with, I don't know, some apps that are part of existing ecosystems or ecosystems that don't even exist yet. Microsoft does a lot of that stuff really well already. And that way, instead of saying like, oh, but poor Windows mixed reality. That never went anywhere. It can rerun however it wants to. Justin, you said in our pre-show that in the era of Satya Nadella that they do what they do well and they really do it and things that aren't necessarily their core forte. He wax it. And this is one of those cases where it absolutely makes sense. This platform wasn't going anywhere. They haven't really built a new headset. They actually canceled the last headset that they had planned and they haven't really done anything in probably close to two years. So the fact that they're letting this go and not having to, as you say, make those comparisons to Apple when they're not really even in the space, it just, to me, just makes complete sense. And they're not chasing. That's the biggest thing. If you compare to where Balmer was, especially in the last five years of Microsoft, they were reactive. They were looking to where people were talking about things now and trying to throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall because they understood they had a lot of money and they understood they have a lot of engineers. I think that was a Microsoft that was insecure about where they were when Satya came in. He understood, hey, our strength is Azure. Our strength is the same thing that we've always had. We have an exceptional sales team that sells to enterprise better than anybody else on the planet. So let's leverage that. I mean, reminder, there was a time when Satya came in when a lot of the rumors were that he was going to sell off Xbox because he didn't feel that Xbox was something that directly dovetailed in to a core strength. They've been able to make that work, but still they don't need to spend the money or divert time, energy and effort to playing in what right now, even if Apple wins here is an unsettled space because you're going to need to understand exactly why they're winning in terms of hardware before you can even begin to compete. The meta right now for AR and VR is primarily games, trying to think of a way that you can get into an immersive reality and enjoy yourself in that landscape. What Apple is pitching is essentially a laptop replacement. Will it work? We're all going to find out possibly as soon as February. But you need to know whether or not that works before I think you're even able to chart a course going forward. I think this is a good call by Satya. So let's change gears a little bit and stop talking about AR headsets and talk about cars. Back in the summer, Reuters released a bombshell report that Tesla was faking its EV range estimates and not being truthful with customers when they called to complain about it. Reuters is back at it again with reviewing thousands of Tesla documents and is reporting a pattern in which Tesla routinely blamed customers for failure of standard parts the company knew to be defective. When parts would fail, Tesla would blame the customers of abusing their vehicles. Now you're saying, okay, what kind of defects are we talking about here? Not minor defects that don't have anything to do with your actual safety. But, quote, wheels falling off cars at speed, suspensions collapsing on brand new vehicles, axles breaking under acceleration. So tens of thousands of customers complained about a host of failures on low mileage cars, even though Tesla documents show it tracked these chronic flaws for years. The company misled regulators rather about it and even sold customers replacement parts knowing that there were high failure rates and were systemically prone to failure. Sounds bad. Tesla under the microscope for a variety of reasons and I know we're going to unpack a lot of that now, but Justin, is this the life of a car startup or do we think there's something really unique going on here? It is bad whenever customers are complaining that your steering wheel flies out the window while you're driving. It is not good. You don't want that and obviously you want a clear and concise communication between you and the customer that is affected. If they are appreciating this or not making this as clear as possible to people, then yes, it is a problem going forward. That being said, it's not a unique one. In the world of automotive sales, when you are looking at from the American perspective, the two most expensive things that many people buy are a house and a car with less people buying houses. That means that a car will be the most expensive thing that they ever buy. Tesla is very expensive. If it is not good, then yes, you should be very, very angry about it. And many automotive manufacturers, including GE and Ford, Toyota, Honda, everybody in this game has bad runs of parts that wind up becoming issues. Some of them have handled it better than others and if what we are hearing here from the Reuters report is true, which I have no reason to believe that it isn't, then that is a problem going forward. But let's also understand that right now, I am looking at the American Consumer Satisfaction Index and Tesla is the number one highest rated customer service automotive manufacturer in the country next to Lexus. That's good. You want that. That is the vast majority of their customers are happy with their purchases. If that's the case, then this feels to me like more of a regular automotive story, the kind that pops up every once in a while. It indicates the Teslas at the top of the food chain, which I'm sure they're happy about, although they're probably not happy about this story. What makes it louder is the four letters that are really a paragraph. Elon. You could say Musk, but yeah, either way, you're absolutely right. And this is one of those situations where having a CEO who is polarizing and whose name is as popular as your brand. In some cases, maybe even more. This is where it could come to bite you because just not think you're right. This is probably just a regular automotive story that we probably wouldn't be covering if it worked for the fact that it is Tesla and Elon Musk. He's polarizing. People don't like him. And now they have somebody they can blame because if this is GM or Chrysler or Ford, there's a good chance that most Americans don't even know the names of the CEOs who run those companies. But not that is not the case in the case of Tesla. So there is a person there is a figure that you can blame on this. So there's just outrage because he also is a polarizing figure about half the country loves him about half the country. Well, actually it's probably more like 25% loves him 25% hates him and 50% are just indifferent. Don't think about him. You don't even think about him. Well, unless you do a show like ours and then you just have to. And you have to. And you have to. Yeah, I mean, I think I think a lot of this is, you know, reading through some of the stuff on the surface, you go, wow, I mean, they're lying to consumers. This might be a case of customer service that people find to be good customer service, but just is not run efficiently. That happens a lot of times with newer and smaller companies. Tesla is not the size of GM or Ford or Chevy or, you know, like, this is your the whole thing with Tesla is and I know it's it's different now because there are a lot of competitors. But when Tesla came on the scene, it was it did everything differently. Everything, you know, buying the car, updating the firmware of the car, things that you can add as, you know, add-ons for the car, everything was different. Companies that were incumbents in the automotive space have started to catch up. And in many cases, people say, you know, if I'm going to plunk down this much money for an electric vehicle, I'm going to go with a company other than Tesla, you know, but I still remember the first time I sat in a Model S. I was like, wow, I feel like I'm in a spaceship. This is the coolest thing ever that, you know, that's that's still something I think is it's still very impressive. To me that Tesla has done what it has done. And I think some of these missteps is one way to put it is par for course. And I don't know that you can really say, well, you know that the Tesla folks, they don't know what they're doing because they clearly do. But yeah, you have automotive recalls across the board all the time. You know, that doesn't mean that you have to like trade your car in for the version that doesn't include a steering wheel that flies out the window. In most cases, you know, it's just it's a little thing that maybe the dealership will will go ahead and fix for you, you know, and you don't have to pay for it type thing. But but yeah, part of this does feel a little overblown because people want to get fired up about Tesla in particular. Well, and I think that there's a narrative that Elon Musk is move fast and break things and there you look at a SpaceX rockets exploding. You look at the dumpster fire that is the model for X and you might be reasonably led to think that Elon Musk has no good car ideas. But the reality of this is that SpaceX and Tesla are transformative companies. There had been no new American car company until Tesla and they are operating in a market and doing very well when we have declining EV sales. And that is not because of Tesla. That is because of everybody else that has tried to get into into this market. And despite the fact that there are heavy government subsidies have not been able to sell as well. A lot of the lines from more established car companies have not taken off in the same way that Tesla has. So you have to take it seriously. But I do think that the Elon hype cycle is a bit overblown. So folks, if you want to stay up to date in the fast moving world of artificial intelligence, you need to listen to AI name this show. Each week, Tristan Jutra and Teja Kastodi wade through the hype and the doom saying to keep you informed about the latest news in AI. And you can catch it at ai-name-this-show.com. All right, yesterday we talked just briefly about e-scooter company Bird filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US bankruptcy court in Miami, Florida. So Justin, do we consider this a sea change in the e-scooter business overall? Are symptom of a larger trend or is this just bird? It's not a sea change in the world of scooter rental. It is the sea changing permanently. It is the sea changing into a dry riverbed. Not to say that there will not be scooter rentals in varying cities where people are able to make it work. But I think the era of bird being a larger company is absolutely done. And not only that, I think an entire era of technology companies are done. There was an article written by a great writer, Derek Thompson. It was this year, last year, we referred to the millennial subsidy. The idea that low interest rates created a lot of startups that were catering to a demographic that had enough disposable income that wanted to capture the market and therefore created inefficient companies so they could do so. Get as many people into the tent as possible and then figure out this whole getting profitable kind of thing. And there was no better place to live while that was happening than where I lived in the Bay Area during that period of time. Good Lord, did I enjoy the fruits of a lot of misbegotten ideas that were catered almost directly to me. Spending far too little money for far too ridiculous a product. And I don't think that anything, anything approached that in the same way that the Scooter Revolution did. To spend not only a high ticket about a money to put out scooters, pay people to recharge them and understand that these nearly $1,000 pieces of machinery were going to deteriorate in not months but weeks. Sometimes days if they got thrown in Lake Merritt like I often saw them. In my neighborhood in Oakland, then you were you understood you were lighting money on fire so you could possibly capture a unique change in the way that people moved in cities that people didn't want to own cars. They wanted to get between one to two miles from their house via another faster mode of transportation that they also didn't want to own or park or care about once they got done riding. I love the scooters, especially when I lived in Oakland. I was a big fan. Don't use them so much anymore because it doesn't fit the lifestyle. But I do think it dying is not only a sign that this entire genre is done. I think the genre that birth this genre of low interest rate, high risk audience capture at any by any means necessary VC driven startups are also done. It wasn't the canary in the coal mine that signaled the beginning of it. It was the dead bird that signaled the end of it. You know, the e-scooter business, the idea of scale, you know, it can't just be like, oh, urban areas, because there's certain areas, for example, probably where you live, Rob, where in the winter, that's never going to work. Like, you're not going to have a e-scooter and drive through the snow. Not with that attitude. No, certainly not. You would be shocked in the downtown area. You will see people on them. You know, I recently just saw someone riding a scooter and it could have been any more than 45 degrees in kind of damp. So they were probably not warm on the device. Here's the thing, though, and I thought this when these things really started, you know, becoming big, is it really going to just be a fad? Because I'm the same way, even though I am generally a habitual rule follower, I've gotten my six, four and a half, 300 plus pound defensive tackle of a self, you know, on these things, even though they're only rated for like 240 pounds, you know, max. I've gotten on them just to try them out. But as I think about it, and you mentioned me living in the Midwest, you know, there are more cars at my home than there are people who can drive them. And that's kind of a Midwest thing. We drive everywhere. So there's definitely those times when if I drive downtown and I've got to make some stops downtown, I don't want to have to go back to the car. I can get on one of these. But what I found, especially in the summer when I would be most apt to ride these things is that you may get a little fresh when you're, you know, you're zipping around at 15 miles an hour or the scooter. You can't carry much. It's hot. And you don't, you know, you're not in air conditioning. Let's just let's just say it like that as you are in a car. So I just wondered about the staying power of these things. And it's I'm with you, Justin, I don't I think this is probably the end of it. Los Angeles where I now live again. But I did a few years ago in the sort of e scooter revolution of, I don't know, let's call 2016 ish. And I lived in a different neighborhood than I live in now. But I mean, they were everywhere to the point where there would just be piles of them on corners, you know, kind of next to a dumpster. The whole thing seemed extremely not sustainable, which it was not. But I lived in an extremely rural area for the last few years where there were no scooters at all. I don't even know if they were allowed in the county I lived in. I never saw any. And I, you know, I kept hearing these stories of like, yeah, scooter companies having a hard time. The people who like the scooters, you know, are using them, but the companies aren't making money. And again, scaling is hard. Once you kind of hit your demo, how do you convince everyone else to get on a scooter? It's not for everybody. It's like telling everybody to ride a bike. Like it's just not going to happen. And it also depends on the layout of the city. Are there a lot of hills? What's the weather like, et cetera, et cetera. Coming back to LA though, I was floored at how many scooters are just just kind of sitting in front yards. And I, it kind of seems like instead of these areas where you have all these scooters, you know, neatly set up for people like me to come and use them and then bring them back and, you know, everything's done through an app. It seems like there are a few people who like the scooters at the end of the day, throw the scooter in the front yard. No one else is going to take it because they don't want the scooter anyway. And then you leave in the next morning and use it again. It seems like there's still a pretty big thriving market for scooters. For your area, Sarah, in the same way that getting from Adams Point to downtown Oakland, where I wanted to go have a drink with somebody that was a great place. It was, it was probably a 20 minute walk. It's a five minute scooter ride and it's fun. You feel like the cutscene of a video game going from one place to another. It was delightful for where you are in LA. There's a lot of different things that happen between one to two miles from where you live compared to where you want to go. So that works. Is that scalable? A hundred percent no. Like you can go and try to socialize people into thinking this is going to happen, especially. That's kind of why I feel like the business model, maybe just if the business model would shift and scale was less of the number one priority, which is very hard to tell any startup that. Then maybe, maybe it makes more sense. It's less of sort of a Sarah uses the scooter for an hour than Justin uses it to go get the drink with a friend and then Rob uses it later to get groceries and more of a maybe I pay a monthly fee for my scooter. Or I buy it outright. I actually got onto a monthly fee. I forget whether or not it was Lyme or Bird because I was using them so often. But the economics don't work when you look at the actual price of those scooters. That's the biggest problem is that that fleet wise, the hardware price never made sense. And also like you were mentioning you can leave it in the front yard and use it the next day. I don't think so. Those things I have a pretty expensive scooter now in in the in my garage. But if you're screwing around with it for like an hour, you need to charge it. And they were paying people to go charge it in their apartments. Yeah. Well and fires ensued. That actually happened down the street from me at my old neighborhood. It was terrifying. Yeah, I don't I don't totally know what's going on with the scooters in the front yard thing. But I'll tell you they're everywhere. They're all over my block. So next time I see somebody on one, I'll flag them down and ask them what's up. Yeah. Ask them what's up. Yeah. All right. Let's check out the mail. This one comes from Ryan in Minneapolis. Hi Ryan. Ryan says my biggest concern with a natural language model option in a car is that it could potentially be triggered by anyone in the vehicle. How will the add on device know which person is speaking and if they're the driver? That said, it makes me glad that these futures didn't exist 40 years ago when I was a knee high poop stomper. Well, Ryan, we're glad you're out of that phase. This is in, this is in response to our conversation on GDI yesterday where we were talking about both Portia and Aston Martin coming out with more customized versions of car play so that you're using car play in your vehicle, but you feel like it's something a little different and special. These of course are premium car brands. But yeah, I've never really thought about voice activation being a safety issue inside the car. It depends on who you're curtain around in the car. Yeah, I would imagine it if they really were worried about that they could make these things so directional that you can just tell where someone is talking in the car. Right. Microphone technology is pretty good. So they could figure out if you're in the passenger seat in the front, if you're in the back, if you're definitely if you're in the driver's seat. Microphone technology should be able to figure that out. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. If if anyone's ever been in the situation where it's like no, no, no. Sometimes you want the passenger to be figuring out navigation using voice. Do let us know feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. All right, Justin, Robert Young. Always a pleasure to have you on the show. Let folks know what's up with you. What's your latest? Well, friends, the holiday season is upon us and I would recommend that you listen to a friend of mine, Andrew Heaton's sixth annual Snuffy's Christmas Special. If you are not familiar with his annual tradition on the political orphanage, he decides to shelve any commentary and just start telling some jokes. I am in it. I think it's really, really funny and I would highly recommend anybody go ahead and listen to it. It is the sixth annual Christmas or Snuffy's Christmas Special. Oh, Tom Merritt's in it too. So you can keep an eye out for his cameo. Yeah, that old, that old salty guy. Tom Merritt, he makes any show better. But yeah, it sounds like a great lineup. I'm there and it's a better time. Patrons, stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. We keep the conversation rolling right along. Today we're going to kick around what a Warner Brothers Discovery Paramount joint company venture might look like. Good idea or great idea or terrible idea. You can also catch the show live Mondays through Friday, 4 p.m. Easter and 2100 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com. We'll be back tomorrow talking about the Figma Adobe deal with Molly Wood, Jason Howe and Lynn Peralta. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com. Bob, I hope you have enjoyed this program.